The War for Korea, 1950–1951: They Came from the North (review)

This magisterial account of the crucial first year of the Korean War marks a significant advance in English-language scholarship on both the Korean conflict and the early Cold War. Allan Millett, the dean of U.S. military historians, is at the height of his powers in this second volume of his planned trilogy on the Korean War. He draws on prodigious research in U.S., South Korean, and United Nations (UN) sources, including previously neglected oral history collections, as well as Russian and Chinese documents and memoirs that have been translated into English. With the benefit of long acquaintance with South Korean military personnel, Millett evaluates the role of the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the war, both military and civilian, more fully and evenhandedly than any previous account in English. His account of the remarkable performance of the Chinese officers and soldiers who drove the UN/ROK forces out of North Korea in November–December 1950 is similarly judicious.

Millett’s focus remains, nonetheless, on the U.S. war in Korea. He emphasizes that when the war began the U.S. 8th Army was in poor condition—a result of the extensive demobilization following World War II. He details the difficulties inherent in the emergency mobilization required to fight the war and how the physical limitations of U.S. military power shaped tactical and strategic decisions, particularly the reliance on air power. He vividly details the problems both the South Koreans and the U.S. forces experienced with poor communications, inadequate weapons and training, disease, and battle fatigue. He argues persuasively that U.S. air power, by far the most readily available force, was the most important factor in stopping North Korean tanks in the first weeks of the war, preventing a quick victory by the North.

Highly critical of the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, Millett argues that the general’s famed amphibious landing at Inchon on 15 September 1950 did little to defeat the North Korean army. He demonstrates that the breakout of ROK/UN forces from the Pusan perimeter later that month was facilitated instead by the steady increase in troops and weapons arriving through the port of Pusan. He is less persuasive in arguing that the Inchon landing sowed the seeds of the strategic disaster of the Chinese entry. ROK/UN forces advancing steadily from the South in September–October 1950 would in any case have pursued the Korean People’s Army north of the 38th parallel and thus presumably would have triggered Chinese intervention.

Millett provides a straightforward and balanced discussion of the atrocities frequently committed by both South and North Korean soldiers and the efforts of UN forces to restrain their South Korean allies from revenge killings. The intensity of the inter-Korean struggle supports Millett’s thesis that the war of 1950–1953 should be seen as the continuation of a civil war begun in 1948, “the aborted Phase Three of an insurgency, transformed into a conventional war of ‘liberation’ or ‘aggression’” (p. 13). However, although from a military point of view the conflict could be seen as proceeding in stages from 1945 onward, from a political point of view the creation of separate states in Korea in 1948 fundamentally altered the nature of the decision to mount a conventional military offensive against the rival state. As Millett describes, Stalin based his decision regarding Kim Il-Sung’s request to invade South Korea on his assessment of whether such action would prompt the United States to intervene, thus risking the outbreak of a wider war. The Soviet leader’s view of the impact a military campaign against the ROK would likely have on the Soviet Union’s worldwide conflict with the United States was decisive. Millett notes in his illuminating discussion of the military preparations for the invasion in the spring of 1950 that Stalin could have called off the offensive at any time “had he so chosen...