REVIEW BY TAYLOR DOWNING
General The Lord Dannatt, once Chief of the General Staff, has teamed up with military historian Robert Lyman to provide a fascinating new take on the Korean War of 1950 to 1953. Their book has three premises. First, that the conflict in Korea is a forgotten one that very much deserves retelling. Second, that the war is very topical today partly because it shows how to fight (or not to fight) a conventional war in a nuclear age, and partly because it shows how politics must always take precedence over military ambition. And, third, the authors argue that the war was not a single conflict but was in fact two wars, quite separate but consecutive.
The ‘first’ war is the story of the surprise invasion of South Korea by the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA), or the In Mun Gun, in June 1950 as their leader Kim Il Sung sought to reunite the Korean peninsula under Communist control without having any sense of the political response he would unleash. What followed was a rapid advance towards the southern city of Pusan in a form of Blitzkrieg that had not been seen since World War II.
This early phase covers the establishment of a US-led United Nations force for the first time in its history – only formed because the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council at the time. US troops finally slowed the NKPA advance and then, in a brilliant counterstroke masterminded by General Douglas MacArthur, an amphibious troop landing took place behind enemy lines at Inch on. This resulted in a complete reversal in the fortunes of the North Koreans and their retreat to pretty well their starting lines on the 38th Parallel that had divided the peninsula since 1945.
