The Farthest Valley: Escaping the Chinese Trap at the Chosin Reservoir
(By Joseph Wheelan)
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| Author | Joseph Wheelan |
The Farthest Valley relates the harrowing experience of 9,000 Marines who were surrounded by 60,000 Chinese soldiers in a remote North Korean valley west of Chosin Reservoir in November 1950 during the early months of the Korean War. The two Marine regiments were the tip of the spear of General Douglas MacArthur’s United Nations end-of-war offensive into northeast Korea. This is the history of the fierce battles waged in below freezing temperatures around the Chosin Reservoir, but The Farthest Valley differs from earlier books on the subject in three key respects: It will focus in on the Chinese perspective, looking in detail at the Chinese offensive on battlefields around the reservoir into the fighting in the Yudam-ni valley west of Chosin. There, the Fifth and Seventh Marine Regiments were besieged by the 9th Army Group of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. Had the 9th Group’s commander, Song Shisun, committed the preponderance of his 150,000-man force to the annihilation of the Marines, he very likely would have succeeded. But he did not; he instead attacked every American regiment around Chosin Reservoir. It was a mistake; the dispersion of Song’s 12 divisions permitted the Fifth and Seventh Marines to escape from his trap after a week of brutal combat. The regiments then led the U.N.’s X Corps’ historic withdrawal to Hungnam. It can be argued that without the fighting acumen of the Fifth and Seventh Regiments, the epic retreat to the northeastern Korean coast could not have happened.
Secondly, the The Farthest Valley will incorporate freshly published Chinese military documents that have not appeared in other books on the Chosin Reservoir battle. As a consequence, The Farthest Valley will provide the rare balanced account, while keeping the spotlight trained on the fate of the Fifth and Seventh Marines and the 9th Army Group forces that attacked them.
Finally, The Farthest Valley will explore the battle for survival as a separate service branch that faced the Marine Corps in 1950, when the military was being downsized. But its conduct at Chosin Reservoir lifted the threat of extinction and assured the Corps’s survival under the Department of the Navy. No recent book about the Chosin Reservoir campaign has thoroughly explored this subject.
Written by the son of a veteran of the Chosin campaign, this is an emotive, thrilling history of two Marine Regiments who fought in the worst conditions imaginable and the Chinese forces who opposed them.”
