David Halberstam’s Korean War

History teaches—and what it teaches most of us is that the opinions we already hold are correct. A case in point: For roughly half of Americans (and probably 90 percent of Europeans), every modern war is Vietnam all over again. For the rest, every modern war is World War II. Is there no middle ground between these two extremes? In fact, there is, in both time and ideology: the Korean War.

On the one hand, it worked. The United States intervened in an overseas civil war, successfully defeated a dangerous and unstable dictator, and went on to build a thriving and prosperous democracy. Can anyone picture Kim Jong Il in control of the entire Korean peninsula without giving thanks for America’s intervention? On the other hand, consider this: The Korean War also had a clear and inarguable casus belli, was sanctioned by the United Nations, involved an ethnically homogeneous country (though one with class and regional frictions), and boiled down to defending a compact and clearly defined border. Take away those things, and what do you have left? Vietnam.

The late David Halberstam’s new (and final) book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Hyperion, 719 pages, $35), provides support for both these interpretations. He deftly shows how the roots of the conflict lay in Korea’s harsh three-and-a-half-decade occupation by the Japanese. After its end in 1945, the bitter hatred between collaborators and resisters remained. Different segments of Korean society had suffered in greatly varying degrees, and these fissures led to internal struggles on both sides of the border, including the division between those who had fled the occupation and those who had stayed behind. The struggle in Korea could not be boiled down to a simple case of us vs. them, though participants tended to view it that way. Each side in the war sincerely expected the people to rise up and flock to its standard as soon as it crossed the 38th parallel.

Another familiar-sounding aspect of America’s involvement in Korea was the problem of establishing a strong government without seeming overbearing. As Halberstam writes, with typical prolixity, of the prickly Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first president, “It was another version of the difficult and repetitive lessons the United States was to learn in Asia and had learned first with Chiang [Kai-shek]: with an Asian leader the Americans had helped install in this new postcolonial era, the more he was in all ways dependent on the United States, the more difficult the relationship was likely to be, because as he was dependent, he would ache to make moves that would prove his independence and would resent what might be considered control on the Americans’ part.” Then there were the logistical difficulties of fighting a war thousands of miles from home, the political problems that accompany a stagnant military situation, clueless decisions made by commanders remote from the action, and the mounting cost in money and lives.

Yet the Korean War can also be spun to support a hawkish defense policy, since the problems America encountered stemmed mostly from being weak and unprepared. As had happened in World War II, America suffered early, but once it got going, its efforts were successful. Korea also provides an example of the importance of talking tough. A speech delivered by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in January 1950, in which he seemed to downplay the strategic value of Korea, encouraged Joseph Stalin to approve an invasion of the South by his North Korean clients. Further lessons might include the necessity of keeping troops in endangered areas indefinitely, the need for patience in repairing a damaged society, and the long-term success of attempts to impose democracy.

One point on which there can be no ambiguity is the enormous courage and endurance shown by fighting men on both sides. The book opens in the fall of 1950 with the U.S. forces’ mad dash to the Yalu River, which formed the border with China, through a seemingly deserted North Korea. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, directing the war from Tokyo, refused to believe reports of Chinese infiltrators, though troops on the ground kept running into them. Then, suddenly, endless masses of Chinese soldiers attacked, completely surrounding the most forward American units. Survivors interviewed by Halberstam tell of stranded platoons, sometimes unarmed, desperately sneaking back through enemy territory; of officers forced to make the wrenching decision to abandon trapped units facing certain annihilation; and of horribly wounded men faking death, then hiding by day and crawling slowly and painfully by night toward the American lines.

Of a platoon leader on the Pusan Perimeter, Halberstam writes, “When he had taken up one of his first combat positions near the front . . . he had done what you were always supposed to do in combat—scout out the friendly units on each side of you and work out communications with them. In this case he had gotten in his jeep and driven, and driven, and driven—in all about five miles. Finally he spotted two GIs. They were from the neighboring Twenty-fourth Division and seemed thrilled to see him—they cheered him as a symbol of the entire Second Division’s arrival in Korea. He barely had the heart to tell them that he was positioned five miles away.”

Through it all, the soldiers contended with chronic shortages of ammunition and supplies and the constant, bone-chilling cold that gives the book its title. One sergeant remembers two dozen huge trucks arriving after the pivotal battle of Chipyongni to haul away the many American dead. “The men doing the loading couldn’t lay the bodies down the way they normally might have, flattened out,” Halberstam writes. “The dead had been frozen as they had died, arms and legs sticking out in every direction, some frozen in firing positions. Their bodies had to be stacked awkwardly atop one another . . . like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle. It was the worst thing he had ever seen.”

While less vivid, Halberstam’s accounts of the international diplomacy that surrounded the war, as well as of the infighting among civilian and military authorities, can be quite revealing. For the most part, he is fair and judicious in apportioning blame (and occasionally praise), even if it takes on a second-guessing air in places. For example, he decries America’s headlong rush to demobilize its armed forces after the end of World War II, which tempted the Soviets and Chinese to snap up whatever countries looked vulnerable. That’s good advice, but did he really expect voters coming off four years of privation and heartbreak to accept America’s permanent militarization, including a peacetime draft? He also resorts to the common practice of cherry-picking intelligence data, reciting warnings that went unheeded even as he mentions incorrect reports (like a supposedly massive Chinese naval build-up in 1950) to which the military overreacted.

Halberstam is at his worst when he refights old partisan battles. A New York Yankees fan we know, who sometimes writes for AmericanHeritage.com, has told us that whenever he looks through old newspapers, he always checks the box scores and gives a silent cheer when the Yankees win (or the Red Sox lose). In The Coldest Winter, Halberstam adopts a similarly nuanced approach to political history, with a philosophy that can be summarized as “Democrats okay, Republicans bad.”

Sometimes the results are amusingly clueless, as when he expresses surprise that Gen. Douglas MacArthur, whose “instincts were more conservative than liberal,” would create an egalitarian democracy in Japan. Elsewhere they just make him sound simple-minded. In discussing the post–World War II political scene, he writes that Harry S. Truman’s “small-town roots were not that different from many of the Republicans who now became his most bitter political enemies, but his own personal odyssey more often than not had been much harder than theirs, and so he had grave doubts about some of the small-town verities that they so unquestioningly believed in.” Gosh, David, which team are you rooting for?

He continues: “In American politics of that period, people still voted their pocketbooks. . . . A small town of eight thousand might have one thousand blue collar workers at a plant, almost all of whom were Democrats; only a handful of a town’s residents—factory owners, managers, and ancillary local allies like the banker, the lawyer, and the doctor—were people almost sure to vote Republican.” Not only does this analysis fail to explain how the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress in the 1946 election; it breaks down when applied to the Solid South, where the factory worker, his boss, the banker, and everyone else voted Democratic—except, of course, those who were prevented from voting by force.

In cases like these, we see the perils of viewing the past through the lens of the present. To be sure, the study of previous wars yields many lessons of great value: the heroism of fighting men, the evils of totalitarianism, the vital importance of gathering reliable intelligence (and using it), the need for flexibility in response to shifting circumstances. These things have changed very little over the millennia. But party politics, international affairs, the chances of success in foreign interventions—these can be altered greatly in a few years or even months, making lessons much harder to draw.

The Korean War offers many instructive points to consider when analyzing modern world affairs, and for the most part Halberstam does an excellent job of elucidating them. Those who are looking for fresh questions to ask and new ways to look at the world will find many things to think about—and those in search of precedent to support their views will not be disappointed, regardless of what side they’re on.