Marines and attached Army troops found it astonishing as well as flattering to learn that such expressions as “epic” and “saga” and “miracle of deliverance” were being applied to the breakout in American newspapers. The press correspondents in turn were astonished to learn that never for a moment had the men doubted that they would slug their way out to the seacoast. “The running fight of the Marines and two battalions of the Army’s 7th Infantry Division from Hagaru to Hamhung--40 miles by air but 60 miles over the icy, twisting mountainous road--was a battle unparalleled in U. S. military history,” commented _Time_. “It had some aspects of Bataan, some of Anzio, some of Dunkirk, some of Valley Forge, some of the ‘Retreat of the 10,000’ (401–400 B. C.) as described in Xenophon’s _Anabasis_.” Not until the Marines had fought their way as far as Chinhung-ni, the weekly newsmagazine continued, did there appear to be much hope that they would come out as an organized force. Then “for the first time it looked as if most of the 20,000 [Marines] would get through.”[627] [627] _Time, the Weekly Newsmagazine_, lvi, no. 25 (18 Dec 50), (Pacific Edition), 18–19. By reading contemporary press accounts it is possible to recapture the mood of the American public upon realization of the disaster which had overtaken the Eighth Army. “It was defeat--the worst defeat the United States ever suffered,” reported _Time_ in the issue of 11 December 1950. “The Nation received the fearful news from Korea with a strange-seeming calmness--the kind of confused, fearful, half-believing matter-of-factness with which many a man has reacted upon learning that he has cancer or tuberculosis. The news of Pearl Harbor, nine years ago to the month, had pealed out like a fire bell. But the numbing facts of the defeat in Korea seeped into the national consciousness slowly out of a jumble of headlines, bulletins, and communiques; days passed before its enormity finally became plain.”[628] [628] _Time_, lvi, no. 24 (11 Dec 50), (Pacific Edition), 9. _Newsweek_ called it “America’s worst military licking since Pearl Harbor. Perhaps it might become the worst military disaster in American history. Barring a military or diplomatic miracle, the approximately two-thirds of the U. S. Army that had been thrown into Korea might have to be evacuated in a new Dunkerque to save them from being lost in a new Bataan.”[629]