Review of The Darkest Summer by Bill Sloan (Simon and Schuster, 2009)

On June 25 1950 communist North Korean troops invaded South Korea advancing quickly.  Seoul fell shortly after and the well-armed invaders made steady progress down the Korean peninsula.  The US and United Nations pledged political and military support to South Korea, with US troops mobilised from Japan for war, with others shipping from the US and Mediterranean.  Given the huge downsizing of the US military post Second World War and their relatively easy postings US troops were ill-prepared for combat and they fared poorly in their initial encounters with the North Koreans.  As the supply lines were extended and more US and UN troops arrived, the battlefront stabilised around Pusan at the foot of the peninsula.  The job of pushing back the North Koreans largely fell to the US marines, a branch of the military threatened at the time with being phased out.  The Darkest Summer tells the story of the US marines battles in Korea in 1950, mainly focusing on battles on the Pusan perimeter and the daring amphibious assault at Inchon near to Seoul.  While the book discusses each encounter and provides eye-witness testimony, it largely skims over the wider political landscape and military strategy and also the battles undertaken by UN or South Korean troops.  Indeed, it is a very US-centric account of the first phase of the Korean War.  As such, while it was interesting and one got a sense of the battles from a soldier’s point of view it is somewhat myopic and narrowly framed.

Review of The Korean War by Max Hastings (Pan, 1987)

Just five years after the end of the Second World War, the Korean War was the first of a set of ideological wars between the capitalist United States and her allies and communist states, which threatened to make the cold war with the Soviet Union a hot one.  In The Korean War, Max Hastings sets out the historical context and lead-up to the war, its initial unfolding and the deployment of a United Nations forces, and its bloody progression up to the armistice in 1953.  The book covers the wider general arc of the war, its ideology and politics, military actions, and the principle actors and their acts, but also has a series of smaller stories about individuals, and chapters about specific aspects of the war, such the air war, intelligence, and prisoners of war.  There’s a wealth of information based on an analysis of documentary sources and interviews with over 200 participants.  And rather than just describe what happened, he’s prepared to provide analysis and judgement as to cause and effects.

However, whilst the book provides an overarching analysis, it is fair to say it is a decidedly slanted one, and has a number of notable absences.  Hastings is a British journalist and historian and the book has a definite British slant in terms of analysis and sources.  There is some criticism of the British participation, but largely the British role both militarily and diplomatically is portrayed favourably.  On the other hand, the Americans do not fair so well, in part because they did make a hames of many situations, but it seems that more than that is going on.  For example, the British disaster at Imjin is depicted as a heroic last stand and plucky retreat, whereas the very similar American defeat at Chosin is framed as a deadly calamity.  His coverage of the Chinese participation is relatively scant and certainly coloured by his own ideological position.  However, by far the largest absence from the book is how the citizens and soldiers of the Republic of Korea and North Korea viewed and experienced the war.  Beyond a handful of anecdotes and some sweeping statements, the Korean people and Korean politics are almost absent in a book about Korea.  Perhaps this is to be expected in a book written by a British historian and the bias toward using Western, and in particular, British sources and interviews, but it does create a somewhat lopsided narrative.  The other major gap is what happened in Korea after the war ended in 1953.  Instead of tracking the post-war developments in both parts of Korea, Hastings instead compares the Korean war with Vietnam and the wider conflict with communism.  It’s another way in which he demonstrates that the book is not so much an analysis of the Korean war, but a war against communism fought in Korea.  It’s shame that it couldn’t have been both.  Nonetheless, it’s a very useful starting point for anyone interested in getting an overarching, if particular, account of the war.