On desperate ground The Marines at the reservoir, the Korean War's greatest battle

Hampton Sides

Large print - 2018

"A chronicle of the extraordinary feats of heroism by Marines called on to do the impossible during the greatest battle of the Korean War."--Provided by publisher.

Saved in:

1st floor Show me where

LARGE PRINT/951.9042/Sides
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
1st floor LARGE PRINT/951.9042/Sides Checked In
Subjects
Published
New York : Random House Large Print [2018]
Language
English
Main Author
Hampton Sides (author)
Edition
First large print edition
Physical Description
xv, 620 pages (large print), 16 unnumbered pages of plates : black and white illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 527-589) and index.
ISBN
9781984833655
  • Prologue: Morning calm
  • Seoul. The professor ; Traitor's house ; Across the Han ; Beneath the lighthouse ; The battle of the barricades ; The savior of our race ; God's right-hand man ; The tiger wants human beings
  • To the mountains. Many, many ; King's envoy to Hamhung ; Heroic remedies ; Will o' the wisp ; Broken arrows ; A powerful instrument ; Fattened for the kill ; Never too late to talk ; Never a more daring fight
  • The reservoir. Easy for us, tough for others ; Boon companions ; Easy Company holds here ; Where the bullet belongs ; Gung-ho, you cowardly bastards ; When the lead is flying ; A hot reception ; The war council ; An entirely new era
  • Red snow. You will all be slaughtered ; Kissing a buzz saw ; Morphine dreams ; No soft options ; One-man army ; Every weapon that we have ; The ridgerunners ; This place of suffering
  • To the sea. Attacking in a different direction ; In the day of trouble ; I'll get you a goddamn bridge ; Blood on the ice ; Taking departure ; The Bridge of Long Life ; Down to earth ; The most harrowing hour ; The crossing ; We will see you again the south ; We walk in the hand of God
  • Epilogue: In the pantheon.
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The 1950 battle in North Korea along the Chosin Reservoir is held in reverence by U.S. Marines. The mountainous terrain minted heroes by the score after a massive sneak attack by Communist Chinese forces during the harsh winter. Best-selling Sides (In the Kingdom of Ice , 2014) tells the story of the First Marine Division, from their landing at Inchon and the drive north to the ferocious attack in a different direction to reach safety after being surrounded. Sides has done incredible work: the action is cinematic, with the detailed insights and character development of a novel. And it is all real. Sides' impeccable research includes interviews with survivors in addition to a thorough survey of the considerable archives. He glides seemingly effortlessly from describing intense firefights on the ground up to the difficult decisions faced by leaders at all levels of the chain of command as the possibility of atomic destruction loomed in the background. The result is a masterpiece of storytelling about a war that is often given short shrift in American history. Readers will feel the fierce cold, the constant threat of death, and the desperation of being trapped and under siege felt by the U.S. Marines in Sides' vivid and invaluable history.--James Pekoll Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Sides (In the Kingdom of Ice) updates the much-chronicled, epic winter fighting retreat from the Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War in this splendid account. In September 1950, countering a June invasion by communist North Korean forces, Gen. Douglas MacArthur launched a "bold, sweeping"-and reckless-landing at the port of Inchon. When United Nations troops reached the border of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong and his generals, fearing an invasion, sent troops into Korea to counter the threat. The First Marine Division, led by Gen. Oliver P. Smith, continued to advance, though its commander rightly feared a Chinese trap. He was correct: for three hellish weeks, his 30,000 Marines, U.S. Army, and assorted UN forces fought four times their number of Chinese soldiers, weathering terrifying assaults with little support and fanatical courage. Sides unsparingly describes the theatrical arrogance and misplaced sense of racial superiority that led MacArthur and X Corps Commander Gen. Ned Almond to discount the intelligence warning of major Chinese infiltration, even dismissing President Harry Truman's concerns about a widening war that could involve nuclear weapons. This account features abundant heroism, vivid battle scenes, and nuanced treatment of the judicious, determined leadership of General Smith. Sides's lucid assessment of the battles, leadership, politics, and key figures at the turning point of the war show how the First Marine Division's commanders and fighting men staved off a nearly unprecedented military debacle. