The Korean War (7 page)

If this appears a simplistic view of American policy, the policy itself could scarcely have been less subtle. In October 1945, the Americans created an eleven-man Korean ‘Advisory Council’ to their Military Governor, Major-General Arnold. Although the membership purported to be representative of the South Korean political spectrum, in reality only one nominee, Yo Un-hyong, was a man of the left. Yo initially declined to have anything to do with the Council, declaring contemptuously that its very creation ‘reverses the fact of who is guest and who is host in Korea’. Then, having succumbed to Hodge’s personal request to participate, Yo took one look around the room at the Council’s first session, and swept out. He later asked Hodge if the American believed that a group which included only one non-conservative could possibly be considered representative of anything. An eleventh nominated member, a well-known nationalist named Cho Man-sik who had been working in the North, never troubled to show his face.

The Council was doomed from the outset. It reminded most Koreans too vividly of their recent colonial experience – its chairman had been a member of the Japanese governor-general’s advisory body, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Japanese war effort. Yet Yo Un-hyong’s ‘unhelpful’ behaviour, contrasted with the ‘cooperative’ attitude of the conservatives who joined the Council, reinforced the American conviction that the conservatives – above all, the members of the Korean Democratic Party – were the men to work with. But what now was to be done about the reality in the countryside – that reports reaching Hodge declared that while
the KPR was ‘organised into a government at all levels’, the KDP was ‘poorly organised or unorganised in most places’?
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Hodge’s answer was that the KPR must be fought and destroyed, to provide the KDP with the opportunity for survival and growth. On 10 November, as a warning to the Korean press, the most prominent Seoul newspaper sympathetic to the KPR was shut down, ostensibly for accountancy irregularities. On 25 November, Hodge cabled MacArthur about his intention to denounce the KPR: ‘This will constitute in effect a “declaration of war” upon the Communistic elements in Korea, and may result in temporary disorders. It will also bring charges of political discrimination in a “free” country, both by local pinkos and by pinko press. If activities of the Korean People’s Republic continue as in the past, they will greatly delay the time when Korea can be said to be ready for independence. Request comment.’ MacArthur answered simply, like McCloy before him, confirming Hodge’s absolute discretion: ‘Use your own best judgement . . . I am not sufficiently familiar with the local situation to advise you intelligently, but I will support whatever decision you may take in this matter.’
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Throughout the winter of 1945–46, the military government waged a campaign to suppress both the KPR and resurgent labour unions, which were adjudged an inevitable focus of communist subversion. And even as this struggle was taking place, a new controversy was growing in intensity. In a fit of benevolent reforming zeal after their arrival, the Americans greatly eased the burdensome conditions of landholding for the peasants – a highly popular measure – and also introduced a free market in rice. The traditional rice surplus was the strongpoint of the Korean economy. Now, suddenly, by a measure introduced with the best of intentions, the Americans unleashed a wave of speculation, hoarding and profiteering on a scale the country had never seen. The price of a bushel of rice soared from 9.4 yen in September 1945 to 2,800 yen just a year later. Officials were making vast fortunes through rice smuggling and speculation. By February 1946, not only was the free market rescinded, but stringent rationing had been introduced.
Tough quotas were introduced for peasant farmers to fulfil, enforced by local police and officials.

