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the retrieval of Chinese POWs from six different armies.

     
    American soldiers enjoy Thanksgiving dinner on the banks of the Yalu, November 23, 1950.
U.S. National Archives
     
    Strong enemy attacks began on November 27, through a “deep envelopment” that chopped allied troops to pieces. The 1st Marine Division was pinned down at the Changjin Reservoir, the ROK II Corps collapsed again, and within two days a general withdrawal ensued. On December 4 the JCS cabled MacArthur that “the preservation of your forces is now the primary consideration”—that is, the utterly overexposed core of the entire American expeditionary force, now battered and surrounded. Two days later Communist forces occupied Pyongyang, and the day after that the allied front was only twenty miles north of the parallel at its northernmostpoint. The combined Sino-Korean offensive cleared North Korea of enemy troops in little more than two weeks from its inception. Gen. Edward Almond wrote that “we are having a glut of Chinamen”; he hoped he would have the chance later “to give these yellow bastards what is coming to them.” By the end of December, Seoul was about to fall once again, to a Sino-Korean offensive launched on New Year’s Eve. 29
    MacArthur had described the first Sino-Korean feint as “one of the most offensive acts of international lawlessness of historic record”; the KPA, he told Washington, was completely defeated, having suffered 335,000 casualties with no forces left. Thus, “a new and fresh [Chinese] army now faces us.” (In fact, KPA forces far outnumbered Chinese at this point.) Then, when large Chinese units entered the fighting at the end of November, he radioed back that he faced “the entire Chinese nation in an undeclared war.” All the Chinese? Did he mean those famous “Chinese hordes”? There weren’t any, Reginald Thompson rightly said; in late 1950 the total of enemy forces in the North never outnumbered those of the UN, even though MacArthur’s headquarters counted eighteen Chinese divisions (somehow a few hundred POWs had fortuitously managed to come from each and every one of them). 30 The Chinese just exploited night maneuvers, deft feints, unnerving bugles and whistles, to make UN soldiers think they were surrounded.
    As soon as Chinese troops intervened in force, MacArthur ordered that a wasteland be created between the war front and the Yalu River border, destroying from the air every “installation, factory, city, and village” over thousands of square miles of North Korean territory. As a British air attaché at MacArthur’s headquarters put it, except for the city of Najin near the Soviet border and the Yalu River dams, MacArthur’s orders were “to destroy every means of communication and every installation and factories and cities and villages. This destruction is to start at the Manchurian border and to progress south.” 31 This terrible swath of destruction, targeting every village in its path, followed Chinese forces right intoSouth Korea. Soon George Barrett of
The New York Times
found “a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war” in a village north of Anyang:
    The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck—a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No. 3,811,294 for a $2.98 “bewitching bed jacket—coral.”
     
    Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted censorship authorities notified about this kind of “sensationalized reporting,” so it could be stopped. 32
    On November 30 Truman also rattled the atomic bomb at a news conference, saying the United States might use any weapon in its arsenal to hold back the Chinese; this got even Stalin worried. According to a high official in the KGB at the time, Stalin expected global