KOREAN WAR
In the dry and clinical description of the annalist, the Korean War may be defined as a war between North Korea allied with China and the Soviet Union and South Korea allied with the United Nations and the United States of America. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea. As always, wars have complex backgrounds. Reasons and factors and inevitabilities are dominoes that later historians set up in the worthy cause of warning the present time and future times not to go down that path.
I will keep this personal and small-scale. My father was a veteran of the Korean War. He was there 1953-1954 with the 7th Infantry Division and was awarded a Bronze Star for meritorious service. He was 23-24 years old there, fresh out of Michigan State University’s ROTC program. We always traded military history back and forth. Late in life he began to tell me stories of his time there — and of his experiences in the Dominican Republic and in Vietnam. As a bookseller I provided him with books on “his” war, which he appreciated for the larger canvas they provided. Here are some of the good ones I have found over the years. I know I don’t have enough of the Korean perspective of the war, and I don’t have many big strategic maps that situate the war within the Cold War. But this listing is a beginning. History is always beginning over. As a discipline, as a way of thought, history never tires of trying to get the story not only right but understandable.
Holding the Line: The Naval Air Campaign in Korea
Holding the Line: The Naval Air Campaign in Korea
Naval and air power were crucial to the United Nations' success in the Korean War, as it sought to negate the overwhelming Chinese advantage in manpower. In what became known as the 'long hard slog', naval aviators sought to slow and cut off communist forces and support troops on the ground. USS Leyte (CV-32) operated off Korea in the Sea of Japan for a record 93 continuous days to support the Marines in their epic retreat out of North Korea, and was crucial in the battles of the spring and summer of 1951 in which the UN forces again battled to the 38th Parallel.
All of this was accomplished with a force that was in the midst of change, as jet aircraft altered the entire nature of naval aviation. This paperback edition of Holding the Line chronicles the carrier war in Korea from the first day of the war to the last, focusing on front-line combat, while also describing the technical development of aircraft and shipboard operations, and how these all affected the broader strategic situation on the Korean Peninsula.
Thomas McKelvey Cleaver is the author of the well-received and best-selling Fabled Fifteen: The Pacific War Saga of Carrier Air Group 15, a history of the US Navy's top-scoring carrier air group in World War II, published by Casemate. He is additionally the author of F4F and F6F Aces of VF-2 published by Osprey, and also the author of Pacific Thunder (2017) and Tidal Wave (2018) a history of the carrier battles in the Pacific War. He lives in Encino, California, USA.