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The Korean War's Lingering Scars a Review of Bruce Cumings'
"The Korean War: A History"
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The Korean War's Lingering Scars a Review of Bruce Cumings'
"The Korean War: A History"
Introduction
The Korean War, the Source, a "History" book by Bruce Cumings, offers an objective
perspective on the background and major moments of the most recent three-year Korean War,
which raged there from 1950 to 1953. Cumings employs articles, interviews, and extensive
study to gather this information to offer a fresh perspective on the alleged "Korean War." His
account diverges from the typical historical understanding and presents the reader with an
insightful analysis of the social, political, and economic factors that led to the making of
Korea into a battleground between two superpowers during the early years of the Cold War
(Modern Library, 2010). As a result of Cumings’ use of analysis and the presentation of ideas
that have heretofore been unfamiliar to the general public, the work is a valuable and
intellectually stimulating review.
Summary
Cummings provides a detailed account of the origins of the Korean War in the early
part of the twentieth century, when Japan invaded Korea. Japan came to colonize Korea after
defeating China and Russia successively in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
with the support of powers such as the US. From 1895 to 1937, Japan dominated Korean
culture, reducing it to the status of an imperial colony and obliterating the ruling class to
replace it with one of their own making, creating resentment and uprisings for an independent
Korea.
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Unfortunately, as Korea was enduring rough treatment by Japan, the yearning for
political independence from foreign domination reached its boiling point and paved the way
for the future partition of the country after Japan’s loss in World War II. In 1945, after the
collapse of the Japanese empire, the U.S. as well as the Soviet armies split the peninsula in
the north and south. Nevertheless, they failed to agree on an aspiration for Korean self-
administration and thus did not establish the outline for a unified Korea during the start of the
twentieth century.
The weak status quo enabled both strategies to establish dreams for distinct,
antithetical Korean polities along the 38th parallel. The conflict reached a violent phase in
June of the year 1950, when civilizations in the south that the Soviet-backed Communists had
taken over invaded the south. Although the conflict in Korea was publicly described as a
small-scale ‘police action’ designed to reunify Korea quickly, soon the conflict turned into a
proxy war involving the Cold War superpowers’ rivals.
Drawing from Cumings's account, this section of the book offers vivid descriptions of
the extensive bombings, the implementation of the tactics of harassment, and the civilian
slaughters that characterized the unbridled warfare in the next three years. He proffers new
information on torture practiced by the U.S.-supported South Korean counterparts against
alleged sympathizers with the North, most of which were hitherto suppressed or censored by
American officials.
The two sides engaged in a war of movement that oscillated back and forth along the
Korean peninsula up to the latter part of 1950, when over a million Chinese crossed the
border and attacked the UN forces led by the United States, driving them back almost to the
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Yalu River. The Chinese intervention brought stability to the pre-September 1950/June 1950
front lines, effectively drawing a line that separated North Korea from South Korea.A
However, after two more years of heavy fighting in trenches, both day and night, in
the following armed expectation, the war was ceased and an armistice was drawn in the year
1953, in which the Korean peninsula is still roughly divided by the earlier demarcation line as
drawn before the start of the war. However, the division was maintained through a
demilitarized zone, and signs of a new order arriving at the peninsula after the Cold War only
prolonged a half-frozen status quo of a heavily fortified and disputed border established for
seven decades more.
Evaluation and Conclusion
Cumings’ authoritative and easily readable account, based on doctoral archival
research, is the only book to explain the other great European conflict. He questions the
ethical reasons that were deemed to support America playing a role in the context when, in
fact, basic misconceptions about Korea’s past and present caused fundamental
misinterpretations. The realism in portraying such grisly details is specifically effective in
challenging the notion of ‘clean’ war as a ‘police action. ’Here, too, however, Cumings does
not allow himself to tilt unfairly toward one side and narrates the atrocities of the North
Korean and Chinese Communist forces with equal detail and apparent discomfort. His
explanation of how it got lost in the embrace and the American Cultural Cold War'the war
zeros in on the anti-communism crusade that began in the fifties as the reason that it rapidly
faded from popular discourse.
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Within its framework of military histories, the book where Ellison shines is in
disentangling the origins of the Korean War and in chronicling how the conflict informed and
re-defined America’s perception of its role in the world. He also offers background
information that always helps in explaining conflicts that may still exist on the Korean
peninsula at present. Amply nuanced and fully wholesome, “The Korean War” is a triumph
of a book that should be mandatory for anyone who wants to better grasp the strategically
pivotal Cold War symptoms.
