In Mortal Combat: Korea, 1950-1953 (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS155 In Mortal Combat: Korea, 1950-1953, by John Toland. New York: William Morrow, 1991. 624 pp. In the past ten years, our understanding of the Korean War has been transformed by scholars like Bruce Cumings, who have reinterpreted and redefined the origins and meaning of that tragic conflict. If the Korean War was on one level a struggle between the blocs, it was on another a revolutionary civil war, an attempt by Koreans to complete the unfinished anticolonial revolution of 1945 and assert their independence of the great powers.' This new academic wave, however, has not been reflected at the popular level where authors like Joseph Goulden and Max Hastings have continued to produce combat narratives within the old coldwar framework, stressing Soviet complicity and viewing Korea as a case of communist aggression.2 Although Toland states that his purpose is to capture the horror of the war and avoid partisanship, his book at first glance offers nothing new, following a path well-trodden by popular writers before him. Although he claims to have read Cumings, he makes no attempt to discuss the domestic Korean roots of the struggle and devotes a mere two pages to the critical period between 1945 and 1950, without even mentioning the Korean People's Republic, the Moscow Agreement, the abortive joint commission talks, or the Cheju uprising. He describes Syngman Rhee as an exile patriot while claiming that Kim Il Sung was trained in Moscow and fought in "the China [sic] civil war" (p. 17). He has little doubt that the North Korean attack was instigated by Stalin to distract the United States from the NATO alliance, accepting in the process some very dubious South Korean evidence about the role of Soviet military advisers in planning and overseeing the entire operation. Toland is thus more concerned with the question of who fired the first shot in June 1950 than with the Korean and Northeast Asian context within which the fighting began, ignoring in this respect the entire thrust of recent historiography. This approach leads him to some strange conclusions . Perhaps the most bizarre is that U.S. intervention in 1950 prevented a Korean civil war. It would be more accurate to say that since 1945, Washington had been a key player in the Korean civil war, propping up a Korean right that could not have survived without its support. Indeed one could go further and agree with Cumings that American occupation of the south in 1945 was the necessary precondition for civil war, since without U.S. sponsorship the right would never have survived its history of collaboration with the Japanese. Toland's apparent ignorance of these facts allows him to mention in passing the Japanese military background of leading ROK officers without apparently grasping its 156BOOK REVIEWS significance for Korean politics in this period. His dismissal of the Korean background contrasts sharply with his treatment of Chinese intervention in October 1950, which accepts Beijing as an independent player with legitimate interests, a concession never extended to Pyongyang . A similar failure either to read or to understand the new historiography characterizes his treatment of the truce talks. As Toland recognizes , the major stumbling bloc to a settlement at Panmunjom was the issue of the repatriation of prisoners of war (POWs). Although he promises detailed treatment of this question, he reproduces the familiar tale of communist terror behind the wire on Koje island, mentioning only briefly and out of context the violence in the anticommunist compounds against anyone who desired repatriation. He seems to accept as fair, without any question, the screening of POWs in April 1952, which produced a total for repatriation completely unacceptable to China and North Korea, something that even the State Department never believed. The real story here is of the cover-up about the reality of Koje, a story which Toland ignores. There is plenty of evidence in published sources like the diary of Admiral C. Turner Joy, the chief U.S. delegate at the truce talks about the brutality that was used in the anticommunist compounds against anyone unwise enough to demand repatriation, something that produced some private qualms in both Washington and London about the morality...