2007 "First Edition" stated on copyright page; Hyperion publishers, New York; larger (thick) hardbound in black and white pictoral boards of marching troops on snowy, icy road; very good condition with unmarked pages; dust jacket quite good.
 
Description -
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War is a non-fiction book by the author David Halberstam. It was published in 2007, after his death.
 
The book, written more than half a century after the Korean War, looks at the war from a different perspective than previously written works on the war by various authors.  Quotes pay homage to an earlier Korean War author T. R. Fehrenbach, and The Coldest Winter mentions Fehrenbach's combat experience, something that Fehrenbach never mentions for himself in his seminal work, This Kind of War.
 
Content -
At the heart of David Halberstam's massive and powerful new history of the Korean War is a bloody, losing battle fought in November 1950 in the snow-covered mountains of North Korea by outnumbered American GIs and Marines against the Chinese Communist Army.
 
Halberstam's villain is not North Korea's Kim Il Sung or China's Chairman Mao or even the Soviet Union's Josef Stalin, who pulled the strings. It's the legendary general Douglas MacArthur, the aging, arrogant, politically ambitious architect of what the author calls “the single greatest American military miscalculation of the war,” MacArthur's decision “to go all the way to the Yalu [River] because he was sure the Chinese would not come in.”