CHAPTER 11

O. P. Smith succeeds at Chosin

One of the little-known aspects of the Chosin Reservoir Campaign was that Maj. Gen. O. P. Smith, the commander of the Marines there, was far more of a Marshall man than were the Army generals to whom he reported. Ned Almond, the Army general over Smith, “was a MacArthur man, and anything MacArthur said, nothing could change it. . . . MacArthur was God,” recalled Smith.

Smith, rail-thin and white-haired, seemed to have been cut from the Marshall cloth. When he was seven years old, Smith lost his father, a Texas lawyer. His widowed mother took him to California and raised him in penury. As a young man, Smith arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, with just five dollars in his pocket and worked his way through school, often as a gardener. He joined the Marines at the outset of World War I but spent the war in Guam, a setback to his career that would help keep him at the rank of captain for almost two decades during the interwar period.

In the early 1930s, though it was unusual for a Marine officer, Smith attended the Army’s Infantry School, then run by Lt. Col. George Marshall. There, he and his classmates Bedell Smith and Terry Allen were instructed in the use of machine guns by Omar Bradley, and in tactics by Joseph Stilwell. “Colonel Marshall was pretty definite in his ideas,” O. P. Smith remembered admiringly. “He was a pretty tough hombre.”

Like Marshall, Smith disliked military sentimentalism or romanticism, even about his own Marine Corps. During the 1930s, he wrote a paper that debunked the bayonet as a weapon. For his evidence, he researched the use of the bayonet by Marines against German soldiers in Belleau Wood in World War I. “But when you run down the history,” the bayonet lacked the shock value often attributed to it, he found. “Where I got the dope was from the medical officers, how many bayonet wounds they treated, and there weren’t many.”

As a general, the quiet, pipe-smoking Christian Scientist hardly fit the gung-ho popular image of a Marine, which may be one reason his name is hardly known today. On the eve of landing for the Battle of Peleliu, in World War II, for example, he passed the time by reading, among other things, a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Peleliu proved to be a bloodbath for the American landing force, which according to Adm. Chester Nimitz suffered the highest casualty rate—nearly 40 percent—of any amphibious assault ever by American forces. This experience surely helped steel Smith for the carnage he would see during the hardest days of the Chosin fight.

It is said that the essence of generalship is what one does before the outbreak of fighting. That is certainly the case with O. P. Smith at Chosin. The three most important decisions of the campaign may be those Smith made before it even began. First, he insisted on consolidating his regiments so they could support one another. This meant bringing the 5th Marines in from the east side of the reservoir and turning that area over to the Army. Second, he made it a top priority to have his engineers scrape out two airstrips in the frozen ground, enabling the Marines in the following days to fly in supplies and reinforcements and move out their wounded, unburdening their units and enabling them to move faster through the frozen roads and mountains. A total of 4,312 wounded or frostbitten Marine and Army personnel were flown out in the mere five days that the northernmost airstrip, at Hagaru-ri, was operational, from the afternoon of December 1 to the evening of December 6, 1950, when the retreating Marines abandoned that base. Third, he put himself at what he believed would be the key point of the battle. The American forces around Chosin Reservoir were essentially in a giant formation resembling the letter Y, with the Marines on the left arm, to the west of the reservoir, and the Army on the right, to the east. Smith understood that if the Marines held their position west of the reservoir but lost the outpost to the south of it, where the forks met, they would be doomed. So on the morning of November 28, he left his rear headquarters and flew to that junction, where the two branches came together and the single road out of the mountains, south to the sea, began. This spot, he had determined, would be the decisive point geographically in the coming battle. “Hagaru-ri had to be held at all costs,” he later explained. “Here was the transport plane airstrip. . . . Here was accumulated the wherewithal to support the subsequent breakout from Hagaru-ri. Here was a defended perimeter where the 5th and 7th Marines [who were isolated to the northwest] could reorganize, resupply, reequip, and evacuate their casualties preparatory to the breakout therefrom.”

•    •    •

In the American system, every general has a boss. A seldom-discussed aspect of generalship is understanding the person to whom one reports, whether that is a president, a prime minister, or another general. What are that superior’s concerns, his skills, his shortcomings? Gen. MacArthur, for example, was poor at this, whether in grasping FDR’s mastery of politics or sensing the threshold of Truman’s temper. A significant aspect of the Chosin campaign, by contrast, was that Smith soberly assessed the combat skills and judgment of Lt. Gen. Almond, the Army general to whom he was reporting.

