The Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle

By Hampton Sides

The seventy-year-old five-star general was, at that moment, the most powerful military figure in American history. MacArthur’s career had been long and tempestuous, and marked by stunning precocity. He was the youngest superintendent of West Point. He was the youngest chief of staff of the Army. 

He had become a general in 1918. During World War II, he had presided over the greatest defeat in American history – the fall of Bataan and Corregidor – but he had also presided over the liberation of the Philippines and the Japanese surrender. Now his array of titles stretched plausibility: supreme commander for the Allied powers. Commander in chief of U.S. Army Forces in the Far East. 

Head of all United Nations troops in Korea. In addition, as the man absolutely in charge of the occupation of Japan, he was the de facto ruler of eighty-three million foreign subjects.

They called him the American Mikado, the American Proconsul, the American Caesar. They called him El Supremo, the Great Panjandrum. He was a man in love with the vertical pronoun, it was said, a man with “a solemn regard for his own divinity.” Asia had become his personal domain, and he seemed to know the Far East better than he knew his home country – he had not visited the United States in fourteen years. It was as though he had become the emperor, and a touchy one at that, jealous of his routines and creature comforts, microscopically attentive to the trappings of power and the nuances of publicity. Since the start of the war, MacArthur had been in every sense an absentee general, running his Korea operations from Tokyo. Though he occasionally flew over to the peninsula for a photo op or a quick afternoon reconnaissance, he would not spend a single night on Korean soil during the conflict.

MacArthur greeted Smith warmly, ushering him into his sanctum with fulsome praise. The Inchon landing would be decisive, he said, and the war would be over in one month. Not only that, but Inchon would provide existential security for the Marine Corps. After World War II, there had been talk in Washington of radically downgrading the Marines. With the advent of atomic weapons and the ascendancy of the Air Force, the day of the amphibious landing, some suggested , was over. But MacArthur strongly disagreed, and he believed that Inchon would prove his point. “He pulls no punches,” Smith wrote to his wife, Esther, in Berkeley. “He feels that the operation will forever assure the Marines of their place in the sun. He apparently thinks a lot of Marines.” 

For these reasons, Smith was at first positively inclined toward MacArthur and his plan. But after a few days in Tokyo, he decided that much about the supreme commander’s world was weird and cultish. 

MacArthur surrounded himself with yes men, many of whom dated back to his days in the Philippines. He appeared to have insulated himself from facts he found inconvenient or unpalatable. He dwelled in a hermetic universe of his own making.

Because the people who worked for MacArthur seemed to regard him as a deity, the Inchon invasion, having sprung from his head, was thus a providential undertaking that could not be questioned. “With that staff, MacArthur was God,” Smith wrote. “It was more than confidence which upheld him. It was a supreme and almost mystical faith that he could not fail.”

(Sides 2018, 15-16)

At the end of World War II, the Allied powers had been faced with the question of what to do with the spoils of the Japanese Empire. Korea had been a Japanese colony, and at the suggestion of the young American diplomat Dean Rusk, who reportedly used nothing more than a National Geographic map as a guide, the peninsula was summarily divided at the thirty-eighth parallel. This line was an arbitrary one – the two “nations” shared the same culture, the same history, the same language. Now the peninsula had been carved up into more or less equal halves, with the understanding that the Soviets would temporarily control the North and the Americans would temporarily control the South, until the country’s thirty million citizens could become reunited under one independent government. But that reunification never happened. The two separate realms were quickly remade, each in the image of its custodial nation.

In the South, the United States installed a staunch anti Communist, pro-capitalist, American-educated leader named Syngman Rhee, who held the country together but proved to be a ruthless authoritarian. When he came to power, in 1947, Rhee’s government tortured and assassinated opposition leaders and led a military campaign against left-wing insurgents that culminated in the deaths of more than 75,000 people. This awkward bedfellow of ‘ democracy as he’d been called, had proven an embarrassment to the United Nations. The United States, growing ever more focused on the global containment of Communism, tended to look the other way, but Rhee’s police-state tactics concerned the Truman administration enough that it refused to provide the republic with much in the way of heavy arms – thus leaving South Korea vulnerable to attack.

