HISTORY / Asia / Korea

Incorporating military, diplomatic, social, racial, and ethnic topics and perspectives, Brotherhood in Combat presents a remarkably thorough and finely textured account of integration as it was experienced and understood in mid-twentieth-century America.
 

The invasion of Korea by Japanese troops in May of 1592 was no ordinary military expedition: it was one of the decisive events in Asian history and the most tragic for the Korean peninsula until the mid-twentieth century. Japanese overlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi envisioned conquering Korea, Ming China, and eventually all of Asia; but Korea’s appeal to China’s Emperor Wanli for assistance triggered a six-year war involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers and encompassing the whole region. For Japan, the war was “a dragon’s head followed by a serpent’s tail”: an impressive beginning with no real ending. Kenneth M. Swope has undertaken the first full-length scholarly study in English of this important conflict.

In the opening campaign of the Korean War, the First Provisional Marine Brigade participated in a massive effort by United States and South Korean forces in 1950 to turn back the North Korean invasion of the Republic of Korea. The brigade’s actions loom large in marine lore. Historian and retired marine Kenneth W. Estes undertakes a fresh investigation of the marines’ and Eighth Army’s fight for Pusan. Into the Breach at Pusan corrects discrepancies in earlier works (including the official histories) to offer a detailed account of the campaign and place it in historical context. It is scrupulously fair to both the army and the marines. Estes sets the record straight in crediting the Eighth Army with saving itself during the Pusan Perimeter campaign, but he also affirms that the army’s suffering would have been much greater without the crucial, timely performance of the First Provisional Marine Brigade.