In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, a young American soldier named Lewis Millett got tired of waiting for his country to fight the Nazis. So he deserted. He slipped across the border and joined the Canadian army to go fight Hitler. When the US entered the war, he transferred back. The Army convicted him of desertion, fined him $52, and then later made him an officer. He won a Silver Star in World War II. On February 7, 1951, Captain Lewis Millett was commanding Company E, 27th Infantry, near Soam-ni, Korea, when his men were pinned down below a hill held by Chinese troops. He ordered his men to fix bayonets. Then he charged up the hill at the front of them, yelling, throwing grenades, and fighting hand to hand. He was hit by grenade fragments and refused to be evacuated until the hill was taken. The Chinese broke and ran. It's remembered as the last major bayonet charge by American troops. A military historian later counted dozens of enemy dead on the hill, many killed by bayonets. Millett received the Medal of Honor. He went on to serve in Vietnam and retired as a colonel. The man once convicted of deserting his army ended up with its highest award for valor.

Reckless under fire in Korea

Hiroshi Miyamura was a Japanese-American from Gallup, New Mexico. During World War II, while thousands of Japanese-Americans were locked in internment camps, he volunteered for the Army and was headed overseas when the war ended. In April 1951, he was a corporal leading a machine gun squad with Company H, 7th Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division, when the Chinese Spring Offensive hit. On the night of April 24, Chinese troops swarmed his position near Taejon-ni. Miyamura jumped out of his foxhole, fixed his bayonet, and charged into them, killing about ten in hand-to-hand fighting. Then he went back to his machine gun. As the Chinese kept coming, he realized the position couldn't hold. He ordered his squad to pull back while he stayed behind alone to cover them. He fought until his ammunition ran out, then fought with his bayonet. He was credited with killing more than 50 enemy soldiers that night. Badly wounded, he was captured. While he was a prisoner, the Army quietly awarded him the Medal of Honor. It was classified Top Secret. Officials feared the Chinese would kill him if they found out. When he was finally released in August 1953, after 28 months as a POW, a general told him the news. He went home to Gallup, ran a gas station, and lived until 2022.

In 1952, a Marine lieutenant bought a small Mongolian mare from a young Korean stable boy for $250. The boy sold her because he needed money to buy an artificial leg for his sister. The Marines named her Reckless, after their recoilless rifle platoon. Her job was to carry heavy ammunition up steep hills to the guns. The Marines trained her to step over barbed wire, lie down under fire, and run into a bunker when shells started falling. She learned fast. She also learned to eat everything: scrambled eggs, pancakes, Coca-Cola, beer, chocolate bars, and once, reportedly, a pile of poker chips. In March 1953, during the Battle for Outpost Vegas, Reckless proved what she was made of. In a single day, she made 51 trips up and down the mountain, mostly alone, carrying thousands of pounds of shells through enemy artillery fire. On the way back down, she often carried wounded Marines. She was hit by shrapnel twice. She kept going. The Marines promoted her to sergeant, then staff sergeant. She was awarded two Purple Hearts. After the war, she came to America, lived at Camp Pendleton, and had foals of her own. Life magazine named her one of America's 100 greatest heroes, alongside people like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