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Outside magazine editor Sides (In the Kingdom of Ice) recounts the classic story of the Korean War's famous battle of the Chosin Reservoir during the winter of 1950. Led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Oliver Smith, American forces of the First Marine Division-who felt that Korea was "a long way to come to fight and bleed and die, in a war that was not officially a war, for a cause that at times was not altogether clear, for an endgame that was anybody's guess"-entered the bitterly cold and mountainous terrain of Inchon along the eastern coast of North Korea with sights set at moving inland toward the reservoir. Confident at first that the Chinese were going to be kept at bay, Mac-Arthur and Smith changed course once Chinese troops surprised and pushed the marines toward humbling mountain passes. Though the bitterly cold conditions made battle difficult, the outnumbered marines courageously fought their way out and ultimately reached safety. VERDICT While other works exist on this famous battle, Sides's highly accessible narrative will be appreciated by general readers as well as history buffs. For fans of Stephen Ambrose and Lynn Vincent. [See Prepub Alert, 4/23/18.]- David Miller, Farmville P.L., NC © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A Korean War story of miscalculation, military ambition, and overreach.Outside editor Sides (In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, 2014, etc.) doesn't always dig deep for topics, but once he settles on one, no matter how well-covered previously, he piles on the research. So it is with this story of "Frozen Chosin," when American forces of the 1st Marine Division penetrated deep into North Korea, assured by their commanders that Mao's Chinese forces would not cross the Yalu River and enter the fight. In any event, Douglas MacArthur devalued the Chinese: "They were nothing more than a band of serfssubsisting on rice balls and yams, relying on little burp gins and fizzly explosives that usually failed to detonate, an army held together with hemp string and bamboo." MacArthur had reason to re-evaluate his position once 300,000 Chinese troops entered the fray and encircled a much smaller American force in a mountain fastness alongside a huge reservoir. Fought in bitterly cold temperatures, the battle was horrible: "The cold seemed to come with only one upside: It had a cauterizing effect on wounds. Blood from bullet holes or shrapnel tears simply froze to the skin and stopped flowing." The Battle of Chosin Reservoir is part of the DNA of every Marine since, and numerous books, such as Bob Drury and Tom Clavin's excellent Last Stand of Fox Company (2009) and Roy Appleman's order-of-battle East of Chosin (1987), have emerged as standards in the field. Sides adds a fast-moving and well-written narrative to the mix, though without bringing much news to the enterprise. A plus is his respectful treatment of the sometimes-maligned (especially in Army accounts) Marine field commander, the scholarly but tough Gen. Oliver P. Smith.Better books are available, but for general readers, this account is a worthy introduction to a battle that has become a byword for suffering. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Prologue Morning Calm   In the misting rain, they pressed against the metal skins of their boats and peeked over the gunwales for a glimpse of the shores they were about to attack. Some thirteen thousand men of the First Marine Division, the spearhead of the invasion, had clambered down from the ships on swinging nets of rope and then had crammed themselves into a motley flotilla of craft that now wallowed and bobbed in the channel. Several of the rusty old hulks, having been commandeered from Japanese trawler­men, smelled of sour urine and rotten fish heads. The Marines, many of them green from seasickness, saw the outlines of the charred foot­hills that rose above the port, and caught the scent of the brackish marshes and the slime of the mudflats. Corsairs, bent-winged like swallows, dove over the city, dropping thousand-pound bombs and sending five-inch rockets deep into hillside nests where the enemy was said to be dug in. Far out at sea, the naval guns rained fire upon the city, damaging tanks of butane that now flared and belched palls of smoke. On this warm, humid morning of September 15, 1950, the Marines had arrived at their destination halfway around the world, to stun their foe and turn the war around: a surprise amphibious attack, on an immense scale, deep behind the battle lines. Only a few months before, these young men, fresh from their farms and hick towns, had piled into chartered trains and clattered across America to California. Then they climbed aboard transport ships, where many of them did their basic training, learning how