BROTHERS AT WAR
SHEILA MIYOSHI JAGER is Associate Professor and Director of the East Asian Studies Program at Oberlin, Ohio where she lives with her husband and children.
Also by Sheila Miyoshi Jager
Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia
(with Rana Mitter, eds.)
Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism
The Unending Conflict in Korea
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FOR JIYUL
Abbreviations Used in Text
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
PART I: THE WAR
1. Liberation and Division
End of Empire
Red Army in Korea
General Hodge Goes to Korea
2. Two Koreas
Failed Revolution
Yŏsu, Sunch’ŏn, and Cheju-do
3. Momentous Decisions
War Drums
Endgame
4. War for the South
Desperate Days
War for the North
Savage War
5. Uncommon Coalition
Integrating an Army
Common Cause
6. Crossing the 38th Parallel
Lessons of History
Pilgrimage to Wake
“If War Is Inevitable, Let It Be Waged Now”
First Strike
7. An Entirely New War
“Defeat with Dignity and Good Grace”
December Massacres
“Revolt of the Primitives”
Wrong Way Ridgway
Lost Chances
8. Quest for Victory
The General and the Statesman
Spring Offensive
Magnificent Glosters
Victory Denied?
9. The Stalemate
Truce Talks
Voluntary Repatriation
10. “Let Them March Till They Die”
Death March
Valley Camp to Camp 5
Camp 10
Camp 12
Return of the Defeated
11. Propaganda Wars
Tunnel War
American Bugs
Kŏje-do
12. Armistice, at Last
“I Shall Go to Korea”
Death of a Dictator
Divided Nation
PART II: COLD WAR
13. Lessons of Korea
Feminized Nation
The “Never Again Club”
The Geneva Conference
Eisenhower’s Warning
14. Deepening the Revolution
The Tragic Demise of Peng Dehuai
Khrushchev, Korea, and Vietnam
15. Korea and Vietnam
Lyndon B. Johnson: Refighting the Korean War
Park Chung Hee’s Crusade
PART III: LOCAL WAR
16. Legitimacy Wars
August Purge
Military Line
The Blue House Raid and the Pueblo Incident
Confessions
17. Old Allies, New Friends
Tensions between Allies
Opening to China
18. War for Peace
Withdrawal
Backlash
To Seoul
19. End of an Era
Kwangju Uprising
Students and the Politics of Legitimacy
PART IV: AFTER THE COLD WAR
20. North Korea and the World
Showdown
Defueling Crisis
Accord
21. Winners and Losers
Triumph and Forgiveness
The North Korean Famine
Gulag Nation
EPILOGUE: China’s Rise, War’s End?
Appendix
Notes
Index
AEC: Atomic Energy Commission
ASPAC: Asia-Pacific Council
CCP: Chinese Communist Party
CPKI: Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence
CPV: Chinese People’s Volunteer
DMZ: demilitarized zone
DPRK: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
IAEA: International Atomic Energy Agency
ICRC: International Committee for the Red Cross
JCS: Joint Chiefs of Staff
KATUSA: Korean Augmentation to the United States Army
KCIA: Korean Central Intelligence Agency
KCP: Korean Communist Party
KDP: Korean Democratic Party
KMAG: Korean Military Advisory Group
KPG: Korean Provisional Government
KPR: Korean People’s Republic
KSC: Korean Service Corps
LST: landing ship tank
LWR: light-water reactor
MACV: Military Assistance Command Vietnam
NAM: Nonaligned Movement
NKPA: North Korean People’s Army
NKWP: North Korean Workers’ Party
NPT: Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
NVA: North Vietnamese Army
PDS: Public Distribution System
PLA: People’s Liberation Army
POW: prisoner of war
PRC: People’s Republic of China
ROK: Republic of Korea
SACEUR: Supreme Allied Commander Europe
SCA: Soviet Civil Administration
SCAP: Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers
SKWP: South Korean Workers Party
SOFA: Status of Forces Agreement
TF: Task Force
UNC: United Nations Command
UNRC: United Nations Reception Center
UNCURK: United Nations Commission for the Unification and Rehabilitation of Korea
USAFIK: United States Army Forces in Korea
USAMGIK: United States Military Government in Korea
VPA: Vietnam People’s Army
WFP: World Food Program
My first opportunity to study the Korean War in depth came in 2006 when I was offered a two-year research fellowship at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Affiliated with the War College is the U.S. Army Military History Institute, which houses the largest collection in the United States of oral history archives on the Korean War. One of the major benefits I saw of working with oral histories at the onset of this project was the visceral connection I was able to make with the subjects of my research. Although oral histories are not always reliable and must be handled with care, they are invaluable for re-creating the mood and emotions of the battlefield that underlay the actions and attitudes of the soldiers who fought there.
