Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Battle of Chosin Reservoir

There is a superb book about the battle at Chosin Reservoir entitled "The Last Stand of Fox Company" by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. It tells the story of how one Marine rifle company held open a pass critical to the withdrawal of U.S. forces for 5 days while under constant attack by Chinese forces. It's an amazing story, told largely in the words of the men who survived the fight. Well worth the time to read.

7th division was outnumbered 11.5 to 1 exactly. Incredible....imagine what the chinks thought about American resolve after that lol

Mao was probably like....maybe this is a bad idea.

Read "For Country and Corps: The Life of General Oliver P. Smith" by Gail B. Shisler. MacArthur was warned not to begin a major offensive on the Korean Peninsula so late in the year. He was also warned of the build up of Chinese forces north of the Yalu River. General Smith saved a lot of Marine lives. Despite daily threats from MacArthur that he would be fired if he did not continue to advance beyond his supply lines and artillery support, Smith's prudence was instrumental in the successful retreat of his troops to be extracted at Hungnam.

Everybody was caught with their pants down in regards to the Chinese buildup...CIA, Mi6, you name it. How that could possibly happen is one of the great questions in the history of modern war but it’s not fair to blame it all on MacArthur. He followed bad intelligence and ultimately bad instincts in that regard.

Did I mention I hate Truman? There is no substitute for total victory. We should have let MacArthur finish the job while the army and marines were there to do it. We are still paying the price for pussy Truman’s cowardly appeasement of the communists

Great book! My dad is a Korean War vet with a purple heart. Nearly lost his leg from enemy artillery. The Navy surgeon wanted to amputate it, told dad he would never walk on it again. Dad refused to let him take his leg and after several surgeries and a lot of recovery he went on to become a master carpenter framing and building homes. The pure grit that generation of men had is almost unfathomable in today's world.

Id bet the us Calvary and 1st Marines can still get it done

a cousin was there. we were going hunting one time and i asked him about it. he just said it was cold and kind of grinned. my father was in the 7th. in ww2 and i heard
a lot of stories when he was with vet friends. (in our neighborhood, almost all the fathers were vets). he never had much to say about okinawa though.

I had an uncle there. Fresh out of high school.
His was a quad 50 gunner and fought in several major hill fights.
He told his dad that it was nothing short of legalized murder........
He came home very ill and really screwed up.
A raging case of PTST. He scared the hell out of the whole family.
I was warned by all the older family members to never ask him about it.

I read a bio on Jack O'Connor and there was chapter on their son, Jerry.
He fought there too. He came home in one piece but was never the same.
It’s a heart wrenching story.

I had an uncle who was a Navy Corpsman who was with the Marines at Chosin. It wasn't until very late in life that he even really even talked of being there. He spoke of how bitter cold it was, the intense fight, the rough situation the Marines were in, and how he had to ditch the Red Cross on his helmet and medic bag as the Chinese would target medics. While being a medic he wasn't supposed to carry a weapon and use it to he said "there was enemy everywhere and I had to do what I had to do to survive." He ended up with two Purple Hearts and one Bronze Star from the Chosin campaign.

My uncle spoke quite a bit about how cold it was. He said they couldn't have fires to keep warm, and it was like 20 below zero. Sleeping in small, slit trenches, covered with tarps, covered in snow. For several weeks. With very little supplies. How he would patch up a badly wounded solider who would then go back to the lines to fight because the solider was gonna likely die from his injuries anyway so the soldier would rather die fighting then die on a stretcher at the aid station. And the wind. The fog - so foggy, that air drop resupplies were not possible. And how many Air Force pilots, flying in the fog trying to drop supplies, would crash into the hillside. He then hugged my Dad in salute to the Air Force pilots as my Dad was a career Air Force pilot (although he wasn't there flying at Chosin). They were in those condition for several weeks, surrounded by "100,000 pissed off Chinese." He said the Chinese even had it worse the the Marines had it. He said, at times, that when you shot, there were so many Chinese, you couldn't help to not hit them.

He said they recovered as many of the US soldiers dead bodies they could from the battlefield and took them with them on their fight southward (as they were surrounded by those 100,000 Chinese) toward safety of the United States front line.

