Mishmash on Korea
OLIVER, ROBERT T.
Mishmash on Korea Substitute for Victory. By John Dille. Doubleday. 219 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Robert T. Oliver Member of faculty, Pennsylvania State University; former adviser to Syngman...
...He enlivens his style with conversation and anecdotes...
...The good will is attractive...
...He should try getting acquainted with them...
...Dille missed the entire point, incorrectly telling his readers that the Constitution forbade two terms for the President and that Rhee forced the Assembly to grant him a second...
...We went to the Yalu "virtually thumbing our noses" at the Chinese Communists, he asserts, forgetting how urgently we assured them that we would stop at the Yalu and even "send the boys home by Christmas...
...He calls them "shorter than the average Chinese," though anthropologists have found them taller than all but the Manchurians...
...One of 1952's biggest stories in Korea was the constitutional amendment by which President Rhee succeeded in transferring the election of the President from the 182 members of the National Assembly to the 8 million Korean voters...
...and he calmly attests to such utter nonsense as "Their language is a baffling mixture of Turkish, Finnish and Manchu dialects...
...The book jacket claims that Dille spent two-and-a-half years in Korea as a reporter for Life, but internal evidence indicates that most of that time must have been spent in Japan and Formosa...
...The last 71 pages (three chapters) constitute a separate book and a vastly better one...
...At one point, he argues that Japan has learned her lesson and will not go to war again...
...We won a sort of victory in Korea, Dille claims, because our men fought bravely, our jet pilots got invaluable training, and we made enormous advances in wartime medicine...
...But he accurately describes the Korean moral code as "probably one of the most puritanic in existence...
...He notes that "Rhee is a remarkable man," but regrets that "he soon came to feel he stood not only at the center of the stage in Korea but at the center of the universe as well...
...Through nine chapters and 140 pages, John Dille labors this theme with the choppiness of style, the exclamatory repetitiousness and the argumentative non sequiturs which marked so many press-billet bull-sessions in Seoul...
...The author believes that Chiang Kai-shek has done an excellent job on Formosa, and he proves it factually...
...We really won, because it was Malik who asked for a truce, he declares, disregarding the fact that Soviet victories since 1945 have generally been won through negotiations and propaganda rather than by arms...
...Dille is dismayed by public misunderstanding of the war, by political partisanship which tried to exploit it to win elections, and by the sad anger of parents who lost sons in Korea without knowing why...
...Dille is a well-intentioned man with some real insights, but with only a superficial knowledge of Korea and with a burning zeal to prove that the truce there was really a victory in spite of everything...
...If he sticks to what he knows about in the future, his subsequent books on the Far East should be better ones...
...If an enemy army were to invade Mexico," surely we would attack it, he comments (in defense of the Chinese Reds), forgetting that the Communists in Korea were the invaders...
...less esthetic than the Japanese," though students of Oriental art have testified that Korean ceramics is "the most classic" in Asia...
...In two fine chapters on Japan, he presents a solid body of evidence to show that democracy has not taken root there and that the country is rapidly shifting back to its prewar feudalistic structure...
...To the author, the Koreans are "stoic and expressionless...lacking in visible signs of personality...sullen, vacuous and exactly alike...
...He believes Chiang can reconquer the mainland if he carries back with him the land reforms and good administration he has developed on Formosa...
...former adviser to Syngman Rhee "The war in Korea was a good war" and "we were not defeated...
...The Korean portion of this book might almost be a transcript of one side of one of those endless talkfests??with all the rebuttals eliminated...
...Dille's reasoning abounds in non sequiturs...
...but later he concludes that the Japanese feel their destiny is to become the ruling force in a pan-Asian union...
...But the fact that he spent too much time in UN circles and not enough among the Korean people led him to some weird misconceptions...
...Our advance northward "stirred up a hornet's nest of Chinese," he says, overlooking the well-attested fact that the Chinese Reds mobilized and moved up to the Korean border in May 1950, clearly proving themselves a party to the invasion planned for June 25...
...It is a mishmash of misinformation, good will and faulty thinking...
...He warmly champions the Korean people and scathingly denounces the bad behavior of a small percentage of the Allied troops in Korea...
...We "never intended" to fight "a conclusive war," he says, failing to explain just what the UN did mean by its resolution of October 7, 1950...
...He finds kimchi, the national dish, "a foul-smelling mess...
...Personally, I like it...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 17
