front cover of An American Dream
An American Dream
The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China
Clarence Adams
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
Throughout his life, Clarence Adams exhibited self-reliance, ambition, ingenuity, courage, and a commitment to learning—character traits often equated with the successful pursuit of the American Dream. Unfortunately, for an African American coming of age in the 1930s and 1940s, such attributes counted for little, especially in the South.

Adams was a seventeen-year-old high school dropout in 1947 when he fled Memphis and the local police to join the U.S. Army. Three years later, after fighting in the Korean War in an all-black artillery unit that he believed to have been sacrificed to save white troops, he was captured by the Chinese. After spending almost three years as a POW, during which he continued to suffer racism at the hands of his fellow Americans, he refused repatriation in 1953, choosing instead the People's Republic of China, where he hoped to find educational and career opportunities not readily available in his own country.

While living in China, Adams earned a university degree, married a Chinese professor of Russian, and worked in Beijing as a translator for the Foreign Languages Press. During the Vietnam War he made a controversial anti-war broadcast over Radio Hanoi, urging black troops not to fight for someone else's political and economic freedoms until they enjoyed these same rights at home.

In 1966, having come under suspicion during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he returned with his wife and two children to the United States, where he was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to face charges of "disrupting the morale of American fighting forces in Vietnam and inciting revolution in the United States." After these charges were dropped, he and his family struggled to survive economically. Eventually, through sheer perseverance, they were able to fulfill at least part of the American Dream. By the time he died, the family owned and operated eight successful Chinese restaurants in his native Memphis.
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An American Rabbi in Korea
A Chaplain's Journey in the Forgotten War
Milton J. Rosen, translated and edited by Stanley R. Rosen
University of Alabama Press, 2004
A firsthand account of the American Jewish experience on the front lines of the Korean War

During the height of the Korean conflict, 1950–51, Orthodox Jewish chaplain Milton J. Rosen wrote 19 feature-length articles for Der Morgen Zhornal, a Yiddish daily in New York, documenting his wartime experiences as well as those of the servicemen under his care. An American Rabbi in Korea is an English translation of Rosen's important articles prepared by his son and annotated with background about Rosen's military service, a general introduction to the war and conflict on the Korean peninsula, and numerous maps and photographs.

Rosen was among those nearly caught in the Chinese entrapment of American and Allied forces in North Korea in late 1950, and some of his most poignant writing details the trying circumstances that faced both soldiers and civilians during that time. As chaplain, Rosen was able to offer a unique account of the American Jewish experience on the frontlines and in the United States military while also describing the impact of the American presence on Korean citizens and their culture. His interest in Korean attitudes toward Jews is also a significant theme within these articles. The sum is a readable account of war and its turmoil from an astute and compassionate observer.
 
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Broken Soldiers
Raymond B. Lech
University of Illinois Press, 2000
Traversing the no-man's-land of political loyalty and betrayal, Broken Soldiers documents the fierce battle for the minds and hearts of American prisoners during the Korean War. In scorching detail, Raymond Lech describes the soldiers' day-to-day experiences in prisoner-of-war camps and the shocking treatment some of them received at the hands of their own countrymen after the war. Why, he asks, were only fourteen American soldiers tried as collaborators when thousands of others who admitted to some of the same offenses were not?
 
Drawing on some 60,000 pages of court-martial transcripts Lech secured through the Freedom of Information Act, Broken Soldiers documents the appalling treatment and the sophisticated propagandizing to which American POWs fell victim during the Korean conflict. Three thousand American soldiers perished in North Korean camps over the winter of 1950-51, most from starvation. Through the unsentimental testimony of survivors, Lech describes how these young men, filthy and lice-infested, lost an average of 40 percent of their body weight. Many also lost their powers of resistance and their grip on soldierly conduct.
 
After six months of starvation, the emaciated, disoriented prisoners were subjected to a relentless campaign to educate them to the virtues of communism. Bombarded with propaganda, the Americans were organized into study groups and forced to discuss and write about communism and Marxism, even to broadcast harangues against capitalist aggression and appeals for an end to the war.
 
