The Korean War

Product Information

This book didn't suffer nearly so much as his Falklands work did and so was a more interesting read. I care less for the politics behind the conflicts and more on the men that fought it but I do understand that one needs an overall frame of reference and thus a need to fully detail the politics behind the scenes. 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. 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. I have read several other books about the Korean War, but never felt those books helped me grasp the whole. This book did.

One of the problems I had while choosing to read a particular history of the Korean War was this. Most history books which are available in English today are written by American or British historians. Occasionally, we might find a French or German book in English translation, but otherwise this is it. (There are lots of books on Indian history in English by Indian historians and writers, but that is a unique case, and so I'm going to ignore that for the purposes of our discussion.) So, because of this, a typical history book in English is going to have a British or American bias. Of course, historians try to be neutral, and try to provide the relevant facts, with objective analysis, but the bias always creeps in. For example, a typical British or American version of the Korean War could go like this – "The army of the evil Chinese empire, joined together with the North Koreans and tried to take over the whole of Korea. The heroic American army intervened with the help of friends and helped the South Korean people. In a furious war waged between the armies of the free world and of the communist totalitarians, the noble armies of the free world triumphed. That is why we have a democratic, free South Korea today, which is one of the biggest Asian economies, while totalitarian North Korea is poor and primitive." This is the kind of history which is peddled by the international press, and media, and this is the history which most of us are aware of. So I was worried that a history of the war by an American or British historian would be a version of this. Maybe a sophisticated version, but still very similar to this. 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.Sir Max Hastings has written a very detailed narrative on the War in Korea. He has also provided readers with an excellent and concise coverage of the Korean war in its entirety. From the constant political debates ensuing from Washington, London and the UN, to the daily struggles of the life of a grunt in the front lines fighting and clinching on to his dear life. Everything is laid out in a way that is easily readable. This book also includes testimonies not only from the UN troops who fought in the war but also that of their opponents; Chinese troops who saw the value life differently from their Capitalist counterpart. The various interviews of enemy troops give readers a unique perspective of the emotions and thoughts of the enemy during the war. SIR: Mr Halliday obviously feels strongly about the Korean War ( Letters, 18 February), but his odium academicum engenders more heat than light. I can only advise your readers to consult my review and see what I actually wrote about the three books concerned: in particular, the reasons I gave for supporting the judgments of Max Hastings on the merits of the war. Whatever the legal situation, the 38th parallel was certainly seen at the time, by the great majority of members of the United Nations, as de facto‘an established frontier’: at least as much so as that between the Soviet Union and Western zones of Germany, and one possessing much the same significance. An East German invasion of the West, with Soviet military support, would not have been regarded as an incident in a local war of no concern to anyone except the participants. Nor was a North Korean invasion of the South. Max Hastings in his book performs the essential function of the historian. He makes the past intelligible by re-creating the passions of the time. I am afraid that Mr Halliday only confuses the issue by introducing new, and irrelevant, ones of his own. 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.

But some young South Koreans did express their hostility to Rhee...and paid the price. Beyond those who were imprisoned, many more became "unpeople." Minh Pyong Kyu was a Seoul bank clerk's son who went to medical college in 1946 but found himself expelled in 1948 for belonging to a left-wing student organization. "There was an intellectual vacuum in the country at that time," he said. "The only interesting books seemed to be those from Noah Korea, and the Communists had a very effective distribution system. We thought the Americans were nice people who just didn't understand anything about Korea." Minh's family of eight lived in genteel poverty. His father had lost his job with a mining company in 1945, for its assets lay noah of the 38th Parallel. Minh threw himself into antigovernment activity: pasting up political posters by night, demonstrating, distributing Communist tracts. Then one morning he was arrested and imprisoned for ten days. The leaders of his group were tried and sentenced to long terms. He himself was released but expelled from his university, to his father's deep chagrin. Like hundreds of thousands of others, Mirth yearned desperately for the fall of Syngman Rhee.

Table of Contents

He has presented many TV documentaries. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, London, he has also received honorary degrees from Leicester and Nottingham universities.He was President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England 2002-2007, and a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery 1995-2004. He was knighted in 2002 for services to journalism. Now 76, he has two grown-up children, Charlotte who works for a London public relations company, and Harry who runs PlanSouthAmerica, ‘a thriving travel business that span the continent’.Max lives with his wife Penny in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.Max’s niece Calypso Rose runs The Indytute ‘brilliantly inspired lessons’.

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. Good intro to how Korea was split in two after WW2 like Germany. Here Soviet put in a strong leader in Kim Il-sung and gave them a ton of weapons and support making them a powerful nation. Of course Kim Il-sung wanted to conquer South Korea that the Western powers had left poor and defenseless. 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: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. 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." 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: