The Korean War and The Vietnam War

People, Politics, and Power

Britannica Educational Publishing, Robert Curley

• Publisher: Britannica Educational Publishing
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781615300471
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

In the 1950s and 1960s and on into the 1970s, the United States was involved in two wars fought far from home—one in aid of South Korea against the neighboring Communist North Korea, and a second waged through the jungles of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Both of these military engagements were a reaction to what the United States feared as being Communist takeovers, and were surrounded by a strong degree of political controversy. This book explores both wars in detail to help readers understand why the conflicts occurred and what their lasting effects have been.

CHAPTER 1
PRECURSORS TO THE KOREAN WAR

The Korean War was precipitated by the collapse of the Japanese empire at the end of World War II, in September 1945. Following the war, China, Manchuria, and the former Western colonies seized by Japan in 1941–42 had either a native government or a colonial regime waiting to return to power after hostilities ceased. Having been annexed to Japan since 1910, Korea did not have a native government waiting to return. Most claimants to Korean power were harried exiles in China, Manchuria, Japan, the U.S.S.R., and the United States who fell into two broad categories. The first was made up of committed Marxist revolutionaries who had fought the Japanese as part of the Chinese-dominated guerrilla armies in Manchuria and China. One of these exiles was a minor but successful guerrilla leader named Kim Il-sung, who had received some training in Russia and had been made a major in the Soviet army. The other category was made up of members of the Korean nationalist movement, no less revolutionary, who drew their inspiration from the best of science, education, and industrialism in Europe, Japan, and America. These “ultranationalists” were split into rival factions. Notably, one of these factions centred on the leadership of Syngman Rhee, educated in the United States and was at one time the president of a dissident Korean Provisional Government in exile.

In their hurried effort to disarm the Japanese army and repatriate the Japanese population in Korea (estimated at 700,000), the United States and the Soviet Union agreed in August 1945 to divide the country for administrative purposes at the 38th parallel (latitude 38° N). At least from the American perspective, this geographic division was a temporary expedient. However, the Soviets began a short-lived reign of terror in northern Korea that quickly politicized the division by driving thousands of refugees south. The two sides could not agree on a formula that would produce a unified Korea, and the division ultimately would lead to civil war between the new North and South within a few years.

The creation of an independent South Korea became UN policy in early 1948. Southern communists opposed this, and by autumn partisan warfare had engulfed parts of every Korean province below the 38th parallel. The fighting expanded into a limited border war between the South’s newly formed Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) and the North Korean border constabulary as well as the North’s Korean People’s Army (KPA). The North launched 10 cross-border guerrilla incursions in order to draw ROKA units away from their guerrilla-suppression campaign in the South.

In its larger purpose the partisan uprising failed: the Republic of Korea (ROK) was formed in August 1948, with Syngman Rhee as president. Nevertheless, almost 8,000 members of the South Korean security forces and at least 30,000 other Koreans lost their lives. Many of the victims were not security forces or armed guerrillas at all, but simply people identified as “rightists” or “reds” by the belligerents. Small-scale atrocities became a way of life.

The partisan war also delayed the training of the South Korean army. In early 1950, American advisers judged that fewer than half of the ROKA’s infantry battalions were even marginally ready for war. U.S. military assistance consisted largely of surplus light weapons and supplies. Indeed, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the United States’ Far East Command (FECOM), argued that his Eighth Army, consisting of four weak divisions in Japan, required more support than the Koreans did. By mid-1950, ROKA forces in the South were still unprepared for the impending invasion from the North.

KOREA OCCUPIED AND DIVIDED, 1910–50

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JAPANESE OCCUPATION

Japan annexed Korea in 1910, before the onset of World War I. A Japanese government was established quickly in Korea, with the governor-generalship filled by generals or admirals appointed by the Japanese emperor. The Koreans were deprived of freedom of assembly, association, the press, and speech. Many private schools were closed because they did not meet certain arbitrary standards set by the Japanese government. The colonial authorities used their own school system as a tool for assimilating Korea to Japan, placing primary emphasis on teaching the Japanese language and excluding from the educational curriculum such subjects as Korean language and Korean history. The Japanese built nationwide transportation and communications networks and established a new monetary and financial system. They also promoted Japanese commerce in Korea while barring Koreans from similar activities.

