The Korean War, in retrospect, seems quaintly old-fashioned. Television coverage of this year's air strikes (if one is on the right side) looks like a video game; it is difficult to imagine the blood on the ground. Since America suffered the national trauma of Vietnam, young men join the US army on the tacit understanding that Cruise missiles and laser-guided "smart bombs" do the fighting. I share the hope that this comfortable arrangement may remain unchanged, though now there are some doubts.
The morning after the Korean armistice was signed, in July 1953, I climbed a steep hill near the 38th Parallel, which still divides North and South Korea. Boulder City, as the United Nations forces called the hill, was the place where American and Chinese soldiers most closely confronted each other at the end of the war - often, astonishingly, no more than 25 yards apart. The opposing positions were actually connected by deep communication trenches. Sometimes there were intruders, one way and the other, and there was hand-to-hand combat.
The weather was hot. There was a buzz of flies. Bodies that had been unrecoverable during the past few days had swollen and putrefied. Some, like inflated rubber dummies, had split the rotten cloth of their battledress. In death, the Americans and Chinese were beginning to look the same. Now opposing stretcher-bearers were collecting bodies - and fraternally exchanging cigarettes. "There's never been anything quite like this," commented my guide, Brig-Gen J. C. Burger of the 1st US Marine Division, "and I don't think we'll ever see anything like it again."
Colonel Michael Hickey, who served as a young officer in the British Commonwealth Division in Korea and is a graduate of staff colleges and the Royal Military College of Science, has written a masterful, authoritative account of the war from beginning to end. The history is comprehensively detailed, allotting appropriate space to the army, navy and air forces of all the belligerents, including North Korea and China, and narrated with admirable clarity. There are even glints of laconic humour, which are not really anomalous, for servicemen can be quite playful.
For example, on the day of Queen Elizabeth's coronation, in June 1953, British gunners fired red, white and blue smoke-shells over no-man's land to screen a patrol of the Durham Light Infantry while draping colourful recognition panels on the Chinese barbed wire. The Chinese, in the spirit of the occasion, kindly refrained from interfering. There were no artillery duels that day.
The international press also enjoyed a few light moments. Patrick O'Donovan of the London Observer organised a large party to celebrate St Patrick's Day, to which he allowed me to contribute smoked oysters and some other delicacies specially flown from Tokyo by the Royal Australian Air Force. A large marquee was set up near Commonwealth HQ, and many invitations were issued, specifying "Carriages at 3 a.m.", but none of the guests was picked up that soon. Maj-Gen Mike West, the commanding officer, danced so strenuously with a young lady of a United Nations relief agency that he dislocated her shoulder. A medical officer promptly put her back together and she was able to resume dancing.
MOST of the story is very grim indeed, of course, as battles raked up and down the peninsula, from Pusan in the south to the Yalu River along the Chinese border and back to where the war began. Hickey tells of POW camps, north and south. In the north the interrogation was severe and communist indoctrination, though usually unsuccessful, wasn't always. Facetiousness sometimes helped to maintain prisoners' morale. One British officer, answering the question "Have you ever committed a serious crime?" responded, "Yes, travelling 1st class on a 3rd class ticket from Woking to Waterloo." Chinese interpreters were often confused.
Hickey discloses interesting information on covert operations by the CIA and SAS behind enemy lines, which was successfully kept secret at the time.
He writes with deservedly scathing candour of Gen Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander until President Truman sacked him. After his triumphant invasion of Inchon, MacArthur spoke of bringing Nationalist troops from Formosa, blockading China and using nuclear weapons. Truman felt that MacArthur's ambition might have precipitated a third world war. But the Korean war was long ago and far away. Things are managed better nowadays. Aren't they?
Patrick Skene Catling was a war correspondent in Korea for the Baltimore Sun