In this readable,insightful, and well-written volume, Hastings aims to paint a “portrait” of the war and does not claim to provide anything resembling a comprehensive history, although in the end the book is a fine balance of both for the most part. The book is also mostly focused on military actions. 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.

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. Suing for peace. UN bring white flags to the meeting. The communists all take this is as a sign of surrender. The communists also just use the meetings to get a cease fire to dig tunnels to make sure Americans can never take North Korea. Ferris Miller, the naval officer who was one of the advance party at Inchon in September 1945, left the country at the end of that year. But he was that rare creature -- an American deeply attracted by Korea: "Somehow, it had got into my blood. I liked the place, the food, the people." In February 1947 he returned to Seoul as a civilian contract employee of the Military Government. He was dismayed by what he found: "Everything had gone downhill. Nothing worked -- the pipes were frozen, the electricity kept going off. The corruption was there for anybody to see. A lot of genuine patriots in the South were being seduced by the blandishments of the North. There were Korean exiles coming home from everywhere -- Manchuria, China, Japan. Everybody was struggling, even the Americans. The PX was almost bare of goods. Most of our own people hated the country. There were men who came, stayed a week, and just got out. There were Koreans wearing clothes made of army blankets; orphans hanging around the railway stations; people chopping wood on the hills above Seoul, the transport system crumbling. It was a pretty bad time." 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." CIA has its beginning. They do a lot of low-tier operations. Mostly people desert them or are killed. The operations are rushed and overly optimistic. Still they keep getting more money. The Koreans themselves make for terrible agents.

Most illuminating – and most heartbreaking – is Hastings examination of the many mistakes made in Korea and his assessment that little was learned by them; they were repeated in Vietnam.

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-02-28 21:03:04 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA178901 Boxid_2 CH119501 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor 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. 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:this is the irony of the American position with regard to the UK, that allegiance to the foreign policy of the United States is part of the national identity to a degree British and Commonwealth nationals may take issue with. however, the famous London society madam's comment aside (viz., "America is the first country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization"), clearly to some degree the relationship is mutually beneficial, as the experiences of the first world empire in history to peacefully withdraw from its foreign frontiers permits the optimistic American empire-in-becoming to understand its limitations. I think this is a good compromise text of the situation, although anyone who wants to comment further is welcome. Max Hastings draws on first-hand accounts of those who fought on both sides to produce this vivid and incisive reassessment of the Korean War, bringing the military and human dimensions into sharp focus. Critically acclaimed on publication, republished with an introduction from the author, The Korean War remains the best narrative history of this conflict. 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 Korean War is journalist and military historian Sir Max Hastings’ compelling account of the forgotten war. Lccn 87016547 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL16218443M Openlibrary_edition 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.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. For twenty-five years, between the studies written in its immediate aftermath and those based on archives opened a generation later, the Korean War was largely ignored. That was natural enough: there is always such ‘dead ground’ as the writing of history moves forward. But that war was so significant as a paradigm for international relations in the post-war world that we can deplore the failure of Western statesmen and, still more, soldiers, to keep it in mind as a guide-post and a warning of what lay in store for them if they attempted any further military interventions in the Third World. For a few years, under the wise guidance of Dwight Eisenhower, American leaders did so bear it in mind, and shaped their policy accordingly: they realised the unwisdom of becoming involved in a land conflict anywhere, especially in Asia. But only ten years after the truce was signed at Panmunjom in July 1953 the slide into Vietnam had begun. The effects of that terrible conflict have been longer-lasting. Even so, the United States has trembled on the verge of military intervention in Central America and does so now in the Middle East. Their present leaders, still obsessed with the memories of Munich, would do better to remember Korea. 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? 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. 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!