From an introduction before the Table of Contents:
Sun Tzu says that in battle there are nine kinds of situations, nine kinds of "ground." The final and most distressing type is a situation in which one’s army can be saved from destruction only be fighting without delay. It is a place with no shelter, and no possibility of easy retreat. If met by the enemy, an army has no alternative but to surrender or fight is way out of the predicament.
Sun Tzu calls this "desperate ground".
And he wasn't even considering the temperature is 25 below zero.
I had read several articles about the "Frozen Chosin" and my son returned from Boot Camp well-versed in the story. This book has quite a bit of the history leading up to the battle – about a third of the volume, starting with some Korean perspective history and the end of World War II. The Japanese constructed Chosin Reservoir to generate electricity for their war factories in occupied Manchuria.
MacArthur's brilliant, impossible landing at Inchon is covered in some detail, but it seems the success of that effort caused his ego to go into hyperdrive, leading him to ignore warnings and intelligence about the coming Chinese invasion.
The author wove a fascinating human interest story into the horror. A teenager flees the North shortly after the end of WW II and starts a new life in Seoul. The commies invade, so he hides. When the Americans recapture Seoul, he lies about his birthplace and becomes a translator in the center of the drive to the Yalu, the North Korean port of Hungnam – which just happens to be his birthplace. He gets a few hours off, finds his family, and ultimately helps them escape to the south. You just can't make this stuff up!
The author does not portray MacArthur generously, nor his right-hand man in Korea, General E. M. Almond. Almond performs a fantastic humanitarian gesture, however. After all the Marines and troops have departed from Hungnam Harbor, he facilitates transport for 100,000 refugees fleeing the advancing Chinese army. The author claims more than a million South Koreans trace their lineage to those evacuated.
Plenty of detail about the Marines, the vicious fighting, heroism, courage, brutality, and intense cold, as well as the Army on the eastern shore of the Reservoir. The detail of the episodes makes you wonder if there were awards for valor. The photos depict several heroes with their Medal of Honor.
The ending seems somewhat anticlimactic. Once the Marines construct a makeshift bridge, destroyed by the Chinese, everyone sort of strolls down the hill into Hungnam harbor for debarkation. An epilogue details some of the participants’ later lives. Once the fighting starts, you won't want to put the book down.
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/13/2019 00:00 ||
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#1
...This was also the fight where the Marines were coming up on an impassible ravine, and the US Air Force managed to drop several bridge sections that were manhandled into place by the Marines, and the breakout went on.
From Wiki: "With the path to Hungnam blocked at Funchilin Pass, eight C-119 Flying Boxcars flown by the US 314th Troop Carrier Wing were used to drop portable bridge sections by parachute.[1]:297[34] The bridge, consisting of eight separate 18 ft (5.5 m) long, 2,900 lb (1,300 kg) sections, was dropped one section at a time, using a 48 ft (15 m) parachute on each section.[1]:296 Four of these sections, together with additional wooden extensions were successfully reassembled into a replacement bridge by Marine Corps combat engineers and the US Army 58th Engineer Treadway Bridge Company on 9 December, enabling UN forces to proceed.[1]:296–304 Outmaneuvered, the PVA 58th and 60th Divisions still tried to slow the UN advance with ambushes and raids, but after weeks of non-stop fighting, the two Chinese divisions combined had only 200 soldiers left.[9]:108 The last UN forces left Funchilin Pass by 11 December.[1]:314"
I have read for years about the Breakout, but it didn't hit me until just recently that when my Dad joined the Corps in mid-'53, the men who walked out of Chosin were the ones that trained him. I understood him a lot better after that.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
01/13/2019 7:02 Comments ||
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#2
A good one on the same topic but at a small unit level is "The Last Stand of Fox Company", Drury and Clavin, 2009, which ought to be required reading for all members of the Chinese politburo. (Quick summary: Never f'n ever launch a human-wave assault on a determined company of US Marines.)
Posted by: Matt ||
01/13/2019 10:40 Comments ||
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#3
Clarification - both the amazing bridge reconstruction and the incredible story of Fox Company are in the book.
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/13/2019 11:06 Comments ||
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He covers the short, doomed battle of the Task Force Faith, the 31st Infantry RCT, that is overlooked by most in the Chosin Reservoir battle. Normally the only mention is a derisive sneer at the Army stragglers... But remember that without them the Marines would have had one less regiment concentrated and had to still face the same number of ChiComs.
