The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam
Macmillan, £25
OF ALL America’s major wars since 1945, the conflict in Korea is the least celebrated in book and on film. It wasn’t popular with US citizens, who were never quite convinced of its purpose. Nor did returning GIs talk about their terrifying experiences in bleak mountains among a people they neither liked nor respected, fighting battles against an enemy they hardly ever saw in daylight. Korea is the war the US would prefer to forget about, except in the lecture rooms of West Point.
The conflict began in the summer of 1950 when the communist north, under Kim Il Sung, invaded the south. By the time it ended in stalemate three years later, after the USA and Mao’s China had lurched into battle each supremely confident of crushing the other, America’s losses numbered 33,000 dead and 105,000 wounded. South Korea counted 415,000 dead and about the same number wounded. Chinese and North Korean losses were estimated at 1.5 million dead.
The two sides ended up where they began, at the 38th parallel, an artificial border drawn on a map just north of the South’s capital, Seoul. And there they remain, more than half a century later, still technically at war and staring down the barrels of artillery at each other.
This was, ostensibly, the first war waged by the United Nations. British forces were right there in the front line with those of the US. But, in reality, it was a war dictated by the nastiest conceivable politics that Washington can offer. It was fought to end the 20 year reign of the Democrats in the White House, as well as the communist occupation of Korea, and succeeded in doing so by labelling President Harry Truman as a pinko who was soft on commies.
Understanding the politics of the war is at least as critical as grasping its military significance. Which is why David Halberstam’s epic account, completed days before his death in a road accident in California, is so important. The justly-famed authority on the Vietnam war, which he covered for the New York Times, takes us through the labyrinth of ruthlessly ambitious Republican politicians, the infinitely guileful China lobby in Taiwan and the US and the subversive military high command in Japan, headed by General Douglas MacArthur, the most vainglorious army chief of the 20th century. A soldier who snubbed his own president by not saluting him, who refused to take orders from his commander in chief and who would have plunged his country into World War III by invading China with nuclear weapons until Truman summoned up the nerve to sack him.
Halberstam relates the riveting story of this war-within-a-war with consummate skill, drawing out the positive side of Truman’s understated presidency and charting the hubristic downfall of MacArthur. He knew American politics like no other, but he’s also brilliant on the mirror image of Mao’s conduct of the war: a brutal private mission to establish his political suzerainty in the new China that was only just emerging from the communist revolution of 1949. When hostilities ceased, he saw himself as the all-powerful “people’s emperor” who had taken on the world’s greatest superpower and not been defeated.
Marshal Peng, his top military strategist in Korea, a devoted communist who lived a Spartan way of life, voiced mild criticism of the direction China was taking. He suffered more than a hundred beatings, from which he died. Apart from his humiliating dismissal at the height of war, MacArthur’s only punishment was the loss of the Republican Party presidential nomination to Dwight D Eisenhower in 1952. This book is a fitting epitaph to MacArthur’s failure.
I have only one quarrel with The Coldest Winter. Halberstam is unrivalled at describing and analysing the Washington politicking over Korea, and its lasting impact on the nation’s development over the ensuing decades, but he scarcely mentions the UN dimension to the story. British, French and even Turkish soldiers put in occasional cameo appearances, but their role is skated over. In a book of 657 pages, he could profitably have told us about America’s diplomatic triumph in pinning a UN label on the war, a skill that was to largely elude the Bush regime 50 years later when it invaded Iraq.
The maps of various battles he describes in detail – happily, few – are useful but the book would also have benefited from images of the war. There are no photographs. And, as he points out, the hugely successful film and TV series MASH, which was ostensibly about Korea, actually portrayed the madness and futility of Vietnam. Just another lie prompted by the Pentagon’s great game which deceived, and continues to deceive, the American people.
Paul Routledge
