“Give ’em Hell” Harry’s Liberation of Korea
– Learn MoreI have written a book about a disastrous event in human history which had turned back civilization, almost to the Dark Ages.
In 1945 one of the most devastating wars of all time was coming to an end and the winners were led by a brilliant and insightful leader, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was planning to guide a rebuilt world into a new era of peace and cooperation.
But he suddenly died and by accident the leader of the most powerful nation on earth was replaced by a very different person, Harry S. Truman. Truman was totally unequipped, in intellect, culture, temperament or inclination, to carry out or even understand FDR’s grand world program.
Truman arrived at the pinnacle of world power “without a clue” and showed himself to be a person with an inflexible parochial intellect and a cartoonish view of the world. Civilization took a huge plunge backward — comparable to the invasions by the Mongols and the Barbarians.
This book is about just one of his many blunders — the Korean War.
It looks at the ill-advised intervention by the United States, the only mega-power left after the holocaust of World War Two, into a local civil war on the peninsular of Korea, 7,000 miles from the US and which had utterly no strategic importance to the US.
One consequence of that destructive intervention over 60 years ago is that today North Korea, though impoverished, nevertheless feels compelled to spend enormous amounts of its scarce resources on developing nuclear bombs and missiles capable of being delivered to the US, or at least to US allies.
To most Americans this seems slightly bizarre. But my conclusion is that North Korea is quite rational – it simply wants to DETER the US from doing the same thing as it did during the Korea War: killing three to six million Koreans; burning down hundreds of villages, towns and cities; and leaving behind tens of thousands to live the rest of their lives without limbs or with napalm deformed bodies. We in the US may have only vague recollections of the 36,000 Americans killed or the 93,000 wounded in that war; but the Koreans vividly remember their millions of dead and the countless deformed survivors.
I set forth my description of these fateful events primarily through American military-oriented sources; the diaries of US Generals; over 200 photos of war scenes taken by US Army and US Air Force personnel; daily Press Releases from General Douglas MacArthur’s Command in Tokyo and finally American newspaper accounts.