The ejection of the invaders of South Korea, for which 6,000 American soldiers gave their lives, was an intoxicating event. North Korea lay open to General MacArthur's armies. MacArthur took the risk of splitting his U.N. force of around 250,000 men into two commands. In the east, the South Koreans set off on September 30, 1950, ahead of General Edward Almond's X Corps of Marine and Army divisions. In the west, Walton Walker's 8th Army began to advance into North Korea on October 9.
Three weeks later, when leading American, South Korean and Australian units approached China's border at the Yalu River, scores of thousands of Chinese Communist troops, who had been hiding in North Korea's canyons and desolate Almond kept advancing, but with his forces fatally scattered on the east side of the central spine of mountains. West of the spine, Walker paused for supplies. At
8 p.m. the next night, in subzero weather under a full moon, the first of a series of massive Chinese attacks overwhelmed 8th Army positions. The longest retreat in American history began with terrible losses, as exhausted men ran gauntlets of fire. By mid-December the 8th Army had fallen back more than 120 miles and was dug in below the 38th Parallel. In the east, X Corps forces were cut off and surrounded in the mountains near the Chosin Reservoir. The breakout of 10,000 men of the 5th and 7th Marines from Yudam-ni to Hagaru, and then the fighting withdrawal to the coast of the whole force of Marines and soldiers, gripped America's imagination. The unflappable General Oliver Smith's magnificent reply to a question about the retreat entered Marine Corps legend: "Gentlemen, we're not retreating," said Smith. "We are just advancing in a different direction." And technically he was right: there was no rear. On the precipitous, twisting icy mountain road enfiladed on all sides by Chinese machine guns and mortars, it took two weeks of combat day and night for the Marine column of 1,500 vehicles to get through to the embarkation port of Hùungnam. There was no "bug out" here. The men advanced in the different direction as a coherent force intact with their heavy equipment, and with the frozen corpses of their fallen comrades. Valor was served by know-how. At Funchilin Pass the column came to a halt at a chasm where the Chinese had blown up a bridge. The answer came floating from heaven: eight bridge sections gently parachuted down by Marine pilots. The chasm was bridged under fire.
Red China pushed MacArthur's forces down below the 38th Parallel, then demanded that the U.S. leave Korea and Taiwan. Once again American resolve was underestimated. When General Walker was killed in a road accident, his successor was one of the best combat generals of World War II, Matthew B. Ridgway, the 82nd Airborne leader who liked to lead from the hottest part of the battlefield with a grenade clipped to his shirt. In the early months of 1951 Ridgway's canny use of firepower hurled the Chinese back above the 38th Parallel. The war of attrition that followed ground on to July 27, 1953, World War I style, with many a headline written in the blood of Heartbreak Ridge, Old Baldy and Porkchop Hill.
valleys, struck them on all sides with devastating speed and surprise. They would come eerily in the night, wave after wave of massed humanity, blowing bugles, horns and whistles (their signaling system) and shooting flares. Their dead would pile up three deep, and still they would come. But it was not just a question of numbers. The clever ambushes, envelopments and roadblocks, mostly concentrated against the 8th Army, destroyed South Korean regiments and forced the battered Americans to retreat south across the Chongchon River. The 8th Army unit that had made the deepest penetration, to within 18 miles of the Yalu, was the 1st Battalion of the 21st Infantry-the very same battalion, led by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Smith, that had made the stand at Osan on July 5. In the east, in the Chosin Reservoir area, the Chinese swarmed all night in hand-to-hand combat with the 7th Marines on November 3, but at dawn, when the Marines could call on close air support and artillery, they retreated. Then it was all over. Mysteriously, on November 6, the Chinese vanished.
FIFTIES
by David Halberstam