The Korean War: An Epic Conflict 1950-1953

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The Korean War is journalist and military historian Sir Max Hastings’ compelling account of the forgotten war.

The conditions Miller discovered in Seoul might as readily have been observed in Berlin, Vienna, Hamburg -- any of the war-ruined cities of Europe that winter. Even in London and Paris, cold and shortages were a way of life in 1947. But whereas in Europe democratic political life was reviving with remarkable vigor, in South Korea a fundamentally corrupt society was being created. Power was being transferred by the Americans to a Korean conservative faction indifferent to the concept of popular freedom, representative only of ambition for power and wealth. The administration and policing of the country had been placed in the hands of men who were willing tools of a tyranny that a world war had just been fought to destroy. Their only discernible claim to office was their hostility to communism. He states North Korean soldiers were "savage hoards" while U.S. soldiers were "restrained platoons." Those "savage hoards" had their country invaded. I guess they should have politely asked for the invaders to leave. And the "restrained platoons" killed women and children so they didn't have to care for any prisoners of war. How very restrained of them! The North Korean army smashes the puny and poor South Korean defense. They beg USA to help out. In USA there is a huge anti-Communist fear so they are actually not unwilling to help. In 2019 he received the Bronze Medal for the US Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Award for VIETNAM: An Epic History of a Tragic War. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-10-15 20:47:29 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA131318 Boxid_2 CH119501 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor

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Hastings achieved his first major literary success with BOMBER COMMAND, published in 1979, which established his trademark style of combining top-down analysis of the ‘big picture’ with human stories from the bottom up. Beyond archive research, he interviewed more than 70 personnel of the RAF’s 1939-45 Bomber Command, from its C-in-C Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris to aircrew and staff officers. On the book’s publication it prompted outrage from some RAF veterans, including Harris, and fierce print controversy including harsh comment from airmen. Many reviewers nonetheless praised the work. C.M.Woodhouse, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, called the book ‘a brilliant tour de force for a man born after the events he describes’. C.P.Snow wrote in the Financial Times: ‘Max Hastings joins Len Deighton as one of the best interpreters of the last war’. The Economist said: ‘This is the most critical book yet written about Bomber Command … it is also far and away the best’. The book was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and has remained in print for more than 40 years. Yet despite the decline of China into a society of competing warlords, and the preoccupation of Russia with her own revolution, even before the Second World War it was apparent that Korea's geographical position, as the nearest meeting place of three great nations, would make her a permanent focus of tension and competition. The American Tyler Dennett wrote presciently in 1945, months before the Far Eastern war ended: Korean independence thus became a dead letter. In the years that followed a steady stream of Japanese officials and immigrants moved into the country. Japanese education, roads, railways, sanitation were introduced. Yet none of these gained the slightest gratitude from the fiercely nationalistic Koreans. Armed resistance grew steadily in the hands of a strange alliance of Confucian scholars, traditional bandits, Christians, and peasants with local grievances against the colonial power. The anti-Japanese guerrilla army rose to a peak of an estimated 70,000 men in 1908. Thereafter, ruthless Japanese repression broke it down. Korea became an armed camp, in which mass executions and wholesale imprisonments were commonplace and all dissent forbidden. On August 22, 1910, the Korean emperor signed away all his rights of sovereignty. The Japanese introduced their own titles of nobility and imposed their own military government. For the next thirty-five years, despite persistent armed resistance from mountain bands of nationalists, many of them Communist, the Japanese maintained their ruthless, detested rule in Korea, which also became an important base for their expansion north into Manchuria in the 1930s. On its face, this is a standard, establishment account of the Korean War. However, once you actually dissect much of what Hastings says and insinuates, you realize this book is filled with inconsistencies, disgusting romanticizing of war, and propaganda. Some of the main issues: USA losing badly. The army gets a new commander who knows his stuff and he starts turning things around.

Without question, The Korean War defines South Korea to this day and Max Hastings work will give you a clear and objective picture – from the view point of both America and China. (In the forward Hastings points out that while objective data and interviews with Americans and Chinese are possible, such an exercise with the North Koreas would be a waste of time.) The scenes he depicts are vivid and graphic without being sensational. The opening firefight between Task Force Smith and the North Korean regulars was particularly gut wrenching. There are some phrases he uses to describe later events that haunt me a bit, yet I believe Hastings did this for clarity. One of the darkest chapters – the story of the POWs during the war - also contains some moments of extreme levity when Hastings describes the pranks GI’s pulled on their captors. Some of them had me laughing out loud. He stood down as editor of the Evening Standard in 2001 and was knighted in 2002. His monumental work of military history, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945 was published in 2005.The essence of McCloy's argument, which would serve as the justification for all that was done in Korea in the three years that followed, was that it was an idealistic fantasy to suppose that the United States could merely hold the ring, serve as neutral umpires while Koreans worked out their own destiny. Some Korean leaders must be singled out from the mob of contending factions and assisted to win and retain power. It must surely be the men on the spot, Hodge and his staff, who were best qualified to decide which Koreans these should be. The American military rulers employed no further deceits to dignify the process by which they now set about installing a congenial regime. Just as the Russians, at this period, were securing control of North Korea for a Communist regime, so the only credentials that the Americans sought to establish for the prospective masters of South Korea were their hostility to communism and willingness to do business with the Americans. If this appears a simplistic view of American policy, the policy itself could scarcely have been less subtle. Hastings argues that China’s intervention in the war was, to a large degree, motivated by a sense of patriotism, rather than a reflexive pro-Communist ideology. The Americans had, of course, committed naval forces to Formosa, which the Chinese viewed as a threat to their sovereignty; crucially, they also thought the defeat of US forces in Korea could resolve the Formosa issue. Hastings also argues that the chief aim of the Soviet Union’s Korean policy was to avoid a direct confrontation with the US, and that the Chinese acted unilaterally (more recent research into the issue has largely reached the same conclusion). Although Soviet-North Korean relations cooled as the war ground on, Soviet diplomatic and military support had, in a very real sense, made North Korea’s aggression possible. I have read several other books about the Korean War, but never felt those books helped me grasp the whole. This book did. urn:lcp:koreanwar00hast:epub:3ae4067f-6aed-44c7-a949-4ffab90169ab Extramarc The Indiana University Catalog Foldoutcount 0 Identifier koreanwar00hast Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t1vd7rp0p Isbn 0671528238 Max Hastings tells a visceral story of the first "international" conflict of the post-WW2 era. It's not the first, but it's the one that shattered the illusion and naivety that was the foundation of the UN, it was the war that crystallized and defined the boundaries of the Cold War, and it's one that the US didn't learn from and went on to repeat in Vietnam a decade later.

