A Task Force Called Faith

The forgotten heroes of Chosin--how Task Force Faith fought against impossible odds and a legacy of unfair shame.

On the 75th anniversary of the legendary Battle of Chosin Reservoir, Steve Vogel tells the little-known story of the Army soldiers who gave all during the Korean War’s most consequential battles and then were denigrated for their sacrifice. A Task Force Called Faith delivers a fresh perspective on Chosin, where 150,000 Chinese soldiers trapped 20,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers in the frozen mountains of North Korea in November and December of 1950. For seven decades, the Marines who successfully broke out from Chosin have been justly hailed as heroes, but the Army soldiers who fought alongside them have been reviled as cowards. In A Task Force Called Faith, Steve Vogel sets the record straight. What he’s learned is the culmination of twenty-five years of digging into the story, first as a reporter for The Washington Post and now as a leading military historian.

At Chosin, an Army force of 2,300 soldiers--a unit known as Task Force Faith--was positioned on the east side of the reservoir to protect the Marines’ flank but was overwhelmed by a Chinese force eight times its size. Fighting with little ammunition, support or food in temperatures that plunged to 35 degrees below zero, more than 80 percent of the Army soldiers were killed, captured, or wounded. After the battle, they were falsely accused of throwing down their weapons and feigning wounds. As Vogel documents, their brave fight through four days and five nights bought time for the Marines on the west side to consolidate and fight their way out. The Army survivors and their families have long sought to clear their names of those terrible charges and reclaim the honor they won at the frozen lake.

A Task Force Called Faith tells their story. Vogel carries the narrative to the present day, as the remains of many of the hundreds of soldiers still missing in action at Chosin continue to be identified and returned to their families.

During a time of growing tension and uncertainty in the relationship between the U.S. and China, A Task Force Called Faith provides an original, deeply researched look at the brutal, undeclared war the two countries fought 75 years ago. Chosin was the moment the Cold War turned into a savage and exceedingly hot conflict, leaving behind an uneasy standoff that looms ever larger with a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Steve Vogel is an historian and former foreign and military correspondent for The Washington Post. His coverage of the U.S. war in Afghanistan was part of a package of Washington Post stories selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. He reported on the U.S. war with Iraq in 2003 as an embedded journalist with an Army airborne brigade. Based in Germany from 1989 through 1994 and reporting for the Washington Post and Army and Air Force Times, he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf War, as well as military operations in Somalia, Rwanda and the Balkans.
Vogel covered the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Pentagon and was the first journalist to get inside the building’s most damaged sections. He reported in depth on the victims of the attack and the building’s reconstruction which led to his writing the history of the Pentagon.