On June 27

On this day in ...
... 1950 (60 years ago today), President Harry S. Truman announced that he'd ordered U.S. troops to join South Korea in enforcing the June 25 U.N. Security Council Resolution 82, which, by a vote of 9-0 with 1 abstention, called for "an immediate cessation of hostilities" on the Korean peninsula and withdrawal of North Korean armies to the 38th parallel. Later on this same day, Council would vote 7-1 in favor of Resolution 83, which

Recommends that the Members of the United Nations furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore peace and security in the area.

War followed for years. Above left, a 1951 U.S. Army photo (credit) of Korean War refugees.

(Prior June 27 posts are here, here, and here.)

Remembering women in service

On this Memorial Day, we note a recent discovery:
In a corner of Washington's Arlington National Cemetery stands the Women in Military Service for American Memorial, "the only major national memorial in our nation's history to honor and pay tribute to all servicewomen of the United States Armed Forces — past, present and future." (photo credit)
Dedicated in 1997, the 4-acre monument, including glass tablets and a reflecting pool, lies at the cemetery's Ceremonial Entrance. Inside may be found a computer database about a quarter-million of the 2 million women who've served, as well as multimedia exhibits including photographs (like that at right of Margaret (Zane) Fleming, an Army nurse at a Korean War MASH unit), recordings, and items used by U.S. servicewomen throughout the centuries.

On June 25

On this day in ...
… 1950, the Korean War began with the crossing of the 38th parallel into South Korea by North Korean troops. In 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union had decided to dismantle the Japanese colonial system on the peninsula by dividing it into 2 occupation zones, American and Soviet. It is said that U.S. intelligence judged that the north could not take over the south without Soviet assistance and that the Soviets would not provide such assistance. But North Korea's Kim Il-sung, who was committed to unifying the country under his rule,managed to secure assent to military action from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The war that followed would devastate Korea, lead to a large expansion of the U.S. armed forces and America’s military presence around the world, and frustrate many on both sides by ending in an armistice that left the peninsula still divided. As we have posted, this conflict remains in a state of ceasefire-without-final-peace-treaty. (credit for photo of South Korean and U.N. troops withdrawing behind the 38th parallel)
… 1954 (55 years ago today), Judge Sonia Sotomayor (left) of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and, as we've posted, the nominee for appointment to the Supreme Court, was born in the Bronx, New York. (photo credit) If confirmed, she would be the Court's 111th justice, its 1st Latina and its 3d woman. At the age of 8, Sotomayor was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Her father, a factory worker with a 3d-grade education who did not speak English, died a year later. Her mother raised her and her younger brother, Juan, now a physician. Her mother, a nurse who worked 6 days a week and whom the judge has described as her biggest inspiration, stressed the value of an education, buying Encyclopædia Britannica for her children.

(Prior June 25 posts are here and here.)

On February 1

On this day in ...

... 1946, Trygve Lie (left) of Norway was elected the 1st Secretary-General of the United Nations. A carpenter's son who entered public life through Norway's Labour Party, Lie had served both before and after World War II in a number of in his country's government, among them Minister of Justice, Foreign Minister, and chief of delegation to the 1945 San Francisco Conference that adopted the U.N. Charter. Lie resigned in 1952 in the face of Soviet opposition triggered by the U.N. role in the Korean War.

... 1862, Julia Ward Howe (right) published a poem in the Atlantic Monthly, a periodical in circulation to this day. Entitled "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," it left little doubt but that in the author's view that in the Civil War it was the Union enjoyed divine approval. Emblematic is the concluding stanza of what would become an American anthem:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Notably, Howe equated the Union cause with her own cause, the abolition of slavery, though President Abraham Lincoln would not move toward even partial emancipation for another 9 months, as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has detailed in her Team of Rivals (2005). (image credit)

