On November 27, 1950 troops from the U.S. Army’s X Corps were pushing north through the Korean Peninsula at breakneck pace, spearheading a United Nations force sanctioned to drive North Korea’s invading Communist Army out of democratically-held South Korea. If all went according to plan, General McArthur had assured President Truman that U.S. troops would be home by the end of the year. But all did not go according to plan. Within days of the assault, 10,000 U.S. Marines—along with units of U.S. Army and U.N. troops—found themselves completely surrounded by more than 85,000 Chinese soldiers in the rugged Taebaek Mountains encircling the Chosin Reservoir.

Over the next two weeks, in temperatures that often plunged to twenty degrees below zero, U.S. troops engaged in intense and bloody combat as they fought their way through mountain passes. The Battle of Chosin recounts the conflict in intimate detail through eyewitness accounts, presenting a harrowing narrative of combat and survival in the first major military clash of the Cold War.