[SmallWarsJournal] It is in this context that the United States, Afghans and the region need to pause and think long and hard over their choices in Afghanistan and the potential consequences of those options for their security and geopolitical interests in the country and beyond.
[American Thinker] National security adviser John Bolton has never suffered fools gladly, so just now, from Abu Dhabi, he's let Venezuela's dictator, Nicolás Maduro, have it, telling him to cut the clown show in Caracas and just get out.
Here is what the Associated Press reports:
The United States stepped up its criticism of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro on Saturday with an explicit call for the formation of a new government in the South American country.
The U.S. State Department said in a statement that it stood behind the head of Venezuela's opposition-run congress, Juan Guaido, who said on Friday that he was prepared to step into the presidency temporarily to replace Maduro.
The statement was the latest in a series of Trump administration attacks on Maduro, whose inauguration to a new term as president on Thursday has been widely denounced as illegitimate.
Bolton's remarks are refreshing, because he's not even pretending Maduro's president these days. He actually isn't, because, having gotten himself into office by a fraud election and then illegally swearing himself in in front of judges instead of the opposition legislature, as the law says he must, he hardly is.
First thing we see from this is a new U.S. willingness to take a logical response from the reality on the ground, and that's good. That's also new, because for 20 years, the U.S. kept pretending.
Second, Bolton's saying what everyone in the region is thinking and, up until now, has been too afraid to say. He knows he has these nations behind him, so what we are seeing is that America is finally taking the lead, and there may well be an avalanche of other nations to follow.
The global compact for migration is the first, intergovernmentally negotiated agreement, prepared under the auspices of the United Nations, to cover all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner. Today, there are over 258 million migrants around the world living outside their country of birth. This figure is expected to grow for a number of reasons including population growth, increasing connectivity, trade, rising inequality, demographic imbalances and climate change. Migration provides immense opportunity and benefits – for the migrants, host communities and communities of origin. However, when poorly regulated it can create significant challenges. These challenges include overwhelming social infrastructures with the unexpected arrival of large numbers of people and the deaths of migrants undertaking dangerous journeys.
[Wash Times] As native populations in Europe decline, they’re increasingly being replaced by immigrants from different and sometimes hostile cultures. The long-term question bothering many Europeans is whether the complex cultures in Europe, carefully cultivated and which have contributed much to the world, can survive this infusion.
Demographic predictions are notoriously subjective, vulnerable to distortion and misinterpretation. Short-term movements can be mistaken for long-term perspectives. Germany is the dramatic example of the phenomenon.
In 10 years’ time there will be a shortage of at least 3 million skilled workers in Germany. Economic growth will otherwise slow if not collapse. Chancellor Angela Merkel is trying to simplify recognition of foreign vocational training degrees and the government no longer requires employers check whether native Germans are available to fill job openings. She would issue temporary residence permits to qualified foreign German-speakers to live in the country while they search for work.
Germany is the second most popular migration destination in the world, after the United States, and is home of the second highest percentage of immigrants in its general population, after Britain. By United Nations estimates that 12 million people living in Germany are immigrants, nearly 15 percent of the total population.
In the aftermath of World War II, the West German government signed agreements with Italy, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia and Yugoslavia enabling recruitment of guest workers with few qualifications. Children born to such guest workers received the right of residence, but not citizenship, though many of them eventually did become German citizens.
[AntiWar.com] The president says he will bring the troops home from Syria and Afghanistan. Now, because of their pathological hatred of Trump, mainstream Democrats are hysterical in their opposition.
If anyone else were president, the "liberals" would be celebrating. After all, pulling American soldiers out of a couple of failing, endless wars seems like a "win" for progressives. Heck, if Obama did it there might be a ticker-tape parade down Broadway. And there should be. The intervention in Syria is increasingly aimless, dangerous and lacks an end state. Afghanistan is an unwinnable war ‐ America’s longest ‐ and about to end in outright military defeat. Getting out now and salvaging so much national blood and treasure ought to be a progressive dream. There’s only one problem: Donald Trump. Specifically, that it was Trump who gave the order to begin the troop withdrawals.
