By Korea based author and journalist Andrew Salmon who wrote the award winning book “To the Last Round“, which I listed as one of my Top 10 Korean War books, has just published his second book about the war, “Scorched Earth, Black Snow”. I will definitely be purchasing this book in the near future. Here is a press release promoting the publishing of this book:
Scorched Earth, Black Snow:
Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950
SEOUL, 1 June, 2011 – A new book casts vivid – sometimes shocking – light on the most terrible months of Britain’s biggest, bloodiest and most brutal post-1945 war.
Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950, covers 27th Commonwealth Brigade and 41 Commando, Royal Marines in the UN’s 1950 defense of South Korea; its counter-invasion of North Korea; and its catastrophic defeat.
The first phrase of the title references the policy of laying waste North Korean villages, crops, and communications; the second of napalm strikes that turned snow black.
“I hope this work will reveal the scale, intensity and drama of the ‘forgotten war’ British soldiers fought in Korea,” said author Andrew Salmon, who launched the book with a press conference at the British embassy in Seoul. “This was a nightmare conflict in which not just individuals were imperiled; entire units faced annihilation.”
The war’s intensity is seen in casualty figures. The UK lost more men dead in Korea than in the Falklands, Iraq and Afghan conflicts combined. Australia lost 512 killed in ten years in Vietnam, compared to 340 in just three years in Korea. And the US suffered worse defeats in just three months in North Korea than anything encountered in a decade in Vietnam.
Veterans were in the eye of the storm at a pivotal moment of 20th century history. “Today, China is viewed as an economic superpower, but it was first a military superpower,” Salmon said. “That status was won in winter 1950, when Mao unleashed his ‘human wave’ into North Korea.”
British soldiers deployed at a single week’s notice. As in Afghanistan, they were under-manned and under-equipped, lacking armour, artillery, transport and winter clothing, yet in a barren, alien land, they undertook some of the war’s most critical missions: 27th Brigade won a South Korean Presidential Unit Citation; 41 Commando, a US Presidential Unit Citation.
Yet the war is unknown in today’s UK; many veterans, in their autumn years, are embittered at their lack of recognition.
While quoting a range of documents – war diaries; after-action reports; notebooks; letters – the story unfolds in the words of some 90 survivors.
The interviewees form a rich cast. Some were hardened veterans, others raw National Servicemen. They include a captain who would lead the SAS and sit in the House of Lords, and a lieutenant who would later command the Australian Defence Force; a teenage artist who became South Korea’s most famous cartoonist and a daredevil US photographer who won a Pulitzer for shooting the war’s most iconic image.
Yet remarkable accounts come from humble sources. A Cockney private recalls the first, heart-stopping sight of Chinese intervention: A hill to his front changes colour as enemy swarm down its slopes. A Korean teenager remembers her terror as, with communist forces closing, her family boards the last vessel to depart Northeast Korea, carrying a world-record number of refugees into the freezing North Pacific while a naval bombardment shrieks overhead, pulverizing a home to which she will never return.
“The tragedy of the Korean people in the war winter of 1950 horrified all who witnessed it,” said Salmon. “Sadly, many military histories overlook the non-combatants.”
The book does not shy away from controversy. It reveals that the last words of the first (posthumous) VC recipient of the war were truncated in his citation to avoid embarrassing allies. Only an after-action report reveals the full version; the “abridged” quote has been included in every publication since.
Eyewitness accounts detail the burning of villages, the shooting of wounded enemy and the beating and humiliation of POWs by Australian and British servicemen; one interviewee is haunted, decades later, by the murder of a Korean civilian by one of his comrades.
“I hope these passages do not overshadow the broader story, but many books in the ‘Boy’s Own’ genre overlook wartime brutalities,” said the author. “War corrodes morality; those who record it should not ignore its cruel realities.”
About the Author
Andrew Salmon covers the Koreas for Forbes, Monocle, The South China Morning Post and The Washington Times. His To the Last Round: The Epic British Stand on the Imjin River, Korea, 1951, was the unanimous winner of the Hamsphire Libraries/Osprey Publishing “Best Military Book of 2009” award and in 2010 was named one of the “Top 10 books on Korea” by the Wall St Journal. In 2010, Andrew won a “Korea Wave” award at Korea’s National Assembly for contributing to the literature of the war.
Email: andrewcsalmon@yahoo.co.uk
Tel: ++82-11-792-6315
Scorched Earth, Black Snow, is released by Aurum Press, London, on 1 June 2011
For those interested in purchasing the book you can either check your nearest book store or purchase it from Amazon.com:
9:02 pm on June 4th, 2011 1
Serious question from the Kangaji for once:
GIKOREA: For Professional Military Reading are there any books you would recommend on the engineer effort during the Korean War?
Anybody else on anything involving terrain for mobility/countermobility/survivability operations?