The Korean War: A Selected Bibliography
By Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., U. S. Army (Retired)
Clay Blair was only too accurate when Be entitled his 1987 Korean War epic The forgotten War. Caught in the middle between World War II, which ended five years earlier, and the Second Indochina War, which began six years later, the Korean War fell through the crack.
Less than a decade after the American withdrawal from Vietnam, Richard Dean Burns and Milton Leitenberg’s The Wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos 1945-1982: A Bibliographic Guide (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Cleo Information Services, 1984) had more than 6,000 entries through 1982 alone. By comparison, almost three and one-half decades after the end of the Korean War, Keith D. McFarland’s The Korean War: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1986) listed only some 2,600 titles.
Public and academic disinterest in the Korean Conflict can perhaps be understood, but less understandable (and less forgivable) is the official disinterest, especially that of the Army’s Center of Military History. Forty years after the war began, the Army, which furnished some 86% of the infantry manpower for the war and took 86% of the casualties, still has not completed its five-volume history of the war.
Still not in print is the center’s volume on theater logistics as well as Ebb and Flow, the critical second volume on the war that covers the period from the Chinese intervention in November 1950 through the withdrawal from North Korea, General Matthew Ridgway’s revitalization of Eighth Army, the relief of General Douglas MacArthur, the massive Chinese “fifth phase” offensive in April 1951, and the subsequent stalemate of the battlefield. It is encouraging to note, however, that the current director of the Army’s Center of Military History, Brigadier General William Stofft, is working to rectify this dereliction. An unscheduled volume. The Medic’s War, by Albert E. Cowdrey was published in 1987 and Billy C. Mossman’s Ebb and Flow (now in final draft) is scheduled to be published later this year by the U. S. Government Printing Office along with a new volume, Shelby Stanton’s Korean War Order of Battle.
Fortunately, there are other sources on the war. Among the most valuable for those wishing to get a feel for the times as well as an appreciation of how the war was conducted at the higher levels is the five-volume Hearings to Conduct an Inquiry into the Military Situation in the Far East and the Facts Surrounding the Relief of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur from his Assignments in that Area, Joint Senate Committees on Armed Services and Foreign Relations, 82d Congress, First Session (U. S. Government Printing Office, 1951). Labeled the “Great Debate” on the Korean War, it features testimony from General MacArthur, Secretary of Defense George Marshall, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Omar Bradley, and the other members of the Joint Chiefs.
Then there are the accounts of the war by the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Air Force. The Navy’s official history, James A. Field’s History of United States Naval Operations, Korea (U. S. Government Printing Office), was published in 1962. Its companion volumes, Malcolm W. Cagle and Frank A. Manson’s The Sea War in Korea and Arnold S. Lott’s Most Dangerous Seas were published by the U. S. Naval Institute in 1957 and 1959 respectively. Unfortunately, all three volumes are out of print.
Also out of print is the Marine Corps’s outstanding five-volume U. S. Marine Operations in Korea 1950-1953. Published by the U. S. Government Printing Office, the series includes Lynn Montross and Captain Nicholas A. Can- zona’s The Pusan Perimeter (1954), The lnchon-Seoul Operation (1955), and The Chosin Reservoir (1957); Lynn Montross and Majors Hubard D. Kuokka and Norman W. Hicks’s The East Central Front (1962); and Lieutenant Colonel Pat Meid and Major James M. Yingling’s Operations in West Korea (1971). These are available for $22.50 each from R. J. Speights, P. O. Box 530322, Austin, Texas 78753-0322.
First printed in 1961, Robert E. Futrell’s The United States Air Force in Korea 1950-1953 (U. S. Government Printing Office) was revised and reprinted in 1983. A distillation of a three- volume earlier work, this is among the best of the one-volume histories of the Korean War.