The best tank of the Korean War was British, and most Americans have never heard of it: the Centurion. When people think of tanks in Korea, they picture the North Korean T-34s rolling south in June 1950, or the American Shermans and Pershings that stopped them. Those tanks fought the famous battles of the war's first year. But by early 1951, the North Korean tank force had been mostly destroyed. The war turned into something else. Hills. Trenches. Bunkers. Mud and frozen ridgelines. The tank that fit that war best came from Britain. The Centurion was designed in the last years of WW2 to beat the German Panther and Tiger. The first prototypes reached Europe in May 1945, just days after Germany surrendered. It never fired a shot in that war. By 1950, the version heading to Korea carried a powerful 20-pounder gun. It also had a stabilizer that helped the gunner stay on target, rare at the time. Thick, sloped armor. Big, heavy, and built to keep going. In November 1950, the 8th King's Royal Irish Hussars arrived in Korea with their Centurions. The terrain looked like the last place anyone should use a 50-ton tank. Then came April 1951. The Battle of the Imjin River. A huge Chinese offensive smashed into the British 29th Brigade. Over three days, the Gloucestershire Regiment was surrounded and nearly wiped out. The rest of the brigade had to fight its way out through a narrow valley swarming with Chinese troops. The Centurions covered the retreat. They drove back and forth along the escape route, firing into Chinese positions at close range. Infantrymen climbed onto their hulls and clung to anything they could grab as the tanks pushed through. Chinese soldiers tried to climb aboard to drop grenades inside. Tank commanders shot them off each other's tanks with machine guns. The Hussars lost several Centurions. But they helped get hundreds of men out who otherwise might never have made it. Then the war settled into stalemate, and the Centurion found its true calling. Crews drove them up steep hills that nobody believed a tank could climb. Once on top, they dug in and became armored artillery. From high ground, the long, accurate 20-pounder could pick off Chinese bunkers and firing slits from long range. Enemy shells often bounced off. Soldiers on other tanks watched in disbelief as the Centurions crawled up ridgelines like mountain goats. And the story only got bigger after Korea. In 1953, Australia parked a Centurion close to an atomic bomb test in the outback to see what would happen. The blast scorched it, blew off parts, and pushed it backward. Afterward, the crew started it up and drove it away. That same tank later served in Vietnam, took a hit from an RPG, and survived that too. Israel bought hundreds of Centurions, upgraded them, and used them in the 1967 and 1973 wars. In 1973, on the Golan Heights, a small force of Israeli Centurions held off a massive Syrian tank assault in one of the most famous armored battles in history. India used Centurions to smash Pakistani Pattons in 1965. More than 4,000 were built. Some versions stayed in service well into the 21st century. The tank designed to beat Hitler never got its chance. Instead it climbed the hills of Korea, survived an atomic bomb, and served in more wars than almost any tank ever made.

The best airplane of the Korean War was the F-86 Sabre. But the story everyone tells about it is only half true, and the other half involves secret Soviet pilots and a jet engine Britain sold to Stalin. November 1950. The US had been bombing North Korea for months with almost no resistance in the air. Then, near the Yalu River, swept-wing jets started streaking down from China and tearing into American bombers. It was the MiG-15. Fast, fast-climbing, heavily armed with cannons, and able to fly higher than anything the Americans had in Korea. Overnight, US air superiority was in danger. And here's the twist. The MiG's engine was British. In 1946, Britain's government had sold the Soviet Union Rolls-Royce Nene jet engines as a gesture of goodwill. Soviet engineers took them apart and copied them. The story goes that even Stalin was shocked anyone would sell them such a thing. Four years later, that copied engine was powering MiGs over Korea. The US rushed its best fighter to Korea: the North American F-86 Sabre. It arrived in December 1950. On December 17, a Sabre scored its first MiG kill. The battle zone became known as "MiG Alley," the stretch of northwest Korea near the Chinese border. And the rules were maddening. MiGs could take off from bases inside China, attack, and run back across the Yalu. American pilots were forbidden to follow them. Some did anyway and kept quiet about it. On paper, the MiG had real advantages. It climbed faster. It flew higher. Its cannons could tear apart a bomber with a few hits. But the Sabre had things that mattered more in a dogfight. Powered controls that let it roll and maneuver smoothly at high speed. A radar-assisted gunsight. G-suits for its pilots. Better visibility. And above all, many of its pilots were veterans who had flown in WW2. And the MiG pilots weren't who they appeared to be. Officially, they were Chinese and North Korean. In reality, many of the best were Soviet pilots, secretly sent to fight. They wore Chinese uniforms. Their planes had North Korean or Chinese markings. They were told to speak Korean on the radio, which quickly broke down into Russian the moment combat started. Moscow kept this hidden for decades. So the war in MiG Alley was really an undeclared war between the United States and the Soviet Union, jet against jet. After the war, the US Air Force claimed Sabres had shot down nearly 800 MiGs while losing fewer than 80 in air combat. Roughly 10 to 1. That number became legend. It's also wrong. Once Soviet records opened, historians found that the real numbers were much closer. Pilots on both sides had overclaimed badly. Against experienced Soviet pilots, the real ratio was probably closer to 2 to 1. Against less experienced Chinese and North Korean pilots, it was much more lopsided in the Sabre's favor. Still a win. Just not the blowout everyone believed. Then came one final twist. In 1953, the US offered $100,000 to any communist pilot who would defect with a MiG. On September 21, 1953, after the armistice, a North Korean pilot named No Kum-sok landed his MiG-15 at an American airbase in South Korea. He later said he had never even heard of the reward. American test pilots, including Chuck Yeager, flew the MiG and finally got to see what the Sabre had been up against all along. The MiG-15 was a great airplane. The Sabre was a better one, flown by better-trained pilots. And the war it won was even stranger than anyone knew at the time.

