More battles. UN forces have huge loses. Of course communists have greater loses, but they don't care much about this. Hastings achieved his first major literary success with BOMBER COMMAND, published in 1979, which established his trademark style of combining top-down analysis of the ‘big picture’ with human stories from the bottom up. Beyond archive research, he interviewed more than 70 personnel of the RAF’s 1939-45 Bomber Command, from its C-in-C Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris to aircrew and staff officers. On the book’s publication it prompted outrage from some RAF veterans, including Harris, and fierce print controversy including harsh comment from airmen. Many reviewers nonetheless praised the work. C.M.Woodhouse, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, called the book ‘a brilliant tour de force for a man born after the events he describes’. C.P.Snow wrote in the Financial Times: ‘Max Hastings joins Len Deighton as one of the best interpreters of the last war’. The Economist said: ‘This is the most critical book yet written about Bomber Command … it is also far and away the best’. The book was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and has remained in print for more than 40 years. Throughout the winter of 1945-46 the Military Government waged a campaign to suppress both the KPR and resurgent labor unions, which were adjudged an inevitable focus of Communist subversion. And even as this struggle was taking place, a new controversy was growing in intensity. In a fit of benevolent reforming zeal after their arrival, the Americans greatly eased the burdensome conditions of landholding for the peasants -- a highly popular measure -- and also introduced a free market in rice. The traditional rice surplus was the strong point of the Korean economy. Now, suddenly, by a measure introduced with the best of intentions, the Americans unleashed a wave of speculation, hoarding, and profiteering on a scale the country had never seen. The price of a bushel of rice soared from 9.4 yen in September 1945 to 2,800 yen just a year later. Officials were making vast fortunes through rice smuggling and speculation. By February 1946, not only was the free market rescinded, but stringent rationing had been introduced. Tough quotas were introduced for peasant farmers to fulfill, enforced by local police and officials.

Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings, FRSL, FRHistS is a British journalist, editor, historian and author. His parents were Macdonald Hastings, a journalist and war correspondent, and Anne Scott-James, sometime editor of Harper's Bazaar. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. This happened hours after the war ended and the armistice was signed. It made me smile 😊 It also made me sad at the meaningless futility of war.The suspicions of many Korean Nationalists about the conduct of the American military government were redoubled by the fashion in which the National Police, the most detested instrument of Japanese tyranny, was not merely retained but strengthened. It was the American official historians of the occupation who wrote that "the Japanese police in Korea possessed a breadth of function and an extent of power equalled in few countries in the modern world." The 12,000 Japanese in their ranks were sent home. But the 8,000 Koreans who remained -- the loyal servants of a brutal tyranny in which torture and judicial murder had been basic instruments of government -- found themselves promoted to fill the higher ranks, while total police strength in South Korea doubled. Equipped with American arms, jeeps, and radio communications, the police became the major enforcement arm of American military government and its chief source of political intelligence. A man like Yi Ku-bom, one of the most notorious police officers of the Japanese regime, who feared for his life in August 1945, was a year later chief of a major ward station in Seoul. A long roll call of prominent torturers and anti-Nationalist fighters under the colonial power found themselves in positions of unprecedented authority. In 1948, 53 percent of officers and 25 percent of rank-and-file police were Japanese-trained. By a supreme irony, when the development began of a Constabulary force, from which the South Korean Army would grow, the Americans specifically excluded any recruit who had been imprisoned by the Japanese -- and thus any member of the anti-Japanese resistance. The first chief of staff of the South Korean Army in 1947 was a former colonel in the Japanese Army. During the 16 years that Hastings served as a newspaper editor, he published no further histories, only three collections of writings about the countryside, and a 2000 memoir of his youthful experiences as a war correspondent, GOING TO THE WARS. On quitting newspapers, he also wrote EDITOR, (2003), a memoir of almost a decade at the Telegraph. CIA has its beginning. They do a lot of low-tier operations. Mostly people desert them or are killed. The operations are rushed and overly optimistic. Still they keep getting more money. The Koreans themselves make for terrible agents. In this readable,insightful, and well-written volume, Hastings aims to paint a “portrait” of the war and does not claim to provide anything resembling a comprehensive history, although in the end the book is a fine balance of both for the most part. The book is also mostly focused on military actions.

