Even for an officer who had fought throughout the second world war, it was a hideous sight: dozens of shot-up trucks, heaped with the bleeding bodies of butchered American infantry, crawling south through the freezing mountains south of Kunu-Ri Pass, North Korea.
Major David Wilson of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a highly experienced veteran of the war against Japan, had never seen anything like it before. He was reminded of passages he had read of Elizabethan naval battles: 'I had never seen trucks with blood running out of the scuppers before,' he said.
The Highland major was unaware at the time - November 30, 1950 - that he was witnessing, at ground zero, a new superpower striding onto the world stage: China.
The American 2nd Infantry Division had been ground up in a Chinese roadblock of almost 10 kilometres. The virtual annihilation of two regiments in Kunu-Ri Pass, or 'The Gauntlet', plunged the United Nations Command, or UNC - the troops who had defended South Korea in July, then counter-invaded the North in October - into panic.
The longest retreat in American history, known as 'The Big Bug-out', got under way. Roads were clogged with traffic desperately pouring south. In fighting around Chosin Reservoir, deep in Korea's mountains, the US 1st Marine Division hacked its way through eight Chinese divisions surrounding it and escaped to the sea, but the US Army's 31st Regimental Combat Team was wiped out.
Pyongyang - the only communist capital captured by free-world troops in the cold war - fell. The UNC pulled back to South Korea. On New Year's Day, the Chinese charged across the 38th parallel. On January 4, Seoul fell.
