On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle

On Desperate Ground chronicles the Marines at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War's greatest battle. In October 1950, General Douglas MacArthur assured President Harry Truman that Communist forces would be defeated by Thanksgiving and that China would not intervene. However, 300,000 Chinese soldiers were already crossing the Manchurian border. The First Marine Division, numbering around 20,000 men, advanced into the snowy mountains of North Korea toward the Chosin Reservoir, where they encountered the trap set by Mao for MacArthur. Surrounded, vastly outnumbered, and facing temperatures of 20 degrees below zero, the Marines fought through enemy forces with ingenuity and courage to reach the sea. Hampton Sides draws on years of archival research, unpublished letters, declassified documents, and interviews with surviving Marines and Koreans to recount this operation. The account examines the failures of American leadership while presenting a ground-level perspective of the battle and the capabilities of ordinary men in extreme circumstances.