Reddit reviews The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles)

You could try The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings. It gives a good introduction into the conflict and is very critical of the USA's role and behaviour in the war. Or you could try his "Origins of the Korean War". I've heard good things about those two volumes but haven't read them myself.

I can't give you much on American public opinion, but I can address your third point.

In the few years of division before war (1945-50), North Korea implemented a lot of really popular policies. This included land reform that parceled out property to the common people; empowering women to work outside the home; schools and daycares; and public work projects. At the same time, South Korea was busy attempting to stamp out leftists and prevent a left-leaning state from springing up and ousting the pro-American dictatorship in place.

After the war, South Korea was still a dictatorship attempting to stamp out leftist opposition. Remember, this is the height of the Cold War. Priorities being what they were, the leadership in South Korea was more concerned with maintaining power than rebuilding. North Korea, with the support of both China and the Soviet Union, was able to immediately turn attention to reconstruction. South Korea remained under dictatorship/military rule for decades. They didn't elect a civilian president until 1993. It's difficult to imagine, because South Korea today is a massive developed economy, but North Korea was doing objectively better for a long time.

The cult-of-personality didn't really begin until the transition of power from Kim Il-Sung to Kim Jong-Il. While the elder Kim had legitimate credentials for leading the party and the state, Kim Jong-Il... not so much. So the veneration of Kim Il-Sung was designed to legitimize Kim Jong-Il's succession. That amazing state education implemented in interwar years turns out to be a perfect vehicle for indoctrination. The economic descent of North Korea is more linked to the winding down of the Cold War: without the Soviet Union and China providing resources and manpower, North Korea's economy stuttered. The country became isolated from the global economy (the same global economy that finally pulled South Korea into Asian Tiger status). This was followed by a famine in the 1990s and the collapse of the state distribution system. North Korea hasn't recovered.

It's hard to imagine how sudden this shift must have seemed. Imagine someone born in Korea, say, in the year 1910. This person is born the same year that the Korean king is ousted, and Korea annexed into the Japanese empire. If they were left-leaning politically, they might go to China in their late teens/early twenties and fight in the Chinese civil war, or perhaps join an anti-Japanese guerilla organization. Age thirty-five, their country is split in two, and they probably have relatives on either side of the border. Age forty, open war between countrymen. The literature from this period is heart-wrenching. Some parents had children fighting for opposing sides, and loyalties were divided.

After the war, if this person is in North Korea, they enjoy an adulthood of fairly secure living, with work and education and land to own. But by the age of eighty, this person will have also seen their grandchildren starving to death, and their children possibly hauled off to re-education or work camps.

If this person is in South Korea, they will have watched as Americans slipped into old colonial institutions and continued the persecution of leftists. They will have worried about getting work and getting food; education is a luxury. But by age eighty, they will have seen successful democratic protests, and seen their grandchildren buy cell phones, and go to world-ranked universities, and never worry about food.

Twentieth-century Korean history is fascinating. So many changes within such a short period of time.

Some random thoughts inspired by the video:

• I disagree with the characterization of Kim Il-Sung as a "Soviet puppet." He was an anti-Japanese guerilla fighter prior to the war, with combat experience in China, and solid socialist credentials. There was significant friction between Kim and the Comintern in Russia, which is probably best exemplified by the obvious example given in the video: Kim Il-Sung was intent on unifying Korea with or without Soviet approval. And he made the attempt without Soviet support. During rebuilding, Kim Il-Sung often played China and the Soviet Union against each other to gain benefit. Hardly a puppet; he played his role to his own advantage.
  
  
• I really appreciate that the phrase "Northern aggression" wasn't used to describe the invasion. While North Korea's invasion is undoubtedly the spark for the war snowballing into a Cold War proxy conflict, it helps to consider the context. Skirmishes had been on-going for months. Both sides were actively calling for unification by military means. North Korea was flourishing, supported by powerful allies (China, Soviet Union), and was implementing the promised policies that people had wanted under Japanese rule. From the northern perspective, South Korea had exchanged one colonial rule for another, and were no better off for it. It's inaccurate to paint North Korean motives as simple aggression. And I wish that was more well known.
  
  My sources:
  
  The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings
  This is the book on the Korean War, one of the earlier "revisionist" academic works. It might give some insight into American perceptions of the "Forgotten War." It's the book that I would recommend to anyone wanting to get a decent overview of the Korean War, because it addresses the issues with American scholarship (i.e. it's very biased about socialism).
  
  "Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950" by Suzy Kim
  This looks at the interwar years in North Korea, with particular focus on land reform, education, and women.
  
  "The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950-1960" by Charles K. Armstrong
  This looks at the socialist "fraternity" of states, and how Chinese/East German/Soviet aid was integral to North Korea's rebuilding and economic success in the immediate post-war period.
  
  This entire issue of Cross Currents on "(De)Memorializing the Korean War: A Critical Intervention" is a useful look at how different players recollect the war in the aftermath.
  
  If you can find it, I also recommend "Socialist Korea: A Case Study in the Strategy of Economic Development" by Ellen Brun and Jacques Hersh. It was written in the 1970s, and might give an interesting perspective on how people were explaining North Korea's progress at the height of its success.

