The Coldest Winter

I've been reading David Halberstam’s history of the Korean War, “The Coldest Winter” and at the same time I’ve been watching the lovely chaos of the 2007-08 primary elections. This curious mix of a book about a violent forgotten war and the nightly TV burst of political non-violence has set me to wondering.

“The Coldest Winter” is a big book in every sense of the word……666 pages, evenly written and powerful researched…about an earthquaking period in the world’s history when Communist China and the Soviet Union owned more than half of the Eurasian continent and we were left to dispute the edges of their empires.

It is Halberstam’s twenty first and last book….he died in a car accident this past Spring on his way to interview an old hero of mine, the New York Giants quarterback YA Tittle, for a football book he was planning.

My first impression of “The Coldest Winter” was that it was much like a Russian novel….most all of the principal characters, high and low in rank and in Halberstam’s esteem, get substantial biographies as they appear on the scene. The book is rich in context; every player and each nation’s political history surrounds the battles and the whole political panolply from from the rise of Mao to the fall of MacArthur is unfailingly described.

As you might expect, there are brave men and cowards, commanders in the very front of the line and commanders hiding in tanks or back in Tokyo. There stands the plainspoken ex-haberdasher Harry Truman and the aristocratic Dean Acheson coupled in a world crisis that no one really understands.

The book was very personal for me….I was drafted into the army on the very day the war ended…..and thus wasn’t sent into the shooting war. In a spooky way, I examined myself as each battle, each death, each mad bloody event was described…..trying to figure out how I would have behaved if I had been there. I suspect many readers my age will do the same. Halberstam evokes combat so graphically that you are drawn onto the hillside or into the valley where men are dying all around you in a sleet of steel.

Throughout the book, you are always reminded that this war was being produced and directed by men most of whom had just survived the Second World War and are infected by the hubris of victory. In particular there is MacArthur. I was raised on MacArthur’s majestic performance in World War II….the “I Shall Return” following his retreat to Australia, the brilliant island hopping in the southern Pacific….his eloquence as he stood on the deck of the USS Missouri accepting the surrender of Japan. But Halberstam’s MacArthur is a lousy soldier, an arrogant would-be royal surrounded by sycophants. And his sycophants (principally one Major General Ned Almond), trying to please MacArthur, blunder and bluster their way through the conflict, dividing forces, spewing anti-Asian racism and damn near losing the war.

Halberstam’s heroes are usually the common American soldiers. (The book is subtitled “America and the Korean War” which directs its focus onto the GIs.) General Matthew Ridgway and Colonel Paul Freeman are singled out as officers who recovered the integrity of the battlefield and eventually turned around the huge defeats of the first months. Lieutenant Paul McGee of Belmont, North Carolina, a brave and sensible platoon commander…is the book’s most singular character.

However, what gives “The Coldest Winter” its true nobility as Halberstam’s finest (in my opinion) work….is the way he weaves the history of the post-war world around this forgotten little war that after killing 58,000 American soldiers and many hundreds of thousands of Asians, ended up right back where it began.

It seems to me that the book, with it’s complete, almost encylopedic recording of this particular struggle, teaches us the futility of all the wars we have stumbled into since World War II…..from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq.