KOREA : The War Before Vietnam by MacDonald, Callum A

Free Press, 1986, New York, US First edition, hard bound in dust jacket, 6x9, VG/VG condition, xx, 330 pages, illus, maps, notes, bibliog, index. ----------------------------------------------------- Based on a wealth of official American, British, and Canadian documents-many only recently declassified. Callum MacDonald's Korea presents the clearest, most complete and unbiased account to date of the politics, strategy, and debate surrounding this disturbing (and still unresolved) conflict. Brilliantly dissecting the combatants' motives and tactics both off and on the battlefield, his powerful history traces the war's local origins and global effects, from the sudden prestige it accorded a young Maoist China to the support it rekindled for strengthening the NATO alliance against growing communist might.As MacDonald makes plain, Korea was quite unmistakably the war before Vietnam. Begun as a civil conflict among right and left factions of a former colonial state, the war soon escalated into a superpower showdown and a brutal campaign of attrition-ending in the devastation of what the Joint Chiefs of Staff judged to be a strategically insignificant Asian land. Moreover, it first confronted the U.S. and its allies with the grim prospect they would face in Indochina: if unlimited war in the nuclear age was unthinkable, limited war was unwinnable.Indeed, MacDonald observes, the frustrations of limited war quickly exhausted the political capital of the Truman administration and led Eisenhower's military advisers to consider using tactical atomic weapons to force a settlement-a possibility that alarmed America's U.N. allies and compelled Great Britain to try to temper U.S. brinkmanship. In the absence of a true atomic threat, the U.N. Command trained unprecedented air and artillery firepower on virtually any Korean position that might harbor enemy troops or sympathizers. The result was destruction on a scale that surpassed that endured by Japan during World War II, and which killed over a million Korean civilians and displaced millions more.