50 Years Later, the Battle of Chosin Ends

In the bitter cold of December 1950, a convoy of 3,200 U.S. Army troops came under withering fire from tens of thousands of Chinese infantrymen massed in the hills east of Chosin Reservoir in North Korea.

Twelve hours later, about 1,500 Americans from the 7th Infantry Division were dead, more than 1,000 were wounded and most of the convoy’s 40 vehicles were charred hulks or in flames. The attack was the brutal conclusion of four days of assaults by the Chinese, and when it was over, only soldiers strong enough to stagger six miles to a U.S. Marine encampment escaped capture.

For years, the units involved have been accused of incompetence, malingering, even cowardice. But now, at the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, the military has taken a new look at the battle and officially affirmed the contribution of what came to be called Task Force Faith.

In a ceremony this month, survivors were decorated with a Presidential Unit Citation acknowledging that, even though the Army units were ill-prepared and poorly trained, without their resistance the Chinese likely would have swept south and achieved their larger goal of destroying a Marine force of 17,000.

“The fact is, this group kept the others from being annihilated,” said Bob Hammond, 67, of Anaheim, who was a 17-year-old Army artilleryman when he faced the onslaught that killed the six other members of his squad at Chosin Reservoir.

The story of Task Force Faith is a tale of collective anguish and official redemption. It also is emblematic of America’s broader struggle to come to terms with a war that began in confusion and ended in stalemate.

In the war’s opening months, the U.S. military, shrunken by demobilization, was a shadow of the force that had whipped Adolf Hitler and the Japanese military machine in World War II. In Korea, it demonstrated its fallibility: faulty intelligence, ill-prepared troops and erratic leadership--all the way up to the most celebrated American war hero of the era, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was the top allied commander in Korea.

These questions about the performance of the troops and their leaders were agonizing to contemplate in the years after the Korean War. And for decades, many Americans chose simply to ignore or deny them. As a result, difficult issues arising from America’s “forgotten war” have remained largely out of sight for decades.

Now, however, some of these issues are finally receiving the scrutiny they deserve as official embarrassment over the conduct of the war subsides and as veterans, nearing the last years of their lives, seek to understand better what happened to them so many years ago.

For Army veterans of the Chosin Reservoir fighting, the negative perception of their performance has made the wait for official reconsideration long and painful. Compounding their discomfort was the way Chosin has come to be seen as a brilliant tactical operation by the Marines who fought next to them.

Marines, Army Fight Over Battle Story

Though then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson called it the greatest defeat for American arms since the Civil War battle of Bull Run, Chosin Reservoir has been celebrated as a success for the encircled 1st Marine Division, which fought its way out of the trap, bringing along its equipment, its dead and wounded, and inflicting 40,000 Chinese casualties.

Some Marines, recalling this feat, have contrasted the corps’ performance with what they regarded as the Army’s failure. The story has been a lingering source of friction between members and veterans of the two services.

The reservoir campaign unfolded as part of a huge allied counteroffensive that began with MacArthur’s daring landing of U.S. forces at Inchon in September and was intended to capture all of North Korea--and end the war--by Christmas.

As part of this drive, MacArthur sent the 1st Marine Division and some units from the Army’s 7th Infantry Division on an offensive from the northeastern coast toward the Chinese border. But as the advance continued, American lines grew thin--and the Chinese became increasingly unhappy with the Americans’ approach. China moved 300,000 troops into North Korea in the late fall, although the Americans continued to believe that they would not jump into the war.

While the Marine force included many battle-hardened officers and NCOs, the Army units were markedly weaker. The Army’s troop strength had been reduced significantly in the rapid demobilization following World War II, leaving units with fewer soldiers than often were needed to engage in combat.

Some of the Army soldiers sent to Chosin Reservoir were hastily trained teenagers who had been rushed to Korea from cushy garrison duty in Japan. About 700 of the original 3,200 members of Task Force Faith were young Koreans who had been swept up in South Korean cities and pressed into unpaid service.

The Army units had meager supplies of ammunition, food and equipment. Many of the soldiers found themselves facing winter temperatures that fell to 40 degrees below zero with only light parkas and thin cotton pants for protection.

