The Coldest War

In the pre-dawn dark of a rainy Sunday in June 1950, North Korean tanks rolled across the 38th parallel, and the Cold War turned hot. Over the next three years, the Korean War would kill some three million people, draw in the armies of two dozen nations, bring the world to the brink of a wider conflict, and divide a single ancient people into two hostile states that glare at each other across the most militarized border on earth to this day. This is the complete story of that war — the desperate stand at the Pusan Perimeter, the audacious gamble at Inchon, the frozen agony of the Chosin Reservoir, the grinding war of the hills, and the two-year ordeal of the armistice negotiations that ended the fighting without ending the war. E.B Cohen braids together the soldier's war and the statesman's war, the American and allied experience and the Korean and Chinese experience, the courage and the folly, the strategy and the suffering. Above all, this is the story of a war that never ended — stopped by an armistice in 1953, never sealed by a peace, its ceasefire still holding, precariously, seventy years on. The Forgotten War deserves to be remembered, and here it is told whole: how the line was drawn, how the fighting raged, and how the coldest war became the most enduring legacy of the Cold War.