I would strongly suggest checking out Bruce Cumings and his work on the Korean War: The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) https://www.amazon.com/dp/081297896X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_WrGeAb5MKNTAV

He does a great job talking about US war crimes, how MacArthur underestimated the fighting ability of the North Koreans (many of whom had fought on the communist side in the Chinese Civil War and were crack troops) because of racism, the atmosphere of McCarthyite USA, and more.

Here is a free YouTube interview with him: https://youtu.be/ba3dgDUtE9A

Hello, I highly recommend that you read Bruce Cuming's amazing The Korean War: A History for a more nuanced understanding of how many Koreans, both North and South, feel about the Korean War.

Different parts of Korean society view the War differently, just like how even to this day different parts of American society view the Civil War differently.

Having said that, the conventional and triumphalist view of the Korean War being a great victory for the South and US is not the entire picture! Like anything in history, it's a more complicated and nuanced matter that has many different angles to it. Many in South Korea, to this day, are still very upset at the South Korean government over the many massacres it conducted during the War against it's own civilian population. The book I mentioned above delves more into this, but in the years before and during the Korean War, the South Korean government conducted a campaign of "anticommunism," where many innocent South Koreans were brutally murdered, especially in the provinces of Jeolla do and Jeju do.

Because of these tragic events, even to this day, there is visible division within Korean society geographically, where the Western provinces of Korea have a deep seated distrust of conservative governments, such as the current Lee Myung Bak administration.

Under the previous Korean administration when Roh Moo Hyung (yes, he's the dude who killed himself, although many Koreans think it was the current president, Lee Myung Bak, who drove Roh to suicide) was president, there was a [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_(South_Korea)) established to help uncover and come to peace with the darker parts of Korean history. Under it, more has come to light as to how horrible and common these massacres were.

EDIT: hyperlink issue seen below

> I don't want war on the peninsula at all but there is no denying the North started the WAR (Not civil war)

How the fuck was the Korean War not a civil war? Korea was united for about a thousand years. The best evidence for the Korean War being a civil war is that right up until the eve of the war, thousands of Koreans were travelling north and south of what would become the border, just like right before the American Civil War Americans commonly crossed what would become the border between the USA and CSA without a second thought. You would not expect this behavior if these Koreans expected to lose their homes and be unable to go back (which is exactly what happened, and families were ripped apart as a result). In fact, as late as 1956 some of these migrants thought they might still be able to go home. In Barbara Demick's book "Nothing to Envy" she refers to a South Korean conscript name Tae-Woo who was trapped north of the border; he was holding on to hope he might be able to go back until 1956, when the DPRK issued him and others like him official citizenship documents.

Your entire comment talks about the two Koreas like they're as different as France and Germany. This is, again, like talking about the Civil War as "the War of Northern Aggression" except even more laughable because at the eve of the Civil War America was still brand spanking new, whereas Korea had been a unified country for a fucking millennium.

>I don't want war on the peninsula at all but there is no denying the North started the WAR (Not civil war) and push south Korea down to Busan. At which point the UN intervened and sent a majority USA force to help the south Koreans.

SK only existed because of US support. The DPRK wanting to drive out American imperialists isn't an invasion, it's a brilliant fucking idea actually.

>You either a troll or uneducated on the politics and history of the Korean peninsula.

Lmao I'm actually highly well read on Korean history, unlike you. It's simply not the opinion of many or most Korean war scholars that the North unequivocally "started" the war, and it's laughable to claim it didn't start as a civil war.

If you want to talk politics and history, read a fucking book. Here's a good start.

Maybe they're not.

The Sinchon Massacre really happened but it was carried out by South Korean troops against the people they saw as communist sympathizers. The Americans just stood aside and let it happen. And then, once the North Koreans re-took the county they massacred most everyone of any consequence left alive assuming they must've been collaborators with the ROK troops. The 35,000 figure is disputed but would be the total murdered by the troops of both sides. But the North Koreans pretend it was all done by the Americans which is pretty much untrue.

But a few years ago this book was published and in the review in the New York Times it is written that:

"The most eye-opening sections of “The Korean War” detail America’s saturation bombing of Korea’s north. “What hardly any Americans know or remember,” Mr. Cumings writes, “is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.” The United States dropped more bombs in Korea (635,000 tons, as well as 32,557 tons of napalm) than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. Our logic seemed to be, he says, that “they are savages, so that gives us the right to shower napalm on innocents.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/books/22book.html?_r=0

If what he says is true, that the U.S. dropped more tons of bombs on North Korea in three years than were dropped in the entire Pacific Theater of WW2, would it be surprising that 10% of North Korea's civilian population at the time, 3,000,000 people, in such a small country, were killed in B-29 attacks?

Ah knew it would be one of the two. Not sure exactly what subjects they cover in the first year at Sheffield but at SOAS we start with 20th century Korea.
The main two books we used were A New History of Korea and Korea's Twentieth Century Odyssey. These two books cover the whole recent history in general and then we had readings within this for each section (colonial time, war, Park Chung-hee rule etc).
I will try and give some of the titles I can remember.
Colonial Era- Colonial Modernity in Korea,

Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea,


Offspring of Empire: The Koch'ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism

War: The Korean War: A History

Park Chung Hee- Korea's Development Under Park Chung Hee,

Reassesing the Park Chung Hee Era

And we finished on a section on Korean identity. Unfortunately the only book I can remember from that was Ethnic Nationalism in Korea.

Hope this helps a little. You do a year abroad in your second year right? Some of my classmates in my year abroad were from Sheffield Uni.