The Korean War: A History (34 page)

17.
Letter to
The New York Times
, July 16, 1950. Taylor noted that these precepts have not always been followed by Western armies.

18.
New York Times
, Aug. 5, 1950; British Foreign Office, FO317, piece no. 84065, Sawbridge to FO, Aug. 17, 1950; Carlisle Barracks, Matthew Ridgway Papers, box 16, Willoughby to Ridgway, Aug. 7, 1950.

19.
National Records Center (NRC), Record Group (RG) 338, Korean
Military Advisor Group (KMAG) file, box 5418, “KMAG Journal,” entries for July 24, Aug. 8, 1950; handwritten “G-3 Journal,” July 1950; Appleman (1961), 478;
New York Times
, Aug. 17, 1950; NRC, RG349, box 465, CIC report of Aug. 17, 1950.

20.
MacArthur Archives (MA), RG6, box 80, ATIS issue no. 28, March 11, 1951, translating a notebook that is identified as belonging to Choe Pae-yun, an intelligence officer, and quoting Pak Ki-song. It was captured on Feb. 4, 1951. The other document is in Carlisle Barracks, William V. Quinn Papers, box 3, periodic intelligence report no. 120, no date but probably January 1951.

21.
James (1993), xi, 140–44, 178, 195.

22.
Michael Walzer,
Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations
(New York: Basic Books, 1977), 117–23.

23.
Zhang (1995), 44.

24.
Ibid., 63, 71–84.

25.
Quoted in Knox (1985), 390.

26.
National Archives (NA), Office of Chinese Affairs file, box 4211, Hong Kong to State, Oct. 26, 1950; FO317, piece no. 83271, FO minute on Mukden to FO, Nov. 23, 1950. Nieh Jung-chen was close to Chou En-lai, having worked in Berlin in 1924 under Chou’s direction; he entered Whampoa in 1925, again helping Chou to recruit Communists, including Lin Piao. Nieh played “a key role” in getting Russian weapons to troops readying for battle in staging areas in Korea. Under Lin Piao’s overall command, Li T’ien-yu led crack Thirteenth Army troops into Korea between October 14 and 20; interestingly, Li had commanded a 100,000-soldier column in fierce battles with the Nationalists in the crisis period of May 1947 in Manchuria, when large numbers of Koreans had joined the battle. (See William W. Whitson,
The Chinese High Command: A History of Communist Military Politics
, with Chen-hsia Huang [New York: Praeger, 1973], 93–95, 307, 338–39.)

27.
William R. Corson,
The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire
(New York: Dial Press, 1977), 205.

28.
Knox (1985), 469, 604; Thompson (1951), 147.

29.
MA, RG6, box 9, MacArthur to Army, Nov. 6, 1950; MacArthur to JCS, Dec. 4, 1950. Gascoigne thought Willoughby probably sought “to cook figures” on how many Chinese were in the North, noting that the total mushroomed overnight from 17,000 to 200,000 (FO317, piece no. 84119, Gascoigne to FO, Nov. 24, 1950); see also HST, PSF, CIA file, box 248, daily reports for Nov. 27-Dec. 16, 1950; Carlisle Barracks, Gen. Edward Almond Papers, “Korean War, Historical Commentary,” Almond letters to H. E. Eastwood, Dec. 27, 1950, and W. W.
Gretakis, Dec. 27, 1950. Hungnam was shielded for several days while allied troops were evacuated.

30.
Thompson (1951), 247, 265.

31.
For extensive documentation on the violence and terror of the air war see Cumings (1990), ch. 21.

32.
NA, Diplomatic Branch, 995.00 file, box 6175, George Barrett dispatch of Feb. 8, 1951; also Acheson to Pusan Embassy, Feb. 17, 1951.

33.
The best account of POWs in the Korean War is Biderman and Meyers (1983); see also Foot (1990), 109–21, 197–98. General Dean wrote that his captors studied Marxist-Leninist doctrine the way they might have the old Confucian classics, and seemed entirely genuine in their belief that they were building a better life. See Dean (1954), 192 and passim.

34.
Figures differ considerably from one source to another; compare for example the Hutchinson encyclopedia (
http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Korean+War+casualties
), with
www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/616264/67418
; I think the former is closer to the mark than the latter, and thus used its figures in the text.

35.
Truman immediately likened Korea to the civil war in Greece, SCAP issued an early press release saying that the United States was “actively intervening in the Korean civil war,” and correspondents frequently said the same. This caused the State Department’s Public Affairs office to send out instructions to every official stressing that “labels can be terrifically important,” and the name “civil war” should never be used. See Casey (2008), 41.

1.
Jon Herkovitz, “Japan’s PM Haunted by Family’s Wartime Past,” Oct. 20, 2008. I am grateful to Jun Yoo for sending me this report. See also Kosuke Takahashi, “Taro Aso with a Silver Spoon” (Sept. 23, 2008),
www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/J124Dh02.html
.

2.
Tamogami Toshio, “Was Japan an Aggressor Nation?”
www.japanfocus.org
.

3.
Quoted in a thorough report by Larry Niksch, “Japanese Military’s ‘Comfort Women System,’”
Congressional Research Service
(April 3, 2007), 6 (emphasis added).

4.
Niksch, ibid., 10; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Comfort Women: It’s Time for the Truth (in the Ordinary, Everyday Sense of the Word),” March 22, 2007, Australia Peace and Security Network (APSnet).

5.
Soh (2008), 3, 12, 15, 91–92, 103, 125, 138–40, 183, 186.

6.
Ibid., 193, 211–16. See also a new book on Korean soldiers in the Japanese army by Tak Fujitani, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

7.
See, for example, Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus,
Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia
(New York: New Press, 1992).

