book reviews and summaries, comments, analysis
Goulden, Joseph Korea: The Untold Story of the War Korean War books traditionally break into two broad categories. One focuses on the battles and the relentless surge and ebb of optimism/pessimism as the combatants tore along the peninsula. The other group covers the politics; the chess games in embassies and parliament hallways around the world. As a reader you should digest a few of each group before you attempt to tackle a text like Gould's. Then his mastery of the interwoven arrogance and naivete, on the battlefield and off, by military and political leaders will disgust you as it should. For this 'sour little war' continues to erode our constitution and its balance of powers, our military, perhaps even our national soul. Forget Desert Storm with its designer weapons and multibillion dollar commitment to cheap oil and the Kuwaiti mall. We still flounder about our post cold-war role. What we have is a pentagon that thinks directing traffic in Kosovo is legitimate military function. Only the Marines-whose star, incidentally, shone brightest in Korea-had enough integrity recently to say "no way!" to further 'peacekeeping' missions.
When you understand the sarcasm of the last few sentences, you'll be ready for Goulden's book. Like a zoom lens the author deftly shifts perspective. One moment you are in the savage fighting near Masan; the next on the shores of Lake Success, where the UN held its sessions for the first few years. This text-and it is a textbook, no doubt about that-is a broad picture of Korea's sad history as a 'shrimp crushed in a battle of whales:' Russian, Chinese, Japanese and in this century, U.S. interests. There are pure heroes in this book: Ridgway-- honest enough to state he wanted dead Chinese, not nameless ridges stained with UN blood. Marine General Smith-who wanted a runway at Hagaru-ri to carry out casualties on the march (north!) into Chosin.
There are the fools. None better than the Joint Chiefs; spineless as MacArthur, Truman, and later even Acheson walked over them.
And there are the tragic figures that always get swept into the tides of fate-far higher, even in this war, than those tides at In'chon. The pitiful Syngman Rhee, whose crusade for an independent Korea began in the twilight years of the Roosevelt administration. Teddy Roosevelt, that is. Kim Il-Sung, the pudgy dictator who discovered that his promise from Stalin was that Russians would fight Americans to the last North Korean.
No author I have read portrays-through powerful prose and skillful mastery of tense, sentence length and format-the suffocating doom and sense of despair that gripped Washington in December of 1950. Acheson went to sleep in his Foggy Bottom home-and US Marines in frozen foxholes-fearful of waking any moment to the clarion call of total war. If you can sigh with relief when Generals Collins and Vandenberg return from Korea after talks with Ridgway, Goulden has you in the palm of his hand. The almost comic relief of Acheson trumping the Chinese at the UN proves to be a bitter jest indeed, as negotiations bog down for 2 years.
Like a Christmas tree Gould's book is decorated with all kinds of detail and stories gleamed from documents sprung loose by the Freedom of Information Act. MacArthur always wanted Chiang Kai Shek in the war. Hans Tofte put him in it more than 'Dugout Doug' could ever imagine, saving an estimated 50,000 American lives. But such documents can also tempt authors to exchange titter for substance. The boyhood stories of MacArthur come off as childish. If Gould wants to point out the spy ring of Philby/Burgess/MacLain gave the Russians what they could get more cheaply from reading the NY Times, fine. But enough about the fact that they were Fags, ok? There were enough spineless leaders in Asia, Europe and the US to turn a Security Council meeting into a Drag Show.
In any case, a powerful book by a good writer. I wish he had made a broader case that tactical nuclear weapons were what really spooked the Chinese that spring of 1953. And whats this? Allowing guerillas from Formosa to open a second front striking at the south of China-always its soft political underbelly, going back as far as the Mongols? My my my---weren't the Joint Chiefs feeling their oats in those lengthening Washington days!! Weren't these the guys who, two years before, wouldn't dare allow hot pursuit of MiGs across the Yalu??