He also spoke of how hard it was to see his fellow Marines bodies, frozen solid in grotesque positions, bouncing along behind the trucks, having been lashed with ropes together in long lines behind the trucks in the convoy as the wounded were inside the trucks. He said as the roads were bomb cratered, that they would use the Chinese bodies as fill material for the craters and simply drove over them as they couldn't dig in the frozen ground to get and dirt to fill in the craters, all the while, fighting off ambushes much of their route out while doing what they could to survive.

My Uncle, being from Idaho, when he got out of the service, moved to Las Vegas as he said he couldn't tolerate the cold anymore after being at Chosin and lived in Vegas the rest of his life. He became a school teacher. He died in 2007 and is buried at the National Cemetary near Henderson, Nevada.

Oddly, he told me about his experience about a year or so before he died. When I was growing up, I had no idea what he had went through. I never even knew he was in the military. I just thought he was a quiet, rather short, thin, school teacher.

His name was Bruce Kenney. RIP Uncle Bruce.

One of my uncles specifically requested to be cremated upon his passing, so that he would never be cold again. Those men suffered, many of them for the rest of their lives.

My Dad was a Korean War Vet. He was Army. Not at Chosin. It's amazing so many managed to live battling the enemy and the unrelenting cold. God bless them all.

Thanks for the tip. I couldn't get it on netflix but got it on Amazon Prime. I watched the first have with by boys (7 & 10) tonight, and we'll finish it tomorrow. I didn't learn about Chosin until I was in the Marine Corps, and I don't think that's acceptable. So I want them to be aware, especially with all the BS going on in this country....just who the overpaid athletes are disrespecting.

I was in the Corps in the late 60 s /early 70 s. Most all of the senior NCO s were Korea Vets, and Chosin Vets as well. Our Battalion Sargent Major in Vietnam , Orville Jones, was Chesty Puller's driver. Another excellent read, "Chosin, Heroic Ordeal of the Korean War" by Eric Hammel.

Semper Fi

Back in my nautical years (USN), got snatched up on Guam in Dec and sent to Osan, Korea for two months. It does get cold there. Pretty much worked the line wearing everything I brought along.

Had an uncle that served there during the conflict. His only mentions where when the old Sunday newsreels played between noon and 1:00 o'clock.

One of my battalion chiefs called someone out about combat saying he was a 19 year old Marine buck sergeant that had a machine gun crew. He mentioned fighting hand to hand. He was a pleasant and very easy going guy.
My father one time only spoke of the cold. He was estranged since I was 14 but apparently he was in hand to hand fighting, caught a bayo to the upper back and got a purple heart. I guess my brother is named after his best army buddy that was KIA.

Had a cousin that was a grunt at Chosin. Lost all the toes on his right foot to frostbite. Epic battle and they had to be tough to survive it.

Interesting post on this thread. Never heard of Chosin nor many Korean War stories. Seems everyone has wanted to discuss the World Wars. Never enter a war to tie!!!!

Korean War vets are the most unappreciated IMO. The same goes for Vietnam vets. They did their job and they did it well. The biggest problem was from the unqualified leaders in the Pentagon and the White House.

I've heard it said that Gen. MacArthur was the greatest actor to ever wear a uniform. He was a prima donna glory hungry loser who cost many lives during WWII unnecessarily. He just had to "return" to the Philippines in order to glorify himself at the expense of so many American lives.

Have you ever noticed that two of the greatest generals, Gen. George C. Patton and Gen. Chesty Puller were never appreciated in the upper levels yet they were the finest fighting generals ever? It's called job security and I see it every day where I work. The golden boys take all the credit and the "grunts" do all the work and take all the risks.

One of my Father's best friends was a MGySgt during Korea. His feet were badly frostbitten during the retreat back south in November/December 1951, but stayed through 33 years of service, retiring in 1970. He believed that the advance northward from Wonsan wasn't well thought out, as the mountainous terrain limited the number of roads that were able to handle vehicle traffic in the volume necessary to support an assault of the size of X Corps. He joined us on a couple of deer hunts in Maine shortly after he retired, I've never known anyone who could, just by looking at a topo map, identify bottlenecks to place stands in country that he'd never seen before.

I've heard that while MacArthur was a prima donna, he was also the person that got the Garand approved for regular issue while he was the Army COS and that gave American soldiers and Marines a tangible advantage when they were engaged in combat with armies equipped with bolt action rifles. I've also read that MacArthur's forces suffered fewer casualties post-Bataan, than were suffered during the Battle of the Bulge.