Treading the Way of Ignorance Officer Education and Critical Thought

摘要

On 25 November 1950, a Chinese army numbering in the hundreds of thousands unexpectedly emerged from the forbidding mountains of North Korea and crashed into the U.S. Eighth Army. Chinese soldiery fired by revolutionary zeal and hardened by twenty years of constant conflict, flowed around U.S. units in the broken terrain like a human tide. U.S. forces, strung out "from hell to breakfast," as one corps commander put it, found themselves isolated in individual companies and battered until they broke and fled south. In ensuing days, the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division was beaten, broken, and forced to retreat down a six-mile corridor of fire and death that earned the sobering appellation "the Gauntlet"