Even for an officer who had fought throughout the second world war, it was a hideous sight: dozens of shot-up trucks, heaped with the bleeding bodies of butchered American infantry, crawling south through the freezing mountains south of Kunu-Ri Pass, North Korea.
Major David Wilson of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a highly experienced veteran of the war against Japan, had never seen anything like it before. He was reminded of passages he had read of Elizabethan naval battles: 'I had never seen trucks with blood running out of the scuppers before,' he said.
The Highland major was unaware at the time - November 30, 1950 - that he was witnessing, at ground zero, a new superpower striding onto the world stage: China.
The American 2nd Infantry Division had been ground up in a Chinese roadblock of almost 10 kilometres. The virtual annihilation of two regiments in Kunu-Ri Pass, or 'The Gauntlet', plunged the United Nations Command, or UNC - the troops who had defended South Korea in July, then counter-invaded the North in October - into panic.