Korea: The War Before Vietnam. Callum A. MacDonald. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986.

In Korea: The War Before Vietnam, Callum A. MacDonald writes with short, sharp clarity. The precision of his writing does not take away from necessary details or the importance of the Korean War in international history, especially for those involved in that conflict. The book is driven by a narrative told through official documents, robust secondary sources, and scholarship developed over nearly 35 years. Callum A. MacDonald died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 49. However, he is remembered as a historian with a broad range of interests and writing abilities with work spanning Anglo-American relations in the years prior to the Second World War, the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Battle of Crete, and others. MacDonald became Lecturer in American Comparative Studies in 1975 at Warwick University where he wrote Korea: The War Before Vietnam.[1] Written and published a decade after the end of American involvement in Vietnam, Vietnam only makes an appearance in the book’s final pages. MacDonald enters the discussion on limited war and its influence on the American conduct of war on the Korean Peninsula. Readers will find MacDonald’s discussion highly relevant for contemporary thinking around limited war and future planning for wars in an era of so-called great power competition. 

The author clearly explains the complexity of the political arrangements on the Korean Peninsula following the Second World War, Western decisions to go to war, negotiations to settle the conflict, and the ultimate aftermath for those involved. The narrative uses a bird’s eye view of political decision-making in various capitals. The fighting is broadly covered in part two of the book, focusing primarily on the employment of air power in simultaneously limiting ground casualties and solidifying the United Nations' military position in negotiations at Panmunjom. The operational level of war is the lowest level of war consistently covered in this section and throughout the book. However, this is less of a negative and shows a consistent focus by the author. Those looking for the tactical experiences will find much greater detail in David Halberstam’s Coldest Winter. 

However, the American public would likely find it difficult to understand effectively “surrendering" to China while maintaining a robust resistance in Europe.

Navigating the book itself is easy as those sources weave together a complex narrative of diplomacy and the deepening of the Cold War in Asia. Relations between Washington and London are a key focus throughout. The U.S. is painted as the new global power struggling to balance the need to confront Communism with the cost of doing so. In contrast, MacDonald portrays Britain as the ever cautious but loyal trans-Atlantic ally seeking to restrain American power.[2] 

British concerns over U.S. policy in Korea meant trying to reorient plans to escalate the war with China, which most likely meant using atomic weapons. However, the American public would likely find it difficult to understand effectively “surrendering" to China while maintaining a robust resistance in Europe. Rejecting British reasoning seemed an obvious answer to achieving the U.S. strategic goals set out in the “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” a U.S. National Security Council document known as NSC-68, and implementing a strategy of containment.[3] To the American public, notes MacDonald, “Containment was indivisible.”[4] 

MacDonald discusses General Douglas MacArthur’s frustration and resistance to orders from Washington throughout his time as head of Far East Command and commander of the U.S. Eighth Army. These attitudes led to explosive congressional hearings in the spring of 1951. President Truman’s recall of MacArthur, beloved by the American public, greatly complicated the Truman Administration’s management of the war effort on the Korean peninsula. Having participated in a second global war with a clear endstate and unconditional, uncompromising use of American power, MacArthur was dismayed that the administration had chosen a solution short of victory through attrition. MacDonald summarizes MacArthur’s comments during the hearing: “By continuing to impose restrictions on American power, Washington was fighting on enemy terms. There were only three alternatives - victory, stalemate, or ‘yielding.’ By opting for stalemate, the administration retreated in the face of aggression at great moral and physical cost.”[5] As MacDonald explains, the administration’s embrace of attrition in Korea, according to MacArthur, abandoned broader political objectives at the cost of American lives and money, the latter of which were key to ending the war decisively.[6]  

Internal conflict between the left and right of Korean politics exploded as the United States used the former Imperial Japanese bureaucratic system in Korea to counter Korean communists.

