The greatest gift a work of history can give is to take a subject that you thought you knew something about and to show you that either your knowledge was far from extensive or it was fundamentally flawed. Years ago, Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston’s book on Crécy complicated the narrative of that battle to such a degree that I’m still reeling from the discovery. Bruce Cummings’ history of the Korean War has achieved a similar feat. This slim 250-page volume radically reframes the war in a way that challenged all my base assumptions about what I thought I knew and has made me think about the Korean War in a completely different way. I’m not sure that I will ever be the same. In complicating the war, Cummings’ digs up hard truths that many would prefer to forget, and which are largely absent from a bittersweet if essentially triumphalist narrative of the war that prevails in many other accounts. This book is essential reading, but at the same time I’m not sure if its impact can be felt as keenly if you haven’t already read at least one other book on the subject which makes me hesitate to recommend it as the best introductory history of the topic.
One of my favorite books I read last year was David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, a brilliantly written and utterly engaging history of the Korean War by a man who showed significant mastery of the art of popular military history. While Halberstam often eviscerates American decision making and particularly MacArthur and his staff, at the end of the day The Coldest Winter does not particularly question whether the American intervention in Korea was overall a good thing. The North Koreans and the Chinese are portrayed sympathetically but we are told that the Americans, while misguided and often flawed, were on the right side of history. In that way it is broadly a positive history, while Korea was no World War II it also assures its readers that it was no Vietnam. Cummings’ gives his readers no such assurances.
It often goes unspoken, but since the Korean War is still technically ongoing it complicates how we think about what happened in 1950-3. There is a tendency to look at the current state of the peninsula and use that as justification for what happened in the 1950s. South Korea is now a thriving democracy and one of the largest economies in the world, while North Korea is a paranoid totalitarian state that let large swathes of its population starve in the 1990s. This is used to justify the American intervention in 1950 – we saved a democracy and its people even if we were ultimately unable to liberate the entire peninsula from autocratic rule. This is basically Whig historiography, though, where we use the modern end point as justification for the trajectory of history. The Korean War does much to challenge this conception and argues for a very different meaning for the war.
Cummings devotes relatively little time to the narrative of the war. The back and forth along the peninsula occupies just thirty pages. Instead, what he does is force the reader to fundamentally rethink what the war was, what it meant, and what we are refusing to acknowledge. At its core the Korean War was a post-colonial civil war, and in that way, it shares far more with Vietnam than we are usually prepared to admit. Cummings shows how the government of South Korea was assembled haphazardly by the United States after 1945 and was full of Koreans who had collaborated with the brutal Imperial Japanese colonial regime in the preceding decades. Far from a free and democratic society, South Korea was in many ways an extension of the practices of colonial rule – a deeply conservative government that perpetuated violence on anyone accused of dissent or leftist thinking.
In contrast, Kim Il-Sung was a famous freedom fighter against the Japanese and North Korea represented a genuine home-grown anti-colonial movement. The Korean War was a civil war between these freedom fighters and the US-created imperialist regime in the South. In this way Korea is very much like Vietnam, where the USA intervened in support of a failing colonial regime against a movement trying to liberate their country from foreign influenced rule.
Cummings does not attach any particular moral value to this assessment, his work is meant to correct our perspective rather than to judge it. That said, later in the book it becomes very hard to feel that the USA was particularly righteous in this war. Chapter six documents the atrocities of the “air war” in the later stages of the conflict. While many people familiar with the Korean War may know of MiG Alley and the early days of jet fighter aerial combat, those accounts focus on technology porn over the actual costs of the war. The reason those plane to plane dogfights were happening is because the USA was carpet bombing North Korea into oblivion – destroying virtually every village and caring not one bit for civilian casualties. That North Korea hates America is known, but if you consider what America did to them maybe one could consider that there is some justification. America destroyed their nation and forced them to completely rebuild it. In many cases these bombing runs likely constituted war crimes – violating agreements put it in place after World War II with regard to carpet bombing civilian targets.
Chapters five and seven, structurally framing the horrors of the bombing campaign in the book, are equally unrelenting in their discussion of violence against civilians. Chapter five documents the establishment of the South Korean state in 1945 and dives deep into the mass violence committed by the new state, with tacit US approval and support, against its own people. The massacres conducted in the southwest and on Jeju Island are documented in great detail. Chapter seven continues this theme into massacres committed during the war. While North Korean violence against civilians is often brought up in histories of the war, Cummings digs deep into the crimes committed by the South Korean and UN forces and shows that of the two it was the latter that was more violent. Some of the massacres committed by the South were even blamed on North Korean forces to push a narrative of the evil communist invasion. While that does not excuse North Korean atrocities, and Cummings does not suggest it should, it is a key part of the story that is almost always overlooked in narratives of the war.
All this evidence is supported by conclusions from truth and reconciliation committees undertaken by the South Korean government around the turn of the millennium, committees that the United States did not support and in fact largely seems to have hindered (even when the forced declassification of our own reports in 1999 showed that the South Korean evidence was correct). A South Korea that is prepared to stare its own dark past in the face is laid in stark contrast with an America that refuses to acknowledge its own crimes and prefers to believe a lie of a “limited war” to prevent the spread of communism. The Korean War is often known as the “Forgotten War”, but Cummings notes that in many ways it is a war that America has refused to reckon with even when it was happening. Forgotten implies that we ever once knew what it was we did in Korea, and Cummings suggests that we never even reached that basic level of understanding of what Korea meant.
There is more to The Korean War than documenting war crimes, including a fascinating chapter that shows how it was the Korean War rather than WWII or Vietnam that led to the current status quo of the USA acting as policeman to the world with military bases flung across the globe, but I should leave at least some aspects of the book for readers to discover for themselves.
Cummings is an excellent writer, although given its content I would not call this an easy read. He does much to explain the context of Japan, China, and Korea in the lead up to and aftermath of the Korean War so no familiarity with east Asian politics is particularly necessary to read The Korean War, but he doesn’t particularly hold readers’ hands when it comes to US politics. If you don’t have some knowledge of the Truman administration and McCarthyism you might find the names thrown at you to be overwhelming. While a determined reader who is prepared to look up individuals they don’t recognize can tackle The Korean War as their first history of the subject, I think it may be best appreciated as a companion to another work on the subject – a counterpoint of sorts. Given that Cummings offers his own critiques of The Coldest Winter in the book (while at the same time praising Halberstam and having his own positive opinions of the work), I think that presents the ideal companion.
Overall, I can’t recommend The Korean War enough. It has fundamentally changed my perspective of the war but beyond that it has made me rethink how I feel about America’s place in the world. At the end of the book Cummings argues that in time the Korean War will be seen as one of the most important conflicts of the twentieth century, far from forgotten it will be fundamental to our understanding of how the Cold War and post Cold War world order came to be. After reading his book, I think he may be right.
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