#69: The Darkest Summer: Pusan and Inchon 1950 by Bill Sloan

Simon and Schuster, New York: 2009. 383 pages

I don't know anything about Korea, and in this I am pretty close to average. I know my father was active during the war and was in the Air Force. I know that on the show "Mad Men" this is Don Draper's war, one that we somehow lost or no one cared about. Before I read this book, I knew these facts and more:

1. That the Korean War was never ended by an armistice. It remains in a state of cease fire.
2. The Chinese were involved and suffered massive casualties.
3. Douglas MacArthur was fired during the war, gave a maudlin speech and then was never heard from again

The subtitle of this text puts forth the idea that in 1950 the US Marine Corps was in danger of being eliminated. After WWII, the US government did not want to have a large standing army; between 1945 and 1949, the size of the US army dropped by nearly 85%. The Marines were viewed as somewhat archaic. Far from being a cheerleading book for the USMC, Sloan's text provides some answers as to why the USMC survived. To be quite blunt, they were better led and had more esprit d'corps than the army. If anything, the USMC had to save the army's bacon multiple times.

However, this was not the army's fault. One thing that absolutely leaps out at the reader here is the utter craziness of the Korean War in general. This was a war that the US did not want to fight and so did with 1 hand behind its back. In essence, the American public, as well as many soldiers in Korea, asked "Who gives two pinches of shit about this place?" That question is never fully answered and the reasons for that are well investigated in this text.

Also, Douglas MacArthur was a complete and absolute 24- karat asshole. While I was under this impression before I read this book, the text and Sloan's evenhanded description of the arrogant asshole with the corncob pipe reinforced this in spades. I mean, the jack ass literally lied about his ability, and when the Marines landed and kicked ass on Inchon, this prick said "OK, well that's it" and went to drink tea below decks of his ship. There is a phrase for this that was en vogue in Vietnam: REMFS. That stands for Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. Most generals are those; ask those poor bastards on Corrigedor in World War II what MacArthur was. They'll answer "Oh, that REMF that evacuated to Australia while we went on the Death March?". What a fuck.

#68: D-Day: The Battle For Normandy by Anthony Beevor

Penguin Press, New York: 2009. 592 pages

Anthony Beevor is perhaps best known for his book about Stalingrad. For this text, he uses sources from U.S., English, French and German archives to try to get a round picture of the campaign that went from the invasion of France to the liberation of Paris. The tale is replete with crazy stories, horror, absolute random violence and random kindnesses. What is missing to a point are villains and heroes. If anyone is a hero here, it is in an abstract sense. Villains are in the SS (where they should be) and are products of a fucked up worldview.

The "indoctrinated" view of most SS soldiers that Beevor takes makes sense in this PC addled world of ours. In the diary entries that Beevor uses (which are used brilliantly and poignantly I might add) the German troops themselves tended to dislike the SS troops. US troops used some SS prisoners as human shields on jeeps. The French Resistance would just as soon murder one of those bastards as look at 'em. And, by and large, I did not care. This is difficult for me to say, but the SS troops, officers and leaders strike me as a group of gangsters-cum-art-thieves who happen to have tanks and artillery. For this reader, it is difficult to find any sort of sympathy for them. If anyone is sympathetic here, it is the much-maligned-by-U.S.-authors French.

Beevor details the suffering of the civilians of Caen (bombed to bits by the Allies because Monty could not close the deal on the ground), the incredibly dangerous and irreplaceable work of the French Resistance before and after the invasion and the relationships of the Free French Forces with the Allies. I found the descriptions of the work of the Resistance following the invasion more compelling than the description of the invasion itself. Perhaps because the buildup and the invasion is a well known subject to this reader, the somewhat uneasy relationship between the Allies and French Resistance read like a combo soap opera and John Wayne movie.

What authors such as Beevor do is subtly shift the "hometown hero" trope used by some historians and put the reader on the lines with these draftees and volunteers of both armies. In reading this text (and the next text that I will review) the reader gets the sense that combat is random, destructive and for the most part, impersonal. It is all frightening but when it gets personal it becomes terrifying. This is the value of these books when done well: leaving the reader with the idea that I NEVER want to be in a situation like that, but that men in our midst once did these things.