Prologue Morning Calm In the misting rain, they pressed against the metal skins of their boats and peeked over the gunwales for a glimpse of the shores they were about to attack. Some thirteen thousand men of the First Marine Division, the spearhead of the invasion, had clambered down from the ships on swinging nets of rope and then had crammed themselves into a motley flotilla of craft that now wallowed and bobbed in the channel. Several of the rusty old hulks, having been commandeered from Japanese trawler­men, smelled of sour urine and rotten fish heads. The Marines, many of them green from seasickness, saw the outlines of the charred foot­hills that rose above the port, and caught the scent of the brackish marshes and the slime of the mudflats. Corsairs, bent-winged like swallows, dove over the city, dropping thousand-pound bombs and sending five-inch rockets deep into hillside nests where the enemy was said to be dug in. Far out at sea, the naval guns rained fire upon the city, damaging tanks of butane that now flared and belched palls of smoke. On this warm, humid morning of September 15, 1950, the Marines had arrived at their destination halfway around the world, to stun their foe and turn the war around: a surprise amphibious attack, on an immense scale, deep behind the battle lines. Only a few months before, these young men, fresh from their farms and hick towns, had piled into chartered trains and clattered across America to California.

Then they climbed aboard transport ships, where many of them did their basic training, learning how to strip and rebuild M1 rifles, drill­ing on the crowded decks, practicing their marksmanship on floating targets towed from the fantails. They crossed the Pacific and stopped briefly in Japan, then heaved their way through a full-scale typhoon. They rounded the peninsula and moved in convoy up the west coast, through the silted waters of the Yellow Sea. By the thirteenth of September the ships had begun to concen­trate, 261 vessels in all, carrying more than 75,000 men and millions of dollars'' worth of war matériel. On the fourteenth, the armada was closing in on its target: the narrow confines of Flying Fish Channel. The channel led to Inchon, an industrial city of a quarter million people, whose strategically vital but treacherous port served the capi­tal, Seoul. On the morning of the fifteenth, in the seas west of Inchon, the ships ranged along the horizon, a long line of gray bars stitch­ing through the mist. First came the destroyers Swenson, Mansfield, DeHaven.

Then the high-speed transports Wantuck, Horace A. Bass, Diachenko, and the dock landing ship Fort Marion. Then the heavy cruisers Toledo and Rochester and three more destroyers: Gurke, Hen­derson, and Collett. Following in their mingled wakes came the British light cruisers Kenya and Jamaica, the attack transports Cavalier and Henrico . Farther out at sea lay the fast carriers, from which the Cor­sairs rose into the skies to make their deadly sorties. By afternoon, as the Marines drew near the Inchon seawall, enemy rounds zinged across the water surface and mortar shells crashed hap­hazardly all around. Within a few minutes the Marines would reach the cut-granite ramparts. They would climb over, and they would set foot on the western shores of central Korea.

What was Korea to these young men? Some fate-ravaged place, an inflamed appendix, a wattle of real estate flapping off the face of the mainland. Though some of the units approaching Inchon had spent the past month bolstering United Nations forces at the southern tip of Korea, most of the First Marine Division had no experience with the country. They had little knowledge of Korea''s tragic history, no appreciation for how faithfully this proud culture had held on through centuries of turmoil and besiegement. It was a small nation that his­tory had pushed around--a shrimp among whales. The Mongols had had their way with her, the Manchus, the Russians, the Japanese. Now had come the Americans, nervous young men who knew next to nothing about the place, though some had passed around guidebooks filched from hometown libraries. Korea, they''d learned, was known as the Hermit Kingdom. The Land of the Morning Calm.