In the North, meanwhile, the Soviets had handpicked Kim II Sung to lead the fledgling Communist nation. Kim had been a ferocious and wily guerrilla resistance fighter against the Japanese in World War II and had become indoctrinated as a Communist ideologue. He proved a master at broadcasting his own legend, exaggerating his exploits as a fighter, among North Korean peasants, stories circulated about how Kim could render himself invisible during battles it was even said he could walk on water. Consciously imitating Stalin’s model, he developed a cult of personality, erecting gargantuan statues and billboards in his honor and calling himself “Great Leader.” Later, his public relations minions would go further, declaring him “the sun of mankind and the greatest man who has ever appeared in the world.” Tightening his grip on the reins of power, he systematically imprisoned, exiled, or murdered his political rivals. Kim vowed to unite Korea under one government – his government – creating what he called a “happy society” that would eradicate all vestiges of “American imperialists and their stooges.”

(Sides 2018, 24-25)

As the Marines began to probe the outlying precincts of the city, the human cost of MacArthur’s deadline became more apparent to Smith. He felt the September 25 date was contrived – little more than a political gimmick designed to win headlines. Smith reckoned that his Marines could probably take Seoul by the twenty-fifth, but only by laying waste to large sections of the city, pounding it with artillery, bombing it to cinders. Seoul would be badly scarred, and the civilian death toll could be terrible.

Smith knew that there were other, less destructive ways to take the city. Alpha Bowser insisted that the Marines could capture Seoul ” with hardly a brick out of place. ” They could encircle it, cut the enemy’s supply lines, and methodically ferret out the defenders, block by block. But this kind of fighting would take more time than MacArthur was willing to tolerate.

So the big guns were brought forward, and the ritual of ” softening up ” targets across the city began. This, of course, was but a euphemism for a devastating bombardment that could only strike terror in the hearts of Seoul’s residents. General Almond was pleased to note that the enemy would be pounded to pieces. That a city might be razed in the process appeared not to trouble him.

(Sides 2018, 33)

On October 1, a South Korean battalion became the first of the U.N. forces to march across the parallel. Within a few days, large numbers of American troops would follow them. As the military caravans hastened north toward Pyongyang, MacArthur continued to enjoy the full blessing of Washington. The Truman administration issued only one caveat: MacArthur must remain vigilant to any indication that Red China or the Soviet Union might enter the war. At the first sign of their involvement, MacArthur was to halt his advance.

(Sides 2018, 53)

At the Zhongnanhai, the former imperial palace in Beijing, Mao Zedong was in secret deliberations with his advisers about the Korea situation.

Mao was eager to enter the war. “Another nation is in a crisis,” he reportedly said. “We’d feel bad if we stood idly by.” His foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, having recently returned from a series of meetings with Stalin at his dacha on the Black Sea and gaining his tacit support, concurred.

Mao decided to assign the command of China’s armies to Peng Dehuai, a veteran officer of the civil war and an old comrade from the days of the Long March. Peng accepted. “The U.S. occupation of Korea, separated from China by only a river, would threaten North east China,” he argued. “The U. S. could find a pretext at any time to launch a war of aggression against China. The tiger wanted to eat human beings; when it would do so would depend on its appetite. No concession could stop it.” In characterizing the prospect of an American presence on the Yalu, some of the Chinese commanders employed a hypothetical analogy: The United States would not countenance a scenario in which the Chinese invaded Mexico and marched right up to the Rio Grande and the Texas border. That, in reverse, was precisely the situation here.

Peng and Mao agreed on a strategy to entrap the Americans – an enemy that, they fully realized , had far greater firepower. Peng wrote, “We would employ the tactic of purposely showing ourselves to be weak, increasing the arrogance of the enemy , luring him deep into our areas.” Then Peng’s far more numerous armies would “sweep into the enemy ranks with the strength of an avalanche” and engage at close quarters. 

