Events

Samuel Colt had already failed twice. His first firearms company, the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, New Jersey, went bankrupt in 1842 after the United States Army passed on his revolving pistol. His second venture, selling waterproof telegraph cable, barely kept him solvent. The revolver appeared to be a dead invention until a letter arrived from the Texas frontier that changed everything. Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers had been using Paterson Colts in combat against Comanche warriors and wrote to Colt with specific battlefield requirements: a revolver that could fire six shots without reloading, with enough stopping power to drop a horse, and durable enough to survive the abuse of mounted combat. Walker had learned through brutal experience that single-shot pistols left riders defenseless during the reload. A Comanche warrior could loose a dozen arrows in the time it took to reload a standard pistol. Colt built the gun Walker described. The Walker Colt weighed four and a half pounds, fired a .44 caliber ball, and was the most powerful handgun the nineteenth century would produce. On January 4, 1847, the United States government ordered 1,000 units at $28 each for use in the Mexican-American War. The contract saved Colt''s business and launched an industrial empire. Colt had no factory, so he contracted with Eli Whitney Jr. in New Haven to manufacture the first batch. By the time the Civil War began in 1861, Colt''s factory in Hartford, Connecticut, was the largest private arms manufacturer in the world, producing revolvers using interchangeable parts and assembly-line techniques that anticipated Henry Ford by half a century. Captain Walker never saw the impact of his collaboration. He was killed by a Mexican lance at the Battle of Huamantla in October 1847, eight months before the revolvers he helped design reached the troops who needed them.

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.