Review by New York Times Review
David Halberstam's last book is a study of the Korean War. DAVID HALBERSTAM discovered his calling in Vietnam, watching men die for a strategic lie. A gutsy reporter not yet 30, he warned of a quagmire in the making by a government in denial. It made him angry, then famous, and he became a lover not of war but of war stories, the grit and stink of combat, be it military, political, bureaucratic or some combination thereof. With remarkable energy, he went on to produce 20 books in 40 years, most notably big heaves about America's war machine but also voluminous studies of our news media and auto industry, and poignant memorials to the civil rights marchers of the '60s and the fallen firefighters of 9/11. As if to relieve those brooding labors, he alternated them with worshipful accounts of athletic feats, but they, too, focused on competitors under stress and reflected on their sweat-soaked devotion and their betrayals, by fate or higher authority. Still more such books were in his head when Halberstam, a vibrant 73, was killed in a car crash last April. There can be no consolation for that loss, but perhaps solace of a kind in knowing that just five days earlier he had finished his most operatic war story, "The Coldest Winter," about the Korean War of 1950-53. The book was born of his desire to resurrect a war "orphaned by history," a war that was cruel and inconclusive and claimed the lives of 33,000 American soldiers, 415,000 South Koreans and about 1.5 million North Korean and Chinese troops. Combining his typically prodigious research with more than a hundred interviews, Halberstam has graphically (if sometimes tediously) recreated the trench warfare up and down that frozen peninsula, juxtaposing accounts of the petty backstabbing and vainglorious posturing at the Tokyo headquarters of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the catastrophic miscalculations by Truman, Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung of North Korea. The result is an outsize but fascinating epic directed simultaneously to battle buffs and pacifists, history enthusiasts and political moralists. With sometimes numbing detail and elegant maps, it evokes the nobility and crazy heroism of outnumbered American grunts in a dozen of the war's critical engagements, cinematic scenes that alternate with crisp essays about the mindless way the war began, the reckless way it was managed and the fruitless way it ended. An infantryman near Haktong-ni in South Korea, 1950, after his buddy was killed. Halberstam's subject is illuminated, of course, by the fact that Korea was but the first of three American conflicts of his time that presidents ordered for dubious strategic ambitions, without the comprehension of either Congress or the public. Korea was where America first revealed its imperial ineptitude and where our military leaders vowed never again to wage a ground war in Asia. As Halberstam barely needs to mention, then came Vietnam, then Iraq. War in Korea was provoked by "a colossal gaffe" - the failure of Secretary of State Dean Acheson in a routine speech to include non-Communist South Korea in America's Asian "defense perimeter." That oversight caused a reluctant Stalin to unleash North Korea's army for what Kim promised would be a three-week blitzkrieg to reunite all Korea. He very nearly succeeded. MacArthur, the reigning American monarch over a defeated Japan, had done nothing to prepare either his own or South Korea's forces for the attack. The first night, he mistook it for "a reconnaissance-in-force"; a day later he decided in panic that "all Korea is lost." America's leaders knew little about either half of Korea, but haunted by the failure to deter Nazi aggression in the 1930s and by the "loss" of China to Communists in 1949, they decided instantly to resist what they insisted on viewing as a coordinated Sino-Soviet drive to Communize the world. Ever the patriot, Halberstam bemoans not so much the fact of our intervention as the mind-set behind it, which led to "an American disaster of the first magnitude, a textbook example of what happens when a nation, filled with the arrogance of power, meets a new reality." The underrated North Koreans virtually destroyed two American regiments and cornered our retreating forces for three blood-soaked months at the edge of the Sea of Japan. MacArthur responded with his career's most brilliant tactical stroke, which paradoxically inspired an even greater disaster. Instead of reinforcing his surrounded troops, he threw a Hail Mary pass, staging an amphibious landing at Inchon, 150 miles to the north, seizing Korea's narrow waist and decimating the suddenly encircled North Korean invaders. Feeling invincible now, MacArthur refused advice that he settle for a defensible line well south of the restive Chinese forces massing at their Korean border. And with Truman rushing across the Pacific to bask in the general's glory, no one was able to restrain him. MacArthur ordered the swift conquest of all North Korea, confident that the Chinese would not dare challenge him. But hundreds