The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War | David Halberstam

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War | David Halberstam | Soldiers pay the price for arrogance and idiocy

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The Coldest Winter...

	The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War David Halberstam Hyperion, 2007 - 736 pages average customer review:based on 136 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Read it and you will be shaken.

It took me a long time to finish reading The Coldest Winter. I would read for a while and then leave it behind as I picked up another book only to find myself returning to another section of what is a really great book. The beauty of Halberstams book is that it has eleven parts which read as self contained essays. Frustrating some readers will be the lack of an overall narrative. I, for one, enjoyed how the book lacked narrative and each section stood alone, each building on the other like a string of short stories. The book reads neither as a political history or a military history but instead appears more personal. Personal to Halberstam as you can almost witness his surprise when his research discovers something he had just learned. And the book is personal to the stories of the front line troops that fought, bleed, and died in Americas forgotten war, Korea. Halberstam does a wonderful job of viewing the conflict from all sides. You find your with Mao and learn his motives, see Stalins influence and most important focus on General MacArthur, his ego, errors and politics. No book can replace the great AMERICAN CAESAR BY WILLIAM MANCHESTER as a biography. But Halberstam is not wanting too write a biography. Instead he follows MacArthurs decisions and views the results as implemented on the ground by a wide variety of United Nation troops. When you have completed the book you have a grand overview and a better perspective of where the Korean War fit in to the geo-politics of the day and was a steppingstone for the Republican Partys right wing who still today try and leverage the simplistic military solution to national security for political advantage. The heart breaking thing is the number of dead and the many on both sides lost due to poor leadership and missed calculations and missed opportunities. A large part of the end of the book is spent covering several important battles. However, the last two years of the war are covered quickly with only a short section on Pork Chop Hill. Mainly because all these battles were a war of attrition and a meat grinder approach. None, in the end, changed anything about the outcome. No doubt that when Halberstam met and interviewed Paul McGee the pulse and heart of the book was discovered. In the end my very favorable opinion and recommendation for this book is based on the fact that Halberstam is a gifted story teller on these pages. He brings you down to the personal no matter if its Mao, Truman, MacAurther or Paul McGee holding the perimeter against thousands of Red Chinese attacking his platoons position. Read it and you will be shaken.

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Soldiers pay the price for arrogance and idiocy

While politicians and generals dither, squabble and preen soldiers die in bitter cold. An examination of a distant time that resonates in todays news.

In Depth Account

I did not know that much about the Korean war until I read this book. I do know this book coers it ALL! I especially enjoyed the battle scenes because he gave the reader both sides of the battle. I can see why it took ten years to write. I felt like I lost a good friend when David passed on. Great job, Mr. Haberstam. Rest in peace.

--Gerard Zemek, husband of author of "My Funny Dad, Harry"

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The Coldest Winter

This is a rather complete history of the times and battles. Well written, if a bit turgid relating need historical context, and the author has definite opinions of the major characters: watch for that.

Stalemate On The 38th

David Halberstam's untimely death in 2007 puts a deeper weight on this, his last book published later that year, than it really should have to bear. "The Coldest Winter" is uneven work, both riveting and rambling.

Emboldened by a desire to emulate his hero Stalin and aggressively enlarge his communist state, North Korean strongman Kim Il Sung in June 1950 sent his army across the 38th Parallel, a somewhat arbitrary dividing line that separated North Korea from South Korea, backed by the United States. Soon the two Koreas were almost completely united under Kim's firm hand. But then the United States struck back, and the first shooting phase of the Cold War, perhaps its bloodiest in terms of sheer concentration of time, was underway.

"A shrimp is crushed in the battle of the whales," said South Korea's president, Syngman Rhee, quoting a Korean proverb. Rhee was a big part of the problem in Korea, though, as were a number of other leaders on both sides of the 38th Parallel.

Halberstam's book is more about those failures of leadership than the war itself. Most especially, it is an indictment of U.S. commander Douglas MacArthur, a revered figure of his time who Halberstam portrays as stubborn, egomaniacal, and self-distancing.

I think Halberstam makes his points very well, better than Halberstam himself apparently believed, as he keeps making them again and again, beating them into the ground like tent poles. It's not enough to say MacArthur didn't spend one night in Korea during the war; it must be repeated twice.

If he isn't rounding on MacArthur, Halberstam is holding up for ridicule some other figure of less renown, like Ned Almond, a corps commander and MacArthur's bulldog lackey who dismissed the possibility the Chinese might enter the war well after his troops were already fighting them.

That Halberstam's book is readable is without doubt. The first 40 pages, detailing the surprise Chinese assault on U.S. positions, offers the kind of first-person reportage that Halberstam did like no one else. It's a bit disappointing, if necessary, to have to pull away from that to a grander overview of the root causes behind the war. Yet Halberstam gets lost in the brambles with too much backstory.

One might expect to get to Inchon, MacArthur's tide-turning invasion against the North, by page 200 in a 650-page book. Instead, one reads there about the 1948 presidential run of Tom Dewey. He actually only devotes a couple of paragraphs to Inchon itself, and only a few pages to the dramatic rollback of North Korea which followed, there mostly to slam MacArthur for pushing on north past the 38th Parallel.

The book concludes with MacArthur's dismissal in April, 1951, two more years of Korean conflict left to run. Halberstam assures us we aren't missing much: "In the end, there would be no great victory for anyone, only some kind of mutually unsatisfactory compromise."

Yet this book seems an unsatisfactory compromise, too. Halberstam may skirt a lot of the more successful battles for the U.S. side, but what he does present in the way of soldiers' stories brings this war to one in a way no writer of his stature had done before. The gritty battles around the Twin Tunnels, for example, of beating off decimating human wave attacks by digging deep and standing firm, forced from me a reckoning of this war's uniqueness and sacrifice both painful and exhilarating.

Halberstam's feeling and ability to communicate that human element is "Coldest Winter's" greatest asset, something you have ample opportunity to notice when he's off on another geopolitical tangent.

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