On July 27

On this day in ...
... 1857, in Mount Pleasant, Ontario, Canada, a daughter, Ann Augusta, was born to suffragist physician Emily Howard Stowe and her carpenter husband, John Stowe. In 1883 the daughter married Dr. John Benjamin Gullen and, moreover, earned her M.D. from the Faculty of Medicine at Victoria University, Toronto. Augusta Stowe-Gullen was the 1st woman to graduate from a Canadian medical school (left). Stowe-Gullen was active in suffrage, temperance, and other social movements, "and she succeeded her mother as President of the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association in 1903." She was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1935, 8 years before her death in Toronto. A medical professor and practitioner at numerous hospitals in Canada, she was a founding member, in 1909, of the Women's College Hospital in Toronto, site of this anecdote:

One day, a visitor remarked upon the hospital's extensive female staff and asked whether everyone in the hospital was female. 'Of course not,' Gullen replied. 'Half the babies born are male.'

... 1953 (55 years ago today), in a purpose-built hall at Panmunjom, a village on the de facto border dividing the northern and southern portions of the Korean peninsula, representatives of 16 U.N. member states signed an armistice "ending hostilities in the three-year-old Korean war." The truce document was not a final peace accord:

... [T]hough the shooting would cease within twelve hours after the signing, only an uneasy armed truce and political difficulties, perhaps even greater than those of the armistice negotiations, were ahead.

The agreement remains to this day the lone basis for cessation of the conflict.

Halberstam on the Korean War

I have been reading David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Hyperion, 2007), a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in history. As Max Frankel wrote in his review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review in September 2007, Halberstam’s book
evokes the nobility and crazy heroism of outnumbered American grunts in a dozen of the war’s critical engagements, cinematic scenes that alternate with crisp essays about the mindless way the war began, the reckless way it was managed and the fruitless way it ended.
One cannot read Halberstam’s book without being reminded, on virtually every page, of the grave situations that face soldiers and civilians in Iraq right now (or of the great loss we suffered when Halberstam died in a tragic car accident a few days after finishing this book).
But to me, the most compelling part of The Coldest Winter is the way in which it reveals what Halberstam calls “the nobility of ordinary people” (660) in the crucible of war. The Coldest Winter’s gripping narratives of battle scenes and soldiers’ struggles are classics of military history. His re-telling of the battle at Chipyongni in February 1951 (514-86) deftly assesses both the origins (strategic necessity) and extraordinary costs (the lethal stalemate that soon set in) of a major victory for U.N. forces in the central corridor of Korea. Halberstam easily moves from generals (the American Matt Ridgway and his Chinese counterpart, marshal Peng Duhai; the charismatic Frenchman Ralph Monchar) to captains (Stanley Tyrrell, leader of a successful rescue that led the survivors to make a banner proclaiming, “when in peril, send for Tyrrell”, 530) to sergeants (Ed Hendricks, who recalled stacking frozen bodies into trucks like “a giant jigsaw puzzle” after the deadly winter battle, 585) as the battle plays out.
Comparable stories of the horror and heroism of the war in Iraq are already in popular circulation; consider the new HBO mini-series (premiering this Sunday, July 13) based on journalist Evan Wright's Generation Kill (Putnam, 2004).
Halberstam’s doggedness in pursuing sources is an inspiration (especially for me, since I see the inside of an archive, or sit across from an interviewee, all too rarely). The brilliant section on Chipyongni relies heavily on an interview with Paul McGee, one of many veterans Halberstam tracked down. In his author’s note, Halberstam reports that he almost called off his visit to McGee, who was an unsung Army lieutenant in the battle, because of fatigue, bad weather, and inconvenience. But he decided to keep the appointment and was rewarded with perhaps the most remarkable interview that appears in the book (“it was as if he had been waiting for me to come by for fifty-five years, and he remembered everything as if it was yesterday”, 661). Halberstam even used McGee’s thoughts on the duty of a soldier to close out his epilogue.
As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich once said in a Penn lecture to aspiring historians, serendipity doesn’t strike in the shower. (But note you no longer have to go to the Maine State Library, as Ulrich did, to find Martha Ballard ’s diary; it’s here.)

(Cross-posted at Legal History Blog)