In the winter of 1945, the Americans ruling South Korea harboured no delusions that they had made much progress towards creating an ordered and democratic society. They understood that they presided over a seething, unhappy country ripe for major disorders. They saw that the Koreans’ hunger for unity and independence surpassed all other ideology and sentiment. They perceived that the drifting policies of the military government, contrasted with the coherent if ruthless socialisation now taking place north of the 38th Parallel, could only increase Korean respect for Soviet strength, and diminish still further American popularity. On 16 December, Hodge submitted a grim report to MacArthur in Tokyo, which subsequently reached the desk of President Truman. His summary of the situation he faced concluded: ‘Under present conditions with no corrective action forthcoming, I would go so far as to recommend we give serious consideration to an agreement with Russia that both the US and Russia withdraw forces from Korea simultaneously and leave Korea to its own devices and an inevitable internal upheaval for its self-purification.’
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Hodge and his colleagues placed the overwhelming burden of blame for their difficulties upon the Russians: Soviet-directed internal policies in the North, and skilful subversion in the South. The Americans detected the organising hand of Moscow in a host of political groups in South Korea. In this, they greatly overestimated both Soviet will and capability in the South at this period. There is no doubt that communists throughout Korea wished to create a united nation under their own control. But many non-communist Koreans also incurred American animosity by their enthusiasm for national unification, merely because Hodge and his colleagues considered this unattainable under non-communist rule. The US military government in Korea – like its counterparts in other areas of the world at this period – dismissed the possibility that its own manipulation of conservative forces in a society was comparable, morally and politically, with the Soviets’ sponsorship
of communist groups in their own zone. The liberal view of history acknowledges the ultimate benevolence of American influence upon the post-war political settlement in the developed societies that came under their control, above all those in Europe. But in Korea, as in many other less developed nations, it was hard to discover any prospective anti-communist leadership possessed of the idealism, the commitment to tolerable moral and political standards, which rendered it worthy of the support of the United States.

On 27 December 1945, the Three-Power Foreign Ministers’ Conference ended in Moscow with an important agreement. The Russians accepted an American proposal for Korea: the nation was to become the object of a Four-Power ‘International Trusteeship’ for five years, paving the way to independence as a unified state. Four-Power Trusteeship represented a concession by Moscow, cramping immediate progress towards a communist state in Korea. The Russians probably anticipated that the left in Korea was sufficiently strong to ensure its own ultimate triumph under any arrangement. But the Moscow Accords also reflected the low priority that Stalin gave to Korea. He was willing to appease Western fears in the Far East, no doubt in the expectation that in return, Washington would less vigorously oppose Soviet policies in Europe.

In the weeks that followed the Moscow meeting, there was political turmoil in South Korea. Rightwing factions expressed their passionate hostility to the trusteeship proposals, backed by strikes and demonstrations. So too did Hodge and his advisers, who raged against the unknown State Department ‘experts’ who had made the agreement with the Soviets. On 28 January, the general offered his resignation in protest. It was refused. More than this, the tide in Washington now began to turn strongly in favour of the American group in Seoul. No less shrewd a diplomat than Averell Harriman visited Korea in February, and returned to report most favourably upon Hodge’s ‘ability and diplomacy’. The Americans themselves now stood their own proposal on its head, and indeed revoked their assent to it. In the wake of the Moscow
meeting, President Truman determined that Secretary of State Byrnes had given away far too much; that the time had come for a determined stand against Soviet expansionism; that Stalin should be confronted on a range of critical fronts. Of these, Korea was now identified among the foremost. All Asia understood the nature of the struggle taking place there. ‘The Korean question’, declared an editorial in the Chinese newspaper
Ta-Kung-Pao
, ‘is in effect the political battleground for Russo-American mutual animosities, parrying and struggling for mastery.’

Hodge’s new proposal was that an indigenous Korean political body should be hastened into existence before the first meeting of the American-Soviet Joint Commission, intended to supervise the trusteeship arrangements. On 14 February, the Representative Democratic Council held its first meeting in Seoul’s Capitol building. Of its twenty-eight members, twenty-four were drawn from rightist political parties. Syngman Rhee declared: ‘Hereafter, the Council will represent the Korean people in its dealings with General Hodge and the Military Government.’ Limited as were the powers of the Council, it provided the Americans with a core of acceptable Korean leaders to match the Russian-sponsored communist leadership now established in the North under Kim Il Sung. When the Joint Commission began its meetings on 20 March, each side focused its attention and complaints upon the lack of facilities afforded to the sympathisers of the other for political campaigning in their own zone.