Almond’s record might give any colleague pause. A 1915 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, he rose quickly during World War I, commanding a machine-gun battalion in the fighting late in the war. His record was less distinguished during the next big war. One of George Marshall’s biggest mistakes during World War II stemmed from a certain misperception about race. Marshall believed that white Southerners best understood how to work with black soldiers, so he officered the Army’s segregated units with white Southerners. One of the most prominent of his picks was Almond, a proud Virginian steeped in the traditions of the Confederacy, who was given command of the 92nd Division and led it in Italy during World War II—with notably poor results. Marshall was to write to Eisenhower that the 92nd’s “Infantry literally dissolved each night abandoning equipment and even clothing in some cases.” When the Army concluded that the 92nd Division’s performance had been “unsatisfactory,” Almond blamed his black soldiers, who, he said, were unwilling to die for patriotic reasons. He claimed his background gave him special insight into the race issue: “People think that being from the South we don’t like Negroes. Not at all. But we understand his capabilities. And we don’t want to sit at the table with them.” Almond’s unhappy troops developed reciprocal feelings, at one point booing their commander. One anonymous member of the division denounced it as “a slave unit for white masters.” Despite the 92nd Division’s weak combat record in World War II, Almond manned his corps headquarters in Korea with six veterans of its staff. Ridgway, who would take over command of the war from MacArthur, had a very different view of the black soldier, commenting later that “there was nothing wrong with him if he had the right surroundings, the right officers, the right training and the right leadership.”

It was said of Gen. Almond that “when it pays to be aggressive, Ned’s aggressive, and when it pays to be cautious, Ned’s aggressive.” Chosin Reservoir was developing as one of the latter cases. When Almond visited Smith’s headquarters, he told the general and his Marine division staff, “We’ve got to go barreling up that road.” Smith bit his tongue until Almond left and then said to his staff, “We’re not going anywhere until I get this division together and the airfield built.” Before the battle, Smith also wrote a personal letter to the commandant of the Marine Corps, putting his unease on the record. “Our left flank is wide open,” he noted. “I have little confidence in the tactical judgment of X Corps or in the realism of their planning. There is a continual splitting up of units and assignment of missions which puts them out on a limb. Time and time again I have tried to tell the Corps Commander that in a Marine Division he has a powerful instrument, and that it cannot help but lose its effectiveness when dispersed.” At one point in mid-November 1950, Almond had spread his five divisions (three American and two South Korean) across a five-hundred-mile front. Smith’s Marine division had a gap of eighty miles on its left and 120 miles on its right. “We went cautiously,” he said later. “We never sent our patrols out of the range of artillery. . . . That meant they could get out to six or seven miles.”

Smith so distrusted Almond’s judgment that, expecting that his forces eventually would be compelled to retreat, he established along the road back to the sea three fortified base camps, about one day’s march apart, loaded with supplies and well protected by infantry units. “In effect, 1st Mar Div stood in column on a line of strong points within enemy country,” wrote Army historian S. L. A. Marshall in a 1951 report that was classified as secret and published only three decades later. When the Chinese force attacked, he continued, it “proceeded to impale itself upon this line of strong points.” Gen. Smith would tell the historian that he felt he had “the upper hand” throughout the campaign.

The tactical layout of the strongpoints and other outposts also was distinctive, reflecting Smith’s calculations about the fight he was facing. As long as his perimeters held, he figured, he could keep his artillery and mortars in operation, which meant the Marines could keep fighting even while heavily outnumbered. This led to the conclusion that it was preferable to have guaranteed close-in kills than just good chances far out. He wanted to prevent as much as possible having handfuls of Chinese soldiers slip inside his lines to suicidally attack machine gunners and artillery and mortar crews. So Smith drew his units together, sacrificing some tactically significant positions atop hills in order to establish extremely tight perimeters. “Instead of going to positions which might improve the prospect for an effective kill at long range, 1st Mar Div built its defenses so as to be certain of stopping CCF [Chinese Communist Forces] at short range,” S. L. A. Marshall explained.

As for Almond, his account of what happened at Chosin frequently rings false. The evidence indicates that Almond lied in his official oral history and elsewhere, repeatedly claiming that he had all but forced Smith to build the landing strips that would prove so vital. “The airstrip was ‘ordered prepared’ by the X Corps and repeated supervision was necessary to insure the speed with which it was constructed,” he insisted in his oral history. “The Marine division commander either was not especially in favor of it or thought little of its advantages.” Almond held to this account for decades, asserting in writing to the official Army historian, Roy Appleman, in 1975, “Yes, I did order the construction of this airstrip.” But Almond’s assertions run contrary to both logic and the documentary record. He was urging the Marines to charge a hundred miles northward, so why would he want them to pause to establish an airfield just a short way from the sea? As Matthew Ridgway later wrote, “Almond seems to have remained optimistic, but Smith and the 1st Marine Division anticipated trouble and began to prepare for it with measures which later proved to be the salvation of a good part of his command.” Also, as it happens, Smith, in a letter to his wife weeks earlier, had mentioned that among his concerns, he considered building airstrips absolutely necessary for supporting any combat operations around the Chosin area. Also, when Smith asked for the help of Army engineers to build the airstrips, X Corps staff refused his request. As Smith put it in an interview decades later, “The [X] corps at the time [early November] wasn’t interested in any field up there. I told Almond that we ought to have a field that would take transport planes to bring in supplies and take out casualties. He said, ‘What casualties?’ That’s the kind of thing you were up against. He wouldn’t admit there ever would be any casualties. We took 4,500 casualties out of that field.”

