A review by larryerick
On Desperate Ground: The Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle by Hampton Sides

3.0

Most readers will probably rate this book higher than I did. In my case, I wanted a true history of the battle. This isn't it. That is not to say it isn't worth reading or that it doesn't keep a reader's attention. It most definitely does. Here's the thing: it starts out very dramatically. I could almost hear the patriotic music swelling in the background, with John Wayne just off to the side, ready to make sure the reader was focused on what really mattered. Then it switches to a quite caustic presentation on how America had two of the most vain, arrogant, military leaders who ever existed in charge of the armed forces in Korea -- with absolutely no explanations for why America would have allowed such a state of affairs -- and then, having set the stage for how several thousand lesser ranking military people were going to have to deal big time with this nearly unlimited amount of incompetence, it goes on to explain in quite graphic detail how they did just that. The book from that point is mostly vignettes of various Marines (and a soldier or two.) At times, you will be hard pressed to believe what you are reading, but the author makes it all very, very convincing. Make no mistake about it, what the Marines (and few others) went through in this battle was remarkable. It is regrettable that only a handful of individuals get the first-class attention when it is obvious that others, unnamed, must have done much or nearly the same. In the end, the author makes no excuses about what the book is or is not. It's one of the few times the Acknowledgments section of a non-fiction book helped me to accept the basic, but limited, book for what it was, allowing me to maintain a rather high regard, nonetheless. As an homage to extraordinary effort, the book serves its purpose quite well.