In 1950 during the Korean War, a brutal battle tested the American military just two weeks before Christmas.

“Only 14 more shooting days until Christmas.” Those words were painted on the side of a Marine Sherman tank parked on a windswept plateau in December 1950.
Encircled by seven Chinese Divisions and pounded by the coldest winter ever recorded along the North Korean/ Manchurian border, the 1st Marine Division began its classic 78-mile breakout to the sea from the frozen Chosin Reservoir.

On the night of November 26th, at 20° below zero with blinding snow, tens of thousands of quilted Chinese soldiers came screaming out of the storm, to the blare of bugles and the glare of green pyrotechnics, firing their Russian snub-nosed “Burp Guns” in disciplined bursts.

With this assault, Red China entered the Korean War big time. Our scattered outposts in the mountains were engulfed by human waves. We rallied and held. Then the freakish Siberian weather hit with a fury. Temperatures plummeted. I recall that the cold was excruciating.

Everything froze. Carbines wouldn’t work. Artillery rounds fell short, sometimes into our own positions. Morphine froze hard as stone. Corpsmen carried the syrettes in their mouths to keep them thawed enough to help numb the wounded.

Tokyo urged Major General Oliver P. Smith, USMC, to abandon his combat equipment and allow his 1st Marine Division to be evacuated by air from Hagaru-ri in a massive aerial Dunkirk. Smith demurred. The 1st Marine Division would fight its way out “as Marines,” with our wounded and our gear—and most of our dead.

Fighting the Chinese in towering mountains required the legs, lungs, and sure-footedness of mountain goats. The wind with snow howling out of Siberia never stopped. The battle of the final pass took place during an intense snowstorm. The temperature started at 14° below zero at dusk, then dropped to -33° overnight.

Into that storm came Captain Robert Barrow’s Company of the lst Marines. We were the same rifle company that had single-handedly captured Yongdong-po three months earlier. I remember that the storm was terrible to endure, but it worked in our favor, making possible our assault up the sheer, reverse slope of Hill 1081. We caught the Chinese peering through the snow at the road below and surprised them painfully. They counterattacked furiously throughout the long, stormy night. Desperate, deadly fighting continued to rage, including bayonet and hand-to-hand savagery.

The Chinese could not hold and began to melt away, leaving us a clear path to the sea. Their once-promising campaign against the single American Marine Division had become a disaster. The Chinese 9th Army Group sustained some 37,000 casualties, including 25,000 deaths to battle and extreme cold. Most of the seven divisions that attacked us were so shot-up they simply disappeared from the Red Chinese Army.

We Marines suffered 3,637 battle casualties of our own during the Chosin Reservoir Campaign, plus 3,657 non-battle casualties, most of which were results of frostbite. But, what a sight all of us survivors made striding and limping into Hungnam, North Korea, on December 12, 1950. Many of us were walking wounded with conspicuously dirty bandages.

One of the admiring correspondents jubilantly exclaimed, “Look at those bastards. Look at those magnificent bastards!”