Millett, Allan R.

More than 36,000 American servicemen died in combat or by other causes during the Korean War. As terrible as this figure is, it pales in comparison with the war’s nearly two million civilian deaths. And the South Korean armed forces, whose soldiers were drawn from a male population half the size of the Union’s in the American Civil War, suffered more combat deaths than the Union army.

All these statistics cannot hide the fact that ultimately the Korean War, like all others, is about the lives and deaths of individual human beings. THEIR WAR FOR KOREA tells the individual’s story. And although war as a human phenomenon has essential elements that have repeated themselves from the dawn of recorded history, every war is unique unto itself. The forty vignettes of THEIR WAR FOR KOREA, placed in proper context by renowned historian Allan R. Millett, catch the uniquely Korean and international flavor of this terrible war while telling its essentially human story.