Lech traces the spiral of debilitation and compromise, showing how parroting certain phrases came to seem a small price to pay for physical safety. Threatened with starvation and indefinite confinement in Korea, many POWs succumbed to pressure to mouth communist slogans and provide information far in excess of the regulation "name, rank, and service number."
 
Of the thousands of American soldiers who, while prisoners in North Korea, spoke and wrote favorably of communism and disparaged their country, a handful were charged with collaborating with the enemy. Why were so few singled out? Why did each branch of the armed services judge parallel circumstances differently, and why were American soldiers not realistically prepared for capture? A powerful indictment of justice miscarried, Broken Soldiers  raises troubling questions that remain unanswered decades after the events.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Cold War Crucible
The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World
Masuda Hajimu
Harvard University Press, 2014

The end of World War II did not mean the arrival of peace. The major powers faced social upheaval at home, while anticolonial wars erupted around the world. American–Soviet relations grew chilly, but the meaning of the rivalry remained disputable. Cold War Crucible reveals the Korean War as the catalyst for a new postwar order. The conflict led people to believe in the Cold War as a dangerous reality, a belief that would define the fears of two generations.

In the international arena, North Korea’s aggression was widely interpreted as the beginning of World War III. At the domestic level, the conflict generated a wartime logic that created dividing lines between “us” and “them,” precipitating waves of social purges to stifle dissent. The United States allowed McCarthyism to take root; Britain launched anti-labor initiatives; Japan conducted its Red Purge; and China cracked down on counterrevolutionaries. These attempts to restore domestic tranquility were not a product of the Cold War, Masuda Hajimu shows, but driving forces in creating a mindset for it. Alarmed by the idea of enemies from within and faced with the notion of a bipolar conflict that could quickly go from chilly to nuclear, ordinary people and policymakers created a fantasy of a Cold War world in which global and domestic order was paramount.

In discovering how policymaking and popular opinion combined to establish and propagate the new postwar reality, Cold War Crucible offers a history that reorients our understanding of what the Cold War really was.

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Embattled Memories
Contested Meanings in Korean War Memorials
Suhi Choi
University of Nevada Press, 2014
The Korean War has been called the “forgotten war,” not as studied as World War II or Vietnam. Choi examines the collective memory of the Korean War through five discrete memory sites in the United States and South Korea, including the PBS documentary Battle for Korea, the Korean War Memorial in Salt Lake City, and the statue of General Douglas MacArthur in Incheon, South Korea. She contends that these sites are not static; rather, they are active places where countermemories of the war clash with the official state-sanctioned remembrance. Through lively and compelling analysis of these memory sites, which include two differing accounts of the No Gun Ri massacre\--contemporaneous journalism and oral histories by survivors\--Choi shows diverse narratives of the Korean War competing for dominance in acts of remembering. Embattled Memories is an important interdisciplinary work in two fields, memory studies and public history, from an understudied perspective, that of witnesses to the Korean War.
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From the Tundra to the Trenches
Eddy Weetaltuk
University of Manitoba Press, 2016

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The Girls Next Door
Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines
Kara Dixon Vuic
Harvard University Press, 2019

The story of the intrepid young women who volunteered to help and entertain American servicemen fighting overseas, from World War I through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The emotional toll of war can be as debilitating to soldiers as hunger, disease, and injury. Beginning in World War I, in an effort to boost soldiers’ morale and remind them of the stakes of victory, the American military formalized a recreation program that sent respectable young women and famous entertainers overseas.

Kara Dixon Vuic builds her narrative around the young women from across the United States, many of whom had never traveled far from home, who volunteered to serve in one of the nation’s most brutal work environments. From the “Lassies” in France and mini-skirted coeds in Vietnam to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, Vuic provides a fascinating glimpse into wartime gender roles and the tensions that continue to complicate American women’s involvement in the military arena. The recreation-program volunteers heightened the passions of troops but also domesticated everyday life on the bases. Their presence mobilized support for the war back home, while exporting American culture abroad. Carefully recruited and selected as symbols of conventional femininity, these adventurous young women saw in the theater of war a bridge between public service and private ambition.

This story of the women who talked and listened, danced and sang, adds an intimate chapter to the history of war and its ties to life in peacetime.

