The breakout from Chosin Reservoir is one of those almost-mythical moments in the history of the United States Marine Corps that shows their very best and most impressive qualities against the face of adversity. It was also undoubtedly the result of a colossal fuck up by US high command, an example of disastrous strategic thinking that needlessly endangered the troops on the ground. It’s hard not to be a little triumphalist about the Marine Corps’ (and their allies’) achievements in November and December 1950, but in doing so it is too easy to fall into the trap of making the Korean War about Americans and losing sight of what any of it meant. The Frozen Chosen is a pop history* account of the Chosin Breakout, as well as the war up to that point and up through MacArthur’s firing after, and while I had a reasonably good time reading it I can’t say it blew me away. It has strange priorities in places and the narrative is not as coherent as it should be, but it also does a good job at sharing the blame for the disastrous strategy without falling into overly simplistic narratives.
While the book certainly indulges its emphasis on the Americans first and foremost, it also makes sure to include details of other UN and ROK forces, so it never fully loses sight of the other participants in the battle. The more notable absence, at least until the very end after the battle is over, is the Chinese perspective below Mao and his closest allies. The Chinese soldiers are reduced to a faceless adversary for the Marines to kill, which robs them of their humanity. Often their only role in the story is as part of the frequent estimates of soldiers killed given after every engagement, a rather grisly bit of triumphal narrative that shows how much better the Marines came out in terms of casualties – something that neatly also sidesteps the fact that the Chinese ultimately won this battle in terms of strategic success. It also somewhat undermines the narrative of how deadly and challenging the breakout was for the Marines.
Unfortunately, I found the sections of the book about the actual fighting at Chosin to be the weakest. It gets bogged down in military minutiae, which units are where and how high casualties forced the Marines to frequently reorganize their units, but it fails to provide a particularly coherent narrative. People who read a lot of twentieth century military history may get more out of this, particularly if they really enjoy a detailed order of battle, but I found it hard to keep track of what was happening and where. There are too few maps in the book and some of them are difficult to parse, which further confuses the narrative as you have to remember which numbered unit is at which similarly named North Korean village. Despite these problems, it does successfully convey the insanity of fighting these battles in the freezing cold weather and makes you frequently question how anyone thought invading North Korea in the winter was a good idea.
Other sections of the book are far better, though. In particular, the chapter on the decision by to cross the 38th parallel heading north is a stand out. The author lays out his Truman loyalties in the book’s introduction, but he pulls no punches here and while he places significant blame on MacArthur for the disaster at Yalu he makes it clear that civilian leadership basically paved the way for him to march north, neatly avoiding a classic narrative that blames MacArthur as a rogue agent solely responsible for the failed invasion.
Perhaps the strangest feature of the book is its significant emphasis on aircraft. The author clearly has some professional history with military aircraft and if I were to retitle the book I would emphasize the idea that it’s a history of the role of air support in the first year of the Korean War, especially at Chosin. These details are genuinely interesting, and I learned a lot about the role of aviation in supporting UN operations during the Korean War (although wider bombing campaigns are largely ignored, as are the civilian deaths they caused), but when I think Chosin Reservoir I don’t immediately think detailed information on issues that British planes had landing on aircraft carriers in choppy waters. The early stages of the book that introduce the Korean War and cover up through the Inchon Landing are filled with lengthy asides about the action in the air, action that is almost universally a one-sided affair. These are interesting, but there comes a time when you’re reading about yet another challenge faced by the Navy in mid-1950 and you stop and think “Hey, isn’t this book supposed to be about Marines at Chosin?”
In the end, The Frozen Chosen is a perfectly fine book. Not one I’d probably recommend, but neither would I dissuade someone from reading it. I think the section on Chosin in David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter was much easier to follow and if I wanted a narrative of the breakout I would choose that first, but it is also buried in a six-hundred page book which might be more than some people are prepared to tackle. I believe the author has also written a book on MiG Alley, and given how he handled the air war in The Frozen Chosen I would expect that to be the more interesting book he’s written on the Korean War. Maybe I’ll pick up a copy sometime in the future.
*Meaning, in this context, that it has no foot/endnotes or other referencing, relying instead on a relatively short bibliography.The Frozen Chosen by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
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