Book Review - The Korean War: Australia in the Giants’ Playground
Written by: Cameron Forbes,
Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 2011,
ISBN 9781742610221, 544 pp,
Reviewed by: Allan R Millet, University of New Orleans, National World War II Museum
Cameron Forbes’s The Korean War is an ‘in-between’ account of Australia’s experience in the Korean War. Holding the strategic-operational high ground, Robert O’Neill’s Australia in the Korean War, 1950–1953 in two volumes remains definitive and rivals General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley’s similar official history of British participation, really a history of all the Commonwealth forces in the theatre.
The literary trenches of combat are held by veterans and storytellers of 3RAR, notably Ben O’Dowd and Jack Galloway. Military professionals should read Bob Breen’s books on the battles of Kapyong and Maryang-sang. There is also a fine book on 3RAR’s battalion commanders of 1950–51: Green, Ferguson, and Hassett.
A veteran war and international correspondent, Forbes can turn a phrase, and his work shows research in printed sources as well as the obligatory interviews. He even puts Koreans and Chinese in his narrative, but his real focus is upon the mates of 3RAR in the war’s first nineteen months. The other two RAR battalions barely make the book, not unusual for units that manned the perilous outposts west of the Imjin, 1951–53. It was not Gallipoli, but it was bad enough.
Forbes is at his best in telling the stories of individual ‘digger’ infantrymen. To cover Reg Saunders is an obvious choice, given his iconic service. To write about Lieutenant Chick Charlesworth, Corporal Kazim Celiker of the Turkish army, Cecil Fisher, and Leon Dawes, the last Australian to die in combat in Korea, is more telling. Forbes also gives the reader a sense of the Koreans’ habitual sadness or han. Koreans in 1950 had plenty of reasons to be fatalistic. The surviving Diggers could go home. The Koreans were home. There were no RSL lodges along the Han River.
Where The Korean War can be faulted is in Forbes’s analysis of important operational issues. For example, one reason the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry escaped the casualties inflicted on 3RAR at Kapyong was because New Zealand’s 16th Field Regiment had more time to survey its battery positions and register its fires for the defence of Hill 677. The result was final defensive fires much closer to the Princess Pat’s foxholes. The Kiwi gunners had too little time to establish a proper position and fire plan before the Chinese hit 3RAR. Instead, Forbes focuses on the confused cooperation between 3RAR and Company A, 72nd Tank Battalion. It was the difference in fire support on the second night of the battle that stopped the Chinese, not just sturdy infantry defence combat by the Australian (thirty-two dead) and Canadian (ten dead) battalions.
A strength of Forbes’ book is its inclusion of stories about members of the RAAF and RAN and their undramatic but important service in closing Communist air space and sea lanes. The weather and terrain proved more dangerous than the enemy.
If an Australian reader wants to read only one book or a first book about the Korean War, Forbes’s book will do, as long as the reader understands that the contextual history of ‘the Giants’ and the two Koreas is breezy and limited by a lack of archival research. For example, the Eisenhower administration was far less nuke-happy than Forbes thinks after reading only those memoranda of NSC meetings posted on the Internet.
For all my quibbles, Forbes deserves praise for doing adequate research to recreate faithfully the Australian participation in the ‘forgotten war’. The book is especially good on recreating the combat experience at the individual level. That is a good way to start studying any war.
