Before you came to the books, what interested you in studying the Korean War?
I went to the peace corps in korea when I was trying to avoid the war corps in vietnam. the Peace Corps is not a substitute for military service, but provides a deferment. I was quite surprised at the relationship Americans in Seoul had with Koreans in the late 1960s when I was there. the Americans lived in compounds and there was very little interaction with the Koreans. So I became interested in the origins of the US-Korea relationship. then i went to grad school and ended up doing a dissertation on the united states. occupation in korea immediately after world war ii, before the korean war. As I did, it occurred to me that I was learning about the origins of the Korean War. there is very little literature i can find in the usa. uu., apart from what the academics have done, which will tell you what the long background of the korean war was. It usually looks like thunder that came on a Sunday morning, like Pearl Harbor.
You are reading: Best books on the korean war
Your first choice is John Merrill’s Korea: The Peninsular Origins of War.
Like many of the best books on the Korean War, this one is out of print. when david halberstam was writing his book on the korean war a few years ago he wrote that he went to a public library and found 88 books on the vietnam war and four on the korean war and i think that says a lot about the general missing of scholarship and interest in the Korean War in the United States.
john merrill’s book is one of the best. it draws on a lot of archival research and looks at the domestic rise of the korean war in the late 1940s rather than this idea that it started in june 1950, which is of course the official american position . He was the first American to write about a rebellion on the island of Cheju, off the southern coast, where at least ten percent of the population was killed in a very brutal campaign of repression. It’s a very good book.
The Next Step Is Steven Casey’s Selling Out of the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States.
yes. this is a recent book, and it is very well researched. I think for laymen trying to understand what historians do, it really helps to know that you can’t cover a topic without using archives and primary sources. also look at previously classified secret documents. all of this information gives us a window into what really happened (as opposed to what was supposed to happen), and it’s also irrefutable evidence. what the author found with all his research is that the us. The government waged a major campaign to massage public opinion about the Korean War, both in the United States and globally.
what kind of things were they doing?
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A set of files I reviewed at the state department is very typical. You may find the embassy in Guatemala trying to refute an article in the local press praising the If Stone book, the hidden history of the Korean War. in south africa they would answer a letter to the editor in the johannesburg newspaper. It’s just amazing how much money and personnel the US uses. had to push his interpretation of the Korean War.
which was what?
Basically, both South Korea and the US. uu. they were totally innocent and that north korea, backed by the soviet union and china, launched an unprovoked invasion that was valiantly resisted. this is actually what many influential people believed. another thing the usa did was censor the battlefield. the first six months of the war were not censored, so you get really interesting books. if i had a sixth book to recommend to you, it would be cry korea by reginald thompson, a british reporter, which was written in 1952. he covered the war in the first six months and said it was a very different war than world war ii. it was really like what we came to understand as the nature of the vietnam war. In particular, Thompson uncovered an extraordinary number of atrocities committed by the South Korean government and saw that the United States was turning a blind eye to the situation. and it was when the British and Australian reports about it came out, in the late 1950s, that censorship descended on the battlefield. For the next two years, what you learned about the war was what you got from General MacArthur’s headquarters or the State Department.
You talk about how the US manipulated press coverage of the Korean War, but you have some critics who say you’re a revisionist historian too quick to criticize the US role and too eager to gloss over petty crime. of the North Koreans. how would you answer them?
Well, the last thing you said is completely untrue, so I would tell you that it’s completely untrue that I overlooked what the North Koreans were doing. what my critics have done is ignore the atrocities in south korea, which we now know had a ratio of six to one to the atrocities in north korea. that has been proven by a truth and reconciliation commission that worked for years in south korea. when south korea democratized, we got a lot more information about stuff like this.
I was the first person (except for former officials) to use the US archives. uu. occupation in korea, so there was no history to review, except the official history, which was full of holes. and I really don’t think any self-respecting historian should be anything but a revisionist. if a book doesn’t tell new things and revise our understanding of what happened, what good is it? but unfortunately, particularly in this country, ‘revisionist’ is a term you can label a person with and then others will freak out and not read their work.
your next book is a novel: ha jin’s war trash.
ha jin’s novel is obviously based on his or his father’s experience in the korean war. there are some very crude and striking descriptions. she didn’t have access to south korea, but she has this wonderful ability to treat everyone fairly and to listen to the songs of the female guerrillas who were captured in the prison camps in south korea and enjoy listening to them. he does the same to the North Korean and Chinese soldiers and civilians who got caught up in the battle.
I just thought it was a true story and very insightful. sounds so true when you know what’s in the archives, even though he didn’t do any archival research. It was based on a very truthful account of soldiers, particularly Chinese, who came to Korea and fought there for two and a half years.
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jump to korea: the war before vietnam, by callum macdonald
Callum was a friend of mine, just because I read his book and met him, and I think this is one of the best books on war. He makes the point that can also be drawn from Reginald Thompson’s book: that the Korean War was much more like the Vietnam War than any previous war. it had very changeable lines. the guerrillas were heavily involved, particularly during the first year or so. There were atrocities and the kinds of things we’ve come to associate with the Vietnam War. i also think the book is overlooked because callum died of pancreatic cancer when he was still very young. It was a terrible loss for his family and also for literature.
your last option is isidor feinstein stone’s hidden history of the korean war.
This book is very interesting. i f stone was a famous iconoclastic investigative reporter. His method was to read a bunch of newspapers every day, cut them out, and then read what the government was saying publicly through government reports, speeches, and the like, and then try to figure out what was going on. and he got a lot of things right about the korean war using that method. in the early 1950s he was condemning the carpet bombing that the u.s. made in north korea. this was an enemy that had almost no defense and no air power. I don’t think many people understand that North Korea suffered the same kind of firebombing that the British and Americans suffered in World War II against Japan and Germany, and yet North Korea was a small country.
particularly if stone were to mention the widespread use of napalm in korea; most people identify that with vietnam. I sometimes assign this book to my students, not because the korean war narrative is necessarily so good (we now know much more than stone could have known), but because it is such a good book to look at and learn how to read. a newspaper or an official government report. it is also a very lively book.
my final question: i think most people in the west have a very definite, negative image of north korea, perhaps based on very little real knowledge of the place. What is your own vision of the country?
Well, I think the contemporary North Korean regime is just a horrible regime. for over ten years he has imposed hardship and death and famine on his own people and it is quite natural for people today to look at kim jong il in his outrageous outfits and see him as a caricature of a communist despot and then transport that to the time of the korean war. The fact is that, in 1950, North Korea was eminently stronger than South Korea. it had a legitimacy that south korea did not have, because its top leaders had fought the japanese in a long and difficult war, while law enforcement in south korea was made up almost entirely of generals and officers and, in particular, , policemen who had served japan. so it was really a kind of anti-colonial war that the us got involved, but when they did, it morphed into some sort of global crusade against communism.
And do you see the current regime as a kind of legacy of that time?
well, for them you have a direct line going all the way back to the korean war, and even earlier, to the 1930s. there are 23 people in the north korean politburo and 15 of them are over 80 years old. they lived through the korean war, and in north korean culture the patriarchy is very deep, much deeper than in south korea. I think you have a fossilized regime that has been holding on for the last 20 years since the berlin wall came down, and holding on mainly because they know that if they give up they will lose their lives, and perhaps the lives of their families, and ultimately Ultimately, they will also lose the Korean War.
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