THE KOREAN WAR
Max Hastings
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987
389 pp., $22.75
KOREA: THE WAR BEFORE VIETNAM
Callum A. MacDonald
New York: Free Press, 1986
330 pp., $24.95
Coming as it did between the monumental struggle of World War II and the trauma of Vietnam, the Korean War has been ignored by historians and the public. Outside of the film Pork Chop Hill, which appeared in the 1950s, and the television show (and movie) M*A*S*H, American popular culture has largely forgotten Korea. After a quarter of a century, the war is still awaiting a historian who will do for it what Samuel Eliot Morison and Russel Weigley did for the American Navy and Army of World War II. The Korean War, in this year of the Seoul Olympics, is also waiting for its John Hersey, Norman Mailer, Herman Wouk, and even its John Del Vecchio and James Webb, writers whose reputations rest on their World War II and Vietnam War novels.
This is puzzling to those knowledgeable about Korea. The war was certainly not an insignificant "police action" (the term used by the Truman administration) similar to Grenada. Although they agree as to the Korean War's importance, Max Hastings and Callum A. MacDonald disagree significantly regarding its origins and results. For Hastings, a prominent military historian and the editor of The Daily Telegraph of London, the United States made the proper decision in deciding to fight for the freedom of South Korea. While his essentially military history does not dwell on the war's political and diplomatic aspects, he leaves no doubt that American and South Korean sacrifices were not in vain. North Korea, Hastings writes, is "among the most wretched, ruthless, restrictive, impenitent Stalinist societies in the world." South Korea, in contrast, "is one of the most dynamic industrial societies Asia has spawned in the past generation."
Few Westerners, looking upon the respective circumstances of North and South Korea today, can doubt that the West's intervention in 1950 saved the Southerners from a tragic fate, and indeed opened the way to a future for them infinitely better than anything attainable under Kim II Sung. If the Korean War was a frustrating, profoundly unsatisfactory experience, more than thirty-five years later it still seems a struggle that the West was utterly right to fight.
For Hastings, the political results of Korea mark it as "one of the most significant, compelling clashes of arms in this century."
MacDonald, in contrast, is one of Hastings' few Westerners. A professor of American studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, MacDonald is part of the left-wing British intelligentsia for whom anything the United States does in the world arena is automatically tainted. Influenced by American revisionist historians, MacDonald charges that America's intervention in Korea was the logical result of a counterrevolutionary Asian strategy rather than of a fear of Soviet expansionism. He bends over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to America's enemies. Thus, in contrast to Hastings, MacDonald attempts
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