Smith also had problems with his own superiors in the Marine Corps. By putting his foot down and insisting on consolidating his troops and moving north carefully, he was bucking his Marine chain of command. At the beginning of November, he had met with Lt. Gen. Lemuel Shepherd, chief of Marines in the Pacific, and had expressed his concerns about Almond. Shepherd told Smith to get with the program. “I talked to him and said, ‘O. P., play the game; don’t get so mad with Almond, he’s trying to do the right thing,’” Shepherd said later in his official Marine Corps oral history. “I kept urging Smith to push forward more rapidly, as he had the North Koreans on the run. . . . Smith, as you know, wanted everything done right by the book. And in battle you can’t always do things by the book. You’ve got to take the initiative in combat—take chances when the opportunity to gain a victory appears probable.” Shepherd believed at this time—correctly, it would turn out—that he would be the next commandant of the Marine Corps, so he might not have wanted to rock the boat and make it appear as though he could not get along with the Army. He also was friendly with Almond: “Having been a schoolmate of mine at VMI, [he] always made me welcome at his headquarters, and he treated me with the greatest courtesy.” Almond’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Clark Ruffner, also was a Virginia Military Institute (VMI) man.

But Smith saw mounting reasons to be careful. Even as Almond urged him to charge north to the Yalu, Smith and his Marines began to notice ominous signs around them. Korean children, normally eager to beg for candy, were nowhere to be seen. Deer were moving down from the ridges, as though displaced by something. When Smith learned that the Chinese had left a bridge intact over a chasm, he was alarmed, believing that it was part of an enemy plan to lure the Marines northward. History has revealed that Smith’s suspicions were correct: Marshal Peng Dehuai, the top Chinese commander in the war, had told his subordinates at a campaign planning meeting on November 13, “We will employ a strategy of luring the enemy forces into our internal line and wiping them out one by one.” The Chinese gambit of entrapment was exactly the right move to make against Almond, who was being overaggressive while underestimating his enemy.

Chinese commanders in North Korea had explicitly been given the mission to “encircle and exterminate the U.S. Marines around the Changin [Chosin] Reservoir.” Sensing this, Smith’s plan “was to slow down the advance and stall until I could pull up the 1st Marines behind us and get our outfit together. I was unable to complete that until the 27th of November.”

That Marine consolidation came just in time. The same night, November 27–28, the two Marine regiments isolated at the northwestern end of the Marine line were attacked by two Chinese divisions. A third division swept in behind them to try to cut off their line of retreat to the southern end of the reservoir. A typical comment from this time in the campaign came from PFC Peter Holgrun: “We spent the night shooting gooks as they approached, one bugle-blowing wave after the next. It was pure battle. You had no idea of who was winning and who was losing.” Lt. Col. Ray Davis, commanding a battalion of the 7th Marines, was surprised by the eerie sound a bugler would make when shot. “Their buglers sounding some kind of battle call would get hit right in the middle of a note, and it’d just die off,” he said.

The confidence of the Marines’ response to these relentless attacks was striking—and infectious. They knew they had lavish and accurate close air support available. Army soldiers and Marines at Chosin alike would recall looking down from hillsides and waving at Corsair pilots flying in the valleys below them. At night, when those planes could not operate, the Marines had artillery batteries standing by, ready to fire at prearranged coordinates in the draws and gullies in which Chinese attackers were most likely to creep toward American lines. When Smith asked Col. Lewis “Chesty” Puller how he was doing, Puller responded, with no irony, “Fine! We have enemy contact on all sides.” Capt. William Hopkins reported that by the next morning five Marines had happily repeated Puller’s comment to him.

Gen. Smith found out later that when the Chinese attack began, Gen. Omar Bradley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, concluded that the Marines would suffer the same terrible fate as the Army units on the east side of the reservoir. “The Army figured we were finished up there and we wouldn’t get out,” Smith recalled. “I found later that General Bradley, in talking to General McGee, who was at that time on the Joint Staff, told him that the 1st Division was lost.”

But there was a key difference in leadership. Unlike Faith and those around him on the eastern shore of the reservoir, the two Marine regiments fighting on the western shore and the third regiment, trying to hold open the road to the south, were led by commanders who knew how to use communications, logistics, maneuver, and fire support. Because of that, they would bring out all their wounded and most of their vehicles and artillery pieces, as well as many of the wandering Army soldiers they encountered. When their infantry attacked, it generally could count on swift and effective supporting fire from mortars, artillery, and aircraft. Both the enlisted men and their officers had stored up hundreds of small combat ruses and ploys in World War II: When the enemy makes a noisy probing attack, he probably is trying to locate your machine guns, so respond only with grenades and rifle fire if possible. When withdrawing, buy a few precious moments by building a fire and throwing in some bullets as you depart, which as they cook off could make the enemy believe the abandoned position is still being contested. In icy weather, have soldiers and medics tuck morphine syrettes inside their mouths so the painkiller will not be frozen when it’s urgently needed.