This strategy, Peng thought, would render ” the superior firepower of the enemy useless. “A few days later, on October 19, large formations of Chinese troops, the People’s Volunteer Army (PVA), secretly crossed the border into North Korea. The word volunteer was a calculated political fiction that gave Mao the rhetorical wiggle room to suggest that he was not sending his regular army, and thus had not formally declared war on the United States, this, Mao coyly suggested, was an organic public uprising to defend China’s Communist brethren in neighboring North Korea, and he would not stand in the way of it. 

To further the deception, he ordered his soldiers to strip their uniforms of any insignia that might identify them as officially Chinese . He seemed to think that American forces might even be stupid enough to mistake his men for North Korean troops. “We all have black hair,” he said. “No one can tell the difference.” A week later, Mao ordered 200,000 more troops to enter North Korea.

From Mao’s perspective, this was a confrontation decades in the making, American imperialism, which the Chairman viewed as merely an extension of the old imperialism of the European colonial powers, had been thwarting China’s progress and intervening in her internal affairs for more than a century. 

He viewed American meddling as a pernicious force, going back as far as the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, and the disruptive role of American missionaries deep in China’s hinterlands. The United States had actively and openly subverted Mao’s revolution, supplying arms and assistance to Chiang Kai-shek. Now, from their base in occupied Japan, the Americans appeared to be expanding their sphere of influence throughout Asia. 

When the defeated Chiang decamped to Taiwan and Mao threatened to attack him there, President Truman had sent the Seventh Fleet to guard the Strait of Taiwan – an action Mao viewed as an affront. Now, by crossing the thirty-eighth parallel and pushing toward China’s border, the United States, Mao insisted , was showing an old, consistent pattern.

Yet, privately, Chairman Mao was surprisingly enamored of much about American culture, and in some senses he wanted China to mimic America’s energetic spirit of innovation and technological prowess. 

Although he reluctantly relied on the Soviet Union in important ways and paid lip service to the ideology of world Communism, Mao also hated, feared, and distrusted Stalin. China’s alliance with Russia, seemingly ratified by the signing of the Sino Soviet Treaty of February 1950, was largely a political sham – the two nations were quite wary of each other and had a delicate relationship. In no way did Mao want China to directly emulate the Soviet system. His vision of Communism took into consideration authentic Chinese thought, Chinese history, and Chinese culture , organically superimposing certain aspects of Marxism-Leninism over a unique national identity. It rankled Mao that neither the United States nor the U.N. would accept Red China’s nationhood. On some level he had concluded that perhaps the only way he could get the Americans to take him and his revolution seriously was for China to confront them head – on. It would be a way of validating the People’s Republic in the world’s eyes. And so it was decided: China would strike.

Besides, Mao reasoned, China had already issued a fair warning to the United States, and to the world , that she would strike. In Beijing two weeks earlier, Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai had personally told India’s ambassador to China, K.M. Panikkar, that if American troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, China would certainly intervene. 

Zhou’s ultimatum could not have been stated in a more emphatic language. India was one of the few non-Communist countries that had formally recognized Mao’s regime as the legitimate government of China, so Panikkar served as a crucially important diplomatic channel. 

The ambassador immediately cabled Zhou’s words to Prime Minister Nehru in New Delhi, who forwarded the statement straight to U.S. and U.N. authorities. But in the end, MacArthur, and Truman’s top advisers as well, dismissed the warning as mere Red propaganda, filtered through an unreliable source. China, Mao believed, had been clear in communicating her intentions. But the United States had chosen to ignore the message.

(Sides 2018, 62-64)

Most of Mao’s soldiers were powerless and desperately poor young men. They came from the lower echelons of an ancient society that did not particularly value the individual and had traditionally viewed warriors as an expendable class. (“As you do not use good metal for nails,” went an old Chinese proverb, “so you do not use good men for soldiers.”) If Mao regarded the legions he was sending into Korea as noble patriots, he also seemed to view them as cannon fodder, war trash, little more than slaves to do with as he pleased.

(Sides 2018, 67)

Men like Huang Zhi and Yang Wang-Fu had been given precious little to fight with. Mao and his generals were keenly aware of this. They knew the American forces enjoyed every conceivable advantage: better weapons, better transportation, better communications, better logistics  But Mao believed that his armies had something the Americans lacked. 

