The Korean War: A History (2 page)

I
NTRODUCTION

 

This is a book about the Korean War, written for Americans and by an American about a conflict that is fundamentally Korean, but one construed in the United States to have been a discrete, encapsulated story beginning in June 1950 and ending in July 1953, in which Americans are the major actors. They intervene on the side of the good, they appear to win quickly only to lose suddenly, finally they eke out a stalemated ending that was prelude to a forgetting. Forgotten, never known, abandoned: Americans sought to grab hold of this war and win it, only to see victory slip from their hands and the war sink into oblivion. A primary reason is that they never knew their enemy—and they still don’t. So this is also a book seeking to uncover truths that most Americans do not know and perhaps don’t want to know, truths sometimes as shocking as they are unpalatable to American self-esteem. But today they have become commonplace knowledge in a democratized and historically aware South Korea.

The year 2010 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Korean War’s conventional start, but also the centennial of Japan’s colonization of Korea. This war had its distant gestation in that imperial history, and especially in northeast China (or Manchuria as it was called) at the dawn of Japan’s aggression in 1931. Japan’s ambitions to colonize Korea coincided with Japan’s rise as the first modern great power in Asia. Seizing on a major peasant rebellion in Korea, Japan instigated war with China in 1894 and defeated it a year later. After another decade of imperial rivalry over Korea, Japan smashed tsarist Russia in lightning naval and land attacks, stunning the world because a “yellow” country had defeated a “white” power. Korea became a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and a colony in 1910, with the blessing of all the great powers and especially the United States (President Theodore Roosevelt admired the skills and “virility” of Japan’s leaders, and thought they would lead Korea into modernity.)

It was a strange colony, coming “late” in world time, after most of the world had been divided up and after progressive calls had emerged to dismantle the entire colonial system. Furthermore, Korea had most of the prerequisites for nationhood long before most other countries: common ethnicity, language, and culture, and well-recognized national boundaries since the tenth century. So the Japanese engaged in substitutions after 1910: exchanging a Japanese ruling elite for aristocratic Korean scholar-officials, most of whom were either co-opted or dismissed; instituting a strong central state in place of the old government administration; exchanging Japanese modern education for the Confucian classics; eventually they even replaced the Korean language with Japanese. Koreans never thanked the Japanese for these substitutions, did not credit Japan with creations, and instead saw Japan as snatching away their ancien régime, Korea’s sovereignty and independence, its indigenous if incipient modernization, and above all its national dignity.

Unlike some other colonized peoples, therefore, most Koreans never saw imperial rule as anything but illegitimate and humiliating. Furthermore, the very closeness of the two nations—in geography, in common Chinese civilizational influences, indeed in levels of development until the mid-nineteenth century—made Japanese dominance all the more galling to Koreans, and gave a peculiar intensity to the relationship, a hate/respect dynamic that suggested to Koreans, “there but for accidents of history go we.” The result: neither Korea nor Japan has ever gotten over it. In North Korea countless films and TV dramas still focus on atrocities committed by the Japanese during their rule, propaganda banners exhort people to “live like the anti-Japanese guerrillas,” and for decades the descendants of Koreans deemed by the government to have collaborated with the Japanese were subject to severe discrimination. South Korea, however, punished very few collaborators, partly because the U.S. occupation (1945–48) reemployed so many of them, and partly because they were needed in the fight against communism.

The Korean conflict thus inherited a Japanese-Korean enmity that broke into a decade of warfare in Manchuria in the 1930s, and in that sense is almost eighty years old—and no one can say when it will finally end. The grandsons of the aggressors and the victims in the Pacific War retain power in Tokyo and Pyongyang and have never reconciled. If the conventionally defined Korean War is obscure to most Americans, this older clash is even more murky, played out in a distant and alien realm, one apparently marginal to the main contours of World War II. Our old enemy in Pyongyang, meanwhile, grabbed hold of this eighty years’ war as they see it and perceive it, held on with white knuckles, and have never let go; they structured their entire society as a fighting machine determined, sooner or later, to win a victory that was palpable for a moment in 1950 but has exceeded their grasp ever since.