There was a hardness in the Marines. The 7th Marines’ Fox Company had been left atop a hill in a key pass to try to keep the road back to the southern end of the reservoir open. Resupplied by air, Fox Company fought for five days, finally operating from behind improvised barricades that included stacks of frozen Chinese corpses. “Word had been passed to kill all enemy wounded,” recalled Fox’s PFC Ernest Gonzalez. It was so icy in the cutting wind of the pass, recalled another member of the company, PFC Robert Ezell, that one morning, when warm milk was poured over his cereal, by the time he sat down on a stump to eat, the milk had frozen. Another Marine, Cpl. Robert Kelly, was so cold that he did not notice he’d been hit by rifle fire in the right foot, a fact he discovered only after the battle, when a medic noticed his limp and sat him down to examine his foot. The medic looked up at him and began laughing, saying, “You dumb asshole, you’re shot.”

The key to getting the two Marine regiments from their outposts on the west side of the reservoir down to the junction at Hagaru, where Smith and supplies were waiting, was to break through the Chinese roadblocks and get the road open. Two attempts were made to clear the road directly; both failed. The regimental commanders, Lt. Col. Raymond Murray of the 5th Marines and Col. Homer Litzenberg of the 7th Marines, recognized that a radically different approach was needed.

In what might have been the crucial tactical moment of the entire campaign, Murray and Litzenberg sent Lt. Col. Ray Davis to lead his 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines overland through enemy-held territory. The temperature was twenty-four degrees below zero, according to reports from artillery units in the valley. Few movements are as physically draining as going up and down hills covered with snow, but Davis’s battalion marched eight miles through waist-high drifts and over three frozen ridges. In steeper sections, Davis said, “we had to climb on our hands and knees, hold on to roots and twigs to keep from sliding back down.” At times the Marines were so near Chinese troops that “we could smell the garlic and hear them talking,” recalled Sgt. Charles McKellar.

The weather was a physical threat but also a tactical ally. The snapping wind covered the sounds of hundreds of heavily laden men moving and climbing in the snow, and encouraged enemy soldiers to keep their ears well covered. It was too cold, and the men were too fatigued, to allow any stops, so the column moved almost continuously for twenty-four hours, then collided with the rear of the enemy along the road, ambushing the would-be Chinese ambushers and relieving the beleaguered Fox Company. When Lt. Col. Davis’s battalion arrived, it saw some 450 Chinese corpses splayed out around the company’s perimeter. Over the course of six days, Fox had suffered 26 killed, 89 wounded, and 3 missing, out of about 220 Marines in the reinforced company. The dead were stacked outside Fox Company’s aid station, recalled McKellar, “probably twenty feet high,” topped by the pilot of a helicopter downed that morning, still in his leather flight jacket. “That sight is burned into my brain,” he said. All of Fox’s survivors had suffered either frostbite or dysentery. Davis and Fox’s commander, Capt. William Barber, would both receive the Medal of Honor. (A total of fourteen Marines in the Chosin campaign would receive that highest of American military honors.) Davis’s battalion then moved down and held open the pass until the Marine column could move southward through it.

Over four days and three nights, this epic march and attack enabled the 5th and 7th Marines to push the fourteen miles back down the left arm of the Y to Hagaru, fighting Chinese attackers most of the time and the cold always. There were seven Chinese roadblocks along the way that needed to be attacked and cleared. Moving slowly and carefully, the two regiments brought with them all fifteen hundred of their wounded—six hundred of them in stretcher cases—as well as their dead. “The dead were stacked in trucks like so many cords of wood,” recalled PFC Doug Michaud of the 5th Marines. “When they ran out of truck-bed space, they laid the dead on fenders, across hoods, tied on the barrels of artillery pieces. God, there were a lot of them.” Patrick Roe, an intelligence officer for the rearguard battalion, wrote later, “No one ever doubted the troops from Yudam-ni would make it, but there was always a question of how many would.”

Smith and his chief of operations, Col. Alpha Bowser, were in a tent at Hagaru one night, working on the issue of how to replace a blown bridge on their line of retreat, when they heard an unfamiliar noise, one of human voices gradually growing louder. Bowser went outside to look and found hundreds of Marines marching into camp from the northwestern side of the reservoir, “singing in the midst of this falling snow,” he said. “The place was a fairyland to look at if you could just detach yourself for a split second and look at the scenery. It was like a fairyland. . . . Beautiful, really beautiful to look at.” The voices were those of the lead element of the two regiments coming into camp, singing the Marine Corps Hymn and other familiar tunes. Bowser looked at Gen. Smith and said, “Our troubles are over. We’ve got it made.” The mood was less cheerful inside the medical tents, where arriving casualties were packed. “We had so many patients lying, sitting, and standing that we could hardly see the floor,” recalled Charles Holloway Jr., a Navy surgeon attached to the 1st Marine Division. “I stacked patients in like sardines in the commandeered pyramidal tents, 25 casualties in a circle around the center stove. Their own body heat and warmth from the heater kept them from freezing until we could load them on planes.”

Hagaru itself was under assault by yet another Chinese division. Smith took two days to allow the two arriving regiments to recuperate and refit, and also to fly out all the wounded and then some of the dead. (The aerial supply and evacuation effort was overseen by Air Force Maj. Gen. William Tunner, who just two years earlier had been in charge of the Berlin Airlift.) With the additional infantrymen, plus ammunition brought in by air, Smith calculated that he now had sufficient combat power to hold Hagaru indefinitely, despite being greatly outnumbered by Chinese attackers. “I considered that the critical part of the operation had been completed,” he wrote not long after the battle. “Even with two depleted RCTs [regimental combat teams] I felt confident we could fight our way to Koto-ri where we would gain additional strength.” But the newly arrived regiments were hardly put on a regime of rest for their two days at Hagaru. PFC Fred Allen of the 5th Marines remembered being put into the Hagaru line upon arrival and told to “dig in and be prepared.” At midnight, an illumination flare launched high overhead revealed a memorable sight: “It looked like half of China was coming down that valley.”

