The Korean War (6 page)

The pressures upon the Americans in Korea to dispense with the aid of their newfound Japanese allies became irresistible. In four months, 70,000 Japanese colonial civil servants and more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians were shipped home to their own islands. Many were compelled to abandon homes, factories, possessions. Yet the damage to American relations with the Koreans was already done. Lieutenant Ferris Miller, USN, who had been one of the first Americans to land in the country, and subsequently enjoyed a lifelong association with Korea, said: ‘Our misunderstanding of local feelings about the Japanese, and our own close association with them, was one of the most expensive mistakes we ever made there.’
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In the months that followed the expulsion of the Japanese, the Koreans who replaced them as agents of the American military government were, for the most part, long-serving collaborators, detested by their own fellow-countrymen for their service to the colonial power. A ranking American of the period wrote later of his colleagues’ ‘abysmal ignorance of Korea and things Korean, the
inelasticity of the military bureaucracy and the avoidance of it by the few highly qualified Koreans, who could afford neither to be associated with such an unpopular government, nor to work for the low wages it offered.’
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Before their enforced departure, the Japanese were at pains to alert the Americans to the pervasive influence of communism among South Korea’s embryo political groupings. Their warnings fell upon fertile soil. In the light of events in Europe, the occupiers were entirely ready to believe that communists were at the root of political disturbances, their cells working energetically to seize control of the country. Benninghoff reported: ‘Communists advocate the seizure
now
of Japanese properties and may be a threat to law and order. It is probable that well-trained agitators are attempting to bring about chaos in our area so as to cause the Koreans to repudiate the United States in favour of Soviet “freedom” and control.’
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The principal losers in the political competition that now developed, to discover which Koreans could prove themselves most hostile to communism, and most sympathetic to the ideals of the United States, were the members of the so-called ‘Korean People’s Republic’, the KPR. In Korea in 1945, the phrase ‘people’s republic’ had not yet taken on the pejorative association it would so soon acquire. The KPR was a grouping of nationalists and prominent members of the anti-Japanese resistance who, before the Americans arrived, sought to make themselves a credible future leadership for Korea. More than half of the eighty-seven leaders chosen by an assembly of several hundred at Kyonggi Girls’ High School on 6 September had served terms of imprisonment under the Japanese. Also, at least half could be identified as leftists or communists. But prominent exiles such as Syngman Rhee, Mu Chong, Kim Ku, and Kim Il Sung were granted places
in absentia
, although few subsequently accepted the roles for which they had been chosen. It is significant that the men of the right nominated to the KPR leadership were, on average, almost twenty years older than those of the left.

It was not surprising that the Americans, on their arrival, knew nothing of the KPR. The chaotic struggle to fill the political vacuum in Korea was further confused by the arrival from Chungking of the self-proclaimed Korean Provisional Government, an exile grouping which included some nominated members of the KPR. In the weeks that followed, the military government’s scepticism about the KPR – energetically fostered by the Japanese – grew apace. Here, there was more than a little in common with Western attitudes to Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues in Vietnam of the same period. There was no attempt to examine closely the communist ideology of the leftists, to discover how far they were the creatures of Moscow, and how far they were merely vague socialists and nationalists who found traditional landlordism repugnant. No allowance was made for the prestige earned by the communists’ dominant role in armed resistance to the Japanese. Hodge and his men saw no merit in the KPR’s militant sense of Korean nationalism – this merely represented an obstacle to smooth American military government. It would be naive to suppose that such a grouping as the KPR could have formed an instantly harmonious leadership for an independent Korea. The group included too many irreconcilable factions. But it also represented the only genuine cross-section of Korean nationalist opinion ever to come together under one roof, however briefly. Given time and encouragement, it might have offered South Korea its best prospect of building a genuine democracy.

But the strident tones in which the KPR addressed the American military government ensured that the group was rapidly identified as a threat and a problem. ‘There is evidence [wrote Benninghoff on 10 October] that the [KPR] group receives support and direction from the Soviet Union (perhaps from Koreans formerly resident in Siberia). In any event, it is the most aggressive party; its newspaper has compared American methods of occupation [with those of the Russians] in a manner that may be interpreted as unfavorable to the United States.’
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It was another group, which could call upon only a fraction of
the KPR’s likely political support, that seemed infinitely more congenial to Hodge and his advisers: ‘. . . the so-called democratic or conservative group, which numbers among its members many of the professional and educational leaders who were educated in the United States or in American missionary institutions in Korea. In their aims and policies they demonstrate a desire to follow the Western democracies, and they almost unanimously desire the early return of Dr Syngman Rhee and the “Provisional Government” at Chungking.’
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Barely three weeks after the American landings in Korea, official thinking in Seoul was already focusing upon the creation of a new government for the South, built around the person of one of the nation’s most prominent exiles.

