Robert Lyman: In Conversation

Dr Robert Lyman is a military historian who has not just written a number of excellent books - the latest being Victory to Defeat in conjunction with General Lord Dannatt - but who has also spent twenty years serving in the British military. We caught up with him at this year's Chalke History Festival to chat about his new projects on the Korean War and his brilliant new tour app, Guidl.

You and General Lord Dannatt are currently collaborating on a second book, Korea: War without End. What can you tell me about the Korean War?

The Korean War was not a total war. It wasn't a righteous war in a way that you can frame the Second World WarA global war that lasted from 1939 until 1945. as being a war to defeat evil. It was not a war of existential goodness or badness. It was a war for territory and power, based around the 38^th parallel. That was created in August 1945, and the Russians occupied the north and the Americans attempted to occupy the south, as a device to disarm the Japanese.

It was quite clear that Russia had its tentacles into North Korea, and it was going to create a client state, which is exactly what it was trying to do in Greece, exactly what it did in 1948 in Czechoslovakia, exactly what it'd already done in Poland with the Polish CommunistSomeone who believes in the ideals of communism, where property is owned collectively and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs. Party, and exactly what it'd done in the Baltic states. People forget that when North Korea was constructed, China was not yet communist. CommunismA theory of system of government and social organisation where property is owned collectively and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs. didn't win under Mao Zedong until October 1949, so you can see the logic of Joseph Stalin wanting an Asian buffer state between Siberian Russia and Chinese Manchuria. We pin the blame on Stalin for starting the war because in building that client state and handing it over to this nationalist communist government under the Kim family, he produced the violent antagonism that created the seeds for war.

It was outrageous politically for Kim Il Sung to launch the attack on the South on 25 June 1950, but he did so largely because he thought he could get away with it. He didn't think the Americans would intervene, and he persuaded Stalin and the Chinese that they wouldn’t. He thought he'd be able to seize Seoul in three days, which he did, and that the whole war would be over in a month. But of course, within two hours Washington had responded to the invasion by creating a UN resolution, which was accepted the same day, and the Americans then started flying missions over Korea. It was a massive miscalculation.

There were two wars for Korea. The first war was Kim Il Sung invading the South, and the American response. The purpose of this campaign, when you think about geopolitics and strategy, is to restore the status quo ante bellum – getting back to the point at which the war began, which was essentially the 38th parallelThe 38th parallel north is a circle of latitude that runs 38 degrees north of the Earth's equator. It was important as it marked the border between North and South Korea at the end of the Second World War.. But after the Inchon landingA surprise amphibious landing conducted by American and South Korean forces between 15 and 26 September 1950, which reversed the tide of the Korean War. and the American defeat of the NKPA, the North Korean People's Army, the Americans pushed the North Koreans out of the Pusan PerimeterA 140-mile defensive line around an area on the southeastern tip of South Korea, including the port of Busan. . They decided in a moment of ecstasy to invade North Korea, and sought the opportunity to unify it under the Republic of Korea. But that was effectively illegal as well, because it was disproportionate to the original crime. You can argue it either way, but the reality is that this was not the purpose of the original intervention by the United Nations. Invading North Korea was effectively what North Korea had done to the South. You can't tell the North off if you're going to do exactly the same thing.

The Americans persuaded themselves that the Chinese would not intervene, and yet the Chinese had been repeatedly telling the Americans through the Indian government that they would. And it wasn't just Douglas MacArthur – the commander of the Far East Asian Command – it was President Truman as well, who supported the decision to invade North Korea without thinking through the consequences. All they needed to do was to whiteboard it, to sit down and say, 'What are the implications of doing this? Have we got the resources to do it? What will happen if things go wrong? Remember it's October and we're entering winter.' The first winters came early that year, and when the blow came, the Americans received a really bloody nose.

Of course, the North Koreans and Chinese massively pushed the UN forces below the 38th parallel in the series of battles. But then territory was regained to about the 38th parallel. So our argument is that the second war, the war initiated by the UN and led by the United States, was entirely unnecessary because two years later it ended where it had started. The status quo ante bellum had been restored, but at the cost of two years of blood and treasure.

