The year 2003 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the armistice that ended the hot war on the Korean peninsula. The Korean War started as a civil conflict and then grew into an all-out superpower war. Whole cities were levelled, factories destroyed, homes torched, farmers uprooted from their fields. This book presents an expanded view of the war in Korea that Americans know little about. In addition to dramatic photographs are two insightful essays that provide an introduction to events during and after the war. The photographs here have been selected from among the tens of thousands that were taken by American military photographers and are now held by the National Archives and Record Administration. Most of those document combat, war materiel, and the life of GIs. The group in this book show something deeper. Here are the faces of people who lived through the effects of the headlines. They are POWs, Koreans, GIs, people mostly without nice clothes, with simple, generic titles like son, comrade, ajumoni (auntie), or private; people mostly afoot, a few armed, many just waiting. These people caught in war share a silent unity that bridges the categories of North, South, civilian, soldier, and prisoner. They become a part of history and memory.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers, a chronicle of the extraordinary feats of heroism by Marines called on to do the impossible during the greatest battle of the Korean War. "Superb ... A masterpiece of thorough research, deft pacing and arresting detail...This war story—the fight to break out of a frozen hell near the Chosin Reservoir—has been told many times before. But Sides tells it exceedingly well, with fresh research, gritty scenes and cinematic sweep." —The Washington Post On October 15, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of UN troops in Korea, convinced President Harry Truman that the Communist forces of Kim Il-sung would be utterly defeated by Thanksgiving. The Chinese, he said with near certainty, would not intervene in the war. As he was speaking, 300,000 Red Chinese soldiers began secretly crossing the Manchurian border. Led by some 20,000 men of the First Marine Division, the Americans moved deep into the snowy mountains of North Korea, toward the trap Mao had set for the vainglorious MacArthur along the frozen shores of the Chosin Reservoir. What followed was one of the most heroic--and harrowing--operations in American military history, and one of the classic battles of all time. Faced with probable annihilation, and temperatures plunging to 20 degrees below zero, the surrounded, and hugely outnumbered, Marines fought through the enemy forces with ferocity, ingenuity, and nearly unimaginable courage as they marched their way to the sea. Hampton Sides' superb account of this epic clash relies on years of archival research, unpublished letters, declassified documents, and interviews with scores of Marines and Koreans who survived the siege. While expertly detailing the follies of the American leaders, On Desperate Ground is an immediate, grunt's-eye view of history, enthralling in its narrative pace and powerful in its portrayal of what ordinary men are capable of in the most extreme circumstances. Hampton Sides has been hailed by critics as one of the best nonfiction writers of his generation. As the Miami Herald wrote, "Sides has a novelist's eye for the propulsive elements that lend momentum and dramatic pace to the best nonfiction narratives."

“Before the Greatest Generation, there was the Forgotten Generation of World War I . . . wonderfully engaging” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). “Richard Rubin has done something that will never be possible for anyone to do again. His interviews with the last American World War I veterans—who have all since died—bring to vivid life a cataclysm that changed our world forever but that remains curiously forgotten here.” —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 In 2003, eighty-five years after the end of World War I, Richard Rubin set out to see if he could still find and talk to someone who had actually served in the American Expeditionary Forces during that colossal conflict. Ultimately he found dozens, aged 101 to 113, from Cape Cod to Carson City, who shared with him at the last possible moment their stories of America’s Great War. Nineteenth-century men and women living in the twenty-first century, they were self-reliant, humble, and stoic, never complaining, but still marveling at the immensity of the war they helped win, and the complexity of the world they helped create. Though America has largely forgotten their war, you will never forget them, or their stories. A decade in the making, The Last of the Doughboys is the most sweeping look at America’s First World War in a generation, a glorious reminder of the tremendously important role America played in the “war to end all wars,” as well as a moving meditation on character, grace, aging, and memory. “An outstanding and fascinating book. By tracking down the last surviving veterans of the First World War and interviewing them with sympathy and skill, Richard Rubin has produced a first-rate work of reporting.” —Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia “I cannot remember a book about that huge and terrible war that I have enjoyed reading more in many years.” —Michael Korda, The Daily Beast

This title addresses the deeper questions of how remembrance of the U.S.-Mexican War has influenced the complex relationship between these former enemies now turned friends.

In contrast to the many books that use military, diplomatic, and historic language in analyzing the Korean War, this book takes a cultural approach that emphasizes the human dimension of the war, an approach that especially features Korean voices. There are chapters on Korean art on the war, translations into English of Korean poetry by Korean soldiers, and American soldier poetry on the war. There is a photographic essay on the war by combat journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Max Desfor. Another chapter includes and analyzes songs on the Korean War - Korean, American, and Chinese - that illuminate the many complex memories of the war. There is a discussion of Korean films on the war and a chapter on Korean War POWs and their contested memories. More than any other nonfiction book on the war, this one shows us the human face of tragedy for Americans, Chinese, and most especially Koreans. June 2000 was the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War; this moving volume is intended as a commemoration of it.

The people of East Timor voted overwhelmingly in August 1999 for independence and an end to Indonesian occupation. In this updated and much expanded edition of Indonesia's Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East Timor (Zed Books, rev ed 1994), John Taylor tells the story of what happened following President Suharto's overthrow. The new government conceded the right of the United Nations to organise the long delayed referendum giving the East Timorese a choice between continued association with Indonesia or independence. At the very moment the historic vote was being counted, armed gangs organised by the Indonesian military plunged the island into an orgy of killing, burning and forced flight. John Taylor analyses the world's reaction to this new genocide of the East Timorese people, the despatch of a peacekeeping force, and the prospects of independence.

"The 'Unknown War' in Korea was very important indeed: as a crucial 'hot' episode in the early Cold War, as a dress rehearsal for Bietnam and as a savage civil war complicated by outside intervention. It left a divided country (35,000 American soldiers and over 3 million Koreans dead), as well as hollow claims of victory from both sides and a legacy of bitterness and controversy. John Halliday and Bruce Cumings have assembled hundreds of photographs to provide a grim picture of everyday life in Korea under 'the heaviest and most sustained bombing ever known'. THey have also talked to a wide range of journalists, observers and participants in many countries, lifted the lid of the 'opaque Never-never-land' of North Korea and cut through the dense propaganda on both sides. The result is a full and unpartisan account of an extraordinary conflict"--Back cover