to strip and rebuild M1 rifles, drill­ing on the crowded decks, practicing their marksmanship on floating targets towed from the fantails. They crossed the Pacific and stopped briefly in Japan, then heaved their way through a full-scale typhoon. They rounded the peninsula and moved in convoy up the west coast, through the silted waters of the Yellow Sea. By the thirteenth of September the ships had begun to concen­trate, 261 vessels in all, carrying more than 75,000 men and millions of dollars' worth of war matériel. On the fourteenth, the armada was closing in on its target: the narrow confines of Flying Fish Channel. The channel led to Inchon, an industrial city of a quarter million people, whose strategically vital but treacherous port served the capi­tal, Seoul. On the morning of the fifteenth, in the seas west of Inchon, the ships ranged along the horizon, a long line of gray bars stitch­ing through the mist. First came the destroyers Swenson, Mansfield, DeHaven. Then the high-speed transports Wantuck, Horace A. Bass, Diachenko, and the dock landing ship Fort Marion. Then the heavy cruisers Toledo and Rochester and three more destroyers: Gurke, Hen­derson, and Collett. Following in their mingled wakes came the British light cruisers Kenya and Jamaica, the attack transports Cavalier and Henrico . Farther out at sea lay the fast carriers, from which the Cor­sairs rose into the skies to make their deadly sorties. By afternoon, as the Marines drew near the Inchon seawall, enemy rounds zinged across the water surface and mortar shells crashed hap­hazardly all around. Within a few minutes the Marines would reach the cut-granite ramparts. They would climb over, and they would set foot on the western shores of central Korea. What was Korea to these young men? Some fate-ravaged place, an inflamed appendix, a wattle of real estate flapping off the face of the mainland. Though some of the units approaching Inchon had spent the past month bolstering United Nations forces at the southern tip of Korea, most of the First Marine Division had no experience with the country. They had little knowledge of Korea's tragic history, no appreciation for how faithfully this proud culture had held on through centuries of turmoil and besiegement. It was a small nation that his­tory had pushed around--a shrimp among whales. The Mongols had had their way with her, the Manchus, the Russians, the Japanese. Now had come the Americans, nervous young men who knew next to nothing about the place, though some had passed around guidebooks filched from hometown libraries. Korea, they'd learned, was known as the Hermit Kingdom. The Land of the Morning Calm. Its national dish was a hot mess of fer­mented cabbage. Some Marines had read with astonishment that in parts of Korea, peasants still nourished their crops with night soil and were known to roast the occasional hound for dinner--these were some of the clichés that were passed around. Korea was said to be a dirt-poor country, mountainous, swept by Siberian winds, sultry dur­ing summer and breathtakingly cold in winter. But what did the travel manuals really know? God created war, Twain wrote, so that Americans would learn geography, and the men of the First Marine Division were about to learn a lot about this tough, sorrowful scrap of land. While some would find a deep affinity for it, many would come to hate it, for all the things it was and for all the things it wasn't. But to most of them, more than anything, Korea just seemed a long way from home--a long way to come to fight and bleed and die, in a war that was not officially a war, for a cause that at times was not altogether clear, for an endgame that was anybody's guess. The Marines had a tradition of being the first to fight, the first to kill, the first to die. They didn't earn their reputation by asking many questions. In a few months, they would face the armies of the most populous nation on earth and would become engaged in one of the more harrowing clashes in the history of warfare. Many would never return home. But for those who survived, Korea would be for­ever stamped on their psyches, and on their souls. They would never forget what happened here, even if the majority of their countrymen quickly did. Now the assault vessels angled past the pitted harbor islands of Inchon and made for the bluff face of the seawall, where the breaking surf left a ring of bone-white foam. The bullets whined and smacked in weird patterns upon the surface. A shell screamed overhead, and the Marines crouched a little tighter into the walls of their boats.   