Joseph Dunford, keeps a picture of one of those Marines on his office wall: his father, who was a Private First Class and already a combat veteran by the time his unit reached Chosin Reservoir. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Almost all suffered wounds, if not by battle then by frostbite. The Marines – dirty, hairy, shell-shocked – hadn't slept in days. They carried their casualties with them, but as the number of wounded continued to pile up, they had to make room on the trucks by burying the dead. The Marines retraced their route to the sea along that single winding road, with Chinese shooting down on them. "I think that's why the Marines to this day view the Chosin Reservoir as one of the great battles in their history, because they had been put into an impossible position, and they had to extricate themselves from this trap." "But the point was to quit the field with honor," said Sides. "Whatever you call it, they were yielding the field to the enemy," Martin said. Smith was asked if he was retreating, his reply was, "Retreat? Hell, we're just advancing in another direction." We never call it retreat." A group of Marines fighting its way from the communist encirclement at Chosin to Hungnam, Korea, takes a rest in the snow in December 1950. Weidhahn said, "We didn't call it retreat. Sides said, "They have to begin to think about a word that the Marines do not like, which is the word 'withdrawal,' or 'retreat.'" General Oliver Smith, the Marine commander, estimated his 13,000 men were surrounded by 100,000 Chinese troops. "Boy, that must have been a feeling of dread when the sun's going down," Martin said. "Every night, as soon as it got dark, they attacked, and en masse right into the lines – hand-to-hand fighting." "Their job was to annihilate us," said Weidhahn. But as soon as night came, the Chinese started their attack all over again. The Marines had air cover, so during the day the Chinese would retreat back into the hills to avoid the bombs. "They overwhelmed the weapons that we had, and pretty soon we ran out of ammunition." Warren Weidhahn was a young Marine at Chosin Reservoir. Every weapon we had was firing at the Chinese. Weidhahn said, "We heard bugles and whistles, and the Chinese came pouring over the mountain in front of us – thousands firing and shooting, coming down the valley towards us. The Chinese sprang the trap on the night of November 27. Any commander knows this is a terrible way to move because you get strung out." Sides said, "This was kind of a perfect trap because they had to go singe file up this very narrow road. The Marines were moving north along a single road that twisted higher into the mountains up to the Chosin Reservoir, which was supposed to be just a way station on their way to the Yalu. Marines and their clash with overpowering Chinese forces at the Chosin Reservoir in November 1950. "They would literally strap themselves to trees and nap during the day so that they couldn't be seen." In his new book, "On Desperate Ground," Hampton Sides recounts the fateful experience of U.S. "The Chinese were so good at this, traveling only at night," said Sides. MacArthur ignored intelligence reports that tens of thousands of Chinese troops had infiltrated into North Korea and were laying in wait for the Americans.
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