The Ashgate Research Companion to the Korean War

At best, encyclopedias of wars and historiographical volumes of the same are dull compendiums of information and ideas that provide useful references to buffs, fact-checkers, and non-specialists. This volume of 32 essays focusing on the historiography of the Korean War is much more. Senior scholars James I. Matray, a diplomatic historian, and Donald W. Boose, Jr., a military historian, have produced a book that not only will inform members of the general reading public interested in the war but will also inform and engage historians with considerable expertise in the early Cold War. At minimum, the essay authors effectively describe the secondary literature and sources available on the topics assigned to them; at most they provide insights on the strengths and limitations of that literature (based in part on their own research) and suggest avenues for future study. Rather than attempt summaries of all 32 essays in the volume, I will comment on a few of the most interesting ones and then outline some of the volume's limitations.In “Prelude to Conflict, 1910–1948,” Boram Yi does an excellent job of placing Bruce Cumings's classic two-volume study The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton University Press, 1981 and 1990) in the evolution of the literature on Japanese rule and the U.S. occupation. She shows both the study's early impact, which was profound, and how subsequent scholarship superseded it with regard to Korea's economic, social, and political development.Steven Casey, the author of the leading study of the U.S. domestic political dimensions of the war, expertly traces the twists and turns of scholarly treatments of the topic. Of special note is his emphasis on a long-forgotten analysis by Alonzo Hamby in 1977 that offered an insightful discussion of the differences between domestic dissent during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the sources thereof, a needed reminder that some scholarship actually improves with age.In the volume's longest essay, Allan Millett, the most prolific scholar of the war over the last decade, provides an extremely useful narrative of the ground war in Korea. More a discussion of events than of scholarship, the essay should be a starting-point for people seeking a basic understanding of the topic.Peter G. Knight, who wrote a doctoral dissertation on the intelligence war under Millett's direction, uses his own research as a departure point for evaluating the literature on his topic. Among other things, the result is a provocative discussion of the U.S. intelligence failure in the fall of 1950, which suggests that Generals Douglas MacArthur and Charles Willoughby in Tokyo were not so much willful in their misreading of Chinese Communist intervention as they were fooled by the enemy's deception campaign through electronic communications.Jiyul Kim's essay, “United Nations Command and Korean Augmentation,” joins Knight's in both reviewing the scholarly literature and developing his own interpretation based on substantial original research. Some will claim that Kim exaggerates in asserting that “the United Nations Command ... was an unprecedented coalition and an important factor in the outcome of the fighting” (p. 283), but he musters considerable evidence to support his argument.Unlike most of the other authors, Robert M. Collins integrates Korean-language sources into his discussion of both the secondary literature and his own research on the North Korean army. His crisply written essay leaves the reader wishing only that Collins had had more space to develop his penetrating generalizations.In focusing on the issue of prisoners of war, Charles S. Young devotes his attention primarily to Americans who were captured by the enemy or went missing. His coverage of the small literature on those in the latter group, including those whose remains were either never found or were identified only many years later, will be highly informative to most readers, even those with expertise on the Korean War. His coverage of the prisoners who did return to the United States, especially the controversy that surrounded many of them, interjects some cultural history into a volume that is notably short in that area.It is hard to criticize what is covered in this impressive volume, but some areas are largely ignored. The substantial Korean-language scholarship on the war is mostly absent, even though many of the volume's authors are native Koreans. Atrocities on both sides are given only cursory treatment, and most of the literature involving cultural and social issues is totally absent. Even Dong-Choon Kim's important if flawed The Unending Korean War: A Social History, which has long been available in English translation from the Tamal Vista publishing house, is overlooked. One hopes that scholars with expertise in these areas will not hesitate to evaluate their historiography in other venues. Meanwhile, we should honor the contributors to this volume for their considerable achievement

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