Book One: Seoul   War is the unfolding of miscalculations. -          Barbara Tuchman   1 The Professor On the Yellow Sea   The amphibious invasion taking place off the jetties and docks of Inchon--an action officially known as Operation Chromite--was among the boldest and most technically complex engagements in modern military annals. The man who conceived the invasion, prevailing over enormous doubts in Washington, was General Douglas MacArthur, and his name would forever be associated with it. But the officer most directly responsible for executing the details of the initial landing, the unsung and largely unknown architect of the Marine assault, was in many ways MacArthur's opposite. He was Oliver Prince Smith, commander of the First Marine Division, one of the great underrated generals in American history. From the decks of the command ship USS Mount McKinley, Smith watched the proceedings as best he could through shifting curtains of smoke. He squinted into his field glasses as the ship heaved in the swells. In the distance, the small landing craft, having butted against the seawall, were in position. In the bow of each vessel, Marines raised a pair of scaling ladders, and the waiting boats treaded the water like enormous bugs with antennae quivering. The leathernecks began to scale the ladders and vanished from view. But the radio reports that came in from the spotter planes were all positive. The Marines were moving into the city now, swarming over the causeways and saltpans, already seizing industrial complexes and other installations along the ruined harbor. Smith's division was a formidable fighting force. Though it had been hastily thrown together at Camp Pendleton, California, most of the division's officers and noncoms were seasoned warriors, men of the Old Breed who had served in the bitter World War II battles of the Pacific--at places like Guadalcanal and Okinawa. "They could load jeeps with their decorations," said one account, and would "need a truck to carry off their Purple Hearts." Battalion for battalion, the First Marine Division was as fierce and as disciplined as any­thing the United States had to offer. "It was the strongest division in the world," boasted one Marine captain who served under Smith. "I thought of it as a Doberman, a dangerous hound straining at the leash, wanting nothing more than to sink its fangs into the master's enemy."   Smith was enormously relieved by the progress of the invasion. The resistance was proving tepid--either the North Korean defenders had been caught off guard or they were overwhelmed by the inten­sity of the firestorm. But Smith stopped short of celebrating. He was superstitious of good fortune. As an assistant division commander at the World War II battle of Peleliu, he had witnessed a senseless loss of life--the result of intelligence failures and strategic mistakes not of his making. Scarred by the events at Peleliu, he tended to proceed with a thoroughgoing sense of caution. In his own experience, it was overconfidence, more than any other single factor, that caused men to die. He felt a little uneasy that MacArthur had invited a gaggle of journalists aboard the Mount McKinley to follow the invasion. It struck Smith as unseemly to have assembled so many members of the press to capture what MacArthur's people confidently expected would be his moment of triumph. "This is a public relations war," Smith wrote in disdain. "We are overrun with onlookers." Smith had spent a lot of time with MacArthur aboard the Mount McKinley. During the past few days, as part of the larger convoy, they had steamed over from Japan in this 460-foot floating command cen­ter, a plush flagship tricked out with all manner of radar, radiotele­phones, and other advanced communications equipment. Smith found the supreme commander initially impressive, occasionally entertain­ing, but ultimately insufferable. MacArthur, he said, is "a born actor" who "puts a lot of drama into his conversation." He "has to his credit many outstanding accomplishments," Smith allowed. "However, the pomposity of his pronouncements is a little wearing." ***   Major General Oliver Prince Smith, fifty-six years old, was a cerebral, soft-spoken man whose habits seemed atypical of a gung-ho Marine. There was no bluster in his demeanor. A Berkeley graduate who incessantly smoked a pipe, he had a reputation in the Corps as an intellectual. People called him "the Professor." One Marine his­torian described him as an "ascetic thinker and teacher." He was flu­ent in French, drank sparingly, read the classics, and never cursed. An expert gardener, he cultivated roses in his spare time. He was an incessant notetaker; he kept a small green notebook on his person and wrote in a cryptic shorthand. Reed-thin and tall, his sharp-featured face set with piercing blue eyes and topped by a nimbus of prema­turely white hair, he spoke deliberately and with precision. But for all his gentleness and reserve, Smith was tough. As a young man, he had been a winch operator and then a crew foreman at a rough-and-tumble logging camp in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. He knew hard work, and his hands showed it. He