The Korean War: A History [Paperback]

This is a useful introduction to the Korean War. This is not a conventional military history and anyone looking for a conventional military history will be disappointed. Cumings, a leading expert on modern Korean history, is primarily interested in debunking common American myths about the Korean war. The book is organized as a series of essays on aspects of the Korean war. Topics covered include the ultimate genesis of the war as a civil conflict between Korean clients of the Japanese imperium and anti-colonial insurgents, the essentially arbitrary post-WWII division of Korea, the nature of the American occupation and direct rule of Korea, the efforts of the US to rollback Communism in the Korean peninsula, the remarkably brutal nature of the conflict - including our use of saturation bombing, and the last consequences of the war for both Korea and the USA.

Cuming's analysis is that the War was an essentially unavoidable civil conflict between Koreans who has been Japanese clients, and who became our clients, and anti-Japanese Korean insurgents allied with the Chinese Communists. Like many local-regional conflicts of the Cold War, the local issues became entangled in the East-West rivalry, greatly exacerbating the conflict. As Cumings points out, the war was started by the North Koreans led by Kim Il Sung but against the background of constant conflict between the Northern and Southern regimes, and given the resources (approval of the US), the Rhee regime in the South would have happily struck first. Cumings devotes quite a few pages to the many, many crimes of the Korean war. As is typical of civil wars, there were enormous atrocities committed by both sides. Partly because of the debunking intent of this book, and partly, I suspect, because documentation is better, there is more discussion of the crimes committed by the South Korean regime. Cumings also discusses US atrocities, and probably more important, the remarkably intense bombing campaign conducted by the US. Cumings emphasizes the centrality of Korea to this phase of Cold War diplomacy. This includes the American tendency to see Korea as an economic adjunct of Japan, a point appreciated quite well by many nationalist Koreans, and the way in which the Korean conflict contributed to the formation of the national security state we still live with. The consequences for Korea were just as great, including the establishment of the authoritarian South Korean state and what Cumings describes nicely as the nationalist monarchy of the North, a garrison state with few peers in recent history.

While there is a lot of useful information and analysis in this book, the format and manner of presentation are less than optimal. The individual chapters are somewhat overlapping essays. Cumings has written each of these sections in a somewhat self-consciously literary style which sometimes impairs readability. In addition, Cumings presents some important arguments in pieces in different chapters, which degrades the quality of his analysis. The discussion of the American tendency to see Korea as a economic adjunct of Japan is an example. Some of the writing has an almost angry tone; Cumings is clearly frustrated by American ignorance of Korea and its history. I think Cumings would have done better to use a more conventional narrative structure and adopt a more neutral voice in this book. There are also, I think, a few errors of interpretation. Cumings, for example, contrasts the limited containment policy advocated by George Kennan with the rollback advocated by Dean Acheson. Kennan, however, was an advocate of rollback at one point in his career.

I have to comment on some of the more negative reviews of this book. This is not a "far-left" view of the war. The civil nature of the Korean conflict, the authoritarian nature and brutal behavior of our Korean clients, the excessive nature of the American bombing campaign, and our primary interest in securing Japanese security, are not arguable points. Nor is Cumings an apologist for North Korea. Cumings own ideological orientation is probably revealed best by the fact that this book is dedicated to the late Kim Dae Jung, the courageous pro-democracy politician who was nearly killed by the authoritarian South Korean regime we supported.

My only gripe with this book is that its title "The Korean War" is misleading. "Essays on the Korean War in Korean and American Memory" would have been a more apt, but maybe less marketable, title. Thus, interested readers looking for a quick, up-to-date narrative of the period of combat involving the United States (1950-1953) might feel disappointed. I hope they will still read this literally eye opening book. After all, there is David Halberstam's recent opus magnum "The Longest Winter" that covers the "conventional" Korean War.

Professor Cumings--who has travelled in Korea and studied its history extensively over more than four decades--dispenses with the traditional story in chapter one and then moves on to uncover the dark sides of the conflict--covered up in Korea and repressed in America for decades. He explores the beginning of the conflict in the brutal Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 20th century, which created fierce guerilla resistance fighters (many of whom would fight for the North in 1950) but also collaboration among the economic and military elite (many of whom would become "our guys" in the South after World War II). He discusses the brutal violence used by corrupt southern leaders to suppress dissent BEFORE 1950, the merciless American air war, which employed napalm, against civilians, the massacres committed on POWs and civilians by both sides, and other topics most Americans never heard of back then and would prefer not to hear about now. After all, this was one of America's "good wars," even for most liberal commentators. Yet ignoring this history, as Cumings forcefully argues, prolongs the terrible traumas the war inflicted among all participants, and it makes it impossible to understand what is currently going on in Korea.

