The son and grandson of writers, he was educated at Charterhouse (scholar) and University College, Oxford (exhibitioner), from which he dropped out to become a journalist. In 1967-68 he worked in the US after winning a World Press Institute fellowship, an experience which inspired his first book AMERICA 1968: The Fire This Time, published when he was 23. Thereafter, he spent most of his early years as a foreign correspondent for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard, reporting eleven conflicts, notably including Vietnam and the 1982 South Atlantic war.

In this readable,insightful, and well-written volume, Hastings aims to paint a “portrait” of the war and does not claim to provide anything resembling a comprehensive history, although in the end the book is a fine balance of both for the most part. The book is also mostly focused on military actions.Hastings was educated at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, which he left after a year.After leaving Oxford University, Max Hastings became a foreign correspondent, and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard. It was another group, which could call upon only a fraction of the KPR's likely political support, that seemed infinitely more congenial to Hodge and his advisers: "...the so-called democratic or conservative group, which numbers among its members many of the professional and educational leaders who were educated in the United States or in American missionary institutions in Korea. In their aims and policies they demonstrate a desire to follow the western democracies, and they almost unanimously desire the early return of Dr. Syngman Rhee and the 'Provisional Government' at Chungking." Barely three weeks after the American landings in Korea, official thinking in Seoul was already focusing upon the creation of a new government for the South around the person of one of the nation's most prominent exiles. I wanted to start this month by reading some history. So I read Max Hastings' book on the Korean War. Without question, The Korean War defines South Korea to this day and Max Hastings work will give you a clear and objective picture – from the view point of both America and China. (In the forward Hastings points out that while objective data and interviews with Americans and Chinese are possible, such an exercise with the North Koreas would be a waste of time.) The scenes he depicts are vivid and graphic without being sensational. The opening firefight between Task Force Smith and the North Korean regulars was particularly gut wrenching. There are some phrases he uses to describe later events that haunt me a bit, yet I believe Hastings did this for clarity. One of the darkest chapters – the story of the POWs during the war - also contains some moments of extreme levity when Hastings describes the pranks GI’s pulled on their captors. Some of them had me laughing out loud.

There's something rather "dirty" about the Korean War. It wasn't linear, it wasn't logical, and it doesn't have closure. It started as a panic ping-pong between the north and the south, became a major conflagration between the US and China, and ended up as a WWI trench warfare slog that simply ended because the big powers have had just the right amount of posturing. My father served in Korea from 1951 to 1953; he was a U.S. Marine and a mortarman. He fought in one of the battles at the Hook, was wounded and received a Purple Heart. Over the years, he related several isolated experiences to me, but we never talked about the war in general; the global and national political atmosphere in which it took place.Now the bad news 😊 The North Koreans are mostly treated as a mass of homogeneous, evil people, who are ruthless and barbaric. Though there is a lot of description of individual American or British soldiers, there is no mention of an individual North Korean by name. Except for Kim Il Sung. The North Koreans are regarded as a primitive, evil horde who are uncivilized and the author probably feels that they deserved what was coming to them. The Chinese soldiers are also mostly depicted this way – as an evil horde who keep on coming and fighting in the night. The Chinese get slightly better treatment though – individual Chinese soldiers are sometimes mentioned and the author is able to interview them and we learn their stories. One of the reasons for this could be that North Korean veterans of the war would have been inaccessible to Western correspondents, as their country was closed and continues to be closed to outsiders today. The same would have been true with respect to Chinese veterans, but there was a thaw between the Chinese and the West in the 1970s, which continued into the 1980s, when Hastings wrote this book, and so he would have been able to speak to some of the Chinese veterans of the war. But, inspite of this small silver lining, it is hard to ignore the fact that the North Koreans and the Chinese are treated as barbaric, primitive, evil hordes, who are out to destroy the beautiful freedom created by Western countries. Overwhelmingly the strongest card that Rhee possessed was the visible support of the Americans. Roger Makins, a senior official in the British Foreign Office throughout the early Cold War period, remarks upon "the American propensity to go for a man, rather than a movement -- Giraud among the French in 1942, Chiang Kai Shek in China. Americans have always liked the idea of dealing with a foreign leader who can be identified and perceived as 'their man.' They are much less comfortable with movements." So it was in Korea with Syngman Rhee. After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, he became editor of the Evening Standard in 1996. He has won many awards for his journalism, including Journalist of The Year and What the Papers Say Reporter of the Year for his work in the South Atlantic in 1982, and Editor of the Year in 1988. Everything is biased from a western perspective. He notes Chinese propaganda but not the U.S. propaganda. All fault lies with the North Koreans and Chinese and none with the U.S. He criticizes the Chinese for the same things he applauds the U.S. for. I remember seeing this in bookshops when it was first published in the 80s. I thought about buying it at that time but decided I didn’t have enough of an interest in the subject. It’s quite topical now though…

It was not surprising that the Americans, on their arrival, knew nothing of the KPR. The chaotic struggle to fill the political vacuum in Korea was further confused by the arrival from Chungking of the self-proclaimed Korean Provisional Government, an exile grouping which included some nominated members of the KPR. In the weeks that followed the military government's skepticism about the KPR -- energetically fostered by the Japanese -- grew apace. Here there was more than a little in common with Western attitudes to Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues in Vietnam of the same period. There was no attempt to examine closely the Communist ideology of the leftists, to discover how far they were the creatures of Moscow and how far they were merely vague Socialists and Nationalists who found traditional landlordism repugnant. No allowance was made for the prestige earned by the Communists' dominant role in armed resistance to the Japanese. Hodge and his men saw no merit in the KPR's militant sense of Korean nationalism -- this merely represented an obstacle to smooth American military government. It would be naive to suppose that such a grouping as the KPR could have formed an instantly harmonious leadership for an independent Korea. The group included too many irreconcilable factions. But it also represented the only genuine cross section of Korean nationalist opinion ever to come together under one roof, however briefly. Given time and encouragement, it might have offered South Korea some prospect of building a genuine democracy.CIA has its beginning. They do a lot of low-tier operations. Mostly people desert them or are killed. The operations are rushed and overly optimistic. Still they keep getting more money. The Koreans themselves make for terrible agents. Interestingly, the author does not hide his anti-communist streak, and he's also fiercely patriotic, giving a more-than-proportional share of attention to the British troops in Korea, but then, he does not try to hide his own message among facts, which is rather cool. This is atypical for nonfiction. Moreover, he also goes emotional here and there, and it's obvious that he does have some disdain for certain figures (politicians and top generals mostly), as well as a generally negative attitude toward China and north Korea. Who would have thought how relevant this book would some seventy years later?