From the Chosin Reservoir to the Sea

The Chosin Reservoir has been covered by many a book before Joseph Wheelan’s The Farthest Valley. What Wheelan brings to his account that is different, first, is a personal connection, as his father, Staff Sergeant John R. Wheelan, died of complications from a wound he suffered in November 1950 during the battle. Second, he extensively incorporates newly published Chinese accounts, so the reader can finally hear from their side of the battle.

The Chinese point of view makes quite clear how intense the suffering of their soldiers was, due to incredible cold that both sides experienced in the North Korean winter, compounded by poor Chinese logistics and the failure of the People’s Liberation Army to properly equip the Chinese People’s Volunteer Forces (CPVF) with winter clothing. The Chinese reports paint a picture that the failure of the CVF to destroy the 1st Marine Division at Chosin was owed as much to Chinese command failures as to the well-known courageous resistance by the Marines.

Time after time, the Chinese experienced heavy losses because they relied on frontal assaults, rather than go around the Marines, tactics that were used successfully by the CPVF against the U.S. Army in western Korea. The encirclement of the Marines was within the grasp of the Chinese but they never took advantage. It was this failure, combined with the massive and sustained Close Air Support that the Marines could count on that saved them at Chosin.

While the focus has always been on the courageous resistance of the 1st Marine Division, the fate of U.S. Army’s Task Force Faith (Regimental Combat Team 31) of the U.S. Army’s 7th Infantry Division on the Eastern side of the Reservoir has been a matter long ignored by other histories of the battle. For decades, the story of RCT-31 was that the cowardly regiment had been routed by the Chinese, and that their conduct had been disgraceful. Wheelan manages to show that RCT-31 put up heroic resistance against multiple Chinese divisions, rendering the Chinese 80^th Infantry Division combat ineffective, before it was over-whelmed and broken. Although RCT-31 was isolated and could not receive much support from the Marines, it did delay the advance of the CPVF’s 27th Army long enough that the Marines were able to beat the 27th to Hagaru-ri, the only route that the 1st Division could use to retreat from the western side of the Chosin Reservoir. But it was not until the year 2000 that the U.S. Navy would finally acknowledge RCT-31’s contribution with a Presidential Unit Citation.

Some pages are also given to the involvement of the UK’s 41st Independent Commando, Royal Marines in the fighting around Koto-ri during the battle, which I also had never heard about before, in a place called Hellfire Valley.

The overall format of the book follows the usual Osprey long-form method of combining a narrative of the battle with first-hand accounts. Unfortunately, the maps are too few to illustrate the different actions that much of the text is given to. But in all, The Farthest Valley is a worthwhile book, especially for its attention to the Chinese point of view, which gives us a better understanding of how the Marines escaped from Chosin.

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Our Reviewer: Dr. Stavropoulos received his Ph.D. in History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2013. Currently an Adjunct Professor at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, his previous reviews include Prelude to Waterloo: Quatre Bras: The French Perspective, Braddock's Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution, Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies, In the Name of Lykourgos, The Other Face of Battle, The Bulgarian Contract, Napoleon’s Stolen Army, In the Words of Wellington’s Fighting Cocks, Chasing the Great Retreat, Athens, City of Wisdom: A History, Commanding Petty Despots, Writing Battles: New Perspectives on Warfare and Memory in Medieval Europe, SOG Kontum, Simply Murder, Soldiers from Experience, July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta, New York’s War of 1812, The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777, The Spear, the Scroll, and the Pebble, The Killing Ground, The Hill: The Brutal Fight for Hill 107 in the Battle of Crete, The Lion at Dawn: Forging British Strategy in the Age of the French Revolution, and Stalin's Revenge: Operation Bagration and the Annihilation of Army Group Centre.

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Note: The Farthest Valley is also available in audio and e-editions.

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