Fighting spirit, he called it. Mao contended, with something like religious fervor, that his men possessed an innate martial quality that was uniquely potent – a zeal, a lust for battle, powered by an all – suffusing patriotism and the camaraderie of the revolution. The Americans depended on machines, he said, whereas the Chinese depended on people. If the Americans fought with planes and tanks and bombs, his army would rely on such human qualities as surprise and flexibility of movement. Of course, it would also draw on overwhelming numbers. Wrote Mao: “China, though weak, has a large population and plenty of soldiers.”

In the end, Mao scoffed at America’s supposed superiority – even its atomic weapons were no match for China’s fighting spirit. America, he thought , was but a paper tiger. “Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor,” he said. “It is people, not things, that are decisive.” The United States would fight in its way, and he would fight in his. “The enemy can use nuclear bombs, and I can use my hand grenades,” Mao reasoned. “I will find the enemy’s weakness and chase him all the way. Eventually, I can defeat him.”

(Sides 2018, 68)

During the late 1930s, the industrial complex of greater Ham hung became an arsenal and a forge for Japan’s deepening war against China. Enormous quantities of explosives were manufactured there. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, operations at Hamhung expanded exponentially. Among other secret projects, Japanese physicists made early attempts to build an atomic weapon. Using uranium reportedly mined from the mountains around the Chosin Reservoir, they constructed a crude cyclotron, produced heavy water, and even began to develop a primitive atomic device.

(Sides 2018, 85)

When it was learned, in 1949, that the Russians had successfully detonated an atomic weapon, the White House basement was dug deeper to accommodate a new hermetic bunker designed to withstand a nuclear blast. The modern world was changing at a frightening clip, and America, still new to her superpower status, struggled to retrofit herself for the perils of the role. For the time being, the most powerful man in the world’s most powerful country, the man who had ushered in the atomic age, lived in what was little more than a glorified guest house across Pennsylvania Avenue.

(Sides 2018, 91)

At 2:20 p.m., a White House policeman named Leslie Coffelt was pulling guard duty on the west side of Blair House when a twenty-five-year-old Puerto Rican man named Griselio Torresola snuck around the corner of the sentry booth, clutching a German Luger. Another Puerto Rican man, Oscar Collazo, armed with a Walther P38 semi automatic pistol, approached Blair House from the other side of Pennsylvania. The two young conspirators wore chalk – striped suits and snap – brim hats. Neither of them bore President Truman any personal ill will – they hardly knew a thing about him, or his politics. But they were determined to murder him anyway.

Collazo and Torresola were Puerto Rican Nationalists, tied to cells that were attempting to foment a violent insurrection and assert independence for the island. The two men believed that only a sational act would bring attention to their movement. They were angry about the Korean War, and the contradictions they saw in the fact that so many Puerto Rican soldiers had joined the U.N. effort to fight for freedoms they themselves did not enjoy on their home island. If some of the two conspirators ‘ grievances seemed reasonable, their plan was absurd. They had done no research. The plot had been hatched only a few days earlier. They’d taken the train down from New York the previous night.

Now Griselio Torresola wheeled on Officer Coffelt. In rapid succession, he shot the officer three times at point-blank range. Coffelt slumped in the chair of his booth, mortally wounded. Torresola then fired three shots at a plainclothes policeman, wounding him as well.

At another guard post, on the east side of Blair House, Oscar Collazo shot a policeman named Donald Birdzell in the leg, shattering his kneecap. Then a Secret Service officer opened fire, and bullets ricocheted off the pickets of Blair House’s wrought-iron fence. On the busy sidewalk, bystanders scattered for cover, and a stray round smashed through the plate-glass window of a drugstore just down Pennsylvania.

President Truman, roused from his nap, dashed to the open window to learn what the commotion was. Still in his underwear, he stood squinting in the hot glare and looked down at the gunfight in progress. Had either of the conspirators looked up at the right moment, their ultimate target would have been standing in plain view.

“Get back! Get back!” someone yelled at the president, and he shrank into the shadows of his room.

