Ghost flames : life and death in a hidden war, Korea 1950-1953

KIRKUS REVIEWS ("starred" review)

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist forges a masterly new history of the Korean War through character studies of the participants caught in the conflict.

During his 40-year career at the Associated Press, Hanley reported from nearly 100 countries around the world, and his journalistic talents are on full display in his latest book. He also demonstrates a novelist’s touch and a wonderful ear for dialogue and detail. He builds his history via observers’ testimonies about the war, from the initial invasion of South Korea by North Korean troops on June 25, 1950, to the stunning “morning of silent guns” on July 28, 1953.

The characters Hanley chooses to highlight aptly represent the diversity of people involved, from refugees and soldiers on both sides to U.S. military leaders like Matthew Ridgway, appointed Far East commander by Harry Truman after certain miscalculations by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. In countless poignant snapshots, the author describes harrowing, often horrific experiences, including those of Sister Mary Mercy at a clinic in Pusan, where “sanitation is abysmal and disease endemic,” and “existing facilities fall far short of what’s needed to deal with the typhoid, typhus, smallpox, and tuberculosis spreading through the refugee population”; and South Korean AP journalist Bill Shinn, who tried to cover the conflict while protecting his family.

Elsewhere, Hanley discusses numerous witnesses to the horrendous retaliation by both North and South Korean troops in terms of executions and mass burials as well as American troops’ “depravity” in torturing and raping the local population. The author also details the conditions at the POW camps, including Pyoktong, where a black American soldier endured not only an existence of “simple misery,” but also racist taunts from fellow American soldiers in the camp.

In addition to excellent maps and a chronology, Hanley provides photos of the characters and an “After the War” section about each of them. The accretion of astounding detail makes for a vivid, multilayered look at a deeply complicated war in which few emerged as heroic.

A top-notch addition to the literature on the Korean War.

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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ("starred" review)

In this sweeping and well-sourced history, Associated Press reporter Hanley (coauthor, The Bridge at No Gun Ri ), who won a Pulitzer Prize for helping to unearth the 1950 massacre of South Korean civilians by panicked U.S. troops, captures the devastating human toll of the Korean War.

The epic scale of the war’s disruption comes into focus through the stories of a survivor of the 1950 slaughter, who lost both her children to American bullets; a Maryknoll nun and physician who tended to refugees in the beleaguered southern port of Pusan, where Allied troops were nearly forced into the sea in the first weeks of the war; and a North Korean pilot who survived dogfights in “MiG Alley.” Hanley also profiles the U.S., Chinese, and North Korean military leaders who directed wild swings of momentum in the war’s early months, and, later, the grinding trench warfare that cost tens of thousands of lives as truce talks dragged on.

Drawing on memoirs, personal letters, declassified documents, and interviews with veterans and civilian survivors, as well as newspaper accounts from AP reporter Bill Shinn and his counterpart on the communist side, Daily Worker  journalist Alan Winnington, Hanley paints an extraordinary portrait of the war’s complexity and devastation. This is an essential account of America’s “forgotten war.”

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LIBRARY JOURNAL ("starred" review)

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Hanley (The Bridge at No Gun Ri ) was on the team that in 1999 broke the story of a U.S. military massacre of fleeing Korean civilians 50 years earlier. Hanley is back with an equally compelling and groundbreaking narrative history of the Korean War, told via the experiences of 20 men and women who lived through the bloodshed.

Commanding generals Matt Ridgway (U.S.) and Peng Teh-huai (China) direct strategy and play politics. British Marxist reporter Alan Winnington reports from the Communist side of the battlefield, while Bill Shinn publishes scoops from behind U.S.-South Korean lines. African American soldier Clarence Adams survives prisoner-of-war camp and ultimately defects to China, inspired by the Communist message of racial equality. Chi Chao-chu resigns his studies at Harvard University, hastening home to Communist China to translate at armistice negotiations, while student Ahn Kyong-hee evades sexual assault and other dangers, helped by a South Korean double agent. Ri In-mo goes from bespectacled Communist Party functionary to mountain guerilla to political prisoner. Meanwhile, this fruitless war of attrition forever alters the course of both Koreas and leads to the death of millions.

VERDICT An extraordinary kaleidoscope of human experiences in a catastrophic forgotten war.

Reviewed by  <a href="https://www.libraryjournal.com/?authorName=Michael%20Rodriguez">Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs </a>  , May 01, 2020

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By Matt Fratus, "Coffee or Die" blog

In American history, the Korean War is remembered simply as “The Forgotten War,” ostensibly trapped in the shadows of World War II and Vietnam. For years, Associated Press correspondent Charles J. Hanley has done his best to make America remember.

The Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, who has reported from some 100 countries during his storied journalism career, recently published Ghost Flames: Life and Death in a Hidden War, Korea 1950-1953, an unflinching account of the Korean War as seen through the eyes of those who experienced it.

Hanley won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 “for revealing, with extensive documentation, the decades-old secret of how American soldiers early in the Korean War killed hundreds of Korean civilians in a massacre at the No Gun Ri Bridge.” In 2001, Hanley turned his reporting into his first book — The Bridge at No Gun Ri.

New evidence collected by the South Korean government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission between 2005 and 2010 uncovered more ugly truths about some of the war’s atrocities: political executions, mass killings, and unclassified reports of the US military ordering air assets to “bomb every village” to prevent North Korean infiltrators.

Hanley coupled these investigations with his own interviews and exhaustive research to compile a well-scripted version of events that draws from 20 different perspectives, including a British communist reporter, a Chinese general, an African American prisoner of war, a South Korean mother, a Marine war hero, a North Korean defector, an American nun, and a 10-year-old North Korean refugee.

In Ghost Flames, Hanley begins with an overview of the war and a timeline of events — a thoughtful and necessary inclusion in a book about an often misconstrued war. The timeline provides a setting, but the book’s main focus is not the large-scale battles, stereotypes of faceless caricatures, or casualty statistics. Instead, Hanley highlights the emotional elements of individual stories and captures the intimate realities of killing, suffering, and endurance.

The reader is given a glimpse into each person’s thoughts and the reasoning behind their split-second decision making. Each unique story is a gut-punch, often ending on a cliffhanger as the timeline unfolds.

Bill Shinn, a Korean journalist for the AP, barely escaped death alongside his pregnant wife and 3-year-old son as he gassed his car through a military checkpoint while held at gunpoint. That same checkpoint was a demolition target of the South Korean military, who indiscriminately killed hundreds of fleeing refugees the following morning.

Shin Hyung-kyu, a 16-year-old high school student, rescued a third grader he found in a smoldering North Korean mountain hamlet. He joined the South Korean Army to escape poverty, and after an ambush, he feigned death in the snow next to two dead American soldiers to avoid execution by a Chinese soldier.

US Army Private Gil Isham broke down in tears after rummaging through the pockets of a North Korean soldier he had just killed and finding a photograph of the soldier’s family. As the war progressed, he no longer cried when he killed despite his disgust in both his fellow countrymen torturing dying soldiers and the North Korean enemy executing American prisoners. His mind struggled to justify these actions and instead numbed any previous resemblance of his pre-war innocence. 

Ghost Flames is a masterful, often brutal representation of the Korean War. Readers with a limited knowledge of the conflict will gain a deeper understanding of the complexities cast upon ordinary people, from the soldiers who fought to the civilians trying to escape. This historical account revitalizes old memories and provides an outlet for healing from the traumatic events suffered by the victims. It leaves the reader with the unmistakable realization that this unpopular war should not be forgotten.