I was also fortunate during my research at the Institute to run into a group of South Korean researchers from South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The South Korean government had established the Commission in 2005 to investigate various incidents in Korean history, and in particular numerous atrocities committed by various government agencies during Japan’s occupation of Korea, the Korean War, and the successive authoritarian governments. The Commission was disbanded in 2010. As I sat down with the TRC researchers one evening over coffee, I discussed my project, and they offered their help. As the primary researcher on the Commission at that time, Suh Hee-gyŏng not only shared with me thousands of pages of unpublished and published reports and photos of the Commission’s findings, but also helped me navigate the daunting Korean bureaucracy in securing permission to use them. She also provided invaluable assistance in assembling materials pertaining to the mass killings that occurred early on during the Korean War. Kim Dong-ch’un, former standing commissioner of the Commission, also provided important materials; it was he who showed me what I regard as one of the most haunting photos of the war, the remains of 114 bodies discovered at Buntegol, Chŏngwŏn, Ch’ungbuk province, in 2007, which appears in this book.
I am also indebted to Balázs Szalontai for sharing some of his unpublished work with me. The book is much richer because of it. Katalin Jalsovszky, the archivist at the Hungarian National Museum, quickly and efficiently helped me to secure some rare North Korean photos of the war. I am thankful to Balázs and Chris Springer, who brought these amazing photos to my attention. John Moffett, librarian at the Needham Institute in the United Kingdom, was helpful in taking the time to locate, scan, and send dozens of photos of Joseph Needham’s trip to China in 1952. Mitchell Lerner steered me to some of his and other recent work on the USS Pueblo incident from which the book has greatly benefited. Choe Yong-ho of the Korea Institute of Military History, Ministry of National Defense, Republic of Korea, helped me to track down books, articles, and data on Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Raymond Lech generously provided me with copies of transcripts of pretrial interviews, appellate reviews, memos, and letters concerning U.S. Korean War POWs. Ray allowed me to borrow this extraordinary collection—filling more than fifteen boxes—to use at my leisure before he deposited them at the U.S. Army Military History Institute, where the collection now resides. New materials about the war from the Soviet, Chinese, East German, Hungarian, and Romanian archives, all available online at the web site for the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, have enabled scholars to adopt a truly multinational approach in their study of the cold war. We now know more about the views of “other” major players in the cold war than ever before. This book is a direct beneficiary of the tremendous contributions the Wilson Center has made to advancing cold war scholarship. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Oberlin College for granting me a two-year leave during which time the bulk of the research for this book was done. I also benefited greatly from three summer research grants awarded by Oberlin for travel to Korea and other research libraries in the United States. I consider myself lucky to be teaching in such a supportive academic environment. My colleagues Ann Sherif, Pauline Chen, and Qiusha Ma have been not only wonderful mentors but also supportive friends.
During the writing phase of the project, Daniel Crewe, my editor at Profile Books in the United Kingdom, read so many drafts of this book that I have lost count. Several of the major sections of the present text were completely revised and rewritten in response to his suggestions and questions. Allan R. Millett, who read an early draft of the book, was pointed in his critical comments but made it all that much better. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Don Boose also read through an earlier draft of the manuscript and provided excellent feedback, especially on the later chapters. For her enthusiastic and unfailing support of this project, I am grateful to my editor at W. W. Norton, Maria Guarnaschelli, and her assistant, Melanie Tortoroli: Maria, for having such faith and insight into the book even as the manuscript grew longer, and Melanie, for helping me at critical points in the rewriting and for keeping everything else on track. I would also like to acknowledge my copy editor, Mary Babcock, whose meticulous attention to every detail of the book helped to improve it tremendously. Kim Preston and Bonnie Gordon have seen me through some of the more grueling stages of the book’s evolution, and I also wish to thank them here for their warm friendship and support.
My older kids, Isaac and Hannah, also contributed to this project early on: Isaac, now a cadet at West Point, for spending an entire summer with me at the Military History Institute pouring over after-action reports and writing them up, and Hannah, for her computer wizardry in organizing all my books, papers, computer files, and photos. In addition, both helped care for their younger siblings, Emma and Aaron, when mom was at work in the attic, good deeds for which I am thankful. All four kids grew up with this book, patiently tolerating my own “unending” obsession with the war without too much complaint while also providing the necessary perspective as only one’s children can do.
My greatest debt is owed to my husband, Jiyul, without whose contribution this book might never have been written. We covered a great deal of ground together; his help in surveying a broad range of materials, reading and rereading through numerous drafts of the manuscript, and above all, his enthusiasm for debating—and often correcting—the finer points of Korean War history, made the final product a much better book. These conversations became part of our daily routine and contributed to the overall richness of our daily lives. For that, I will always be grateful.
