HASTINGS, Max : The Korean War (fülszöveg)
It was a bloody, bitter siege, the first war we could not win. At no other time since World War II have two superpowers met in battle. At no other time since World War II, except in the Cuban missile crisis, has East-West nuclear war been so close. The Korean War cost the U.S. 142,000 lives in three years, just under the number lost during ten years in Vietnam. Yet Korea has been neglected by historians and too long misunderstood by the American public.
Now Max Hastings, preeminent military historian and author of Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, takes us back to the struggle to restore South Korean independence after the Communist invasion of June 1950. Hastings dramatically recounts the sequence of great military dramas that formed the war – the invasion itself, the huge U.S. losses in the first year, the defense of the Pusan Perimeter, MacArthur's triumphant landing at Inchon, which cut off the North Koreans, the drive to the Yalu, and the Chinese retribution.
As he demonstrated in Overlord, Hastings' particular genius is getting us inside the experiences of the fighting men. Using personal accounts from interviews with over 200 vets – including the Chinese – Hastings follows real officers and soldiers through the battles, showing us how it was in the thick of the raging action.
And Hastings brilliantly captures the big picture – the Cold War crisis at home, the strategies and politics of Truman, Acheson, Marshall, MacArthur, Ridgway, and Bradley. He shows how Korea served as a prelude to Vietnam and how its lessons – the difficulty of using air power against a primitive economy, the problem of deploying a Western army in a broken country – were ignored. Analyzing the war in the context of its times, Max Hastings' The Korean War shows what we endured, what we achieved, and what we should have learned in the war that began a new era in the American conflict with communism.
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