Breakout from the Chosin

Seventy miles behind enemy lines. Surrounded by 120,000 veteran soldiers. Temperatures plunging past thirty-five degrees below zero.

In late November 1950, Allied forces in Korea stood on the threshold of victory. General Douglas MacArthur had promised American troops they would be home by Christmas. But high in the treacherous, wind-scoured Nangnim Mountains around the Chosin Reservoir, a catastrophic trap was snapping shut.

Twelve elite divisions of the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Army had slipped across the Yalu River undetected. Moving by night in canvas sneakers and quilted cotton, they enveloped the 1st Marine Division and attached Army battalions in a frozen vise. Rations froze into rock-hard ice. Morphine syrettes shattered in medics hands. Machine gun lubricating grease turned to tar. When asked by war correspondents if the Marines were in full retreat, Major General Oliver P. Smith gave the immortal clarification that defined an era: "Retreat, hell! Were just attacking in another direction!"

What followed was seventeen days of raw human endurance and unyielding brotherhood. From Captain William Barbers desperate five-day defense of Fox Hill atop Toktong Pass to Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Daviss harrowing cross-country relief march through waist-deep drifts, and from the tragic destruction of Task Force Faith to the unprecedented parachute airdrop of an entire steel bridge across a sixteen-hundred-foot abyss, Breakout from the Chosin delivers an unforgettable narrative of one of the greatest fighting withdrawals in military history.

Drawing upon declassified combat war diaries, action reports, and the published personal memoirs of the men who were there, military historian Caleb R. Montgomery brings readers directly into the sub-zero foxholes alongside the immortal "Chosin Few." Discover the epic story of courage and survival today.