Good intro to how Korea was split in two after WW2 like Germany. Here Soviet put in a strong leader in Kim Il-sung and gave them a ton of weapons and support making them a powerful nation. Of course Kim Il-sung wanted to conquer South Korea that the Western powers had left poor and defenseless. Between 1945 and 1947 the foreign political patrons of North and South Korea became permanently committed to their respective protégés. The course of events thereafter is more simply described. In September 1947, despite Russian objections, the United States referred the future of Korea to the United Nations. Moscow made a proposal to Washington remarkably similar to that which General Hodge had advanced almost two years earlier: both great powers should simultaneously withdraw their forces, leaving the Koreans to resolve their own destinies. The Russians were plainly confident -- with good reason -- that left to their own devices, the forces of the Left in both Koreas would prevail. The Americans, making the same calculation, rejected the Russian plan. On November 14 their own proposal was accepted by the General Assembly: there was to be UN supervision of elections to a Korean government, followed by Korean independence and the withdrawal of all foreign forces. The Eastern bloc abstained from the vote on the American plan, which was carried by 46 votes to 0. Hastings was educated at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, which he left after a year.After leaving Oxford University, Max Hastings became a foreign correspondent, and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-02-28 21:03:04 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA178901 Boxid_2 CH119501 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor In October 1945 the Americans created an eleven-man Korean "Advisory Council" to their military governor, Major General Arnold. Although the membership purported to be representative of the South Korean political spectrum, in reality only one nominee, Yo Un-hyong, was a man of the Left. Yo initially declined to have anything to do with the Council, declaring contemptuously that its very creation "reverses the fact of who is guest and who is host in Korea." Then, having succumbed to Hodge's personal request to participate, Yo took one look around the room at the Council's first session and swept out. He later asked Hodge if the American believed that a group which included only one nonconservative could possibly be considered representative of anything. An eleventh nominated member, a well-known Nationalist named Cho Man-sik, who had been working in the North, never troubled to show his face. Without question, The Korean War defines South Korea to this day and Max Hastings work will give you a clear and objective picture – from the view point of both America and China. (In the forward Hastings points out that while objective data and interviews with Americans and Chinese are possible, such an exercise with the North Koreas would be a waste of time.) The scenes he depicts are vivid and graphic without being sensational. The opening firefight between Task Force Smith and the North Korean regulars was particularly gut wrenching. There are some phrases he uses to describe later events that haunt me a bit, yet I believe Hastings did this for clarity. One of the darkest chapters – the story of the POWs during the war - also contains some moments of extreme levity when Hastings describes the pranks GI’s pulled on their captors. Some of them had me laughing out loud. The pressures upon the Americans in Korea to dispense with the aid of their newfound Japanese allies became irresistible. In four months 70,000 Japanese colonial civil servants and more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians were shipped home to their own islands. Many were compelled to abandon homes, factories, possessions. Yet the damage to American relations with the Koreans was already done. Lieutenant Ferris Miller, U.S. Navy, who had been one of the first Americans to land in the country, and subsequently enjoyed a lifelong association with Korea, said, "Our misunderstanding of local feelings about the Japanese, and our own close association with them, was one of the most expensive mistakes we ever made there." Britain still wanted to feel big at this point and still had a big army to help out with. They were eager to help USA too. Both the left and right in Britain largely supported South Korea. Though plenty on the left were against helping them.

