On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle

by Hampton Sides

It was as though he had become the emperor, and a touchy one at that, jealous of his routines and creature comforts, microscopically attentive to the trappings of power and the nuances of publicity. Since the start of the war, MacArthur had been in every sense an absentee general, running his Korea operations from Tokyo. Though he occasionally flew over to the peninsula for a morning photo op or a quick afternoon reconnaissance, he would not spend a single night on Korean soil during the conflict.

At school, he and his classmates were required to recite the Pledge of the Imperial Subjects, promising to “serve the Emperor with united hearts.” Lee, like all citizens, had to forsake his Korean name and adopt a Japanese one. He learned the Japanese language and was forbidden to study Korean in school. The Korean anthem was not to be sung, the Korean flag not to be unfurled, traditional white Korean clothing not to be worn. People were even expected to give up Korean hairstyles, cutting off their braids and topknots.

Talk of revolution hung in the air. Important Communists came from Pyongyang to deliver impenetrable, jargon-filled harangues, often in Russian, on the principles of Marxism and Leninism. Then followed the parades, the rallies, the self-criticism sessions. A new decree made it a crime for more than five people to meet without permission from the authorities.

That last sentence...ahem, "the right to free assembly"...there's a reason our rights are so relevant to democracy.

They were dazed, semiconscious. Their vital signs became erratic, and their respiratory rates dropped to dangerously low levels. Others suddenly transitioned from this catatonic state into a hysterical sadness, sobbing uncontrollably. The Navy medical corpsmen developed a term for these extreme cold casualties: They were “shook,” they said, a description that seemed to get at both the physical and the psychological aspects of their condition.

Mao and Peng had decided to send one of their best armies, the Ninth Army Group, to the Chosin Reservoir to confront the First Marine Division, which they believed to be the strongest of all the U.N. forces approaching the Manchurian border. “It is said,” Mao wrote to Peng, “that the 1st Marine Division has the highest combat effectiveness in the American armed forces. Your generals should make its destruction their main effort.” The Chinese officers had passed down through the ranks the notion that the U.S. Marines were uniquely diabolical—bloodthirsty murderers and rapists and, according to one account, “highly competent criminals.” A rumor was passed around that to be inducted into the Corps, a prospective Marine had to kill a member of his own family; a distant cousin wouldn’t suffice—it had to be a direct relative. Another rumor said Marines were known to eat babies.

Captain Barber had been avoiding the obvious, but he knew what he had to do. It was the hardest decision he would make in his entire life—harder than anything he’d been forced to do on Iwo Jima. He was a God-fearing man, a Christian, a churchgoer. But he thought he had no choice. He called for a private from Georgia and told him to get a few other Marines and take care of the problem. And so they went around back, behind the command post and the med tent, back where the prisoners squatted in the snow. Then they shot every one of them in the head.