Seconds later, Collazo was shot in the chest and fell, his body splayed at the base of the steps. He was critically but not fatally wounded. Then Officer Coffelt, bleeding in his sentry booth, summoned the energy to rise from his death throes. Holding his Colt revolver, he propped himself against the guardhouse and fired a single shot at Torresola, who fell dead behind a boxwood hedge, a bullet in his brain.

As abruptly as it had started, the battle stopped, and an eerie silence fell over Pennsylvania Avenue. It was the largest gunfight in the history of the Secret Service. Two men lay dead or dying , and three others were wounded. Twenty-seven shots had been fired in less than two minutes.

(Sides 2018, 91-93)

Two days after the election, on November 9, an incident over the Yalu River captured the full attention of the Truman White House, and the Pentagon as well. A U.S. Navy fighter pilot, flying a Grumman Panther, was on a mission to bomb several bridges near the river’s mouth, at a place called Sinuiju. The pilot of the jet, Lieutenant Commander Bill Amen, had taken off from the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea and was flying over the river when he encountered an enemy aircraft boring in on him: a Soviet MiG-15 that was piloted, it would later be learned, by a Russian captain, Mikhail Grachev.

That argentine flash in the sky must have been a forbidding sight. At the time, American experts believed that the swept-wing, snub-nosed MiG outclassed any fighter jet the U.S. armed forces had in the air. But no one knew for sure, for no American jet had ever fought a MiG before. Now, over the Yalu, a genuine dogfight commenced, with the two sleek warplanes darting through bands of low, hazy clouds. Lieutenant Commander Amen, circling around and closing in on Grachev, scored a mortal wing hit on the MiG, which went into an inverted dive and crashed to earth. Amen safely returned his Panther to its carrier.

The incident was not widely reported, but it made history: It was aviation’s first jet-on-jet kill. It also provided hints that the vaunted MiG was not invincible. But in Washington and in Tokyo, this isolated victory provided little cause for celebration. If an American pilot had won the opening round in a new hyper – adrenalized kind of aerial warfare, that was fine , but American commanders considered it a portentous day nonetheless. The Soviets had stationed a number of MiG squadrons at a Chinese air base in Antung Province, Manchuria, and now it was clear that they intended to use them. In the days ahead, encounters with Soviet jets would become so numerous that this stretch of the Yalu would acquire a new nickname : MiG Alley.

While Stalin insisted that only North Korean pilots were flying the MiGs, American fighter pilots suspected otherwise. Among other telltale signs, they swore they heard Russian voices crackling over the radio waves.

If this were true, then President Truman had larger implications to mull over. Not only had the Chinese actively entered the war; now, quite possibly, so had the Russians.

(Sides 2018, 106-107)

The Corps was diligent about commemorating its natal day. The Marines may have had a reputation for being crabby warriors with hearts of iron, but they could be sentimental. There was an old tradition in the Marines, wherever they might be, whether at home or on the most trying battlefield, to commemorate the Marine’s birthday with a cake and a corny little ceremony like this one. As the story goes, the Marine Corps was established on November 10, 1775, in a tavern in Philadelphia – Tun Tavern, it was called. The details are sketchy, but that was when and where the first recruits of the Continental Marines were said to have formally enlisted during the Revolutionary War.

(Sides 2018, 109-110)

For all their esprit de corps, the Marines also suffered from a persecution complex, a sense of wounded pride, a feeling that the military – political hierarchy in Washington misunderstood and underappreciated them. At times the Marines wondered if they were the redheaded stepchildren of the military. 

They were neither fin, nor fur, nor feather. Though formally attached to the Navy, they weren’t sailors. One could think of them as infantry, but they were emphatically not of the Army. They had their own cadre of excellent aviators, but they were not Air Force. Nor were the Marines considered “special operations forces,” like the Rangers or the Green Berets, or any other units schooled in stealth and the raiding arts.

The point was, the Marines were their own tribe, a breed apart. This made them outcasts of a sort, a status they begrudged but also savored. They thrived on the very thing they resented. They felt they were constantly having to prove their worth , that in the public’s eye they were only as good as their latest exploit. On the battlefield, they tended to adopt an orphan’s mindset: No one can save us but ourselves.

