Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir » (Reissue)

Joseph R. Owen, 1st Lieutenant, USMC (Ret.), commanded the mortars and a rifle platoon in Baker, 1/7, one of the rifle companies that spearheaded the breakout from Chosin Reservoir. A 1948 graduate of Colgate University, he served on active duty in the Marine Corps from 1943 to 1946 and from 1948 to 1952.

Owen has been active in Baker, 1/7, reunions and has written articles on the company's wartime experiences for the Marine Corps Gazette and short stories for Leatherneck Magazine. Now retired from his own marketing business, he and his wife divide their time between Skaneateles, New York, and Naples, Florida.

"A MUST READ . . . This book [is] one of the best on that war in Korea. . . . A wonderful account of common, decent men in desperate action."
—Leatherneck

During the early, uncertain days of the Korean War, World War II veteran and company lieutenant Joe Owen saw firsthand how the hastily assembled mix of some two hundred regulars and raw reservists hardened into a superb Marine rifle company known as Baker-One-Seven.

As comrades fell wounded and dead around them on the frozen slopes above Korea's infamous Chosin Reservoir, Baker-One-Seven's Marines triumphed against the relentless human-wave assaults of Chinese regulars and took part  in the breakout that destroyed six to eight divisions of Chinese regulars. COLDER THAN HELL paints a vivid, frightening portrait of one of the most horrific infantry battles ever waged.

"Thoroughly gripping . . . The Chosin action is justly called epical; Lieutenant Owen tells the tale of the men who made it so."
—Booklist

Publishers Weekly

The morning of December 8, 1950, found Marine lieutenant Owen, along with the rifle company he led, fighting his way through "blood-splotched snow" with the temperature at 25 degrees below zerothe beginning of another day in North Korea. Owen's dramatic account of that morning begins this close-focus combat memoir. Rifle company Baker-One-Seven, Owen tells us, "functioned at a primal level: they ate, slept, and fought, and they tried to get warm." What Owen presents here is an extraordinarily detailed and realistic account of combat at the level of individual soldiers and small units, covering the role of infantrymen in war, the dangers they are exposed to, the relations that form among them, what keeps them going, their ingenuity and their daring. Only occasionally and in passing does the author put the action of his rifle company into broader perspective, or refer to nonmartial matters such as his wife and two young daughters back in the States. Owen's journal-like account can be repetitive, but it's never monotonous. By offering an extended look at deadly combat taking place on snow-covered mountainous terrain in bone-jarring cold, Owen highlights the hardships and tactics characteristic of the war in Korea. Photos; maps. (Sept.)