Elements of six Chinese divisions stood along the sole road leading from the junction of the Y south to the sea. On December 6, Smith began the march of his ten thousand Marines to the coast. It was planned even more carefully than an attack, with Marines moving along the flanking ridgelines to protect the column. There were a thousand trucks, tanks, and other vehicles in the column, but by Smith’s order, only drivers, radiomen, medics, and the wounded were allowed to ride. Everyone else would walk, the better to stay warm and to ward off enemy attacks. “This was a very powerful force,” Smith later wrote. “It was well-supplied with ammunition, fuel, and rations; was powerfully supported by Marine and carrier-based air; possessed organically artillery, tanks and the whole gamut of infantry weapons; and had dedicated officers and men to carry the fight to the enemy.” Even so, it took thirty-nine hours and cost six hundred more casualties to fight southward eleven miles through nine more roadblocks to the next of Smith’s prepared strongpoints, at Koto-ri. Gen. Almond flew over the convoy and was outraged to see it stopped at points, so he had his aircraft land at Koto-ri, where he lectured Gen. Smith on the need to move rapidly.

When the Marines marched into Koto-ri, the last of Smith’s strongpoints, PFC Paul Martin, a member of the 1st Marine Division’s reconnaissance company, went looking among them for friends in the 5th and 7th Marines. “Found most of them had been killed,” he said.

On the final leg, south from Koto-ri down to the coastal plain, one of Lt. Col. Davis’s officers, Joseph Owen, encountered combat in a whiteout blizzard. “The tracers were weird streaks of orange that flew at us out of blinding snow clouds,” he wrote. Chinese soldiers, ill-clad and at the far end of their supply lines, were found frozen to death in their foxholes. Chinese mortars were zeroed in on a point in the road where it was crossed by railroad tracks. The Navy Reserve surgeon Charles Holloway, who had been pulled from civilian life just months earlier, was frightened out of his wits but still conscious enough to observe that the fragments of exploding mortar rounds hit the icy canyon walls with a sound “like gravel being thrown against glass.”

The final obstacle, where the road ran along the top of a fifteen-hundred-foot cliff face, was a deep notch in the cliff whose bridge had been almost completely destroyed by the Chinese. Without it, troops could walk out, but Smith’s fourteen hundred vehicles (he had picked up four hundred more at Koto-ri) were stuck—and on them lay the truck-bound wounded. “To leave them was unthinkable,” said Lt. William Davis of the 7th Marines. The division engineer, Lt. Col. John Partridge, came up with a novel way to address the problem: Drop bridge sections by air.

Partridge is one of the unacknowledged heroes of Chosin, having already overseen the emergency construction of the northern airstrip that permitted the evacuation of more than four thousand casualties. The end of that runway was only three hundred yards from the base perimeter, and the engineers occasionally had to put down their construction tools and pick up weapons to help repel attackers. But Smith was skeptical of the unprecedented plan for the bridge and questioned Partridge closely about it. “He was kind of a grouchy guy,” Smith recalled of his engineer. “He admitted that the Air Force had never dropped Treadway bridge sections.” Smith pressed him, asking how he knew it would work, whether test drops had been conducted, what would happen if some sections were damaged while being parachuted in, and whether there was a backup plan. Finally Partridge tired of the questions and exclaimed, “I got you across the Han River. I got you the airfield. And I’ll get you a bridge.” Smith laughed and told him to proceed. The bridge project worked, and the Marines were able to move out of the mountains. Surprisingly, despite his heroic efforts and Smith’s support, Partridge would not be promoted beyond lieutenant colonel.

Evenness under extreme strain is a vital leadership skill, one that both George Marshall and O. P. Smith appreciated, and that Lt. Col. Ray Davis demonstrated for weeks during the Chosin campaign. An officer in his 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines recalled Davis raising his voice just once during the campaign, when he was informed that one of his companies had been pushed off a hill. Near the end of the retreat, Cpl. Ray Pearl heard a voice in the frozen darkness. It was Davis. “Is that you, Pearl?” he asked.

“How you been, Colonel?” Pearl responded.

“No complaints. How’s things with you?” said Davis.

“Fine, sir. Just fine.”

“That’s good. . . . Take care, Pearl.”

It was the most ordinary of exchanges, made memorable because it occurred in the most stressful of circumstances. When Davis reached the sea at the conclusion of the retreat, he was surprised at how hungry he was, eating first “five or six of these great large Tootsie Rolls” and then “something like 17 or 18 pancakes in two hours.” One of Davis’s Marines, Charles McKellar, reported that when he landed at Inchon he had weighed 170 pounds, but when he left Chosin he was down to 120.