8.
Morris-Suzuki, “Comfort Women.”

9.
Han Hong-koo’s brilliant historical exegesis, based on rare materials in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, is the best English-language source on the origins of the North Korean leadership. See Han,
Wounded Nationalism: The Minsaengdan Incident and Kim Il Sung in Eastern Manchuria
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming). In subsequent paragraphs on the U.S. occupation, all information is documented in Cumings (1981).

10.
Yamamuro (2006), 259.

11.
The Korean title is
In’gan Munje
, which might be translated as “human problems” or “the problem of humanity.” It first appeared serially in
Tonga Ilbo
in 1934, and was translated into English by Samuel Perry and published as
From Wonso Pond
(New York: Feminist Press, 2009), hereafter Kang (1934). Kang died at the age of thirty-nine in 1944, and ROK dictators banned her work for three decades.

12.
Bertolt Brecht, “The Measures Taken,” in John Willett and Ralph Manheim, eds.,
The Measures Taken and Other Lehrstücke
(New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001), 9, 34.

13.
NA, Office of the Chief of Military History, “Military Studies on Manchuria” (1951), consisting of interviews by American officers of former Japanese counterinsurgency commanders. The officers gave this as the reason why “Kim Il Sung and Choe Hyon went to the Soviet Union about February and returned to Manchuria about May or June.” Wada Haruki coined the term “guerrilla state.”

14.
Ibid.; for a longer discussion of Japanese methods, with documents, see Lee (1966).

15.
Ibid., both.

16.
Han (1999), 8, 13.

17.
Kim’s arrest by Chinese comrades was long shrouded in mystery, but various sources now attest to it, and Han Hong-koo’s scholarship has lifted the veil on many of these early 1930s events.

18.
Han (1999), 324–26; Suh (1988), 37–38.

19.
Kim Se-jin,
The Politics of Military Revolution in Korea
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 48–57.

20.
Charles K. Armstrong,
The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 31; NA, Office of the Chief of Military History, “Military Studies on Manchuria” (1951).

21.
Suh (1988), 37–38.

22.
Kim’s Feb. 8, 1948, address, in
Choguk ûi t’ongil tongnip kwa minjuhwa rûl
wihayo
(For the unification, independence, and democratization of the homeland) (Pyongyang, 1949), 73–87.

23.
See, for example, Nicholas Eberstadt,
The End of North Korea
(Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1999), 1.

24.
My wife, Meredith Woo, produced a documentary on the displaced Koreans called
Koryo Saram
, and has interviewed many survivors.

25.
In recent years scholars reading several of the relevant languages, such as Wada Haruki, Charles Armstrong, Han Hong-koo, and Andrei Lankov, have excavated Kim’s history as an anti-Japanese guerrilla from 1931 to 1945.

26.
Lankov (2002), 7–8, 59.

27.
I found the documents on this and reported them in Cumings (1990).

1.
“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Nietzsche (1983), 60–61.

2.
Quoted in Friedlander (1979), 182.

3.
Rosenberg (1995), xiii; also Jameson (1981), 9; Foucault (1972), 8–13; Friedlander (1979), 79.

4.
Nietzsche (1967), 57–58, 61 (emphasis in original); Winter (2006), 271.

5.
Martha Gellhorn,
The Face of War
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988), 274–75.

6.
Nietzsche (1983), 78, 84.

7.
Public Record Office (PRO), London, FO file 317, piece no. 83008, Stokes to Bevin, Dec. 2, 1950.

8.
Adam B. Ulam,
Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1973
, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1974), 520.

9.
Thucydides,
History of the Peloponnesian War
, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 147.

10.
Fussell (1975), 155.

11.
Casey (2008), 219, 221–22. One of the only querulous films on the war, Sam Fuller’s
Steel Helmet
(1950), instantly became a subject of political attack.

12.
Reginald Thompson found beauty in Korea, but he too clearly enjoyed being in Japan much more. See Thompson (1951), 272.

13.
www.amazon.com/Ten-Best-Books-Korean-War/Im/R44H26DIANVO9
.

14.
Robert Kaplan, for example, was most impressed with General Paek in his article “When North Korea Falls,”
The Atlantic
(Oct. 2006), 64–73. From the 1950s to the 1980s the World Anti-Communist League brought together anti-Communists in Seoul, Taipei, and other threatened
right-wing regimes, with Japanese and American ultra-rightists (like Sasakawa Ryoichi, who gave much money to the league). MacArthur’s G-2 chief General Willoughby also appears to have aided the World Anti-Communist League when it was headquartered in Seoul, obtaining funds from the right-wing extremist Billy James Hargis Crusade. See the letters from Jose Hernandez, secretary-general of the WACL, to Willoughby, Willoughby Papers, box 12. This league had South Korea and Taiwan as its founding countries, and along the way accumulated an appalling assortment of Eastern European émigré war criminals, superannuated prewar fascists, anti-Semites, and aficionados of Latin American death squads. Gen. John Singlaub, another hero of
The Coldest Winter
(52), organized the American branch of the World Anti-Communist League in the 1980s, working closely with CAUSA International, an organization founded by Reverend Sun Myung Moon. See the extensive information in Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson,
Inside the League
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), 55, 120, 150–51, 238.
    When I worked on the Thames Television documentary
Korea: The Unknown War
, I learned that Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media had called up a Boston public television producer, Austin Hoyt (who was working with Thames and directed the PBS version of the film), and intimated that if our project did not interview certain people, he would charge it with bias. The first person mentioned was Gen. Richard Stilwell, a CIA operative in Korea during the war, whom Hoyt agreed to interview, telling me that they would have done him anyway. Stilwell then recommended we interview James Hausman, who then recommended his good friend Paek Son-yop.