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Haunting the Korean Diaspora
Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War
Grace M. Cho
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

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In Time of War
Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq
Adam J. Berinsky
University of Chicago Press, 2009

From World War II to the war in Iraq, periods of international conflict seem like unique moments in U.S. political history—but when it comes to public opinion, they are not. To make this groundbreaking revelation, In Time of War explodes conventional wisdom about American reactions to World War II, as well as the more recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adam Berinsky argues that public response to these crises has been shaped less by their defining characteristics—such as what they cost in lives and resources—than by the same political interests and group affiliations that influence our ideas about domestic issues.

With the help of World War II–era survey data that had gone virtually untouched for the past sixty years, Berinsky begins by disproving the myth of “the good war” that Americans all fell in line to support after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attack, he reveals, did not significantly alter public opinion but merely punctuated interventionist sentiment that had already risen in response to the ways that political leaders at home had framed the fighting abroad. Weaving his findings into the first general theory of the factors that shape American wartime opinion, Berinsky also sheds new light on our reactions to other crises. He shows, for example, that our attitudes toward restricted civil liberties during Vietnam and after 9/11 stemmed from the same kinds of judgments we make during times of peace.

With Iraq and Afghanistan now competing for attention with urgent issues within the United States, In Time of War offers a timely reminder of the full extent to which foreign and domestic politics profoundly influence—and ultimately illuminate—each other.

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Korean Showdown
National Policy and Military Strategy in a Limited War, 1951–1952
Bryan R. Gibby
University of Alabama Press, 2021
A historical analysis of the policies and military strategies applied during the Korean War stalemate period

Winner of the 2023 Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. Writing Award

Korean Showdown: National Policy and Military Strategy in a Limited War, 1951–1952 takes a holistic and integrative approach to strategy, operations, and tactics during the Korean War’s stalemate period and demonstrates how these matters shaped each other and influenced, or were influenced by, political and strategic policy decision-making. Bryan R. Gibby offers an analysis of the major political and military decisions affecting how the war was conducted operationally and diplomatically by examining American, Chinese, North Korean, and South Korean operations in the context of fighting a limited war with limited means, but for objectives that were not always limited in scope or ambition. The foundational political decision was Harry Truman’s voluntary repatriation policy, which extended the war by up to eighteen months. Its military counterpart was the American-led Operation Showdown, the last deliberate military offensive to coerce concessions at the negotiation table. Showdown’s failure (and the Communists’ own equally disappointing military efforts) opened up new avenues for solving the war short of a militarily imposed solution.
 
Gibby’s research draws on primary sources from American, Korean, and Chinese archives and publications. Many of these sources have not yet been mined in diplomatic and military histories of the Korean War. This innovative book also addresses a significant gap in the study of Korean military operations—the linkage between ground and air pressure campaigns, as well as the many Chinese and American operations conducted to establish negotiation positions. Gibby also explores many political and propagandist developments that assumed great importance in the summer of 1952, such as prisoner of war riots, the bombing of hydroelectric dams, and the South Korean constitutional crisis, which significantly influenced American and Chinese military decision-making.
 
Ultimately, this volume serves as a cautionary analysis of the limits of force, the necessity to understand an adversary, and the importance of strategic consensus. It also offers an effective case study on an underappreciated period of civil-military tension during the Cold War and on how civilian politicians and military leaders must collaborate to determine a realistic and effective strategy.
 
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Making Peace with Nature
Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ
Eleana J. Kim
Duke University Press, 2022
The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) has been off-limits to human habitation for nearly seventy years, and in that time, biodiverse forms of life have flourished in and around the DMZ as beneficiaries of an unresolved war. In Making Peace with Nature Eleana J. Kim shows how a closer examination of the DMZ in South Korea reveals that the area’s biodiversity is inseparable from scientific practices and geopolitical, capitalist, and ecological dynamics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with ecologists, scientists, and local residents, Kim focuses on irrigation ponds, migratory bird flyways, and land mines in the South Korean DMZ area, demonstrating how human and nonhuman ecologies interact and transform in spaces defined by war and militarization. In so doing, Kim reframes peace away from a human-oriented political or economic peace and toward a more-than-human, biological peace. Such a peace recognizes the reality of war while pointing to potential forms of human and nonhuman relations.
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Making the Forever War
Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism
Mark Philip Bradley
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
The late historian Marilyn B. Young, a preeminent voice on the history of U.S. military conflict, spent her career reassessing the nature of American global power, its influence on domestic culture and politics, and the consequences felt by those on the receiving end of U.S. military force. At the center of her inquiries was a seeming paradox: How can the United States stay continually at war, yet Americans pay so little attention to this militarism?

