War is hell anywhere it breaks out, but the battle of the Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War was a particularly fiendish circle.

Korea remains a largely forgotten conflict today, a footnote of the Cold War no one is ever sure whether we won or lost. That doesn’t make this showdown any less dramatic, and PBS’s American Experience recounts it in extensive detail with The Battle for Chosin Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET (check local listings).

The special is pegged to Veterans Day, and at numerous points through the two hours, it feels like it would require a miracle to have any veterans come home from this one at all.

But some did, and PBS has rounded up a dozen or so, along with historians and military experts, to explain how that happened.

In fact, The Battle for Chosin focuses on that “how” pretty much to the exclusion of everything else, including the battle’s outcome. Almost as a footnote, it mentions that in the end, the troops did not achieve their original objective.

Which means the other team won. Sort of. It’s complicated.

Around the middle of 1950, the Communist government of North Korea decided to unify the country by overrunning democratic South Korea.

The North Koreans had taken over almost all of the South, which occupies the bottom half of the Korean Peninsula, when the United Nations sent troops to stop what the UN considered illegal aggression.

Most of those troops were Americans, and they quickly took back the South.

But Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the World War II star brought back to run the military operation, decided that this had gone so well the troops should just keep going and take over North Korea as well, unifying the country under the system of the South.

President Harry Truman didn’t like this idea, fearing it could draw Communist China into the war, with obvious potential global consequences.

Nonsense, said MacArthur, who was not only convinced he could be the hero here, but who claimed he didn’t care whether the Chinese entered the battle or not, because they had no fighting skills. One expert here notes a reference to Chinese soldiers as “laundrymen.”

Well, the laundrymen did cross the border, some 60,000 of them. The 12,000 American troops who were racing toward the northern border of Korea were suddenly outnumbered more than five to one, with their single supply line cut off.

It was also late November by now, and the nighttime temperature in the northern Korean mountains dipped to 20 or 30 below, meaning the elements were as lethal as the enemy troops.  

It became immediately clear, then, that this wasn’t going to be a struggle for control of the Chosin reservoir. The only hope for keeping the American troops alive was to get outta Dodge. Call it an evacuation or a retreat. Everyone needed to leave now.

Running out of food, many times with their feet frozen in their boots, Marines and Army troops first had to stave off the attackers with hand-to-hand combat. They had to find some way to tend to multiple injuries in Arctic conditions. They had to stay warm enough and eat enough to keep going.

Then they had to figure out how to travel 80 miles to the nearest safety camp, marching down a frozen road between mountains dotted with snipers.  

On that trip, they were delayed three days when the Chinese dynamited a bridge. Steel beams had to be airlifted in so engineers could rebuild the span.

It’s an amazing story of survival, deservedly noted in Marine Corps lore as a glistening example of resilience and toughness.

The Battle of Chosin notes a few other points of context as well. The Chinese soldiers, while numerous, were more ill-equipped, with insufficient food and almost no protection against the brutal cold. Many of the Chinese troops wore sneakers.

The show also notes that none of this would have happened at all if MacArthur had heeded his commander-in-chief, and that while the Marines won by surviving, the Chinese won by pushing the American/UN forces out of North Korea. Which still creates some problematic issues today.  

The Battle of Chosin’s producers didn’t need two hours to tell their story. Clearly they felt that the more we see the contemporary black-and-white footage of what it was like at the Frozen Chosin, the more we will appreciate the courage and tenacity of the soldiers there.

We do. We also can’t help thinking that the real victory would’ve been a world without any war.