The Sea War in Korea

More about the book

Originally published in 1957, just a few years after the war ended, the book was the first full accounting of the U.S. Navy's role in the Korean conflict to be written for the general public. It is a subject that has not received the attention it deserves mostly because the larger more dramatic naval operations of World War II overshadowed those in Korea. Yet, as authors Malcolm Cagle and Frank Manson show, sustaining the war would have been impossible without the U.S. Navy. With the navy's command of the sea, United Nations forces were able to slow and eventually stop the communist invasion. The authors argue that without American naval dominance in the waters around Korea and the vital logistics tail that stretched halfway around the world, the tide-turning amphibious landing at Inchon would never have materialized, and the countless insertions, extractions, naval gunfire support operations, and naval aviation missions would not have occurred. They also maintain that in the heightened tensions of the time, the Seventh Fleet served as a deterrent to the temptation of widening the war elsewhere in the Pacific.