Making the Forever War brings Young's articles and essays on American war together for the first time, including never before published works. Moving from the first years of the Cold War to Korea, Vietnam, and more recent "forever" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Young reveals the ways in which war became ever-present, yet more covert and abstract, particularly as aerial bombings and faceless drone strikes have attained greater strategic value. For Young, U.S. empire persisted because of, not despite, the inattention of most Americans. The collection concludes with an afterword by prominent military historian Andrew Bacevich.
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Minor Salvage
The Korean War and Korean American Life Writings
Stephen Hong Sohn
University of Michigan Press, 2022
The Korean War, often invoked in American culture as “the forgotten war,” remains ongoing. Though active fighting only occurred between 1950 and 1953, the signing of an armistice resulted in an infamous stalemate and the construction of the Korean Peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone. Minor Salvage reads early Korean American life writings in order to explore the admittedly partial ways in which those made precarious by war seek to rebuild their lives. The titular phrase “minor salvage,” draws on different valences of the word salvage which, while initially associated with naval recovery efforts, can also be used to describe the rescue of waste material. Spurred by the stories told and retold to him by his parents Soon Ho and Yunpyo, Sohn enacts minor salvage by reading overlooked early Korean American life writings penned by Induk Pahk, Taiwon Koh, Joseph Anthony, and Kim Yong-ik alongside a later generation of life writings authored by Sunny Che and K. Connie Kang. In the context of the Korean War, Sohn argues, life writings take on a crucial political orientation precisely because of the fragility attached to refugees, civilians, children, women, and divided family members. To depict the possibility of life is to acknowledge simultaneously the threat of death, violence, and brutality, and in this regard, such life writings are part of a longer genealogy in which marginalized communities find representational power through the creative process.
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A Morning in June
Defending Outpost Harry
James W. Evans, with a foreword by John S. D. Eisenhower
University of Alabama Press, 2010
By June 1953 the Korean War, marked at the outset by extremely fluid advances and retreats up and down the peninsula, had settled into position warfare very near the original pre-war demarcation line between North and South Korea. At this point both sides were fighting to win a peace, to achieve incremental advantages that could be translated into gains at the peace negotiations in Panmunjom. These last days of the war saw savage battles for control of important local terrain features, and in the trench warfare of the Chorwon Valley a young U.S. Army lieutenant was assigned to lead an infantry company charged with holding Outpost Harry against a determined Chinese assault.
 
The battle devolved into hand-to-hand combat during a period of constant, intense fighting that lasted two days. The author, although seriously wounded that night, refused evacuation and remained on the hill to successfully lead his company in defense of the outpost. It wasn’t romantic; it wasn’t chivalrous; and many died or were badly wounded. Some of the survivors never fully overcame the mental and physical damage they suffered during the nightmare.
 
With this book, one of those scarred by that experience recounts the events of the battle and his lifelong efforts to deal with the residual horrors. The Korean Conflict may be called “the forgotten war” by some, but not by those who were on the front lines.
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The Naval Air War in Korea
Richard P. Hallion
University of Alabama Press, 2011

“In The Naval Air War in Korea, Dr. Hallion has captured the fact, feel- ing, and fancy of a very important conflict in aviation history, in- cluding the highly significant facets of the transition from piston to jet-propelled combat aircraft.”—Norman Polmar, author of Naval Institute Guide to the Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet, 18th Edition

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Outpost Kelly
A Tanker's Story
Jack R. Siewert, with a foreword by Paul M Edwards
University of Alabama Press, 2006
In the second year of the Korean War, Jack Siewert commanded a platoon of five M-46 tanks. Temporarily assigned to provide fire support for an infantry battalion on the front, he eventually found himself in the midst of intense fighting for a relatively unknown and unimportant hill, code named Outpost Kelly.
 
