Customer Reviews

The Secrets of Inchon: The Untold Story of the Most Daring Covert Mission of the Korean War

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3 star:		(3)
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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!

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.

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.

This is a great story. Most of it takes place in the few weeks preceding the U.N. landing of troops at Inchon in September, 1950, only a few months after the Korean war started. The author, Gene Clark, was supposed to send as much information as possible to Tokyo prior to the landing date. Fortunately, he was highly aware of many aspects of such operations from his previous service in the American invasion of Okinawa in 1945. In 1948, he served as an interpreter at Japanese war crimes trials on Guam, and his account of his weeks in Korea is filled with information about how well ideas were translated from one language into another. A short paragraph in which he quotes himself is capable of showing how quickly his mind operates on many levels in the midst of complex situations, thusly:

"Can't we get some clothes for these men, Kim? And get that doctor to take care of those splinters right away," I directed. Min's back and arms were a bloody mess. We couldn't afford to have this man hospitalized. (p. 150).

That's from a page in the middle of the book, where the 15 pictures are located. Back in 1950, Gene Clark was not transmitting pictures in his reports to Tokyo. His radio communications were quite limited, and a lot of the spying took place after dark. Even the picture of his ten men on the island about eleven miles from Inchon, showing Clark with his shoulder holster and Youn standing "with the pistol in his belt," doesn't use the nicknames which were constantly used in the story "in case they were captured by the Communists." (p. 18). Clark had a knack for picking names for his top buddies that could be confused for major Asian figures: Yong Chi Ho and Kim Nam Sun. My confusion about which Kim was part of this story was greatest on page 129, after a digression about "a certain doom for more than a hundred of the innocent peaceful inhabitants of Taemuui-do, sacrificed on the blood-drenched altar of Communism to the ambitions of the traitorous and false Korean prophet, Kim Il Sung, the Soviets' puppet president of North Korea," as related to Clark by Kim after his interrogation of the mother of Political Officer Yeh of the North Korean People's Republic. Yeh had been assigned to impose order and collect rice for the Red High Command on an island a mere five miles from where Clark was able to observe things like, "Down the beach, a sampan was shuttling back and forth between beach and junk, landing the people from Taemuui-do." (p. 128). Yeh's father had been a close friend of Kim Il Sung and had been captured and later executed by the South Korean counterintelligence organization for which Kim Nam Sung had previously worked, "But Syngman Rhee had fired him for failing to predict the North Korean invasion." (p. 24). The attempt to capture Yeh to extract whatever information he might have about Red High Command intentions on the defense of Inchon is barely plausible, but it was an exciting episode.

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is mentioned a number of times in this book. There is no index, so this will not be an easy source to use for those who are looking for details about how well General MacArthur did in 1950, but a picture of how pleased he was, sitting on the bridge of the USS Mount McKinley on September 15, and walking ashore on September 17, are great evidence of this operation's success. The Epilogue, written by another after this manuscript was revealed by Clark's surviving family members in 2000, gives Clark the credit for flashing "earthshaking news to headquarters in Tokyo" (p. 324) from islands in the mouth of the Yalu River at the end of October, 1950. A million Chinese troops, with human wave tactics that are easy to imagine, after the number of casualties that begin to mount up in the actions reported in this book, changed the situation enough to confine the UN army mainly to South Korea. In noting the medals won by Gene Clark, the Navy Cross which he received for an action behind enemy lines in early 1951, escorting Brigadier General Crawford Sams, a doctor, to determine if Chinese troops were dying of bubonic plague, which might have required "the daunting task of vaccinating their entire army against the plague," (p. 325) seems most modern.

Many people seem to have forgotten about the Korean War. This is one mans truly great story. I had never heard anything about this, but it seems to have been an intergal part in the UN's success in stomping some communist ass. Having served there I think its great that this information is out there and I hope it spreads. If you are into military history this is the book for you. Eugene Clark had, from what I gathered, no combat training, yet he performed spec ops. caliber missions. This book is not only a tribute to him, but to those who fell in korea, and the over 10,000 Americans still unnaccounted for there.

I actually felt it was between 3 and 4 stars. I knew of this misson but never knew the details until now. I would personally like to thank Mrs. Clark for volunteering her husband's personal account of the misson which was in a safe-deposit box, unbeknown to the outside world.

It was amazing how one Navy officer and two Korean oficers had to get everything together and ready for the invasion of Inchon. Would you believe they had only two weeks to complete the task. One just does not know how many details and how many bumps there were until they read this book. I really enjoyed the descriptions and details. I feel I have gotten to understand the Korean people better because of this book. I fellt like I was there. A job well done!

The decision by General MacArthur to invade Inchon was highly controversial. All command structures were against the move. The decision turned out to be correct. The author is the nab who went behind the enemy lines and helped gather the information needed to make the invasion a success. A good quick read.

For all us W.E.B. Griffin freaks this tells the real story from Under Fire and the brave men that caputured the islands. A must read for miltary history buffs.

Full disclosure: This reviewer failed to read "The Secrets of Inchon" as closely as he would have preferred. The Inchon Landing of September, 1950 was one of the most heroic and timely exploits in U.S. military history. It came at the lowest point in the Korean War as our troops were trapped in the far Southeast corner of the peninsula ("the Pusan Perimeter"). The invasion, behind enemy lines, broke the back of the North Korean Army, virtually eliminating it as a military force. In the weeks before the invasion, the author landed a commando team on the islands surrounding Inchon. His team obtained critical information on the size of the local garrison, disposition of machine gun nests, artillery emplacements, and the height of the seawalls. This should have made for an exciting military story and for others it did. However, this reviewer was distracted to the point of total frustration by the inadequacies of the physical book. There are 3 major problems: 1) Most of all, the MAPS are of TOTAL inadequacy. This is a major defect in an operation where geography was of overriding importance. Why do publishers permit such lapses? 2) The centerfold photos are dull and serve virtually no purpose. Surely the Navy could have provided better. 3) The typesetting is completely unprofessional. More than that, it hurts the eye. There is no spacing between the paragraphs through the ENTIRE text! I found myself skimming pages to save my sight! The bottom line is that mistakes and omissions by the publisher have marred a potentially superior tale. Hopefully, future reprintings can address these shortcomings. Perhaps the hardcover edition does not contain them at all. The call from this corner is a reduction in rank from 5 stars to 3. This is solely due to the sloppy or otherwise disinterested publisher-or sleeping editor-who failed to support a superior piece of military reporting.

This book is a factual account of the efforts of Commander Eugene Franklin Clark USN in support of General MacArthurs invasion at Inchon to retake Seoul South Korea. The book was mentioned as a footnote in a story of The Corps "Retreat Hell" by W.E.B. Griffin. The story by Mr. Griffin seemed to push the envelope of audacity and courage in fiction but the reference to the Secrets of Inchon in the story led me to purchase the book. The factual story is amazing and well worth the read.