ABSTRACT
Although Clay Blair’s The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950–1953 (1987) resonates with Korean War veterans’ sense of their place in American memory, there is a healthy, if not prodigious, body of literature examining the conflict. Like Blair’s survey, much of it looks more closely at the early months of the war, because after the Chinese rout of the forces of the United Nations Command (UNC) at the Changjin Reservoir in the winter of 1950–1951, the war lost the mobility and maneuver that makes for especially good reading. A three-volume history of the Korean War that Allan R. Millett is completing constitutes the exception (Appleman 1961, Alexander 1986, Hastings 1987, Halliday and Cumings 1988, Toland 1991, Millett 2005, 2010). Throughout those first months of the conflict in Korea, the advantage shifted from the invaders to the defenders and back again. After the Chinese intervention and the UNC’s headlong retreat south of the 38th parallel, the Korean War began to resemble the trench-bound slog of World War I, while lacking the popular fascination. In a war with few “great battles,” the fight for the Pusan Perimeter, however, brings to the history of the Korean War that romantic character that scholar and general reader alike enjoy. An adequate, but not rich, literature explores this important topic.
