(Larger Image)
|
MacArthur's War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero
by Stanley Weintraub (Reader: Edward Herrmann)
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Audioworks (2000-05-01)
ISBN: 0743505352
EAN: 9780743505352
Dewy Decimal #: 951.9042
Audio Cassette
Edition: Abridged
SKU: BX004-060815020
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: Clean and shiny, complete, 4 cassettes (run time 6 hrs). Tapes near new, original box has light creasing on edges.
|
Editorial Reviews
|
Amazon.com Review
Douglas MacArthur, in William Manchester's memorable phrase, was an American Caesar, a general accustomed to having his own way on or off the battlefield. He surrounded himself with fawning aides, commanded imperiously and sometimes impetuously, and did not kindly accept criticism. Stanley Weintraub, who served as an Army lieutenant during the Korean War, makes the persuasive case that MacArthur's character and methods as commander of the Allied forces in Korea led him to commit disastrous errors of judgment--among them his failure to anticipate the Chinese entry into the war when MacArthur's troops approached the Yalu River, and his odd plan to seed South Korea's defensive perimeter with nuclear explosions and thus make the border impassable for generations. Weintraub praises MacArthur's brilliance as a tactician and student of military history, pointing out that MacArthur's audacious landing at Inchon was straight out of Xenophon. He also notes that MacArthur correctly predicted that the Allied conduct of the Korean conflict would lead to stalemate. Still, Weintraub quietly insists that President Harry Truman was right in removing MacArthur from command on the grounds of insubordination, an act with enormous political repercussions at the time. An outstanding contribution to the literature of the Korean War--a conflict that is again in the news--Weintraub's book spares no detail in examining the end of Douglas MacArthur's checkered career. --Gregory McNamee
|
Product Description
Douglas MacArthur towers over 20th-century American history, chiefly for his WWII service in the Philippines. However, Korea was far more "MacArthur's War." In just three years, 35,000 Americans lost their lives. Korea, like Vietnam, was a breeding ground for the crimes of war. To this day, 6,000 Americans remain MIA. In Korea, American troops faced for the first time a Communist foe, as China and the Soviet Union contributed troops to the North Korean cause. The war that nearly triggered the use of nuclear weapons, reveals MacArthur at his most flamboyant -- flawed yet brilliant. Acclaimed historian Stanley Weintraub offers a thrilling account of the months of MacArthur's command. MacArthur was imperious, vain, blind to criticism, and insubordinate to the point that Truman chose to fire him. Yet years later, the war ended where MacArthur had left it, at the border that still stands as one of history's last frontiers between communism and freedom. MacArthur's War is the gripping story of the Korean War and its soldiers -- and of the one soldier who dominated the rest.
|
Customer Reviews
|
An Unbalanced History of the Korean War!
Rating  (3)
Date: 2007-12-05
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Although a relatively good history of the early years of the Korean War and the resurrection and failure of General Douglas MacArthur in that conflict, "MacArthur's War" suffers from glaring inaccuracies.
Historian and Korean War veteran Stanley Weintraub is at his best when describing the war in Korea. To his credit he lets the veterans, who participated in the conflict, narrate much of the action. The author also makes use of new archival sources, especially when describing the origins of Operation Chromite - the amphibious landings at Inchon. And the personal insights provided by MacArthur's commanders and staff members are revealing.
That said, Weintraub is at his worse when he touches on the U.S. Army's ethnic formations - especially the African-American 24th Infantry Regiment and the all-Puerto Rican 65th Infantry Regiment. His description of both units in Korea is unbalanced and historically inaccurate. A published history of the 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea ("Black Soldier, White Army"), which Weintraub cites but appears not to have read, shows that the failures of the unit in the Korean War were the result of racist policies, weak leadership by its white officers, poor training, and a lack of equipment. And a new forthcoming history of the 65th Infantry Regiment in Korea will show that the unit arrived in country as the largest and one of the best trained infantry formations in Eighth Army. The 65th fought brilliantly for the first two years of the war and then failed at two battles in the fall of 1952 for many of the same reasons the 24th Infantry failed earlier in the war.
Thus, as in another of his more recent works in which he touches on the conflict ("15 Stars. Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall. Three Generals Who Saved the American Century), Stanley Weintraub perpetuates inaccurate and hurtful racial stereotypes of African Americans and Hispanic fighting men in the Korean War.
|
|
Some Valid Points, Some New Insights, But...
Rating (3)
Date: 2007-11-23
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
More is known now about the Korean Conflict from the (Communist) Chinese side--if not the North Korean. Some of this information is incorporated here though it tends to be vague and general. How ironic that Gen. Peng De-Huai, very successful against the U.N. side, would fall in disgrace thirteen years on during Mao's Cultural Revolution!
Certainly it is high time that Gen. MacArthur was assigned responsibility for the deplorable state in which the U.S. Army in the Pacific had sunk in the six years following the Japanese surrender. The son of a Union Army general, MacArthur was anything but a G.I. general himself. He was--or saw himself--a grand strategist. He had no interest in the minutiae of war: whether the troops had clothing for winter, when they last had a hot meal, whether their radios worked.