“The Too Far East Club” Seoul, Korea, 1956

In December 1950, the UN was evacuating the port of Hungnam in North Korea. Chinese armies were closing in. Tens of thousands of terrified North Korean civilians crowded the docks, begging to get out. One of the last ships there was the SS Meredith Victory, a merchant cargo ship. It was built to carry only 12 passengers. Its captain, Leonard LaRue, looked at the crowd and made a decision. He ordered his crew to throw out cargo and load people. They packed refugees into every space on the ship: cargo holds, decks, anywhere a person could fit. When they were done, there were about 14,000 people on board. There wasn't enough food, water, toilets, heat, or medicine. The ship sailed through waters that might have been mined, with no escort. It took three days to reach safety in South Korea. They arrived on Christmas Day. Not one person died on the voyage. Five babies were born on the way. The crew nicknamed them Kimchi 1 through 5. It went into the record books as the largest rescue from land by a single ship. Among the refugees was a couple whose son would grow up to become the President of South Korea, Moon Jae-in. And Captain LaRue? A few years later, he left the sea and became a Benedictine monk.

Richard Wilson grew up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. He played right guard on his high school football team, then left school after his junior year and enlisted on his 17th birthday. The Army made him a combat medic, then a paratrooper. Nine days before shipping out to Korea, he married his high school classmate. On October 21, 1950, the day after the 187th Airborne's combat jump north of Pyongyang, Wilson was the medic with Company I on a patrol near Opa-ri. The company walked into a valley surrounded on three sides by hills. The North Koreans opened up with mortars, machine guns, and rifles. Men went down everywhere. Wilson went from one wounded man to the next, treating them in the open, completely exposed. The company was ordered to pull back before it was surrounded. Wilson helped carry and drag the wounded out and made sure no one was left behind. Then, after they'd escaped, he heard that a soldier they'd thought was dead had been seen moving, trying to crawl to safety. Wilson's buddies told him not to go. He was unarmed. The enemy was still there. He went back anyway. Two days later, a patrol found him lying beside the wounded man. He had been shot several times while trying to shield and treat him. Richard Wilson was 19. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously.

A member of the South Korean National Police holds the severed head of a North Korean communist guerrilla during the Korean War, 1952.

In mid-October 1950, as UN forces closed in on Pyongyang, the North Koreans loaded American prisoners of war onto trains and moved them north. Many were already starving and sick after months in captivity. They traveled only at night, hiding in tunnels during the day so UN planes wouldn't see the train. On October 20, the same day American paratroopers were jumping just a few miles away, the train stopped in a tunnel near Sunchon. The guards tried to kill the prisoners with smoke first, stoking the engine inside the tunnel. When that didn't work fast enough, they began taking the Americans off the train in groups and shooting them. More than a hundred American POWs were murdered. Some survived by playing dead among the bodies. A few slipped away in the darkness. Over the next days, troops of the 187th Airborne found the bodies scattered in ravines and fields near the tracks. Around 20 survivors were found alive, many barely, and flown out for medical care. The paratroopers had jumped to rescue them. They arrived only hours too late. It became known as the Sunchon tunnel massacre, one of the darkest moments of the war for American prisoners.

In the summer of 1950, Gen. Walton Walker saved South Korea. He commanded the US Eighth Army during the desperate defense of the Pusan Perimeter. He shifted his few reserves from crisis to crisis and famously told his troops there would be no more retreating. Stand or die. He was a tough little Texan who'd been one of Patton's best corps commanders in World War II. The troops called him "Johnnie Walker," like the whiskey. His son, Sam Walker, was also in Korea, serving as a young captain. On December 23, 1950, in the middle of the UN retreat from North Korea, Walker was riding in his jeep north of Seoul, heading out to visit troops. A South Korean army truck pulled out into the road. The jeep crashed into it. Walker was thrown out and killed. The commander of an entire army, a man who'd survived World War II and the worst days of Korea, was killed in a traffic accident. His son escorted his body home. Walker's death brought in his replacement: Gen. Matthew Ridgway. Within weeks, Ridgway would turn the beaten Eighth Army around and start pushing the Chinese back north. Sam Walker stayed in the Army too. He eventually became a four-star general, just like his father.