This is the second installment of Allan R. Millet's three-volume magnum opus on the Korean War. The War for Korea, 1950–1951: They Came from the North is an intensely detailed and rich chronicle of the most violent phase of the war. Millett masterfully weaves together a compelling narrative that draws on a lifetime of exhaustive mining of English-language sources, including declassified archival materials and secondary literature on the subject. This book and the larger trilogy will be an absolutely indispensible resource for scholars of the Korean War and the Cold War in general. Millet's annotated bibliography of the secondary literature and archival sources is comprehensive in scope, spanning the earliest primary sources to the most recent revelations and revisions. His exquisite documentation of declassified archival sources is particularly valuable for students and scholars alike. However, Millett does not present a new perspective or analysis of the war. Instead, he synthesizes the arguments of other historians in presenting the broadest interpretation of the war. The edges of previously “revisionist” ideas are blunted and made mainstream. Millett argues that the Korean War was both a civil war and an international war, “the Korean War, known in the West as the war of 1950–1953, was simply the most violent phase of a struggle between two competing visions of a modern, authentic Korean nation” (p. 10).

In the first volume, The War for Korea, 1945–1950: A House Burning (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), Millett describes the first two phases of the war, polarization (1945–1948) beginning with the dual American-Soviet occupation of the peninsula, and insurgency (1948–1950) beginning with the Cheju Uprising. Although he validates Bruce Cumings’ thesis about the war's civil essence rooted in a postcolonial conflict among Koreans that drew larger powers into its vortex (Origins of the Korean War, 2 vols., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990), Millet's version of the story is biased in the opposite direction, being wholly sympathetic to the American leaders and unforgiving of the Communists. In the volume under review, Millett describes the beginning of conventional warfare with the North Korean invasion of June 1950, coupled with the continued insurgency that began in 1948. Millett presents a truly international conflict, of alliances and enemies, and the often cross purposes of allies and misunderstandings between enemies. He concludes with the beginning of the end of the conflict, the first forays of armistice negotiation in Kaesong, and presumably Millet's forthcoming third volume will cover the armistice negotiation period (1951–1953) when the talks were moved to Panmunjom.

Millett is an American historian of the Cold War, and not a Korea specialist. Although this does not diminish his contribution to the field of Korean history, his perspective is evident in the narrative. He draws almost exclusively from the declassified archives of the United States. To be fair, even Korean scholars of the Korean War rely heavily on the American archives because of the unavailability of comparable material from either the South or North Korean governments. However, it was multi-linguistic, multi-archival research in studies such as Uncertain Partners (Sergei Goncharov, John Lewis, and Litai Xue, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993) which provide much of the groundwork for the fascinating story behind the demystification of North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet decision-making and manipulation preceding the June 1950 invasion that Millett himself incorporates as an integral part of this story. Millett is admittedly constrained by linguistic limits in pursuing genuinely multinational, multi-archival research. Millett does seem sympathetic to the Koreans, but because of the nature of his sources, this is more of an account of the international conflict and there's very little in this book that overtly addresses the civil war at its core. Curiously, Millett consciously decided not to use any standard system of Romanization, and belying his encyclopedic knowledge of Korea during the war, he makes several inaccurate claims about Korea in general, such as references to Koreans’ “nomadic, then village” based language and culture, and the “creation of a written Korean language in the sixteenth century [sic]” (pp. 8, 464).

Millet's strengths are his remarkable talent for personalizing the war, in particular illustrating intimate details of various high and low-profile Americans involved, as well as his keen ability to see more in the archival documents than the authors of the documents themselves. For instance, in lieu of a conclusion near the end of the book, Millett points out that the British allies recognized a Sino-Soviet split when the Americans had not. In dealing with the PRC, Clement Attlee's government perceived in 1951 that “the Truman administration had compounded its errors by assuming that Mao Zedong was Moscow's puppet” (p. 361). This is a dark foreshadowing of events to come, as the last section of the book, “The Road to Kaesong,” details American plans enlisting George Kennan to seek strictly bilateral terms for an armistice with the Soviets, without consideration of the Chinese, or the Koreans and their interests (pp. 454–460).