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.
The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War
The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War
War has been the inspiration of such great novels as The Red Badge of Courage and A Farewell to Arms, and daring feats of courage and tragic mistakes have been the foundation for such classic works. Now, for the first time ever, the Korean War has a novel that captures that courage and sacrifice.
When Captain Thomas Verity, USMC, is called back to action, he must leave his Georgetown home, career, and young daughter and rush to Korea to monitor Chinese radio transmissions. At first acting in an advisory role, he is abruptly thrust into MacArthur's last daring and disastrous foray-the Chosin Reservoir campaign-and then its desperate retreat.
Time magazine at the time recounted the retreat this way: "The running fight of the Marines...was a battle unparalleled in U.S. military history. It had some aspects of Bataan, some of Anzio, some of Dunkirk, some of Valley Forge, and some of 'the retreat of the 10,000' as described in Xenophon's Anabasis."
The Marines of Autumn is a stunning, shattering novel of war illuminated only by courage, determination, and Marine Corps discipline. And by love: of soldier for soldier, of men and their women, and of a small girl in Georgetown, whose father promised she would dance with him on the bridges of Paris. A child Captain Tom Verity fears he may never see again.
In The Marines of Autumn, James Brady captures our imagination and shocks us into a new understanding of war.
“The privation undergone by the U.S. Marines at the 'Frozen Chosin' in Korea, 1950, stands with the monumental infantry ordeals in the history of warfare. Now James Brady, who himself fought as a Marine rifle platoon leader in the same Taebaek Mountains of North Korea, brings this annal of valor to life in prose that is at once brutal, humorous, harrowing, and indelible. The Marines of Autumn takes its place among the unforgettable chronicles of war crafted by men, to paraphrase Whitman, 'who were there, who knew, who suffered.' Outstanding.” —Steven Pressfield, author of Tides of War and Gates of Fire
“In this thoroughly engrossing novel Brady captures the way the Marines of 1950 thought, talked, fought, and died. His Marines of Autumn are not the Marines of World War II or Vietnam, but the Marines of Korea, and a uniquely fascinating breed they were...At last we have a major Korean War novel!” —Martin Russ, author of Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950