Korean War

The Korean War is the setting for the book’s account of Dag Hammarskjöld’s mission to China to negotiate the release of captured American airmen. The episode places a private religious practice—a diplomat copying verses from Psalm 139 into his journal—alongside a tense international dispute, and shows the prolonged negotiations that followed.

A Wider Twentieth-Century Timeline

The book’s treatment of the Korean War sits within a broader chronology of religious lives shaped by racial division, economic hardship, and political conflict. In early-twentieth-century Daytona, Florida, segregation divided the city geographically, and African American children could attend school only through the seventh grade. Howard Thurman’s attempt to leave for high school in Jacksonville depended on a stranger paying to send his trunk onward; his grandmother, a former slave who had inspired his faith, rejected readings from Paul because he had instructed enslaved people to obey their masters.

The book also follows social and religious activity in the 1930s, before the Korean War. In 1935, Thurman travelled with a delegation to Sri Lanka and India, where conversations about Christianity, slavery, and other religious traditions tested and deepened his understanding. In 1934–35, Simone Weil took leave from teaching to work in a factory, seeking direct knowledge of the conditions experienced by industrial laborers. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin began publishing The Catholic Worker in 1933; its circulation later reached 190,000 in 1938, then declined during World War II in connection with Day’s pacifism. These earlier episodes mark distinct historical circumstances rather than events of the Korean War, but establish the book’s continuing attention to how religious conviction meets social and political realities.

The Mission to China

During the Korean War, Hammarskjöld travelled by U.S. military plane to negotiate for American airmen captured by China. A Chinese court had convicted eleven of spying, asserting that they had violated Chinese airspace; the United States maintained that they had been over North Korea. China was already holding four other American pilots whose planes had been shot down, and the newer captives intensified existing hostilities.

The mission was politically constrained. The United Nations was preparing to condemn China for violating the Armistice Agreement by holding the airmen, while China sought admission to the United Nations. Hammarskjöld could not promise China that this request would be granted. On the long flight, he copied verses from Psalm 139 into his journal, a documented act that places his religious reflection within—not apart from—the diplomatic crisis.

When the plane landed in Peking, Hammarskjöld met Premier Chou En-lai. Their negotiations were long and delicate, and the airmen were not released until many months later. The account emphasizes both the limits of the Secretary General’s authority and the time required to reach an outcome: the mission opened negotiations, but it did not produce an immediate release.

War, Public Record, and Private Faith

The Korean War episode is presented through the practical particulars of diplomacy: disputed airspace, prisoners, an impending United Nations resolution, and China’s effort to join the organization. Against that public record, the journal verses disclose a religious dimension to Hammarskjöld’s work. The contrast is significant because his spirituality was not widely recognized by his associates during his life.

After Hammarskjöld’s death in a plane crash in 1961 while attempting to negotiate peace in Africa, his journal was found in his New York apartment and published as Markings. The book describes it as revealing to close associates a religious side of him they had not sensed, and notes that his religious experiences had motivated his work despite being little known. The Korean War mission thus acquires a further significance in retrospect: the journal entry made during the China flight belongs to a private record that later changed how readers and associates understood the diplomat.