Gen. Smith, vastly outnumbered, had mauled the Chinese divisions—at least nine of them, and perhaps even twelve—arrayed against his one division. Afterward, he wrote to the commandant of the Marines that his men “came down off the mountain bearded, footsore, and physically exhausted, but their spirits were high. They were still a fighting division.”

Smith’s pride was justified. According to Russell Spurr’s groundbreaking history of Chinese involvement in the war, Enter the Dragon, after the Chosin battles, the Chinese commander in Korea, Marshal Peng Dehuai, a coal miner turned guerrilla from Hunan Province and a veteran of the Long March of 1934–35, flew to Beijing. There he confronted Chairman Mao Zedong, telling him bluntly that the forces given him were unequipped, untrained, and undersupplied. As a result, he said, the attack on the Marines had been a disaster. (Twenty-three years later, during the last phases of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Peng would be repeatedly beaten by Red Guards in a series of more than 130 interrogations and also paraded with a humiliating placard hung around his neck, before he succumbed to cancer.) The Chinese divisions that attacked the Marines at Chosin suffered twenty-five thousand dead, twelve thousand more wounded, and tens of thousands of frostbite cases. These divisions were withdrawn from fighting until March of the following year.

Nonetheless, the campaign was a strategic victory for the Chinese. They had taken on the Americans, the world’s leading military power, and, fielding an illiterate, unmechanized peasant army, had pushed them out of northern Korea. And they had done it against one of America’s most prominent generals, Douglas MacArthur, the conqueror of Japan. “Communist China—until then considered to be a rogue regime of doubtful legitimacy—had become a power with which to be reckoned,” concluded Patrick Roe, a Marine intelligence officer at Chosin.

Gen. Ridgway admired O. P. Smith’s performance at Chosin. “If it wasn’t for his tremendous leadership, we would have lost the bulk of that division up north. His leadership was the principal reason it came out the way it did. He was a great division commander.” When Smith retired, S. L. A. Marshall, the Army historian, went even further, calling his Chosin performance “perhaps the most brilliant divisional feat of arms in the national history.” It is difficult to overstate what he achieved. Had he simply followed orders and charged toward the Yalu, he might well have lost more than ten thousand Marines, which would have been perhaps the greatest military disaster in the nation’s history. If the 1st Marine Division had been wiped out, it would have been a triumph for Communism, with consequences for the Korean War and the larger Cold War that are incalculable. The United States might have withdrawn from the peninsula and into isolationism, or it might have escalated and used nuclear weapons in Korea. Neither prospect is appealing.

Surprisingly, Smith is not much remembered or honored in today’s Corps. Ask a Marine who commanded at Chosin, and he is likely to say Chesty Puller or perhaps, even more mistakenly, Gen. H. M. Smith, the “Howlin’ Mad” officer of World War II fame. A major reason for the relative obscurity of Gen. O. P. Smith likely is the friction between him and Gen. Shepherd, his immediate superior in the Marine Corps during the Chosin campaign, which probably is why he was never invited to the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, to teach fellow officers about the campaign. “Regimental commanders spoke, company commanders spoke—everyone spoke but O. P. Smith,” wrote his granddaughter, with evident bitterness.

This neglect continues even now. The exhibit on the Chosin campaign at the big new Marine Corps museum near the Quantico base is magnificent. Especially chilling is the room-size re-creation of Fox Company’s hilltop stand, with its depiction of tracer fire arcing across the night as mortarmen run low on shells and the dead are covered by snow. “Chosin remains a touchstone of Marine Corps history,” a nearby sign states. Yet the exhibit treats O. P. Smith as an afterthought, sharing a small display case in a corner with Chesty Puller. The only Marine general from the Korean War honored with a prominent yellow-on-red biographical plaque, oddly enough, is Gerald Thomas, who succeeded O. P. Smith as commander of the 1st Marine Division in Korea.

Upon retiring, Smith and his wife, having never owned a house, at first found it difficult to obtain a mortgage, but eventually they were able to buy a small rambler not far from Stanford University, in Los Altos, California. There he gardened in the combat boots he had worn at Chosin. He died on Christmas Day of 1977.

Why the difference in leadership?

Years later, Faris Kirkland, an Army veteran of Korea turned academic historian, wrote a careful analysis of the Chosin campaign that is heartbreaking in its conclusions. Sifting the historical records and mulling the different outcomes of the Marine and Army units, he found little difference between the 13,500 Marines and the 4,500 Army troops in the performance of their enlisted men and junior officers. But in their more senior officers—majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, and generals—he detected crucial distinctions. “Marine commanders at Chosin demonstrated knowledge of tasks, obstacles and the means to overcome them,” Kirkland wrote. “Army commanders showed dash, bravery and hope; but little understanding of such matters as communications, reconnaissance, fire support and logistics.”

