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Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950. By Martin Russ. New York: Fromm International, 1999. 452 pages. $27.50. Reviewed by Dr. Henry G. Gole (Colonel, USA Ret.), a combat veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars.
The Last Parallel, A Marine's War Journal, by Martin Russ, appeared in 1957. That account, by a 22-year-old who experienced the last seven months of the Korean War as a corporal in a rifle platoon, was one of the few fine books by a participant published in the immediate aftermath of "the forgotten war." Forty-two years later, in Breakout Russ describes the Marine Corps' finest moment, the fight from the Chosin Reservoir to Hungnam in October-December 1950. His latest book benefits from some 30 sources listed by the author, but the strength and authority of the book come from the author's extensive interviews and correspondence with survivors.
Firsthand accounts are enhanced by the author's crisp prose, tight organization, and obvious love affair with the Marine Corps. Russ blends the raw material of interviews with insights from his own combat experience and his later reflection on what it all means a half century after the events described.
The Corps' specialties are assault and a willingness to sacrifice. It attracts tough kids, filters out the indeterminate and irrelevant, and turns life in its bosom into the accomplishment of specified tasks determined by easily recognized authority. It knows what it wants. It says,...