Battle of the Ch'ongch'on River, 1950: the Chinese counterstroke in Korea

On 24 November 1950 the US Eighth Army attacked north from the Ch'ongch'on River toward the Chinese border, and there was talk of ending the war by Christmas. Within a week the Eighth Army was in full retreat. The fight along the Ch'ongch'on and the ambush of the 2nd Infantry Division south of Kunu-ri turned the Korean War around, and the historian Robert Bruce calls it the worst defeat of the US Army since the fall of Bataan and Corregidor in 1942.²

Who won the Battle of the Ch'ongch'on River and why?

China won. The XIII Army Group of the People's Volunteers struck the Eighth Army by night while it was advancing toward the Yalu, broke the South Korean II Corps on its right and cut the roads behind the Americans. The US 2nd Infantry Division was shattered covering the retreat, and the Eighth Army fell back out of North Korea.³

Background: the last push to the Yalu

By the autumn of 1950 the war seemed won. After the landing at Inchon on 15 September, UN forces drove the North Koreans back, crossed the 38th parallel and pushed deep into North Korea, while the remnants of the North Korean army fell back toward the Yalu, the border with China.⁴ › The Battle of Inchon, 1950

Washington had set limits. The directive drafted for MacArthur in late September authorized operations north of the 38th parallel only so long as there was no entry into North Korea by major Soviet or Chinese forces, no announcement of an intended entry and no threat to counter his operations. The Chinese moved before anyone was sure they had come.⁵

Then China came in. The People's Volunteers crossed the Yalu in secret, and late in October they checked the UN advance, mauling South Korean and American regiments around Unsan, on the Ch'ongch'on. On 6 November, just as suddenly, the Chinese broke contact. In Washington and Tokyo few concluded that China had decided on an all-out war.⁶

The Chinese fought in a way the UN armies were not ready for. Mass attacks pinned units in place while smaller parties slipped round the flanks by night to set roadblocks and ambushes on the roads behind them, so that a unit that pulled out drove straight into a killing zone. MacArthur himself later described how they had moved into North Korea by night infiltration and broken contact to build up their strength.⁷

Armies and commanders

General Walton Walker spread the Eighth Army evenly across the front. In the west the I Corps had the US 24th Infantry Division, the South Korean 1st Division and the British 27th Commonwealth Brigade. In the center the IX Corps had the 25th and 2nd Infantry Divisions, with a Turkish brigade, new to battle, in reserve at Kunu-ri. On the right, around Tokch'on in the mountains, stood the South Korean II Corps.⁸

The commanders expected little resistance. With the Chinese quiet since 6 November, the advance of 24 November was meant as the last push to the border; there was speculation that the war would be over by Christmas, and soldiers were told they would be home for it.⁹

The judgment came from the top. At Wake Island on 15 October, asked by President Truman about the chances of Chinese or Soviet interference, MacArthur answered “Very little,” and said he hoped to withdraw the Eighth Army to Japan by Christmas.¹⁰

The Turks had come a long way. Their brigade, under Brigadier General Tahsin Yazıcı, landed at Pusan on 17 October and moved up to Kunu-ri in late November as a reserve of the IX Corps.¹¹

Facing them was the Chinese XIII Army Group under Li Tianyu. Its main blow was aimed at the IX Corps, and the 2nd Division in particular, while the 38th and 42nd Armies went for the South Koreans on the eastern flank and the 50th and 66th struck the I Corps in the west. On 28 November MacArthur put the Chinese in North Korea at close to 200,000 men, with some 50,000 North Koreans besides.¹²

The battle in phases

24 November: the advance. The first day went well. The I Corps pushed up the coastal plain, the IX Corps moved up the valleys of the Kuryong and the Ch'ongch'on, and the South Koreans started north through the mountains. Resistance was light.¹³

25 and 26 November: the blow. On the night of the 25th the Chinese struck the 2nd Division and the IX Corps, working round the American companies. The heaviest blow fell farther east: by the 26th the South Korean II Corps had broken, and the right flank of the Eighth Army lay open.¹⁴

27 and 28 November: the Turks at Wawon. Walker sent the Turkish brigade east from Kunu-ri toward Tokch'on to close the gap, and the 1st Cavalry Division up to block the roads farther south. Near Wawon the Turks met the Chinese 38th Army in their first battle in Korea. They fought a delaying action and fell back, but the Chinese got round them and cut the road behind them, and the brigade was roughly handled.¹⁵