_________
A note on source, transliteration, and naming convention: Considerations of space have precluded the inclusion of a separate bibliography. The notes include the full citation of each source when it appears for the first time in a particular chapter. Throughout the text, I have employed the McCune-Reischauer system of romanization for all Korean words and names, with the exception of well-known nonstandard romanized names, such as Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee, Kim Il Sung, and Kim Jong Il. As a rule, Chinese names are romanized according to the pinyin system. Korean, Chinese, and Japanese personal names are, with the exception of Syngman Rhee, written with family name first and given name last.
Sheila Miyoshi Jager
Oberlin, Ohio
December 2012
BROTHERS AT WAR
The War Memorial, Seoul. (PHOTO BY AUTHOR)
MY INTEREST IN THE KOREAN WAR began with a visit to a memorial. In the summer of 1996 my family relocated to South Korea when my husband, a U.S. Army officer, was assigned to work at the U.S. embassy in Seoul. Just a few minutes away from the main gate of the Yongsan U.S. Army base, where we lived, is the War Memorial, and over the next four years I made frequent trips to visit it. Ostensibly, it commemorates South Korea’s military war dead, but other wartime events, including Korea’s thirteenth-century struggles with the Mongols and sixteenth-century defense against the Japanese, are also represented in the exhibitions. Inclusion of these earlier conflicts appears to reinforce the idea that the Korean War was part of the nation’s long history of righteous struggle against adversity—in this case, South Korea’s struggle against North Korean communists. Situated on five acres along a wide boulevard that bisects the army base, the War Memorial encompasses a rare, large open space in crowded Seoul. Originally conceived and planned under the No T’ae-u (Roh Tae-Woo) administration (1988–93), the complex opened its doors in 1994. It includes a museum as well as an outdoor exhibition area featuring tanks, airplanes, statues, and a small amusement area for children. It has become a popular destination for school field trips.
What struck me most about the memorial was the paradox of what it represented. How does one commemorate a war that technically is not over? While the Korean War, at least for Americans, “ended” in 1953, the meaning and memories of the war have not been brought to closure in Korean society because of the permanent division of the peninsula. How does one bring closure to a war for which the central narrative is one of division and dissent, a war whose history is still in the process of being made?
In South Korea, the official view of the Korean War has always had, unsurprisingly, an anti–North Korean character. One striking feature of the memorial, however, is the relative absence of depictions of the brutal struggle between the North and the South. Although its purported task is to memorialize the war, the main purpose of the memorial appears to be to promote reconciliation and peace. There are few exhibits of bloody battle scenes, but most conspicuously is the lack of any reference to known North Korean atrocities committed during the war. The successive purges of South Korean sympathizers after the North Korean People’s Army occupied Seoul in June 1950 and the execution of prisoners of war are represented nowhere. Evidence of the widely publicized executions of an estimated five thousand South Korean civilians during the last days of the North Korean army’s occupation of Taejŏn in September 1950—an event highlighted in the history books from previous South Korean military regimes—is also missing. For a war that was particularly remembered for its viciousness, the memorial seems to be promoting a tacit kind of forgetfulness. This is in sharp contrast to earlier representations of the conflict that proliferated during the cold war, when North Korean brutality played a central role in the story of the war.
It was not difficult to understand why this sudden shift in memory had occurred. By the time the memorial had opened its doors, the cold war had ended and South Korea had come out on top. Following its global coming-out party during the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Korea had clearly “won” the war against the North, but it could not afford to bask in its glory if it wanted to foster North-South rapprochement and the reunification of the peninsula. The memorial’s designers were thus faced with the dilemma of how to memorialize a brutal war while at the same time leaving open the possibility for peninsular peace.
When I returned to the Memorial a decade later, the pendulum of politics in South Korea had swung sharply to the Right. The conservatives had gained power and opposed improving relations with the P’yŏngyang regime. I was in Seoul in 2006 when North Korea test-fired missiles, including a long-range Taep’odong-2 with the theoretical capacity to reach the continental United States. These acts of defiance were followed by the testing of North Korea’s first nuclear device on October 9, 2006, and then again on May 25, 2009. South Koreans were furious. When the conservative presidential candidate Yi Myŏng-bak (Lee Myung-bak) assumed office in 2008, he abruptly renounced the policy of engagement with the North that previous administrations had pursued. The North responded with vitriolic attacks against the new South Korean government. Relations between the two Koreas spiraled downward from there. By then, it had become quite apparent that the Korean War would not end as optimistically as the War Memorial planners had hoped. Rather, the memorial itself had become part of the history of the war, one “phase” of its never-ending story.
That initial visit to the War Memorial in 1996 spurred me to think more closely about the war. Eventually, I made the memorial the subject of several essays and book chapters and then finally undertook a major research project on the Korean War itself. This entailed exploring the policies and actions of all the major players of the war, including the sixteen UN countries that sent troops to aid South Korea, the military history, and a wide variety of popular and academic writings about the conflict. But I never lost sight of my original fascination with the war and its continuing and evolving impact on the two Koreas and on the rest of the world.
