THE COLDEST WINTER
America and the Korean War
THE COLDEST WINTER (reviewed on July 1, 2007)
The master journalist’s 21st and final book: a magisterial account of the Korean War.
Halberstam’s latest (The Education of a Coach, 2005, etc.) is a vivid chronicle packed with anecdotes and the stories of great men. North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung was a loyal Stalinist. America had installed Syngman Rhee in the South because he was Christian, spoke English and was the only Korean known in Washington. Halberstam describes both as thoroughly unpleasant autocrats but fierce nationalists, each equally anxious to unite Korea under his own leadership. Kim yearned to invade, but Stalin refused to provoke America until 1950, when he gave reluctant permission. Far East Commander Douglas MacArthur insisted North Korea would never attack; after being proven wrong, he remained mysteriously inactive for several days. Everyone feared Stalin was launching World War III and cheered Truman’s decision to intervene. At first, MacArthur handled the defense competently; his brilliant behind-the-lines landing at Inchon in September 1950 shattered North Korea’s army. Ignoring Washington’s suggestions to stop at the 38th parallel, MacArthur pushed north toward the Chinese border, despite good intelligence that Chinese units were pouring south. Once again, he dithered when disaster struck and did little to rally his defeated forces. A national icon but detested by his superiors, MacArthur finally overstepped by loudly advocating total war against China. Truman dismissed him, an act now considered courageous that at the time outraged the nation. MacArthur’s successor, WWII hero Matthew Ridgway, performed brilliantly in stopping the Chinese, but more than two years of bloody stalemate followed. As America’s first modern war without victory, Korea was the conflict everyone wanted to forget. It was a black hole of history, Halberstam writes, a war with China that never should have happened.
Another memorable slice of 20th-century history, measuring up to such earlier Halberstam classics as The Best and the Brightest (1972) and The Powers That Be (1979).
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-halberstam/the-coldest-winter-3/#review
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam
David Halberstam had the gift of being an old time storyteller trapped in the body of a journalist. Until his untimely death in 2007, he was a Pulitzer Prize winning writer extraordinaire on politics, sports and history. His last work, The Coldest War, continues that fine tradition with a fascinating narrative of the war in Korea.
While many may only know the Korean War from M*A*S*H, it was a period where World War III was on the precipice, hanging on only by the thread of Harry Truman’s nerve and Mao’s lack of resolve. It was a battle of titans – MacArthur, the hero of World War II versus the hero of the Chinese revolution. Neither believed in the resolve of the other and via their proxies engulfed the area into a war that was always inches away from escalating.
There seem many parallels to modern era situations in the narrative and Halberstam warns the reader early not to transfer the history of this period to Vietnam or Iraq, but one can’t help but look at the similarities. China is the central figure in the story -- MacArthur stressed over it, North Korea acted because of it, Russia pushed it and Mao himself vacillated from this between euphoria and depression. For the Americans, much of the bloodshed could have been avoided, but central command in Tokyo was removed in mind and spirit from troops in the field. Troops were not trained for action in the field, the best officers were kept at HQ, supplies did not reach the field and military intelligence was ignored or made up. It was this perceived laxity that convinced North Korea and China that the time was right to gain control of the whole province.
MacArthur was convinced that the Chinese were too exhausted from their civil war to act. He was still living the dream of World War II hero surrounded by sycophant assistants. It was through sheer will and a bit of luck that US forces were able to turn impending defeat into a victory with the Inchon landing, but then because of basic faults in the structure he had the army adapt, Korea became a meat grinder, where the general started setting policy that should have been the responsibility of Washington.
Politically, Truman was faced with several problems internally and externally. The fall of China to the communists triggered a right-wing backlash in the country despite millions of dollars of support given to the terminally corrupt government of Chiang Kai-shek. He could not seem “soft” on communism despite the fact that the US has very little interest in Korea. Behind the scenes there was a battle between civilians in Washington and MacArthur in Korea on the best policy not only for Korea, but all of Asia. MacArthur felt that if he could unleash “our” Chinese on the mainland the communists would fall because they were “soft” and ripe for the pickings. It was this course by the general, the inability to accept the political and military reality of the situation we faced, that forced Truman to recall the general and pull us back from the precipice nuclear annihilation. It was only after this that the war starts to take a controlled turn in favor of UN troops.
Halberstam deftly explains the different undertones of the era, the issues in conflict and then narrates his way through the years to the conclusion of the war and its aftermath. He does not point fingers nor deify any one person, but paints a picture that the reader can interpret as they wish. There are multiple personalities in conflict -- Stalin and Mao, Truman and McArthur, the US and Russia -- and yet Halberstam navigates this morass of intertwined conflicts to lay out a clear and coherent path from invasion to peace.