The key factor, he concluded, was the combat experience of those in command. As Kirkland noted, the officer officially designated as the Army’s hero of the battle, Lt. Col. Faith, who took over after the regimental commander was killed, had no combat experience, nor even much formal schooling in his profession. Rather, Faith, the son of an Army general, had been plucked directly from Officer Candidate School during World War II to become an aide to Matthew Ridgway. He never attended the Infantry Advanced Course for officers or the Command and General Staff College. Eight years after OCS, leading a beleaguered regimental combat team in Korea, he knew how to look like a commander. “On the battlefield, Faith was a clone of Ridgway: intense, fearless, relentlessly aggressive, and unforgiving of error or caution,” wrote the historian Clay Blair. Yet for all that, Kirkland noted, Faith did not really know how to command:

[He] had not mastered the fundamentals of military operations in the field. He ordered all the mortars and howitzers destroyed. He made no arrangements for communications within or between the infantry forces or the truck column. He did not ask Marine aviators, who had provided close support throughout the period 27 November–1 December, for information about the condition of the route he was to traverse or the dispositions of the enemy; neither did he send out patrols. He assigned no intermediate objectives and made no plan for spending one or more nights on the road. At least one company of 3-31 Infantry did not know there was going to be a breakout until leaders saw a line of trucks driving out of the perimeter. The commander of the artillery battalion asserted that he never had oral, telephonic or radio contact with Faith from the time he assumed command until the 31st RCT was annihilated.

The list goes on. “There is no evidence that any effort was made by Faith . . . to establish communications when the means were at hand to do so through the daily radio contact of the TACP [tactical air control party] with pilots overhead,” noted Roy Appleman, formerly an official Army historian. “It apparently never dawned on Faith or his principal staff officers that this means of establishing communications with the 1st Marine Division at Hagaru-ri, and through it with the 7th Infantry Division and X Corps, was available.”

Faith, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, was “both the beneficiary and the victim of officer personnel policies,” concluded Kirkland. The histories of the Chosin fight tend to take their cue from the official accounts compiled by Army historians. As Kirkland noted, the lead Army historian, Appleman, chose not to write anything critical of Faith. “About Faith, I have not placed in the [manuscript for the book East of Chosin] any unfavorable views that may have been uttered to me by others—only the favorable,” Appleman wrote in a letter. “I owe his memory and personal valor that much. I do not know if anyone could have done better in the exact circumstances. I do believe he overlooked some possibilities open to him while he was at the inlet. This is the extent of my criticism. I place far greater blame on higher command for the result.”

Sadly, Kirkland noted, Faith’s lack of combat experience would not have made him stand out in the Army units sent to Korea that year: “Of the six generals initially assigned to command divisions in Korea, four had not held a combat command at any level during the Second World War.” Had the commanders above him been more seasoned in combat, they might have been better prepared to assist Faith, especially with communications and support. “The communications breakdown . . . bordered on command criminal negligence,” concluded historian Shelby Stanton. Maj. Gen. David Barr, Faith’s commander in the 7th Division, had been a chief of staff for Gen. Jacob Devers in the earlier war. Likewise, Kirkland observed, of the eighteen colonels commanding infantry regiments in the initial phase of the Korean War, fifteen had never before led units in combat.

In reading histories of the Korean War, when new regimental and division commanders are discussed, it is striking how often they are introduced with phrases such as “had not previously led troops in combat.” Instead they had spent World War II in the Pentagon war-planning division, or had trained troops, or had been a staff planner in the Mediterranean Theater, or had been a corps chief of staff. This extended even to the chief of staff for Gen. Almond, Clark Ruffner, who had spent World War II as the chief of staff for his father-in-law, Gen. Robert “Nelly” Richardson, who oversaw Army troop training in the Pacific. In Korea, the Marines still had a bad taste in their mouth from Richardson, who had played a major role in the Army’s querulous response to the firing of Army Gen. Ralph Smith by Marine Gen. H. M. Smith during the Battle of Saipan, in 1944.

Trying to be fair to officers can be lethal to the soldiers they lead on the battlefield. The Army was using the Korean War to give the staff officers of the earlier war “their chance” to command in combat—with disastrous results. Well before Chosin, the Army had recognized that it had a problem with inexperienced combat leadership in the war. In August 1950, the Army sent a team of expert colonels and lieutenant colonels to Korea. They produced a thick report that, among other things, warned that the Army’s approach to filling command slots with inexperienced officers “has often resulted in poor leadership, especially at the regimental and lower levels. The career program has been detrimental to combat efficiency.” Some commanders were found to lack “the ability to command under adverse conditions, resulting in a defeatist attitude.” Gen. Mark Clark, then commander of Army Field Forces, sent the report to Gen. J. Lawton Collins, the Army chief of staff, along with a “Dear Joe” cover letter explaining that “the detrimental effect of the [officers’] career program on combat efficiency is an inescapable corollary of the program as a whole which seeks, by variations in assignment, to produce well-rounded and versatile officers.” In response to complaints about the quality of officership, the Army tried to change its approach. In February 1952, it instituted a new program to send better officers, especially colonels, to Korea. The focus of the program was to find and deploy “officers considered by their seniors to be potential high-level commanders, but who had not had a combat command during World War II.”

