The war for Korea, 1950-1951: they came from the north

for 1950-1951: They Came from the North by Allan R. Millett Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010 644 pages 45. 00 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED To military historian and one-time US Marine officer Allan R. Millett, the Korean not so much the forgotten war the neglected He opens by chastising his fellow historians for their Eurocentric studies of the Cold War, noting that one devoted eight pages to the Korean War, another a page and a half, and a third skipped over the Korean conflict from 1948 to 1953. Millett, to the contrary, asserts that strategic thinkers and serving officers could learn much from the Korean that applicable today. author, a professor at the University of New Orleans, asserts: I propose that the Korean an example of the one great lesson of twentieth-century warfare: that no conflict should be categorized simply an interstate war or civil war or even a limited insurgency. While such definitions may advance statistical analysis, they are not much help for field diplomats and soldiers. He adds: Understanding the Korean will provide even more relevant examples of a war that embodies almost every aspect of contemporary Particularly pertinent: The Korean conflict remains a major window on the Chinese way of war. most appropriate way to view it, Millett writes, would be as a Maoist people's war, the global socialist template for wars of national liberation and postcolonial succession. Phase One began in 1945 with the end of World II and the division of in which the Soviets took the Japanese surrender north of the 38th parallel and put Kim II Sung in power while the US took the surrender in the south--and then went home. Phase Two started in 1948 when North sent a column of 1, 800 partisans into the south to take advantage of a rebellion there. But South Miller asserts, won the unknown war before the forgotten war. That brought on the North Korean invasion of June 1950, which had the backing of Joseph Stalin in Moscow and Mao Zedong in Beijing. Millett labels that Phase Three of the conflict in but contends that Stalin and Mao guessed wrong on the North Korean army's ability to conquer South which led to the intervention of the Chinese People's Volunteer Force (CPVF) in November of 1950. That, Millett says, is the subject of this book, the second in a trilogy on the Korean conflict. author, whose writing a model of clarity, doesn't say it outright but he might well have renamed the Korean the Sino-American War. Note the book's title, The for Korea, not the War in Korea or The between the Koreans. Both the South Korean and North Korean armies turned in spotty performances, to the dismay of their respective American and Chinese allies, leaving the brunt of the battle to the two foreign armies. Mao's motive, having come to power in Beijing just a year before, was to drive the United States off the Asian mainland. …