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157 v 6 v Forgetting Korea: The Korean War in popular memory, 1953–2014 Former national service conscript Ronald Larby wrote in his self- published memoir that after the war: Everything and everybody connected with … Korea just simply sank out of sight. Years went by during which time I never met anyone who had served in Korea. There were no books in the library and no films about Korea. There was nothing. It was as though it –the Korean War –had never happened. A truly forgotten war.1 Popular history has an abundant supply of books claiming to recover
52 v 2 v You’re in Korea my son: Experiencing battle In 1951, a soldier poet calling himself ‘Rudyard N.G. Orton’ subverted Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem ‘If ’: If you can work on trucks when spanners freeze you With a bolt … it’s agony to touch When a mug o ‘char’s the only thing to please you And news of note is never very much If you can wait in some towns for one minute While other people burn and run Yours is the stores and everything that’s in it And which is more, you’re in KOREA my son.1 This light-hearted reimagining of Kipling’s poem lists the
The Korean War in Britain explores the social and cultural impact of the Korean War (1950–53) on Britain. Coming just five years after the ravages of the Second World War, Korea was a deeply unsettling moment in post-war British history. When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, Britons worried about a return to total war and the prospect of atomic warfare. As the war progressed, British people grew uneasy about the conduct of the war. From American ‘germ’ warfare allegations to anxiety over Communist use of ‘brainwashing’, the Korean War precipitated a series of short-lived panics in 1950s Britain. But by the time of its uneasy ceasefire in 1953, the war was becoming increasingly forgotten, with more attention paid to England’s cricket victory at the Ashes than to returning troops. Using Mass Observation surveys, letters, diaries and a wide range of under-explored contemporary material, this book charts the war’s changing position in British popular imagination, from initial anxiety in the summer of 1950 through to growing apathy by the end of the war and into the late-twentieth century. Built around three central concepts – citizenship, selfhood and forgetting – The Korean War in Britain connects a critical moment in Cold War history to post-war Britain, calling for a more integrated approach to Britain’s Cold War past. It explores the war a variety of viewpoints – conscript, POW, protestor and veteran – to offer the first social history of this ‘forgotten war’. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Britain’s post-1945 history.
In order to achieve the harmonious merging of the Japanese and Korean people, nothing was more necessary than the [1914] reform which placed both of them on an equal footing in the same administrative framework. 1 Just when the Japanese migration to Korea was soaring – eventually bringing about one of the largest new communities in the colonial world – the colonial authorities in Seoul curiously set out to dissolve it within a unified political body, Chôsen, which was neither Korea
73 v 3 v Citizen soldiers: National servicemen in the Korean War Compulsory peacetime military service –national service –left a mark on an entire generation of young British men. Some loved it: called up in April 1948, Ron Laver argued that ‘those years were the best of our lives’.1 Others loathed it: Patrick Wye, a Private in the Royal Army Service Corps, described it in his unpublished autobiography as ‘a great cloud on the horizon of our youth’ and Barry Smith talked of getting it ‘over with’ when he was called up on 15 March 1951.2 For some, its
4 ‘A vaccine for the nation’: South Korea's development of a hepatitis B vaccine and national prevention strategy focused on newborns Eun Kyung Choi and Young-Gyung Paik Introduction When the scale of hepatitis B infection in South Korea came to light in the 1970s, the emerging public debate on the disease centred on the method of transmission. South Korean medical
1 Introduction: The Korean War in Britain In the summer of 1950, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge was holidaying in Portofino on the Italian Riviera when the news broke that, on 25 June, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) had invaded its southern neighbour, the Republic of Korea (ROK). Muggeridge worried about how he and his wife would re-join their children should this be the beginning of a wider war. Journeying steadily back to Britain, Muggeridge wrote in his diary in Monte Carlo that everyone was ‘frenziedly following the Korean news, some
citizenship in the Japanese empire is quite striking. Recent scholarship has shattered the myth of pre-war Japan as a ‘homogeneous’ nation, pointing in particular to Japan’s internal colonisations of the Ainu and the Okinawans, processes that preceded the acquisition of the formal colonies of Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910. 2 While issues of citizenship for people moving between both ‘internal’ and external colonies and the Japanese metropole were also complex, after 1895 Japan’s status as a Great Power with regard to China also opened up
96 v 4 v Brainwashing in Britain: Korean War prisoners of war Brainwashing is an iconic twentieth- century term: over- used and under-analysed, its evolving usage since 1950 encapsulates many of the century’s anxieties, prejudices and lay understandings of human behaviour. It has been frequently used as a pejorative term to describe the unwitting, external manipulation of individuals and their view on the world. In modern Britain, it has been applied to topics as far-ranging as political outlooks, religious fundamentalism, history teaching and
30 v 1 v No woman wants any more war: Popular responses to the outbreak of war In July 1950, MO surveyors questioned people across London about the outbreak of the war in Korea. This questioning followed the decision that month to dispatch 27 Brigade, then based in Hong Kong, to support the UN Force. Amid concerns over the scale of British involvement, the prospect of nuclear warfare and general distrust of both the United States and Soviet Union, another concern emerged. One fifty-year-old woman in Victoria noted that: All the women round our way are