The Farthest Valley; the Epic Breakout from Chosin Reservoir, 1950

On Northwest Ridge outside the hamlet of Yudam-ni near Chosin Reservoir, the Marines shivered in their icy foxholes under frost-covered parka hoods, trigger fingers aching, their feet lumps of ice.

The night of November 27, 1950, was moonless and bitter-cold — 30-degrees below zero or lower. The cold was unlike anything experienced by either the Marines or the Chinese troops that surrounded them.

Then, bugles, whistles and duck calls shattered the silence. Screaming enemy soldiers seemed to appear everywhere at once. “Sonuvabitch Marines, we kill! Sonuvabitch Marines, you die!” they chanted.

On a nearby hill, a Marine observed, “It was like the snow came to life. ... They came in a rush, like a pack of dogs.”

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Just weeks earlier, the Korean War appeared all but over. North Korea’s army, whose invasion had very nearly swept through the entire peninsula in June, was being driven from South Korea by United Nations forces.

With the onset of fall came shocking 30-below-zero cold and snow, with wind chills of 50-below or more.

As fall progressed, a new enemy, the Red Chinese peasant army, began materializing in North Korea’s forests and villages in breathtaking numbers.

Mao tse-Tung had warned repeatedly that if United Nations troops crossed the 38th Parallel, China would intervene on North Korea's behalf to protect China’s Manchurian border.

But the commander of the United Nations forces in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur, and his staff discounted the warnings. They urged their two armies to continue to march north to the Yalu River and the Chinese border.

Mao's warning was not an empty one. Beginning in October, Chinese troops began crossing the Yalu at night into North Korea. They hid in peasants’ huts or under camouflage netting in the forests during the daytime, eluding aerial reconnaissance.

MacArthur and his generals optimistically believed that when the Eighth Army in western Korea and X Corps in northeast Korea reached the Yalu, victory would be theirs. By Christmas, the troops could begin going home.

Meanwhile, Mao’s generals lured the invaders, who had no idea of the size of the enemy forces that awaited them, ever deeper into North Korea.

When on November 27 the Chinese trap snapped shut, the 1st Marine Division was deep in the North Korean mountains at Chosin Reservoir, 78 miles away from Korea’s east coast.

Surrounded by seemingly innumerable enemy soldiers, the Marines battled for their lives in the killing cold and knee-deep snow, thousands of miles from home.

The Chinese, ill-clad and lacking air support and even radios, died by the thousand to carry out Mao's orders to annihilate the Marines to the last man.

The ferocious two-week battle for survival in the pitiless cold left tens of thousands of men on both sides dead, wounded, or frostbitten.

In the days ahead, MacArthur was forced to concede that his armies faced a wholly new war. The terrible suffering by the starving, tennis shoe-clad Chinese, many having frozen to death while waiting to attack, surpassed even the Americans’ considerable hardships.

The Marines’ leadership, immense firepower advantage, and pioneering close-air support made their epic withdrawal from Chosin Reservoir possible.

As the world watched, the Marines fought their way through massed enemy troops to the Sea of Japan.

The Chosin Reservoir campaign has rightfully been deemed the most dramatic episode of the Korean War.