The Hidden History of the Korean War

"This book is very interesting. I F Stone was a famous iconoclastic investigative reporter. His method was to read a whole bunch of newspapers every day, clip them, and then read what the government was saying publicly through government reports, speeches and the like, and then try to figure out what was going on. And he got many things right about the Korean War using that method. In the early 1950s he was condemning the carpet bombing which the U.S. did in North Korea. This was an enemy that had almost no defence and no air power. I don’t think many people understand that North Korea suffered the same kind of fire-bombing that the British and Americans did in World War II against Japan and Germany – and yet North Korea was a small country. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In particular, I F Stone brought up the widespread use of napalm in Korea; most people identify that with Vietnam. I sometimes assign this book to my students, not because the narrative of the Korean War is necessarily all that great (we know much more now than Stone could possibly have known), but because it is such a great book to look at to learn how to read a newspaper or an official government report. It is also a very lively book. Well, I think that the contemporary North Korean regime is just an awful regime. For more than ten years it has imposed hardships and deaths and famines on its own people, and it is quite natural that people today would look at Kim Jong Il with his outrageous get-ups and see him as a caricature of a Communist despot and then transport that back to the time of the Korean War. The fact is that, in 1950, North Korea was eminently stronger than South Korea. It had a legitimacy that South Korea did not have, because its top leaders had fought against the Japanese in a long and difficult war, whereas the forces of order in South Korea were almost entirely populated by generals and officers and particularly police officers who had served Japan. So it really was a kind of anti-colonial war that the U.S. got involved in. But when they did, it was kind of transformed into a global crusade against Communism. Well, for them you have a direct line drawn back to the Korean War, and even earlier, to the 1930s. There are 23 people in the North Korean Politburo and 15 of them are over 80 years old. They lived through the Korean War, and in North Korean culture patriarchy runs very deep – much deeper than in South Korea. I think you have a fossilised regime which has been hanging on for the past 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down – and hanging on primarily because they know that if they give up they will lose their lives, and perhaps their families’ lives, and, ultimately, they will also lose the Korean War."