2010 is the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War. Many of the larger accounts of that conflict, for example by Max Hastings or the late David Halberstam, adhere to a pretty conventional formula, although much new work has been done on  Soviet and Chinese responsibility for the initiating crisis, notably by Jian Chen, Xue Litai and Sergei Goncharov. 

Egged on by Stalin, who then promptly offloaded the risk of global war onto Mao, Kim Il Sung invaded the South in June 1950, rolling back the South Koreans and US reinforcements hastily redeployed from Japan. The Americans had gone to seed while acting as occupation troops, many of