At the end of World War II, the Japanese surrendered to whatever Allied leader was close at hand. In North Korea, it happened to be a communist named Kim. In South Korea it was Sigman Rhee. Both men had visions of "uniting the peninsula" under their own dictatorships and were eager to go to war with one another. Realizing this, President Truman refused to equip the Republic of Korea with heavy arms. Stalin made the mistake of arming Kim and in 1950 Kim invaded South Korea. There followed a see-saw battle which ended up with General Douglas MacArthur commanding Marines, soldiers, and some UN troops at the dividing line between North and South, the 38th parallel. The North Korean Army was in full flight.
MacArthur's original idea had been to reestablish the original border at the 38th parallel. But his recent advances had been so successful and easy that he concluded we might as well kick the North Korean Army off the peninsula entirely, right over into Manchuria. With that in mind, he invaded the north. The rest of the UN commanders weren't quite so optimistic. What about the Chinese, who backed the North Korean communists and were worried not only about the border with the USSR but even moreso about MacArthur. Truman was worried about the Chinese too. Not that he LIKED the Chinese communists. In his pronouncements he began by calling them "Chinese," then "the yellow peril," "the heathen Chinee" and finally "Chinks."
The Brits and other UN troops stopped to consolidate after crossing into North Korea and resupply but MacArthur's Americans sailed blithely by them in trucks, waving and cheering. Still, MacArthur brushed off the threat of Chinese intervention, although there were reports of Chinese troops massing in Manchuria, on the other side of the Yalu River which formed the border between Manchuria and North Korea. MacArthur held them in disdain, a ragtag army made up of peasants. He assured Truman they would never pit themselves against a well-equipped modern army. Late in World War II, the Japanese would call these convictions "the victory disease." It had all been so easy at the beginning, so why shouldn't it remain so?
Back home, MacArthur was a hero. Not so to the Chinese leader, Mao Dz Dung. From Mao's point of view, it was the same as if a communist army had landed in Mexico and began pushing north towards the American Southwest, rolling up capitalist forces as it went. Mao carefully infiltrated Chinese troops across the border into Korea. Their movements went undetected. They secretly occupied the mountains surrounding the single dirt road the Americans were traveling on. They hit hard and then withdrew according to plan, luring MacArthur farther into the hinterlands of the north, stretching his supply lines and thinning his ranks along the road. They repeated the tactic almost all the way to the Yalu River. Despite all reports to the contrary, to MacArthur the Chinese were only a handful of volunteers.
When the Chinese forces finally attacked the American spearhead in strength, the Americans found themselves surrounded on all sides. Sixty thousand Chinese engaged General Oliver Smith's loosely organized Marines and GIs at the Chosin Reservoir. Smith had been doubtful of MacArthur's headlong rush towards the Yalu and now worried that the entire First Marines might be wiped out. Smith's headquarters were in the village of Haga-Ru at the southern end of the line. He turned his cooks, bakers, and clerks into riflemen. The combat that followed was brutal. Enemies were sometimes no more than a few yards from one another and at times it was mano a mano.
The Chinese withdrew at dawn to their daytime hiding places and Smith called for reenforcements from the south. A number of American troops, British commandos, trucks, tanks, and supplies were sent but were badly chewed up by the Chinese, who now surrounded just about everything. Fewer than half the reenforcements reached Smith at Hagaru. The extreme cold added to the misery. Nobody could build a fire or dig a fox hole. The cold was so intense that some of the wounded survived only because the blood from their wounds froze and stopped the hemorrhaging. Men stacked frozen Chinese corpses to provide shelter from the wind and from enemy fire.
Permission was given to the Marines and soldiers to withdraw from the Chosin Reservoir, which they did. But the only place of safety for anyone, from General Smith on down, was the port of Hungnam, protected by naval guns, but it was seventy-eight miles away on a single-lane road flanked on both sides by mountains.
Fourteen thousand men began the march. It was one obstacle after another: snipers, fire fights, blown bridges that had to be rebuilt, and unimaginative exhaustion. The journey was an epic struggle, perhaps made successful only by forceful and extremely low, Allied close air support that dropped napalm and bombs on Chinese positions.
The Chinese were hardly better off. They weren't clothed properly for winter and wore sneakers (trainers). Half the vast horde of Chinese that faced the First Marines were casualties either of enemy fire or the weather, because the temperature could drop to thirty below zero at night and rarely rose above zero even on sunny days.
The program is almost all in black and white and shows still crisp photos, combat footage, and survivors comments in almost equal measure. It's one of the most evocative and saddening documentaries on the misery of battle that I've watched.
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