However, Weintraub goes too far in faulting MacArthur. Even things for which the general was not responsible are invariably blamed on him in this book. Example: the poor battlefield performance of an all-Black regiment in a segregated Army. Every doubt is resolved against him. Actions he took, things he said, which deserved no criticism--which even were praiseworthy--are twisted and distorted so as to look negative.
There also are stylistic flaws--lack of concentration, jarring **non sequiturs** encountered again and again, reliance on few and clearly biased sources.
|
|
Inchon myth
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-06-30
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Of the many MacArthur myths, none seems more pervasive than the myth that Inchon was a stellar military achievement. In point of fact, Inchon was folly in and folly out. Folly in? Virtually all MacArthur's contemporaries above the grade of corporal saw an amphibious assault on Inchon as a dangerous operation the execution of which foreclosed a very real opportunity decisively (by landing further south on less dangerous beaches) to trap the North Koreans between Almond's 10th Corp and Walton Walker's Eighth Army, end the conflict in compliance with the UN mandate, pack up and go home. Not only was Inchon an invasion that required far more luck than MacArthur deserved, merely to get the landing force up Flying Fish channel, over a high sea wall and landed in the face of potentially devastating flanking fire from Wolmi-do Island, but also it violated a stern article of amphibious warfare wisdom that argued against sending a landing force immediately to fight in a built-up area. Thanks to the US Marines, MacArthur got away with it, but one can only observe that even if one or two men in history have survived jumping out of airplanes without parachutes, such is not a wise act. MacArthur's maniacal ego had as end in view his parading pompously into the Korean government house to "restore" Korea to Syngman Rhee. The folly out was that 10th Corp has no mission after the unnecessary recapture of Seoul and once it crossed the peninsula, what next? History records the answer. And yes, I am not a MacArthur fan. His incompetence destroyed the 31st Infantry Regiment (with which I served in Korea as a rifleman) twice in a decade (Bataan and the Reservoir in Korea). Beyond 1918 MacArthur stayed too long at the ball and many good men paid for it.
|
|
MacArthur, And War
Rating (4)
Date: 2006-05-30
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
"MacArthur's War" provides the reader with an up close view of the initial portions of the Korean War with particular emphasis on the role of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. It is not, however, a one-dimensional view. Much of it focuses on the role of the on the ground American soldiers and their commanders, all of whom served and suffered under MacArthur.
I found the many facets of this book to be interesting. Although I had read a little of the Korean War, Stanley Weintraub presents events in a different light than I have seen in other works. He depicts MacArthur's indecisiveness at the start of the war in contrast to his later decisiveness in the absence of in in opposition to authorization. Weintraub is generally favorable to MacArthur, contrasting his decisive action with, what he portrays, as uncertainty and indecision among his superiors in Washington. Weintraub suggests that some of MacArthur's insubordinate actions were not necessarily manifestations of uninformed or undisciplined arrogance, but may have been a reasoned strategy to maneuver his superiors into the position that he would have to be relieved.
Looking in the other direction, Weintraub introduces his readers to the resentment which MacArthur's actions generated in his subordiantes. His practice of accepting credit for their successes while washing his hands of their failures was the culmination of a life long practice which infuriated his subordinates throughout his military career.
This book is not all MacArthur, it is also about war. The readier is introduced to the experiences of the ordinary soldier and their officers at all levels. This book makes the flow of battle see more comprehensible than other books which I have read and places terms, such as "Frozen Chosen" into context. I feel that I understand the Korean War and Douglas MacArthur better than I did before reading this book. "MacArthur's War" is an unrivaled asset for anyone with an interest in either.
|
|
Should be on your Korean War Reading List
Rating (4)
Date: 2004-05-24
7 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
There is no question that Douglas MacArthur had a long and distinguished career. And that he showed great Barvery in World War I. That he planned some great island hopping strategy during World War II. And did much to help Japan reform and rebuild. But Korea is not an area where his career shines. When conflict broke out in Korea in 1950, MacArthur assumed command of American, South Korean and U.N. forces and drove back the North Korean army to the Yalu river, which is the border between Korea and China. And at center stage was his very risky yet stunning achievement, his amphibious attack behind enemy lines at Inchon. But his total lack of failure to anticipate Chinese entry into the war and his delusion that Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese forces in Formosa could be brought into the war to fight the Communists as a viable force had him lose all credability. Only by General Matthew Ridgway taking command of the Allied ground forces were the Allies able to reverse the trend. General Ridgway took the demoralized Allied troops and transformed them back into a strong fighting force. Which under his command was able to recapture some of the lands lost to the Communist. During this time MacArthur actual came up with a plan to sow a defensive field of radioactive waste on the southern bank of the Yalu. This plan helped Truman to make the to make the decission to dismiss MacArthur at the begining of April 1951. This work is well written and well worth reading.
|
|
|