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This is the discussion thread for the selection - The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings.

by Bruce Cumings (no photo)

This is the table of contents for the book. We will read and discuss a chapter a week and if you just keep up with the weekly assignments - there are no spoiler html needed. If you go ahead - then you will need to use the spoiler html or if you do not want to use the spoiler html they you need to post in the glossary thread which is a spoiler thread. This thread is a non spoiler thread.

CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Chronology
Glossary
Introduction
Map

CHAPTER ONE:
The Course of the War

CHAPTER TWO:
The Party of Memory

CHAPTER THREE:
The Party of Forgetting

CHAPTER FOUR:
Culture of Repression

CHAPTER FIVE:
   38 Degrees of Separation: A Forgotten Occupation

CHAPTER SIX:
   “The Most Disproportionate Result�: The Air War

CHAPTER SEVEN:
The Flooding of Memory

CHAPTER EIGHT:
   A “Forgotten War� That Remade the United States and the Cold War

CHAPTER NINE:
   Requiem: History in the Temper of Reconciliation

Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Other Books by this Author
About the Author
Further Reading
Index

Syllabus:

CONTENTS

Week One - September 1st - September 8th, 2019 (p. xi - 36)
Title Page
Copyright
Chronology - xi
Glossary - xiii
Introduction - xv
Map

CHAPTER ONE:
The Course of the War - 1

Week Two - September 9th - September 15th, 2019 (p. 37 - 58)
CHAPTER TWO:
The Party of Memory - 37

Week Three - September 16th - September 22nd, 2019 (p. 59 - 76)
CHAPTER THREE:
The Party of Forgetting - 59

Week Four - September 23rd - September 29th, 2019 (p. 77 - 100)
CHAPTER FOUR:
Culture of Repression - 77

Week Five - September 30th - October 6th, 2019 (p. 101 - 146)
CHAPTER FIVE:
38 Degrees of Separation: A Forgotten Occupation - 101

Week Six - October 7th - October 13th, 2019 (p. 147 - 162)
CHAPTER SIX:
“The Most Disproportionate Result�: The Air War - 147

Week Seven - October 14th - October 20th, 2019 (p. 163 - 204)
CHAPTER SEVEN:
The Flooding of Memory - 163

Week Eight - October 21st - October 27th, 2019 (p. 205 - 222)
CHAPTER EIGHT:
A “Forgotten War� That Remade the United States and the Cold War - 205

Week Nine - October 28th - November 3rd, 2019 (p. 223 - 234)
CHAPTER NINE:
Requiem: History in the Temper of Reconciliation - 223

Week Ten - November 4th - November 10, 2019 (p. 235 - End of Book)
Dedication
Acknowledgments - 235
Notes - 247
Other Books by this Author
About the Author
Further Reading - 269
Index - 277

Week Eleven - November 11th - November 17th, 2019 (No new reading - just group members' thoughts about the book as a whole)
Book as a Whole and Final Thoughts

Folks, you have plenty of time to finish this book because we still have it scheduled through December 15th - so if you get behind - you still have enough time or even if you start late - you are always fine at the HBC.

Chapter Overviews and Summaries

Introduction

The author tells us that this is a book about the Korean War written by Americans and for Americans. He believes it to be the Forgotten War. The primary reason he feels is that they never knew their enemy and they still don't. The war had its distant gestation period in imperial history and especially northeast China at the dawn of Japan's aggression in 1931 decades before the Korean War conflict. Not only is this book about the forgotten war - "it is about history and memory. Its major themes are the Korean origins of the war, the cultural contradictions of the early 1950s in America, which buried this conflict almost before it could be known, the harrowing brutality in the air and on the ground of a supposedly limited war, the recovery of this history in South Korea, and the way in which this unknown war transformed the American position in the world—and history and memory."

Cumings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 33) . Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Chapter One
The Course of the War

Chapter One describes the course of the war and its origins as well as the politicians and US and Korean Leaders who helped incubate this conflict.

We are opening this book up early - reading and discussion begins September 1st but I would love to find out why folks are interested in the book and could you introduce yourself.

I am Bentley - founder/moderator of The History Book - from New England, Metro NYC area primarily but have traveled and worked world wide. What interested me about this book is that I knew so little about the origins of the Korean War conflict and why the United States seemed to masterfully make one mistake after the other sending young men into a conflict that they knew they were not prepared for. In the Introduction, the author stated that we did not know that much about the enemy and that frankly we still did not. That sounds very much like our experiences in the Vietnam War that came a decade or so later. I have heard so much about this book that I felt it was time to read it. So here we are and here I am.

Please introduce yourself and tell us why you are reading this book.