Lost in the haze of their pathological hatred of President Trump, the majority of mainstream liberal pundits and politicians can’t, for the life of them, see the good sense in extracting the troops from a couple Mideast quagmires. That or they can see the positives, but, in their obsessive compulsion to smear the president, choose politics over country. It’s probably a bit of both. That’s how tribally partisan American political discourse has become. And, how reflexively hawkish and interventionist today’s mainstream Democrats now are. Whither the left-wing antiwar movement? Well, except for a few diehards out there, the movement seems to have been buried long ago with George McGovern.
Make no mistake, the Democrats have been tacking to the right on foreign policy and burgeoning their tough-guy-interventionist credentials for decades now. Terrified of being painted as soft or dovish on martial matters, just about all the "serious" baby-boomer Dems proudly co-opted the militarist line and gladly accepted campaign cash from the corporate arms dealers. Think about it, any Democrat with serious future presidential aspirations back in 2002 voted for the Iraq War ‐ Hillary, Joe Biden, even former peace activist John Kerry! And, in spite of the party base now moving to the left, all these big name hawks ‐ along with current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ‐ are still Democratic stalwarts. Heck, some polls list Biden as the party’s 2020 presidential frontrunner.
[The Federalist] Compromise. It’s a word President Trump used several times yesterday. He is open to compromise. In this case, that means something short of the $5 billion he wants for a border wall. He’s open to taking less, perhaps in exchange for not applying the law to younger illegal immigrants. This is clearly the easiest way out of the current debacle. But it is something the Democrats, led by "No Wall" Nancy Pelosi, have said they will never support.
This is a problem. Democrats have backed themselves up against a, well, a wall. They have created a situation in which if they give even one dollar to Trump to build a wall, or fence, steel barrier, or whatever, they have lost the political fight. Pelosi, the great speaker of the House who gets things done, has left herself no leverage to get anything done. She could ask for almost anything in exchange for wall funding, but instead, she won’t budge.
Trump is channeling his inner Michael Corleone and telling Democrats that his offer is this: nothing, not even the price of the border wall, which he would appreciate Pelosi appropriating. So here we are.
We all like to knock and mock Trump’s braggadocio claims that he is the best negotiator ever. But in this case, he really has outflanked his opponents. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have painted themselves into a corner. They have said, "No funding for a wall." They say this despite the fact that they have supported barrier funding in the past. So in essence they have given themselves no fallback position.
The Democrats have made this a zero-sum game. If Trump gets any money for the wall, he wins. That’s a really fantastic position for him. He can go on TV, whether in a controversial network roadblock or an appearance on the southern border, and say, "Hey, I’m up for a compromise." Meanwhile, Chuck and Nancy have to slam the door shut on getting 800,000 federal employees back to work.
#1
Dems are accustomed to winning these disputes. The R's always cave. Always. This must be driviing them insaner.
Posted by: Black Charlie Poodle2028 ||
01/13/2019 11:45 Comments ||
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#2
If the Wall was that important to Trump and Republicans as a whole why pray tell they did not pass and sgn a bill to specifically fund between the midterms and the New Year is IMO a good question
Here's an interesting thought. Maybe Trump should start offering emergency contracts to private companies to fulfill government functions during the shutdown. If done correctly the government would *never* have to be reopened. Image how Pelosi and crew would react!
From the author's perspective; globalism, endless conflict, tribal meddling and regime change are all good. President Trump is not aligned with the global view, therefore he is not an "adult" but simply a unenlightened "white man."
BLUF:
[Al Haram] Presidents come and go, but the US and its strategic interests and assets remain constant. Among the most important of these are NATO, the joint defense treaty between Washington and Tokyo, the EU as an important wing of the Western camp and the Anglophone intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US. Abdel, please tell me you're not on FIVE EYES distro.
All these arrangements and institutions were the product of the enormous efforts the US had invested in order to counter the Soviet Union and communist ideology and to create such global institutions as the World Trade Organisation, an embodiment of globalisation and liberal ideology and the technologies that bind the planet and organise humankind’s forays into outer space. But Trump was not convinced. In fact, he frequently expressed his "lack of respect" for America’s allies, NATO and the EU.
Trump comes from different school. He doesn’t see the world as one. He does not even share a vision for a world becoming one, in the ways it deals with crucial concerns from trade to global warming. To him, the world is made up of discrete national entities, each having its own set of interests and abilities. There it is! There it is! The "Global Warming" three point shot!