28 and 29 November: retreat. On the 27th the forces on the coastal plain were ordered back across the Ch'ongch'on, and by the next day the whole Eighth Army was retreating. On the 28th MacArthur told the Joint Chiefs that he would pass from the offensive to the defensive, and that evening he summoned Walker and the X Corps commander, Edward Almond, to Tokyo. The 2nd Division, covering the IX Corps, was the last to go.¹⁶

Turning point: the gauntlet south of Kunu-ri

The 2nd Division's road south ran from Kunu-ri to Sunch'on through a narrow pass, and the Chinese had already put a fire block across it. On the morning of 30 November the division set out down that road. Chinese troops on the hills on both sides raked it with machine guns and mortars; Andrew Salmon describes a trap ten kilometers long held by two Chinese divisions.¹⁷

Wrecked and burning vehicles soon blocked the pass, and every truck that stopped held up those behind it. Fighter-bombers came down low over the hills and dropped napalm on the Chinese positions, so close that burning napalm spilled onto the road, and for a time the column moved again. British troops of the 27th Brigade waited at the southern end of the pass to take in the survivors.¹⁸

Behind the column the division's engineers held on. The 2nd Engineer Combat Battalion, already used as infantry, stood on the ridge east of Kunu-ri as part of the rear guard and was among the last units left when the road south was found blocked; it came out having lost almost all of its equipment.¹⁹

At the rear of the column there was no way through. Men of the artillery and of the 9th Infantry abandoned their guns and vehicles and set off across the hills toward Sunch'on. Among them was a young soldier of the all-Black 503rd Field Artillery Battalion, Charles Rangel, the future New York congressman. Wounded by a mortar fragment, he led a band of some forty men out through the hills to safety; he later said he had not had a bad day since. After the war he took up law and in 1970 won a seat in the House of Representatives, which he held from 1971 until 2017.²⁰

Counting the losses

No one tallied the losses with any precision. A count made on 1 December and cited in the Army's official history put the 2nd Division's battle casualties for the second half of November at 4,940, a third of the 15,000 men it had in the middle of the month, and listed 64 artillery pieces lost; Mossman warns that this early tally was not wholly certifiable. Andrew Salmon writes that two of the division's three regiments were wiped out at Kunu-ri and that the 503rd Field Artillery lost all of its guns, and the Army's account of the 2nd Engineer Battalion says it was down to 266 men of an authorized 977.²¹

The Turkish brigade paid heavily too: TRT, the Turkish state broadcaster, gives 218 killed, 455 wounded and 94 missing in the fighting around Kunu-ri from 26 to 29 November. Over the whole war, by TRT's and the South Korean veterans ministry's count, the Turks lost 721 killed and 2,147 wounded. Chinese losses on the Ch'ongch'on are not known.²²

Aftermath

As December opened, the remnants of the 2nd Division reached Sunch'on and the Eighth Army was disengaging toward P'yongyang. The 503rd and most of the artillery had lost their guns on the road; Bruce argues that the division's rearguard fight greatly slowed the Chinese offensive and helped save the Eighth Army from destruction.²³

The retreat did not stop at P'yongyang. In early December Walker decided to give up the city and took the road south, and by the end of the month his army stood along the Imjin River and the 38th parallel. In the east, at the same moment, the Marines and soldiers of X Corps were fighting their own battle at the Chosin Reservoir.²⁴ › The Battle of Chosin Reservoir, 1950

Legacy and memory

In Tokyo the shock was immediate. On 28 November MacArthur cabled the Joint Chiefs that all hope of confining the war to North Korean troops could be abandoned: “We face an entirely new war.”²⁵

For China it was a triumph. Andrew Salmon calls it an incredible achievement for China's peasant soldiers, a turning point for a nation that had suffered a century of humiliation by outside powers.²⁶

For the United States the Ch'ongch'on is the great defeat of the Korean War. Salmon calls it the bloodiest battlefield defeat America has suffered since 1945, and Bruce the worst for the US Army since Bataan. The division's run down the road from Kunu-ri became known as the Gauntlet, the word S. L. A. Marshall put in the title of his 1953 study of the battle, The River and the Gauntlet.²⁷

For Turkey, Kunu-ri was the first battle of its brigade in Korea. Turkish soldiers also built a school for Korean children orphaned by the war, and South Korea still remembers the brigade with gratitude.²⁸ › Battles of Korea