American policy was now set upon the course from which it would not again be deflected: to create, as speedily as possible, a plausible machinery of government in South Korea which could survive as a bastion against the communist North. On 12 December 1946, the first meeting was held of a provisional South Korean Legislature, whose membership was once again dominated by the men of the right, though such was their obduracy that they boycotted the first sessions in protest against American intervention in the elections, which had vainly sought to prevent absolute rightist manipulation of the results. A growing body of Korean
officials now controlled the central bureaucracy of SKIG – the South Korean Interim Government. In 1947, a random sample of 115 of these revealed that seventy were former office-holders under the Japanese. Only eleven showed any evidence of anti-Japanese activity during the Korean period.

The suspicions of many Korean nationalists about the conduct of the American military government were redoubled by the fashion in which the National Police, the most detested instrument of Japanese tyranny, was not merely retained, but strengthened. It was the American official historians of the occupation who wrote that ‘the Japanese police in Korea possessed a breadth of function and an extent of power equalled in few countries in the modern world.’
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The 12,000 Japanese in their ranks were sent home. But the 8,000 Koreans who remained – the loyal servants of a brutal tyranny in which torture and judicial murder had been basic instruments of government – found themselves promoted to fill the higher ranks, while total police strength in South Korea doubled. Equipped with American arms, jeeps, and radio communications, the police became the major enforcement arm of American military government, and its chief source of political intelligence. Such men as Yi Ku-bom, one of the most notorious police officers of the Japanese regime, who feared for his life in August 1945, was a year later chief of a major ward station in Seoul. A long rollcall of prominent torturers and anti-nationalist fighters under the colonial power found themselves in positions of unprecedented authority. In 1948, 53 per cent of officers and 25 per cent of rank-and-file police were Japanese-trained. By a supreme irony, when the development began of a constabulary force, from which the South Korean army would grow, the Americans specifically excluded any recruit who had been imprisoned by the Japanese – and thus, any member of the anti-Japanese resistance. The first chief of staff of the South Korean army in 1947 was a former colonel in the Japanese army.

Paek Sun Yup, who was to prove one of the few competent soldiers in Rhee’s army in the 1950–53 war, rising to become its
Chief of Staff while still in his early thirties, was a typical product of the system. A North Korean landlord’s son, he attended Pyongyang High School, then Mukden Military Academy; he served as a young officer with the Japanese army in Manchuria. ‘We thought nothing about Japanese influence,’ he shrugged, years later. ‘Every young man takes the status quo for granted. At that time, the Japanese were Number One. They were winning. We had never seen any British or Americans.’
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Paek’s unit was fighting the Russians when the war ended. He walked for a month to reach his home. He quickly disliked what he saw of the new communist regime in the North. On 28 December 1945, he escaped across the 38th Parallel, leaving his wife behind in the North. She joined him later. Two months later, he joined the constabulary as a lieutenant. He rose rapidly, to become director of intelligence in the embryo South Korean army, and a divisional commander a few weeks before the 1950 invasion. No man could have attained Paek’s position without demonstrating absolute loyalty to the regime of Syngman Rhee, and all that implied. But in every Asian society, there is an overwhelming instinct in favour of serving the strongest force. The worst that can be said of Paek is that he was a tough, ambitious product of his environment.

But many young South Koreans did express their hostility to Rhee, and paid the price. Beyond those who were imprisoned, many more became ‘unpeople’. Minh Pyong Kyu was a Seoul bank clerk’s son who went to medical college in 1946, but found himself expelled in 1948 for belonging to a left-wing student organisation. ‘There was an intellectual vacuum in the country at that time,’ he said. ‘The only interesting books seemed to be those from North Korea, and the communists had a very effective distribution system. We thought the Americans were nice people who just didn’t understand anything about Korea.’
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Minh’s family of eight lived in genteel poverty. His father had lost his job with a mining company in 1945, for its assets lay north of the 38th Parallel. Minh threw himself into anti-government activity: pasting up political posters by night, demonstrating, distributing communist tracts.
Then one morning he was arrested and imprisoned for ten days. The leaders of his group were tried and sentenced to long terms. He himself was released, but expelled from university, to his father’s deep chagrin. Like hundreds of thousands of others, Minh yearned desperately for the fall of Syngman Rhee.