of thousands of Chinese lay in wait to spring American history's greatest ambush. Halberstam writes: "The bet had been called, and other men would now have to pay for that terrible arrogance and vainglory." Yet again the Americans were routed, and MacArthur's obsessive reaction was to agitate for total war against China, nuclear if necessary. He had to be fired by Truman in April 1951 so that more sober generals could settle for "a grinding, limited war" that asked men to "die for a tie," a stalemate that eventually restored the original border between the Koreas. With his experience of Vietnam still fresh, a young Halberstam had brilliantly mocked "the best and the brightest" who misled us into that debacle. It was his way of honoring the sacrifices he had witnessed and exposing the ruinous politics that had driven American policy. At the end of his life, unfolding a similar plot in Korea, he settled for a subtler, even ambiguous diagnosis. "The Coldest Winter" still venerates the grunts on the ground and damns their feckless commanders. It once again recalls the ugly fears and smears of the partisan wars at home that provoked politicians to send Americans to bleed needlessly abroad. But in looking over the carnage that was Korea, Halberstam wonders quietly about "the odd process - perhaps the most primal on earth - that turned ordinary, peace-loving, law-abiding civilians into very good fighting men; or one of its great submysteries - how quickly it could take place." And so he ends his last great book not in his own voice but with the reflections, in old age, of Sgt. Paul McGee, who felt that despite the public's disillusionment and forgetfulness, he and his friends had done the right thing. They "had shared those dangers, and that set them apart from almost everyone else for the rest of their lives," Halberstam reports. "They did not need words to bind them together; their deeds were the requisite bond." McGee felt that "he was glad he had gone and fought there. It was a job to do, nothing more, nothing less, and when you thought about it, there had not been a lot of choice." David has left us with a long salute to duty. Korea was where America first revealed its imperial ineptitude. Then came Vietnam, then Iraq. Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The Times, was once David Halberstam's colleague at the paper and later became his neighbor in New York.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
"*Starred Review* Halberstam's shockingly sudden death in an April 2007 automobile accident was an irreplaceable loss of a great journalist and historian, making a poignant valedictory of this history of the Korean War. It bears the salient traits of Halberstam's singularity: his working combination of deep-drilling interviewing with thorough research, a detached awareness of historical trends, and, as he writes in this work, a respect for the nobility of ordinary people. The connections he makes between them and leaders who perceive themselves as directing events in this case, between General Douglas MacArthur and platoon-level soldiers who bore the consequences of his decisions dispels history as an impersonal force and restores it as a tangible, visceral process influenced by character. Halberstam's acuity about weapons, terrain, and the mysterious transformation of a man into a warrior focuses on the Chinese intervention in the Korean War in November 1950, and considers particularly how American soldiers and marines at all ranks recovered from initial defeats, learning how to thwart the enemy's successful tactics. Commanding and evocative as Halberstam is about the brutal face of battle, his career's forte of explaining political contexts is the crucial advantage of this work, offering answers on how America became involved in the Korean conflict. Unabashed about extolling heroes and condemning villains, Halberstam's final work stands as the coda to his enduringly famous The Best and the Brightest (1972)."--"Taylor, Gilbert" Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
At the heart of David Halberstam's massive and powerful new history of the Korean War is a bloody, losing battle fought in November 1950 in the snow-covered mountains of North Korea by outnumbered American GIs and Marines against the Chinese Communist Army. Halberstam's villain is not North Korea's Kim Il Sung or China's Chairman Mao or even the Soviet Union's Josef Stalin, who pulled the strings. It's the legendary general Douglas MacArthur, the aging, arrogant, politically ambitious architect of what the author calls "the single greatest American military miscalculation of the war," MacArthur's decision "to go all the way to the Yalu [River] because he was sure the Chinese would not come in." Much of the story is familiar. What distinguishes this version by Halberstam (who died this year in a California auto crash) is his reportorial skill, honed in Vietnam in Pulitzer-winning dispatches to the New York Times. His pounding narrative, in which GIs and generals describe their coldest winter, whisks the reader along, even though we know the ending. Most Korean War scholars agree that MacArthur's sprint to the border of great China with a Siberian winter coming on resulted in a lethal nightmare. Though focused on that mountain battle, Halberstam's book covers the entire war, from the sudden dawn attack by Kim Il Sung's Soviet-backed North Koreans against the U.S.