By

David Halberstam

 

Although David Halberstam’s final book, The Coldest Winter, desperately needed editing, I am glad that I plodded through his narrative of the Korean War. Over the years, I enjoyed immensely Halberstam’s ability to tell a story whether the subject matter was Vietnam, basketball, the Brooklyn Dodgers or the Ford Motor Company. 

 

Halberstam sadly commented on our failure to remember the Korean War and its 53,000 casualties. "If American military history has shortchanged any of this country's wars in the past century," he wrote in a later chapter, "it was Korea." In The Coldest Winter, Halberstam brought to life an important chapter of America’s actions during the Cold War, including colorful anecdotes about some of the key players during that era, Harry Truman, Douglas Mac Arthur, Syngman Rhee (South Korean President), Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Matthew Ridgway (America’s Best General in the Korean War). The Korean War was the first armed confrontation of the Cold War and set the standard for many later conflicts. It widened geographically the conflict between communism and capitalism from Europe to Asia. Within a decade the cold war touched the continents of Africa, North and South America.

 

Sadly, the Korean War—sometimes called the Forgotten War— does not receive its deserved recognition. That is, the United States supported by the United Nations, successfully stood up to communist aggression. 

While I have not counted, I would guess there are more books on Herman Goring than the Korean War. 

 

While America has shed incalculable amounts of money and blood since World War II, very few of our sacrifices were justified. Korea is a salient exception. That is, over the past half century South Korea has achieved remarkable economic progress. Stated differently, South Korea represents the success of capitalism and North Korea reflects the perils of communism. That is, currently South Korea’s Gross Domestic Product is close to thirty-three times that of North Korea, and its per capital income is close to fourteen times greater. 

 

I feel particularly badly about our amnesia regarding the Korean veterans. These men fought under the most strenuous circumstances, serving initially under incompetent leadership that badly misrepresented the potency of North Korea and China, possessing poor equipment, and fighting in the most inhospitable terrain, and in temperatures sometime 40 degrees below zero.  Some sixty years after Korea, we must shudder that generals such as Douglas Mac Arthur underestimated the fighting ability of the “yellow man.” Time and time again, our combat troops suffered grievously because of outdated notions of the fighting capability and spirit of their enemies. In order to protect his sullied reputation for completing miscalculating the likelihood of Chinese intervention, Mac Arthur urged the use of atomic bombs against China. Mac Arthur preferred keeping his reputation and thereby risked World War III. Luckily, he had so raised the ire of his military contemporaries such as George Marshall, Omar Bradley, and Dwight Eisenhower, that Truman could take the politically calculating risk of dismissing him in the middle of a war. In this case, changing horses in midstream was the right choice. According to Halberstam, Mac Arthur was the epitome of an arm chair general, never spending a single night in Korea.

 

Halberstam captured intimately the crudeness of the three major communist leaders—Joseph Stalin, Kim II-Sung, and Mao Zedong. In conversing with each other, they resorted to the language we associate with illiterate factory workers or peasants. Four letter expletives were frequently used in their conversations. Being politically correct, I will just say that Stalin warned Kim II-Sung that he might get his teeth knocked in. 

 

Halberstam pointedly highlighted the failures of many of our Korean generals, particularly Douglas Mac Arthur. No modern general can attain high rank without a large sense of ambition. But instead of seeking a common goal, it seems that both Mac Arthur and his hand picked subordinate Edward Almond were more interested in personal advancement and glory than leading their troops to victory for the sake of their nation. Halberstam used adjectives like "vainglorious," "over-confident," "ambitious" and "megalomania" flowed freely in describing them. Mac Arthur often flew in the face of common sense: "Of the many professional sins of which [he] were guilty…including hubris and vanity, none was greater than his complete underestimating of his enemy." While reading the book, I was tempted to take Mac Arthur’s pipe and stick it into “unnamed parts.”

 

In hindsight, America’s obsession with the notion of monolithic communism or our fear that countries would fall like dominoes under communism totally failed to grasp the reality of nationalism. Communist countries were as self-serving as their capitalist antagonists. Our intelligence failures led us directly into Vietnam because we failed to recognize that Ho Chi Minh was a genuine nationalistic hero who while communist would lead a movement antithetical to China.

 

The Korean War directly led to a split between China and the Soviet Union. That is, Stalin’s paranoia made him so distrustful of Mao Zedong that he failed to provide any substantial aid to China following the communist accession to power in 1949 and then reneged on providing needed military support during the Korean conflict.

 

The ironic flipside was that Kim II-Sung disdainfully refused any military aid from Red China at the outset of the Korean War, and then shamelessly beseeched Mao when his troops faced annihilation. The Chinese in return treated North Korea as a backwater state after they intervened. From the perspective of the cold war, the Korean War left a legacy of distrust between China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. America belatedly recognized the tension between the two communist superpowers—China and the Soviet Union—until hostilities broke out between these nations around 1970. 

 

The Korean War started almost haphazardly. That is, because Dean Acheson, the United States Secretary of State, failed to mention Korea when he discussed America’s Pacific defense perimeter, both Stalin and Kim II-Sung felt that the United States would not intervene to save South Korea.

 

Adding to the problem, the United States never armed or equipped the South Korean military establishment, leaving the country with rudimentary heavy armaments. When the Korean conflict broke out, South Korea possessed no air power, only forty tanks and some 170,000 poorly trained troops. On the other hand, the North Koreans possessed about two hundred tanks and four hundred thousand well trained troops.

 

Another irony was the American ability to obtain a United Nations resolution to oppose North Korea. That is, the Soviet Union did not veto the United Nations resolution because they had walked out of the United Nations over Taiwan’s holding a seat at the Security Council. Thus, the Truman administration received a key psychological victory because we fought in Korea at the “behest of the United Nations.” While ultimately the Korean War became deeply unpopular, Truman initially received warm endorsements for America’s intervention because the American public viewed this war as “the free world against communism.”

 

I would like to mention one last point. In seeking the Korean armistice, the United States never received the endorsement of Syngman Rhee. We just pursued actions that were in our best interest. Fast forward, America could have gotten out of Vietnam in 1968 if we had by-passed South Vietnamese leaders. Instead, we spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of our fighting men to achieve comparable peace terms in 1973. In retrospect, we should have followed the Korean War precedent.