The Korean War: A History (7 page)

The UN negotiating team. Paek Son-yop is in the front row.
U.S. National Archives

The North Koreans had abused many American and allied POWs, harshly depriving them of food and especially sleep, and subjecting many to political thought reform that was decried as “brainwashing” in the United States. Meanwhile, in spite of endless American statements of their allegiance to individual rights, human dignity, and the Geneva convention, a virtual war ensued in the South’s camps, as pro-North, pro-South, pro-China, and pro-Taiwan POW groups fought with one another, and for the allegiance of other POWs. Against American presuppositions, the Communists were more discriminating in the violence they dealt out to POWs, whereas the South routinely murdered captives before they could become POWs and tortured and mentally tormented the ones they let live. Right-wing youth groups—the familiar ones from the turmoil of the 1940s—tried to organize anti-Communist prisoners but generally dealt in haphazard mayhem. Both sides sought to “convert” POWs politically, but the Communists had a positive message and genuinely seemed to believe in what they said, whereas youth group leaders simply demanded automatic obedience (one of the best sources for all this remains
General Dean’s Story)
. Even after years in the camps, the ROK put liberated POWs through six more months of “reeducation” before dismissing them to their families. Sixty individuals remained detained because they had not yet shed their Communist “brainwashing.”
³³

North Korean head negotiator Nam Il at Panmunjom.
U.S. National Archives

The POW issue was finally settled on June 8, 1953, when the Communist side agreed to place POWs who refused repatriation under the control of the Neutral Nations’ Supervisory Commission for three months; at the end of this period those who still refused repatriation would be set free. Two final and costly Communist offensives in June and July sought to gain more ground but failed, and the U.S. Air Force hit huge irrigation dams that provided water for 75 percent of the North’s food production. On June 20, 1953,
The New York Times
announced the execution of the accused Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg at Sing Sing prison; in the
fine print of daily war coverage the U.S. Air Force stated that its planes bombed dams at Kusong and Toksan in North Korea, and in even finer print the North Korean radio acknowledged “great damage” to these large reservoirs. Two days later the
Times
reported that the State Department had banned several hundred American books from overseas libraries of the U.S. Information Service—including Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon
.

The fighting could have come to an end much earlier, but both Moscow and Washington had interests in keeping it going since Korea no longer threatened to erupt into general war. Some historians think that Stalin’s death in March 1953 and the Eisenhower administration’s escalation of the air war in May and June finally brought the hot war to a conclusion, while others argue that it easily could have ended in 1951. But as the war dragged on, the United States also brandished the biggest weapons in its arsenal. On May 26, 1953,
The New York Times
featured a story on the first atomic shell shot from a cannon, which exploded at French Flat, Nevada, with ten-kiloton force (half the Hiroshima yield). A few days later came the “mightiest atom blast” ever exploded at the Nevada test site; some speculated that it might have been a hydrogen bomb. Formerly secret materials illustrate that in May and June 1953 the Eisenhower administration sought to show that it would stop at nothing to bring the war to a close. In mid-May Ike told the National Security Council that using nukes in Korea would be cheaper than conventional weaponry, and a few days later the Joint Chiefs recommended launching nuclear attacks against China. The Nevada tests were integral to this atomic blackmail, a way of getting a message to the enemy that it had better sign the armistice. Nonetheless, there is little evidence that Ike’s nuclear threats made any difference in the Communist decision to end the war, which had come some months before (since 1953, however, it remains true that
The Maltese Falcon
has subverted many innocents).

On July 27, 1953, three of the four primary parties to the war signed the armistice agreement (the ROK still refusing). It called
for a 2.5-mile-wide buffer zone undulating across the middle of Korea, from which troops and weapons were supposed to be withdrawn. Today this heavily fortified “demilitarized zone” still holds the peace in Korea, as does the 1953 cease-fire agreement. No peace treaty has ever been signed, and so the peninsula remains in a technical state of war.

Various encyclopedias state that the countries involved in the three-year conflict suffered a total of more than 4 million casualties, of which at least 2 million were civilians—a higher percentage than in World War II or Vietnam. A total of 36,940 Americans lost their lives in the Korean theater; of these, 33,665 were killed in action, while 3,275 died there of nonhostile causes. Some 92,134 Americans were wounded in action, and decades later, 8,176 were still reported as missing. South Korea sustained 1,312,836 casualties, including 415,004 dead. Casualties among other UN allies totaled 16,532, including 3,094 dead. Estimated North Korean casualties numbered 2 million, including about 1 million civilians and about 520,000 soldiers. An estimated 900,000 Chinese soldiers lost their lives in combat.
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Washington, D.C., reporters wrote, met the war’s end with “a collective shrug of the shoulders.” In New York, TV camera crews showed up at Times Square to find desultory citizens who had to be coaxed into shouting approval of the peace; fewer people were on the streets because subway fares had just gone up to fifteen cents. The next day an Iowa court ruled that there had been no state of war in Korea, since Congress never declared one to exist.