Since the late nineteenth century, the Korean peninsula has been a focal point for confrontation and competition among the Great Powers. First China, then Japan, Russia, and the United States in succession, exerted some form of control over the peninsula. No other place in the world has assumed such symbolic importance to these four countries. The Second World War, however, left only two Great Powers vying for influence over Korea: the United States and the Soviet Union (formerly Russia).
But by then the Koreans had already divided themselves into partisan camps under the tutelage, and with the support, of these two patrons. Two antagonistic regimes were born: communists in the North and conservatives in the South, each with dreams of reunifying the Korean peninsula under their rule, but without any means of achieving this ambition on their own. Their diverging visions of what kind of modern nation Korea was to become made the possibility of conciliation and unity increasingly remote and exploded into war in 1950.
The main issues over which the war was fought had their origins immediately after Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945. The division of the peninsula at the 38th parallel by the United States and the Soviet Union gave rise to a fractured polity whose political fault lines were exacerbated further by regional, religious (Christians versus communists), and class divisions. Open fighting among these groups eventually claimed more than one hundred thousand lives, all before the ostensible Korean War began. Prior to the founding of the Republic of Korea in August 1948, the Americans organized a constabulary force in their zone to augment the national police, primarily to conduct counterinsurgency operations against leftist guerillas. While the record of their operations remains controversial, the security forces successfully suppressed the insurgency by the spring of 1950. The decision by North Korea’s leader, Kim Il Sung, with the backing of Joseph Stalin, to launch a conventional attack across the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, thus resumed the fighting by other means.
The Korean War, in the midst of the rapidly developing cold war, reestablished China, now Communist China, as a Great Power, setting up a triangular struggle over the peninsula between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Communist China. The irresolution of the Korean War, owing to the lack of a peace treaty, with only a military armistice signed in 1953, stoked the fire of simmering confrontation and tension between North and South Korea as well as their Great Power overseers. But the most important fuel that kept the flame of confrontation alive was the implacable nature of the two Korean regimes. This is all the more remarkable as Korea had been unified since the seventh century.
Today, the essentially continuous war between the Koreas threatens to reach beyond their borders, as North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. How did we get to this point? This book is the story of Korean competition and conflict—and Great Power competition and conflict—over the peninsula: an unending war between two “brothers” with ramifications for the rest of the world. If a resolution to the conflict is ever to be found, this history must be understood and taken into account.
I develop two major but overlapping themes in this book. The first one emphasizes the evolution of the war through time. Because the Korean War technically ended in an armistice and not a peace treaty, it continued to influence regional events even though the significance of the war dramatically changed. Hence, the conflict evolved from a civil war in 1948–49 to an international war from June 1950 to 1953, to a global cold war after 1953, only to undergo yet another transformation in the late 1960s, when the focus of the conflict was no longer on containing communism per se, but ensuring the region’s stability. By the mid-1970s, the stalemated Korean War kept American forces in South Korea because the conflict had ironically become a source of regional stability during a period of significant changes in Asia: Sino-American rapprochement, the Sino-Soviet split, and increasing Sino-Vietnamese tensions. Although the Korean War continued to be waged as a series of “local wars” along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) dividing the North from the South, the nature of the conflict had fundamentally changed since the armistice. In the post–cold war period, the Korean War was defined by a series of crises over the North Korean nuclear weapons program and the potential collapse of the North. Should fighting ever resume on the Korean peninsula, it will not resemble the first phase of the war. No one will mistake another North Korean attack on the South as a communist challenge or a war by proxy.
As much as the war has transformed over the years, it has also stayed very much the same. By titling this book Brothers at War, I highlight the second major theme: the continuous struggle between North and South Korea for the mantle of Korean legitimacy. It was this competition, after all, that had given rise to Kim Il Sung’s ambition to reunify the peninsula by force in June 1950. Although Kim did not succeed in this endeavor, he never gave up on his dream of “liberating” the South. By the late 1960s, when it appeared that South Korea was winning the legitimacy war against the North, owing to the South’s rapid economic growth and greater international stature, Kim embarked on a series of provocative actions in the hope of toppling the South Korean regime. These events were remarkable for the brazenness in which Kim tried to co-opt his allies, the Soviet Union and China, to back him in starting a second Korean War. While these efforts ultimately failed, they reveal Kim’s increasing desperation to undermine the South’s growing global stature and influence. By the 1990s, few people could deny that North Korea had lost its legitimacy war with the South. The contrast between the two “brothers” could not have been more stark. Today, North Korea is an aid-dependent nation, wracked by hunger, repression, and a looming legitimacy crisis. This book puts this legitimacy struggle in a longer historical perspective to consider how the fraternal conflict has influenced, and continues to influence, East Asia and the world.