You mentioned that the Second World War was a just war, whereas this one wasn't.

Both Richard, Lord Dannatt, and I argue that the response by the United Nations to the North Korean invasion was legal, morally just and proportional. The definition of a just war is to restore an injustice using proportional force. But the moment you get to the 38th parallel and the Americans decide that they, with UN agreement, would continue to fight, then that disappears – all of a sudden you're fighting an unjust war.

People traditionally see the Korean War as the first hot war of the Cold WarA period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, 'officially' lasting from 1947 to 1991., and it was that. But actually, we need to put its legs firmly into the Second World War. It's been fascinating to think about it in a new way. When Richard and I started the project, I thought, 'What can we possibly come up with that's new?' But the more you challenge received ideas about the past, the more you realize that most of them are built on pretty shallow foundations. This whole idea about the Second World War producing the modern security environment under which we all operate is just not true. It's true to the extent that the world order was broadly divided between East and West, so far as the northern hemisphere is concerned. It's broadly true in terms of the encroachments of communism. But it's not true in terms of the military confrontation between both sides. We've always assumed that the Cold War came straight out of the Second World War and NATOThe North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a military alliance of two North American and 30 European member states. was the product of that. No, it was the product of the Korean War.

Another challenge we found when we first started reading up about the Korean War was that everyone says it is forgotten. That’s not right: it's certainly not forgotten in Korea. Richard and I were horrified, speechless, about the numbers killed in the Korean war: a million and a half North Koreans were killed, many of them by aerial bombing. Out of a population of nine million, that's 16.5 per cent of their entire population. A million and a half South Koreans were killed. When you put them together, that's three million out of a total population of 29 million: over 10 per cent. Proportionate to the population size, North Korea lost more people than anyone else in the history of warfare. Richard Overy suggests that 400,000 German civilians died in the bombing campaigns of the Second World War, and we know that about 200,000 Japanese died outside of the atomic bombs. So we're talking about less than 1 per cent of the population in both cases. It is crazy, completely crazy. What is the purpose of war: is it to kill people, or is it to secure a political advantage? It was only when the United States and the UN agreed in 1951, moving into 1952, that the restorationThe restoration of the monarchy and the return to a pre-civil war form of government in 1660, following the collapse of the Protectorate. of the status quo ante bellum – the 38th parallel – would be regarded as a victory, that both sides started thinking about limiting the war to achieve those ends.

Possibly we consider ourselves to be too civilized now for war, particularly for the targeting of civilians.

One of the shocking things in 1950, in Korea, is the degree to which the Americans applied the policy of scorched earthThe military tactic of destroying everything that might be used by an enemy.: American units would go into a village on their retreat from Seoul in June, July, August 1950 and force all the villagers out of their homes – men, women and children – into the countryside, tell them to walk south if they wanted to become refugees, and then burn the village so they had no choice. All these discombobulated human beings, with no idea who this army was, found themselves on the road being forced to walk south, and then, without any warning, being attacked by other American forces fearful that the NKPA were infiltrating the refugees. The idea of scorched earth in this day and age by a Western liberal Christian army, for historians like Richard and myself, is frankly shocking. Richard was the author of the Military Covenant, which was instituted into law in Britain in the early part of the 2010s. It is a covenant between country and Army, but it's also based on a series of premises about how the Army behaves. The standards of behaviour for our army are much higher than we would expect of anyone else. And yet here we are studying a war in which a Western liberal democracy is waging war like barbarians.

Is there just something about the nature of war that brings this out?

There is a very fine historian, who's now passed away, called John Tirman. He wrote a book called Deaths of Others, and he asked the question, ‘Why is it that so many civilians die in wars led by America?’ He comes up with lots of answers, many of which aren't satisfactory to us. He says that, in Korea, people were regarded as another race and therefore fair game: they weren't like us. That's a real challenge to get your head around. But he also states that the American Army at the time was segregated, so racism played a role. We have a slightly different view. We don't deny that any of that might have played a part. But our view is that the primary reason was the ill-training and poor preparation of the troops. It's really important that when war starts that you are trained in combat. The only way to train in combat is to do it in peace, otherwise you're caught napping.

