The Korean War: An Epic Conflict 1950-1953

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Despite their initially limited goals, the Chinese soon, like the Americans, adopted “mission creep” and aimed for a decisive victory on the Peninsula, a decision that would cost them dearly in manpower as the war ground on. At the same time, US forces were woefully unprepared for war, as “nearly every unit in the army was under-strength, under-trained, and under-equipped.” Many GIs couldn’t even grasp the basics of handling a rifle, and more than one had been deployed from quiet postings with almost zero training but with their records marked combat-ready. 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. Interestingly, the author does not hide his anti-communist streak, and he's also fiercely patriotic, giving a more-than-proportional share of attention to the British troops in Korea, but then, he does not try to hide his own message among facts, which is rather cool. This is atypical for nonfiction. Moreover, he also goes emotional here and there, and it's obvious that he does have some disdain for certain figures (politicians and top generals mostly), as well as a generally negative attitude toward China and north Korea. Who would have thought how relevant this book would some seventy years later?

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.urn:oclc:472742150 Scandate 20110721225223 Scanner scribe10.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Source Suk Bun Yoon, the fourteen-year-old schoolboy who had twice escaped from Seoul under communist occupation, was living with the remains of his family as suppliants upon the charity of a village south of the capital in the spring of 1951. A government mobilisation decree was suddenly thrust upon the village: twenty able-bodied men were required for military service. Suk’s family was offered a simple proposal by the villagers: if the boy would go to the army in place of one of their own, they would continue to feed his parents.

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. Syngman Rhee was born in 1875, the son of a genealogical scholar. He failed the civil service exams several times before becoming a student of English. Between 1899 and 1904 he was imprisoned for political activities. On his release, he went to the United States, where he studied for some years, earning an M.A. at Harvard and a Ph.D. at Princeton -- the first Korean to receive an American doctorate. After a brief return to his homeland in 1910, Rhee once more settled in America. He remained there for the next thirty-five years, lobbying relentlessly for American support for Korean independence, financed by the contributions of Korean patriots. If he was despised by some of his fellow countrymen for his egoism, his ceaseless self-promotion, his absence from the armed struggle that engaged other courageous nationalists, his extraordinary determination and patriotism could not be denied. His iron will was exerted as ruthlessly against rival factions of expatriates as against colonial occupation. He could boast an element of prescience in his own world vision. As early as 1944, when the United States government still cherished all manner of delusions about the postwar prospect of working harmoniously with Stalin, Rhee was telling officials in Washington, "The only possibility of avoiding the ultimate conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is to build up all democratic, non-communistic elements wherever possible."Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings, FRSL, FRHistS is a British journalist, editor, historian and author. His parents were Macdonald Hastings, a journalist and war correspondent, and Anne Scott-James, sometime editor of Harper's Bazaar. During the 16 years that Hastings served as a newspaper editor, he published no further histories, only three collections of writings about the countryside, and a 2000 memoir of his youthful experiences as a war correspondent, GOING TO THE WARS. On quitting newspapers, he also wrote EDITOR, (2003), a memoir of almost a decade at the Telegraph. Lccn 87016547 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL16218443M Openlibrary_edition My father served in Korea from 1951 to 1953; he was a U.S. Marine and a mortarman. He fought in one of the battles at the Hook, was wounded and received a Purple Heart. Over the years, he related several isolated experiences to me, but we never talked about the war in general; the global and national political atmosphere in which it took place.

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. I begin listening to this book while on the plane from California to Seoul on my first trip to the Land of the Morning Calm. The book gave me such a detailed overview of the entire war that I was able to discuss the events with locals and feel like an informed person.