In early November, the 1st Marine Division and the Army units began a laborious advance up a gravel mountain road that wound 78 miles into the interior toward the huge reservoir, about 40 miles from the Chinese border. While most of the troops headed toward the west side of the reservoir, three Army battalions and a few other units turned east.

The Army brass told them that only a scattering of Chinese units was in the area. The soldiers set up three separate camps on the night of Nov. 27 without digging foxholes into the rock-frozen earth as military practice required or, in some cases, without setting up communication links so neighboring units could be contacted for help.

By 11 p.m., the soldiers found out that Army intelligence was wrong.

Hordes of Chinese infantrymen, some armed with captured U.S.-made Thompson submachine guns, announced their arrival with bugles, whistles and shepherd’s horns. Swarming through the camps in subzero weather, they killed some soldiers as they slept in their tents and destroyed vehicles, artillery and other equipment before they were repulsed.

Pvt. Hammond, assigned to the 57th Field Artillery, saw in the dawn’s light that only a few men in his unit were left to operate its six 105-millimeter guns.

Only slowly recognizing the extent of the threat, Army leadership first ordered the units to continue their mission.

According to historical accounts, Gen. Edward M. Almond, commander of the Army’s X Corps, flew in by helicopter and urged the men on: “Don’t let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stand in your way.”

Two days later, the brass ordered the troops to withdraw, though some senior Army leaders privately doubted that many would make it out. For four days, the task force held out against two Chinese divisions, who attacked at night and remained hidden during the day.

Except for Marine aircraft, the Americans had no support. An Army tank unit a few miles south tried briefly to join them--but turned around after two of its tanks were destroyed by the Chinese. American aircraft tried to airdrop supplies to the units, but some were lost to the enemy. In other cases, the wrong ammunition was sent.

The Chinese were carrying only light weapons, but they had large numbers of troops and were highly disciplined. Clarence White, then an 18-year-old supply sergeant, recalled watching the Chinese march in formation toward the American positions as grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns from an Army tracked vehicle cut them down. “It was unbelievable,” he said of their determination.

Many of the Army’s officers were killed or wounded in the first days at Chosin Reservoir.

Col. Allan D. MacLean, the commanding officer, ran out across the reservoir ice to greet what he thought was an American rescue mission. It turned out to be a Chinese column. He was wounded, then captured by the Chinese.

The new commanding officer, Lt. Col. Don Carlos Faith, on Dec. 1 ordered the troops to form a convoy of trucks for a withdrawal. The wounded, then numbering 600, were piled in the vehicles and lashed onto hoods and fenders.

But the withdrawal began in disaster as a Marine Corsair fighter plane dropped a canister of napalm too close to the column, incinerating a dozen U.S. soldiers at the head of the convoy. The mistake encouraged the Chinese, who increased their fire and panicked many of the U.S. soldiers, who surged down the road without waiting for orders.

For the next 12 hours, the convoy moved sluggishly as Chinese marksmen picked off drivers and trucks broke down. Finally, with Faith dead and the column still six miles north of the Marine encampment, the convoy ground to a halt.

The Chinese troops swarmed in, shooting the wounded, lobbing grenades, setting other vehicles afire and taking the few unwounded soldiers prisoner.

Thomas Sealey, 68, then an 18-year-old private, was crouching under a broken truck with only five rounds remaining when the Chinese surrounded it and poked their bayonets in his direction.

For 33 months he was held prisoner, living on two boiled potatoes a day and watching weaker soldiers die in filth and despair. Over the next several days, the last soldiers straggled in to the Marine camp at Hagaru-ri. Only 385 members of an Army force that once numbered 3,200 were healthy enough to join the Marines in their withdrawal to the sea.

The Army soldiers’ battlefield ordeal was over. But a new fight soon began--over their reputation.

A Marine chaplain who had been at Chosin, Lt. Cmdr. Otto Sporrer, returned to the states to give news interviews and write an article deploring the Army’s performance.

