The Real ‘Bridges at Toko-Ri’
By By Don Hollway
7/17/2017 • Aviation History Magazine
James Michener’s bestseller and movie adaptation were based on one very bad day in North Korea
It was a new kind of war.
In less than a decade the United States had sided with former enemies, retired its most famous general and settled with bitter foes—ex-allies—for nothing more than a stalemate. President Harry Truman called it a “police action.” The press called it the “Forgotten War.” Trying to make
sense of it, in January 1952 a correspondent for Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post joined the Task Force 77 commander, Rear Admiral John “Black Jack” Perry, on his flagship, the aircraft carrier Valley Forge. James A. Michener was researching what would become the classic story, and arguably greatest film, about the Korean War: The Bridges at Toko-Ri.
“In those days of research for Toko-Ri I would participate in catapult takeoffs and cable-grabbing landings many times,” wrote Michener, a World War II naval officer who had won the Pulitzer Prize writing about combat on sultry tropical islands. In the wintry Sea of Japan, with victory nowhere in sight, he wanted to know, “Have Americans lost their moral courage?”
http://www.historynet.com/real-bridges-toko-ri.htm
