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Remembering the Forgotten War
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13947 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1988 |
4,901 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
THE KOREAN WAR
Max Hastings
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987
389 pp., $22.75
KOREA: THE WAR BEFORE VIETNAM
Callum A. MacDonald
New York: Free Press, 1986
330 pp., $24.95
Coming as it did between the monumental struggle of World War II and the trauma of Vietnam, the Korean War has been ignored by historians and the public. Outside of the film Pork Chop Hill, which appeared in the 1950s, and the television show (and movie) M*A*S*H, American popular culture has largely forgotten Korea. After a quarter of a century, the war is still awaiting a historian who will do for it what Samuel Eliot Morison and Russel Weigley did for the American Navy and Army of World War II. The Korean War, in this year of the Seoul Olympics, is also waiting for its John Hersey, Norman Mailer, Herman Wouk, and even its John Del Vecchio and James Webb, writers whose reputations rest on their World War II and Vietnam War novels.
This is puzzling to those knowledgeable about Korea. The war was certainly not an insignificant "police action" (the term used by the Truman administration) similar to Grenada. Although they agree as to the Korean War's importance, Max Hastings and Callum A. MacDonald disagree significantly regarding its origins and results. For Hastings, a prominent military historian and the editor of The Daily Telegraph of London, the United States made the proper
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