Abstract
The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 led to the deployment of tens of thousands of British soldiers to Asia. Despite the size of the deployment, Britain’s contribution and the service of British veterans has largely been forgotten. The introduction offers an insight into the role of British forces and the historical context of the war. Rather than provide a generic overview, it uses the accounts of British Korean War veterans to tell that story, not least because the experience of individual soldiers presents the book’s unique historical perspective. The introduction also explains the book’s origins as an oral history project, outlining the methods used to gather the memories of British veterans and the processes that governed the editing and publication of their stories.
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Notes
- 1.
Megan Hutching, “After Action: Oral History and War” in Donald A. Ritchie (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 241–2.
- 2.
For a concise assessment of the military history, see Max Hastings, The Korean War (London: Simon and Schuster, 1987). For a comprehensive appraisal, see Allan Reed Millett, The War for Korea, 2 vols. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010–2015).
- 3.
On the containment policy and the domino or apples metaphor, see Robert J. McMahon, Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2009), 53, 65. On the Korean War and early Cold War geopolitics, see William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3–46; William Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 11–60. On the legacy of the conflict for the remainder of the Cold War, see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library Chronicles Book, 2010), 205–21.
- 4.
Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 39.
- 5.
Cumings, The Korean War, 219.
- 6.
On the second Korean War and episodic violence in the demilitarized zone, see Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 22–66.
- 7.
“North Korea Conducts New Intercontinental Missile Test,” BBC News, 28 July 2017; “Koreas Make Nuclear Pledge after Historic Summit,” BBC News, 27 April 2018; “Trump-Kim Summit: US and North Korean Leaders Hold Historic Talks,” BBC News, 12 June 2018.
- 8.
Joanna Bourke, “The Killing Frenzy: Wartime Narratives of Enemy Action” in Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod (eds.), No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), 122.
- 9.
Bourke, “The Killing Frenzy,” 109.
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Cullinane, M.P., Johnston-White, I. (2023). Introduction. In: Cullinane, M.P., Johnston-White, I. (eds) A Forgotten British War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_1
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