The Imjin and Kapyong Battles, Korea, 1951

Paul MacKenzie | 4.50 | 12 ratings and reviews

The sacrifice of the "Glorious Glosters" in defense of the Imjin River line and the hilltop fights of Australian and Canadian battalions in the Kapyong Valley have achieved greater renown in those nations than any other military action since World War II. This book is the first to compare in depth what happened and why. Using official and unofficial source material ranging from personal interviews to war diaries, this study seeks to disentangle the mythology surrounding both battles and explain why events unfolded as they did. Based on thorough familiarity with all available sources, many not previously utilized, it sheds new light on fighting "the forgotten war."

Reviews:
"MacKenzie offers a fresh, exhaustively researched and clear-eyed account of a pair of complex battles and of the warring national historiographies to which they gave rise. A thorough tactical analysis is matched by a careful reading of the subsequent accounts and a fair-minded and judicious apportioning of praise and responsibility for the successes and failures in a critical period of the Korean War." - Jeffrey Grey Australian Defence Force Academy

"In Korea, on the night of 22nd April 1951, communist forces unleashed what remains, to this day, their greatest offensive since Zhukov's storm on Berlin. In the desperate fighting that followed, the key flanks of free world forces were held by one British and one Commonwealth brigade. The former took on a Chinese army; the latter, a Chinese division. Six decades later, an American historian has dismantled the barriers between Australian, British, Canadian, and New Zealand accounts of those whirlwind days to compose the only comparative analysis of the tragedy on the Imjin and the stand at Kapyong. While not neglecting grand strategy, S. P. MacKenzie is at his best at ground zero: his pages capture, for veterans and their descendants, vivid glimpses of the close-range, midnight combat against China's 'human wave' in full flood. I write with admiration for MacKenzie's research and in agreement with his conclusions." - Andrew Salmon, author of Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950 less

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