So this book is about a forgotten or never-known war and therefore, ipso facto, is also about history and memory. Its major themes are the Korean origins of the war, the cultural contradictions of the early 1950s in America, which buried this conflict almost before it could be known, the harrowing brutality in the air and on the ground of a supposedly limited war, the recovery of this history in South Korea, and the way in which this unknown war transformed the American position in the world—and history and memory.

The basic military history of the 1950–53 phase of this war can be presented quickly, because the conflict divides neatly into three parts: the war for the South in the summer of 1950, the war for the North in the fall and winter of 1950, and China’s intervention, which soon brought about a stabilization of the fighting along what is now the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, even though a form of trench warfare went on for another two years. If there is anything that has been well covered in the American literature, it is this military history—including volumes of official history from Roy Appleman, Clay Blair’s excellent
The Forgotten War
, and many other books. There are also various oral histories and memoirs that give insight into American servicemen in a war and a land that most of them thought to be godforsaken.

Least known to Americans is how appallingly dirty this war was, with a sordid history of civilian slaughters amid which our ostensibly democratic ally was the worst offender, contrary to the American image of the North Koreans as fiendish terrorists. The British author Max Hastings wrote that Communist atrocities gave to the United Nations cause in Korea “a moral legitimacy that has survived to this day.”
¹
What then of South Korean atrocities, which historians now know were far more common.? Ironically, this disturbing experience was featured in popular magazines of the time such as
Life, The Saturday Evening Post
, and
Collier’s
, before MacArthur’s censorship descended. Then it was suppressed, buried and forgotten for half a century; still today, even to talk about it thus seems biased and unbalanced. Yet by now it is one of the best-documented aspects of the war.

I have written much about the Korean War in the past, and this book both distills that knowledge for the general reader and invokes new themes, ideas, and issues. I wish I could write with the serene confidence that other historians do in similarly short books, offering their settled interpretations unencumbered by footnotes and sources. So many things about this war are still so controversial, however, vehemently debated and hotly affirmed or denied (or simply unknown), and my head is so drilled with obligations owed to fellow scholars, that I have added unobtrusive endnotes that cite important documents or make quick reference to books in the bibliography. (If I name an author of one of these books in the text, I dispense with notes.) Those books, in turn, offer a wealth of insight and argument for readers who want to learn more about the unknown war. For the ever-dwindling number of American veterans of this war, I offer salutations for shouldering a thankless task and fervent hope that this war will soon come to an end, so that they can again encounter their North Korean counterparts before it is too late—this time in peace, to share indelible memories and rediscover each other’s humanity.

Another comment about the evidentiary basis of this book: How do we evaluate sources? If formerly secret American documents reveal that South Korean jails held tens of thousands of political prisoners, or that the police worked hand in glove with fascist youth groups, or that these same forces massacred their own citizens on mere suspicion of leftist tendencies, this is crucial evidence because one assumes that Americans on the scene would prefer not to report these things about their close ally. If during decades of military dictatorships no one dares speak of mass political murders, and then after an equally long struggle from below to oust these dictators, a new generation growing up in a democracy carries out careful, painstaking investigations of these murders, that evidence is far more important than government statements to the effect that none of it happened, or if it happened, no orders from higher-ups could be located (unfortunately this has been the Pentagon’s typical response to recent South Korean revelations). If historical evidence from the time contradicts the contemporary image of North Korea as the most reprehensible and intolerable dictatorship on the planet, perhaps that can help Americans understand why no military victory was possible in Korea.

All Asian names except those of famous people (like Syngman Rhee) are given last name first; for widely known individuals or for those who have published in the West, I use the name as they write it (for example Kim Dae Jung, or Dae-sook Suh).