The Americans were caught napping in 1950. We have lots of instances of soldiers, who had rarely even fired their weapon, suddenly in combat situations where they've been told to shoot at the people in front of them who happen to be Korean civilians. They're frightened for themselves and they do what they're told: they get rid of the problem and shoot everyone they can. A number of very high-profile incidents occurred during 1950, and most of the first-hand reports, many of them only revealed in the last ten years, talk about soldiers panicking, about being overcome by events, not knowing how to respond, having very ill-constructed orders. There were specific orders given on four or five occasions, all written down by American Army officers, saying, 'You are to shoot the people in front of you. We don't know whether they're civilians or NKPA’, but the Americans didn’t slaughter villages on the German, even the Vietnam, model.

Preparation of the armed forces seems to be a constant theme in your books – it certainly was emphasized in Victory to Defeat.

We didn't actually expect to see it writing a book about Korea. We wrote Victory to Defeat to identify a serious problem in the conversation that's currently taking place between the armed forces and the government, about how important it is to have a deployable capability that can be sustained over the long term. Wars always happen in a moment: you don't have years to prepare. You need to be ready for that moment.

1950 is fascinating because we, the West, the United States, even the Republic of Korea, were simply not prepared for war. After the Second World War, the Americans went home. We talk about the First World War as the war to end all wars, but in 1945 America demobilized to an extent Britain didn't even do in 1919, which was the subject of Victory to Defeat. The American Army went down from 85 divisions to ten divisions almost overnight. Even by 1950, it had not recovered from that dramatic reduction. Despite all the evidence about troop movements in North Korea, and despite all the evidence coming through, we dismissed it all. It was 'groupthink', where you only believe what you want to believe because it fits your plan. This is human nature reasserting itself. Most people want to live in peace; most people don't want to entertain the idea that war might be around the corner. There is a cycle of forgetfulness, and yet society, if it's true to itself and really does want to protect itself, needs to remember the facts. There needs to be a small number of people who are imagining all the time what war could be like and preparing for it.

The chief of the general staff, who's retiring soon, said recently that if we do go to war again, we're going to have to think about conscription – because it’s going to happen. In every war we've had, the professional army's done and dusted in the first six months. The people who fight and win the war are the guys sitting out there in the pews. It was a fabulous speech. He got it absolutely right. He wasn't saying we need to launch conscription because we're going to fight another war. He was saying we need to imagine what war is going to do to our society, if it happens. There's no point in saying war won't happen, or the likelihood of it happening is very low. It’s still a possibility. When you do risk analysis, you say, 'What's the worst case? What's the percentage chance of it happening?' Even if you put the chance at 5 per cent, it's still 5 per cent. That's what we are in danger of forgetting now, and that's what everyone forgot in 1950.

You were in the British Army for two decades. That obviously influences the way you write, the way you research, the way you look at things.

I'm a graduate of the Staff College, as was Richard Dannatt, who taught the Higher Command and Staff Course. It's taught us strategy. It's taught us important things about arranging capabilities: what capability is important, how it’s applied in war, how you overcome enemy advantages, how you build up your own deficiencies so that they are beneficial.

I won't for a moment decry non-military historians, but I think it does give us a particular perspective that's very helpful. Lots of military historians in the past take the tactical view, the battle view. John Keegan wrote a fabulous book, The Face of Battle, where he took four campaigns, starting with Crécy, then Agincourt, then Waterloo and then the Somme, and he looked at each of those battles through the eyes of private soldiers. It's an amazing book, first published in 1976, and the first book of military history I read. But we're not doing just that. We're narrativeA story; in the writing of history it usually describes an approach that favours story over analysis. historians, we believe in telling the whole story, but we do move very quickly from grand strategy to tactics. One minute we're talking about General Dean at Taejon fighting off a tank, because he's trying to persuade his soldiers that that's what they should be doing. The next minute, we're up to MacArthur in Tokyo, and then we're down to operational planning in the Republic of Korea Army. It's not a whole book based through the lens of soldiers. We think we've got the expertise to range far and wide, and take a reassessment from the view of two military practitioners saying, 'What were the errors? What could we have done better? What were the major things that we need to understand?'

