Defense Technology International - December 2007 - (Page 48)

REVIEW BOOK REVIEWED BY DAVID AXE THE COLDEST WINTER America and the Korean War BY DAVID HALBERSTAM Hyperion, 2007 718 pp., $35.00 On Nov. 1, 1950, U.S. and South Korean troops, ﬂush from a threemonth rout of the North Korean army, ran headlong into hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers that senior U.S. commanders for weeks had refused to believe were even there. The result for the poorly equipped and poorly led American units was “like suddenly hitting a brick wall,” writes the late David Halberstam in his history of the Korean War, published in hardcover. Intelligence failures and the overconﬁdence of an out-of-touch top commander, Douglas MacArthur, had drawn the U.S. to the Chinese-Korean border and into an unintended shooting war with the world’s most populous nation. MacArthur’s failures are just one subject of this dense work, which examines a “grinding, limited war” that claimed 33,000 American lives. More than 50 years later, the war has hardly penetrated the popular consciousness. The Korean War, especially after Chinese intervention, turned into a pointless and bloody conﬂict that highlighted the great extent to which the U.S. military had unlearned the lessons of World War II. “American equipment was terrible,” Halberstam writes. “Their basic infantry gear was often junk.” He describes amateurish battalion commanders, untrained infantry, a rickety logistics system and, above all, a strategic cluelessness that doomed the U.S. Army to ﬁghting the wrong battles at the wrong time with the wrong tools. Indeed, the parallels between the bloody re-education of U.S. troops in Korea and that of their predecessors during the African and Italian campaigns in 1942 and 1943 indicate a seemingly intentional forgetfulness that perhaps still plagues the U.S. military. The historical parallels between Korea and the Mediterranean theater in World War II beg a comparison between Halberstam’s book and Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle, published around the same time. The Day of Battle does for the Mediterranean what The Coldest Winter does for Korea, but with better writing, sharper insight and a superior eye for a story that gathers hundreds of individual threads into one tight narrative. Halberstam has a tendency to tell rather than show, and the result is a far less compelling read than this tragic conﬂict demands. “At the heart of the book are the individual stories of the soldiers,” the book’s jacket claims. But Halberstam seems reluctant to let the soldiers speak for themselves. Missing is the stripped-down but deeply evocative testimony that Atkinson effectively mines from soldiers’ memoirs and letters. Still, the history lesson is valuable, especially now. As the U.S. military eyes an increasingly likely staged withdrawal from Iraq, some observers worry that lessons might be lost. That kind of deliberate forgetfulness just gets U.S. troops killed in the next round of ﬁghting, as Halberstam’s good, but not great, book proves. � ADVERTISERS IN THIS ISSUE UPCOMING: IN PRINT - JAN ISSUE Maritime Patrol Aircraft Insurgent Technology Singapore – market and industry EVENT Network Centric Jan 22-25 AFCEA West Feb 5-7 DTAR Feb 12-13 DefExpo India, Feb 16-19 Singapore, Feb 19-24 AFA Orlando, Feb 21-22 AUSA Winter, Feb 27-29 ONLINE New Exclusive Videos! BAMS, V-22 belly-mounted gun system, C-27J Derivatives, and more! 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Defense Technology International - December 2007 Contents Around the World Science Watch Tech Watch BrahMos: Ramjet Ship Killer r-e-s-p-e-c-t Deja Vu Trump Card Dubai Demos Agile Helos Joint Force Online Charge UGVs Creep, Crawl to Victory Sweet Ride Fast, Lethal Ship Defense Networking Stealth: Why Raptors Can't Talk The Net Cutting Edge First Person In Review Insight

Defense Technology International - December 2007

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