The Few, The Proud, The First Marines

A few weeks ago, a couple of presidents did their photo ops number at the dedication of the new Washington memorial to the veterans of the Korean War, 19 steel statues of American riflemen on the march.

It was a one-day media do, somewhat overshadowed by all the 50-year celebrations of the end of World War II. Korea vets say they find that situation familiar.

One photo shows our nation’s president gesturing toward a statue’s M-1 rifle and looking bemused, as if he never has seen one up close. Which, come to think of it, might be the case. The other president does not look puzzled - he knows the real memorial to the millions of Americans who served from 1950 to 1953 is the independent country over which he presides. Without those whom the statues represent, there would be no South Korea.

I attended another kind of July memorial to the Korean War out in Van Zandt County, Texas. It didn’t feature celebrity politicians and media types, but it was more fun and had better barbecue. Also, the sea stories were more fascinating, because nearly all of those present had been stars in the original cast, the real war. Indeed, they had been the victors in one of the Korean battles that will be studied in the military academies a thousand years from now - the breakout from the Chosin Reservoir.

And what a victory it was - a Chinese army of 120,000 against an American division, yet the division emerged triumphant. The triumph was that it emerged, because the Red army had been given the mission of not only surrounding that specific division but also destroying and annihilating it. For this was our first war against the Mao strategy, which was to wage war not only in the field but also in the enemy’s homeland by politics and media spin. Mao Tse-tung’s maxim was that for devastating psychological effect in the enemy homeland, “it is better to cut off one of the enemy’s fingers than to break 10.”

The finger that Mao had chosen to cut off at Chosin was a division sometimes referred to by envious outsiders as “the cafe society of the Marine Corps” and by its own as “the Marine Corps’ Marine Corps.” It was the First Marine Division, which had launched the first U.S. land offensive of World War II at Guadalcanal and which had just broken the back of the North Korean army with the landing at Inchon.

The famous division was chosen for execution in order to provoke the kind of catastrophic shock back in the United States that the 1968 Tet offensive would score in a later war. As in the Tet offensive, the Communist leaders were prepared to pay a huge cost in the lives of their own soldiers to get the big, black headlines that would panic Americans at home.

Later, armchair generals would sneer at the Marines’ comment during the breakout, “Retreat, hell - we’re just attacking in a different direction.” In fact, that was the military truth, for the main Chinese army was behind the First Marine Division, between it and the sea. That army was supposed to utterly destroy the Americans.

As it turned out, when the battle was over, the Marines marched out, in step, some of the outfits singing the Marine Hymn. They had won; the cut-off fingers back in those freezing mountains were Chinese. Four Chinese divisions had been destroyed along that 75-mile road, disappearing from the order of battle. Four more were withdrawn to be rebuilt, out of the war for the next six months. The Chinese commander tried to resign; another general threatened suicide.

Yet at the beginning, the Marines’ situation looked hopeless. Not only were they outnumbered and surrounded, but also orders from Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters had spread out the division’s regiments. To Mao, the task of cutting off these extended fingers, the separated regiments, appeared easier than doing the same to a clenched fist.

But the regiments stopped the waves of assaulting Chinese dead. Marine Gen. O.P. Smith pulled regiments together, reclenching the Marine fist at Koto-ri.

After building an airstrip there, Marines flew out their wounded, flew in ammunition and rations. General Smith rejected an offer to evacuate the division to safety. Instead, he threw the clenched fist of his division at the Chinese divisions between Koto-ri and the sea. And smashed them. His division brought out all its wounded, most of its dead, and 4,000 soldiers from army, British and South Korean units caught in the Chinese tide.

There is no other battle in American history in which our side has been so outnumbered or in such straits and still won.

Yet the gathering of the North Texas chapter of the Chosin Few this summer was low-key, with no chest beating or vainglorious hype. The Marine Corps is a family, and this was a family get-together for old times’ sake. I was there as a guest, not a Chosin Few member. Only 5,000 nationwide have met the demanding requirements for membership: You have to have been there and done that at Chosin.

The North Texas Few, who were and did, had another get-together for a fish fry this past weekend at Texoma. And the next gathering is the chapter’s frostbite seminar in November. Yes, you read that right: Featured speakers will be medical specialists in dealing with pains and problems of frostbite aftereffects. Marines marched out of Chosin, many of them on frozen feet and with frozen hands. Forty-five years later, they still are quietly dealing with that, without whining or complaints.

The theme of the big do in Washington this summer was “Freedom isn’t free.” The Chosin Few don’t have to be told that. Forty-five years ago, on the road from the reservoir, they paid not only their own part of the tab but a considerable share of yours and mine as well.

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