Book Review: 'The Korean War'
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| ©1987 Simon & Schuster (U.S. Edition) |
In retrospect, the Korean War is eclipsed by the conflict - World War II - that came before it and the one that came after it: Vietnam. The former was a titanic struggle that ended in triumph for America and her Allies; the latter was a disastrous quagmire that began - almost unnoticed - soon after the Korean Cease-fire was signed at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953, and went on during the Administrations of five American Presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. Thus, fewer books, documentaries, novels, or movies have been made about Korea; M*A*S*H is the only multimedia franchise with which American audiences are familiar, and even then the film and TV sitcom are really about Vietnam - the Korean War setting is just dramatic window dressing.
It was the first war we could not win. At no other time since World War II have two superpowers met in battle.
Now Max Hastings, preeminent military historian takes us back to the bloody bitter struggle to restore South Korean independence after the Communist invasion of June 1950. Using personal accounts from interviews with more than 200 vets—including the Chinese—Hastings follows real officers and soldiers through the battles. He brilliantly captures the Cold War crisis at home—the strategies and politics of Truman, Acheson, Marshall, MacArthur, Ridgway, and Bradley—and shows what we should have learned in the war that was the prelude to Vietnam. - Publisher's back cover blurb, The Korean War
Written nearly 35 years after the armistice stilled the guns and created the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that still separates North and South Korea, The Korean War begins with the tragic story of Task Force Smith, a battalion-sized U.S. Army unit sent to South Korea to try and stem the invasion by Communist forces from Kim Il-Sung's Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Led by Lt. Col. Charles B. "Brad" Smith USA, the task force, which only had some artillery support but no tanks, was defeated at the Battle of Osan by units from two North Korean divisions, including 36 Soviet-made T-34 tanks; of the 540 men in Task Force Smith, 60 were killed, 21 were wounded, and 82 were captured. It was not an auspicious beginning to America's first postwar conflict.
Hastings then goes back to the root causes of the war, including the supposedly temporary division of Korea by the American and Soviet forces that liberated the peninsula from its colonial master, Japan, at the end of World War II, the onset of the Cold War, and the setting up of two rival governments in both the North and South. He also explains how the superpowers' two clients - North Korea's Kim (grandfather of the DPRK's present leader, Kim Jong Un) and Syngman Rhee were authoritarian nationalists with ambitious - if different - plans to reunite the peninsula at the expense of the other.
The Korean War also goes into detail about the consequences of America's postwar defense drawdown and the Truman Administration's dependence on U.S. nuclear weapons at the expense of conventional forces. With U.S. forces scattered around the world - primarily in Western Europe as part of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the new (1947) Defense Department was unprepared to wage even a "limited war" in Korea in June of 1950. As General Omar N. Bradley famously said at the time, Korea was "the wrong war, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy."
It was also, from the American point of view, a war waged by an Allied force led by a general whose temperament and political worldview was totally unsuited for the complex diplomatic and military situation in 1950. At age 70, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was a legendary commander past his prime but had retained his post as Supreme Commander, Allied Powers in Tokyo due in no small part to his connections with powerful Republican members of Congress and conservative media moguls, including China-born Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines.
MacArthur's contributions to the Allied victory over Japan were valuable and a matter of historical record, no doubt, but they obscured defects in the aging "American Caesar's" military acumen and personality. Despite the accusation that the general lacked physical courage (the nickname "Dugout Doug" was both unfair and inaccurate, as was the charge that he had willingly abandoned his command during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1942, MacArthur had shown courage throughout much of his career as an Army officer. However, he had a towering ego and craved the limelight far too much. He also surrounded himself with a staff full of sycophants, including a nearly useless intelligence officer, Major Gen. Charles A. Willoughby.
It was under Willoughby's watch - in World War II - that MacArthur received poor intelligence about Japanese forces and intentions throughout the Pacific Campaign, a fact that was obscured by MacArthur's victories in that theater of operations. In Korea, however, Willoughby's incompetence and deliberate suppression of intelligence reports - especially those concerning Chinese troop buildups in North Korea in the fall of 1950 - led to near-disaster for the United Nations Command and contributed to MacArthur's downfall and removal from command in the spring of 1951.
