Thomas McKelvey Cleaver - The Frozen Chosen

The country around the Chosin Reservoir in winter was never intended for military operations. Even Genghis Khan wouldnt tackle it.

Major General Oliver P. Smith, Commanding General, 1st Marine Division, 1950

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Osprey Publishing,
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2016 Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

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ISBN: 978-1-4728-1436-4 (PB)
ISBN: 978-1-4728-1438-8 (eBook)
ISBN: 978-1-4728-1437-1 (ePDF)

Cartography by bounford.com

All images are from the United States National Archives and Records Administration and are in the public domain.

Front cover: (Upper) Tanks of the 1st Marine Division, December 9; (Lower) 1 Marine Division withdraws from Koto-ri, December 8.
Back cover: (main) US Marines are given close air support near Hagaru-ri, December 26, 1950; (left) Marine tanks scramble around a blown-out bridge south of Koto-ri, December 9, 1950; (right) Marines engage enemy forces, December 6, 1950.

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LIST OF MAPS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PROLOGUE

United States Marines are special people.

As an Army soldier, I only suspected this for 27 years and with occasionally a tinge of jealousy, I must admit. Then in 1993, a man I had come to know fairly well while I worked for General Colin Powell General Chuck Krulak, then-Commandant of the US Marine Corps asked me to go to Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia and take over as deputy director of the Marine Corps War College. I did. What happened there, in one sense immediately, taught me a great deal.

The immediate lesson came from my new boss, the Colleges director, Marine Colonel W. R. (Rick) Donnelly. Rick called me into his office as soon as I arrived, shut the door, told me to sit down, and then told me he was dying. From that moment on, I began to realize I had probably never met a braver man. Its one thing to breast enemy fire to go Once more unto the breach to overcome ones fear in a rush of adrenalin or in a deep and frenetic desire to help ones buddies; its quite another to succumb to an ugly death in the middle of life, no combat, no sounds of the guns, just the creeping, inexorable death that comes from a virulent and incurable cancer. At the end, as Rick had wasted almost completely away before our incredulous eyes, he refused even to let his sixteen-year old son see him. He wanted his son, he said, to remember him as the strong, healthy, vibrant Marine he had been. I understood completely.

A week or so after Ricks funeral, I made a special trip, alone, to Arlington Cemetery, to kneel before his freshly-turned grave and thank him for the brief period he had let me know him. To this day, I still have his office nameplate, its brilliant red backdrop trimmed in bright yellow, secured in my home. He was a man I shall never forget.

The longer-term lesson was that I came to realize over time that part of this mans demeanor and its underlying character were a product of the US Marine Corps its ethos, its history, and its incredible cohesiveness. The other Services in general have concluded that the Marines have the best uniforms; what most wont admit, though, is they have the best warriors.

In this book, Thomas McKelvey Cleaver tells a typical story about these warriors, this one in 1950 in the heady days of the massive incursion of China into North Korea at a place identified in the history books as the Chosin Reservoir. It is by no means typical in the sense that men throughout history have done similar deeds; they most certainly have not. Perhaps on a dozen or so occasions in the past 5,000 years have men performed in the manner of these Marines in North Korea. This story is typical of the United States Marine Corps because of those dozen or so stories, at least a quarter belong to them.

It is not a story of strategic and tactical genius such as that of Alexander; or of the harnessing of new concepts or brilliant maneuvers as did the best of the German commanders in World War II; or of subtlety, creativity and critical thinking such as I think we military professionals imagine in Sun Tzus armies. Neither is it the fundamental determination of Wellingtons men at Waterloo or of Mao Tse Tungs fighters on the Long March; nor Marlboroughs brilliant ubiquity at Blenheim or Slims artful craftiness in Burma.

Its in many ways indefinable; but the reader will recognize it instantly: like the old saw says about pornography, we cannot define it but we know it when we see it.

In this book the reader sees a Marine fighting in sock-clad feet in temperatures of twenty-below zero, with Siberian wind-chills pushing the cold far below even that, against seemingly insurmountable odds, all night long. Later, having miraculously survived the battle, he will lose all his toes to frostbite.

The reader sees a unit of 200 men dwindle to 150, then to 100, then to 85, then still lower, and yet maintain unit cohesion, unit integrity, sufficient to repulse a determined and out-numbering enemy again and again and again. All in weather so appallingly cold that even the imagination is incapable of conjuring it. Such actions give full confirmation to the Marines iron-clad concept of every man a rifleman. Cooks, supply men, truck drivers it does not matter every Marine is taught how to fight, how to use his weapons, and how to be the ultimate key to survival if necessary, or to be the last man standing or dead. Like the Spartans, they retire from the fray with their shield or on it.

The reader sees Marine pilots taking off from icy carrier decks pitching so violently in 30-knot winds and an abominable sea state that just getting off successfully is the severest challenge, only once off to penetrate fog and ice-filled cloud cover that restricts vision completely until one penetrates it on the way back down to deliver ordnance without which the Marines on the ground might not make it through another day (or night in some cases). I used to consider Army aviation as being close-knit with its infantry as I was for over a decade an Army aviator, including in the Vietnam conflict, in addition to being an infantry officer but Army aviation is not comparable to Marine aviation. Marine pilots live and die for their ground-pounding riflemen; they have no other mission, indeed in combat no other reason to exist. The Marine Corps instills this team-ethos deeply.