However, the U.S military on the spot, ruling through the same oppressive apparatus the Japanese had used before them, regarded the fervent Korean nationalism as communist. This is why they imported their own substitute, Synghman Rhee, who was educated in America, ferociously nationalistic, brutal, and determined to reunite the whole peninsula under his rule. Interestingly, the author does not hide his anti-communist streak, and he's also fiercely patriotic, giving a more-than-proportional share of attention to the British troops in Korea, but then, he does not try to hide his own message among facts, which is rather cool. This is atypical for nonfiction. Moreover, he also goes emotional here and there, and it's obvious that he does have some disdain for certain figures (politicians and top generals mostly), as well as a generally negative attitude toward China and north Korea. Who would have thought how relevant this book would some seventy years later? PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Korean_War_Pan_Military_Classics_-_Max_Hastings.pdf, The_Korean_War_Pan_Military_Classics_-_Max_Hastings.epub Hastings has received awards both for his books and journalism. BOMBER COMMAND (1979) won the Somerset Maugham Prize. He was Journalist of The Year and Reporter of the Year in the 1982 British Press Awards, and Editor of The Year in 1988. And now, suddenly, the war was over, and the Japanese Empire was in the hands of the broker's men. Koreans found themselves freed from Japanese domination, looking for fulfillment of the promise of the leaders of the Grand Alliance in the 1943 Cairo Declaration -- that Korea should become free and independent "in due course."In the months that followed the expulsion of the Japanese, the Koreans who replaced them as agents of the American military government were, for the most part, long-serving collaborators, detested by their own fellow countrymen for their service to the colonial power. A ranking American of the period wrote later of his colleagues' "abysmal ignorance of Korea and things Korean, the inelasticity of the military bureaucracy and the avoidance of it by the few highly qualified Koreans, who could afford neither to be associated with such an unpopular government, nor to work for the low wages it offered." There's something rather "dirty" about the Korean War. It wasn't linear, it wasn't logical, and it doesn't have closure. It started as a panic ping-pong between the north and the south, became a major conflagration between the US and China, and ended up as a WWI trench warfare slog that simply ended because the big powers have had just the right amount of posturing. this is the irony of the American position with regard to the UK, that allegiance to the foreign policy of the United States is part of the national identity to a degree British and Commonwealth nationals may take issue with. however, the famous London society madam's comment aside (viz., "America is the first country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization"), clearly to some degree the relationship is mutually beneficial, as the experiences of the first world empire in history to peacefully withdraw from its foreign frontiers permits the optimistic American empire-in-becoming to understand its limitations. I think this is a good compromise text of the situation, although anyone who wants to comment further is welcome. urn:oclc:472742150 Republisher_date 20120504182122 Republisher_operator [email protected];[email protected] Scandate 20120503214312 Scanner scribe12.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Source Now the bad news 😊 The North Koreans are mostly treated as a mass of homogeneous, evil people, who are ruthless and barbaric. Though there is a lot of description of individual American or British soldiers, there is no mention of an individual North Korean by name. Except for Kim Il Sung. The North Koreans are regarded as a primitive, evil horde who are uncivilized and the author probably feels that they deserved what was coming to them. The Chinese soldiers are also mostly depicted this way – as an evil horde who keep on coming and fighting in the night. The Chinese get slightly better treatment though – individual Chinese soldiers are sometimes mentioned and the author is able to interview them and we learn their stories. One of the reasons for this could be that North Korean veterans of the war would have been inaccessible to Western correspondents, as their country was closed and continues to be closed to outsiders today. The same would have been true with respect to Chinese veterans, but there was a thaw between the Chinese and the West in the 1970s, which continued into the 1980s, when Hastings wrote this book, and so he would have been able to speak to some of the Chinese veterans of the war. But, inspite of this small silver lining, it is hard to ignore the fact that the North Koreans and the Chinese are treated as barbaric, primitive, evil hordes, who are out to destroy the beautiful freedom created by Western countries.

In 2019 he received the Bronze Medal for the US Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Award for VIETNAM: An Epic History of a Tragic War. urn:oclc:472742150 Scandate 20110721225223 Scanner scribe10.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen SourceHis most recent book is ABYSS: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, published in October 2022. Hastings says in his introduction to the book that he seeks to set the events of the so-called Thirteen Days of the US-Soviet nuclear confrontation in the wider context of the Cold War, ‘to explain what sort of country Cuba then was, and the Soviet Union, and America’. He explores obvious parallels with today’s Ukraine war and crisis, which he writes are not exact, but have awakened ‘oversleeping Westerners’ to the mortal danger posed by nuclear weapons, ‘which has been for decades scarcely discussed among ordinary citizens’. His long experience of writing about conflict convinces him that the rightful motto for all wise national leaders is ‘Be Afraid’.