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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
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Breakout : The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950
Reviewed by Justin R. Martin
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Why does the Chosin Reservoir matter? What was accomplished there? Martin Russ suggests the following: it showed, at least for certain individuals, there is the possibility for dignity and honor even in the most hopeless of circumstances. As Breakout illustrates, not every person is made this way – one Marine literally died of battle shock/fatigue – and even those that survived chide themselves for their shortcomings. Nonetheless, Russ aptly and appropriately illuminates the immeasurable nature of fighting spirit, particularly when it is rooted in a corps of men dedicated to each other and the principle (as opposed for the objective) for which they fight. By October of 1950, the United States Army’s Commander-in-Chief, General George MacArthur, successfully convinced everyone, including himself, that the campaign in North Korea would accomplish its goal of victory before Christmas. His belief seemed well founded. The Eighth Army in the west and the X Corps in the east each formed an arm of a giant pincer, which MacArthur intended to encircle the remaining North Korean resistance and thereby snuff out the unpleasantness in Korea. To accomplish decisive victory, MacArthur’s northern initiative ignored a seemingly benign warning issued by the Chinese that an advancement of United Nations troops beyond the thirty-eighth parallel constituted an attack against China itself. As the world would soon discover, Mao Tse-Tung, taking advantage of a strong and durable army built during the overthrow of Chiang Kai-Chek, backed up his talk by flooding the Taebek Mountains and the Chosin Reservoir with soldiers from Manchuria. Breakout, The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, concerns the fate of X Corps, and in particular the efforts of its core unit, the 1st Marine Division of the United States Marine Corps, which withstood and ultimately repelled the brunt of China’s ambush. |
 Breakout : The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950 by Martin Russ Hardcover - $19.25 Published April 1999 Fromm Intl |
Mao Tse-Tung placed General Sung Shih-lun in charge of the Korean campaign against the Americans. Sung rapidly deployed the Red Army, taking advantage of three elements: surprise, concealment, and the onset of a harsh Korean winter, which would eventually claim from both forces as many casualties as the guns, shrapnel and napalm. But as Russ illustrates, these elements could not by themselves overcome American artillery, technology and airpower. To offset these liabilities, Sung’s troops traveled and fought only at night, safely hidden away during the day in every available cave, mine, hut and cellar. Through gripping narratives, anecdotal personal accounts and recorded memorandum, Russ artfully tells the story of both the individual and collective efforts employed to regain life from the deathtrap set by the Red Army.
The Chinese patiently waited until the Marines, ultimately the only effective fighting force stationed in North Korea, strung themselves out over the one hundred miles of rough, arctic terrain between the port city of Hungnam and the Taebek Mountain range. There, upon a high plateau, sits the frozen Chosin Reservoir, which the 1st Marines reached first as the spearhead of the northeastern Korean initiative. Over the course of disembarking from Hungnam, the details of 1st Division’s assignments are highlighted with detailed descriptions of how and why the regiments, battalions, companies, platoons, squads and even individual were split apart to guard the high mountain passes that comprised the main supply route for the Army’s campaign.
When the 1st Division became broken into its lesser parts, the Chinese attack caught the Marines unaware in the depth of night. By cutting bridges, communication lines and supply lines, the Marines found that they sat as isolated islands in a sea of Chinese that outnumbered them by an average of five to one. Russ takes us on the journey of how, even after isolating the Marines’ companies and regiments, the Red Army failed to fulfill its objective of annihilating each faction piecemeal. The heart and soul of his account lies not in the political, tactical or administrative decisions that permitted the near-annihilation of an entire Marine Division. Rather, Breakout delivers a carefully researched testimonial of perseverance that explains how the Marines willed individual victories and then cobbled those achievements into a collective success that saved the X Corps from certain destruction. In the process, the reader becomes immersed in the field of battle, which is characterized not by the horrors and extremes of bloody battle, but by the Marines’ unique esprit de corps. This esprit provided them with the momentum that ultimately built individual triumphs into a massive victory.
The disastrous results that followed on the heels of the Chosin Reservoir initiative shocked the expectations of nearly every American, most of whom (including President Harry Truman) believed MacArthur’s pronouncement that the troops would be home for Christmas. The newspapers predicted the complete destruction of X Corps. As it happened, the Chosin Reservoir troops succeeded in returning stateside for Christmas, but only after escaping by the narrowest of possible margins and suffering the worst "defeat" since Pearl Harbor and Bull Run. This meticulous compilation illuminates the forces that moved each individual marine to fight despite utter Chinese encirclement of the overextended division. Breakout examines the roots of a Marine's faith in his comrades, and no evidence is more powerful than this simple fact: the 1st Marines, far from the beachheads that they were trained to take and hold, fought through six Chinese divisions. In raw numbers, sixteen thousand Marines confronted sixty thousand Chinese soldiers, saving nearly twelve thousand of their own number and inflicting approximately twenty thousand casualties upon China’s gathered forces.
Ultimately, Breakout serves as much more than a simple military history text. By showing the manner in which the marines of 1st Division fought, and in showing the core beliefs that motivated them, Russ explores the very makeup of the Marine Corps. In doing so, he illustrates, better than any Marine recruiter testimonial could hope, what distinguishes the Marines from any other large-scale fighting force in the United States Armed forces.
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Justin R. Martin is currently in his third year of law school at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He was born in Yakima, Washington. In the near future he hopes to practice international law and/or maritime law. Mr. Martin first studied international law in 1994 as a Normandy Scholar in Caen, France.