TY - JOUR
AU - Grant,, Matthew
AB - The central theme running through Grace Huxford’s important book is the complexity of how the Korean War, and more generally the wider Cold War conflict, is remembered. Not for nothing does the subtitle tell the reader the book is about forgetting, rather than remembering. Whereas the two World Wars dominate memory, the Cold War struggles to maintain its place within popular culture. This was vividly illustrated by the 2014 decision to move the Lutyens-designed Great War memorial in St Peter’s Square, Manchester, as part of the redevelopment of the square. Previously hemmed in between tramlines, the war memorial was cleaned and moved to a more open aspect, providing a greater commemorative spectacle. A consequence of the move, however, was the destruction of the Manchester Peace Garden, installed in the mid-1980s as part of the City Council’s anti-nuclear stance. Although the impetus for the move was economic, care was taken to enhance Manchester’s primary memory site for the First World, at the expense of eradicating its Cold War past. Huxford teases out just why the Korean War was ‘forgotten’, and in doing so makes a major advance in how we think about Britain’s Cold War history. Put simply, the ‘long Second World War’ (p. 7) overshadowed the conflict. Whereas the war against Hitler was remembered as simple, noble, and victorious, the war in Korea was none of these things. As she makes clear in an excellent chapter on initial reactions to the war, soldiers, and civilians alike were confused about the war’s aims and what relationship it had to Britain’s own security. The way the war ended—an inconclusive armistice signed in 1953 after 2 years of meandering talks—did not clarify people’s understandings. Whereas the Second World War formed part of Britain’s ‘usable past’, the Korean War never did. As Huxford makes clear, forgetting is never simply passive, but a consequence of a dynamic process of cultural formation. The neglect of the Korean War was part of the wider process by which the memory of the Second World War was codified, dispersed, and understood in the decade or so following 1945. As she also makes clear, this ‘forgetting’ has a broader social dynamic for those who experienced it. The idea of the Korean War as ‘forgotten’ became central, she argues, to the group identity of Korean veterans, and tackling it was the key guiding principle behind the Korean War Veterans Association. This veterans’ group has long been neglected, as indeed have veterans in Britain more generally. And although veterans did not command the social and political heft their comrades in the USA or France did, their history has the potential to tell us a great deal about the place of post-1945 conflict in the lives of those who experienced it. In addition to ‘forgetting’, the book has two other themes: citizenship and selfhood. To shed light on these, Huxford has approached a disparate set of sources as a corpus of life-writing to understand how people understood themselves within the multilayered, interconnecting contexts of Cold War citizenship and the memory of the Second World War. This is an ambitious aim, and she has successfully mined some fantastic material. Not just autobiographies and oral histories, but Mass-Observation material and a set of combat reports that asked officers to reflect on their experience. Although there are limits to this source material, with their emphasis on officers and other middle-class experiences and a distinct lack of working-class voices, they are used in an illuminating and innovative fashion to provide pointers to how Korea was experienced. It is particularly important to use such sources to probe the nature of the Korean War as a ‘forgotten’ war. The manner in which people struggle to make sense of the conflict and its place in their life is compelling evidence for her wider argument about the war as ‘forgotten’. More generally, it illustrates that although historians are confident in analysing the Cold War as a chronological period or analytical category, it was an abstract concept to many people living in the 1950s. Huxford shows that people were not sure what it meant, or how it connected to their own lives, in stark contrast with the clear sense they had about the legacy and memory of the Second World War. The very lack of coherent cultural memory about the Korean War makes it all the more challenging to use these sources to investigate the experience of that conflict. Huxford’s success in doing so is an important reminder that although researching representation remains vital to understanding the past, we must go beyond the methodologies of cultural history if wish to discuss experience and meaning. In doing so, Huxford highlights the intersections of memory and experience, particularly the way memories of the Second World War helped people understand the Cold War as it went on around them. These memories could be of people’s own experience, or they could be individual understandings of the wider cultural memory of the war as it developed after 1945. Whichever way, cultural memory was inescapable for people experiencing the Cold War. Huxford’s is therefore both an essential book for those interested in the Korean War and the domestic history of the Cold War. It is also a fruitful jumping-off point for future work on how the Cold War was experienced and how historians can approach the topic. © The Author(s) [2019]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Korean War in Britain: Citizenship, Selfhood and Forgetting. By Grace Huxford
JO - Twentieth Century British History
DO - 10.1093/tcbh/hwz036
DA - 2020-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-korean-war-in-britain-citizenship-selfhood-and-forgetting-by-grace-5n4pWBL4BB
DP - DeepDyve
ER -