Sporrer, who resented the fact that the Marines had been used in the Chosin campaign, said that some Army soldiers had thrown down their weapons. Others feigned injuries once back at the Marine camp, he said, so they would be evacuated to safety and would not have to fight. In “Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950,” a 1999 account of the campaign as seen largely through Marine eyes, author Martin Russ reported that an anonymous Marine had written lyrics about the task force, to the tune of Hank Snow’s classic country song, “Movin’ On”:

Hear the pitter patter of tiny feet

It’s the U.S. Army in full retreat.

Responding to accusations from Sporrer and others, the Army had its inspector general study the units’ performance. He found no evidence to support the accusations. In the years after the war, Col. Faith was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor and the official Army history praised the soldiers.

Yet the stain on the Army units’ reputation has been difficult to erase.

In 1952, when U.S. military commanders in Asia proposed a Presidential Unit Citation to honor the American performance at Chosin, the Marine commander, Gen. Oliver Prince Smith, recommended inclusion of Marine components but not the Army units who fought nearby.

In recent years, some Marines, Army veterans and others have petitioned repeatedly to honor Army units as well. They cited documents from official Chinese archives showing that the Chinese had thrown two full divisions and an attached regiment--20,000 troops--at the task force. But the authorities demurred, saying that rules required them to abide by the judgment of the commander on the scene, Smith, the Marine general.

Last year, two groups of veterans again urged authorities to grant recognition to Task Force Faith. One group consisted of the directors of a veterans’ group called the Chosin Few, four-fifths of whose members are Marines.

In October, Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, who has authority over the Marines, signed a terse order calling for the Army units to be included in the citation for displaying “extraordinary heroism.” At a convention of the Chosin Few in Lancaster, Pa., on June 10, the veterans finally were honored.

Some Army veterans acknowledged that many of the soldiers at Chosin Reservoir were ill-prepared and that their officers made mistakes. But they deny that there was malingering and insist that, if any soldiers threw down their weapons, it was because they were malfunctioning or because they had no ammunition.

Merrill A. Needham Jr., a sociologist and writer who has pushed since 1993 to win recognition for the Army units, said that it made him “very emotional . . . to think of this unit, stripped of its honor.” That they “fought as long and hard as they did, basically unsupported, was miraculous,” said Needham, who has written a book, “Foot Soldiers,” about the long military tradition of Faith’s family.

Needham sees the soldiers as belonging to a centuries-old military tradition called the “forlorn hope”--a small band of warriors who are thrown into the path of likely destruction to slow an enemy’s attack.

With many soldiers’ bodies “left smoldering amid the wreckage of their trucks, or frozen in the ice of Chosin,” the Army units fit that definition, Needham wrote in a letter to one officer of the outfit. “Neither then, nor later, were they honored.”

The Army veterans, though, said that they now are trying to focus on the positive aspects of what happened, including the way some Marine veterans helped push the Pentagon bureaucracy to clear their names. “It was, really, the Marines that got it done,” Hammond said. And that may be a sign that, 50 years after the fighting, the wounds are healing.

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One of the Bloodiest Wars in History

The Korean War was one of history’s bloodiest, a Cold War flash point that set the stage for American involvement later in Vietnam. It began on June 25, 1950, after Communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The U.N. entered the war in support of South Korea. The Soviet Union and China supported the North. The United States supplied about 90% of the troops and supplies that the U.N. sent to South Korea.

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Military Casualties in Korea

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Prisoners Dead Wounded or missing South Korea 58,127 175,743 166,297 U.S. 36,516 103,284 8,100 Other U.N. nations 3,194 11,297 2,769

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Dead or wounded Prisoners North Korea 522,000 102,000 China 945,000 22,000

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Battle of the Chosin Reservoir

In late 1950, the war appeared to be over. Allied forces were pushing the North Koreans to the Yalu River. Then the Chinese sent a huge force against the Allies on Nov. 27-29. American troops, outnumbered 10 to 1, were forced to retreat along snowy mountain roads, in one of the most pivotal and startling battles of the war.

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Sources: “Chosin, Heroic Ordeal of the Korean War,” “Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950,” Department of Defense, World Book Encyclopedia; researched by JOHN JACKSON and VICTOR KOTOWITZ/Los Angeles Times

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SUBDUED REMEMBRANCE

Ceremonies marking the war anniversary are muted amid signs of rapprochement. A9