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The Darkest Summer is the dramatic story of the first three months of the Korean War as it has never been told before. A narrative studded with gripping eyewitness accounts, it focuses on the fateful days when the Korean War’s most decisive battles were fought and the Americans who fought them went— however briefly—from the depths of despair to the exultation of total conquest. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of surviving U.S. veterans, it reveals how one ninety-day period changed the course of modern history and opens a unique and revealing window on an all-but-forgotten war.
- Sales Rank: #1059277 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Simon n Schuster
- Published on: 2010-11-23
- Released on: 2010-11-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x 1.20" w x 5.50" l, .80 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 400 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
""The Darkest Summer" is not only exciting reading -- a cautionary tale about Korea in 1950 -- but it should also make every sensible reader ask why it's a good idea to fight in faraway foreign countries like Korea, or Afghanistan today, without a plan for victory or an exit strategy." -- Michael Korda, author of "Ike"
"How did we get enmeshed in this struggle halfway around the world? Was it worth it? Was it victory, defeat, or merely stalemate? In Bill Sloan's well-told tale, I found my answers." -- Joseph E. Persico, author of "Roosevelt's Secret War"
""The Darkest Summer" is a truly heroic book. In heart-pounding detail, Bill Sloan recounts the most momentous season in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps -- the fateful summer of 1950. Riveting from the first page to the last." -- Alex Kershaw, author of" Escape from the Deep" and "The Bedford Boys"
"There is no story quite like this in military history -- the epic tale of how the American Army, the mightiest war machine in the history of the world in 1945, was surprised and overrun a mere five years later by a nation that had been a subject-state of Japan in 1945. And then how America's pathetically ill-prepared armed forces regrouped with astonishing speed and launched one of the most audacious counteroffensives in military annals, one that saved South Korea from communism and changed the course of world history. The Darkest Summer is a stunningly good military history, crafted in the style of an accomplished novel, with characters that are almost too interesting to be believed." -- Donald L. Miller, author of "Masters of the Air"
""The Darkest Summer" is a harrowing and heroic tale of Korean War valor. By interviewing U.S. Marines who fought at Pusan and Inchon, Bill Sloan transports the reader to ground zero in Korea. A truly riveting read." -- Douglas Brinkley, author of "The Wilderness Warrior"
"In 1950, President Truman and others were in the process of a military reunifying and downsizing that would have essentially eliminated the U.S. Marine Corps. Then came Korea, and in the battles for Pusan and Inchon, the Marines did what had to be done. Bill Sloan, the premier chronicler of war at the ground level, tells the whole awful, bloody story in his superb "The Darkest Summer", a dead-on account that answers forever the question, 'What is war really like?'" -- Jim Lehrer, anchor of "The NewsHour" on PBS and author of "Oh, Johnny"
About the Author
Bill Sloan is a respected military historian and author of more than a dozen books, including Brotherhood of Heroes: The Ultimate Battle. He lives in Dallas, Texas.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 8
Nightmare on the Naktong
It was seventy -five miles from Hill 202 near Sachon to the town of Miryang, now threatened by an estimated 7,000 enemy troops, who had waded across the shallow Naktong River, towing crude rafts loaded with heavy weapons, vehicles, and supplies. By August 8, an entire reinforced North Korean regiment had established a bridgehead on the east bank of the river, which was the last natural barrier between the Communist army and Pusan.
Over the next few days, the NKPA had steadily broadened its foothold until most of its crack Fourth Division -- the same unit that had shared in the capture of Seoul, then routed Task Force Smith -- was on the American side of the stream, opening a yawning gap in U.S. lines. The gap was in a cluster of rugged hills, where a sharp bend in the river surrounded a thumbshaped strip of land on three sides to form a topographical oddity that the Americans called the Naktong Bulge. Unless the gap could be closed, the main supply route between Pusan and the inland city of Taegu, headquarters of General Walker's Eighth Army, was in danger, and Taegu itself might be overrun.
