fascinating place, with Hollywood films that replayed the script of World War II in Korea, weekly magazines with articles and photos that documented a new and very different kind of war (anticipating Vietnam), and shocking stories that threatened and frightened all Americans (not unlike the period since 9/11): a menacing Communist bloc unified from Berlin to Canton, crushing and incomprehensible defeats on the battlefield, fiendish “brainwashing,” and the astounding defection to communism of twenty-one Americans at the end of the war (all of whom ended up in China, and nearly all of whom eventually returned to the United States).
The known and observed Korean War occurred in the first six months, when some 270 journalists from nineteen countries followed the troops and the shifting battle lines, and sent mostly uncensored dispatches to their editors. 1 They instantly understood this to be a very different war from the global conflagration that ended five years earlier—and that most of them had also covered. It was obviously a smaller and more restricted war (“the limited war” was its name before Vietnam came along), but it was also something novel: a civil war, a people’s war. The best of them was Reginald Thompson, an experienced British journalist who had reported on every important war of the twentieth century to that point and who covered Korea before censorship began. Honest, inquiring, investigative, confident in the truth seen by his own eyes, willing to saywhat he thought—he was what one wants in a war correspondent. Thompson’s
Cry Korea
is the only Western book of the Korean War that can be compared to the classics of the Chinese civil war such as Graham Peck’s
Two Kinds of Time
or Jack Belden’s
China Shakes the World
. But another eyewitness account is almost as interesting: Gen. William F. Dean wandered around the hills near Taejon for more than a month after losing that battle, and then spent three years in a North Korean prison camp. His candid and thoughtful observations offer very little grist for the Cold War mill of Communist evil and free-world virtue. Instead both of them opened a window to eyewitness truth.
Early war coverage was fascinating and instructive, revealing its essential nature, its
civil
nature; war raged up and down the peninsula for six months, and everything was seen. Then for the last two years it was positional warfare along the DMZ, and Westerners had little contact with Koreans except as enemy, soldier, servant, or prostitute. Thompson was appalled by the ubiquitous, casual racism of Americans, from general to soldier, and their breathtaking ignorance of Korea. Americans used the term “gook” to refer to all Koreans, North and South, but especially North Koreans; “chink” distinguished the Chinese. Decades after the fact, many were still using the term in oral histories. 2 This racist slur developed first in the Philippines, then traveled to the Pacific War, Korea, and Vietnam. Ben Anderson called it a depository for the “nameless sludge” of the enemy, and it might be the namelessness of Koreans, in American eyes, that stood out then and still does today. Donald Knox’s voluminous oral histories, for example, rarely if ever name any Koreans. But American soldiers do comment on the paradox that “their gooks” fought like hell whereas “our gooks” were cowardly, bugged out, never could be relied on. (General Dean sampled the fierce resentment that being called “gook” stirred in all Koreans, North and South. 3 ) It did not dawn on most Americans that anticolonial fighters might have something to fight about.
In the summer of 1950 basic knowledge about the KPA and its leaders was treated as a revelation—for example, that the majority of its soldiers had fought in the Chinese civil war. Three months into the war,
The New York Times
found big news in a biography of Defense Minister Choe Yong-gon released by MacArthur’s headquarters: it discovered
The known and observed Korean War occurred in the first six months, when some 270 journalists from nineteen countries followed the troops and the shifting battle lines, and sent mostly uncensored dispatches to their editors. 1 They instantly understood this to be a very different war from the global conflagration that ended five years earlier—and that most of them had also covered. It was obviously a smaller and more restricted war (“the limited war” was its name before Vietnam came along), but it was also something novel: a civil war, a people’s war. The best of them was Reginald Thompson, an experienced British journalist who had reported on every important war of the twentieth century to that point and who covered Korea before censorship began. Honest, inquiring, investigative, confident in the truth seen by his own eyes, willing to saywhat he thought—he was what one wants in a war correspondent. Thompson’s
Cry Korea
is the only Western book of the Korean War that can be compared to the classics of the Chinese civil war such as Graham Peck’s
Two Kinds of Time
or Jack Belden’s
China Shakes the World
. But another eyewitness account is almost as interesting: Gen. William F. Dean wandered around the hills near Taejon for more than a month after losing that battle, and then spent three years in a North Korean prison camp. His candid and thoughtful observations offer very little grist for the Cold War mill of Communist evil and free-world virtue. Instead both of them opened a window to eyewitness truth.
Early war coverage was fascinating and instructive, revealing its essential nature, its
civil
nature; war raged up and down the peninsula for six months, and everything was seen. Then for the last two years it was positional warfare along the DMZ, and Westerners had little contact with Koreans except as enemy, soldier, servant, or prostitute. Thompson was appalled by the ubiquitous, casual racism of Americans, from general to soldier, and their breathtaking ignorance of Korea. Americans used the term “gook” to refer to all Koreans, North and South, but especially North Koreans; “chink” distinguished the Chinese. Decades after the fact, many were still using the term in oral histories. 2 This racist slur developed first in the Philippines, then traveled to the Pacific War, Korea, and Vietnam. Ben Anderson called it a depository for the “nameless sludge” of the enemy, and it might be the namelessness of Koreans, in American eyes, that stood out then and still does today. Donald Knox’s voluminous oral histories, for example, rarely if ever name any Koreans. But American soldiers do comment on the paradox that “their gooks” fought like hell whereas “our gooks” were cowardly, bugged out, never could be relied on. (General Dean sampled the fierce resentment that being called “gook” stirred in all Koreans, North and South. 3 ) It did not dawn on most Americans that anticolonial fighters might have something to fight about.
In the summer of 1950 basic knowledge about the KPA and its leaders was treated as a revelation—for example, that the majority of its soldiers had fought in the Chinese civil war. Three months into the war,
The New York Times
found big news in a biography of Defense Minister Choe Yong-gon released by MacArthur’s headquarters: it discovered
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