Forbes examines the often harrowing personal experiences of Australians in the war and the political motives of Prime Minister Robert Menzies and External Affairs Minister Percy Spender in competing with Britain and New Zealand to be the first to respond to a United States appeal for military forces to repel the North Korean aggressors.

Spender’s view was that if South Korea fell under the domination of communist imperialism, the strategic picture of Asia would undergo a radical change, increasing the danger to the whole of South and South-East Asia. Associated with this perspective was Spender’s ambition to win a security treaty from the United States. His view rehearsed the domino theory which would become, in Forbes’s words, the heavy artillery in the conservatives’ rhetorical armoury. Meanwhile, Menzies described the opposition as Chamberlain-like appeasers, a pack of left-wing communist sympathisers, fatal characterisations in a largely conservative Australian electorate.

In Washington, anti-communist hysteria was, if anything, stronger than it was in Canberra. The State Department saw Pyongyang as a vassal of the Soviet Union, and the invasion as a challenge to American power. If allowed to go unchecked, the flawed but effective argument went, the Soviets and their satraps would soon be in Indochina, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia.

The North Koreans invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950. Many historians fail to acknowledge that the invasion was preceded by increasingly severe clashes initiated in equal measure by North and South Korean forces along the whole frontier since 1948. Refreshingly, Forbes observes that the June 25 invasion was by no means the unprovoked attack against an innocent and unsuspecting South so frequently portrayed in Western media. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles even visited Syngman Rhee in Seoul, just before the war began, to persuade him to moderate his provocative behaviour towards the North.

Forbes gives a workmanlike account of the astonishingly rapid way the war moved in its first six months: North Korea’s swift advance across the thirty-eighth parallel, its capture of Seoul and encroachment on to the desperate, defensive UN perimeter on the outskirts of the south-east city of Pusan; Douglas MacArthur’s brilliant landing at Incheon west of Seoul and his rapid advance through North Korea right up to the Yalu River separating Korea from China; and the ambush by Chinese troops inside North Korea that resulted in allied bug-out fever, retreat south of Seoul, and eventual stasis and trench warfare along the thirty-eighth parallel that remained until the 1953 armistice. Forbes gives particularly detailed accounts of three battles fought by elements of the Commonwealth Brigade: Imjin, Kapyong, and Maryang San.

By early 1951 a military stalemate of virtual trench warfare existed along the entire front. Forbes describes the bloody but futile attacks from fixed positions that marked the two remaining years of the war, the only motive for which was to stiffen the resolve of US and Chinese negotiators engaged in protracted armistice negotiations at the border village of Panmunjom some sixty kilometres north of Seoul.

Forbes paints a generally unflattering portrait of MacArthur. His 1942 medal of honour was for ‘gallantry and intrepidity’ (sic) beyond the call of duty in his defence of the Philippines against Japan. Yet, admittedly on the orders of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he fled Corregidor for Australia in 1942, having visited his embattled troops on Bataan only once. He also visited the troops in Korea from his Tokyo headquarters only once, and blandly ignored abundant intelligence available towards the end of 1950 that the Chinese had substantial forces inside North Korea and were ready to attack. In the end, despite enormous support from the American public for MacArthur as their military hero, President Harry Truman, in an act of political courage, sacked the general for insubordination because of his repeated public appeals to extend the land war into China and to drop atom bombs on the Chinese mainland. MacArthur was replaced in April 1951 by a much less outspoken man, General John Wainwright.

If fault can be found with Forbes’s absorbing narrative, it is in its failure to critically compare the situations that existed on the Korean peninsula during the American and Soviet occupations that help to explain the conflict. In the North, Stalin installed the resistance fighter Kim Il Sung as head of a fledgling communist government. But Kim was not a malleable Soviet puppet, and there is no conclusive evidence that he was directed by the Kremlin to launch the June 1950 attack against South Korea. In the South, the American occupiers captured the colonial government and used its Japanese-trained secret police to preserve the power of the traditional landowning élite, and to back them against general peasant uprisings on Cheju-do and in Cholla and Yosu. The American-educated and appointed president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee, proved just as ruthless and authoritarian as Kim, and equally resistant to Occupation direction.

The fact is that, like Vietnam, this was a civil war between revolutionary nationalistic movements and conservative landowners tied to the colonial status quo. With limited Soviet intervention the revolutionaries won in the North, and with substantial United States support the conservatives won in the South. Unlike Vietnam, however, there was no victory for either the North or South in Korea in their subsequent conflict, which cost the lives of three million Korean civilians, one million Chinese soldiers and over a million Korean combatants. Of the UN force, 34,000 American soldiers died. Three thousand soldiers of other UN nations perished, of whom 339 were Australian.

Forbes describes the tragedy of Korea as an integrated, peaceful, but isolated country that reached its golden age under King Sejong in the early fifteenth century, but that became increasingly hostage to the machinations of three great powers that surrounded it – China, Russia, and Japan. He quotes a Korean Catholic bishop on the Korean personality characteristic called han: a mixture of rancour, hatred, lamentation, regret, grief, pathos, self-pity, and fatalism that was formed by the collective Korean experience of submission and domination. Except on the occasion of reunions with family members in the North, South Koreans, at least, seem to have shed their han. The han of North Koreans would seem to be much stronger.