This supposed “solution,” which actually intensified the leadership problem, is inexplicable until one remembers that the Army of this era was focused on the Soviet threat. If World War III came, the Army’s plan was to field eighty or more divisions, so it was desirable to have on hand as many seasoned officers as possible to lead regiments and divisions in combat. The United States had to keep its eye on the Red Army in Central Europe, and it feared that Korea, a secondary theater, might be a Communist diversion intended to weaken it in Europe. Even so, the approach the Army took meant that for the rest of the Korean War, complaints about the character and competence of Army officers would be rampant.

The Marine Corps, by contrast, was dealing with the more immediate threat of doubts in Washington about whether the Corps should even continue to exist, so it had an incentive to send its best commanders to Korea. After the initial emergency of the war, when it sent anyone it could find, the Marines tried to stick to their practice of requiring anyone commanding a unit to have led the next-lower level of unit in combat. Thus, a colonel leading a regiment had to have overseen a battalion that fought, and a battalion commander needed to have done so with a company. O. P. Smith had been an assistant division commander on Peleliu. The officers leading his regiments were some of the best the Corps has ever had. Col. Homer Litzenberg, who had a reputation for crankiness with both superiors and subordinates, had not only commanded in the Pacific War—he had been relieved there. Despite that, Smith said later, “I gave him the 7th Regiment. He was difficult to handle but he did a good job with the 7th. I had no complaint. I gave him good fitness reports, and he made brigadier general. And he made major general, but he could not get along. They tried him out at Lejeune and pulled him out, tried him out at Parris Island, and pulled him out—he was just too tough on his subordinates.”

Lt. Col. Raymond Murray, commanding officer of the 5th Marines, had fought at Guadalcanal. He then received command of a battalion after Col. Lewis “Chesty” Puller, the regimental commander, not only relieved his predecessor but busted that officer from lieutenant colonel to lieutenant. At Guadalcanal, Ray Davis sometimes had the mission of extinguishing grass fires touched off by Japanese strafing before the flames ignited bombs stored there. “I spent many a moment standing atop a 500-pound bomb beating out a fire around it,” he would recall. “It’s a good thing they weren’t fused, but still it was a hairy way to spend an afternoon.” At the age of twenty-eight, Davis led a battalion at Tarawa and then at Saipan, which he considered the toughest fight he had ever faced; he was seriously wounded there and received a Navy Cross to join his two Silver Stars. Chesty Puller, “perhaps the most famous Marine of all time,” who had received an extraordinary four Navy Crosses even before the Korean War, was alongside Davis at Chosin, still commanding a regiment. As a battalion commander at Guadalcanal, Puller had held off the Japanese at Henderson Field, despite being shot twice and being hit by three pieces of shrapnel. Smith’s operations chief, Col. Alpha Bowser, had commanded an artillery battalion on Iwo Jima. His chief engineer, Lt. Col. John Partridge, was a veteran of Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. Capt. William Barber, who received the Medal of Honor for his leadership of the encircled Fox Company, had led a platoon at Iwo Jima.

One would expect that it must have given the Army pause to receive such a devastating analysis, one that clearly argued that its officer management policies had led to disaster in the Korean War. But Kirkland said that the Army, even decades after the event, chose to ignore him. He said he offered his article to Parameters, the journal of the Army War College, for which he had written before, but was turned down. Instead he published it in Armed Forces & Society, an obscure academic journal specializing in military sociology.

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MacArthur’s reaction to the disasters of the Gauntlet and Chosin Reservoir, which resulted directly from his impulse to drive the Communists from Korea and from his misapprehension of Chinese intent and capabilities, was typical of his behavior, though it was still surprising. He had just taken an amazing gamble. In October 1950, the United States had a total of twelve divisions globally. Seven of those were under MacArthur’s control in Korea, and he sent them, as one historian put it, “in an uncoordinated rush toward the border of a hostile nation that possessed an army of more than 5,000,000 in 253 divisions. . . . All this was done in the face of explicit Chinese warnings not to do so and in defiance of orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” MacArthur responded to his military setback by launching a series of blistering public attacks on the Truman Administration. Most notably, he told U.S. News & World Report that he had been handicapped by Washington’s limits on him, “without precedent in military history,” and accused Western leaders of being “somewhat selfish” and “short-sighted.”

Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, the Army’s G-3, or deputy chief for operations, and others were puzzled about why MacArthur was being allowed to talk like that. After a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Chosin battles, Ridgway approached the Air Force chief, Hoyt Vandenberg. He asked why the Joint Chiefs did not just issue direct orders to MacArthur telling him what to do. “What good would that do?” Gen. Vandenberg responded, shaking his head. “He wouldn’t obey orders. What can we do?”

Ridgway was exasperated by such talk. He knew what he would do. “You can relieve any commander who won’t obey orders, can’t you?” Vandenberg’s astonished reaction to this suggestion, he remembered, was such that “his lips parted and he looked at me with an expression both puzzled and amazed.”

Privately, Ridgway blamed MacArthur for the debacle at Chosin. “I regard General MacArthur’s insistence on retaining control from Tokyo, 700 miles from the battle areas, as unwarranted and unsound,” he wrote years later. “In my opinion, this was largely responsible for the heavy casualties and the near disaster which followed.” He also said that Army schools “could well choose this operation as a perfect example of how not to plan and conduct a campaign.”

This was the general to whom Ridgway would report just a few weeks later.