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THE COMMUNIST SUCCESSES in the central sector were mounting. Three days into what had started as an American offensive, the Chinese were now moving in on two of the prizes they had sought from the start, Wonju and Chipyongni. As the Chinese seemed ready to take Wonju, fears for Chipyongni grew. So far almost everything the Americans had done in Wonju had gone wrong, and the Communist victories had seemed like a continuation of what had happened around the Chongchon. Then, with both Wonju and Chipyongni at stake, the Americans caught a major break, the kind that can turn defeat into victory. On the morning of February 14, a small artillery spotter plane was flying over the Som River, which cut its way through the mountains northwest of Wonju. One of the observers, Lieutenant Lee Hartell of the Fifteenth Field Artillery Battalion, happened to look out. There, along the sandy beach of the river, was an unusually heavy tree line, or so he thought at first, a lot more trees than one usually saw in that area. He decided to look again. This time he noticed that the tree line was moving. It was not a tree line, he suddenly understood, but a vast Chinese force, seemingly well camouflaged, and so confident that they were moving en masse in daylight as they almost never did, and did not even freeze as they were supposed to when a plane came over. With victory so close and time so precious, they now had too little respect for their enemies and had simply ignored the spotter plane. Hartell and his stunned pilot placed the force at as many as two divisions, perhaps fourteen thousand men moving four abreast, almost surely on their way to the final battle for Wonju. Hartell radioed in his find and called for artillery fire. The battle was soon to be memorialized by the Americans as the Wonju Shoot.
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
From the cheapest quintile of starting points, the S&P 500 earned an 11.6 percent real (inflation-adjusted) compounded return over the next ten years. By increasingly expensive quintile, the compounded real returns were 10.0 percent, 9.6 percent, 5.3 percent, and 4.4 percent, respectively. Again, the pattern is very consistent. It’s intriguing that if the P/Es are converted into earnings yields, one more percentage point of starting earnings yield often boosts investor rates of return by more than one percentage point, assisted by mean reversion.
Big Money Thinks Small
Joel Tillinghast
After Morgan had installed the Edison lighting plant in his redecorated house on Madison Avenue, in the autumn of 1883, he held a big reception for four hundred guests. One of them, Darius Ogden Mills, the famous gold mine operator and stock market plunger, was so impressed with all those brilliant new lights that on the following morning he walked into the office of Drexel, Morgan & Company and ordered the purchase of a thousand Edison shares. “Pierpont heard of this at once,” and before Mills could go out the door, caught him and asked him what he knew about the Edison light. “I know all about it,” answered Mills. “All right, we will take your order,” said Pierpont, “and any other orders of the same kind, but I am going to put a condition on my partners with respect to such orders... that for every share of Edison stock they buy for you they buy one for me.”458 This incident has been cited as showing Morgan’s enthusiasm for the Edison venture. What it suggests rather is that Morgan was serving notice that he would allow no one else to take control over this promising industry; and he was a most determined and formidable man. By the end of 1883, the meetings of the directors of the Edison Electric Light and of its two non-manufacturing subsidiaries, the Edison Illuminating of New York and Isolated Lighting, were regularly held in Morgan’s office.
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