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

by Hampton Sides

God created war, Twain wrote, so that Americans would learn geography,

Oliver Prince Smith, commander of the First Marine Division, one of the great underrated generals in American history.

He took a dim view of those who brought an exaggerated sense of chivalry to war. Engagements were won by systematically destroying the enemy, not through flamboyant acts or the symbolic capturing of ground.

At the root of Smith and Almond’s mutual dislike was something larger than a personality conflict, larger than the inevitable differences arising from the rivalry between the Army and the Marines. What was emerging was a clash of command styles and methodologies—opposing views on what war was about, how it should be fought, what its goals should be. Yet these two men were going into Inchon together.

Now the peninsula had been carved up into more or less equal halves, with the understanding that the Soviets would temporarily control the North and the Americans would temporarily control the South, until the country’s thirty million citizens could become reunited under one independent government. But that reunification never happened. The two separate realms were quickly remade, each in the image of its custodial nation.