The Imjin and Kapyong Battles, Korea, 1951

“MacKenzie has crafted an excellent history of Imjin and Kapyong that future scholars working in memory studies, Korean War-era military history, and coalition warfare can draw on for important insights.”–H-War

“MacKenzie offers a fresh, exhaustively researched and clear-eyed account of a pair of complex battles and of the warring national historiographies to which they gave rise. A thorough tactical analysis is matched by a careful reading of the subsequent accounts and a fair-minded and judicious apportioning of praise and responsibility for the successes and failures in a critical period of the Korean War.”–Jeffrey Grey, Australian Defence Force Academy

“In Korea, on the night of 22nd April 1951, communist forces unleashed what remains, to this day, their greatest offensive since Zhukov’s storm on Berlin. In the desperate fighting that followed, the key flanks of free world forces were held by one British and one Commonwealth brigade. The former took on a Chinese army; the latter, a Chinese division. Six decades later, an American historian has dismantled the barriers between Australian, British, Canadian, and New Zealand accounts of those whirlwind days to compose the only comparative analysis of the tragedy on the Imjin and the stand at Kapyong. While not neglecting grand strategy, S. P. MacKenzie is at his best at ground zero: his pages capture, for veterans and their descendants, vivid glimpses of the close-range, midnight combat against China’s ‘human wave’ in full flood. I write with admiration for MacKenzie’s research and in agreement with his conclusions.”–Andrew Salmon, author of Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950

A comparative study of two battles and the exigencies of war