To him, the entity that he is in charge of ‐ the US ‐ has little interest in the welfare of the rest of the world. It cares about its own welfare and the welfare of its people or, more accurately, the white people who have been trampled on by the march of "coloured" peoples from all quarters of the world. Abdel, did AOC help you write this? Come on man.
So, the Trump approach is to deal with the world as separate units, each with its own bilateral relationship with the US. Multilateral organisations like the UN, WTO and NAFTA mean nothing if they mean moving US factories to Mexico or letting China have a permanent trade surplus over the US.
#2
>The entity that he is in charge of ‐ the US ‐ has little interest in the welfare of the rest of the world.
That is what being the POTUS is all about after all. The welfare of the rest of the world is only of interest when it's improvement is in the interests of the American people.
[AlAhram] This year has seen a downward trajectory in the activities of terrorist groups in the Middle East, but there is little room for complacency.
Years of reluctance in dealing with the two major financiers of the Muslim Brotherhood and other radicals, Turkey and Qatar, has rendered the War on Terrorism largely useless.
The term the "War on Terrorism" was coined on 11 September 2001 when the horrendous attacks on New York and Washington gave rise to a new era of asymmetrical warfare between the world’s governments and terrorist groups.
The term still represents a state of ongoing war that has moved from Afghanistan and spread across the globe since its declaration by former US president George W Bush in retaliation to the 9/11 attacks.
Continued on Page 49
#1
Marine Barracks in Beirut October 23, 1983
William Richard Higgins (January 15, 1945 – July 6, 1990) was a colonel in the United States Marine Corps who was captured in 1988 while serving on a United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. He was held hostage, tortured[1] and eventually murdered by his captors.
The Khobar Towers June 25, 1996
The USS Cole 12 October 2000
the tempo just picked up with 9/11 with our 'measured' response
[The Hill] The founder and CEO of augmented reality company EchoAR told Hill.TV that 5G will dramatically improve the quality of interactive experiences.
"5G will have a tremendous effect on augmented reality," Alon Grinshpoon said during an episode of "Boundless" that aired Monday.
"At EchoAR, when we've created software solutions for content creators and developers, we basically provide them with tools and network infrastructure," Grinshpoon continued. "When 5G rolls out, that means we'll be able to provide them with ways to stream more data faster and efficiently and engage more users at the same time."
"'Pokemon Go' was a 4G experience. You were just seeing one small asset in the real world, but with 5G, you can stream a lot more data," he added. "You get much more meaningful experiences."
"Boundless" is a multi-part Hill.TV documentary series focused on technological advancements.
[AlAhram] Armed groups in northern Syria are finishing each other off in what is believed to be part of a restructuring of the region, writes Bassel Oudat in Damascus
In the two weeks since the US announced it would withdraw its military forces from Syria, there have been fierce battles among major military factions in northwest Syria between those viewed as part of the Syrian opposition and others affiliated with the terrorist al-Qaeda group.
The latter has declared it will fight the armed opposition and support the Syrian Kurdish militias that are now supporting the regime led by Syrian Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad
Continued on Page 49
[BBC] "We learned when America retreats, chaos often follows." This assertion was made by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during his recent speech in Cairo. But the remark did little to resolve the uncertainty among Washington's friends and allies in the region. Are US troops in Syria staying or going? If staying, for how long? And if going, when?
Mr Pompeo's speech was a broader attempt to re-set US policy in the region and to give some sort of coherence after days of mixed messages.
But taking a leaf from his boss in the White House, Mr Pompeo spent a good deal of his time castigating the Obama administration's approach and contrasting it with the apparent progress made on Mr Trump's watch.
But there were some significant elements missing in Mr Pompeo's remarks. There was no mention of human rights in Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Indeed there was only the briefest of mentions to Saudi Arabia at all, a country that surely should loom large in US policy.
The Yemen crisis got only a passing comment; divisions amongst the Gulf countries were papered over; and Mr Trump's much heralded peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians was not touched on at all.
On the Dallas Morning News' front page of the Sunday "Points" (opinion) page. Originally published December 20, 2018 at National Review. The title is from the print newspaper; the on-line headline is more ...'edgy'.
[Dallas News] Impeachment chatter is suddenly in vogue. It was strictly déclassé during the Obama years. To hear congressional Republicans tell it, the Clinton fiasco of the late Nineties proved both that the Constitution’s procedure for removing corrupt presidents is futile and that invoking it guarantees political carnage for the accusers.