Those four days of battle against Chinese forces form the heart of this memoir, which is unique in its focus on the hill fighting that dominated two thirds of the Korean War. Trained to take advantage of his tanks’ mobility, his orders—to provide direct fire support for advancing infantry—along with the mountainous terrain and the torrential monsoon rains that created shin-deep fields of impenetrable mud, forced him to abandon doctrine and improvise.
 
At the height of the fighting, Siewert was able to bring to bear the guns from only one of his five tanks against the enemy. Nevertheless, his platoon played a key role in allowing members of the 15th Infantry to retake Outpost Kelly, and he offers an excellent analysis of how theory and experience come together in a point-of-the-spear military situation.
 
Siewert's platoon played a key role in allowing members of the 15th Infantry to retake Outpost Kelly, and he offers an excellent analysis of how theory and experience come together in a point-of-the-spear military situation. Outpost Kelly also paints a fascinating picture of the type of fighting, often overlooked, that characterized the second and third years of the Korean War. With truce talks proceeding in Panmunjom, both sides fought to claim incremental pieces of real estate along the demarcation line between North and South.
 
In the grand scheme of the war, the battle for Outpost Kelly might not ahce meant much. But for 3rd Infantry Division, and the men, like Jack Siewert, who fought there, it was the entire focal point of the war during the last four days of July, 1952.
 

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Reencounters
On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique
Crystal Mun-hye Baik
Temple University Press, 2020

In Reencounters,Crystal Mun-hye Baik examines what it means to live with and remember an ongoing war when its manifestations—hypervisible and deeply sensed—become everyday formations delinked from militarization. Contemplating beyond notions of inherited trauma and post memory, Baik offers the concept of reencounters to better track the Korean War’s illegible entanglements through an interdisciplinary archive of diasporic memory works that includes oral history projects, performances, and video installations rarely examined by Asian American studies scholars. 

Baik shows how Korean refugee migrations are repackaged into celebrated immigration narratives, how transnational adoptees are reclaimed by the South Korean state as welcomed “returnees,” and how militarized colonial outposts such as Jeju Island are recalibrated into desirable tourist destinations. Baik argues that as the works by Korean and Korean/American artists depict this Cold War historiography, they also offer opportunities to remember otherwise the continuing war. 

Ultimately, Reencounters wrestles with questions of the nature of war, racial and sexual violence, and neoliberal surveillance in the twenty-first century.

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Remembering Korea 1950
A Boy Soldier's Story
H. K. Shin
University of Nevada Press, 2001
Hyung K. Shin was sixteen years old when the North Korean army invaded South Korea in June 1950. Fleeing his home, Shin soon found himself alone in Pusan, a refugee without resources or any means of support. To save himself from destitution, he lied about his age and volunteered for service in the South Korean army. Shin’s account of the months that followed is a moving record of the Korean War from the perspective of an ordinary ROK soldier. He recounts his hasty training and subsequent experiences as a battlefield soldier in North Korea, as a guard in a prisoner-of-war camp, and as a refugee again in the massive flight of civilians and ROK military personnel retreating before the onslaught of the Chinese invasion. Through it all, Shin struggles to retain his humanity and pursue his education. In the process, the naïve schoolboy becomes a man. Today, Hyung K. Shin is an internationally respected chemist, but in the pages of this memoir he carries us back to Korea during a pivotal moment in that country’s history. This is the first account in English that describes the war from the perspective of a Korean who lived through and fought in it. Shin’s detailed and lively narrative is a stirring monument to the survival of human decency and kindness in the midst of terror, cruelty, despair, and the destruction of a proud nation.
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Retrieving Bones
Stories and Poems of the Korean War
Ehrhart, W. D.
Rutgers University Press, 1999

The Korean War was a major event in American history. It marked an abrupt end to the euphoria Americans felt in the wake of victory in World War II and turned out to be the harbinger of disaster in Vietnam a decade later.

