Readable history of the famous stand of Fox Company, a small US Marines force that held off enormous Chinese forces to hold open a key retreat path away from the Chosin Reservoir. It was one of the Korean War's many crucial turning points.
This is a narrowcasted narrative: it discusses mostly one company and what happened to it, leaving out nearly everything else from this very complicated war. The authors give enough context to ground the reader on why and how the conflict reached the Chosin Reservoir, as well as how the Chinese then "entered the chat" with a huge army, overwhelming everything.
Beyond this, however, the authors make just a few scant comments concerning broader aspects of the conflict, thus readers new to the Korean War may want to read a separate history of the war to fill in the blanks. It's worth it: the geopolitics behind this conflict are fascinating, and the see-saw conduct of the war itself is really fascinating, as MacArthur took a nearly defeated army (pushed back to a tiny perimeter in the lower right corner of Korea), executed a daring landing at Inchon in the north behind the enemy, and quickly overran nearly the entire peninsula.
And that all happened before our book even begins its tale.
A few thoughts on the various devices needed to tell a military history like this. First, as you set up your narrative, you have to introduce all of the characters: giving each person's background, ideally telling memorable-enough things so the readers develop some attachment and interest. The authors tell the backgrounds of most of their key characters as they're digging in on Fox Hill, that's essentially the story's prologue and setup. You can't really give out background information during the actual battle--that ruins the pacing and the reader's experience. But the reader has to have enough familiarity with the key characters to keep everybody straight while the confusing events of combat happen.
Another nuance: you want to keep your readers reading and guessing, so you don't want to make it too obvious who survives and who doesn't! Think about the film Saving Private Ryan for example, where the viewer didn't know who was going to make it until the very end. Another master of this technique is Steven Ambrose: see for example his book Citizen Soldiers, where he compellingly tells of soldier Waverly Wray's astounding heroics on D-Day, only to shock readers with Wray's death in combat three months later in the Netherlands[1].
A good author--even when telling factual history--has to do some second-order thinking and imagine the reader's expectations, and then figure out a way to violate those expectations somehow in the interests of structuring a good story. This is the key differentiator between well-written history and "one damn thing after another" history, and the authors do quite a capable job here.
A comment here on the Chinese soldier of the Korean War, and how they were treated as utterly expendable by their commanders--and their government. Per these authors, military service was held in very low esteem in Chinese culture at that time, and the reader can't help but be struck by how mindless the Chinese attacks appear. Soldiers are ordered to march in formation against artillery, they walk right into machine gun fire--it's as if their leadership (knowing they had millions of "excess" peasantry at their disposal) knew they could easily afford to waste as much manpower as they wanted. It's vile, and it reminds me of the commentary from Flags of our Fathers, James Bradley's book on Iwo Jima, which described how the Japanese military felt about its own peasant soldiers: they called them issen gorin, the cost of a postcard stamp, implying that their life was worth about as much as a stamp.
Which brings me to my final thought. When we look back and consider the three generations of endlessly incompetent, worldwide American bellicosity that followed the Korean War, what do we see? We see a powerful but foolish USA, meddling everywhere, yet having no idea what they are doing nor who they are going up against, and luring and drafting its young citizens overseas to suffer and die for the arrogant mistakes of a geopolitically ignorant government.
As the authors introduce the various soldiers in this narrative, most had been dazzled by World War II movies, dazzled by the reputation of the Marines in the various conflicts of World War II. The propaganda worked: it got these young men to sign up, and then their leaders hurled them into a conflict nothing like a dazzling war movie.
Further, had the US government been even slightly less clueless, they might have figured out that China would be as threatened by us meddling in their neighborhood as we might be had they done the same. Remember, it was we who created the Monroe Doctrine in the first place! Thus we should have seen that China was likely to enter this conflict, and then we might have seen the astounding strategic and tactical foolishness of this specific Chosin Reservoir engagement, where the US military was essentially lured into a gigantic trap--and nearly destroyed by an enemy bringing unimaginably overwhelming numbers of men who it valued even less than we valued ours.
Footnote:
[1] For the moment, let's overlook Ambrose's disastrous penchant for plagiarism here, as we focus on his undeniable gift for structuring great story arcs out of historical events.
[Dear reader: the notes that follow aren't too ridiculously long this time: feel free to read on.]
Notes:
1) On William Barber, the commanding officer, his background, and how when he meets his men in Korea after the Inchon landing, he makes them clean up. "He liked grumbling Marines. The more they bitched, the harder they fought. Plus, as an enlisted man he'd been a griper himself."
2) On Military Lessons, a propaganda tract circulated by the Communist high command among North Korean and Chinese troops. "After grudgingly noting the tactical superiority of U.S. tanks, planes, and artillery, it declared, 'their infantry is weak. These men are afraid to die, and will neither press home a bold attack nor defend to the death. If their source of supply is cut, their fighting suffers, and if you interdict their rear, they will withdraw.'"
3) On the various problems of absolute frigid cold, the battery is on the field phones failed within minutes, weapons jammed soldiers combat effectiveness is reduced dramatically, etc. Also interestingly it affects the firing range of artillery, cuz the temperature affects the gases that propel the shells.
4) Commentary here on the geopolitical backdrop: nobody wanted to really be involved in this war; the US was almost exclusively fighting it with minimal support from other UN countries; World War II had just ended, nobody wanted to engage with China.