This chronic grievance had recently been reinforced by none other than President Harry Truman, no fan of the Marines. In a letter leaked to the press only a few months earlier, Truman had belittled the Corps as “the Navy’s police force,” adding that “as long as I am President that is what it will remain.” The Marines, Truman went on to say, “have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s.” Truman had roundly apologized, but his remarks were taken as a deep insult by many Marines, including Smith. Before the outbreak of the Korean War, it had been bruited about that the president (an Army man all the way) wanted to decimate the Marines as a fighting force – or disband them altogether. Many Marines in Korea had the sense that they were not only fighting the enemy , but fighting to save themselves as an institution. The perception was that their very existence was on the line.

(Sides 2018, 112-113)

Everyone at the U.N. seemed aware of the official Chinese visit to protest American doings in Korea and Taiwan but in back of that awareness floated an ardent wish that the parties might still negotiate a settlement before the world slipped into full blown war. Though the Chinese were putting up a bellicose front , a number of optimists clung to the hope that perhaps Mao’s emissaries had secretly come to negotiate an agreement. After so many years of civil war, the Chinese surely could not afford a conflict with the United States and her allies.

It was widely reported that the American, British, and French governments had reached a tentative agreement to propose a ceasefire and a buffer zone along the Yalu. This no-man’s-land could include all the North Korea-based hydroelectric plants that supplied power to Manchuria, as this was thought to be one of the major points of Chinese contention. Throughout the U.N., there was hope that a settlement could be worked out. The Chinese presence here in New York, many felt, was the world’s last chance for sanity to prevail. One Far East delegate expressed the attitude this way: “It is never too late to talk; it is always too early to fight.”

In truth, a shroud of mystery hung over the Chinese visit. Why had they come so far, with such a large entourage? If all they wished to do was issue a complaint, they could have done it by cable. Their sojourn to New York would seem to be an unnecessary and expensive bit of diplomatic theater. Trying to divine their true purpose in New York, said one U.N. delegate, was “like flying blind through an uncharted mountain range.”

The nine Chinese delegates, holed up in their posh rooms at the Waldorf and guarded around the clock, waited for their chance to address the U.N.

(Sides 2018, 129-130)

In back of his fury, Cafferata felt sorry for the Chinese. He couldn’t understand why they kept running headlong to their deaths, as though they wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. Some of them charged at him with quaintly crude weapons, almost archaic in some cases. One enemy soldier had a long pole at the end of which a knife had been attached with string. In other cases, they were charged with no weapons at all. He wondered where that kind of bravery and fanaticism came from. Did they do it for the love of their country? To defend an ideology they held dear? To assert some principle held deeper within their society? Or did they do it because their officers compelled them to?

(Sides 2018, 165)

When the mortar teams ran low on ammo, a supply drop was called in, using the established code name for 60 – millimeter mortar shells: “Tootsie Rolls.” A plane came and dropped the requested supplies by parachute, but when the boxes were cut open, the supply crews found no shells inside. Whoever had packed the order, apparently not familiar with the code name, had stuffed the boxes with actual Tootsie Rolls, enough candy for many thousands of men. 

The mortar teams were infuriated about the mix-up, but everyone else was thrilled. From then on, Tootsie Rolls became the signature treat of the Chosin campaign, and a form of currency. Many Marines would insist that Tootsie Rolls had sustained them through their darkest hours and may have saved their lives. (The Chinese were crazy about them, too. When looting American positions , Tootsie Rolls, along with Marlboro cigarettes, were the first things they hunted for.) The Marines found that the confection not only provided quick fuel, it had a practical use, too. The rolls were the perfect size and consistency for plugging bullet-riddled gas tanks, fuel hoses, and radiators. 

The men would warm the candies in their mouths until they softened, then “precision-mold” them to whatever shape was required. Tootsie Rolls thus became a kind of all-purpose spackle that kept the Marines and their machines going through the battle.

(Sides 2018, 262-263)

---

References

Sides, Hampton. 2018. On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle. N.p.: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

ISBN 978-0-385-54115-2