American policy was now set upon the course from which it would not again be deflected: to create, as speedily as possible, a plausible machinery of government in South Korea that could survive as a bastion against the Communist North. On December 12, 1946, the first meeting was held of a provisional South Korean Legislature, whose membership was once again dominated by the men of the Right, though such was their obduracy that they boycotted the first sessions in protest against American intervention in the elections, which had vainly sought to prevent absolute rightist manipulation of the results. A growing body of Korean officials now controlled the central bureaucracy of SKIG -- the South Korean Interim Government. In 1947 a random sample of 115 of these revealed that seventy were former officeholders under the Japanese. Only eleven showed any evidence of anti-Japanese activity during the Korean period. 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. The suspicions of many Korean Nationalists about the conduct of the American military government were redoubled by the fashion in which the National Police, the most detested instrument of Japanese tyranny, was not merely retained but strengthened. It was the American official historians of the occupation who wrote that "the Japanese police in Korea possessed a breadth of function and an extent of power equalled in few countries in the modern world." The 12,000 Japanese in their ranks were sent home. But the 8,000 Koreans who remained -- the loyal servants of a brutal tyranny in which torture and judicial murder had been basic instruments of government -- found themselves promoted to fill the higher ranks, while total police strength in South Korea doubled. Equipped with American arms, jeeps, and radio communications, the police became the major enforcement arm of American military government and its chief source of political intelligence. A man like Yi Ku-bom, one of the most notorious police officers of the Japanese regime, who feared for his life in August 1945, was a year later chief of a major ward station in Seoul. A long roll call of prominent torturers and anti-Nationalist fighters under the colonial power found themselves in positions of unprecedented authority. In 1948, 53 percent of officers and 25 percent of rank-and-file police were Japanese-trained. By a supreme irony, when the development began of a Constabulary force, from which the South Korean Army would grow, the Americans specifically excluded any recruit who had been imprisoned by the Japanese -- and thus any member of the anti-Japanese resistance. The first chief of staff of the South Korean Army in 1947 was a former colonel in the Japanese Army. 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.

Everything is biased from a western perspective. He notes Chinese propaganda but not the U.S. propaganda. All fault lies with the North Koreans and Chinese and none with the U.S. He criticizes the Chinese for the same things he applauds the U.S. for. USA losing badly. The army gets a new commander who knows his stuff and he starts turning things around. Hastings has received awards both for his books and journalism. BOMBER COMMAND (1979) won the Somerset Maugham Prize. He was Journalist of The Year and Reporter of the Year in the 1982 British Press Awards, and Editor of The Year in 1988.Now the bad news 😊 The North Koreans are mostly treated as a mass of homogeneous, evil people, who are ruthless and barbaric. Though there is a lot of description of individual American or British soldiers, there is no mention of an individual North Korean by name. Except for Kim Il Sung. The North Koreans are regarded as a primitive, evil horde who are uncivilized and the author probably feels that they deserved what was coming to them. The Chinese soldiers are also mostly depicted this way – as an evil horde who keep on coming and fighting in the night. The Chinese get slightly better treatment though – individual Chinese soldiers are sometimes mentioned and the author is able to interview them and we learn their stories. One of the reasons for this could be that North Korean veterans of the war would have been inaccessible to Western correspondents, as their country was closed and continues to be closed to outsiders today. The same would have been true with respect to Chinese veterans, but there was a thaw between the Chinese and the West in the 1970s, which continued into the 1980s, when Hastings wrote this book, and so he would have been able to speak to some of the Chinese veterans of the war. But, inspite of this small silver lining, it is hard to ignore the fact that the North Koreans and the Chinese are treated as barbaric, primitive, evil hordes, who are out to destroy the beautiful freedom created by Western countries. 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.” This is a very solid book, and an important read, because it also tries to go beyond the chessboard tactics and politics, and provide some insight into cultures, and the cultural clash, and the cardinal divide between the West and the East. It would be even better if there was more information from the other side, but again, the author laments a dearth of material from the "other" side. Even so, it's a top notch work of history. I have read several other books about the Korean War, but never felt those books helped me grasp the whole. This book did. On December 27, 1945, the Three-Power Foreign Ministers' Conference ended in Moscow with an important agreement. The Russians had accepted an American proposal for Korea: the nation was to become the object of a Four-Power "International Trusteeship" for five years, paving the way to independence as a unified state. Four-Power Trusteeship represented a concession by Moscow, cramping immediate progress toward a Communist state in Korea. The Russians probably anticipated that the Left in Korea was sufficiently strong to ensure its own ultimate triumph under any arrangement. But the Moscow Accords also reflected the low priority that Stalin gave to Korea. He was willing to appease Western fears in the Far East, no doubt in the expectation that in return Washington would less vigorously oppose Soviet policies in Europe.