On Determined Floor: The Epic Story of Chosin Reservoir–the Best Battle of the Korean Battle

On October 15, 1950, Normal Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of UN troops in Korea, satisfied President Harry Truman that the Communist forces of Kim Il-sung can be completely defeated by Thanksgiving. The Chinese language, he mentioned with close to certainty, wouldn’t intervene within the battle.

As he was talking, 300,000 Purple Chinese language troopers started secretly crossing the Manchurian border. Led by some 20,000 males of the First Marine Division, the Individuals moved deep into the snowy mountains of North Korea, towards the lure Mao had set for the vainglorious MacArthur alongside the frozen shores of the Chosin Reservoir. What adopted was probably the most heroic–and harrowing–operations in American navy historical past, and one of many traditional battles of all time. Confronted with possible annihilation, and temperatures plunging to twenty levels under zero, the surrounded, and massively outnumbered, Marines fought by means of the enemy forces with ferocity, ingenuity, and practically unimaginable braveness as they marched their method to the ocean.

Hampton Sides’ excellent account of this epic conflict depends on years of archival analysis, unpublished letters, declassified paperwork, and interviews with scores of Marines and Koreans who survived the siege. Whereas expertly detailing the follies of the American leaders,
On Determined Floor is a direct, grunt’s-eye view of historical past, enthralling in its narrative tempo and highly effective in its portrayal of what atypical males are able to in probably the most excessive circumstances.

Hampton Sides has been hailed by critics as probably the greatest nonfiction writers of his technology. Because the
Miami Herald wrote, “Sides has a novelist’s eye for the propulsive components that lend momentum and dramatic tempo to one of the best nonfiction narratives.”