The point to remember is that this was a civil war
³⁵
and, as a British diplomat once said, “every country has a right to have its War of the Roses.” The true tragedy was not the war itself, for a civil conflict purely among Koreans might have resolved the extraordinary tensions generated by colonialism, national division, and foreign intervention. The tragedy was that the war solved nothing: only the status quo ante was restored, only a cease-fire held the peace.

O
n April 25, 2007,
The New York Times
carried a photo of North Korean soldiers goose-stepping through Pyongyang, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of their army. The
Times
noted that the regime itself was founded only in 1948, but carried no more information. Another article announced the arrival of the Japanese prime minister, Abe Shinzo, in Washington to visit George W. Bush. Neither there, nor in any article that I saw in the press after Abe came to power, were these two events connected. Abe is the grandson of the class-A war criminal and postwar prime minister Kishi Nobosuke, who was head of munitions in Manchuria in the 1930s.

Another recent prime minister, Aso Taro, also had direct links to Japan’s empire. He was heir to a rich mining fortune, from a family company that used thousands of Korean forced laborers during the war, and which had a particular reputation for brutality and terrible working conditions. Allied POWs, mainly Australian and British, were also forced to work there. As the grandson of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, Aso’s lineage traces back to leaders of the Meiji Restoration, and he is related by marriage to Kishi and Sato Eisaku (another prime minister), to Abe Shinzo, and indeed to the emperor’s family.
¹
If the DPRK features hereditary communism, postwar Japan is hereditary democracy—often 70 to 80 percent of their parliamentarians have inherited seats from their fathers or come from politically prominent families. When a person like Abe or Aso comes to power in Japan, Pyongyang remembers what others don’t know or forgot: their genealogy.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the ingrown solipsism of North Korea’s leaders, but it is often matched on the right wing of
the Liberal Democratic Party. In 2008 the chief of staff of the Air Self-Defense Force, Tamogami Toshio, a man known to be close to Mr. Abe, published an essay that might well have been entitled “Everything I Ever Wanted to Declare About Japan’s Wars Since 1895 but Was Afraid to Say.” Like many members of the Japanese elite, Gen. Tamogami is an entirely unreconstructed believer in the virtues of Japan’s colonial mission and the justice of its wars against China and the United States. In 1937 Japan was lured into the Sino-Japanese War by a Comintern-manipulated Chiang Kai-shek, he claimed; a Kremlin conspiracy carried out by its spies in Washington (such as Harry Dexter White) initiated U.S. entry into World War II (and thus “Japan was drawn into it”); Roosevelt was duped because he “was not aware of the terrible nature of communism.” In passing, Tamogami lauded “Col. Kim Suk Won,” who led a thousand Japanese troops and “trampled the Army from China, the former suzerain state that had been bullying Korea for hundreds of years. He was decorated by the emperor for his meritorious war services.”
²
Gen. Tamogami not only poured salt into Korean wounds by lauding their Benedict Arnold, but had spoken so clearly that dismissal (on October 31, 2008) was the prime minister’s only option. But his essay still won the top prize ($30,000) in a contest sponsored by a wealthy hotel and condominium owner.

As for Mr. Abe, he selected March 1, 2007, to announce that “no evidence” existed to show that any women were “forcibly” recruited into the multitudinous ranks of Pacific War “comfort women”
(ianfu
in Japanese; sex slaves to everyone else). That is to say, “forcible in the narrow sense of the word,” he elaborated, and then proceeded to try to clarify that opaque distinction for many succeeding days and weeks—and ultimately just “apologized” for himself on March 26, 2007 (while never retracting his original formulation). “I apologize here and now,” he said, without really indicating what he was apologizing for, and then said, “I express my sympathy toward the comfort women and apologize
for the situation they found themselves in.”
³
Here Mr. Abe pays fealty to his departed comrades in arms: former sex slaves often said that soldiers would clean up, button up, and then offer awkward apologies to them on the way out the door.

“Comfort women” in Burma, 1944.
U.S. National Archives (courtesy of Sarah Soh)

Japanese historians had written about the sexual slavery system for decades, but were told time and again by the authorities that no archival documents existed on it. In 1992 the historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi walked into a military library and found many such documents just sitting on the shelf. His 1995 book,
Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II
, is now a standard source, but his findings were also a direct impetus to Foreign Minister Kono Yohei’s 1993 apology, stating that many were recruited “against their will” through coaxing and “coercion.” (Abe essentially repudiated this statement.) Dr. Yoshiaki and other historians determined that somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 women were in the system by the time it was fully established, the vast majority of them Korean. Of course, many were lured or tricked into service with promises of ordinary jobs, before being compelled into slavery.
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