The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
By David Halberstam
Hyperion, 719 pages, $35
Talk about the fog of war. This was a war conducted in fog:
The fog of the Cold War, which transformed nationalism into ideological struggle. The fog of incendiary domestic politics in the U.S., shaped by the China lobby and McCarthyism. The fog of post-revolutionary China, warped by Mao Tse-tung’s sense of destiny and instinct for despotism. The fog of Joseph Stalin’s Russia, where nothing was as it seemed and relations with the Soviets’ communist colleagues were even more obtuse than relations with the capitalist running-dog enemy. The fog of both Koreas, one run by a maniacal ally of the communists, the other by an egomaniacal ally of the Americans. And of course the fog of Douglas MacArthur, as tyrannical and egomaniacal as anyone in this story or any other.
All of which will make you wonder why we have all but purged the Korean War from our memory and why it took more than half a century and the storytelling skills of David Halberstam, in his last book, “The Coldest Winter,” to render it one of the most compelling tales of the 20th Century.
Halberstam, who died in an automobile crash in California in April, has written an unforgettable book about a forgotten war. He has shown, not for the first time, how the best and the brightest fumbled a war in Asia, in part by showing the tragic flaws of leaders who should have known better or, in the case of MacArthur, planned better, listened better and behaved better.
The book has several themes, including the interplay between domestic and foreign policy (a common theme of our more recent wars, Korea through Vietnam and then all the way to Iraq), the way established lessons of geopolitics are almost always wrong (the lessons of Munich, later the lessons of Vietnam), and the notion that Korea was, more than anything else, a war of miscalculations.
There was the American miscalculation that put Korea just outside the American defense perimeter. There was the Soviet miscalculation that allowed the administration of President Harry Truman to cloak its war effort as a United Nations initiative. There was the communist conviction that the Americans would not intervene if Kim Il Sung invaded South Korea. There was the American miscalculation that the war would be a cakewalk.
“After that, in the single greatest American miscalculation of the war, MacArthur decided to go all the way to the Yalu [River] because he was sure the Chinese would not come in, and so made his troops infinitely more vulnerable,” Halberstam writes. “Finally, Mao believed that the political purity and revolutionary spirit of his men greatly outweighed America’s superior weaponry (and its corrupt capitalist soul) and so, after an initial great triumph in the far North, had pushed his troops too far south, taking horrendous losses in the process.”
Americans remember Vietnam far more vividly than Korea, and sometimes they fold the Korean stalemate into the Vietnam quagmire, but in truth the Korean War was different from, and in many ways far more dangerous than, the Vietnam War. Much more was at stake, and much more was in play, in Korea, than in Vietnam, in part because Stalin and Mao were at their prime and were prime players. The Cold War was younger then, more unstable.
To this task — breathing life into a war long ignored or forgotten — Halberstam brings the tools of a journalist proven in the arts of seeing the tragic ironies of war. Indeed, this volume is classic Halberstam: the long, stretching sentences in the service of sweeping ideas and insights. But we are accustomed to seeing Halberstam the reporter at work. In his last book we see, finally, Halberstam the stylist at work, too, and the result is war writing of an intensity and depth that is evocative of Norman Mailer and of an entirely different war and era:
“All of the wounded in the perimeter knew what was up. None of them wanted to be left behind for the Chinese. Soon after his return, some of them who were still partially ambulatory, started coming up to [Sgt. 1st Class Bill] Richardson, crying, telling him not to leave them, please, dear God, not to leave them, not for the Chinese, please dear God take them, don’t leave them there to die. Was it possible, he wondered, to do your duty, to follow the orders of your superiors, orders you agreed with in the end, and get as many men out as best you could, and yet feel worse about yourself as a human being?”
This being a Halberstam book there are also lengthy asides, not so much to permit the reader to catch his breath but to permit him to catch up with the background that made the Korean War era so complex, so bitter, so fraught with rivalry and resentment.
And so in the course of this narrative are small, brilliantly sketched portraits of the figures who defined the era, including Joseph McCarthy, Henry Luce, George C. Marshall, Matthew B. Ridgway, Dean Acheson, George F. Kennan, Chiang Kai-shek and, of course, MacArthur, Mao, Stalin and Truman. This is a cast without peer in the 20th Century, the only possible exception being that of the World War II era that foreshadowed and in many ways created this conflict.
Today hardly an American schoolboy or schoolgirl knows a whit about the Inchon landing, the pleas to unleash Chiang, the battle for Pork Chop Hill. Hardly anyone knows how unprepared were America’s soldiers, how shabby was their equipment, how ghastly were the fighting conditions, how shocking was the early success of the North Koreans and, later, the Chinese, how big was the toll (33,000 American lives), how long-standing were the resentments of the men who served there, some of whom had served in World War II. “The implication that U.S. soldiers in Korea were more a police force than an army was a source of considerable bitterness to many of the men who went there,” Halberstam writes.
The Korean War was nothing if not the outgrowth of the Cold War, and so it was a war over territory but also one fought in the name of ideology. “Without the threat of global Communism, America cared noting about Korea; with that threat Americans were willing to fight and die for it,” Halberstam writes.
But the struggle between capitalism and communism was just one of the battles of the Korean War. There was the conflict between each side’s expectations for easy victory and their failure to achieve it; there was the clash between the goals of American officials in Asia and those in Washington; there was the conflict between military command and civilian command — and in all those disputes the central figure was MacArthur. He was a larger figure at the time than anyone in the American tableau, including the president. This disequilibrium could not survive, and didn’t.
This dispute turned hot when the war turned bad. “The war, which the president had thought was virtually over, had not only been enlarged, but the commanding general was now surfacing as the administration’s most serious adversary, as much a political as a military one, blaming the administration for a lack of support, and in effect for the defeat,” Halberstam writes.
Thus the titanic struggle between the military commander in Asia and the commander in chief in Washington.
“The general wanted to expand the war, and the president, fearful of possible military confrontations elsewhere, wanted to localize and then end it,” Halberstam writes. “MacArthur had moved fatefully from being a military man, at least ostensibly carrying out the orders of the president and his military superiors, to becoming a dissenting policy man, armed with the exceptional powers and influence granted by his long service, his uniform, and his formidable political allies in Congress and the media.”
This conflict was resolved the only way it could be, with the dismissal of MacArthur — one of the few times, as Luce’s Time magazine put it, when an unpopular man fired a far more popular one. America could afford a stalemate in Korea, but not one between the president and a general.
Halberstam finished this book just five days before he died. It was the product of a decade of work but of four decades of rumination. It may be his best book, or, at the very least, along with “The Best and the Brightest,” one of the bookends of a remarkable lifetime dedicated to understanding how power is used, misused and misunderstood. We may have forgotten the Korean War, but this volume is a reminder of what we should have remembered in history and, with the Halberstam oeuvre now complete, what we will miss.
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David M. Shribman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of American politics, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
