Book Review: 'The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War'
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| (C) 2007 Hyperion Books |
The three-year-long Korean conflict was, in retrospect, doomed to be forgotten except, sadly, by the brave men and women who served in a U.S.-led United Nations force that included troops from at least 16 U.N. member nations and their families. And, of course, it's burned into the collective memories of millions of Koreans who still live on a divided peninsula, as well as those of North Korea's staunchest allies during the conflict: the People's Republic of China and the former Soviet Union.
As a result, while there are untold thousands of volumes devoted to either World War II or the Vietnam War, there are comparatively few books devoted to Korea. In part, this is because the American public wanted no part of a conflict in a distant part of the world under the leadership of an unpopular President - Harry S. Truman. Most Americans had had enough of war after their country's reluctant entry into the Second World War and were content to enjoy the dividends of a robust post-war economy. And, Cold War fears aside, the fickle public decided to turn its back on Korea when it became clear that there would be no triumphant "signing of a surrender on the battleship Missouri" this time around; after China entered the conflict in November 1951, the best the U.N. commanders could hope for was a stalemate and not an outright victory in Korea.
These are points that are familiar to readers who are familiar with the history of the Korean War and its aftermath, and they are among the many themes that are at the core of journalist and historian David Halberstam's final book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.
Halberstam, who died in a car accident not long after finishing the last revisions to the manuscript of The Coldest Winter in 2007, was one of the nation's best-known and most respected reporters. In his 20s, Halberstam was one of the New York Times' correspondents who covered the early years of the Vietnam War from Saigon; his experiences "in-country" led to his being a co-recipient (with reporter Malcolm W. Browne) of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
Halberstam was also one of the first writers to write critical accounts of the Vietnam "quagmire" (a term he helped popularize) in such works as The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era and The Best and the Brightest.
In his next-to-last book, which was published posthumously in September of 2007 by Hyperion (now Hachette) Books, Halberstam covers the first year of the Korean War in an unorthodox manner. Instead of focusing solely on Big Picture political, strategic, and diplomatic decisions or "you are in the thick of the fight with the grunts" battle narratives, the author opts for a hybrid approach that blends both of those techniques.
Take, for instance, the beginning of The Coldest Winter:
On October 20, 1950, the men of the U.S. First Cavalry Division entered Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Later, there was some controversy over who got there first, elements of the Fifth Regiment of the Cav or men from the South Korean First Division. The truth was the men of the Cav had been slowed because all the bridges in their sector going over the Taedong River had been blown, and so the South Korean troops, or ROKs (for Republic of Korea), beat them into the ruined city. That did not diminish their pleasure. To them, the capture of the city meant the war was almost over. Just to make sure everyone knew that of all American units in country, the Cav got there first, some troopers, armed with paint and brushes, painted the Cav logo all over town.
Small private celebrations were taking place throughout Pyongyang. Lieutenant Phil Peterson, forward observer with the Ninety-ninth Field Artillery Battalion, and his best buddy, Lieutenant Walt Mayo, both working with the Third Battalion of the Eighth Regiment of the Cav, had their own two-person celebration. They could not have been closer as friends, having been through so much together. Peterson thought it an unusual friendship, one only the Army could forge. Walt Mayo was a talented and sophisticated man who had gone to Boston College, where his father taught music, whereas Peterson was a product of Officer Candidate School, and his formal schooling had ended back in Morris, Minnesota, in the ninth grade because they were paying $5 a day for men to work in the fields. In Pyongyang Lieutenant Mayo had managed to procure a bottle of Russian bubbly from a large store of booze liberated from the Russian embassy, and they shared it, drinking the pseudo-champagne, so raw it made you gag, from the metal cups in their mess kits. Vile, but good, they decided.
Sergeant First Class Bill Richardson of Love Company of the Third Battalion felt a wave of relief sweep over him in Pyongyang. The war was virtually over, and the Cav might be getting out of Korea. He knew this, not just because of all the rumors, but because Company headquarters had called asking all men who had experience loading ships to notify their superiors. That was as sure a sign as any that they were going to ship out. Another sign that their days of hard fighting were over was that they had been told to turn in most of their amino. All the rumors seeping out of the different headquarters must be true.
In his own mind Richardson was the old guy in his unit: almost everyone in his platoon now seemed new. He often thought of the men he had started out with three months earlier, a period that seemed to have lasted longer than the preceding twenty-one years of his life. Some were dead, some wounded, and some missing in action. The only other soldier in Richardson's platoon who had been there from the start was his pal Staff Sergeant Jim Walsh, and Richardson sought him out. "Jesus, we did it, buddy, we made it all the way through," he said, and they congratulated each other, not quite believing their good luck. That mini-celebration took place on one of the last days of October. The very next day they were reissued their amino and ordered north to save some South Korean outfit that was getting kicked around.