had climbed his way from an impoverished background to become a scholarship student while steering his family through sev­eral tragedies--most notably the death of his only sibling, Peggy, who was found raped and murdered in a cabin at Yosemite National Park, the perpetrator unknown. On the battlefield, Smith believed in ruthless efficiency. One Marine called him "a professional killer, employed in a hard trade: tenacious, cunning, resourceful, cold, cynical, and tough." He took a dim view of those who brought an exaggerated sense of chivalry to war. Engagements were won by systematically destroying the enemy, not through flamboyant acts or the symbolic capturing of ground. At Quantico, he was famous for giving a lecture that analyzed the effectiveness of the bayonet charge during modern wars; after crunching the numbers, he proclaimed it, by and large, a pseudo-heroic waste of energy. He was keenly aware of the impact of his decisions. During World War II, through his battles across the Pacific, he would tally in his diary the precise number of casualties the day's fighting had brought. It was his nightly ritual. With the zeal of a sharp accountant who understands where every last dollar was spent, Smith demanded a reckoning of war's exact human cost. He had enlisted in 1917 and had devoted his life to the Corps. The Marine ethos appealed to his sense of order and rectitude. He had bounced across the globe during his long career: Guam, the Mariana Islands, Washington, D.C., Iceland, the American embassy in Paris. He had lived in a bungalow in the jungles of Haiti and in a castle in the Loire Valley. He had commanded every type of unit from platoon on up. Smith was said to be a "school man and a staff man." He had studied at France's prestigious military academy, L'École Supérieure de Guerre--he was the first U.S. Marine ever to do so. Smith, said one account, was "one of those rare men who love to work and who find a natural delight in detail." If he had come to understand warfare from the perspective of the textbook, he had also seen how poorly and how seldom the theories and abstractions of military science obtained in the context of the grime, grit, and chaos of a battlefield. Smith was a "by-the-book" Marine--but he knew when to throw the book away. His command style was preternaturally calm. His chief of staff when he was serving at Quantico found Smith to be a rare gentle­man, a dignified man who seldom raised his voice: "If you think of a forceful person as one who beats his chest and shouts loudly and utters tirades, then Smith was not a very forceful person. It was contrary to his personality to make a fuss about things. But the people who worked for him listened for any expression of opinion that he gave and took it on themselves as a directive." Frank Lowe, a retired Army general who was serving as President Truman's eyes and ears in Korea, described Smith this way: "He is a very kindly man, always calm and cheerful, even under the great­est strain. He is almost professorial in type and this characteristic is apt to fool you because he is an offensive tiger. His concept is to find the enemy and kill him--with a minimum of casualties. His offi­cers and men idolize him, albeit he is a strict disciplinarian-- Marine discipline." Smith also happened to be one of the country's preeminent experts on the tactics and logistics of amphibious warfare. He had practically written the book on the subject. He had taught ship-to-shore landings in classrooms at Quantico and Camp Pendleton, had perfected some of the techniques on the beaches of Peleliu and Okinawa. The Profes­sor was legendary for his seaside drills. Amphibious operations were among the most complicated maneuvers in war, requiring tedious planning, careful choreography, an exquisite sense of timing. They were the Marine signature, the Marine specialty--at the heart of why the Marines existed in the first place. Marines were supposed to be "Soldiers of the Sea," shock troops sent to hector coastlines and establish beachheads. They were finned creatures who washed up on hostile shores, only to sprout legs. Time and time again in the Pacific during World War II, the Marines had demonstrated their indispensability, and MacArthur, having relied upon them throughout his island-hopping campaigns, had long been impressed by their steady, ready competence. Smith's First Marine Division was the largest, oldest, and most decorated division in the Corps. So when MacArthur decided, against the better judgment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to forge ahead with an audacious and incred­ibly risky scheme to storm the harbor at Inchon, it was obvious whom he needed to draw up the plans. Excerpted from On Desperate Ground: The Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle by Hampton Sides All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.