After five: Halberstam's The Coldest Winter

My Monday has been partly filled with Halberstam's book and partly with personal taxes and partly with good walking exercise up and down St. Mary's Road. The evening hours are still to come.

On Halberstam and the Korean War - just finished a section on the fall of China: the rise of the China Lobby and the blame game - the author makes it clear that America didn't lose China but rather it collapsed from within, that Mao Zedong and his merry band of followers won rather easily against the inept and greedy Chiang Kai-Shek and his not so merry band of followers - Mao Zedong referred to Chiang Kai-Shek as his supply officer, alluding to the fact that many of the American provided supplies to fight the civil war going on in China intended for the Nationalists ended up with the Communists (sounds like Vietnam and Iraq...). The author opened his book with a long section on the early battles of the Korean conflict, going into much detail. He almost lost me as that is not what I wanted to read - descriptions of battles drawn to a fairly fine detail. Fortunately I skipped ahead and got into the conversations that deal with the personalities and the policies and the events that go with that time period. George Marshall, Harry Truman, MacArthur, Dewey, Stilwell, Roosevelt, Eisenhower: just a few of the characters. The Depression, WWII, the Cold War, the Atomic Bomb, the demobilization after WWII: a few of the events. It's good, about what I would expect of one of my favorite authors.