Still, the word was out: there was going to be a victory parade in Tokyo, and the Cav, because it had fought so well for so long in the Korean campaign, and because it was a favorite of Douglas MacArthur's, the overall commander, was going to lead it. They were supposed to have their yellow cavalry scarves back for the parade, and the word coming down was that they better be prepared to look parade-ground sharp, not battlefield grizzled: you couldn't, after all, march down the Ginza in filthy uniforms and filthy helmets. The men of the Cav were planning to strut a bit when they passed MacArthur's headquarters in the Dai Ichi Building. They deserved to strut a bit.
The mood in general among the American troops in Pyongyang just then was a combination of optimism and sheer exhaustion, emotional as well as physical. Betting pools were set up on when they would ship out. For some of the newest men, the replacements, who had only heard tales about how hard the fighting had been from the Pusan Perimeter to Pyongyang, there was relief that the worst of it was past. A young lieutenant named Ben Boyd from Claremore, Oklahoma, who joined the Cav in Pyongyang, was given a platoon in Baker Company of the First Battalion. Boyd, who had graduated West Point only four years before, wanted this command badly, but he was made nervous by its recent history. "Lieutenant, do you know who you are in terms of this platoon?" one of the senior officers had asked. No, Boyd answered. "Well, Lieutenant, just so you don't get too cocky, you're the thirteenth platoon leader this unit has had since it's been in Korea." Boyd suddenly decided he didn't feel cocky at all.
Halberstam opens The Coldest Winter on a promising - if rather ominous - note: in a spellbinding first chapter, the author of One Very Hot Day and The Fifties throws the reader into one of the darkest episodes of the Korean War: General of the Army Douglas MacArthur's ill-fated decision to exceed his orders from Washington (which were to clear South Korea of Communist forces from the North but not cross beyond the 38th Parallel) and take his command north to liberate North Korea and march all the way to the border with China on the Yalu River.
It was this decision by America's most senior (in both rank and age) field commander that transformed Korea from a successful campaign with limited but achievable goals (the liberation of the South and re-establishment of the status quo ante into America's first frustrating "war in a time of peace." Instead of a victory parade on the Ginza, MacArthur handed his exhausted and beleaguered troops a series of setbacks that ended with a harrowing retreat under fire, a clash between a vainglorious general and an unpopular Commander-in-Chief, and perhaps one of the most famous public dismissals of an American general in history.
Alongside the main storyline of the first year of the Korean War, Halberstam switches back and forth along the timeline to explore the roots of the conflict, Like Vietnam, the main impulse that drove Truman to send U.S. troops to Korea was wrangling between the Republicans and Democrats in the domestic front. The GOP was using the Cold War as a wedge issue to wrest back control of Congress and the White House after 20 years of Democratic hegemony, and it worked. A hot-button issue in 1950's mid-term elections was the recent Communist victory in China, a turn of events that Republicans pinned - unfairly - on Truman's Administration.
Halberstam also examines the decision-making processes of the side that started the war in the first place, including those of North Korea's "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung (grandfather of present-day dictator Kim Jung Un), Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin.
The Coldest Winter also examines some of the battles that took place between June 1950 and mid-1951, the strategies and tactics used by both sides, and the personality clashes between the senior commanders that, for good or ill, shaped the battlefield and resulted in the eventual outcome of the war.
The book is written well, but it is not without some narrative issues. First, it never quite makes up its mind on what narrative it wants to be. At times The Coldest Winter is a scholarly work that focuses a great deal on larger-than-life figures such as MacArthur (a general that I've grown to dislike intensely over time), Stalin, Truman, and Mao and their roles in the conflict. At the same time, however, Halberstam attempts to make the Korean War come to life for 21st Century readers in the same "based on eyewitness accounts" style of popular military histories as those written by Rick Atkinson, Cornelius Ryan, and Stephen E. Ambrose.
Does it work? Well, for me it sort of does. Once I figured out what Halberstam was doing, I just accepted that this was not going to be a conventional narrative such as Max Hastings' The Korean War and went with the flow.
However, if the reviews on the book's Amazon product page are a fair guide to readers' opinion, other people have a hard time with The Coldest Winter. They either wanted a more complete account of the war, which Halberstam did not set out to write, or they wanted a Band of Brothers/The Pacific kind of work, with more of a focus on the battles and the troops that fought them.
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