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The Coldest Battle In History
How cold was it? And why it will never be matched.
The mountains of North Korea were already a frozen wasteland when the American Marines arrived. They just didn’t know how frozen it was truly going to get. The air was already cold enough that rifles jammed relentlessly, and the wounded often froze where they fell if not tended to immediately.
At the Chosin Reservoir, survival itself became the fiercest enemy, as an outnumbered force of American Marines fought their way through the blizzard and the swarming Chinese army, carving a legend of endurance and defiance in the coldest battle of the Korean War and the coldest battle in world history. It was here that the Marines scoffed that they weren’t retreating; they were just attacking in another direction.
American planners knew that the highlands of North Korea would get cold, but they had no clue how cold it could truly get. Their forecasters had no idea that one of the strongest cold fronts in regional history would descend over the region in late November of 1950. This was just one of two grave miscalculations that pushed the 1st Marine Division to the edge of the abyss during the Korean War.
The first miscalculation was that the Chinese would not enter the war on the side of North Korea, and if they did, their numbers would be…
