The cold war's coldest winter

Lessons not learned in Korea meant history would indeed repeat itself to America's woe.

By EDWARD B. COLBY, Special to the Times
Published September 30, 2007

In November 1950, as his regiment headed toward North Korea's border with China, Col. Paul Freeman was distressed. "He felt privately that crossing the thirty-eighth parallel had been a catastrophic mistake, that the American leadership was placing the entire Eighth Army in jeopardy," writes David Halberstam in The Coldest Winter, "and that America's leadership had ended up playing right into the hands of the Russians - fighting an unwinnable war in Asia while the Russians sat on the sidelines."

Gen. Douglas MacArthur had turned the tide against the North Koreans with a brilliant amphibious landing, but he was now pushing his troops north on a mad offensive toward the Yalu River, intent on claiming all of Korea as a final, glittering victory in his career.

But MacArthur was sending the U.N. forces into a trap: Numerous Chinese divisions were waiting, and as they struck, the men of the 2nd Division suffered most. Much of the division made a horrific retreat south through "the Gauntlet," a 6-mile stretch of road that became a shooting gallery for the Chinese.

Freeman finally got permission to escape to the west, but then a "vast field" of Chinese soldiers closed in: "The regiment, Freeman later remembered, unloaded all its weapons and ammo, and the men laid everything out in front of them. This is where they were going to make their last stand, he thought, and quite possibly die."

But in that "apocalyptic moment" of "eighteen guns that never stopped," they had stopped the Chinese. "Get the hell out of here, and don't stop!" Freeman ordered, and his unit did, finding the road to Anju completely open. By going west instead of following the doomed convoy south, Freeman had saved his regiment.

Freeman is one of the central characters in The Coldest Winter, Halberstam's 21st and last book. It is a superb military history that tells in all-encompassing detail of the fierce struggles of the Korean War, "a puzzling, gray, very distant conflict, a war that went on and on and on, seemingly without hope or resolution."

It is also a war seemingly "orphaned by history," but Halberstam resurrects it here with his usual relentless research, including targeted interviews with survivors of the most important battles, including Chipyongni, the Naktong, and Unsan.

But the story is much broader, covering the showdown between the Truman administration and MacArthur, who was incredibly out of its control; describing the hardening Cold War political situation back home; and giving a portrait of Mao in his early days in power that is impressively fresh. This book's biographies are more digestible than those in The Powers That Be, and its narrative has a great immediacy, even as it chronicles events from more than half a century ago.

For the U.S. military, this was a war of surprising defeat by the North Koreans followed by our own powerful advance, a more stunning setback by the Chinese, and finally a grinding stalemate, a war that ended in 1953 in the same place it began.

Halberstam notes that by mid 1952, as the Americans and Chinese squared off, it was "trench warfare, days and nights of living under constant artillery barrages, men caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with almost all meaning subtracted from the fighting and dying. By then both sides had created seemingly unassailable extensive defensive lines."

But the consequences, as Halberstam charts them, are more significant. No matter its successes in rebuilding Europe, the Truman administration had been blamed for the loss of China in 1949, and it was battered by the unpopular Korean War. Meantime, "the Republicans had found their issue -- they were in their rhetoric always tougher on the Communists."

As combating Communism became "deeply entwined with domestic American politics," the Democrats were haunted by China, but the larger question of the post-Korean War years, Halberstam says, "was soon ignored: whether or not America could separate serious and genuine national security concerns from the increasing power of simplistic anti-Communist rhetoric expressed in domestic political campaigns." It could not, as Vietnam later showed.

Halberstam emphasizes that South Korea eventually developed into the vibrant, economically strong democracy that it is today - a success which brought for the brave Americans who fought there "a sense of belated validation to their sacrifice, and the sacrifice of others who had not come home, and granted them a legitimacy and honor that they had not always felt."

In retrospect, Korea was the right place to make a stand in a shooting war against Communism. And yet its major lessons were not heeded, leading America barely a decade later into a massive Asian land war against a stealthy, numerically superior, politically fervent and above all nationalist enemy - an unwinnable war of choice, as The Best and the Brightest so expertly demonstrated.

It took Halberstam 10 years of on-again, off-again work to produce The Coldest Winter; he finished it last spring only five days before he died in a car accident. The result is the final piece in his careerlong history of postwar America, from civil rights to Vietnam, from 9/11 to baseball.

This book does not have the scope of The Powers That Be, and it will not have the impact of The Best and the Brightest. But The Coldest Winter is the capstone to a remarkable career.

Edward B. Colby is a writer in New York.

THE BOOK

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

By David Halberstam

Hyperion,719 pages, $35

[Last modified September 29, 2007, 22:37:41]