This is Week One's assignment:

Week One - September 1st - September 8th, 2019 (p. xi - 36)
Title Page
Copyright
Chronology - xi
Glossary - xiii
Introduction - xv
Map

CHAPTER ONE:
The Course of the War - 1

So this means that from now through September 8th - you can discuss anything in the Introduction and/or Chapters 1from pages xi through page 36 without using any spoiler html.

If you want to go ahead - you can but we hope that you will stay with the schedule in order to stimulate a great discussion of the book. However if you do go ahead - you must use the spoiler html on this thread since this is a non spoiler thread. If you do not want to use the spoiler html then your only option if you go ahead is to simply post on the glossary spoiler thread. We will always respond to you whether you are posting on the discussion thread or the glossary thread but keep in mind that the discussion thread is always a non spoiler thread.

Here is the link to the glossary thread for this books which is a spoiler thread: /topic/show/...

I am Jeff. I have been reading biographies of each US president, and just finished #33 Harry Truman. The timing of this being BOTM was nice as it makes an appropriate supplement for me. In his time, it was known as "Truman's War," and is a conflict I knew little about.

Bentley wrote: "We are opening this book up early - reading and discussion begins September 1st but I would love to find out why folks are interested in the book and could you introduce yourself.

I am Bentley - f..."
I am Marianne. I am reading this book because I just completed reading
Jager, Sheila Miyoshi. Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea. W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. I learned that there is no end to this war, but the understanding of why still eludes me. I trust I will learn more about the conflict reading this book, and I intend to compare the two perspectives on the war on not only North Korea and South Korea, but also about the role of the US, China, Russia, Japan and the United Nations.

I am Stormie, and I am reading this book to learn more about the Korean War. I know a veteran and have heard some of his stories, but I wanted to also read as much as I can because this is before I was born. I love History of all types and wars on foreign soil are not something I know much about. I was born in VA and lived there until 2000 when I moved to CA, and I have been here ever since. I am currently volunteering at a couple of museums here in CA, and their focus is local history. I have not read much on Korea or the war from what I can recall.

I am Matt, and I've decided to read this book in order to start understanding the transition in strategy from American warfare in WW2 to Cold War conflicts (such as the Korean War and Vietnam). I feel like a crucial juncture in policy/ideology came between 1945-1950, and as Cumings has shown already (not explicitly), a few instrumental white men-including Atcheson, Rusk, etc.-turned the direction of American military engagement from protecting democracy to protecting prestige. I'm not sure we as a country are really over that transition, and I'm hoping this monograph will help explain the source of blunder and lack of foresight from many of our best leaders and military commanders.

Welcome everyone - I wanted folks to introduce themselves and dig right in -

This is Week One's assignment:

This is Week One's assignment:

Week One - September 1st - September 8th, 2019 (p. xi - 36)
Title Page
Copyright
Chronology - xi
Glossary - xiii
Introduction - xv
Map

CHAPTER ONE:
The Course of the War - 1

I always appreciate maps at the front of a book where they are easy to find.

As for the text, Cumings wastes no time establishing that the Korean War laid Cold War fears over pre-existing animosities. Americans never really had a chance to see the tensions as anything but Communist-inspired, nor the Korean people as anything but helpless and uncivilized.

Hi. I'm Marissa. I've read a handful of books on North Korea so I'm interested in learning more about the Korean war that resulted in the country being divided. The Korean War is also not one that is talked about a lot in my opinion. It's less well known so I'm curious to learn more.

I feel like America underestimated KPA army from the start what with all the talk describing them as "barbarians". I also did not know how aggressive the US and the ROK army were against leftists going as far as to destroy entire villages.

Marissa wrote: "I feel like America underestimated KPA army..."

Sadly, America has a pattern of doing that. From Native Americans and Mexican nationals to the Japanese and Viet Kong. Often we have overpowered our foes with sheer numbers of soldiers, and machines off the assembly lines. But the numbers were never really there in Korea for what it would have taken to push to the Yalu.

Hi everyone, my name is Michael. I live in Alberta, Canada but grew up in the great state of Montana. I have read a couple of books prior to this on the Korean War and wrote a paper in college on the role of the Canadian Military in the Korean War. Most notably the Princess Patricia's Light Infantry. I live close to their modern base here in Alberta.

Many mistakes were made prior to the conflict as well as during and after. I would make one comment to what Marissa said above and that is simply that the division of Korea into North and South was actually a result of the late arrival of the Russians into the Pacific Theater at the end of World War 2. Things may or may not have worked out differently for Korea if two zones of occupation had not been allowed. The cease fire in Korea simply caused a return to the Post-WW2 positions.

I will be curious to see how Cummings handles the MacArthur issue. My dad served in the US Army under MacArthur in the Pacific during World War 2 and did not have a lot of good to say about him. He would have rather served under Nimitz but was not a Marine.

