WAM: Book Reviews

If, as Max Hastings has suggested in his 1987 book The Korean War, popular awareness of the Korean conflict centres upon the television comedy MASH, then any book that offers an insight into that war should be welcomed. With an introduction by Richard Keeble, the republication of Cry Korea is a first-hand account by a British reporter who was on the ground from the landings at Inchon right through to the retreat. The book, culled from Thompson’s experiences and his notebooks as he covered the war for The Daily Telegraph, is a narrative, an indictment of that conflict, and the way US forces prosecuted the war. In many ways, the Korean war would presage the way those same forces would behave in Vietnam from the use of air power to how they would handle press briefings.

Vietnam is the curse of Korea in popular memory, for Vietnam was a Technicolor television war and Korea was not. Korea is thus the poor relation in the mass consciousness, a short nasty war forgotten by all except those who had the misfortune to fight there and for whom that experience can only be a bitter memory. But Korea was the precursor of Vietnam, and it is worth reading Thompson’s book in conjunction with Michael Herr’s 1977 Dispatches, for there are eerie similarities in the events both cover, such as air strikes, the civilians caught up in war, the way they portray GIs. Both men start from different perspectives, Thompson, a former officer, from the British, literary tradition, which saw war as something of an adventure, with a moralising and civilising mission at its heart. Thompson had been in military intelligence prosecuting a just war against Hitler; Herr came from a sex, drugs and rock’n’roll counterculture of the 1960s which saw war as an aberration. The two would share a common experience of American involvement in Asian conflicts aimed at halting the spread of Communism. Both had considerable freedom to go where they wanted and both would come to similar conclusions about the futility of war in Asia. Only the language is different.

War to Thompson meant not just adventure and exotica, but erotica too. He details at length the pleasures he enjoyed in Tokyo in the interlude between apparent UN success and Chinese response, of girls who would ‘wash me with care and partake of the bath and bed, sensing the exact degree of playfulness, intimacy or seclusion in the feeling of man’ ( p.232). Despite this, after MacArthur raised the spectre of the atomic bomb’s use against China, ‘the ultimate expression of cowardice’ (p.313), Thompson speaks with relief of being able to return to his wife; it is a peculiarly English journey that has taken him from the greenhouse where he dreams of making chutney to his eighteenth assignment, Korea.

Thompson is sceptical of the UN role in Korea and in a document (presciently called the Korean Rehearsal), warns that ‘a country devoid of democracy in its nature cannot suddenly become one, for democracy is the result of political evolution and from no other source’ (p.243 ) and that it is impossible to liberate a country unless it is fully able to stand on its own feet afterwards . In Cry Korea, written after Thompson’s return to England, there are signs of what is to come in South East Asia, with Thompson recording (p.61) how a marine got a ‘gook’, a term more often associated with Vietnam but which clearly had a much earlier origin: ‘I let him have it in de festerin’ guts. Den in de festerin’ haid. Festerin’ haid split like a melon. Aw muck!’ Reflecting later on the memories of blasted bodies from the ‘puny’ V2 blitz on London which killed hundreds, Thompson says (p.339) they are “but child’s play” to the tragedy that is Korea with its estimated two million dead. Korea has acquainted him with death ‘in many previously unimaginable forms’ and he has lost his last illusions about war: ‘I had called myself for some years a war reporter. It would be more accurate to call me a reporter of death. Death in all its ghastliest forms’ (p338). For Herr the Vietnam conflict would be similarly illusory, with Marines ‘making movies in their heads’ as they sought to find in Vietnam the Hollywood glamour of John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima. For both men Asia is the heart of darkness for American democratic idealism. For Thompson Korea is also the death of the notion of a just war. It is old fashioned, he says, the glamour is false, the illusion gone. The message from Korea is written on the wall in letters of blood. Soon the civilians may disappear without trace. (p.339) For Herr, war in Vietnam will prove similarly meaningless.