The author argues that the U.S. superimposed its Cold War fears and objectives on what was merely a civil war, aligning more closely to Bruce Cumings’ argument in The Origins of the Korean War. In describing Kim Il-Sung, MacDonald argues that, “Despite his debt to Moscow, Kim was never merely a Soviet puppet. He was both a communist and a nationalist, committed to social revolution and unification.”[7] The earliest elements of this civil war component can be found immediately following the end of Japanese rule in Korea in August 1945. Internal conflict between the left and right of Korean politics exploded as the United States used the former Imperial Japanese bureaucratic system in Korea to counter Korean communists. The ultimate goal in Korea was independence. MacDonald concludes that American reservations and confusion between nationalist and communist goals in Korea led to “an example of intervention against a Third World revolution which threatened the global status quo.”[8] This confusion of local politics and agendas meant “the war was the logical extension of U.S. occupation policy” in that “Washington was determined to contain the Korean left as well as the Soviet Union, assuming that all change would favour [sic] the Russians.”[9] 

MacDonald’s work thus fits within the broader literature on the Korean War by offering an alternative view to other major works like Rethinking the Korean War: a New Diplomatic and Strategic History by William Stueck. Stueck argues that the war in Korea was not a simple civil war, but rather a war initiated by outside factors with Stalin’s acquiescence of Kim Il-Sung’s invasion plan.  

One of the few shortcomings to MacDonald’s work is the lack of a definition on limited war. What is limited war? And for whom is the war limited? The author does not shy from the impact of war in Korea and notes the effects of the war on the peninsula were not limited for those who experienced it. MacDonald discusses the seemingly total destruction wrought by limited war and witnessed across South Korea by generals, soldiers, and journalists alike. The author observes bluntly that, “From the moment that Korea was selected for an experiment in limited war, ‘Korea was doomed.’”[10] The Chinese and Korean perspectives are lacking in part two of the book, “Problems with Limited War,” as the focus is mostly concerned with the American and Allied experience.

In 1988, a review of MacDonald’s book in the Journal of Asian Studies takes brief issue with the subtitle, noting that “comparisons with Vietnam are few and off its track.”[11] Yet in writing a robust political history of the war in Korea, MacDonald clearly connects American involvement in Vietnam that was soon to follow. MacDonald’s references to Vietnam note a conscious U.S. effort throughout the Vietnam War, beginning under President Eisenhower to avoid provoking direct Chinese military involvement in South Vietnam by steering clear of an invasion of North Vietnam.[12] 

This “third force” bears a strong resemblance to a military plan enunciated by Gen. MacArthur at his 1951 Senate hearings that included blockade, bombing, training additional Republic of Korea units and deploying Chinese nationalist troops to the Chinese mainland.

MacDonald explains other implications of the Korean War on American policy in Vietnam and East Asia more broadly.[13] The training and equipping of the South Korean (ROK) Army was modeled later by  U.S. military training and assistance programs in Laos, South Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines. U.S. policy in the region focused on “contain[ing] China by establishing stable nationalist regimes around the Chinese periphery, based on a third force which was neither communist nor colonial.”[14] MacDonald explains that a U.S.-backed political third force stretched back to President Roosevelt who supported the idea, and which was now “regarded as the key to progress in other areas such as Indochina.”[15] Establishing nationalist, anti-Communist regimes through force were key to U.S. policy and in driving China and the Soviet Union apart. In practice, the third force idea relied, in part, on CIA and US military support to nationalist insurgents on the Chinese mainland. Though, there was little support for the idea in China or Taiwan.[16]

This “third force” bears a strong resemblance to a military plan enunciated by Gen. MacArthur at his 1951 Senate hearings that included blockade, bombing, training additional Republic of Korea units and deploying Chinese nationalist troops to the Chinese mainland. MacArthur’s idea, explains MacDonald, “would ally American technology with Asian manpower.”[17] Through this plan, “[MacArthur] offered a heady vision of liberated Asia, won at minimum cost in American lives and money.”[18] It was this plan that helped set MacArthur at odds with the Truman administration.

Emphasis on nuclear weapons brought conflict into the realm of proxy warfare and the expanded reliance on regional partners, all while maintaining a wary eye toward possible Chinese intervention…

In addition, NSC-68 continued to weigh heavily on U.S. policy in Asia. While the objectives of NSC-68 had been modified through the Korean War, it nevertheless determined the outlines of a continued expansion of the defense budget. MacDonald notes importantly that, “A new approach to containment, however, was being shaped by the frustration of Korea. It was made possible by government spending on atomic weapons under NSC-68.”[19] Increased nuclear weapons testing and the growing variety of delivery methods—artillery shells and lighter ordinance that could be carried by fighter aircraft—proved that such “technical developments offered an opportunity to break the stalemate in Korea without risking huge ground casualties or exposing the air force to unacceptable levels of attrition.”[20] While never used in Korea, these developments in the early 1950s would come to define American ideas of security during the Eisenhower administration alongside a reliance on military assistance and training of non-communist and non-colonial partners. 

