'Christmas' in Korea is a story of war and ego, not joy

There are many reasons to get angry while reading Stanley Weintraub's A Christmas Far from Home, but the main reason is that the sacrifice of so many American lives in the cold desolation of North Korea in December 1950 was totally avoidable.

U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, drunk on public adulation from his service in World War II and his inspired amphibious invasion at Inchon earlier in 1950, bragged that the Korean War was over and that U.S. troops who had swept across most of North Korea would be home by that Christmas.

At the outset of 1950, no American leaders anticipated they would be in this situation. But communist North Korea invaded South Korea in June, and their surprise invasion almost succeeded in conquering their southern neighbor. MacArthur's assault at Inchon seized the initiative, and by November the allied forces were close to the Yalu River separating China from Korea.

MacArthur planned to finish off the North Koreans there. He ignored the Chinese warnings not to go farther and the multiple pieces of intelligence that showed that Chinese troops had slipped across the Yalu or were waiting on the other side of the frozen river to attack unsuspecting U.S. troops.

Weintraub, who received a Bronze Star for his service in Korea, builds the suspense steadily through the early pages of this slim volume. Those who know Korean War history know what comes next — a catastrophic Chinese attack that trapped thousands of U.S. troops deep in North Korea with little hope of an escape.

That attack came in late November. A rattled MacArthur messaged home that "the Chinese military forces are committed ... in great and ever-increasing strength."

"He went on to describe an unanticipated attack on the order of Pearl Harbor," Weintraub writes, "yet he had been warned for more than a month."

Chinese troops poured through every part of the U.S. front lines, trapping many American units as they rushed to the south. U.S. soldiers and Marines also turned and ran to save their lives in the face of the Chinese onslaught as they tried to regroup and stop the offensive.

All of the fighting happened in the bitter, sub-zero cold of northern Korea. On page after page, Weintraub writes of frozen corpses littering the roadsides or of vehicles running low on fuel because troops kept their engines on to prevent them from freezing.

Nowhere was the situation as dire as around the Chosin Reservoir, where 30,000 Marines and United Nations troops were surrounded by 67,000 Chinese. For 17 days, the Allied forces fought to break out of the trap, and they eventually broke out and moved south toward the port of Hungnam.

That fighting has been burned in the lore of the U.S. Marine Corps, and rightly so. It is a story of brutality and heroism that characterizes the Marines at their best. Too bad their top leadership, especially MacArthur, did not live up to their standards.

A Christmas Far from Home is Weintraub's fourth book about Christmas and wartime. He's written about a Christmas truce in World War I, the bitter cold Christmas during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and the holidays in Pearl Harbor shortly after the Japanese attack in 1941. In a way, the title of the new book is misleading. Most of the action happened closer to Thanksgiving than Christmas.

But MacArthur's claim that troops would be home by Christmas gives Weintraub's book its relevance.

Weintraub does not give readers a joyous holiday tale but he does provide a useful one. It shows the dangers when commanders fail to use intelligence wisely and let hubris get the better of them.

A Christmas Far From Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival During the Korean War

By Stanley Weintraub

Da Capo Press

3 stars out of four