Although it later stumbled badly, the Army began well with its projected five- volume U. S. Army in the Korean War series. Also all published by the U. S. Government Printing Office, the first volume was Roy A. Appleman’s South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu (1961), which covered the first five months of the war. This was followed by Walter G. Hermes’s Truce Tent and Fighting Front (first published in 1966 and republished in 1988), which covered the period July 1951 through the end of the war.
The last volume published so far is James F. Schnabel’s Policy and Direction: The First Year (1972), although a pamphlet-sized paperback, Terrence J. Gough’s U. S. Army Mobilization and Logistics in the Korean War: A Research Approach, was published in 1987, evidently as a preliminary work to the long- delayed volume on theater logistics. Schnabel also collaborated with Robert J. Watson on The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy: The Korean War (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1979).
These official histories of the Korean War, available in most military libraries, are the best sources for serious students of the conflict, since most of the “civilian” histories of the war are merely rewrites of the official version. But there are some remarkable exceptions. The best book written on the Korean War, and certainly the most influential as far as the Army is concerned (at one time in the 1970s, the Army gave it to all newly promoted generals), is T. R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York: Macmillan, 1963). A tank platoon leader and company commander in the Korean War, Fehrenbach’s impressionistic look at the war at every level is in a class by itself. Coming close, however, is a newer work, Clay Blair’s The Forgotten War: America in Korea 1950-1953 (New York: Times Books, 1987), which takes leadership as its central theme. (See the review in the April 1988 Proceedings.) Of the general histories of the war, these are among a highly recommended few that add a new dimension to the official version. Another volume that has received high marks from reviewers is Donald Knox’s The Korean War, Pusan to Chosin: An Oral History (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985).
Works on the war from the enemy’s perspective remain almost nonexistent. British war correspondent Russell Spurr’s Enter the Dragon: China’s Undeclared War Against the U. S. in Korea 1950- 1951 (New York: Newmarket Press, 1988) is a recent exception. (See the review in the January 1989 Proceedings.) So too is Jurgen Domes’s P’eng Te-Huai: The Man and the Image (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986).
Some useful new books have appeared on narrower aspects of the war. Rosemary Foot’s The Wrong War: American Policy and the Dimensions of the Korean Conflict 1950-1953 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) takes a fresh look at, among other things, the U. S. threat to use nuclear weapons to bring the war to a close. Reexamining the surprise of the North Korean invasion and particularly the Chinese intervention are Ephraim Kam’s Surprise Attack: The Victim’s Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch’s Military Misfortune (New York: The Free Press, 1989), and several contributors to The Korean War in History, edited by James Cotton and lan Neary (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989).
Among autobiographies and biographies of Korean War personalities published in the 1980s are Omar Bradley’s A General’s Life: An Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983); P’eng Te Huai’s Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal (1898-1974) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1984); Thomas J. Schoenbaum’s Waging Peace and War: Dean Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy and Johnson Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988); and D. Clayton James’s The Years of MacArthur: Triumph and Disaster 1945-1964 (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1985), far and away the best book written on MacArthur.
Other recent Korean War books worthy of note are Richard P. Hallion’s excellent The Naval Air War in Korea (Baltimore, MD: Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1986); Max Hastings’s The Korean War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), which examines the war from a dyspeptic British perspective (see the August 1988 review in Proceedings)-, William B. Hopkins’s One Bugle No Drums: The Marines at Chosin Reservoir, 1950 (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1986), which gives a firsthand account of the Marine withdrawal front the Chosin Reservoir (and contains a recently declassified analysis of the battle by historian S. L. A. Marshall); Roy E. Appleman’s bone-chilling East of Chosin: Entrapment and Breakout in Korea, 1950 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 1987), which details the travail of Task Force MacLean; and James L. Stokesbury’s A Short History of the Korean War (New York: Morrow, 1988). Finally, there is Brigadier General Roy K. Flint’s “Task Force Smith and the 24th Infantry Division” in Charles E. Heller and William A. Stofft’s America's First Battles 1776-1950 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1986).