Though three years of brutal fighting resulted in millions of casualties, the final truce line of 1953 corresponded almost exactly to the positions the opponents held when the fighting began. Back home, the returning veterans met with little interest in or appreciation of what they had endured. Consequently, literary responses to the Korean War did not find an eager readership. Few people, it seemed, wanted to read about what they perceived as a backwater war that possessed neither grand scale nor apparent nobility, a war that ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

Yet an important literature has come out of the Korean War. As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the war, these writings are well worth our attention. Many of the twelve stories and fifty poems assembled in Retrieving Bones have long been out of print and are almost impossible to find in any other source. The editors have enhanced this collection by providing maps, a chronology of the Korean War, and annotated lists of novels, works of nonfiction, and films. In a detailed introduction, Ehrhart and Jason discuss the milestones of the Korean War and place each fiction writer and poet represented into historical and literary contexts.

Among the writers and poets are

· James Lee Burke

· Eugene Burdick

· William Chamberlain

· Rolando Hinojosa

· Reg Saner

· Vern Sneider

· Stanford Whitmore

· Keith Wilson

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Shooting for Change
Korean Photography after the War
Jung Joon Lee
Duke University Press, 2024
In Shooting for Change, Jung Joon Lee examines postwar Korean photography across multiple genres and practices, including vernacular, art, documentary, and archival photography. Tracing the history of Korean photography while considering what is disguised or lost by framing the history of photography through nationhood, Lee considers the role of photography in shaping memory of historical events, representing the ideal national family, and motivating social movements. Further, through an investigation of what it means to practice photography under the normalized conditions of militarism, Lee treats the transnational militarism of Korea as a lens through which to probe the officially and culturally sanctioned readings of images when returning to them at different times. Among other themes, Lee draws on photography of militarized sex work, political protest in the military era, war orphans, and mass protests. Ultimately, Lee treats the formative periods in nation building and transnational militarization as both backdrop and cultivator for photographic works.
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Storming the City
U.S. Military Performance in Urban Warfare from World War II to Vietnam
Alec Wahlman
University of North Texas Press, 2015

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Success and Failure in Limited War
Information and Strategy in the Korean, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, and Iraq Wars
Spencer D. Bakich
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation—be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions.

Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state’s ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems.

Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.
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Truman and Korea
The Political Culture of the Early Cold War
Paul G. Pierpaoli, Jr.
University of Missouri Press, 1999

Detailing for the first time the story of America's homefront during the Korean War, Truman and Korea fills an important gap in the historical scholarship of the postwar era. Paul Pierpaoli analyzes the political, economic, social, and international ramifications of America's first war of Soviet containment, never losing sight of the larger context of the cold war. He focuses on how and why the Truman administration undertook a bloody, inconclusive war on the Korean peninsula while permanently placing the nation on a war footing.

Truman and Korea illuminates the importance of the Korean conflict as a critical turning point in the cold war by examining both the immediate and the long-term domestic and foreign policy effects of the conflict. Pierpaoli addresses such important topics as presidential war powers and debates concerning the Defense Production Act; the inner workings of the many war mobilization agencies; the operations and politics of nationwide price and wage controls; questions concerning cold war tax policies and fiscal and monetary policies; and the evolution of national security policy.

Pierpaoli shows that President Truman's decision to intervene in the Korean War quickly became subsumed by larger cold war concerns. By the autumn of 1950 the Korean mobilization program had become the nation's de facto cold war preparedness program, which would come to span nearly forty years and eight presidential administrations. After 1950 the cold war not only continued to significantly shape political and ideological discourse in the United States but also began to reshape aggregate economic policy. By doing so, it altered the nation's industrial and economic contours, giving birth to the concept of an institutionalized "national security state," which in turn spawned the cold war military-industrial-scientific complex.

Based upon extensive research in the papers and official presidential files of Harry S. Truman, as well as many manuscript collections and records of wartime and government agencies, Truman and Korea offers a new perspective on the Korean War era and its inextricable ties to broader cold war decision making.

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Warring Genealogies
Race, Kinship, and the Korean War
Joo Ok Kim
Temple University Press, 2022

Warring Genealogies examines the elaboration of kinships between Chicano/a and Asian American cultural production, such as the 1954 proxy adoption of a Korean boy by Leavenworth prisoners. Joo Ok Kim considers white supremacist expressions of kinship—in prison magazines, memorials, U.S. military songbooks—as well as critiques of such expressions in Chicana/o and Korean diasporic works to conceptualize racialized formations of kinship emerging from the Korean War.

