The Korean War at Sixty: New Approaches to the Study of the Korean War ed. by Steven Casey (review)

This fine collection of essays commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Korean War makes a significant contribution to English-language scholarship on that pivotal conflict. The authors broaden the investigation of the war by addressing new questions or bringing new perspectives to old questions about important issues of alliance diplomacy, military strategy, public opinion, and historical memory.

In “An Alliance Forged in Blood: The American Occupation of Korea, the Korean War, and the US-South Korean Alliance,” William Stueck and Boram Yi supplement the extensive scholarship on U.S. strategic calculations regarding the Korean peninsula with a subtle, balanced examination of the sources of the mutual mistrust and disrespect that quickly took root between U.S. occupiers and newly liberated Koreans. Drawing on Korean-language sources and U.S. Army documents, they chart the evolution of attitudes that contributed to Washington’s failure to extend a security guarantee to the Republic of Korea (ROK)—a guarantee that might have deterred the North Korean attack of 25 June 1950.

In “China and the Dispatch of the Soviet Air Force: The Formation of the Chinese-Soviet-Korean Alliance in the Early Stage of the Korean War,” Shen Zhihua extends his pioneering research into Chinese sources on the war. Deepening our view of Kim Il-Sung’s subordination to Iosif Stalin, Shen reveals that from July through September 1950 the North Korean leader repeatedly asked for Soviet permission to request Chinese assistance. PRC officials expressed eagerness to intervene, but Stalin refrained from giving the necessary approval. The Soviet leader also refused to provide air cover for Chinese troops deploying in the northeast of China. By the time Stalin finally asked China to intervene on 1 October, it was too late to prevent the near-destruction of the Korean People’s Army and enemy occupation of North Korea.

Robert Barnes explores new territory in “Branding an Aggressor: The Commonwealth, the United Nations and Chinese Intervention in the Korean War.” He argues persuasively that when Commonwealth countries joined in opposition to U.S. efforts to brand China an aggressor in late 1950, they were able to restrain the United States from taking an action they feared could expand the conflict. In “Lost Chance or Lost Horizon? Strategic Opportunity and Escalation Risk in the Korean War, April-July 1951,” Colin Jackson of the U.S. Naval War College presents a carefully reasoned claim, based partly on Chinese and Soviet documents, that the United Nations (UN) command squandered an opportunity to advance the front line to the narrow neck of the peninsula in the wake of the failed Chinese offensive of April-May 1951. The militarily unsound decision to suspend offensive operations resulted from the political environment in the United States created by the removal of General Douglas MacArthur, which made it difficult to support any action that appeared to intensify the war. In Jackson’s view, Washington’s failure to take advantage of Chinese weakness “redefined the war in a way that surrendered all of the UN’s major advantages” (p. 113) and prompted the U.S. military to draw questionable “lessons” from the war in Korea.

The book’s editor, Steven Casey, explores the little-understood issue of how the U.S. military reported casualties as the war unfolded. In “Casualty Reporting and Domestic Support for the War: The U.S. Experience during the Korean War,” Casey provides a fascinating discussion of the practical difficulties of casualty reporting and the complex interaction between the military’s attempt to soften the blow, Republican efforts to discredit the Truman administration, and the media’s eagerness to report the resulting controversy. Casey concludes that this dynamic led to an exaggerated sense among the American public that the war was unusually bloody. Charles Young addresses another aspect of Washington’s management of public perceptions of the war. In “POWs: The Hidden Reason for Forgetting Korea,” he discusses the awkward disconnect between the...