A complete bibliography of the Korean War would include many other worthwhile books. It is significant, however, that quite a few of the books listed here have been written in the past five years, indicating that the neglect visited upon the conflict may at long last be coming to an end. And that’s an encouraging sign, for like it or not, the Korean War is the paradigm of war in the nuclear age. We ignored its lessons in Vietnam; we ought not do that again.
Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten 1943-1946
Philip Ziegler, editor. London: William Collins Ltd., 1988. 357 pp. Photos. Maps. Append. Gloss. Ind. $30.75 (27.67).
Reviewed by Captain John Coote, Royal Navy (Retired)
If ever it had been necessary, Philip Ziegler confirmed his integrity as a historian with his official biography (Mount- batten, New York: Knopf, 1985). It was to the credit of all concerned, not least the family executors, that Ziegler did not then shrink from hinting that not everyone would wholly share the charismatic royal sailor’s own assessment of his place in history. The personal diaries, now published for the first time, cover Mountbatten’s years as Supreme Allied Commander Southeast Asia from November 1943, when the Japanese invasion of India was about to be turned back, until his triumphal return to London in time for the Victory Parade in June 1946.
By any reckoning these years were Mountbatten’s most successful. He deployed all his charm, qualities of leadership, and powers of intrigue in high Places, climaxing with the meticulously stage-managed surrender ceremony at Singapore. General Douglas Mac Arthur, whom he admired and in some ways resembled, would have envied his theatrical mastery of the occasion.
Every day he dictated a brief record of events for a limited distribution; King George VI in Buckingham Palace was on the list. Partly for security reasons at the time, the diaries now read like an expanded version of his desktop daily appointments book. Meetings are tantalizingly described as “interesting,” but rarely embellished by their agenda, let alone the decisions reached, except where the editor has added a footnote. Sometimes I found it helpful to refer back to the 1985 official biography for background.
As it is, the editor’s note and preface are the most informative parts of the hook. Thereafter Ziegler does not provide much editorial linking narrative. He has cut the original material by one-third. He might usefully have gone further by giving us more than the precise timings of each of Mountbatten’s flights around his far-flung theater. The reader is left wondering how Mountbatten escaped the fate of so many other World War II military leaders who were killed flying in slow, cumbersome aircraft through appalling Weather to airstrips with minimal air traffic control facilities. Following the trips is perplexing, since the book’s only map is on a scale of 300 miles to the inch and shows few of his destinations.
Much of Mountbatten’s energy was devoted to getting the chain of command in the Southeast Asia theater sorted out to his satisfaction and convincing other senior officers that his was the best way. These officers had very different ideas of where Mountbatten’s authority impinged on their own. For example, when Mount- batten arrived, he found that most of the U. S. air forces reported to his new deputy, General Vinegar Joe Stilwell, whose orders from Washington made him nominally answerable to General Chiang Kai-shek. At sea the situation was exacerbated because the Royal Navy’s Eastern Fleet was commanded by Admiral Sir James Somerville, whose instructions from the Admiralty were ambivalent. He was in any case 18 years senior to the new Supreme Commander and had an impressive record as a fighting admiral leading the Carrier Force “H” from the battle cruiser Renown, whereas Mount- batten had been on the losing side of every encounter he had with the enemy at sea, all in the rank of captain.
Nothing in the diaries suggests that these potential problems had been properly discussed in London, let alone Washington, Chungking, or Canberra, before Mountbatten eagerly accepted his appointment and flew out to New Delhi.
No one questions that Mountbatten’s informal “gather-round-me” talks to units in the field did much for morale and persuaded the troops that the monsoon season provided an opportunity to beat the Japanese in conditions that tactical commanders had hitherto declared off- limits. Mountbatten always managed a few words in the native tongue of the dozens of nationalities that made up his command of ultimately more than one and a quarter million men. Later his energetic wife Edwina swept through the medical and prisoner-of-war rehabilitation services like a cyclone. The diaries emphasize how they vied with one another to meet the more demanding schedules of meetings and visits.
