Customer Reviews

The Bloody Road to Panmunjom

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This is the type of story that cries out for both a historian and a writer. There is more to a war that reporting that this is how it started, this is how the fighting went, this is how it ended and this is what it meant. The Korean War, a "police action" made possible only by the boycott of the USSR from the UN, was the first and last stand by the West against naked aggresion in the Cold War.

It was a turbulent time, an age when American and Russia fought for supremacy and it seemed to many that communism was sweeping the world. This war demonstrated that totalitarian governments come to power through force - they are never elected at the ballot box. The political firestorm, the international and domestic politics, the geopolitical situation - all get short shrift here.

Instead we climb muddy hills, camp our with Turks, take small ridges, fire machine guns...you can't see the forest for the trees. In this case the sum of the parts is NOT greater than the whole. This might be useful in a course on military strategy and history but not as a description of the Korean conflict.