It's not purely military: our books are challenges to the politicos who are in charge of us, because they need to understand the limitations of force. Force has utility, we are completely convinced of that. We take the Nigel Biggar approach, that war has meaning and relevance and reference, particularly in the defence of the civil state. But you need to understand how force can be applied legally. That's one of the things that really struck us about Korea: some decisions were immoral, they weren’t acceptable then, and they are not acceptable today. Whilst something might be right in a total war where you're fighting 'evil', if that's how you define it (and I'm very happy to have that debate!), in a limited war your moral decisions need to be really, really carefully worked through.

Are you going to be publishing Korea: War without End in America?

It's their lead title for Bloomsbury next year. We think it'll go down well in America. Civilizations change and develop. This isn't an argument between conservatives and progressives; this is an argument between human beings at different stages in their civilization. Korea was the last campaign of the Second World War, which is why you have area-bombing, which is why no one blinks an eyelid when MacArthur says, 'We'll just flatten all of North Korea.' Only one very junior officer asked if it were legal. That would not happen today. No rational person in modern society would say it would be right to wipe a nation off the earth for the achievement of military or operational objectives. We need to remember that those bombing attacks on Korea took place because America was on the back foot, on the ground. It was losing the tactical battle, and it needed to respond in some way to demonstrate that it had the ability to destroy North Korea or China.

Part of this is the conversation about using nuclear bombs, which was strongly considered. Very fortunately, they weren't used, but the Americans were area-bombing cities. The leap – or the walk – from conventional high explosive and incendiaries of the type that were dropped on North Korea, and atomic bombs is millimetres wide. Millimetres. It's just another type of bomb. If you're killing thousands of people with hard or iron bombs and incendiaries, what's the difference? It's going to reduce your payload – you only need a couple of aircraft. It's going to be beneficial for everyone, so the argument goes, so let's just go and get it done. It's quite shocking, isn't it?

I'm always reminded of the fact that when I joined the Army in 1981, for the first decade and possibly longer, the British Army had tactical nuclear weapons. The idea was that you could fire nuclear shells in a tactical battle, and that was perfectly acceptable. It would clear an area of a couple of square miles for one shell, and it was quite an efficient way of killing the enemy. That was a product of the Second World War as well. We're all products of our past in that way.

Moving away from the Korean War, you're working on a new app called Guidl?

Guidl is such an exciting project. It came from an idea that a number of us have been talking about for years, which is when you go to a place – it might be a town or a city, it could be a remote part of countryside – and you look at it and you say, ‘I wonder what the history of that place is?' So we created an app, called Guidl, where someone with a particular knowledge about a place uploads a Guidl – a short audio snapshot, lasting between three and ten minutes. You can add a whole series of Guidls together to form a full Guidl tour, but you don't have to take the full tour, and you don't even have to be there. Although it's geolocated, you can consume them at home. We've started calling them 'podcasts of a place'. I was sitting up in bed the other morning listening to an amazing set of Guidls that took me 96 minutes: I was mesmerized by a wonderful London artist called Kate Lovegrove, who produced eighteen Guidls on the artists of Cheyne Walk, going from one end to the other end. They're all absolutely fabulous. We know that people consume history not just by reading it: they like to see it and they like to hear it. We're all used to Audible now, so the idea of having Tom Holland take us on his Londonium tour is really powerful. And it’s global: I've done two tours of Kohima in India, two tours in France; I will do some tours in Burma.

