Hodge and his colleagues placed the overwhelming burden of blame for their difficulties upon the Russians: Soviet-directed internal policies in the North and skillful subversion in the South. The Americans detected the organizing hand of Moscow in a host of political groups in South Korea. In this they greatly overestimated both Soviet will and capability in the South at this period. There is no doubt that Communists throughout Korea wished to create a united nation under their own control. But many non-Communist Koreans also incurred American animosity by their enthusiasm for national unification, merely because Hodge and his colleagues considered this unattainable under non-Communist rule. The U.S. military government in Korea -- like its counterparts in other areas of the world at this period -- dismissed the possibility that its own manipulation of conservative forces in a society was comparable, morally and politically, with the Soviets' sponsorship of Communist groups in their own zone. Western historians support the ultimate benevolence of American influence upon the postwar political settlement in the developed societies that came under their control, above all, those in Europe. But in Korea, as in other less-developed nations, it was infinitely less easy to discover any prospective anti-Communist leadership possessed of the political maturity, the commitment to tolerable moral and political standards, which would render it truly worthy of the support of the United States.

Now the bad news 😊 The North Koreans are mostly treated as a mass of homogeneous, evil people, who are ruthless and barbaric. Though there is a lot of description of individual American or British soldiers, there is no mention of an individual North Korean by name. Except for Kim Il Sung. The North Koreans are regarded as a primitive, evil horde who are uncivilized and the author probably feels that they deserved what was coming to them. The Chinese soldiers are also mostly depicted this way – as an evil horde who keep on coming and fighting in the night. The Chinese get slightly better treatment though – individual Chinese soldiers are sometimes mentioned and the author is able to interview them and we learn their stories. One of the reasons for this could be that North Korean veterans of the war would have been inaccessible to Western correspondents, as their country was closed and continues to be closed to outsiders today. The same would have been true with respect to Chinese veterans, but there was a thaw between the Chinese and the West in the 1970s, which continued into the 1980s, when Hastings wrote this book, and so he would have been able to speak to some of the Chinese veterans of the war. But, inspite of this small silver lining, it is hard to ignore the fact that the North Koreans and the Chinese are treated as barbaric, primitive, evil hordes, who are out to destroy the beautiful freedom created by Western countries. Despite their initially limited goals, the Chinese soon, like the Americans, adopted “mission creep” and aimed for a decisive victory on the Peninsula, a decision that would cost them dearly in manpower as the war ground on. At the same time, US forces were woefully unprepared for war, as “nearly every unit in the army was under-strength, under-trained, and under-equipped.” Many GIs couldn’t even grasp the basics of handling a rifle, and more than one had been deployed from quiet postings with almost zero training but with their records marked combat-ready.The suspicions of many Korean Nationalists about the conduct of the American military government were redoubled by the fashion in which the National Police, the most detested instrument of Japanese tyranny, was not merely retained but strengthened. It was the American official historians of the occupation who wrote that "the Japanese police in Korea possessed a breadth of function and an extent of power equalled in few countries in the modern world." The 12,000 Japanese in their ranks were sent home. But the 8,000 Koreans who remained -- the loyal servants of a brutal tyranny in which torture and judicial murder had been basic instruments of government -- found themselves promoted to fill the higher ranks, while total police strength in South Korea doubled. Equipped with American arms, jeeps, and radio communications, the police became the major enforcement arm of American military government and its chief source of political intelligence. A man like Yi Ku-bom, one of the most notorious police officers of the Japanese regime, who feared for his life in August 1945, was a year later chief of a major ward station in Seoul. A long roll call of prominent torturers and anti-Nationalist fighters under the colonial power found themselves in positions of unprecedented authority. In 1948, 53 percent of officers and 25 percent of rank-and-file police were Japanese-trained. By a supreme irony, when the development began of a Constabulary force, from which the South Korean Army would grow, the Americans specifically excluded any recruit who had been imprisoned by the Japanese -- and thus any member of the anti-Japanese resistance. The first chief of staff of the South Korean Army in 1947 was a former colonel in the Japanese Army. Overall, I recommend Hastings’ account as an eye-opening account of the Korean War that neatly balances military details with wider analysis. 29 years after its publication, it would be fascinating to read a complementary account drawing on USSR and Chinese archives that may have subsequently become available. What has not changed, sadly, in the apparent inability of the US to learn foreign policy lessons. Hastings quotes Colonel John Michaelis as follows: The essence of McCloy's argument, which would serve as the justification for all that was done in Korea in the three years that followed, was that it was an idealistic fantasy to suppose that the United States could merely hold the ring, serve as neutral umpires while Koreans worked out their own destiny. Some Korean leaders must be singled out from the mob of contending factions and assisted to win and retain power. It must surely be the men on the spot, Hodge and his staff, who were best qualified to decide which Koreans these should be. The American military rulers employed no further deceits to dignify the process by which they now set about installing a congenial regime. Just as the Russians, at this period, were securing control of North Korea for a Communist regime, so the only credentials that the Americans sought to establish for the prospective masters of South Korea were their hostility to communism and willingness to do business with the Americans. If this appears a simplistic view of American policy, the policy itself could scarcely have been less subtle. In this readable,insightful, and well-written volume, Hastings aims to paint a “portrait” of the war and does not claim to provide anything resembling a comprehensive history, although in the end the book is a fine ba