Today’s Democrats, as the saying goes, never got the memo. Or perhaps they have known all along that their counterparts learned precisely the wrong lessons from President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Now that the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump is a realistic contingency, though, getting those lessons right is vital.
The problem with Clinton’s impeachment was not the impeachment process itself. It is difficult by design, as it must be for stability’s sake. But it is hardly obsolete. It did, after all, drive a president from office ‐ Richard M. Nixon, who resigned on the cusp of impeachment ‐ just 25 years before articles of impeachment were filed against Clinton.
No, the problems were twofold. First was the nature of the impeachable offenses. It is not the case, as is commonly assumed, that they were salacious, but that they were remote from the core duties of the presidency. Second was the mulish insistence on pursuing impeachment when the public was clearly opposed to it. An impeachment effort cannot succeed without the tireless building of a political case in favor of removal, a case that achieves a critical mass of public support before impeachment is sought. But the Dims - and the media - have been tirelessly building their case for the last two years.
Hindsight is always 20/20, of course. I was still a Justice Department prosecutor during most of Bill Clinton's second term as president, not a journalist doing public commentary. But I favored his impeachment, just as most Republicans and conservatives did. It is easy to see now that the episode has had an enduring, poisonous effect on our politics.
When the Framers debated the Constitution, among their principal concerns were the awesome powers of the new executive office they were creating in Article II, that of the president of the United States. It would be "indispensable," James Madison opined, to vest the power to remove the chief executive in Congress, which was conceived as the dominant, Article I branch, most accountable to the sovereign ‐ the people. What percentage of the midterms electees were new to national politics, I wonder?
Some delegates believed the ballot box would be an adequate check. The consensus, however, was that an impeachment power was essential, and not merely for such obvious corruption as treason and bribery. The Framers adopted a term of art from British law, "high crimes and misdemeanors," to address truly egregious instances of maladministration. Oh, go read the whole thing. The National Review article has fewer impediments than the Dallas News site. NR article from 12/20/18 Wanna skip down to the conclusion? Here ya go -
The Republicans' post-Clinton assumption that impeachment efforts are politically ruinous is wrong. After 1998, Republicans continued to win elections until 2006. Rather, the Clinton impeachment teaches that the public has a healthy resistance to impeachment but will abide a failed impeachment sought in good faith. It further instructs that the Constitution's high impeachment hurdles cannot be surmounted without an indefatigable political campaign urging the president's ouster. To be credible, that campaign must be based on clear misconduct that implicates core presidential duties and imperils our constitutional order. To seek impeachment in the absence of such gross maladministration, or to seek it in the teeth of public opposition, is to guarantee failure.
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/13/2019 13:10 ||
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The "no fail" strategy is about smearing POTUS, eventually driving away enough of his '16 voters to allow a Donk in for the coup de gras, imo.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[American Thinker] National security adviser John Bolton has never suffered fools gladly, so just now, from Abu Dhabi, he's let Venezuela's dictator, Nicolás Maduro, have it, telling him to cut the clown show in Caracas and just get out.
Marcel de Graaff: 'Criticism of migration will be criminal offence - Migration as a human right' 
[Wash Times] As native populations in Europe decline, they’re increasingly being replaced by immigrants from different and sometimes hostile cultures. The long-term question bothering many Europeans is whether the complex cultures in Europe, carefully cultivated and which have contributed much to the world, can survive this infusion.
[AntiWar.com] The president says he will bring the troops home from Syria and Afghanistan. Now, because of their pathological hatred of Trump, mainstream Democrats are hysterical in their opposition.
[The Federalist] Compromise. It’s a word President Trump used several times yesterday. He is open to compromise. In this case, that means something short of the $5 billion he wants for a border wall. He’s open to taking less, perhaps in exchange for not applying the law to younger illegal immigrants. This is clearly the easiest way out of the current debacle. But it is something the Democrats, led by "No Wall" Nancy Pelosi, have said they will never support.
[AlAhram] Armed groups in northern Syria are finishing each other off in what is believed to be part of a restructuring of the region, writes Bassel Oudat in Damascus
Impeachment chatter is suddenly in vogue. It was strictly déclassé during the Obama years. To hear congressional Republicans tell it, the Clinton fiasco of the late Nineties proved both that the Constitution’s procedure for removing corrupt presidents is futile and that invoking it guarantees political carnage for the accusers.