In his first attempt to dislodge the enemy troops, Walker ordered the recently arrived Second Infantry Division's Ninth Regiment, commanded by Colonel John G. Hill, to join elements of General John Church's 24th Division to create Task Force Hill. In addition to his own regiment, Hill was placed in control of all 24th Division units in Church's southern sector -- giving him a force equal to three full infantry regiments -- and ordered to assault the enemy bridgehead.
To Walker's distress, however, the attack by Task Force Hill on August 11 met a reception hauntingly similar to those encountered by previous Walker task forces. The attack lost its momentum and dissolved in confusion when the North Koreans attacked at the same time. Hill tried twice more, on August 14 and 15, but his troops ran into a stone wall of resistance, and bad weather deprived them of air support.
During this interval, the enemy had spirited more than 100 machine guns, considerable artillery (including a number of American 105s seized at Taejon), and even several tanks across the river. Entrenched in the high ground and with superior weaponry, the NKPA force was simply too strong, and Hill was forced to break off the attack and take up defensive positions east of the enemy stronghold.
By now, Walker's patience was frayed to the breaking point. He minced no words when he told Church, "I'm giving you the Marine brigade, and I want this situation cleaned up -- and quick!"
On their arrival at Miryang on the afternoon of August 15, General Craig and his men confronted stakes that could not have been higher. The consensus among high-echelon UN commanders was that if Miryang fell, neither Taegu nor Pusan could be held. Walker himself pledged to fight in the streets if the enemy got into Taegu.
"And you'd better be prepared to do likewise," he told one field commander, whose reticence and excuses brought Walker to the boiling point. "Now get back to your division and fight it! I don't want to see you back from the front again unless it's in your coffin."
Meanwhile, by August 15, more than 400,000 Korean refugees had crowded into Taegu, and the ROK government, fearing its security could no longer be guaranteed in the city, packed up and moved to Pusan.
In addition to the precarious situation at the Naktong Bulge, Walker faced serious problems all across the front. The First Cavalry Division, charged with anchoring a tremendously wide section of the front west of Taegu, had repulsed repeated NKPA incursions across the Naktong farther to the north but remained under heavy pressure from the enemy. In the far southwest, although the Marine attacks had left NKPA forces weakened and disorganized, Army lines continued to develop leaks after the Marines' hurried withdrawal from Sachon. On the east side of the peninsula, the ROK Third Division was forced out of the secondary port of Pohang-dong and evacuated under cover of American air and naval forces, then relanded farther south. With NKPA troops only a few hundred yards from its runways, the U.S. Fifth Air Force abandoned Yonil Airfield, its only base on the east coast, and moved its desperately needed F-51 squadrons back to Japan. The entire eastern front looked to be hovering on the verge of collapse.
If there was any small shred of hope remaining, it lay with the Marines. As a British military observer attached to the 24th Division observed in a wire dispatched on the morning of August 16, as Craig's brigade prepared for its new mission,
"The situation is critical, and Miryang may be lost. The enemy has driven a division-sized salient across the Naktong. More will cross the river tonight. If Miryang is lost...we will be faced with a withdrawal from Korea. I am heartened that the Marine brigade will move against the Naktong salient tomorrow. They are faced with impossible odds, and I have no valid reason to substantiate it, but I have the feeling they will halt the enemy....
"These Marines have the swagger, confidence, and hardness that must have been in Stonewall Jackson's Army of the Shenandoah. They remind me of the Coldstreams at Dunkirk. Upon this thin line of reasoning, I cling to the hope of victory."
When the Marines reached Miryang, however, they were dragging their heels rather than swaggering. To a man, they were drained, hungry, caked with dirt, and red-eyed from lack of sleep. Many of the troops had had to march most of the previous night after a promised convoy of trucks failed to show up, and the forced journey, after days of heavy fighting, had been an ordeal for everyone. "By that time," recalled PFC Ben Wray, a native Texan and a BAR man in the First Battalion's Second Platoon, "we looked and felt like an old horse that had been rode hard and put away wet."
