The Battle of Chosin Reservoir, 1950: breakout from the frozen hills

Late in 1950, deep in the frozen mountains of North Korea, a huge Chinese army closed around the Marines and soldiers at the Chosin Reservoir. In cold that froze weapons and wounds alike, the surrounded men turned a trap into a fighting march to the sea.⁴

Part of Battles of Korea · Before: Inchon, 1950

Part of The greatest battles in American history · Before: The Battle of Inchon · Next: The Battle of Ia Drang · Key figures: Chesty Puller

China enters the war

After the X Corps landed at Inchon in September 1950, the United Nations Command chased the broken North Korean army back across the 38th parallel. On General Douglas MacArthur's orders the Eighth Army crossed the old border on 7 October and drove up the west side of the peninsula, while the X Corps under Major General Edward Almond was shipped around to the east coast. Confident that the war was nearly won, the UN forces raced for the Yalu River and the Chinese border.⁵

China had been preparing to intervene since Inchon. On 18 and 19 October Mao Zedong ordered the Chinese People's Volunteers under Peng Dehuai into Korea. Their First Offensive in late October and early November mauled the Eighth Army, and on 2 to 4 November a Marine regiment met and beat a Chinese division at Sudong, inland from Hungnam. The warning was there. MacArthur, underestimating his new enemy, pressed on.⁶ › Battle of the Ch'ongch'on River, 1950

Up the road to the reservoir

MacArthur's plan sent the 1st Marine Division and the Army's 7th Infantry Division inland to the Chosin Reservoir and then west toward Kanggye, behind the Chinese armies facing the Eighth Army. It meant an advance of about 55 miles up a single unpaved road through the Taebaek Mountains in snow and freezing cold. The Marine commander, Major General Oliver P. Smith, told Almond the plan was rash and later said these mountains were "never intended for military operations." Almond, answering only to MacArthur, ordered him forward.⁷

Smith obeyed slowly and carefully. He set up battalion bases along the road at Chinhung-ni and Koto-ri, and on 15 November his lead regiment reached Hagaru-ri at the southern tip of the reservoir, where he began to build a rough airstrip. The reservoir's Korean name is Changjin; Japanese maps from the occupation rendered it Chōshin, the Japanese reading of the same characters, and that became the Chosin of American memory. From Hagaru-ri the 7th Marines prepared to push on to Yudam-ni, fourteen miles to the west, while the 5th Marines advanced up the east side of the reservoir. East of the reservoir the Marines were relieved on 25 November by an Army regimental combat team of about 3,200 Americans and Koreans under Colonel Allan MacLean.⁸

The trap closes

Waiting in the hills was the Chinese Ninth Army Group under General Song Shilun, twelve divisions and some 150,000 men by Britannica's count, about 120,000 by the Marine Corps' own estimate. They were mostly infantry with mortars and machine guns, short of artillery and trucks, and badly equipped for a Korean winter. They relied on stealth, night attacks and ambushes, and sent divisions to cut the road south of Hagaru-ri.⁹

On the night of 27 to 28 November they struck everywhere at once: at Yudam-ni, at Hagaru-ri, at Koto-ri and against the Army troops east of the reservoir. The attacks came in the dark to the sound of bugles, whistles and cymbals, wave after wave of white-clad soldiers. Halfway between Yudam-ni and Hagaru-ri a single Marine rifle company held the Toktong Pass against a Chinese division. Over three nights every Marine perimeter held, although the rifle companies lost a third to a half of their men.¹⁰

One misstep cost dearly. On 29 November a convoy of tanks, trucks and infantry, including a company of Marines, a company of soldiers and British Royal Marine commandos under Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Drysdale, set out from Koto-ri to reinforce Hagaru-ri. Ambushed on the road, a third of it fought through, a third fought its way back, and 162 officers and men were killed or captured.¹¹