This book is also a military history of the war. The critical importance I give to military campaigns and operations arises from my conviction that it was during the life-and-death struggles in Korea that cold war antagonisms were hardened and perceptions of the enemy were formed. I argue that these perceptions were just as important in understanding American and Chinese behavior after the armistice, for they continued to influence America’s view of China and China’s view of America. Certainly, the two “lost” decades in Sino-American relations between the outbreak of the war in 1950 and Nixon’s opening to China in 1972 came about because of attitudes forged by both parties during the war.
At the same time that the Korean War influenced the cultural perceptions of the enemy, it transformed society at home. When the armistice was signed in 1953, the United States, for the first time in its history, emerged staunchly anticommunist, with a large permanent standing army, a huge defense budget, and military bases around the world. The war did much to forge a new China too. China had lost nearly half a million men, but Mao Zedong emerged with his reputation intact and his power greatly enhanced. Emboldened by his success, Mao applied what he learned during the war to building his communist utopia at home, stoking the flames of Sino-Soviet competition in the process. The war significantly transformed the two Koreas as well. The military on both sides of the DMZ became the strongest, most cohesive, best-organized institutions in Korean life. For the first time since the twelfth century, a military regime took power in South Korea in 1961, marking the beginning of its extraordinary path toward economic development and the source of its eventual “triumph” in its legitimacy struggle with the North.
Something about North Korea invites people to view it hermetically, not unlike the way Westerners wrote about the “Hermit Kingdom” after their travels to Korea in the nineteenth century. “It can hardly be a cause of surprise,” observed the German businessman and traveler Ernst Oppert in 1879, “that a system so strictly and severely carried out, combined with a reputation for inhospitality not altogether undeserved, would have been thought sufficient to deter others from any attempt to form a closer acquaintance with this country. It naturally follows that foreigners have found it next to impossible to collect any reliable information on the subject there, and Corea has remained to us like a sealed book, the contents of which we have yet to study.”1 Similar observations could be made about North Korea today. The place is uniformly characterized in the West as “bizarre,” “erratic,” or simply “baffling.” North Korean experts also tend to isolate and insulate North Korean uniqueness, focusing on Kim Il Sung’s cult of personality and the regime’s Stalinist-Confucian system. For many, the regime’s behavior is explained either as a ruthless ploy to maintain its hold on power and privilege or as a “rational” response to the legitimate threats posed by hostile foreign powers, namely, the United States.2 Both interpretations have focused on the actions of the regime in which North Korea’s ongoing legitimacy war with the South plays little or no role.
North Korea’s main security threat, however, is not the United States. It is the prosperity, wealth, and prestige of South Korea. The greatest challenge of the North Korean regime is not how it will feed its own people; it is how it will come to terms with its own humiliating defeat. South Korea’s miraculous story of economic growth and democratic progress threatens the regime’s hold on power precisely because the more North Koreans know about the South, the less likely they are to put up with the conditions of poverty and repression at home. It is the regime’s pending legitimacy crisis that drives it to act in “irrational” ways. This is why it explodes nuclear devices, launches missiles, fires on South Korean naval vessels, and shells remote islands. A North Korean poster sums up these anxieties: “We will reckon decisively with anyone, anywhere who meddles with our self-respect.”3 Any reforms that would make North Korea look more like the South cannot be accepted, for they would undermine the entire legitimacy of the regime and spell the end of the Kim dynasty.
More than sixty years after North Korea invaded South Korea, the first major hot war of the cold war has yet to end. The fighting resolved nothing of the internal Korean issues that had caused the war in the first place, and the status quo ante was restored. Today, the Korean peninsula remains roughly divided where the conflict began, and the DMZ that separates North and South Korea is the most heavily fortified border in the world. Two million soldiers face each other along a two-and-a-half-mile-wide strip of land straddling the 155-mile-long Military Demarcation Line. President Bill Clinton once called the DMZ “the scariest place on earth.” This is hardly an exaggeration. Should fighting break out again on the Korean peninsula, the ramifications on the region and the world would be catastrophic. There is also reason to hope, however, that given the regional powers’ experience in dealing with this sixty-year-old conflict, they will eventually come up with a solution to finally end it. China is the key and has the best potential to bring this about.
Korean peninsula
In 1943, in the middle of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Premier Joseph Stalin, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill discussed the fate of Korea at the Cairo Conference, in anticipation of Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule. Roosevelt hoped to grant Korea independence “in due course” after a period of trusteeship under the Allied Powers. This did not sit well with the Korean people. The Korean nation had been in existence far longer than any of the Allied Powers. By the seventh century, Korea was a unified nation with its own language, culture, monarchy, state bureaucracy, and centuries of high civilization comparable to that in neighboring China and Japan. Korea had been an independent nation for over a thousand years when Japan annexed it in 1910.