As Hastings observes, the UN effort in Korea was very much a U.S.-South Korea show, but at least 18 other UN member nations sent forces to repel the North Korean invasion in the new organization's first attempt at collective action to deal with international aggression. Great Britain was one of the countries that contributed a military contingent (the Commonwealth Division, along with a Royal Navy squadron) to the war effort. Thus it's fitting that Hastings included a chapter devoted to a battle in which British forces had a prominent role.
Some officers were most unhappy about the scattered deployment of the small force, when 29 Brigade’s position lay across the historic route southwards to the Korean capital. They argued in
favour of concentrating the battalions where they could provide
effective mutual support, for instance on the dominant heights of
Kamak-san, where there were superb natural defences and ready
access to water. Major Tony Younger, commanding the British
engineer squadron, was in Japan on leave when he saw speculation
in the US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes about a possible Chinese
thrust towards the Imjin. He flew hastily back to Seoul, and rejoined
the brigade. He was dismayed to find that no special precautions
were being taken: ‘We were not really in a defensive frame of mind.
We had been crawling forward, probing forward for months. We
didn’t even really know exactly where on our front the Imjin was
fordable.’1 Major Guy Ward of 45 Field Regiment, the gunner battery
commander with the Gloucesters, found the atmosphere ‘relaxed.
Too relaxed’. Despite all the intelligence indications of an imminent
Chinese offensive, the extraordinary absence of enemy activity in
front of Brodie’s men suggested that the blow would fall elsewhere.
The Imjin position was deemed safe.
My Take
I read The Korean War for the first time when I was in college; the American edition had just come out and Miami-Dade Community College, South (now Kendall) Campus had a copy in the "just in" section of the library. I checked it out as soon as I had a chance, and I read as much of it as I could; it was final exam time then, though, so I only got to the 'two-thirds' mark before I had to return it to the library.
Years later, I bought the paperback edition. I read that book several times; so much so that it was dogeared and sans its cover by the early 2000s. Still, I held on to that battered but well-loved volume till plumbing issues caused a leak in what was then my Mom's townhouse and flooded the two bedrooms upstairs. My paperback copy of The Korean War was one of the casualties, so I replaced it in March of 2014, a year before my mom passed away.
At the time of its publication, The Korean War was criticized (as was Hastings' previous World War II book Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy) for being unfairly critical of the performance of the American soldier in Korea. Never mind the fact that he was quoting American commanders who had led those GIs in the book; angry U.S. veterans accused Hastings of being anti-American for pointing out flaws in U.S. foreign policy, defense decisions before, during, and after Korea, and especially the fighting ability of the average soldier, who was more often than not a draftee rather than a career GI or Marine.
I can understand why some ex-soldiers would feel that way, but The Korean War does not in any way minimize the achievements of the Marines, airmen, sailors, and soldiers who served and fought in this, the first of America's many late-20th Century "limited wars." MacArthur's final burst of military brilliance - the landing at Inchon in September 1950 - is chronicled here, and so are the successful efforts of American generals such as James Van Fleet, Matthew Ridgway, and Mark Clark to challenge the combined forces of Red China and North Korea, repel the Communist's second attempt to conquer the South after booting the UN out of the North in the winter of 1950-51. In no way does Hastings' book look down on the U.S. soldiers; it does, however, call into question the decisions made by MacArthur, President Harry S Truman, and other major Western and Communist leaders, including Stalin and Mao Zedong.
The book is now almost 32 years old as of this writing; because its topic is not comfortable to the American reader, very few books of this scope have been published since, the most important being the late David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. Due to the paucity of works of this breadth and depth, Hastings' book has stood the test of time.
As the late Stephen Ambrose wrote in the back cover blurb for The Korean War, "Max Hastings has no peer as a writer of battlefield history."
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