Its national dish was a hot mess of fer­mented cabbage. Some Marines had read with astonishment that in parts of Korea, peasants still nourished their crops with night soil and were known to roast the occasional hound for dinner--these were some of the clichés that were passed around. Korea was said to be a dirt-poor country, mountainous, swept by Siberian winds, sultry dur­ing summer and breathtakingly cold in winter. But what did the travel manuals really know? God created war, Twain wrote, so that Americans would learn geography, and the men of the First Marine Division were about to learn a lot about this tough, sorrowful scrap of land. While some would find a deep affinity for it, many would come to hate it, for all the things it was and for all the things it wasn''t. But to most of them, more than anything, Korea just seemed a long way from home--a long way to come to fight and bleed and die, in a war that was not officially a war, for a cause that at times was not altogether clear, for an endgame that was anybody''s guess. The Marines had a tradition of being the first to fight, the first to kill, the first to die. They didn''t earn their reputation by asking many questions.

In a few months, they would face the armies of the most populous nation on earth and would become engaged in one of the more harrowing clashes in the history of warfare. Many would never return home. But for those who survived, Korea would be for­ever stamped on their psyches, and on their souls. They would never forget what happened here, even if the majority of their countrymen quickly did. Now the assault vessels angled past the pitted harbor islands of Inchon and made for the bluff face of the seawall, where the breaking surf left a ring of bone-white foam. The bullets whined and smacked in weird patterns upon the surface. A shell screamed overhead, and the Marines crouched a little tighter into the walls of their boats. Book One: Seoul War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

- Barbara Tuchman 1 The Professor On the Yellow Sea The amphibious invasion taking place off the jetties and docks of Inchon--an action officially known as Operation Chromite--was among the boldest and most technically complex engagements in modern military annals. The man who conceived the invasion, prevailing over enormous doubts in Washington, was General Douglas MacArthur, and his name would forever be associated with it. But the officer most directly responsible for executing the details of the initial landing, the unsung and largely unknown architect of the Marine assault, was in many ways MacArthur''s opposite. He was Oliver Prince Smith, commander of the First Marine Division, one of the great underrated generals in American history. From the decks of the command ship USS Mount McKinley, Smith watched the proceedings as best he could through shifting curtains of smoke. He squinted into his field glasses as the ship heaved in the swells. In the distance, the small landing craft, having butted against the seawall, were in position. In the bow of each vessel, Marines raised a pair of scaling ladders, and the waiting boats treaded the water like enormous bugs with antennae quivering.

The leathernecks began to scale the ladders and vanished from view. But the radio reports that came in from the spotter planes were all positive. The Marines were moving into the city now, swarming over the causeways and saltpans, already seizing industrial complexes and other installations along the ruined harbor. Smith''s division was a formidable fighting force. Though it had been hastily thrown together at Camp Pendleton, California, most of the division''s officers and noncoms were seasoned warriors, men of the Old Breed who had served in the bitter World War II battles of the Pacific--at places like Guadalcanal and Okinawa. "They could load jeeps with their decorations," said one account, and would "need a truck to carry off their Purple Hearts." Battalion for battalion, the First Marine Division was as fierce and as disciplined as any­thing the United States had to offer. "It was the strongest division in the world," boasted one Marine captain who served under Smith.

"I thought of it as a Doberman, a dangerous hound straining at the leash, wanting nothing more than to sink its fangs into the master''s enemy." Smith was enormously relieved by the progress of the invasion. The resistance was proving tepid--either the North Korean defenders had been caught off guard or they were overwhelmed by the inten­sity of the firestorm. But Smith stopped short of celebrating. He was superstitious of good fortune. As an assistant division commander at the World War II battle of Peleliu, he had witnessed a senseless loss of life--the result of intelligence failures and strategic mistakes not of his making. Scarred by the events at Peleliu, he tended to proceed with a thoroughgoing sense of caution. In his own experience, it was overconfidence, more than any other single factor, that caused men to die.

He felt a little uneasy that MacArthur had invited a gaggle of journalists aboard the Mount McKinley to follow the invasion. It struck Smith as unseemly to have assembled so many members of the press to capture.