This Day in History: China overwhelm Allies in N.Korea

On 29 November 1950, US-led U.N. troops begin a desperate retreat out of North Korea under heavy fire from the Chinese, three weeks after US General Douglas MacArthur first reported Chinese communist troops in action in North Korea.
Near the end of World War II, the “Big Three” Allied powers – the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain – agreed to divide Korea into two separate occupation zones and temporarily govern the nation. The country was split along the 38th parallel heavily fortified on both sides, with Soviet forces occupying the northern zone and Americans stationed in the south. By 1949, separate Korean governments had been established, and both the United States and the USSR withdrew the majority of their troops from the Korean Peninsula. The South Koreans were unprepared for the hordes of North Korean troops and Soviet-made tanks that suddenly rolled across the border on June 25, 1950.
Two days later, US President Harry Truman announced that the United States would intervene in the Korean conflict to stem the spread of communism, and on June 28 the United Nations approved the use of force against communist North Korea. In the opening months of the war, the US-led UN forces rapidly advanced against the North Koreans, but in October, Chinese communist troops entered the fray, throwing the Allies into retreat, only to be pushed back to the 38th parallel by May 1951.
The Korean War war ended with an armistice in 1953 reestablishing the 1945 division of Korea that still exists today. It killed 150,000 troops from South Korea, the United States, and participating UN nations. One million SKorean and estimated 200,000 NKorean civilians perished.

Actress Natalie Wood drowns

Also on this day in 1981, actress Natalie Wood drowns in a boating accident near California’s Catalina Island.
Wood, 43, was twice married to the actor Robert Wagner, from 1957 to 1962 and from 1974 to the time of her death. On that night, she was with her husband on their yacht “The Splendor,” moored off Santa Catalina, near Los Angeles. Also on the yacht was the actor Christopher Walken, who at the time was making the movie Brainstorm with Wood. Neither Wagner nor Walken saw what happened, but it was believed she somehow slipped overboard while untying a dinghy attached to the boat. Her body was found in the early hours of the following morning. The cause remains mysterious until today.
Born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko on July 20, 1938, in San Francisco, California, Wood began her acting career as a child. As a teenager, she went on to play James Dean’s girlfriend in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. Among many other movies, she also earned Best Actress Academy Award nominations for her performances in Splendor in the Grass (1961) with Warren Beatty and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) with Steve McQueen. Film credits also include West Side Story (1961), winner of 10 Oscars, in which she played the lead role of Maria; Gypsy (1962), which was based on the hit Broadway musical of the same name; The Great Race (1965), with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis; Inside Daisy Clover (1966), with Christopher Plummer and Robert Redford; and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) with Robert Culp, Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon. Brainstorm, Wood’s final film was released in 1983.