25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent work betrayed... read it anyway!, December 12, 2002
This is a gripping adventure story. Lieutenant Clark was the man responsible for checking, updating, and correcting information on tidal channels, mudflats, seawalls, beaches, and defenses during the two weeks prior to the Inchon landings of Sept. 15, 1950. He landed, with two key Korean aides, on the island of Yonghung-do - just 12 miles from the city of Inchon. His team took the isle, organized its 1,000 inhabitants, and maintained control of his looking post during the last days before the invasion which broke the back of the North Korean supply line. From the base camp Clark conducted repeated clandestine probes of enemy defenses (frequently dressed only in mud!). There is enough action and exploits here to satisfy any reader! Paradoxically, this book's biggest problem is not Lieutenant Clark's fascinating narrative. It is the inadequate way this book was put together. Most bothersome are the curiously inadequate maps! It only has two: one of the entire Korean peninsula, and another of the islands and channels around Inchon. The first is unnecessary; the second is simply infuriating. Of the many islands shown on the second map, only four are identified by name. This is unconscionable since careful reading of the text allowed me to identify several others: Sin-Do, Sinbul-Do, Chongna-Do, Yui-Do, and Sammok-Do. (I carefully penned the names of each of these onto map next to each island for my own future reference!). I was also forced to create my own detail maps of the islands of Palmi-Do (the lighthouse island), and of Yonghung-Do (the base island) from Lieutenant Clark's narrative! The book features eight pages of glossy photos in the center (15 photos) only some of which bear directly on Clark's narrative itself - too bad the money used on these was not spent on adequate maps! (An index would have been very appreciated, too.) Despite all these annoying flaws, I would still buy this book - simply to read Clark's captivating and extremely well written story. Those who have slogged around in small boats, contending with tides, sandbars, mudflats, shell banks, shifting channels, and so on will especially relate to the challenges facing those Koreans who lived in these waters and who assisted the American `spy!' Those who have served in the U.S. military (both naval and ground) will appreciate the knowledge and capabilities of this man, who seems a prototype for Navy Seals or for Green Berets of later generations. Sadly, many who could learn from this man will never read a book like this, thinking he lived "too long ago" for anyone now to learn from. Not so! "The Secrets of Inchon" is worth every moment spent reading it!
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Read About a Forgotten War, July 5, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: The Secrets of Inchon: The Untold Story of the Most Daring Covert Mission of the Korean War (Mass Market Paperback)
The Secrets of Inchon is a remarkable war story complete with suspense, hair-raising escapes, death, education about the Korean culture and some romance mixed in. Navy Lieutenant Eugene Clark tells the story very capably.
Combat is treated as a necessary evil and he is not afraid to say he was scared during his many incursions into hostile territory. The Korean people working with him are patriotic and hard working. They understand the chances they are taking, but know that their entire country is in the balance as they assist the Americans in their preparations for the imminent Inchon landing.
I echo the editorial review that lamented the absence of maps. While I am not a big fan of map reading during most books, the number of islands and their proximity are key elements of the story and the book suffers from the lack of a single usable map.
The most striking feature of this story is the fact that Lieutenant Clark locked it away in a safe deposit box and never revealed its existence. In other words, it wasn't written for self-aggrandizement or enrichment, but out of a desire to tell the story.
I recommend this book to fans of military history and espionage.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
War crimes, June 15, 2008
When Kuraku-san -- Eugene Clark -- died in 1998, no one except his family noticed his passing. Half a century earlier, Clark had prevented thousands of men, women and children from being murdered, and, indirectly, forestalled the deaths of millions more from murder and starvation.
He was a war criminal.
At least, by the standards of the self-appointed moral censors at Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Code PINK and the editorial boards of the New York Times and similar papers, he was.
He set up a secret prison where he kept civilians taken prisoner without access to the Red Cross or lawyers. He turned over prisoners to a government that was known to torture and kill prisoners. He shot soldiers who had laid down their arms. He recruited and used a child soldier only 13 years old.
You can decide for yourself the fitness of his behavior. He wrote it down for his superiors in the United States Navy in 1953. After they read it, it was put in a safety deposit box where it stayed, unknown to the world,
for 50 years.
Clark, who spoke Japanese, was chosen to head a commando mission in September 1950 to gather information about the notoriously difficult approaches to Inchon, the port of Seoul. The anticommunist armies were on the ropes in southeastern South Korea, fighting desperately to keep from being pushed into the sea. A few weeks earlier, at an insignificant place called No Gun Ri, a minor skirmish had been fought by retreating Americans. That action has since been elevated into another war crime, as a result of a phony story published by the Associated Press.
Kuraku-san, two South Korean lieutenants and a dozen South Korean marines occupied an island, Yonghung, on the approaches to Inchon and recruited local fishermen and farmers to collect intelligence. It involved nightly skirmishes, knifings, stealthy patrols and the last battle in history of fleets under sail.
Torture and murder of prisoners was frequent on both sides, although Lt. Kim, Clark's interrogator, preferred not to use it. Kim also usually failed to get any information from communist prisoners.
There are other kinds of torture besides waterboarding.
The key figure in the story, from out 21st century perspective, was Yeh, a Korean communist from the Inchon area. Yeh's father had been killed as a communist by the South Korean police. His mother, however, was an anticommunist.
After the war began, Yeh emerged as political officer for the North Koreans at Inchon. He was in a position to
use a unique kind of torture.
Yeh's grandfather, an elder on one of the islands, came to Yeh with the other elders to ask the communists to
leave them enough rice to survive; they were starving. Yeh was able to break down his grandfather by telling
him that he, Yeh, had killed the grandfather's daughter, Yeh's mother.
That broke the islanders. The elders were shot; the people fled to the hills to starve.
Clark staged a raid to capture Yeh. To Clark's frustration, Yeh was captured alive but shot (probably by accident by his own men) during a gun battle during the retreat.
Clark leaves no doubt that he did not expect Kim's restrained methods to work on a character like Yeh. He does not specify what torture he planned to use on Yeh, but he clearly intended to make him talk.
Clark commented many times on the difference between American and Oriental, especially Korean, rules. When he agreed to send a 13-year-old girl behind communist lines to spy, he labeled it "a pretty low business."
Early on, he defined the rules of engagement: "The Republic of Korea was waging 'total' war against the Reds, admitting of no compromise -- utterly ruthless in her determination to expel the enemy and bring the nation together again under one flag. Korea was fighting this war under Oriental rules, with no pretense of observing the fast-becoming outmoded 'humanitarian' laws of warfare established by Western conventions. No squeamish American could hope to obtain the respect or following of such ardent Korean revolutionaries (against first the Japanese, later the communists) as Yong and Kim," his Korean lieutenants.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Clark's foresight was justified.
In those days, conduct that the University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds has dubbed "lawfare" did not prevent anti-totalitarians like Clark from fighting on terms that made victory possible.
Clark's work made a success of the landing at Inchon. The result was not a complete victory for freedom, but as we now know, it saved tens of millions of South Koreans from slavery and death. Of the villagers who worked with Clark, about 50 were murdered in cold blood by the communists.
Lawfare was not in vogue in 1950. Clark was awarded a Silver Star and a Legion of Merit for his valor and skill. The recognition was inadequate, but Clark fought for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who begrudged giving credit to anybody but Douglas MacArthur, and especially not to a mustang like Clark.
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