Korea’s fate after World War II was not decided by a trusteeship, but by military conditions on the ground. Roosevelt anticipated there would be heavy losses in defeating the Japanese forces in China and Korea. Hoping to leave those operations to Soviet forces, he agreed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 that for entry into the war against Japan, Stalin would get the southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, the lease of ports at Dairen [Dalian] and Port Arthur [Lüshun], and control of key railroads in northeast China, formerly Manchuria. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, news of the successful testing of the atomic bomb significantly dampened President Harry Truman’s enthusiasm for a quick Soviet entry into the war. Japan surrendered virtually overnight in August soon after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, coupled with rapid Soviet advances in Manchuria. Truman, who had become president after Roosevelt’s death in April, proposed that the occupation of Korea be shared, divided along the 38th parallel. To his surprise, Stalin agreed. Although the entire peninsula had been his for the taking, Stalin was focused more on consolidating control over Eastern Europe. Control over the northern half of Korea was enough to secure Soviet interests without unduly antagonizing Washington. Eventually, the two zones were to be united under a trusteeship, but as the cold war heated up in Europe, it soon became clear that no reconciliation between the superpowers, and their respective zones, would be possible.
Violent upheavals by communists and leftists plagued the American zone. In the face of Soviet opposition, a UN-sponsored election for a national assembly was conducted but only in the South in May 1948. The new national assembly chose an aging and fiery nationalist, Syngman Rhee, to be the first president of the Republic of Korea. Four months later, in September 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was established in the north, headed by a young former Soviet Army captain and anti-Japanese guerilla fighter, Kim Il Sung. By the end of 1948, two antithetical and antagonistic regimes were formed, each with its own vision of Korea’s future.
Stalin gave Kim Il Sung the green light to launch the invasion of South Korea, which took place at dawn on June 25, 1950. Within a week, American forces, under the UN flag, were committed in the fighting. Kim Il Sung’s war of liberation had turned global, and China’s entry in October 1950 risked expansion into World War III. The unfinished war, the first hot war of the cold war, intensified global confrontation and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Paradoxically, the new international order that resulted from the fighting significantly reduced the possibility of a world war by establishing a stable balance of power that neither side was willing to upset.
Shortly before noon on August 15, 1945, Kim Eun-kook turned on the radio. His grandfather told the young boy that an important announcement was to be broadcast at noon and that they would listen to it together. The day before, the police had come through his neighborhood in Hamhŭng city to remind everyone to listen to the radio because the emperor would be speaking. “The emperor was going to say something about a ‘fantastic weapon’ invented by Japan,” the old man told the boy. The weapon was supposed to “wipe out the Americans in no time” and win the war for Japan.
Eun-kook and his grandfather sat together on the veranda while they listened to the crackling notes of the Japanese national anthem. Although they had been reminded by the police to face the radio and touch the floor with their foreheads when the emperor spoke, they did no such thing. Both remained sitting upright and cross-legged. Then the emperor spoke. Eun-kook translated the speech for his grandfather because the old man could not understand Japanese. At first the young boy had a hard time making sense of the emperor’s words. Neither he nor his grandfather, or any of the emperor’s subjects for that matter, had ever heard the voice of the emperor before.
“Well, what is he saying?” asked the old man. “Has he said anything important yet?” The boy shook his head. The emperor spoke in a complex form of Japanese that few people could understand. Eun-kook turned up the volume. Suddenly, he straightened up, jolted by what he had just heard. He told his grandfather that the emperor had just announced that Japan had lost the war and would surrender unconditionally to the Allied Powers. The old man grasped the boy and began sobbing. Hearing the cries, the boy’s grandmother ran out to the veranda. She too began weeping openly when she learned the news. Before the emperor had finished speaking, Eun-kook abruptly turned off the radio. He ran outside and took down the Japanese flag that hung by the door. Showing it to his grandmother, he asked what he should do with it. “Burn it,” she said.1
For tens of millions of Koreans who listened to the Japanese emperor’s announcement that afternoon, August 15 was a day of joyous celebration, marking freedom from thirty-five years of colonial servitude. Despite the fervor of the moment, however, liberation carried a heavy price. Korea was not liberated by Koreans, and so Korea was subjugated to the will and wishes of its liberators. While thousands of Japanese flooded the trains and ferries to go back to Japan, the Americans and Soviets took control. American planners had only a vague notion of what would happen to Korea after Japan’s collapse. Korea had never been important to the United States. Forty years earlier, President Theodore Roosevelt had taken a cold-eyed, realistic view of the situation in northeast Asia. He had accepted Japan as the regional hegemon and praised Japan’s success and progress from a feudal state to world power in less than four decades. Roosevelt’s recognition of Japan’s “special interest” in Korea after it defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), a war he helped end by negotiating a peace treaty, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize, had facilitated Korea’s colonization. For this Japan had agreed to recognize America’s special interest in the Philippines.