The book is full of revelations. I know a good deal about U.S. cold war policies, but had no idea that at least 100,000 south Koreans had been killed in brutal counterinsurgency operations by southern leaders--with American assistance--before 1950. That president Truman had actually signed the order to use nuclear weapons in April 1951 (Chinese restraint might have saved the world from nuclear war). That some of the worst Korean war criminals (and their families) who had collaborated with the Japanese regime ended up holding elite positions in South Korea for decades. That the Pentagon actively suppressed evidence of American war crimes and today refuses to pay compensation to the victims who are still alive...

Lastly, Cumings gives the Korean War the central place in recent U.S. and world history it deserves. He argues that it was the Korean War that created containment as it would be practiced outside Western Europe for the rest of the cold war and beyond (picking sides in postcolonial wars, controlling development by forcefully incorporating areas into the western economic orbit, justifying policies with anti-communism whether applicable or not). He confirms the judgment of other historians that it was Korea that sparked the national security state of permanent preparedness and the creation of what Chalmers Johnson has called an empire of bases.

The book reads less like a monograph than a series of essays. Cumings pulls no punches when criticizing American complacency and misjudgments, and he frequently inserts himself into the narrative. This is frankly a book for people who already know the basic conventional story and might be open to ponder its implications and neglected sides. Contrary to what some critics (who clearly have not read the book) have charged, Cumings not once excuses the violence, political persecutions, or cult of personality in North Korea. I kept track of how often he criticizes the North Korean regime and found him even-handed throughout the book. His acerbic criticism of U.S. attitudes toward Korea might be hard to swallow for some "patriotic" readers, but Professor Cumings knows his stuff.

One can disagree with his interpretation of details, but his central argument--that American leaders intervened in a civil war they did not understand on behalf of people they did not care about--is hard to refute. Powerful, even moving, history.

It is only fair to start by saying that this book was not as bad as I expected, despite its serious shortcomings. On the positive side, it seems that Professor Cumings has largely, though belatedly and grudgingly, come to terms with the appalling nature of the North Korean regime. Also, there are certainly things that I agree with that may surprise many Americans for whom the Korean War came out of the blue on June 25, 1950. I made many of the same points in a lecture on the Korean War's role in US foreign policy at the Citadel in Charleston in 2008. They include:

o The war had its distant origins in the 1930's in the political struggle among Koreans, mostly in exile in Manchuria, China and the US, to determine the shape of a future independent Korea. (But it is inaccurate to say that the Korean War started then.)

o The US occupation (1945-48) was headed by John Hodge, an honest and brave general who was completely unprepared for the political complexities of southern Korea. Hodge gravitated toward the most conservative Koreans and seemed to believe that all the rest were communists, when the actual situation was far more complicated. (After I gave my lecture, I learned from the Russian scholar Andrei Lankov that the Soviet occupation of the North was every bit as unplanned and ad hoc as ours was.)

o The conflict began in earnest from 1948 with the formation of the ROK in the South and the DPRK in the North. There followed many North-South military clashes along the 38th Parallel, then just a line on the map, totally unlike the present Demilitarized Zone. Some were battalion-sized battles.

o Before the North Korean invasion of June 25, 1950, there was horrendous violence in Korea, mainly in the South, with bloody guerrilla fighting that may have cost up to 100,000 Korean lives. Most, but not all, of the Southern guerrilla operations were supported by North Korea. The Rhee regime's successful suppression of these uprisings was extremely brutal, but its very success probably was the chief impetus for Kim's 1950 invasion. (Cumings makes the amazing assertion - on no apparent evidence - that Kim Il Sung's primary motivation in invading the South was to "settle the hash" of South Korean officers who had served the Japanese. Certainly, the Soviet officers who planned his invasion believed the objective was to ensure that Kim could rule an undivided Korea.)

o For the US, the Korean War, as a hot war within the Cold War, helped trigger the heavily militarized "national security state," that we still live in today. It also made inevitable our involvement in the Viet Nam War (the Second Indochina War), in which I served as a soldier for two and a half years between 1968 and 1972. But looking at the world of June 1950 through contemporary American eyes, it is no surprise that Truman and Acheson made the decisions that they did.