Japanese gendarmes in Korea, 1910. The gendarmes served as the police force in Korea during the oppressive Japanese occupation of the country (1910–45). Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Gettty Images

The colonial government promulgated a land-survey ordinance that forced landowners to report the size and area of their land. By failing to do this, many farmers were deprived of their land. Farmland and forests owned jointly by a village or a clan were likewise expropriated by the Japanese since no single individual could claim them. Much of the land thus expropriated was then sold cheaply to Japanese landlords. Many of the dispossessed Korean farmers took to the woods and subsisted by slash-and-burn tillage, while others emigrated to Manchuria and Japan in search of jobs. The majority of ethnically Korean residents now in those areas are the descendants of those emigrants.

IN FOCUS: KOREAN PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT

In April 1919 Korean patriots organized a provisional government in exile in Shanghai in reaction to Japanese suppression of the March 1st Movement. This movement for Korean independence from Japanese rule was so named for a proclamation of independence issued by 33 prominent Koreans on March 1, 1919, which resulted in a number of massive demonstrations that occurred in Korea wherever the proclamation was read. Leading members of the Korean Provisional Government included such national leaders as Syngman Rhee, An Ch’ang-ho, and Kim Ku.

With the establishment of the provisional government, Korea was able to make more concerted efforts toward achieving independence from Japan, and it made immediate contacts with various independence groups both at home and abroad. By 1922 all of the Korean resistance groups in Manchuria were unified under the provisional government’s leadership. To help gain their aims, the leaders published a newspaper, The Independent, which greatly enhanced popular consciousness of political participation. They also sent delegations to the United States and Europe to draw attention to their cause.

Nevertheless, the Korean Provisional Government soon encountered insurmountable problems. Internally, the Japanese suppressed all nationalistic dissension in Korea, even going so far as to prohibit use of the Korean language in the later 1930s. Externally, the coalition of exiled Koreans that had formed the provisional government began to grow apart. Although Syngman Rhee was elected the nominal president, he remained in the United States, attempting to solicit Western moral support. The premier, Yi Tong-hwi, began to seek Soviet military aid for revolutionary operations in Manchuria. Kim Ku drew close to the right-wing Chinese Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek.

With the liberation of Korea from Japanese occupation at the end of World War II, the Korean Provisional Government came to an end. Its members returned to Korea, where they put together their own political organizations in what came to be South Korea and competed for power.

DIVISION OF KOREA

The Cairo Declaration, issued on Dec. 1, 1943, by the United States, Great Britain, and China, pledged independence for Korea “in due course.” This vague phrase aroused the leaders of the Korean provisional government in Chongqing to request interpretation from the United States. Their request, however, received no answer. At the Yalta Conference held in February 1945, U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin a four-power trusteeship for Korea consisting of the United States, Great Britain, the U.S.S.R., and the Republic of China. While Stalin agreed to Roosevelt’s suggestion in principle, they did not reach any formal agreement on the future status of Korea, and after the Yalta meeting there was a growing uneasiness between the Anglo-American allies and the U.S.S.R.

Throughout the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, U.S. military leaders insisted on encouraging Soviet entry into the war against Japan. The Soviet military leaders asked their U.S. counterparts about invading Korea, and the Americans replied that such an expedition would not be practicable until after a successful landing had taken place on the Japanese mainland. The ensuing Potsdam Declaration included the statement that “the terms of the Cairo Declaration,” which promised Korea its independence, “shall be carried out.” In the terms of its entry into the war against Japan on August 8, the U.S.S.R. also pledged to support the independence of Korea. On the following day Soviet troops went into action in Manchuria and northern Korea.

The General Order No. 1, drafted on August 11 by the United States for Japanese surrender terms in Korea, provided for Japanese forces north of latitude 38° N (the 38th parallel) to surrender to the Soviets and those south of that line to the Americans. Stalin did not object to the contents of the order, and on September 8 American troops landed in southern Korea, almost a month after the first Soviet entry. On the following day the United States received the Japanese surrender in Seoul. There were now two zones of occupied Korean territory—northern and southern—for the Soviets had already begun to seal off the 38th parallel.

The historic decision to divide the peninsula into two has aroused speculation on several counts. Some historians attribute the division of Korea to military expediency in receiving the Japanese surrender, while others believe that the decision was a measure to prevent the Soviet forces from occupying the whole of Korea. Since U.S. policy toward Korea during World War II had aimed to prevent any single power’s domination of Korea, it may be reasonably concluded that the principal reason for the division was to stop the Soviet advance south of the 38th parallel.

