The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Book

I like the idea of David Halberstam more than his books. I liked the fact that a well-educated, erudite journalist with diverse interests lived in this world, writing big, messy, sprawling books about those interests, whether they be Vietnam, the Portland Trailblazers, or a single firehouse. Unfortunately, I've never really liked his books.

Halberstam is famous for his style, which really isn't a style at all. His writing has been called "workmanlike," which is to say it is skillful, but not that skillful. He is known for those long, repetitive, oblique sentences, such as that famous opening to The Best and the Brightest. In The Coldest Winter, Halberstam turns his researching and interviewing skills to the Korean War. The result is a big, confusing book.

The story starts after the invasion, and then sort of loops back to tell us what happened. Throughout the book he intercuts between matters on the ground, in Korea, and the political arena in Washington D.C. Such intercutting can work just fine; here, though, it makes for a muddle. Then, instead of finishing his story, describing the stalemate between 1951-53, during which time several major battles occurs, Halberstam just ends the book. He gives a brief overview about what happened, but really, in essence, he just stops telling the story. This is a book about The Korean W--.

Halberstam has always been masterful at fleshing out a historical personage. Indeed, I sort of thought The Best and the Brightest was one long character notebook, in which Halberstam told us about the lives of various Harvard and Yale grads. This ability is put to good use here:

"He was born Kim Song Ju in the village of Nam-ri on April 15, 1912, just two years after the Japanese began their colonial era in Korea. If one imagines some child of modern Europe growing up in Holland or France under a Nazi occupation that lasted for the first thirty-three years of his life, Kim's anger and his rigidity can be better understood."

Halberstam strains hard to evoke the vividness of combat. In The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam wrote about the Vietnam War without ever mentioning the existence of a war. Here, he dives right into combat, using a wealth of personal anecdotes. These scenes, though, are incredibly dry. His sources, the men on the ground who fought the North Koreans and Chinese, are understated by nature and profession. Halberstam, for whatever reason, tends to mimic that understatement.

"[T:]he Chinese struck in force. It was like suddenly hitting a brick wall, Paik later wrote. At first the ROK commanders had no idea what had happened. Paik's Fifteenth Regiment came to a complete halt under a withering barrage of mortar fire, after which the Twelfth Regiment on its left was hammered, and then his Eleventh Regiment, the division reserve, was hit on its flank and attacked from the rear. The enemy was clearly fighting with great skill. Paik thought it must be Chinese. He reacted by reflex, and thereby probably saved most of his men. He immediately pulled the division back to the village of Unsan. It was, he said, like a scene from an American Western, when the white folks, hit by Indians and badly outnumbered, circled the wagons. His division had walked into a giant ambush set by the Chinese."

Yawn. I don't know why Halberstam's retelling is so lifeless. Perhaps it's the astronomical number of commas he uses, breaking every sentence up into four or five or six clauses. It also doesn't help that his most interesting characters, a number of intrepid young American officers, appear, disappear, then reappear much later, so that whey you are with them in their defining moments, you've already forgotten who they are.

For me, the most enjoyable part of this book is the trashing of Our Lord and Savior Douglas MacArthur. A lot of conservatice critics have complained that much of the book is dedicated to this pursuit. Indeed, Halberstam does end his mammoth telling shortly after MacArthur is sacked by Truman. Still, it is deserved.

MacArthur was a vainglorious, pompous, pretentious, incapable ponce. This has been shown and proven by countless historians. Not even William Manchester could save his reputation, though he devoted 800 florid pages to trying. MacArthur screwed up every which way in his career. He blew it in the Philipines, when he ignored warnings of an impending attack, and allowed his planes to be blown up on the runway long after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He showed it in his unwillingess to prep the Philipines for a Japanese invasion, believing they could never get within range without his airplanes spotting them. Then, after his mistakes forced his men into Corregidor, he snuck out in the dead of night, leaving John Wainwright and 70,000 American soldiers to march to Bataan. To double down on idiocy, he forced the Americans to recapture the Philipines, even though it was a sideshow to the actual strategy of island-hopping to Japan. In the first moments of the Korean War, MacArthur was to have said "All is lost."

American Caesar indeed!

MacArthur, of course, scored a coup at Inchon. Then he blundered his way towards the Yalu, let his men get cut to pieces by the Chinese - whom Mac said would never enter the war - then tried to get Truman to drop atomic bombs. And this man is a hero and icon? He makes a mistake and to cover it up, tries to nuke a billion Chinamen? Class act.

MacArthur was a dangerous man. He thought himself a god (which was probably why he did so well in postwar Japan, amongst people who believed in divine emperors. If Truman hadn't fired him, it probably would've become the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War.

I also ruefully enjoyed the takedown of MacArthur's staff. His chief intelligence officer, Willoughby, was frighteningly creepy. I could read between the lines with him...but no. Then there's Ned Almond, who acquitted himself fine in World War II, then turned out to be an incompetent, virulently racist bozo in Korea. I laughed aloud when Almond went to the front to see the troops, and berated a soldier for chopping wood incorrectly.

There is a definite left-of-center slant to all Halberstam's work. And to be fair, there are quite enough right-of-center books that tell us we could have won the Vietnam War, or that MacArthur would have redeemed himself in Korea if Truman hadn't fired him. An author's political perspective, right or left, should always be kept in mind. Yet I think here, in one major way, Halbertam's point-of-view betrayed him. I'm speaking of the reason why he abruptly ended his book where he did. This leaves the impression that all was a mess in Korea, and that America had been thoroughly trounced. This just isn't the case.

American soldiers said they were in Korea to "die for a tie." In reality, though, we could've come out of this much worse. The original North Korean invasion could've wrested all South Korea into the Communist sphere. Instead, under Ridgeway and Eisenhower, the stalemate led to a return to the status quo antebellum. It showed the Communist world that we'd fight to protect our satellites. And it caused a nice big rift between the USSR and China.

On the other hand, we can't exactly say we solved the problem with North Korea, can we?