Theodore Roosevelt’s complicity in Korea’s colonization would be rectified in 1945 by his cousin’s vision of a free and independent Korea. After World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) embraced a new world order that would fundamentally transform the status of Japanese and European colonies. He advocated the virtues of representative democracy, aid to the oppressed, free trade, and open markets. But before full independence could be granted to Korea and other former colonies, FDR envisioned a period of trusteeship by the Allied Powers to oversee internal affairs and prepare them for independence and self-rule. He was also careful to ensure that postcolonial nations would not orient themselves against American interests. Although at first opposed, Churchill agreed, because the Cairo Declaration did not specifically infringe on Britain’s own colonial holdings and named only Korea for trusteeship. The Declaration, published on December 1, 1943, contained the first Great Power pledge by the United States, Great Britain, and China to support Korean independence “in due course.” Stalin responded positively about the trusteeship idea when FDR told him about it at their meeting in Tehran shortly after the Cairo Conference, but Stalin thought the period of trusteeship should be as short as possible.2
The proposal, however, was ill defined and lacked specifics on how a joint trusteeship in Korea was supposed to work. In the end, it was not resolved through an agreement, but by military events on the ground. More than FDR’s grand design for a new world order, it was the sudden collapse of Japan that would determine Korea’s future, as well as the post–World War II order in Asia. At Yalta in February 1945, as the end of World War II approached, FDR and Stalin agreed that Soviet forces would liberate Korea while the Americans would invade the Japanese mainland.3 Stalin expected much in return for liberating Manchuria and Korea. American General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) for the Japanese occupation, warned, “They would want all of Manchuria, Korea, and possibly parts of North China. The seizure of territory was inevitable, but the United States must insist that Russia pay her way by invading Manchuria at the earliest possible date after the defeat of Germany.”4 Roosevelt tacitly agreed. Without consulting Churchill or the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), FDR made a secret deal with Stalin conceding the Kurile Islands, the southern half of Sakhalin, and special privileges in Manchuria for Soviet entry into the war against Japan.5
By the time the Potsdam Conference was held in July following Germany’s surrender, the situation had changed dramatically, owing to the death of FDR in April and the success of the atomic bomb program. The main goal of the Potsdam Conference was to establish a vision for the postwar world order, but the bomb’s existence had complicated matters between the United States and the Soviet Union. American Secretary of War Henry Stimson told President Harry Truman at the conference that the atomic bomb would be ready in a matter of days for use against Japan. Truman then approached Churchill to discuss what they should tell Stalin. If they told him about the bomb, he might try to enter the war against Japan as soon as possible. The bomb provided the possibility of circumventing a costly invasion of Japan, and the need for Soviet help became far less pressing. Truman decided to tell Stalin as late as possible and to describe it in the vaguest terms, not as an atomic bomb but as “an entirely novel form of bomb.”6
Stalin, however, had already known of the bomb’s existence for some time.7 Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador to the United States at the time, recalled that Stalin was angry at the Americans’ apparent lack of trust. “Roosevelt clearly felt no need to put us in the picture,” Stalin later told Gromyko. “He could have done it at Yalta. He could simply have told me the atom bomb was going through its experimental stages. We were supposed to be allies.”8 Stalin told Truman that his forces would be ready for action by mid-August. With the atomic bomb on the table, however, Stalin secretly decided to advance the date of the attack by ten days, as Truman and Churchill had feared. He would outmaneuver the Americans, who had hoped to force Japan’s surrender without the Soviet Union’s entry into the war. At 11 p.m. on August 8, two days after “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Soviet forces began crossing into Manchuria an hour later on August 9. For just a week’s worth of fighting, the Soviet Union reclaimed the territory lost in the Russo-Japanese War. Truman had lost the race to induce Japan’s surrender before Soviet tanks rolled into Manchuria.9
Japan’s sudden collapse caught everyone by surprise. The fate of the Korean peninsula suddenly became of interest to the Americans. The Soviet advance through Manchuria was so rapid that it would be able to occupy all of the Korean peninsula before the Americans could get there. It was one thing to give up Korea to save American lives and quite another to simply hand it over to the Soviets. The United States realized that talks of joint trusteeship would be moot if the Soviets occupied all of Korea. The Americans decided to approach the Soviets with a proposal to divide the peninsula into American and Soviet zones of occupation, with the ultimate goal of creating a unified Korea under joint American and Soviet tutelage. But before such a request could be offered, a decision on where to divide the peninsula had to be made. This task fell on two U.S. Army colonels from the War Department staff, Charles Bonesteel, future commander of U.S. and UN forces in Korea in the late 1960s, and Dean Rusk, future secretary of state under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Using a National Geographic map and working late into the night under great pressure, they chose the 38th parallel. Rusk later recalled that “we recommended the 38th Parallel even though it was further north than could realistically be reached … in the event of Soviet disagreement,” but to the surprise and relief of everyone, Stalin agreed.10
