MJ Moore
THE new film “Oppenheimer” guarantees fresh debates about America ending World War II by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945.
Odd but true: Only eight years later, in 1953, a troupe of mostly American musical artists — Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge and Gene Krupa, among others — received rapturous applause in Tokyo as part of producer Norman Granz’s concert series “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” which became a smash hit on an international tour.
Elsewhere in 1953, the Korean Armistice Agreement was duly signed. Seventy years after that armistice was finalized in the border town of Panmunjom on July 27, 1953, the perennial crises ignited by the Korean War of 1950 to 1953 bitterly remain. North and South Korea are as divided as ever, while America’s alliance with South Korea prevails. There’s nuclear rhetoric as the “forgotten war” threatens to erupt again.
One way to acknowledge the 70th anniversary of the armistice halting the Korean War is to look at some cultural artifacts. I’ll exempt “M*A*S*H” (the book, film and long-running television series) because its Vietnam-era sensibilities used Korea as a decoy locale, not for serious exploration.
Two important short novels come to mind: William Styron’s “The Long March” (1952) and James A. Michener’s “The Bridges at Toko-ri” (1953) capture the bewilderment experienced by innumerable Americans as our nation found itself again at war, barely five years after World War II.
Nobody anywhere was prepared for it. Not the troops in America’s shrunken postwar military. And certainly not the ex-military civilians like Styron who were ordered back into uniform as President Harry Truman declared a “limited” national emergency in December 1950.
It’s no accident that T.R. Fehrenbach’s 1963 book “This Kind of War,” one of the first major accounts of the Korean War, was originally subtitled, “A Study in Unpreparedness.”
Michener’s novella and the movie “The Bridges at Toko-ri” feature pungent remarks between military officers whose irksome confusion about the war is palpable.
Filmmaker Samuel Fuller, a WWII veteran, put his prodigious skills as a writer, director and producer to work on two films as the war metastasized in Korea: “The Steel Helmet” and “Fixed Bayonets!” are edgy, violent glimpses of the mayhem endured by soldiers and civilians. Fuller managed to transcend Hollywood limits, and “The Steel Helmet” holds up powerfully with lines and images confronting racism, class conflict and the suffering of children in war. Astoundingly, Fuller completed both movies in a single year — 1951.
Excellent narrative nonfiction books by David Halberstam, Hampton Sides, Max Hastings and others make clear that the ordeals, disasters and milestone moments at the Battles of Pusan Perimeter, Incheon, Chosin Reservoir and Pork Chop Hill and the Hungnam evacuation were extraordinary episodes.
Even more extraordinary are the parallels such authors cite between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, when once again, in a faraway place few Americans could locate on a map, a confusing war detonated. Dismal analogies abound. My Lai Massacre in 1968 has its parallel at No Gun Ri in 1950. As for the ludicrous use of napalm, which burned foliage and humans alike in Vietnam, one line by an ex-GI in the cable series “Mad Men” sums it up: “It was all over Korea.”
And just as the saturation bombing of North Korea failed to bring about victory in 1953, America’s “air war” in North Vietnam led to the Christmas bombings of 1972 but no real victory or resolution.
Nonetheless, as July 27 signals the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice in 1953, the economic and cultural triumphs of South Korea invite global celebration. Despite everything, the armistice has held.
American music acts won’t tour in North Korea anytime soon, but anyone visiting South Korea may witness with awe that the grim Korean War was not a lost cause.
(MJ Moore is the author of “Star-Crossed Lovers: James Jones, Lowney Handy, and the Birth of ‘From Here to Eternity.’”)