Among his bestselling books Bomber Command won the Somerset Maugham Prize, and both Overlord and The Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize. South Korea can best be described as a powder keg ready to explode at the application of a spark," Hodge's State Department political adviser H. Merell Benninghoff reported to Washington on September 15. "There is great disappointment that immediate independence and sweeping out of the Japanese did not eventuate. Although the hatred of the Koreans for the Japanese is unbelievably bitter, it is not thought that they will resort to violence as long as American troops are in surveillance....The removal of Japanese officials is desirable from the public opinion standpoint, but difficult to bring about for some time. They can be relieved in name but must be made to continue in work. There are no qualified Koreans for other than the low-ranking positions, either in government or in public utilities and communications." Ferris Miller, the naval officer who was one of the advance party at Inchon in September 1945, left the country at the end of that year. But he was that rare creature -- an American deeply attracted by Korea: "Somehow, it had got into my blood. I liked the place, the food, the people." In February 1947 he returned to Seoul as a civilian contract employee of the Military Government. He was dismayed by what he found: "Everything had gone downhill. Nothing worked -- the pipes were frozen, the electricity kept going off. The corruption was there for anybody to see. A lot of genuine patriots in the South were being seduced by the blandishments of the North. There were Korean exiles coming home from everywhere -- Manchuria, China, Japan. Everybody was struggling, even the Americans. The PX was almost bare of goods. Most of our own people hated the country. There were men who came, stayed a week, and just got out. There were Koreans wearing clothes made of army blankets; orphans hanging around the railway stations; people chopping wood on the hills above Seoul, the transport system crumbling. It was a pretty bad time."The Korean War is journalist and military historian Sir Max Hastings’ compelling account of the forgotten war. American policy was now set upon the course from which it would not again be deflected: to create, as speedily as possible, a plausible machinery of government in South Korea that could survive as a bastion against the Communist North. On December 12, 1946, the first meeting was held of a provisional South Korean Legislature, whose membership was once again dominated by the men of the Right, though such was their obduracy that they boycotted the first sessions in protest against American intervention in the elections, which had vainly sought to prevent absolute rightist manipulation of the results. A growing body of Korean officials now controlled the central bureaucracy of SKIG -- the South Korean Interim Government. In 1947 a random sample of 115 of these revealed that seventy were former officeholders under the Japanese. Only eleven showed any evidence of anti-Japanese activity during the Korean period. More battles. UN forces have huge loses. Of course communists have greater loses, but they don't care much about this.

I have read several other books about the Korean War, but never felt those books helped me grasp the whole. This book did. The Council was doomed from the outset. It reminded most Koreans far too vividly of their recent colonial experience -- its chairman had been a member of the Japanese governor-general's advisory body and an enthusiastic supporter of the Japanese war effort. Yet Yo Un-hyong's "unhelpful" behavior, contrasted with the "cooperative" attitude of the conservatives who joined the Council, reinforced the American conviction that the conservatives -- above all, the members of the Korean Democratic Party -- were the men to work with. But what now was to be done about the reality in the countryside -- that reports reaching Hodge declared that while the KPR was "organized into a government at all levels," the KDP was "poorly organized or unorganized in most places?"In October 1945 the Americans created an eleven-man Korean "Advisory Council" to their military governor, Major General Arnold. Although the membership purported to be representative of the South Korean political spectrum, in reality only one nominee, Yo Un-hyong, was a man of the Left. Yo initially declined to have anything to do with the Council, declaring contemptuously that its very creation "reverses the fact of who is guest and who is host in Korea." Then, having succumbed to Hodge's personal request to participate, Yo took one look around the room at the Council's first session and swept out. He later asked Hodge if the American believed that a group which included only one nonconservative could possibly be considered representative of anything. An eleventh nominated member, a well-known Nationalist named Cho Man-sik, who had been working in the North, never troubled to show his face.