Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea. By Sheila Miyoshi Jager. W.W. Norton; 605 pages; $35. Profile; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

HISTORIES of the cold war tend to overlook the war in Korea. The vicious conflict, which neither side won nor lost, has been eclipsed by the victorious second world war that preceded it and the harrowing failure in Vietnam that followed. The armistice on July 27th 1953 neither restored peace (no treaty was signed) nor reunified the newly divided peninsula. Sixty years on, the hostilities of this battle may be over but the struggle continues.

This paradox is the central theme of a timely account of the war by Sheila Miyoshi Jager, an East Asian studies professor at Oberlin College in Ohio. From the skirmishes that cost 100,000 lives even before the communist North invaded the South in June 1950, to the confrontation that dragged America and the Soviet Union into their first hot war, Ms Jager shows how Korea’s fraternal struggle has evolved over six decades—outliving the cold war itself.

Since Bruce Cumings finished his seminal history of the conflict in 1990, a wealth of new archives has become available. Soviet, Chinese and American sources bring to life Ms Jager’s chronicle of the relentless build-up to war. In early 1950 the North’s restless Kim Il Sung confided to the Soviet ambassador: “Thinking about reunification makes it impossible for me to sleep at night.” When, after two years of negotiation, a truce was at last in sight, the South’s Syngman Rhee refused to sign, explaining “An armistice without national unification [is] a death sentence without protest.” Neither side wished to cede power in the battle to run a reunified country.

This struggle continued well after the ceasefire. In 1961 North Korea’s income per head, at $160, was twice that of the South, despite heaps of American aid. In the 1980s student dissidents in the South envied the North’s political autonomy and questioned the legitimacy of UN-backed elections. Drawing on a popular Confucian love story, they saw the two sides as a loyal husband and faithful wife, America as the lecherous charmer and the 1945 division as rape. But by the end of the decade Seoul was basking in the success of its Olympics. Its new-found confidence spawned a policy of rapprochement with communist states. The collapse of the Soviet Union precipitated a decade of famine for the North. A statue at Seoul’s war memorial, built in 1994, confirmed that capitalism had finally won: it depicts a taller South Korean clasping his admiring little North Korean brother in his arms.

Yet reconciliation required “a tacit kind of forgetfulness,” writes Ms Jager. Using unpublished reports and photos from Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she outlines the war’s “endless cycle of violence and retribution”. South Koreans killed anyone suspected of communist leanings. American planes strafed North Korean villages pell-mell. After December 1950 all media reports of UN operations were censored. “The process of forgetting was beginning to take place.”

Ms Jager breaks from Mr Cumings’s critical line on South Korean troops. Wildly optimistic assessments of their strength (the “best doggone shooting army outside of the United States”, according to one American general) delayed the decision to send arms. The army suffered devastating losses: 100,000-strong at the time of the North’s invasion, its numbers fell to just 22,000 within three days. Yet it made “heroic efforts” to hold back Kim’s forces on the southern coast, and successfully integrated America’s army. UN forces from 19 other countries, neglected in most histories, swelled their ranks to 1m by 1953. An account of how this motley army worked together makes for enjoyable reading.

Though she produces long-buried material indicting both South Koreans and American bystanders, Ms Jager hardly excuses the North. An American survivor recalled that the North Koreans made them dig their own graves before gunning them down. By recounting its neglected players and unsung heroes, its ignored atrocities (on both sides) and countless, nameless bodies, Ms Jager has written the most balanced and comprehensive account of the Korean war. Perhaps by chronicling the brutal deeds of this “forgotten war”, this book will help lay them to rest.