During the withdrawal from near Sachon, the situation had been so hectic that Colonel Harold Roise, commanding the Second Battalion, received his only orders for the move scribbled on a scrap of paper. The terse message, written by Colonel Joe Stewart, Craig's operations officer, and left with a fleet of parked vehicles, read simply, "These are your trucks. Move to Naktong at once."
After all this, Miryang proved to be an unexpectedly pleasant surprise.
Compared to the sun-baked, unforgiving hills they'd just left, the picturesque village was the closest thing to paradise the Marines had seen since leaving the States. To Colonel Robert Taplett of 3/5, it looked like "a heavenly oasis" and "an ideal spot for a picnic," and Saturday Evening Post writer Harold H. Martin, embedded with the brigade, called it "the most beautiful bivouac in all Korea."
"Our bivouac area was in a cool grove of trees on the grassy banks of the Miryang River, which would soon be our bedroom, bathroom, and laundry," Taplett recalled. "Everyone looked forward to our first night of uninterrupted sleep, a dip in the river, a change of clothes, and our first hot meal since leaving the USS Pickaway."
After a dozen days of living and fighting in the same field dungarees, Taplett and his troops were, in his words, as dirty and smelly as "a herd of goats." They took to the river in droves while dozens of native women, recruited by unit supply officers and paid with wages of cigarettes, washed grimy Marine uniforms and laid them out on the riverbank to dry.
Medical officers tried to warn the Marines that the pristine-looking stream might harbor potentially dangerous contaminants, but the warnings were ignored. Even normally cautious Navy corpsman Herb Pearce joined in the splashfest. But, as he observed later, "My enjoyment of the swim was lessened somewhat when I got out of the stream and discovered that some Koreans were busily skinning a dog in the water just around the bend from us."
The Marines realized that their interlude of rest and rehabilitation would be brief and that another brutal ordeal loomed ahead. On August 16, barely twenty hours after their arrival at Miryang, they received orders to move west about twenty-four miles to the area of Yongsan, a village less than ten miles from the Naktong. This would be the jumping-off place for their attack.
Intelligence reports indicated that the enemy was almost ready to break out of his Naktong salient, seize Miryang, and split UN forces into northern and southern halves. Miryang lay astride the double-track railroad over which vital supplies flowed between Pusan and Taegu. If Communist forces gained control of the rail line or cut it, Taegu would be cut off from supply and reinforcement.
That night, Fifth Marines commander Colonel Ray Murray met with Colonel Harold Roise, whose Second Battalion had been chosen to lead a frontal assault the next morning on Obong-ni Ridge, part of a jumbled mass of high ground held in strength by the NKPA. Roise's battalion would be followed by Taplett's 3/5, with Colonel Newton's 1/5, which had been badly battered in the fight for Sachon, in brigade reserve.
"Obong-ni Ridge sprawled across the Marine front like some huge prehistoric reptile," wrote Marine historian Lynn Montross. "Its blunt head overlooked the main supply route...and the elongated body stretched to the southeast more than 2,000 yards before losing its identity in a complex of swamps and irregular hill formations."
The ridgeline included half a dozen dominating peaks (identified by number, from north to south, as Hills 102, 109, 117, 143, 147, and 153), several smaller hills, and a succession of steep spurs, separated by deep gullies that ran all the way down to a series of rice paddies on the plain below. It presented a vast, demonic puzzle for the men of the Second Battalion's D and E companies assigned as the first Marines to climb it.
"You must take that ground tomorrow," Murray told Roise. "You have to get on that ridge and hold it. Understood?"
"Understood," Roise assured him. "This battalion goes on...
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
The Dark Days of 1950
By Dave Schranck
Bill Sloan has written another commendable story of combat. This time he covers the opening months of the Korean War when South Korea and especially the US were unprepared to repulse an invasion from the north. The signs were there but were ignored by MacArthur in Japan and by Washington. The author has chosen the first three months when the US was slowly coming up to speed, throwing in reinforcements piecemeal against the determined NKPA.
