Korea - War Without End will appraise the full sweep of the strategic and geo-political story of the standoff between East and West in Korea, as well as evaluating the course of the war in military terms. It will consider the lack of preparation by the West for war; the results of the North Korean invasion in June 1950; the counter-stroke by MacArthur in September and then the strategic overreach which led to the direct involvement of communist China on the side of North Korea, and the rapid escalation to consideration of the use of nuclear weapons which followed.
It will consider the chaos of political decision-making in both East and West at the outset of the war and as it progressed, demonstrating from our knowledge of post-Cold War scholarship that the West got the East wrong, and vice versa. The Korean War was not planned by Stalin or Mao as a Communist offensive against the West, as the West almost universally believed. In turn the East simply did not understand the principle which framed the basis for the Western response to Kim Il-sung's aggression, namely a refusal to appease an aggressor, the mistake the West considered to be at the heart of the rise of Nazi Germany and militaristic Japan in the 1930s, thus a direct cause of the Second World War.
Importantly, it will detail the military superiority of the US-led United Nations coalition which, in a year of fighting (to July 1951) largely defeated vastly superior numbers of North Korean and Chinese (People's Liberation Army) forces. The final two years of the war (to the signing of the Armistice in July 1953) was a period in which United Nations forces remained on the defensive along the rough line of the 38th Parallel, effectively containing their enemy.
In addition to the telling the story of the conflict, it will also evaluate the political and grand strategic manoeuvring in London and Washington in which the option of nuclear war versus military stalemate were conceived.
Korea - War Without End will also consider the effect of the fighting on the country and people of North and South Korea. While the war was a proxy one between East and West, its civilian population suffered immensely, with approximately 3 million war fatalities and a larger proportional civilian death toll than the Second World War or the Vietnam War. It resulted in the destruction of virtually all of Korea's major cities. North Korea became among the most heavily bombed countries in history, and precipitated enormous refugee flows, some 4.5 million North Koreans fleeing to the south.
This was an American-dominated war, in which Britain was a willing though numerically much smaller participant. Nevertheless, we will consider America, British and British Commonwealth voices in equal measure.