Many of the sources quoted in this book have been cited before, but the author also makes use of new information to give the most complete picture of the story to date. The maps help to give a perspective on the different areas the book references, but it could have used a few more, especially if you are unfamiliar with the geography of Korea. Sometimes the book does go into minutia that tends to distract from the central story, but like any good story teller the author manages to tie everything back in the end. Some of this is not new (American Caesar gives some of the same background), but Halberstam is at his best cutting through all the different strains of conflict to hit the heart of the issues.
On the whole, The Coldest Winter is a well written history that makes sense of a part of history many have, or would rather, forget. While some parts read like a pot-boiler, it is all the more enjoyable because it is real. More importantly, it reminds us of sacrifices made, the fragile quality of government and the ability of people to influence at just the right moment for the betterment or harm of society as a whole.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam
Hyperion
ISBN: 1401300529
736 Pages
http://www.bookslut.com/nonfiction/2008_03_012507.php
Rehearsal for Defeat
Published: September 23, 2007
David Halberstam discovered his calling in Vietnam, watching men die for a strategic lie. A gutsy reporter not yet 30, he warned of a quagmire in the making by a government in denial. It made him angry, then famous, and he became a lover not of war but of war stories, the grit and stink of combat, be it military, political, bureaucratic or some combination thereof.
With remarkable energy, he went on to produce 20 books in 40 years, most notably big heaves about America’s war machine but also voluminous studies of our news media and auto industry, and poignant memorials to the civil rights marchers of the ’60s and the fallen firefighters of 9/11. As if to relieve those brooding labors, he alternated them with worshipful accounts of athletic feats, but they, too, focused on competitors under stress and reflected on their sweat-soaked devotion and their betrayals, by fate or higher authority.
Still more such books were in his head when Halberstam, a vibrant 73, was killed in a car crash last April. There can be no consolation for that loss, but perhaps solace of a kind in knowing that just five days earlier he had finished his most operatic war story, “The Coldest Winter,” about the Korean War of 1950-53. The book was born of his desire to resurrect a war “orphaned by history,” a war that was cruel and inconclusive and claimed the lives of 33,000 American soldiers, 415,000 South Koreans and about 1.5 million North Korean and Chinese troops.
Combining his typically prodigious research with more than a hundred interviews, Halberstam has graphically (if sometimes tediously) recreated the trench warfare up and down that frozen peninsula, juxtaposing accounts of the petty backstabbing and vainglorious posturing at the Tokyo headquarters of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the catastrophic miscalculations by Truman, Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung of North Korea.
The result is an outsize but fascinating epic directed simultaneously to battle buffs and pacifists, history enthusiasts and political moralists. With sometimes numbing detail and elegant maps, it evokes the nobility and crazy heroism of outnumbered American grunts in a dozen of the war’s critical engagements, cinematic scenes that alternate with crisp essays about the mindless way the war began, the reckless way it was managed and the fruitless way it ended.
Halberstam’s subject is illuminated, of course, by the fact that Korea was but the first of three American conflicts of his time that presidents ordered for dubious strategic ambitions, without the comprehension of either Congress or the public. Korea was where America first revealed its imperial ineptitude and where our military leaders vowed never again to wage a ground war in Asia. As Halberstam barely needs to mention, then came Vietnam, then Iraq.
War in Korea was provoked by “a colossal gaffe” — the failure of Secretary of State Dean Acheson in a routine speech to include non-Communist South Korea in America’s Asian “defense perimeter.” That oversight caused a reluctant Stalin to unleash North Korea’s army for what Kim promised would be a three-week blitzkrieg to reunite all Korea. He very nearly succeeded.
MacArthur, the reigning American monarch over a defeated Japan, had done nothing to prepare either his own or South Korea’s forces for the attack. The first night, he mistook it for “a reconnaissance-in-force”; a day later he decided in panic that “all Korea is lost.”
America’s leaders knew little about either half of Korea, but haunted by the failure to deter Nazi aggression in the 1930s and by the “loss” of China to Communists in 1949, they decided instantly to resist what they insisted on viewing as a coordinated Sino-Soviet drive to Communize the world.
Ever the patriot, Halberstam bemoans not so much the fact of our intervention as the mind-set behind it, which led to “an American disaster of the first magnitude, a textbook example of what happens when a nation, filled with the arrogance of power, meets a new reality.” The underrated North Koreans virtually destroyed two American regiments and cornered our retreating forces for three blood-soaked months at the edge of the Sea of Japan.