There is about Thompson’s book an aura of uneasy awareness that post-war American was calling the shots and for Thompson this shift in authority is embodied in the figure of General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur, had as Thompson saw it, assumed ‘a kind of divinity’ (p.105) a remote figure who practised blatant news management, feeding his press releases exclusively through the four agency channels of his entourage (p.106). In Korea, Thompson greets with scepticism ‘grandiose’ and unreliable statements by the United States Air Force (‘brave handouts of action which bore but little relation to the facts’, p. 58) and MacArthur who ‘not having known enemy strength previously to within one or two hundred thousand’ could, by November 1950, know the exact totals of enemy killed to the last man (p.248). Headquarters correspondents in Korea would be fed carefully written if nonsensical accounts of the war of enemy casualties and material damage so that it would come as no surprise for war correspondents to read ‘that a pilot attacking a farmyard had wounded five geese, killed a hen, seriously damaging three ploughs (ancient pattern) and one hoe totally destroyed’ (p.248). Thompson notes that MacArthur’s Public Information staff arbitrarily closed down the briefings amid growing scepticism. The practice would be revived in Vietnam in what Michael Herr would call the Five O’Clock Follies.

As The Times, reviewing Cry Korea on its publication in 1951, would comment, ‘If we rely on Mr Reginald Thompson, we shall find our worst fears realised’. Indeed, by Suez those worst fears would be, as Britain shrank from empire and American hegemony would be confirmed. In Cry Korea, there are glimpses through Thompson’s eyes of British resentment at the affluence and influence of the American way of life and war. Thompson, coming from the austerity of post-war and class conscious Britain, is critical of the way the classless Americans prosecute the war, with their ‘wild and outrageous profligacy’ in the use of artillery and air power (p60). American officers are represented as friendly and hospitable, for they are ‘as different from “fightin’ men” as another race’(p84). Officers are clearly the nearest the Americans have to an upper class for Thompson laments the apparent lack of an American middle class. By contrast, he comments acidly of living ‘in the kind of masochistic squalor inseparable from the American fighting man. . . they ate out of tins, or ‘chow-lined’ for masses of food, meat, vegetables, fruits, bread, butter, jam, all lumped together on a tin plate, and which they shovel into their mouths. . . Few ever shaved. . . none cleaned his boots. . . lacking any kind of ‘classes’ in their society and all being ‘equal’ there were in fact no accepted standards. . . a ‘guy’ who shaved or cleaned his boots, or ate in a civilised way, or obeyed swiftly and well, would be a ‘cissy’’ (p.76). The ‘fightin’ men” of Thompson’s era are recognisably the ‘grunts’ of Herr’s, whose view of them is generally more sympathetic.

It is little wonder that no American publisher would touch Thompson’s book, and as Keeble says in his excellent introduction, Thompson later told Philip Knightley it was thought that Cry Korea ‘could endanger the Anglo-American alliance’ (p.11). A dangerous book then- and for that reason one worth recommending. Cry Korea is a good primary source for the Korean conflict, the Cold War and war reporting. There is even a reference to MASH activities for those who care to seek it. But the book also provides testimony, witting and unwitting, to the post-war shift in Anglo-American relations, and British attitudes towards America: ‘Wherever we met Americans they destroyed privacy and peace and solitude. . . they sought to fill the unforgiving minute. . . with hideous noise and useless activity’. (p.315)For Thompson, who lamented the civilian tragedy, the most nauseating expressions after Korea became ‘Freedom (or peace loving) democracy in the mouths of Communists, and ‘Our American way of life’ (p.315).

I must add that I am touched by something one does not see too often -- a percentage of the profits of this modestly priced (£8.99) book go to the charity Candel Light, set up in memory of Thompson’s granddaughter Charlie, who died in a train accident at the age of 13. The charity raises money for deprived children in Rajasthan, one of India’s poorest provinces (see www. writecharliesname.com for details of how to donate). Like Cry Korea itself, this seems a fitting memorial not just to her but to Thompson, the Korea correspondent.

Barry O'Shea
Portsmouth University