I don’t think that, as an army or a nation, we ever learn from our mistakes, from history. We didn’t learn from the Civil War, we didn’t learn from World War I. The US Army has still not accepted the simple fact that its performance in Korea was lousy.” The Council was doomed from the outset. It reminded most Koreans far too vividly of their recent colonial experience -- its chairman had been a member of the Japanese governor-general's advisory body and an enthusiastic supporter of the Japanese war effort. Yet Yo Un-hyong's "unhelpful" behavior, contrasted with the "cooperative" attitude of the conservatives who joined the Council, reinforced the American conviction that the conservatives -- above all, the members of the Korean Democratic Party -- were the men to work with. But what now was to be done about the reality in the countryside -- that reports reaching Hodge declared that while the KPR was "organized into a government at all levels," the KDP was "poorly organized or unorganized in most places?" Prison camps. Largely Chinese prisons as North Koreans just killed prisoners. The prisons were extremely poor and many Westerners died. But later China tried to improve their image by giving the prisoners a bit basic healthcare. They tried to make the prisoners communists, but they used terrible tactics. To the relief of the committee in Washington, the Russians readily accepted the 38th Parallel as the limit of their advance. Almost a month before the first Americans could be landed in South Korea, the Red Army reached the new divide -- and halted there. It is worth remarking that, if Moscow had declined the American plan and occupied all Korea, it is unlikely that the Americans could or would have forced a major diplomatic issue. To neither side, at this period, did the peninsula seem to possess any inherent value, except as a testing ground of mutual intentions. The struggle for political control of China herself was beginning in earnest. Beside the fates and boundaries of great nations that were now being decided, Korea counted for little. Stalin was content to settle for half. At no time in the five years that followed did the Russians show any desire to stake Moscow's power and prestige upon a direct contest with the Americans for the extension of Soviet influence south of the Parallel. The Korean War was probably the first war in the Cold War era when Western and communist forces clashed on the battlefield. It is not as famous as the Vietnam War, and it is mostly forgotten today. But though the Vietnam War has passed on to history and legend today, with the country filled with bustling cities with tall skyscrapers like any other East Asian city, the fires of the Korean War are still smoldering today, with North Korea and South Korea being two separate, distinct countries, with tension brewing in between. So I thought it will be a good idea to read this book and find out how it all started.

Table of Contents

Kap Chong Chi, a landowner's son and another university student, felt far better disposed toward the Americans, and toward his own government, than Minh. But even as an unusually sophisticated and educated Korean, he shared the general ignorance and uncertainty about the politics of his own country: "In those days, we did not know what democracy was. For a long time after the Americans came, we did not know what the Communists were, or who Syngman Rhee was. So many of the students from the countryside, farmers' children, called themselves Communists. There was so much political passion among them, but also so much ignorance." Korean society was struggling to come to terms with a political system, when it had possessed none for almost half a century. Not surprisingly, the tensions and hostilities became simplistic: between haves and have-nots; between those who shared the privileges of power and those who did not; between landlord and peasant, intellectual and pragmatist. The luxury of civilized political debate was denied to South Korea, as it was to the North. Take this instance, British chaplain Padre Sam Davies is being spoken of highly in the book for his heroics during the battlefield and courage while under captivity. But Father Emil Kapuan, probably the greatest and most prominent chaplain in the history of warfare was only mentioned in a measly sentence. I wanted to start this month by reading some history. So I read Max Hastings' book on the Korean War. A brilliant and compelling book which must rank, even by the standards Max Hastings has set, as a masterpiece' Professor Michael Howard, London Review of Books In October 1945 the Americans created an eleven-man Korean "Advisory Council" to their military governor, Major General Arnold. Although the membership purported to be representative of the South Korean political spectrum, in reality only one nominee, Yo Un-hyong, was a man of the Left. Yo initially declined to have anything to do with the Council, declaring contemptuously that its very creation "reverses the fact of who is guest and who is host in Korea." Then, having succumbed to Hodge's personal request to participate, Yo took one look around the room at the Council's first session and swept out. He later asked Hodge if the American believed that a group which included only one nonconservative could possibly be considered representative of anything. An eleventh nominated member, a well-known Nationalist named Cho Man-sik, who had been working in the North, never troubled to show his face.