The Battle For the Peninsula

By TOM NAGORSKI

It is known as the "forgotten war." It was never formally declared, and it never formally ended. Sandwiched between World War II and Vietnam, the Korean War has never matched those conflicts for American passion and interest, though it claimed more than 36,000 American lives.

Forgotten or not, the war and its aftershocks are still with us. The U.S. and South Korea are holding military exercises after the North was blamed for sinking a South Korean ship. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the demilitarized zone between North and South and attended ceremonies marking the war's 60th anniversary.

Now comes another, very different, way of marking the anniversary: Bruce Cumings's "The Korean War: A History." Don't be fooled by the book's banal title. What Mr. Cumings has produced is more argument than straight history. He takes aim at journalists and other historians who, he believes, have ignored evidence of the darker side of the Korean War.

Korea was divided in 1945, part of the postwar carve-up of territory between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. American troops occupied the South, Soviet troops the North. This division sowed the seeds of the Cold War's first major conflict. The Soviets set up a communist government in the North, under Kim Il Sung, while the U.S. flew in exiled politician Syngman Rhee. Tensions and violence grew steadily, and on June 25, 1950, Kim Il Sung's forces invaded the South.

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Seoul fell quickly to the North; a largely American United Nations force intervened, and by mid-September Gen. Douglas MacArthur and his forces had regained the upper hand. MacArthur's bold amphibious landing at Inchon led to the recapture of Seoul. That might have settled matters, a reversal of North Korean aggression, had it not been for the new U.S. doctrine of containment. President Truman's advisers saw a chance for "a roll-back" of the North Korean regime and for containing communism in Asia.

The attempt at roll-back drew China into the fight, and in the brutal winter of 1950-51 Chinese and Korean peasant armies bloodied the Americans in the North. After two more years of stalemate and carnage, a July 1953 armistice was concluded, but no peace treaty was signed, leaving North and South in a technical state of war.

Mr. Cumings neatly delivers this much and then goes about shattering the popular wisdom. He has two principal targets: the barbarity of the U.S.-backed government before the war; and MacArthur's no-holds-barred assault on the North once China had joined the fight.

When segments of the South Korean population rose against Rhee and his U.S-backed government in the late 1940s, they were brutally put down. Mr. Cumings argues, drawing on ample documentary evidence, that the South Korean government's butchery was widespread and indiscriminate; the U.S. knew of the killings but looked the other way. Walter Sullivan of the New York Times was "almost alone," Mr. Cumings says, when he wrote that much of South Korea was "darkened . . . by a cloud of terror."

When it came to war, Gen. MacArthur was merciless. As the battle for the North soured, MacArthur ordered an aerial bombardment to strike every possible "installation, factory, city and village" in the North. Cities across North Korea were reduced to ashes; hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. Mr. Cumings asks why, when the conduct of World War II (the firebombing of Dresden, say) or Vietnam (My Lai) has been so thoroughly examined, U.S. tactics in Korea have merited so little attention. No one knows or remembers "that we carpet-bombed the North for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties."

Mr. Cumings's point is that histories of the Korean War often describe North Korean atrocities with little or no attention to American or South Korean actions. Among the chroniclers he skewers is David Halberstam, whose 2007 book, "The Coldest Winter," evinces "almost no knowledge of Korea or its history."

As Mr. Cumings builds his case, the questions accumulate: Why was Dow Chemical attacked in the 1960s for providing napalm to the U.S. military in Vietnam when "oceans" of napalm "were dropped on Korea silently or without notice"? And why did it take a half-century for major news organizations to "discover" a massacre?

That's a reference to the Sept. 30, 1999, edition of the New York Times, which carried a front-page, Associated Press account of a massacre in a small Korean village in July 1950. The article quoted South Koreans who recalled the machine-gunning of civilians by American soldiers. It also included the confessions of one of those soldiers, who remained haunted by what he had seen and done. Why, Mr. Cumings asks, had it taken so long for such an account to appear in a U.S. newspaper?

Mr. Cumings has in the past defended North Korea against its common characterization as a gulag state, and here he goes out of his way to claim that North Korea's executions of POWs were carried out more humanely than those in the South and that such killings happened only when "it became onerous or impossible" to transfer prisoners. These are not helpful distinctions. But none of this obscures or undermines the book's central thesis. "The Korean War" may be a polemic, but it is well-sourced. What is more, it is elegantly presented. Mr. Cumings invokes Nietzsche, Brecht and Sophocles in thoughtful riffs on human memory and the "need to forget."

In South Korea today, the need to remember is being recognized. The government has established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission modeled on post-apartheid South Africa's. The Koreans have uncovered evidence of the killings of tens of thousands of their own citizens during the rule of Syngman Rhee. Mr. Cumings argues persuasively that a similar accounting is due of the U.S. role and that the Korean War—whatever one's perspective—must never be forgotten.

Mr. Nagorski is a managing editor at ABC News and the author of "Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack."