The Marines had proved beyond doubt in their Chosin Reservoir campaign that the Chinese Reds could be beaten by ground and air firepower engendered by sound training, discipline, and combat leadership. Five Chinese armies, of three or four divisions each, were identified in northeast Korea during the November-December operations. Three of them were directly or indirectly opposed to the 1st Marine Division, with a U.S. Army battalion and smaller Army units attached. Yet the beleaguered American forces seized the initiative and fought their way for 13 days and 35 miles through enveloping CCF units which had cut the mountain MSR in five places. Throughout the CCF January offensive, EUSAK G-2 officers anxiously sought every scrap of evidence as to the whereabouts of the five CCF armies identified in northeast Korea as late as 10 December. Even if reduced by casualties, they would have been a formidable and perhaps even decisive reinforcement to the seven CCF armies engaged. But they did not appear. Nor were they encountered again until the middle of March 1951, when similarly numbered units filled with replacements reached the front. The full story may never be known, since the Chinese Reds are not fond of acknowledging their disasters. But it is a likely conjecture that the fatal combination of Marine firepower and General Winter created terrible havoc among Communists who had been so certain of an immediate victory that they were neither armed, clothed, nor supplied for a 13-day campaign in subzero weather. CHAPTER III The Pohang Guerrilla Hunt _The New Marine Zone of Operations--1st MAW Moves to Bofu--Marine Rice Paddy Patrols--Operations_ THUNDERBOLT and ROUNDUP_--Action in the Pohang-Andong Zone--KMC Regiment Joins 1st Marine Division_--_10th_ NPKA _Division Scattered--New Mission for the Marines_ On 15 January 1951 a reinforced regiment of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division drove northward from Line D (Map 4) to a point about half a mile from Suwon in the I Corps sector. VMF-212, flying from the CVE _Bataan_, supported the movement along with land-based Air Force planes. No CCF troops were encountered during a two-day thrust dignified with the name Operation WOLFHOUND. Its only importance lay in its distinction as the first Eighth Army counterstroke in reply to the enemy’s January offensive. Other EUSAK advances were soon to follow, each more ambitious than the last and bearing a more bristling code name. General Ridgway proposed by this means to exert continual and increasing pressure on an enemy paying for victory with extended supply lines. Meanwhile, he hoped to build up the morale of his own troops without asking too much of them at first.