The Korean War: An Epic Conflict 1950-1953

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Take this instance, British chaplain Padre Sam Davies is being spoken of highly in the book for his heroics during the battlefield and courage while under captivity. But Father Emil Kapuan, probably the greatest and most prominent chaplain in the history of warfare was only mentioned in a measly sentence.

In the months that followed the expulsion of the Japanese, the Koreans who replaced them as agents of the American military government were, for the most part, long-serving collaborators, detested by their own fellow countrymen for their service to the colonial power. A ranking American of the period wrote later of his colleagues' "abysmal ignorance of Korea and things Korean, the inelasticity of the military bureaucracy and the avoidance of it by the few highly qualified Koreans, who could afford neither to be associated with such an unpopular government, nor to work for the low wages it offered."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’.

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. 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 Many of the international factors which led to the fall of Korea are either unchanged from what they were half a century ago, or are likely to recur the moment peace is restored to the East. Japan's hunger for power will have been extinguished for a period, but not forever. In another generation probably Japan will again be a very important influence in the Pacific. Meanwhile the Russian interest in the peninsula is likely to remain what it was forty years ago. Quite possibly that factor will be more important than ever before. The Chinese also may be expected to continue their traditional concern in the affairs of that area." Hastings was educated at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, which he left after a year.After leaving Oxford University, Max Hastings became a foreign correspondent, and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard.

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.

This is a very solid book, and an important read, because it also tries to go beyond the chessboard tactics and politics, and provide some insight into cultures, and the cultural clash, and the cardinal divide between the West and the East. It would be even better if there was more information from the other side, but again, the author laments a dearth of material from the "other" side. Even so, it's a top notch work of history.

My 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. Among his bestselling books Bomber Command won the Somerset Maugham Prize, and both Overlord and The Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize. The North Korean army smashes the puny and poor South Korean defense. They beg USA to help out. In USA there is a huge anti-Communist fear so they are actually not unwilling to help. All very chilling. Not surprisingly, most of the voices in the narrative are American or others on the UN side, but Hastings does take care to include Korean and Chinese accounts. He also makes no secret of the atrocities on all sides and the pervasive racism of the US soldiers. In addition to following the front lines, the book includes chapters on intelligence (scant and badly organised), the war in the air (US-dominated), prisoners of war, and how peace was negotiated. The latter includes extraordinary accounts of how the island of Koje-do, where the UN forces kept their POWs, became in effect a second front in the war. North Korean and Chinese POWs took control of the camps where they were imprisoned, thanks to deliberate communist infiltration and remarkably slapdash US management. In May 1952, one camp of North Koreans actually took their American commandant hostage, precipitating a siege.

I begin listening to this book while on the plane from California to Seoul on my first trip to the Land of the Morning Calm. The book gave me such a detailed overview of the entire war that I was able to discuss the events with locals and feel like an informed person. Without question, The Korean War defines South Korea to this day and Max Hastings work will give you a clear and objective picture – from the view point of both America and China. (In the forward Hastings points out that while objective data and interviews with Americans and Chinese are possible, such an exercise with the North Koreas would be a waste of time.) The scenes he depicts are vivid and graphic without being sensational. The opening firefight between Task Force Smith and the North Korean regulars was particularly gut wrenching. There are some phrases he uses to describe later events that haunt me a bit, yet I believe Hastings did this for clarity. One of the darkest chapters – the story of the POWs during the war - also contains some moments of extreme levity when Hastings describes the pranks GI’s pulled on their captors. Some of them had me laughing out loud. SIR: Mr Halliday obviously feels strongly about the Korean War ( Letters, 18 February), but his odium academicum engenders more heat than light. I can only advise your readers to consult my review and see what I actually wrote about the three books concerned: in particular, the reasons I gave for supporting the judgments of Max Hastings on the merits of the war. Whatever the legal situation, the 38th parallel was certainly seen at the time, by the great majority of members of the United Nations, as de facto‘an established frontier’: at least as much so as that between the Soviet Union and Western zones of Germany, and one possessing much the same significance. An East German invasion of the West, with Soviet military support, would not have been regarded as an incident in a local war of no concern to anyone except the participants. Nor was a North Korean invasion of the South. Max Hastings in his book performs the essential function of the historian. He makes the past intelligible by re-creating the passions of the time. I am afraid that Mr Halliday only confuses the issue by introducing new, and irrelevant, ones of his own.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.