Anyway, I love history and look forward to seeing what we end up discussing out of this book.

Hi, I'm Chris! I know I'm a little late to the party, but a lot of things have been keeping me from reading the first chapter.

I very much enjoyed the first chapter's summation of the Korean War. I especially liked learning about some of the details I didn't know before, like John Foster Dulles's Korean visit just a few days before the start of the war and the fact that, like in Vietnam, or South Korean allies didn't always live up to the same ideals that Americans wanted.

Having said that, I thought that The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam did a much better job of explaining those crucial first six months of the war. That book is still one of my all-time favorites.

Now that he has finished summarizing the war, I am curious to see where Mr. Cumings goes from here. The book description holds out the promise of a much fuller picture of the Korean War, but I've heard promises like that before from other history books and been disappointed. Still, I'm willing to hear Mr. Cumings out.

Christopher wrote: "The book description holds out the promise of a much fuller picture of the Korean War ..."

I am a little ahead of you, but I understand now that Chapter 1, The Course of the War was probably all we will get of the operational and strategic aspects of the war, and that this book is looking at it's anatomy beneath the skin: It's causes, consequences, and culturally-significant details that Americans consider taboo.

My first real literary exposure to the Korean War was in David McCullough's Truman, in which it is offered as a reaction to post-WWII McCarthyan fear of communism, and little more; then given as a plaything to MacArthur for those first six months. Cumings' book is revealing the very real situations and people that existed long before America had any interest, and I'm enjoying what I'm learning so far.

by David McCullough

The first serious book I read about the Korean War which is also a history of the war years as we know them rather than events leading up to and after the war was:
by T.R. Fehrenbach.
Again this was more of a military history of the actual war years. If I remember right it did not really deal with things on a socio/political/cultural level. Whereas it seems this is the focus of our current read.

I’m finally caught up with the reading schedule for this book, but I don’t know how I feel about this book. On the one hand, I like the greater context to the war that this is providing. I didn’t know about the protracted internal fighting going on in the South before the war and how Americans “aided and abetted� President Rhee’s suppression. It is fascinating as it very much echoes what would happen in Vietnam later. On the other had, I still don’t feel that the information Mr. Cumings provides changes the overall story significantly. It may be better to think of the war as a long civil war that, technically, has never ended, but it doesn’t change the overall narrative one learns about the war in a typical high school textbook. Hopefully, the second half will get better, but I’ve been burned by revisionist histories before.

Christopher wrote: "I’m finally caught up with the reading schedule for this book, but I don’t know how I feel about this book. On the one hand, I like the greater context to the war that this is providing. I didn’t k..."

I tend to agree with you Christopher. I am enjoying some of the insights that I have not considered before. When we get into the politics of the war I wonder how easy it is for an author to be unbiased. There may be a tendency to color those discussions with our current political insights. But then that is always a problem with history books. I am looking forward to getting into deeper discussion.

I have recently just finished this book, and though I'm still processing what to do with it, here are my general thoughts:

First and foremost, this general survey of the war is valuable because it is a criticism of the US' foreign policy in an era that should have seen more de-escalation than global policing. The atrocities committed by the ROK, headed by Rhee, on both left-wing committees in the southwest areas of the Korean Peninsula as well as on N. Koreans have been too long overlooked though the ROK has opened a formal governmental probe to research and repair what little can be salvaged. I had no idea that the South, and specifically Americans, were implicated in such brutal civilian slaughter.

Second, the point the Cumings makes that the Korean War launched the US into global policing status is something that I had intuitively known but had not grasped. I had previous thought that the US just simply had kept a large military force after the end of WWII and set up permanent bases abroad as a matter of course after Potsdam. I had no idea that the military had shrunk dramatically, and the Korean War, including a subsequent quadrupling of defense budget spending, shot America into a path of fighting wars they couldn't possibly understand enough to win.

Third, I thought the order of the book was pretty confusing and jumbled up. The initial plot, followed by a breakdown of foreign policy figures (Acheson, Rusk, Kennan, etc.), to a social history expose (film, books), and then to a long catalog of atrocities felt like the book was kind of doing too much in its mere 220+ pages. The story is wide in scope, but seems paper-thin at points, almost as if Cumings has expected us to have read up beforehand.

Overall, this is an important book but not one of my favorites. It will definitely help in my teaching of the Korean War in the classroom, which is why I decided to read it in the first place.

Matthew wrote: "...almost as if Cumings has expected us to have read up beforehand."

I do think he meant for this to fill in some missing pieces in our existing knowledge of the war. I myself had next to no familiarity with Korea before reading this, but knew going in that this was not going to provide everything I'd like to know, rather what textbooks would never tell me.

Terrific posts on this thread. Thank you.