Forgotten War No More

Review by Chris Manson October 18, 2007 Issue

While reading David Halberstam’s gargantuan The Fifties, I found the segments on the Korean War particularly interesting. Those chapters, and Halberstam’s earlier Vietnam history The Best and the Brightest, were surely the launching points for what is certain to be remembered as the definitive book about the forgotten war.

The Coldest Winter—subtitled America and the Korean War—accomplishes what 11 seasons of TV’s M*A*S*H did not. It puts the reader right in the middle of those harsh Korean snows. We get a painfully realistic sense of what it must have felt like to be outnumbered 10-to-1 by Chinese troops—a serious underestimation on General Douglas MacArthur’s part. The ever-decreasing morale of the troops is realistically depicted, too—thanks in part to communications foul-ups, lack of support at home, and the ineptitude of the South Korean troops our boys were trying to help.

Halberstam was a young journalist covering the Vietnam War when he won his Pulitzer Prize. For The Coldest Winter, the author did not have the first-hand experience that served The Best and the Brightest so well. In the last decade, Halberstam conducted more than 100 interviews and consulted numerous books written about the conflict. In the process, he has rendered all of those previous volumes obsolete.

While Halberstam makes the argument this war was a futile and ridiculously mismanaged one, he uncovers some real heroes in these pages. Sadly, more than a handful of these men—from high-ranking officers to lowly enlisted—were passed over for awards due to the egos of some senior officers and the increasingly political war that was being waged far beyond Korea’s 38th Parallel.

The most compelling battles were those fought between MacArthur and President Harry S. Truman’s administration. Additionally, there were skirmishes between MacArthur—his Tokyo headquarters sycophants in tow—and the real commanders who traversed Korea’s impossible terrain. Halberstam digs deep into MacArthur’s history, and comes up with a portrait of a third-generation military man who thumbed his nose at his Commander-in-Chief as well as anyone else who did not agree with him. Interestingly, this larger-than-life character never spent a single night in Korea.

The Coldest Winter lacks photographs, but Halberstam’s vivid narrative more than compensates. Any reader who has spent time in a military tactical operations center will recognize the maps that are included throughout, busy with lines and arrows and rectangles. The book is preceded by detailed descriptions of the weaponry used by both sides.

Of course, we’ve been up to our ears in war lately, from the never-ending fiasco in Iraq to the inevitable showdown with Iran. And there is the around-the-world genocide that is largely ignored by the mainstream media. Recently, Ken Burns offered yet another take on World War II with his PBS miniseries The War (along with the companion book and soundtrack CDs). A large—and at times, admittedly difficult—volume on the Korean War is not an easy sell, but it would be a disgrace if The Coldest Winter went ignored by all but the military history buffs.

Russell Baker’s closing remarks make a strong case for David Halberstam as the leading chronicler of our times, but you only need to read The Coldest Winter to reach that conclusion yourself. Halberstam was killed in a car accident in April; just weeks after he put the finishing touches on this exhausting work. Will anyone step forward and attempt to fill this man’s very large shoes?

Hyperion, 719 pages. Available from booksellers and local libraries.

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