Cumings renders harsh judgments on the US conduct of the war, some of which are arguable. He sees the air war from a very different perspective than most American writers. While they tend to focus on US fighter pilots in MiG Alley, Cumings emphasizes the devastating bombing campaign, which obliterated North Korea many times over. The US planners applied the tactics they had just perfected against Japan and Germany in the much more confined space of North Korea. The result was horrifying and in the calm light of academic hindsight, more than was militarily necessary. In this and other books and documentaries, Cumings has complained about the "Hudson Harbor" campaign flown by lone B-29s to make North Korean leaders think we would use atomic bombs against them. I'm not sure why he objects to psychological warfare against Kim Il-Sung, unless he just doesn't like the idea of disconcerting one's foes in wartime.

Because Professor Cumings's government experience was limited to just six months in the Peace Corps (out of a two-year commitment) in Korea in the late 1960's, he seems to believe that the US Government is able to make detailed and Machiavellian plans and execute them flawlessly. Those of us with much more experience in government only wish that were true. The reality is that US officials make decisions in crises with imperfect knowledge of the situation. Cumings sees Acheson as a spider at the center of his web, making key initial war decisions without reference to Truman. Almost all sources say that Acheson was in close touch with Truman that June weekend while Truman was in Missouri. Besides, Acheson was following the Truman Doctrine the President had enunciated in 1947: "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." He knew Truman's mind.

For decades, Cumings has been obsessive about the point that North Korea's legitimacy derives from the long-ago struggle against Japan. It is important to know that North Korea was founded by guerrillas who were chased all over Manchuria by the Japanese 80 years ago, but that has zero nutritional value for today's North Korean population. North Korea is a stultified Confucian communist monarchy with an appalling human rights record and an economy wrecked by decades of willful ideological mismanagement, including the cost of a bloated military force. In 1788, Count de Mirabeau said "Prussia is not a country that has an army; it is an army that has a country." O'Neill's Corollary to Mirabeau's Observation is: "The same is true of North Korea." Kim Jong-Il apparently agrees, since he has made "military-first politics" (son-gun jong-chi) the basis of his rule.

This intense militarization of North Korea is not traditionally Korean: indeed, it is more like Imperial Japan - the same Japan that Kim Il-Sung fought against. The Kim personality cult and dynasty - now heading for the third generation - also recall the Japanese Imperial system. Is this Cumings's idea of a model for the 21st century?

It is easy for Cumings to attack South Koreans like Park Chung-Hee and General Paik Sun-Yup (Paik's preferred transliteration; not Son-Yop as Cumings has it) for serving as Japanese officers. But he glosses over the fact that Kim Il-Sung and his guerrilla comrades arrived in northern Korea in 1945 as Soviet Army officers, who had earlier served in Chinese Communist units. Thus, Kim and his cohort had served the two losers in the three-way battle for control of Korea that Japan had won by 1905. Was that better?

One of my biggest problems with this book is what I would call spurious or absent footnoting: Cumings makes some assertions that demand footnotes, but they are not always to be found. In other cases, he makes assertions and footnotes them, but the footnote doesn't fully address his claim. This is a serious lapse for the chairman of a history department at an important university.

I'll just give two examples. On page 34, he writes "formerly secret materials illustrate that in May and June 1953, the Eisenhower administration sought to show it would stop at nothing to bring the war to a close." There's no footnote. Some footnotes don't match the cited material. On page 197, Cumings asserts that rapes of Koreans by US military personnel frequently go unpunished (in the present), yet the footnote cites some State Department documents from long ago, attributed to Callum MacDonald's "Korea: the War Before Vietnam" (1986). The cited pages in MacDonald's book describe no such documents. Anyway, Cumings's assertion is untrue. Under the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), a credible charge of rape (or murder or robbery) by a GI against a Korean is tried in the Korean court system.

The penultimate sentence in the book reads "In the aftermath of war, two Korean states competed toe-to-toe in economic development, turning both of them into modern industrial nations." Really? The South has a one trillion dollar economy, the 14th largest in the world and the other's annual foreign trade equals about 48 hours' worth of ROK foreign trade. That one sentence says a lot about Cumings's approach to the peninsula's tortured modern history.

The South, which only surpassed the North in GDP in the mid-1970's, has a deeply rooted democracy and a capitalist economy which was resilient enough to bounce quickly back from the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the recent world recession, a country that has demonstrated international leadership in countless ways - including restraint at frequent North Korean outrages. North Korea is essentially a dangerous blot on the Asian map - a Zimbabwe with a nuclear weapons program.

One of Cumings's favorite words is "solipsism," which could easily be applied to himself. His arch and self-absorbed writing style will not gain a wide audience among the Americans for whom he says he was writing. I have given the book two stars for its facts but none for Cumings's interpretation.