2nd infantry division

Charles MacDonald was twenty-one yeas old when he assumed command of Company I 23rd Infantry in October 1944.  His company had been in combat sense D plus 1 and MacDonald had never been in combat.  MacDonald learns his job in a trial by fire that tests him in every imaginable way.  In the eight months he was in command he fought in Battle of the Bulge and lead his infantry company across Germany in the last months of the war.  This story of a young infantry company commander leading men is battle during World War 2 is one of the most brutally honest accounts of leadership and combat ever written. 

North Korea tried to unify the peninsula by invading South Korea in June 1950.  Initially the North Koreans had great success.  They quickly advanced south while the United States tried to get forces onto the peninsula to stop them.  This soon became a United Nations’ mission, and the North Koreans were stopped right around the southern port of Pusan.  Then the United States landed in the rear of the North Koreans at the port of Inchon next to Seoul on South Korea’s west coast.  The North Koreans started to collapse and the United Nations force pushed back up the Korean peninsula.  They pushed north of the 38th parallel into North Korea and headed towards the Chinese border on the Yalu river.  As the U.S. advanced during late October and November they got higher into the mountains and the weather got much colder.  While this was going on there was the question of what, if anything, the Chinese Communists were planning to do.  Would the Chinese go to war to keep U.S. forces away from their border? The U.S. commander General MacArthur didn’t think so.  He was wrong.  The cold, desolate hillsides were crawling with over three hundred thousand tough and committed soldiers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.  David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter” tells the story of what happened when the Chinese sprung their trap.