5) Interesting to note General MacArthur's "deranged blood lust," wanting to strangle communist China in its crib "before it could accumulate more power and territory"
6) Comments on the Chinese military: peasant conscripts who were actually battle-hardened; some 10 million of them (!) holding enormous contempt for American soldiers.
7) Note that all of The Americans in the first Marine division in this region were gradually being surrounded by an enormous Chinese Army. With this as the broader context a small American outpost on Fox Hill was a mere annoyance, there were only "250 freezing, weary Marines at this pass."
8) Note that the South Korean army had warned the US military that there were some 300k Chinese soldiers in Korea, but the US military dismissed the idea, assuming Mao was "unwilling and unprepared to take on the United Nations on behalf of such an ally as weak as North Korea" and likewise that "the Soviet Union did not want to see the war extended." The US military also didn't see the divide that was opening between Russia and China. Note a couple of levels of the USA misjudging its opponents here.
9) A shocking quote here from congressman Albert Gore Sr of Tennessee[*] suggesting that atomic weapons be used on the 38th parallel to make a radiation belt separating the two Koreas. Not to be outdone, MacArthur wanted to do something even better: use 30 A-bombs just north of the Yalu River to make "a belt of radioactive Cobalt strung along the neck of Manchuria."
[*] Yep, this is the father of son Al Gore--who forty years later would become infamous for traveling the world by private jet, pseudo-virtuously lecturing the plebes about their carbon footprint, while living in a 10,000 sq ft Tennessee mansion with a $30,000 a month utility bill.
10) Interesting thoughts here on the inferior, misguided cold-weather fighting knowledge of the US military at this time; frostbite took out more soldiers than the enemy; see also the caloric deficits the Marines faced during this particular engagement; you're supposed to eat more when your body is cold, but the food kept freezing to the point where the guys were not able to eat it in the first place, etc.
11) Layout of Fox Hill early on in the engagement:
12) The attack from the Chinese begins after midnight, November 28th, 1950. Fascinating how it can take several pages to describe a mere eight minutes of combat.
13) Comment here on some wounded Chinese soldiers who surrendered; note that military service was held in the lowest esteem in Chinese culture at that time; these soldiers were just disposable peons; there was no honorable discharge from the Chinese military, "once a peasant was swallowed up in the Chinese Army, that is where he stayed until he was killed, was captured, or grew too old to fight." Reminds me of the commentary from Flags of our Fathers, James Bradley's book on Iwo Jima, which described how the Japanese military felt about its own soldiers, also recruited from the peasantry, calling them issen gorin, basically the cost of a stamp on the postcard that was mailed out to draft them, implying that their life was worth basically a postcard stamp.
14) Sobering comment here about a commander, General Edward Almond, in a different part of the reservoir area, who was in total denial about the Chinese attack, specifically about the scale of it. He was told that there are at least two Chinese divisions, maybe more, in the region, and his response was, "That's impossible... Don't let a bunch of goddamn Chinese laundrymen stop you." MacArthur actually understood what was happening, reporting to the UN around the same time the implications of the Chinese intervention: "Consequently, we face an entirely new war."
15) Fox Company's misso has to hold their hill overlooking the main road out, so the rest of the Marines in the region can stage an orderly retreat from the reservoir. The battle scenes of the third day are hard to imagine, it just seems like there's Chinese soldiers everywhere overwhelming them, you'd think nobody could have possibly made it out of there alive.
16) 1950s era regime media right here: "...sympathetic war correspondents, visiting the rear areas, asked the commander of the First Division, General Oliver P. Smith, about the Chosin withdrawal. They subsequently converted his rambling response into a stirring battle cry. 'Retreat, hell,' he was quoted as saying. "We're just attacking in another direction."
17) The reader can't help but be struck by how mindless the Chinese attacks are.
18) Deeper in the book the story gets increasingly complicated; there's a lot of new characters flooding into the narrative as plans are drawn up to assist the breakout from the reservoir. We meet soldiers like Chew-Een Lee (he was the first Asian-American officer in the history of the US military), Joe Owen, Joseph Kurcaba, and others. Lee, astoundingly, was shot in the elbow, moved to a hospital but then went AWOL, stole a Jeep and made his way back to his unit--cast, sling and all. "He thought the highest honor he could achieve was to be killed in a just war. ...he was cheered to recall from his studies of history that, on average, the United States had engaged in combat somewhere in the world, in declared or undeclared wars, every five years." Also: "his primary goal in life was to honor his family by dying in combat."
19) On the "ridge runners" who led a flanking maneuver through the mountains, through enemy lines and then towards Fox hill to relieve them. Fascinating, disturbing section here on pages 265-266 where the squad gets lost and is trying to orient themselves, but they're so hypocognized due to cold and exhaustion that they keep forgetting what they're trying to do.
20) The authors do not explain all that clearly how exactly, but the Americans in the reservoir somehow fight their way through in a column; then, somehow, the Chinese 59th division is trapped and wiped out.
21) Another one of the horrible ironies that happens: the new doctor of Fox Company is shot through the head by a sniper's bullet while walking out of one of the med tents. This was after the bulk of the engagement was over with.
To Read:
Mao Tse-tung: On Protracted War