Jeff Shaara

"June, 1950: the North Korean army, a formidable force backed by Soviet arms and training, invades South Korea, with the intent of uniting the country under Communist rule. In response, the United States mobilizes a force to defend the overmatched South Korean troops. But the US is no better equipped than their allies. The American and United nations troops are fighting for their lives against the most brutal weather conditions imaginable, and an enemy that outnumbers them more than six to one. This struggle, and how the Americans respond, form the core of this novel. The Frozen Hours tells the story of "Frozen Chosin" from multiple points of view: Oliver P. Smith, the commanding general of the American 1st Marine Division, who famously redefined defeat as "advancing in a different direction"; Marine Private Pete Riley, a World War II veteran who now faces the greatest fight of his life; and the Chinese commander Sung Shi-Lun, charged with destroying the Americans he has so completely surrounded, ever aware that above him, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung watches his every move"--

A Novel of the Korean War

The Frozen Hours

Bryan Alexander

I read this one because my father strongly recommended it. He was drafted during the Korean War, but didn't serve on that peninsula. I've only dipped into a bit of Jeff Shaara's previous writing, on the US Civil War.

The Frozen Hours is a historical novel about the very brutal Battle of Chosin Reservoir (1950). Jeff Shaara's account tracks the events in chronological order, using two main point of view characters: the Marine commander O.P. Smith, and a soldier on the ground, Pete Riley. There are also several chapters from the point of view of Song Shilung, commander of Chinese forces attacking the Marines.

The book is effective in presenting the battle as it unfolded. It begins right after the Inchon landings, carries over to the doomed march to the Yalu, then about halfway in settles down for the Chinese surprise attack and fighting US retreat around and below Chosin. The Frozen Hours concludes with a fast sketch of characters/historical personages' subsequent careers. In short, it functions effectively as military history. 

For the American war in Korea, there is the extra burden of reminding people that it happened, as that "police action" is notoriously forgotten. Americans rarely mention Korea. We have relatively few works of art about it - arguably the most famous, MASH, is clearly about Vietnam. Several Vietnam veterans have told me that regretted not knowing about Korea when they fought and when they reflected afterwards, as the prior war offered them so many precedents. 

Shaara seems to have done solid work in interviewing veterans and working with primary source materials. That includes a nice presentation of how the battle's most famous quotation came to be:Retreat, hell. We're just attacking in another direction.
-O.P. Smith (456-7)(However, there's no sense that this, ah, edited quote is a riff on the classic American WWI line: "Retreat, hell! we just got here!" WWI is also forgotten for most Americans.)

Shaara is especially interested in physical suffering, taking care to show us soldiers enduring extreme privation through combat, cold (temperatures of -30 F), exhaustion, and starvation. He is also interested in relationships between soldiers, especially across ranks. The novel argues strongly for the view that O.P. Smith heroically led his men out of a deathtrap, and that both general MacArthur and local commander Edward Almond made terrible mistakes following the Inchon triumph, compounded by ignorance and an apparent lack of concern both for on the ground reality and men's suffering. These organizational and emotional themes are perhaps the novel's highlight. I was especially moved by Riley's poignant answer to a reporter's question about what he most wanted ("I want to see tomorrow", 255).

Shaara also excels at combat scenes. His prose shifts under fire, with paragraphs lengthening and sentences becoming almost modernist in their impressionism. 

However, the prose is otherwise strangely thin. The text describes organizational details at great length, and zeroes in on the mental states of key characters. But it rarely describes. That is, Shaara positions items on that page without describing what they look like. There are few textures, and details are scarce. He describes a soldier as "the Hollywood image of the crusty old veteran" (429), but without a word on what that means. He writes of hills and mountains, but with few notes about shapes or colors. It is weirdly hard to see this battle. Unfairly, the book is better about org charts than about sensation.

At a different level the book suffers from too narrow a focus. It manages to miss ideology and recent history. The Chinese - and kudos for including them at all - are all about the attack on the Marines and organizational politics (which subordinate needs to be treated in which way, how to deal with a Soviet observer). There's very little until the very end about Communism and revolution - which makes no sense for events occurring just months after the end of the Chinese Civil War (1949). Shaara presents an odd scene where Song tries to convince some American prisoners to foment revolution (482-3), and it comes out of nowhere. We don't know Song's take on Marxism. We don't know what this revolutionary ideology means here. Not being ideological is a particular stance, and it doesn't have any resonance. Similarly, Americans have no political or ideological motivation, even when anticommunism was rising to a fever pitch (there is a cute bit where Smith keeps a photo of Stalin on the wall, to inspire his staff). Their World War II experience - just five years past - is barely present at all; strangely, there's no reference to Pacific theater doctrine or tactics. Shaara has overfocused, which is a mistake for a novel trying to rescue history from oblivion.

I have to commend the book for one more thing, a bugaboo of mine. It has excellent maps. This is especially important since Chosin's geography is not well known. Bravo!

The Frozen Hours A Novel of the Korean War

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