Before beginning his war coverage, the author describes how Truman and Johnson in the five years since WWII had gutted the Armed Services, especially the Marine Corps which was on life support. He goes on to depict the Army as poorly trained and equipped as well as low in morale. To make matters worse, the non confrontational ways of Acheson in regards to China and Soviet Union only encourage Stalin to help train and equip North Korea to invade the South.
Mr Sloan's battle coverage begins with the fall of Seoul and continues down the peninsula toward the important port of Pusan. In between Seoul and Pusan, you'll read about the battles for Suwon, Osan, Kum River, Taejon, Kumchon, Yongdong, Sanju, Sachon, Kosong, Obong-ni Ridge, Taegu and the Naktong River line, also called the Pusan Perimeter.
These were days when US Forces, both Gis and Marines, suffered heavy casualties and by August were almost pushed into the sea. In September there was a reversal when MacArthur landed at Inchon and within two weeks recaptured Seoul, saw the Pusan breakout and the full fledge retreat of the NKPA back to North Korea. MacArthur wasn't satisfied with regaining the 38th Parallel; he talked Truman into attacking the North with the objective of combining the two countries into one democratic one.
The battle coverage of the select engagements was good, descriptive. Using many sources including primary documents as well as interviewing 56 veterans, Mr Sloan was able to present many first hand experiences that added to the tactical details, giving greater depth to the book. The book closes with a brief summary of the rest of the war that includes UN forces invading the North, the Chinese counterattack, the dragged out negotiations as well as the present day circumstances. There is closing remarks on Truman and MacArthur as well as a discussion on whether the war had merit or if it is appreciated by the current generation.
Even though I really liked the book and eagerly recommend it, I couldn't give it five stars. The author provides too small of a window into the war, specializing too much which gives an incomplete view of the battle. I understand that was the author's intent but if this is the only book on the Korean War you read, you will have an incomplete picture of it. It can't compete with the full coverage books from Clay Blair, Bud Hannings and Roy Appleman. Secondly, there are only a few large scale maps of the peninsula. It would have been helpful to have a detailed map of each engagement covered; it certainly would have helped to follow the action. Also provided are photos and an extensive Notes section, Bibliography and Index.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Fast Paced Accurate Read
By Richard A. Jeffries
Bill Sloan again does an excellent job with his treatment of the first few months of the Korean War. There are many fine books out there that give the Army's view of the first disasterous months of the Forgotten War. Sloan justly gives them credit in his extensive notes(Blair's "The Forgotten War"; Fehrenbach's "This Kind of War"). Kudos to Mr Sloan for his written work on the First Marine Brigade's efforts to stem the tide and greatly backstop Walker's Eighth US Army. The action sequences and insertions of valorous deeds by young Marines do the Corps proud. This book is written in the same gritty factual fast paced style as Sloan's efforts describing the Okinawan campaign in "The Ultimate Battle."
As an Army veteran it always pains me greatly to read about the initial painful efforts of the US Army's attempts to halt the initial onrush of NKPA forces into South Korea. Sloan provides a succinct overview of those weak initial efforts and the causes that led to the post-war draft Army's weakened condition. The Marines as a fighting force have never been equaled and were much needed during this trying time. Sloan's book is an excellent example of the perils of unpreparedness by our nation for armed conflict, but also a shining example of the fighting spirit of volunteer forces who are aptly supplied and ably led.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Superb account fo the first three months of the Korean War
By Ironmike
Mr Sloan has done something unique, held my attention on a subject that I have read much on. His account of the three critical months that saved South Korea and the US Marines as an organiazed fighting unit. Interesting accounts of the brutal fights and the brave army and Marines that stemmed the tide of the North koreans. It is packed with facts, amazing characters that did the impposible and faced a ruthless foe bent on victory at any cost.
I would rank this among Mr Sloan's best works and I have read several of his other books. I recommend this title for anyone wanting to learn more about our brave military members then and now and to discover the horrific conditions they had to back in 1950 - the year I was born. Tough guys and glad we had men like these when we needed them. Real American heroes and Sloan does justice to the other UN forces that stepped up to the plate in dire times as these.
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