IN FOCUS: 38TH PARALLEL

Latitude 38° N, or the 38th parallel, in East Asia roughly demarcates North Korea and South Korea. The line was chosen by U.S. military planners at the Potsdam Conference (July 1945) near the end of World War II as an army boundary. North of the 38th parallel the U.S.S.R. was to accept the surrender of the Japanese forces in Korea, and south of it the Americans were to accept the Japanese surrender. The line was intended as a temporary division of the country, but the onset of the Cold War led to the establishment of a separate U.S.-oriented regime in South Korea under Syngman Rhee and a communist regime in North Korea under Kim Il-sung.

After the outbreak of the Korean War between North and South Korea in June 1950, United Nations (UN) forces, which under U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had come to the aid of the South, moved north of the 38th parallel in an attempt to occupy North Korea. With the intervention of Chinese troops in support of the North, the war came to a stalemate roughly along that parallel. The cease-fire line, fixed at the time of the armistice agreement, gave South Korea possession of an eastern mountainous area north of the parallel, which was the major battlefront when the demarcation line was fixed. Likewise, North Korea was given a roughly triangular portion of territory south of the 38th parallel and west of longitude 127° E that includes the city of Kaesŏng.

A demilitarized zone (DMZ) was created by pulling back the respective forces 1.2 miles (2 km) along each side of the boundary. It runs for about 150 miles (241 km) across the peninsula, from the mouth of the Han River on the west coast to a little south of the North Korean town of Kosŏng on the east coast. Located within the DMZ is the “truce village” of P’anmunjŏm, about 5 miles (8 km) east of Kaesŏng. It was the site of peace discussions during the Korean War and has since been the location of various conferences over issues related to North and South Korea, their allies, and the UN.

The areas north and south of the DMZ are heavily fortified, and both sides maintain large contingents of troops there. Over the years there have been occasional incidents and minor skirmishes but no significant conflicts. Since the end of the Korean War the DMZ, which was once farmland, has lain almost untouched and, to a large extent, has reverted to nature. In mid-2007 limited cargo-train service was resumed across the zone.

A sign in English identifying the 38th parallel, 1950. The 38th parallel roughly marks the border between North and South Korea and is at the center of the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

THE SOUTHERN ZONE

The end of Japanese rule caused political confusion among Koreans in both zones. In the south various political parties sprang up. Although they were roughly divided into rightists, leftists, and middle-of-the-roaders, they had a common goal: the immediate attainment of self-government. As early as Aug. 16, 1945, some Koreans organized a Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, headed by Woon-hyung Lyuh (Yŏ Un-hyŏng), who was closely associated with the leftists. On September 6 the delegates attending a “national assembly” called by the committee proclaimed the People’s Republic of Korea. But the U.S. military government in South Korea, under Lieut. Gen. John R. Hodge, the commanding general of the U.S. armed forces in Korea, refused to recognize the republic, asserting that the military government was the “only government” in Korea, as stipulated in General Order No. 1. The exiled Korean provisional government, on returning, also was compelled by the military government to declare itself a political party, not a rival government. U.S. policy in Korea was to establish a trusteeship that would supersede both the American and the Soviet occupation forces in Korea.

In late December the Council of Foreign Ministers (representing the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain) met in Moscow and decided to create a four-power trusteeship of up to five years. Upon receiving the news, Koreans reacted violently. In February 1946, to soothe the discontent, the military government created the Representative Democratic Council as an advisory body to the military government. This body was composed of Koreans and had as its chairman Syngman Rhee, former president of the Korean government-in-exile.

In October the military government created an Interim Legislative Assembly, half of whose members were elected by the people and half appointed by the military government. The assembly was empowered to enact ordinances on domestic affairs but was subject to the veto of the military government. The feeling against trusteeship came to a climax several months later when the assembly formally condemned trusteeship in Korea.

THE NORTHERN ZONE

Unlike the U.S. forces in the south, the Soviet army marched into the north in 1945 accompanied by a band of expatriate Korean communists. By placing the latter in key positions of power, the Soviet Union easily set up a communist-controlled government in the north. On August 25 the People’s Executive Committee of South Hamgyŏng province was created by the South Hamgyŏng province Communist Council and other nationalists. The Soviet authorities recognized the committee’s administrative power in the province, thus setting a precedent for the committee’s role throughout the provinces of the northern zone. In this way the Soviet Union placed the north under its control without actually establishing a military government. In October Korean leaders in the north orga...