East of Chosin

The Army task force east of the reservoir fared worst. Strung out along the shore road in seven separate positions, it was hit by Chinese divisions night after night. Colonel MacLean was captured and died of his wounds, and command passed to Lieutenant Colonel Don Carlos Faith. Faith was killed in the fighting and was awarded the Medal of Honor after his death. The survivors struggled on foot in small groups around the reservoir or straight across the ice to Hagaru-ri. About 1,000 arrived, and only 385 of them were fit to fight.¹²

Cold

The cold was an enemy in its own right. Temperatures fell to around 30 and 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The ground froze so hard that foxholes had to be blasted out with explosives or bulldozers. Weapons malfunctioned, and even men with minor wounds often died. If you stopped moving, veterans said, you froze. The Chinese, who had not prepared for a winter war, were in the end ruined by cold and hunger as much as by firepower.¹³

Attacking in another direction

On 29 November Almond, back from a meeting with MacArthur in Tokyo, accepted that X Corps had to get out to the coast. His first plan was to fly the Marines out of Hagaru-ri and abandon their heavy weapons and vehicles. Smith refused. He would bring the regiments at Yudam-ni back to Hagaru-ri, fly out the wounded, fly in ammunition and replacements, and then fight his way south with his equipment, "attacking in another direction," as he put it.¹⁴

The march began on 1 December. The 5th Marines walked the road to guard the vehicle column, while the 7th Marines struggled along the ridges to clear Chinese ambushes and relieve the company on Toktong Pass. Artillery leapfrogged down the road to keep up continuous fire, and Marine and Navy fighter-bombers struck any suspected ambush by day. The Yudam-ni force reached Hagaru-ri on 4 December. Transports landing on the rough strip brought in ammunition and fuel and took out some 4,500 casualties.¹⁵

The bridge from the sky

On 6 December the reassembled division set out for Koto-ri, eleven miles further on. Below Koto-ri lay the Funchilin Pass, where the Chinese had blown a bridge over a chasm, leaving a gap no vehicle could cross. The answer came by air: bridge sections were dropped by parachute, enough of them survived the fall, and engineers set them in place so the column could roll on. The Chinese fought for the chokepoint, and the rear guard had to leave seven tanks behind.¹⁶

The last pass to the south had been cleared by the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, in a night attack in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. By then Chinese resistance was fading, their divisions wrecked by cold, hunger and relentless firepower. The Marine rear guard entered the Hungnam perimeter, held by the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, on 11 December. Behind it came thousands of North Korean refugees.¹⁷ › Chesty Puller

Hungnam

From 10 December the ships of Rear Admiral Doyle's Task Force 90 began loading at Hungnam, the Marines first, then South Korean units, then the Army divisions. Navy guns covered the perimeter, firing more than 18,000 five-inch rounds and 162 sixteen-inch shells between 7 and 24 December, and the Chinese chose not to contest the evacuation. By Christmas Eve the fleet had taken off 105,000 troops, 17,500 vehicles, 350,000 measurement tons of cargo and 91,000 Korean civilians. As the last ships pulled away on 24 December, demolition teams blew up the port.¹⁸

Why Chosin mattered

Strategically the battle was a Chinese success. X Corps was driven out of northeastern Korea and shipped back south, where it joined the Eighth Army in January 1951, and the dream of uniting Korea by force was over. But the Ninth Army Group had been ruined and did not return to the front until March 1951. The Chinese have never been precise about their losses; their own records and UN estimates put them between 40,000 and 80,000, counting the dead, the wounded and the victims of the cold. The 1st Marine Division lost 4,385 men in battle and 7,338 to the cold, and the rest of X Corps some 6,000 Americans and Koreans.¹⁹

The men who came out became the Chosin Few, and the battle a cornerstone of Marine Corps lore. In Korea, where it is remembered as Changjin, it is also bound up with the refugees carried away from Hungnam. The war itself had begun to turn at Inchon months earlier. After Chosin it fell to Matthew Ridgway, who took command of the Eighth Army during the Chinese offensive, to rally the UN forces. The war went on until the armistice of 27 July 1953, which drew a demilitarized zone along the 38th parallel.²⁰ › Matthew Ridgway