The Korean War

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No disrespect is intended to the careful and well-documented analyses by Peter Lowe and Callum MacDonald in suggesting that so complex and tragic a drama, involving such remarkable protagonists and causing such widespread suffering, needs the skills of a story-teller as accomplished as Max Hastings to do it justice. The fear and bewilderment of American troops pitchforked into a struggle for which they were psychologically and physically unprepared; the confusion and incompetence of their commanders; the nightmare sufferings of the Korean people themselves, caught between the brutality of their own countrymen and the American penchant for using air power to make up for the shortcomings of their troops; the bizarre affair of the Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war, terrorised by their own commissars under the indifferent or intimidated eyes of their Western guards – out of all this Max Hastings makes a brilliant and compelling book which must rank, even by the standards he has set, as a masterpiece. A brilliant and compelling book which must rank, even by the standards Max Hastings has set, as a masterpiece' Professor Michael Howard, London Review of Books urn:lcp:koreanwar00hast_0:epub:196a2f09-ed99-4bbe-be7c-4d3fe1500fb8 Extramarc University of Michigan Foldoutcount 0 Identifier koreanwar00hast_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t34183b0z Isbn 9780671668341

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. While many books on war or military campaigns offer little to nothing to the student of history (many so fetishize tactics, casualty figures, and types of ordnance they read like firearms porn), it comes as something of a surprise when a war historian goes out of his way to place battle in a greater social and political context. The Forgotten War;" the KW was briefly last month in the media again as N. Korea sabre-rattled. at time of writing, China is attempting to assert sovereignty over the Diaoyu/Senkaku island chain. maybe we are all in the shadow of another 3 year war?! To write THE KOREAN WAR, Hastings conducted extensive research and interviews in China and South Korea as well as in Britain and the US. By the time it appeared in 1987, Hastings had become editor of the Daily Telegraph. Professor Sir Michael Howard wrote in the London Review of Books: ‘A brilliant and compelling book which must rank, even by the standards Max Hastings has set, as a masterpiece’. Robert Blake wrote in the Financial Times: ‘Hastings is one of our most able and perceptive writer on the military history … not only very readable but judicious, scholarly and generous. His latest book can only add to a reputation already very high’.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. 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.

I have mixed emotions - Hastings is a superb historian and one I recommend. His wide view treatment of the Korean War is excellent. He lays out the political, military and ideological factors that led to the war and sustained it for the three years it ran, the inextricably interlaced influences of the leadership and decision making personalities, the tactics and strategic considerations - examined from the perspectives of both sides, the US, Britain, South Korea and the UN on one side and the Soviets, Red Chinese and North Koreans on the other. It is illuminating, and perceptive - and well worth reading the book. In addition to the conflict as a whole, he also devotes chapters to specialized topics such as the air war, intelligence, prisoners of war, that nicely examine their dedicated topics within the larger, wider narrative of the war as a whole to which the bulk of the book is devoted. It was another group, which could call upon only a fraction of the KPR's likely political support, that seemed infinitely more congenial to Hodge and his advisers: "...the so-called democratic or conservative group, which numbers among its members many of the professional and educational leaders who were educated in the United States or in American missionary institutions in Korea. In their aims and policies they demonstrate a desire to follow the western democracies, and they almost unanimously desire the early return of Dr. Syngman Rhee and the 'Provisional Government' at Chungking." Barely three weeks after the American landings in Korea, official thinking in Seoul was already focusing upon the creation of a new government for the South around the person of one of the nation's most prominent exiles. I remember seeing this in bookshops when it was first published in the 80s. I thought about buying it at that time but decided I didn’t have enough of an interest in the subject. It’s quite topical now though… PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Korean_War_Pan_Military_Classics_-_Max_Hastings.pdf, The_Korean_War_Pan_Military_Classics_-_Max_Hastings.epubMy 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. There's something rather "dirty" about the Korean War. It wasn't linear, it wasn't logical, and it doesn't have closure. It started as a panic ping-pong between the north and the south, became a major conflagration between the US and China, and ended up as a WWI trench warfare slog that simply ended because the big powers have had just the right amount of posturing.

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. Perhaps this is inevitable with the Korean War which the author describes with much caustic comment in which Cold War superpower geopolitics alone escalated a regional conflict into an undeclared superpower war that narrowly missed precipitating WWIII. As the author describes, with UN troops in the field and the easily war wearied home fronts in America and Britain feeling little personal investment in the war’s nominal cause – the defense of a corrupt and unpopular S. Korean dictatorship – the war could be interpreted (as Hastings does) as a preview for the south Asian conflict a generation later. Hastings’ narrative is particularly poignant when recalling the similarities between the two especially the implication that the U.S. learned little to nothing for all the blood, sweat, and tears shed on the Korean peninsula – don’t wage an unpopular war to prop up a corrupt regime with no support in their own country much less yours, high tek fire and air power doesn’t work as well on a low tek enemy, don’t underestimate the foe just because they’re “gooks,” and more. Please note: without maps and diagrams to indicate troop dispositions and battlefield maneuvers, this audiobook is likely to disappoint arm chair generals but I find the attention to the war’s larger context more than compensates. 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 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? South Korea can best be described as a powder keg ready to explode at the application of a spark," Hodge's State Department political adviser H. Merell Benninghoff reported to Washington on September 15. "There is great disappointment that immediate independence and sweeping out of the Japanese did not eventuate. Although the hatred of the Koreans for the Japanese is unbelievably bitter, it is not thought that they will resort to violence as long as American troops are in surveillance....The removal of Japanese officials is desirable from the public opinion standpoint, but difficult to bring about for some time. They can be relieved in name but must be made to continue in work. There are no qualified Koreans for other than the low-ranking positions, either in government or in public utilities and communications."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. 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. 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.

I have read several other books about the Korean War, but never felt those books helped me grasp the whole. This book did. 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. 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’. Book Genre: American History, Asia, Cultural, ers, History, Military, Military Fiction, Military History, Nonfiction, North American Hi…, Politics, rs, sers, War, World History 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."

He was editor, then editor-in-chief, of The Daily Telegraph from 1986-1995, and of the Evening Standard 1996-2002.He has described his journalistic career in two memoirs, GOING TO THE WARS (2000) andEDITOR(2002).