Showing The Korean War: The West Confronts Communism by Michael Hickey

In 1950, the United Nations agreed to collective action to protect the predominantly Christian South Koreans from the aggression of the Communist-backed North Koreans. This decision owed as much to chance as anything else, since the Soviet Union missed out on their chance to veto the engagement as they had decided to boycott the UN Security Council in protest at the UN's refusal to recognise Chairman Mao's Chinese regime. But once made it took the UN over three years to disengage. During that time, the Americans lost over 50,000 men, the British over 1,000, the South Koreans 46,000, the North Koreans 214,000 and the Chinese over 400,000. And yet when both sides finally called it a day, the front line was roughly in the same place as when the fighting started, the dictator Kim Il-Sung was still in power in the North and the South was still in the doubtful hands of Syngman Rhee. Overall, it's hard to avoid the feeling that the whole exercise was fundamentally pointless.

Like many historians, Michael Hickey shrinks from making such bold assertions in The Korean War, and contents himself more with providing a detailed military history, often drawing on sources that have been hitherto unavailable. Not least of these unpublished sources is Hickey himself, who served in Korea as a junior officer in the British Army. It is Hickey's personal experience that raises this book above a dry academic read; his writing brings alive both the very real hardships, such as the freezing cold winters, and the feeling of being stuck in a war that you don't fully understand, thousands of miles from home. The Korean War is one of the least reported and least understood engagements of modern times, and yet it has set the standard for post- Second World War military encounters. The superpowers no longer fight each other; instead they fight by proxy in other theatres. While the Americans clearly failed to draw the right lessons from Korea, as they were up to their necks in Vietnam within a decade, Britain at least realised that their days as a major player on the post-imperial foreign stage were up. As a result of Korea, the British began to rapidly scale back their armed forces. But lessons that have been learned, can be quickly unlearned and Tony Blair showed worrying signs that he believes that Britain has a part to play once more as a major military superpower. Before he gets too carried away with his success, Tony Blair should take a long hard look at Hickey's book for a historical reminder. He might not be so lucky next time round. --John Crace