It says much for Mountbatten’s personality that he seems to have ended up firmly established in the respect of most top commanders, notably getting warmer cooperation from the Americans than his own countrymen. Even Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, not a notable Anglophile, became an enthusiastic supporter, whilst Vinegar Joe stopped calling him “Pisspot” and dubbed him “Glamour Boy” instead, as the official biography told us. Meanwhile, the Viceroy of India, Field Marshal Earl Wavell, seems to have been supportive of “the Boy Champion,” as he is reputed to have called him, though he probably breathed a sigh of relief when Mountbatten moved his staff of 2,000, including the banqueting manager of the Dorchester Hotel in London’s Mayfair, to Kandy in the hills of Ceylon.
A Leaf Upon the Sea: A Small Ship in the Mediterranean, 1941- 1943
Gordon W. Stead, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988. 218 pp. Photos. Maps. Figs. Append. Bib. Ind. $27.95.
Reviewed by Captain T. C. Pullen, Royal Canadian Navy (Retired)
The felicitous title of this little book alludes in part to Malta, which at that time was “the key to a crucial theater [the Mediterranean] whose loss might well have lost the war or at least extended it for years ... it is so pitifully small. Seen from aloft it has been likened to a leaf upon the sea.” It refers also to the small craft, the 110-foot Fairmiles, or MLs as they were known in the Royal Navy, in which author Gordon Stead served so diligently in some of the more hazardous parts of the Mediterranean during the dark days of World War II.
The author supports his story with a number of photographs, including scenes of Maltese devastation and one of Winston Churchill clambering aboard his command. The maps are excellent and will serve to guide a new generation of readers unfamiliar with those historic places and events. Noteworthy and without exception is that every place named in the text appears on a nearby map. The preface includes useful guidelines for readers unfamiliar with naval jargon and, finally, there are mercifully few word- processor-inspired typographical errors.
In 1940, at the age of 27, impatient to become involved and unwilling to wait for Canada to enlist his services. Stead joined the Royal Navy as a lieutenant on loan from the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve. It was not long before he found himself in one of the more violent theaters where he learned quickly in what he aptly calls “the pressure cooker of war.” To Americans, of course, this was the “war before their war.”
He describes in spirited and often humorous language an aspect of the naval war that seems to have escaped the notice of historians and others. To quote the dust jacket:
“The 3rd Flotilla of Motor Launches . . . was the first to go abroad from the British Isles and the only one sent into the eye of the storm [the Mediterranean] as the larger ships were driven out. Stead recalls passages in disguise through hostile waters, successful fights with aircraft, the siege and blitz of Malta [more than 2,000 air raids and 16,500 tons of bombs], major convoy battles, minesweeping in the forefront of the action, and the landings that drove [Benito] Mussolini’s Italy out of the war.”
During this Stead seems to have led a charmed life, all of it at sea and much of it in command. He had his share of golden moments, none of which seem to have slipped through his fingers.
The author shows his high regard for the Royal Navy by noting its
“competence . . . honed in centuries of vital duty . . . whatever material concessions it had to make were more than offset by its spirit. Its strategic touch was sure ... its handling of manpower superb. Its finest regular officers were at sea and in key positions ashore, its few duds where they could do no harm, and its discipline was administered with kindness and good humour. With no personal hatred for the enemy, the sea war was run like a rugby game, which imparted an unemotional elan that took its units through adventures they should not have survived on any rational assessment.”
Stead adapted swiftly to service in the Royal Navy and wartime life at sea in the Third ML Flotilla. His award of the Distinguished Service Cross and Bar attest not only to his adaptability, competence, and leadership, but also to the regard his superiors felt for this young Canadian in their midst. This admirable personal memoir of what MLs did during those unforgettable days has been a long time making its appearance but is certainly worth the wait. Leaf Upon the Sea fills another small but important hiatus in the history of World War II.