Warring Genealogies unpacks writings by Rolando Hinojosa (Korean Love Songs, The Useless Servants) and Luis Valdez (I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges, Zoot Suit) to show the counter-representations of the Korean War and the problematic depiction of the United States as a benevolent savior. Kim also analyzes Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student as a novel that proposes alternative temporalities to dominant Korean War narratives. In addition, she examines Chicano military police procedurals, white supremacist women’s organizations, and the politics of funding Korean War archives.

Kim’s comparative study Asian American and Latinx Studies makes insightful connections about race, politics, and citizenship to critique the Cold War conception of the “national family.”

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We Were Innocents
AN INFANTRYMAN IN KOREA
William D. Dannenmaier
University of Illinois Press, 1999
Known as the Forgotten War, the "police action" in Korea resulted in almost as many American combat deaths in three years as the Vietnam War did in ten. Yet for many Americans today, the Korean War brings to mind nothing more than the television series "M*A*S*H."
 
William Dannenmaier served in Korea with the U.S. Army from December 1952 to January 1954, first as a radioman and then as a radio scout with the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment. Eager to serve a cause in which he fervently believed—the safeguarding of South Korea from advancing Chinese Communists—he enlisted in the army with an innocence that soon evaporated. His letters from the front, most of them to his sister, Ethel, provide a springboard for his candid and wry observations of the privations, the boredom, and the devastation of infantry life. At the same time these letters, designed to disguise the true danger of his tasks and his dehumanizing circumstances, reflect a growing failure to communicate with those outside the combat situation.
Woven through the letters is Dannenmaier's narrative account of his combat experiences, including a vivid re-creation of the bloody battle for Outpost Harry, which he describes as "trivial and insignificant—except to the men who fought it."A high-intensity, eight-day battle for a hill American forces would abandon three months later with the signing of the truce, Outpost Harry was largely ignored by the press despite heavy casualties and many official citations for heroism.
 
From his vantage point as an Everyman, Dannenmaier describes the frustration of men on the front lines who never saw their commanding superiors, the exhaustion of soldiers whose long-promised leaves never materialized, the transitory friendships and shared horrors that left indelible memories. Endangered by minefields and artillery fire, ground down by rumors and constant tension, these men returned—if they returned at all—profoundly and irrevocably changed.
 
This intimate, revealing memoir, a rare account by a common soldier, is a tribute to the Americans who served in a conflict that has only recently begun to gain a place in official public memory.
 
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The Will to Win
American Military Advisors in Korea, 1946–1953
Bryan R. Gibby
University of Alabama Press, 2012
The Will to Win focuses on the substantial role of US military advisors to the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) from 1946 until 1953 in one of America’s early attempts at nation building.
 
Gibby describes ROKA’s structure, mission, challenges, and successes, thereby linking the South Korean army and their US advisors to the traditional narrative of this “forgotten war.” The work also demonstrates the difficulties inherent in national reconstruction, focusing on barriers in culture and society, and the effects of rapid decolonization combined with intense nationalism and the appeal of communism to East Asia following the destruction of the Japanese empire. Key conclusions include the importance of individual advisors, the significance of the prewar advisory effort, and the depth of the impact these men had on individual Korean units and in a few cases on the entire South Korean army.
 
The success or failure of South Korean government in the decade following the end of World War II hinged on the loyalty, strength, and fighting capability of its army, which in turn relied on its American advisors. Gibby argues that without a proficient ROKA, the 1953 armistice, still in effect today, would not have been possible. He reexamines the Korean conflict from its beginning in 1945—particularly Korean politics, military operations, and armed forces—and demonstrates the crucial role the American military advisory program and personnel played to develop a more competent and reliable Korean army.
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front cover of Wisconsin Korean War Stories
Wisconsin Korean War Stories
Veterans Tell Their Stories from the Forgotten War
Sarah Larsen
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2008
A companion to the Wisconsin Public Television documentary of the same name, this compelling book features the stories of Wisconsin men and women who served in Korea. With unique insight they describe their experiences in camp, on the battlefield, and back home, as well as the war's lasting effects. The book is lavishly illustrated with photos, artifacts, maps, and timelines.
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