MacArthur responded with his career’s most brilliant tactical stroke, which paradoxically inspired an even greater disaster. Instead of reinforcing his surrounded troops, he threw a Hail Mary pass, staging an amphibious landing at Inchon, 150 miles to the north, seizing Korea’s narrow waist and decimating the suddenly encircled North Korean invaders. Feeling invincible now, MacArthur refused advice that he settle for a defensible line well south of the restive Chinese forces massing at their Korean border. And with Truman rushing across the Pacific to bask in the general’s glory, no one was able to restrain him.
MacArthur ordered the swift conquest of all North Korea, confident that the Chinese would not dare challenge him. But hundreds of thousands of Chinese lay in wait to spring American history’s greatest ambush. Halberstam writes: “The bet had been called, and other men would now have to pay for that terrible arrogance and vainglory.”
Yet again the Americans were routed, and MacArthur’s obsessive reaction was to agitate for total war against China, nuclear if necessary. He had to be fired by Truman in April 1951 so that more sober generals could settle for “a grinding, limited war” that asked men to “die for a tie,” a stalemate that eventually restored the original border between the Koreas.
With his experience of Vietnam still fresh, a young Halberstam had brilliantly mocked “the best and the brightest” who misled us into that debacle. It was his way of honoring the sacrifices he had witnessed and exposing the ruinous politics that had driven American policy.
At the end of his life, unfolding a similar plot in Korea, he settled for a subtler, even ambiguous diagnosis. “The Coldest Winter” still venerates the grunts on the ground and damns their feckless commanders. It once again recalls the ugly fears and smears of the partisan wars at home that provoked politicians to send Americans to bleed needlessly abroad. But in looking over the carnage that was Korea, Halberstam wonders quietly about “the odd process — perhaps the most primal on earth — that turned ordinary, peace-loving, law-abiding civilians into very good fighting men; or one of its great submysteries — how quickly it could take place.”
And so he ends his last great book not in his own voice but with the reflections, in old age, of Sgt. Paul McGee, who felt that despite the public’s disillusionment and forgetfulness, he and his friends had done the right thing. They “had shared those dangers, and that set them apart from almost everyone else for the rest of their lives,” Halberstam reports. “They did not need words to bind them together; their deeds were the requisite bond.” McGee felt that “he was glad he had gone and fought there. It was a job to do, nothing more, nothing less, and when you thought about it, there had not been a lot of choice.”
David has left us with a long salute to duty.
Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The Times, was once David Halberstam’s colleague at the paper and later became his neighbor in New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/review/Frankel-t.html?pagewanted=all
IN THE SHADOW OF THE GREATEST GENERATION
The Americans Who Fought the Korean War
Who served during the Korean War? How did their wartime and postwar experiences differ from those of World War II veterans? Why did they sometimes come to see themselves as not measuring up to the Greatest Generation?
IN THE SHADOW OF THE GREATEST GENERATION (reviewed on September 15, 2012)
Who served during the Korean War? How did their wartime and postwar experiences differ from those of World War II veterans? Why did they sometimes come to see themselves as not measuring up to the Greatest Generation?
In attempting to answer these questions, Pash (History/Fayetteville Technical Community Coll.) begins by examining who entered the service and why, what parts of the country they came from, how they accepted the call to serve, and how well they were trained for battle. Through interviews with Korean War veterans, the archives of the Eisenhower library, government documents and contemporary books and articles, the author constructs a portrait of the men and women who served in Korea. She reveals their attitudes once they were in Korea, where, as the war dragged on, troops came to question the reason for U.S. involvement and to understand that the American public had little knowledge of or interest in the conflict. She also looks at the experience of American POWs, who, upon their return, often faced questions of their possible brainwashing and collaboration with the enemy. Pash then briefly examines the situation of servicewomen, mostly nurses, and more extensively, the relations of black and white troops in the newly integrated armed forces. Manpower pressures had created a military life far less segregated than life at home, making the return to civilian life especially difficult for African-Americans, who faced continued discrimination. In general, Korean War veterans found that a hero’s welcome was not to be, that veterans organizations like the American Legion excluded them, that the VA offered less help to the physically or psychologically damaged, and that the education benefits were less generous than those of World War II’s GI Bill. Americans, it seemed, just wanted to forget about an inglorious war.
Packed with facts, figures and anecdotes, the book doesn’t entertain like M*A*S*H, but it does provide a wealth of source material for future historians.