-trained South, on June 25, 1950, to its uneasy truce in 1953. It was a smallish war but a big Cold War story: Harry Truman, Stalin and Mao, Joe McCarthy and Eisenhower, George C. Marshall and Omar Bradley, among others, stride through it. A few quibbles: there were no B-17 bombers destroyed on Wake Island the day after Pearl Harbor, as Halberstam asserts, and Halberstam gives his minor characters too much attention. At first MacArthur did well, toughing out those early months when the first GIs sent in from cushy billets in occupied Japan were overwhelmed by Kim's rugged little peasant army. MacArthur's greatest gamble led to a marvelous turning point: the invasion at Inchon in September, when he outflanked the stunned Reds. After Inchon, the general headed north and his luck ran out. His sycophants, intelligence chief Willoughby and field commander Ned Almond, refused to believe battlefield evidence indicating the Chinese Communists had quietly infiltrated North Korea and were lying in wait. The Marines fought their way out as other units disintegrated. In the end, far too late, Truman sacked MacArthur. Alive with the voices of the men who fought, Halberstam's telling is a virtuoso work of history. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This final work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author (The Best and the Brightest), who died in April, looks at the "Forgotten War." Not a battle history, it concentrates largely on the politics of the situation and how the Truman administration found itself fighting a war it did not want with a commander it could not trust. Much of the book concerns the MacArthur headquarters and the general's insistence on carrying out his own agenda rather than Washington's. The author expresses a great deal of anger at Col. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence chief, who baldly falsified his estimates to agree with the boss's fanciful preconceptions of the Chinese. The result was a huge U.S. military debacle culminating in the disastrous retreat from the Yalu in 1951. Halberstam offers interesting discussions of the China Lobby and the effect it had on the debate. The run-up to the war and the first year are covered in great detail, but the book gets sketchier after Matthew Ridgway's assumption of supreme command in 1951. Some rough organization and lack of narrative covering the later years suggest that Halberstam's death may have cut short his work. Still, this is a vital, accessibly written resource for students of the period and is sure to be widely read. Recommended for most collections.-Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KS (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The master journalist's 21st and final book: a magisterial account of the Korean War. Halberstam's latest (The Education of a Coach, 2005, etc.) is a vivid chronicle packed with anecdotes and the stories of great men. North Korea's Kim Il-Sung was a loyal Stalinist. America had installed Syngman Rhee in the South because he was Christian, spoke English and was the only Korean known in Washington. Halberstam describes both as thoroughly unpleasant autocrats but fierce nationalists, each equally anxious to unite Korea under his own leadership. Kim yearned to invade, but Stalin refused to provoke America until 1950, when he gave reluctant permission. Far East Commander Douglas MacArthur insisted North Korea would never attack; after being proven wrong, he remained mysteriously inactive for several days. Everyone feared Stalin was launching World War III and cheered Truman's decision to intervene. At first, MacArthur handled the defense competently; his brilliant behind-the-lines landing at Inchon in September 1950 shattered North Korea's army. Ignoring Washington's suggestions to stop at the 38th parallel, MacArthur pushed north toward the Chinese border, despite good intelligence that Chinese units were pouring south. Once again, he dithered when disaster struck and did little to rally his defeated forces. A national icon but detested by his superiors, MacArthur finally overstepped by loudly advocating total war against China. Truman dismissed him, an act now considered courageous that at the time outraged the nation. MacArthur's successor, WWII hero Matthew Ridgway, performed brilliantly in stopping the Chinese, but more than two years of bloody stalemate followed. As America's first modern war without victory, Korea was the conflict everyone wanted to forget. It was a black hole of history, Halberstam writes, a war with China that never should have happened. Another memorable slice of 20th-century history, measuring up to such earlier Halberstam classics as The Best and the Brightest (1972) and The Powers That Be (1979). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
