Steven L. Shields has lived in Korea for many years, beginning in the 1970s. He served as copy editor of The Korea Times in 1977.
Korean War remembered in US scholar's new book
The cover of “The Korean War Remembered: Contested Memories of an Unended Conflict” by Michael J. Devine / Courtesy of University of Nebraska Press
How do you remember the Korean War? This seemingly simple question has never before been explored with such attention to detail as in Dr. Michael J. Devine's new book, “The Korean War Remembered: Contested Memories of an Unended Conflict.”
Not only is the question extraordinarily complex, but there are so many perspectives and implications that to answer it with a single monograph is a monumental task. Yet, it is a task that Devine tackles with a balance of perspectives and profound insight. He clearly explains this question is one of such dynamism that yesterday’s answers are not the answers for today and will not be the answers for tomorrow.
The history of “memories” is what this book is about, and those memories change over time. They change with the person or persons remembering, and the answers shift with the political tides of an increasingly complex geopolitical environment.
Devine, who came to Korea in 1970 as a Peace Corps volunteer, is a retired professor of history and a former director of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. He has had a lifelong interest in the 1950-53 Korean War, personally and professionally. His time as director of the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, brought him intimately close to one of the major players in the Korean War era. Not only does Devine have an academic interest in understanding the war and its setting, but he also has personal connections with war survivors and family members of those who did not survive, both in Korea and in the United States.
This book is not just “another” history of the Korean War. Devine approaches the topic by examining how various individuals and nations have shaped their narratives of the war and its implications in the longer-term worldview. His primary questions: How does (a person, community or nation) remember the Korean War? How have these memories of the war shaped later responses to conflicts around the world, particularly the democratic versus communist political saber-rattling? History is misused to create acceptable national narratives. Those national narratives have guided political and military responses by all parties engaged in war. At the same time, the narrative memory is not history.
Written within Devine’s academic and life context, the book explores the topic from a mostly U.S.-centric perspective. Devine does look at the other sides to the questions, but each perspective probably needs more than one volume to cover. His bibliography of sources is extensive. As it is, Devine’s tome is massive — not in its length but in the implications of its content.
Devine gives a brief background to the story of the war and some of the tension between MacArthur and Truman. He covers how North and South Korea have national narratives (or memories) of the war, its beginning, immediate outcome and long-term effects. He looks at Soviet and Chinese perspectives and pays particular attention to how United States veterans of the war were largely ignored for decades and how the war became “forgotten” in daily memory and national narrative in the United States. He has some interesting comments on what lessons U.S. politicians and military learned or did not learn from Korea when faced with a similar regional conflict in Vietnam starting just a few years after the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement.
Devine does not shy away from some difficult questions about the guilt of war crimes. He points out how certain events, though investigated by the powers-that-be, left many unanswered questions and dissatisfaction on all sides. He candidly wonders how it could be that the U.S. stood by, seemingly condoning Syngman Rhee’s autocratic and increasingly vicious dictatorship, followed by decades of military dictatorship. Yet, in every case, U.S. politicians were focused on larger regional challenges and bent on a policy of containment rather than unification. Unable to destroy communism, at least, the U.S. leaders believed they ought to contain it to post-World War II boundaries and prevent its expansion. President Truman thus would not commit to full-scale military intervention but would support “limited engagement.” The U.S. was worried about nuclear war and wanted to prevent that at all costs, including the sacrifice of victory in Korea. Most in South Korea blame Truman for the lack of a decisive end to the war and for allowing the peninsula to remain divided.
The bottom line for most Americans was that a “police action” (as Truman called it) was not an all-out war. Thus, the public memories among Americans are vague at best. Korea was America’s first war that did not end in victory, which was deflating to the American belief in might and power and ran counter to their wartime history to that point. It seems the Korean War experience then doomed most future American engagements around the world to the similar kind of lackluster stalemate that Korea demonstrated. At the same time, the Korean War was an important turning point in the history of East Asia, which has been playing out over the past 70 years and will continue.
The Korean War was problematic for all players, including Koreans, who once again were at the mercy of world powers and ended up not with the independence so yearned for during the 1910-45 Japanese colonial era but a divided people, with colonial powers holding sway in their circles both north and south.
Devine’s book is an important piece of the history of the Korean War, East Asia and American involvement on the world stage. Frankly, I found the book difficult to read — not from a grammatical perspective, but because Devine raises some challenging questions for which there are no easy answers. His thoughts require reflection and sometimes rereading. It’s a short book at about 300 pages, but the topic is so much more than that — a worthwhile consideration for reading in the coming year.
Rev. Steven L. Shields (slshields@gmail.com) has lived in Korea for many years, beginning in the 1970s. A lifelong member of the Royal Asiatic Society Korea, he has served as a director and president. He was copy editor of The Korea Times in 1977.