Life and Death, Frozen in Time
My father and the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, 1950
When my father was a part of the retreat from the Chosin reservoir he thought a lot about life and death. The year was 1950. It was between Thanksgiving and Christmas and the North Korean army backed by Communist China had encircled the US forces, triggering an epic battle and ultimately, a US defeat.
The US was withdrawing along a single lane dirt and gravel road that was carved into the sides of steep mountain ranges running from the Yalu river in the north to the sea of Japan in the south. Their retreat had to take place at night so as to avoid being easily spotted by Chinese soldiers aiming rifles and artillery down on them from the ridge lines. Temperatures were in the minus ten-to-twenty-below range and as many soldiers succumbed to frostbite and exposure as from guns. The US commanding officer, when asked about this defeat, scoffed at journalists and insisted his troops were simply “advancing to the rear.”
What were those soldiers doing at the Chosin reservoir, only a few miles from the Yalu river which was the natural border to China itself? General MacArthur, the supreme commander of American and allied UN forces in the region wanted to win the Korean war quickly. He believed driving deep into North Korea from the already occupied capital of Pyongyang would break the North Korean military and dissuade a weakened China from sending troops to the aid of their ally. He was wrong.
China sent hundreds of thousands of troops into North Korea and surrounded the UN and US troops encamped around the Chosin reservoir. They accomplished this feat by marching on foot overland through difficult mountain passes via simultaneous and coordinated lines until they held all the high ground surrounding the reservoir and local towns. Then they unleashed the now infamous “human wave” battle plan. Thousands upon thousands of Chinese soldiers assaulted the fortified American positions until it became clear that over time the US troops would be overrun.
The Americans fought bravely, but the Chinese kept sending wave after wave of troops in an unrelenting assault over a five-day period. Exhausted, out of ammo, food, supplies and frozen half to death, the American forces were ordered to “advance to the rear” and regroup south.
Since lights of any kind would show the enemy where they were, the US troops had to inch along the mountain roads in complete darkness. Tanks, armored vehicles, trucks and jeeps regularly slid off the treacherous frozen path through the mountains during the night. My father spoke of holding a small flashlight with black tape over it and occasionally being told to illuminate a small patch in front of their jeep when it became clear that the driver did not know if what lay before them was more road or a sheer drop into an abyss.
My father would flick on the flashlight, then flick it off quickly. The others in the jeep with him would then debate what they had seen in the brief flash. They also kept a lookout above them on the ridge line to see if they had given away their position to the enemy.
Over the dozen or so days the fighting retreat from the Chosin reservoir lasted, over 15,000 soldiers were lost on the US side and over 50,000 were lost on the Chinese side. Eventually all UN forces would be forced to withdraw from the region and the stalemate that ensued would result in the now infamous demarcation line dividing North and South Korea.
The battle of the Chosin reservoir would come to be known as one of the most harrowing events of 20th century warfare. To my father, who was near the front doing his job, it was a life changing experience. As an intelligence officer he interrogated many of the Chinese prisoners. He sent many of them to prison camps and many of them to the firing squad.
These Chinese soldiers were like him except for the fact that they had stayed and been conscripted into Mao’s massive military machine. He told me that looking across the table at them made him heartsick. Most knew their fate and were resigned to it. They were the sons of peasants who had little choice but to join the army.
These were not mindless men. They all had families and loved ones back home but found themselves fighting a better trained and equipped enemy with little more than their wits and their courage. Those interrogated by my father looked at him with both contempt and envy. Perhaps if things had been a little different for them, they could have gotten out of China and fled to their west as well.
My father had fled first to Hong Kong, then to Taiwan after China fell to the Communists. He was offered American citizenship and more if he would join the US army as an intelligence officer. His fluency in English came from attending missionary high school in Shanghai before the revolution. After training in America, he was sent to join the US forces in Korea.
I often try to imagine what was in my father’s heart when he was fighting for his new country at the Chosin resevoir. As a child he had learned firsthand about the cruel exploitation of his homeland by western powers who carved up a weakened China like a holiday turkey. As a boy he lived through the Japanese occupation of his hometown of Shanghai. Now he was a newly minted American citizen and soldier, having declared his loyalty to the freedom and opportunity of the United States.
Then he found himself in the frozen despair of Korea, interrogating men and boys just like him who threw themselves into a desperate frontline with little or no understanding of what they were really fighting for.
There was one Chinese soldier captured out of uniform who turned out to be from my father’s neighborhood in Tientsin where he grew up. They were the same age and knew the same streets, the same shops, the same schools. During the interrogation, my father pleaded with the soldier to tell the US officers what they wanted to know. He wanted to help him survive. The soldier thought about this for a while, but then decided to remain silent. In the end, he was taken out and shot as a spy.
When my father would finish his shift and leave the interrogation rooms, he would light a Lucky Strike and walk quickly through the bitter cold towards the commissary and hot coffee. As he did so, he would see the piles of frozen Chinese soldiers who had been executed and he would hear the gunshots of the firing squad echo through the crevices of the icy mountains around him.
He was an American soldier at war.