Syngman Rhee was born in 1875, the son of a genealogical scholar. He failed the civil service exams several times before becoming a student of English. Between 1899 and 1904 he was imprisoned for political activities. On his release, he went to the United States, where he studied for some years, becoming an MA at Harvard and a Ph.D at Princeton – the first Korean to receive an American doctorate. After a brief return to his homeland in 1910, Rhee once more settled in America. He remained there for the next thirty-five years, lobbying relentlessly for American support for Korean independence, financed by the contributions of Korean patriots. If he was despised by some of his fellow-countrymen for his egoism, his ceaseless self-promotion, his absence from the armed struggle that engaged other courageous nationalists, his extraordinary determination could not be denied. Through all his long years in the United States, Rhee learned nothing, and forgot nothing. His iron will was exerted as ruthlessly against rival factions of expatriates as against colonial occupation. He could boast an element of prescience in his own world vision. As early as 1944, when the United States government still cherished all manner of delusions about the post-war prospect of working harmoniously with Stalin, Rhee was telling officials in Washington: ‘The only possibility of avoiding the ultimate conflict between the
United States and the Soviet Union is to build up all democratic, non-communistic elements wherever possible.’
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Rhee had gained one great advantage by his absence from his own country for so long. Many of his rivals disliked each other as much as the Japanese. But against Rhee, little of substance was known. He was free from the taint of collaboration. While the Americans struggled to come to terms with a culture and a society that were alien to them, Rhee was a comfortingly comprehensible figure: fluent in the small talk of democracy, able to converse about America and American institutions with easy familiarity, above all at home in the English language. Rhee was acerbic, prickly, uncompromising. But to Hodge and his advisers, this obsessive, ruthless nationalist and anti-communist seemed a plausible father-figure for the new Korea. On 20 October, the general was present at an official welcoming ceremony for the Americans in Seoul, stage-managed by the so-called Korean Democratic Party, the KDP – in reality a highly conservative grouping. On the platform stood a large ebony screen inlaid with mother-of-pearl. In a grand moment of theatre, the screen was pulled aside. The bony, venerable figure of Dr Syngman Rhee was revealed to the Korean people. The crowd cheered uproariously. Rhee delivered a rousingly anti-Soviet speech, and disconcerted even his sponsors by denouncing American complicity in the Soviet occupation of the North. The doctor was triumphantly launched upon his career as South Korea’s most celebrated – or notorious – politician.

Overwhelmingly the strongest card that Rhee possessed was the visible support of the Americans. Roger Makins, a senior official in the British Foreign Office throughout the early Cold War period, remarks upon ‘the American propensity to go for a man, rather than a movement – Giraud among the French in 1942, Chiang Kai Shek in China. Americans have always liked the idea of dealing with a foreign leader who can be identified and perceived as “their man”. They are much less comfortable with movements.’
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So it was in Korea with Syngman Rhee.

In an Asian society, where politics are often dominated by an instinctive desire to fall in behind the strongest force, Rhee’s backing from the military government was a decisive force in his rise to power. When Benninghoff identified Rhee with the Korean ‘Provisional Government’ in Chungking, he blithely ignored the open hostility between the two which had persisted for twenty years, despite Rhee’s continuing claim to be the ‘Provisional Government’s’ representative in Washington. The State Department, with long and close experience of Rhee, regarded him as a dangerous mischief-maker. The return of Rhee to Seoul remains a murky episode. The military government firmly denied not only complicity, but prior knowledge of this. Yet all the evidence now suggests that General Hodge and his staff participated in a carefully orchestrated secret plan to bring back Rhee, despite the refusal of the State Department to grant him a passport. A former Deputy Director of the wartime OSS, one Preston Goodfellow, prevailed upon the State Department to provide Rhee with documentation. There appears to have been at least a measure of corruption in this transaction. Rhee came to know Goodfellow during the war, when the Korean mendaciously suggested to the American that he could provide agents for operations behind the Japanese lines. After the war, it seems almost certain that Goodfellow assisted and raised finance for Rhee in return for the promise of commercial concessions in Korea when the doctor gained power. The South Korean flew to Seoul in one of MacArthur’s aircraft. Despite the vigorous denials of the US Army in the Far East, it seems likely that he met secretly with both the Supreme Commander and Hodge during his stopover in Tokyo. Rhee, it is apparent, was their nominee for the leadership of a Korean civilian government.

Why did not Washington, undeluded about Rhee’s shortcomings, simply call a halt to the policies being pursued in Seoul? John Carter Vincent, director of the State Department’s Office of Far Eastern Affairs, indeed sought to remind the War Department that the United States was seeking to avoid taking sides, far less promoting factions, in Korean politics. But his memorandum of 7
November on these issues provoked a response from John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, which goes as far as any document of the period to explain the course of events in post-war Korea:

Vincent’s memorandum seems to me to avoid in large part the really pressing realities facing us in Korea . . . From talking with General Hodge I believe that his concern is that the communists will seize by direct means the government in our area. If this were done, it would seriously prejudice our intention to permit the people of Korea freely to choose their own form of government. There is no question but that communist action is actively and intelligently being carried out through our zone . . . It would seem that the best way to approach it in the over-all is to build up on our own a reasonable and respectable government or group of advisors which will be able under General Hodge to bring some order out of the political, social, and economic chaos that now exist south of the 38th Parallel and so provide the basis for, at some later date, a really free and uncoerced election by the people . . . To get back to Vincent’s memorandum – does it not add up to asking us to tell Hodge that we really repose little confidence in him, that we are not prepared to let him do the few things which, on the spot – and what a spot – he feels can be useful towards achieving our aims? Let us not only ask for his views on the communist problem and his thoughts as to how to keep it from wrecking our objectives, but let us also let him use as many exiled Koreans as he can, depending on his discretion not to go too far.
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The essence of McCloy’s argument, which would serve as the justification for all that was done in Korea in the three years that followed, was that it was an idealistic fantasy to suppose that the United States could merely hold the ring, serve as neutral umpires while Koreans worked out their own destiny. Some Korean leaders must be singled out from the mob of contending factions, and assisted to win and retain power. It must surely be the men on the
spot, Hodge and his staff, who were best qualified to decide which Koreans these should be. The American military rulers employed no further deceits to dignify the process by which they now set about installing a congenial regime. Just as the Russians, at this period, were securing control of North Korea for a communist regime, so the only credentials that the Americans sought to establish for the prospective masters of South Korea were their hostility to communism and willingness to do business with the Americans.