I Remember Korea: Veterans Tell Their Stories of the Korean War, 1950-53

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Linda Granfield solicited memoirs for her book. Thirty men (most of them
Americans) and two women (one a South Korean) describe their Korean War
experiences, usually in prose but twice in poetry. Pictures accompany
the text, and all submissions are brief.

There is a wide range of subjects. Russell Freedman describes his
experiences in counter-intelligence and in preparing for the visit of
President-elect Dwight Eisenhower late in 1952. Patrick W. O’Connor,
one of the 378 Canadians buried at the United Nations Cemetery in Pusan,
served only five days as a combat soldier; the evening before his death
he wrote five moving stanzas, “There is blood on the hills of
Korea.” George Dawson of California recounts the horrors of crossing
the Pacific Ocean during a typhoon. Eugene L. Inman reviews his 1004
days as a prisoner of war. Ed Ziegler tells his story as a helicopter
pilot, Hank Buelow and others as infantrymen. Lou Harmin found the
Communist POWs whom he supervised “nice young men, similar to me.”
Ruth K. Schairer describes her experiences as part of the U.S. Army’s
Women’s Army Corps. Others remember the cold weather, the ubiquity of
dead bodies, the food, and the interactions with South Korean civilians.
Danny Kaye and other celebrities provided entertainment. To put the
stories into context, Granfield includes chronological lists of key
events.

Unfortunately, Granfield has marred this fine record with a badly
researched interpretation of the origins of the Korean War. Unaware of
Soviet and Chinese documents that have been released in the past decade,
she attributes the war to a lust for land on the part of Joseph Stalin
and Mao Zedong. The idea of invading South Korea was that of North
Korean leader Kim Il Sung, who nagged Stalin for a year before Stalin
agreed. Mao, who would have preferred to “liberate” Taiwan,
intervened only when he feared that the U.S. Army was approaching
uncomfortably close to China’s borders. Recommended.