Why did he agree when Soviet forces could have easily occupied the entire peninsula? Rather than territorial gain, Stalin’s main concern was to eliminate Japanese political and economic influence in the region. “Japan must forever be excluded from Korea,” stated a June 1945 Soviet report on Korea, “since a Korea under Japanese rule would be a constant threat to the Far East of the USSR.”11 Stalin accepted a divided occupation in Korea because the Americans could help in neutralizing Japan. Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War had forced Russia to forfeit its interests in Korea and Manchuria for nearly half a century and to give up Russian territory in southern Sakhalin. Japan’s demise gave Stalin the chance to regain Russia’s pre-1905 position in the Far East. As Stalin triumphantly noted in a radio speech on September 2, the date of Japan’s formal surrender, “The defeat of the Russian troops in the period of the Russo-Japanese War left grave memories in the minds of our people. It fell as a dark stain on our country. Our people trusted and awaited the day when Japan would be routed and the stain wiped out. For forty years we, the men of the older generation, have waited for this day. And now this day has come.”12
The first weeks of Soviet occupation did not bode well for the Koreans. The soldiers were not the Red Army’s finest and lacked discipline. The initial wave of Russian troops behaved with widespread and indiscriminate violence toward the local population. Within days of their arrival, disturbing reports of rape and pillage filtered into the American zone from beleaguered Japanese and Korean refugees.13 Harold Isaacs of Newsweek described a harrowing visit to Sŏngdo city, about fifty miles north of Seoul and now known as Kaesŏng, which the Russians had mistakenly occupied and then retreated from as it lies south of the 38th parallel. During their ten-day stay, the Russians had thoroughly ransacked the city’s shops, wineries, and warehouses.14 Moscow claimed northern Korea’s economic resources as compensation for its week-long war against Japan. Industrial complexes in North and South Hamgyŏng provinces were particularly hard hit as Russian forces dismantled steel plants, textile mills, and dock facilities and shipped the parts back to the Soviet Union.15
Reports of the Soviet pillaging led many Americans to believe that support for the Russians in northern Korea would be short-lived. Remarkably, however, Korean resistance to Soviet occupation did not last long. Stalin ordered the commander of the Soviet occupation force to take control of the situation and “to explain to the local population … that the private and public property of the citizens of North Korea are under the protection of Soviet military power … [and] to give instruction to the troops in North Korea to strictly observe discipline, not offend the population, and conduct themselves properly.”16 By late September 1945, discipline markedly improved, and the harassment of the local population ended as the Soviet occupiers quickly began to establish control over their zone.17 Ethnic Koreans already in service with the Soviet government and others were mobilized to help with the administration of the Soviet zone. While the occupation of northern Korea found the Soviets almost as unprepared and untrained for the task as the Americans were in the south, the available pool of these Soviet Korean citizens who were committed communists, spoke both Korean and Russian, and understood the political and cultural nuances of Korean society made the transition to Soviet-occupied northern Korea a fairly easy one.
The history of the Soviet Korean community is intimately intertwined with the turbulent history of Russo-Japanese relations. Although Korean emigration to the Russian Far East goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, the flow increased significantly after the Russo-Japanese War and Japanese colonization of the peninsula. Tens of thousands of Koreans during this period fled the Japanese colony and sought refuge in Russia. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, many Korean communists joined the Bolsheviks in Russia’s civil war. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 and Stalin’s pledge to aid Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces against the Japanese further consolidated Soviet Koreans behind the Soviet regime in their fight against Japan. In 1932, all Soviet Koreans were granted Soviet citizenship, but it did not spare them from Stalin’s Great Purge of the late 1930s. Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 was used as a pretext to forcibly relocate, at great human cost, the entire Korean community away from the Soviet Far East on the suspicion that they were instruments of the Japanese.18 Between September and November 1937, some 180,000 Koreans were involuntarily resettled in the Soviet interior in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.19 It was from these same communities that Stalin later recruited ethnic Koreans to help administer the Soviet zone.
Ethnic Korean families living in the Soviet Far East, like Hum Bung-do and his wife (above), were the first among many ethnic minorities to be subjected to the hardships of deportation by the Soviet leadership in 1937. Their resettlement in Kazakhstan and Central Asia also offered a partial solution to depopulation in these areas. Forced collectivization, famine (1931–33), epidemics, and other hardships had killed some 1.7 million people in Kazakhstan alone. These losses created severe labor shortages, which were partly filled by the new Korean settlers. (COPYRIGHT KORYO SARAM: THE UNRELIABLE PEOPLE)
The first cohort of Soviet Koreans arrived in P’yŏngyang in September 1945 to help set up the Soviet Civil Administration (SCA), the Soviet military government for the northern zone. “We call this period the ‘Age of the Translators,’ “ wrote Lim Ŭ20