Emphasis on nuclear weapons brought conflict into the realm of proxy warfare and the expanded reliance on regional partners, all while maintaining a wary eye toward possible Chinese intervention, as in 1950. Finally, MacDonald identifies a course of action pursued by the Truman administration that would be a feature of American strategy in the decades to come: “Truman and his civilian advisers were determined to hold in Korea as long as possible, in order to preserve American honour and strengthen the chances of a cease-fire, however slim.”[21]  

MacDonald’s work is relevant for military writers, historians, and current military and political leaders who discuss the phrase “limited war.” Renewed debates surrounding so-called great power competition, and how to define it, often feature limited war as the likely future of military force within the current strategic environment.[22]

Such discussions tread over much the same ground of limiting war through means or geography or, assuming the reader has their own ideas of limited war, not providing a definition at all.[23] MacDonald frames Korea as a limited war, arguing this type of war was totally foreign to the U.S. military prior to World War II. A definition for limited war is not explicitly provided but seems to stand as the antithesis to how the author defines “total war.” To MacDonald, total wars “were global and involved the total mobilisation of resources to defeat the enemy.”[24] In regards to Korea, limited U.S. intervention meant that “Washington was ultimately prepared to accept less than total victory rather than pour resources indefinitely into a peripheral struggle or risk involving the Russians.”[25]   

Where MacDonald’s definition for limited war is better found within his idea of total war, he is clear about the problematic nature of fighting a war only to accept something less than total victory. This willingness on the part of Washington did not rescue the Korean War from American public perceptions that the war was without a clear objective or purpose beyond the grandiose policy of containing Communist expansion globally. MacDonald observed  that “It was difficult to ask men to die to preserve a military stalemate in some obscure corner of North-East Asia.”[26]

This struggle for justification fits neatly within the limited war discussion taken on by Donald Stoker in his recent book Why America Loses Wars. MacDonald’s lack of a limited war definition is juxtaposed with the idea that total war involves the complete mobilization of a state’s resources. This is a key focus for Stoker who criticizes such definitions for delineating strictly the means for fighting the war and not the political ends.[27] Advocating for the ejection of the term limited war from military discussions, Stoker seeks the decisive battle with an adversary that would eliminate the possibility of protracted struggle.  

Korea: The War Before Vietnam is essential reading for those seeking to better understand the complex political nature of the Korean War, its effects on subsequent US actions in Vietnam, and the politico-military conditions that led to a limiting of U.S. wars even further into the future. Contemporary discussions around preparing for limited war, or not, make MacDonald’s book an important, enduring work of history. 

Harrison Manlove is a U.S. Army ROTC cadet. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U. S. Government.

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Header Image: DMZ, From South Korea, 2007 (Tyrell Mayfield)

Notes:

[1] Dale Carter, “Obituary: Professor Callum MacDonald,” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, January 30, 1997, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-professor-callum-macdonald-1285868.html. 

[2] Callum A. MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986), 261. 

[3] “National Security Council Report, NSC 68, 'United States Objectives and Programs for National Security',” April 14, 1950, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, US National Archives. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116191

[4] Ibid., 76.

[5] MacDonald, Korea, 100. 

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 11.

[8] Ibid., 264.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 258.

[11] Gregory Henderson, The Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 2 (May 1988), 389.

[12] MacDonald, Korea, 264.

[13] Ibid., 263.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid., 105

[16] Ibid.,106.

[17] Ibid., 100.

[18] Ibid. 

[19] Ibid., 132.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid., 73.

[22] Alexander Boroff, “What is Great-Power Competition, Anyway?” Modern War Institute, April 17, 2020.https://mwi.usma.edu/great-power-competition-anyway/.

[23] Maj. Zachary L. Morris, U.S. Army., “Emerging U.S. Army Doctrine: Dislocated with Nuclear-Armed Adversaries and Limited War,” Military Review, January-February 2019. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/Jan-Feb-2019/Morris-Doctrine/f/.

[24] MacDonald, Korea, 201.

[25] Ibid., 201.

[26] Ibid.

[27] For various definitions of limited war related to means and geography see: Ian Bertram, ”The Return of Limited War,” The Strategy Bridge, September 13, 2016 https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2016/9/13/the-return-of-limited-war; Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1957); Adrian R. Lewis, The American Culture of War (New York: Routledge, 2018), 177; Robert Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); David Rees, Korea: The Limited War (London, Macmillan & Co. LTD, 1964) xii-xvi; Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 410-424.