Seoul Captured: Chinese Forces Turn Korean War Tide

Seoul fell for the second time in six months on January 4, 1951. Chinese and North Korean forces entered the South Korean capital after the United Nations command, led by the U.S. Eighth Army, chose to abandon the city rather than fight street by street. It was the lowest point of the Korean War for the Western alliance. Three weeks earlier, 300,000 Chinese troops had poured across the Yalu River and shattered the American advance toward the Chinese border, sending UN forces into the longest retreat in U.S. military history. The Eighth Army was in disarray. Its previous commander, Lieutenant General Walton Walker, had been killed in a jeep accident on December 23, 1950, when his vehicle collided with a South Korean military truck. His replacement, Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway, arrived to find an army that had stopped believing it could win. Officers had lost contact with their units. Soldiers huddled around fires rather than digging defensive positions. Morale had collapsed. Ridgway transformed the Eighth Army through sheer force of personality and tactical competence. He relieved underperforming officers, walked the front lines personally, and made himself conspicuous by pinning live grenades to his chest harness so soldiers could always identify him in combat. He reimposed discipline, established a continuous defensive line, and began probing counterattacks that tested Chinese supply lines, which were stretched to their breaking point. The counteroffensive that Ridgway launched in late January 1951, dubbed Operation Thunderbolt, pushed Chinese forces steadily northward. By March 14, Seoul was back in UN hands for the fourth and final time. The city had changed hands four times in nine months, each occupation leaving more rubble. The Seoul that exists today, a metropolis of ten million people and the twelfth-largest economy in the world, was built almost entirely from the wreckage of 1951.