We are really keen to democratize history. One of the things that’s really excited me over the last 35 years of writing and talking about history, is how many experts there are who are not professionals. So, they can create their own Guidl by writing to us, or clicking the registration button on the website, and we'll send them the software. They either then upload the audio if it’s separately recorded, or just talk into their computer. They don’t even have to be there: they just click on the map and it will take them to the right place. Easy peasy.

It's free to download, but there is a small charge for people to consume Guidls, which is set by the creator. We're trying to support the historical, archaeological, cultural communities. So, if you're going to do a Guidl tour of, say, historic sites around Gloucester, you might want to charge £4.99 for it, and 20 per cent of the revenues go back to the Guidl creator – for every £4.99, you get £1 back (a lot of money sadly goes to the app store and VAT).

If you had a safety bubble, and you could go anywhere in history – and be able to return – where would you go?

1484 through to the early part of the sixteenth century, because one of my ancestors was Sir Thomas Lyman, who was the lawyer to Richard III. He married a lady called Elizabeth Lambert, also known as Jane Shore, so she is also one of my ancestors. She was regarded as Edward IV's mistress, but Sir Thomas Lyman fell madly in love with her when Richard III sent him to interrogate her in the Tower. There is a letter from Richard saying 'Lyman is infatuated with Jane Shore and he wants to marry her. What do I do?' They eventually married, and I'm very pleased that he did, because I'm here.

That story has always really intrigued me, because we think about the Wars of the RosesA series of conflicts, during the second half of the fifteenth century, between two branches of the Plantagenet line: York and Lancaster. Over the course of 30 years the crown passed through several hands: Henry VI, Edward VI, Edward V, Richard III, and Henry Tudor. Most historians date the end of the Wars to Henry VII's victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field, although it can be argued that they actually finally finished during the sixteenth century. as deeply historical, a long way away. But I can almost viscerally feel my past. When I read all these stories I think, 'This is my family; I have this DNAHolds the genetic code to all living things, and is passed down to children from their parents. in me'. That's why history is important to me. I live it and I breathe it because it's part of me physically, not just because it's important to me in terms of understanding who I am and where I come from. I'm very lucky because my family is well recorded, but everyone had lives, and lived them as widely and as wildly and as passionately as we do. History is about uncovering that and understanding it and embracing it, good or bad.

My fourteenth great-uncle was John Knox on my mother's side, so that's another period I'd like to go to. John Knox was a highly articulate, highly educated, very political animal playing a very political game, but he has been written off by people who don't understand the role of theology in that period of history. His mother was Lady Margaret Sinclair, so my mother's side is the Sinclair family, the lords of Orkney, which is also a very important part of my life.

If you were to host a dinner party with guests from the past, who would you have?

Definitely Sir Thomas Lyman. I would also love to invite another ancestor of mine: John Lyman, who was one of the first adventurers in the East India CompanyA monopolistic company formed to engage in trade with Southeast Asia and India.. The story of commercial adventure in the early 1600s is quite extraordinary. It wasn't because of competition with Portugal or Holland; it was to try to make money for these very impoverished people. England was a very poor place for a very long time, and the civil wars in the middle of that century didn't do us any favours either. People were just trying to survive and create money, and they knew they could create money through trade. Interestingly, his nephew, another John, was captain of a ship called Royal James, and he died off the coast of Sumatra in about 1621. When the ship came back, his widow Joan was paid off in pepper. This is the history of our country. The history of the world is best seen through the lives of people who lived it.

Anyway, that's the family done! Bill Slim, commander of the 14th Army, one of my greatest all-time heroes, was a remarkable man. I'm a great fan of Sir Winston Churchill as well, and I would have him at the table, but I'd make sure I didn't give him too much champagne because he'd make a fool of himself. There's a whole bunch of other people – like the Duke of Wellington, who was quite a character – a lot of them wearing uniforms, I'm afraid. But that's who I am and that’s where I come from.

You can buy Robert Lyman's latest book, Victory to Defeat, here; and to find out more about Guidl, click here.