The Korean War Between Great Powers
Korea, located between China to the west and north and neighboring Japan to the east, has historically been the subject of intervention by greater powers for centuries. The geographical situation of the Korean peninsula has made Korea vulnerable to invasion by great powers. Korea has been a subject of various Chinese empires since the Chinese Han dynasty invaded the peninsula in 109 B.C. China often demanded contributions and took members of the royal family from Korea as hostages. Moreover, Japan invaded Korea, which was ruled by the Chosun Dynasty at that time, in 1592, and the resulting war lasted for seven years, ending with the Chosun Dynasty’s victory. Even before a complete recovery from Japanese rule, the Chinese Later Jin attacked Chosun in 1627. Incessant foreign invasions led Korea to insist on a closed-door policy during the rule of the prince regent, or “Taewon gun,” 1863–1873. However, Japan assassinated Queen Min in 1895, leading Korea to open its doors to western countries (Jung, Kim, Shin, Shin, & Cho, 2011; Sheen, 2009).
Japan’s fear of a rival power, Russia , and its desire to prevent Russia’s military conquest led it to war with Russia in 1904–1905; in the wake of the war with Russia, Japan annexed Korea in 1910, and its colonization of the Korean peninsula lasted until the end of the Second World War (Williams, 2004). During the period of Japanese colonization, hundreds of thousands of Koreans were sent to Japan, and a continuing debate on Korean sex slaves, also known as “comfort women” for Japanese soldiers, remains unresolved because Japan denies the existence of the comfort women system and consequently refuses to offer an official apology. 1 This issue, as well as the Dokdo Island dispute with Japan , has caused great resentment among Koreans. Korea became independent from Japan on August 15, 1945, when Japan declared its unconditional surrender, and the Second World War ended. Earlier that year, at the Yalta Conference on February 11, 1945, Stalin had promised to fight against Japan, and in return, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union would regain the authority and rights that they had possessed before the Russo-Japanese War. On August 9, 1945, the Soviets began to attack Manchuria and the Korean peninsula, and on the following day, Japan accepted the UN suggestion for an unconditional surrender. At that time, the United States divided Korea along the 38th parallel of latitude. Therefore, Japan’s surrender and disarmament were managed by the Soviets in North Korea and the United States in South Korea . 2 Even at the end of the Pacific War, it appeared that the fate of the two Koreas remained undecided.
By July 1945, the U.S. concern about the spread of Soviet influence in the Far East was growing, and on August 10, 1945, two American army colonels were ordered to draw a line across Korea that followed the 38th parallel, the demarcation line of the demilitarized zone on the Korean peninsula (Lee, 2001). Lowe (1997) explains that in the aftermath of the sudden death of President Franklin Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, Vice President Harry S. Truman, who had little foreign affairs experience, assumed the presidency (Truman was President from April 1945 to January 1953). One argument holds that Truman’s trenchant dislike for communism and hostility toward Russia led him to deploy the atomic bomb against Japan partly to persuade the Soviet Union to pursue a less abrasive policy in Eastern Europe (Cumings, 1983: 67–91). However, according to Lowe (1997), the colonel who believed that the 38th parallel was the most satisfactory line of division, the goal of the United States was to prevent the Russians from occupying all of Korea and to restrict the Soviet Union from expanding its occupation to the entire peninsula. It seems that containment existed between the Soviet Union and the United States, but the two powers agreed that the north and south zones divided by the 38th parallel would be controlled by the Soviets and Americans, respectively; consequently, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States wanted to expand the war without achieving a clear-cut victory. Halberstam (2007) calls this situation a failure by Secretary of State Dean Acheson to include noncommunist South Korea in America’s Asian “defense perimeter.” To summarize the lengthy historical background, it is worthwhile to concentrate on the role of China in the Korean War and briefly on its role in the region. Many revisionists and scholars have studied the Korean War. I will not examine the debate in detail; rather, I seek to describe general facts about the Korean War to prevent my studies from becoming a topic of further debate. As shown above, throughout centuries of history, Korea has been a victim of power politics in the region. It seems as if this situation has never ended.
In South Korea , the Korean War is better known as the “6.25 war.” It began at dawn on 25 June when armed North Korean infantry units attacked the Republic of Korea, and within three days, Seoul, the capital of South Korea, was occupied by the North. Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong Un, the current supreme leader of North Korea, had sought authorization from Stalin in 1949 to launch the invasion of South Korea, and Stalin had consented. With air support from the Soviet Union, North Korea launched a surprise attack on June 25, 1950. 3 In defense, President Truman sent American troops from Japan , and the attack was so effective that it has been said that the first nuclear crisis may have been the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea by U.S. forces. British Prime Minister Atlee made an emergency trip to the United States and argued against the use of nuclear weapons (Perry, 2006). Truman agreed and instead built up a massive quantity of conventional arms. In addition, General Douglas MacArthur, who was the supreme commander of the UN forces, made a successful landing at Inchon, forcing the North Koreans to retreat to the north. UN military forces, with soldiers from 21 countries, joined the war. They were from Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Ethiopia, France, Greece, India, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, Great Britain , and the United States. As Leckie (1962) notes, the number of “dead” and “wounded and missing” for the communist forces is not known; 900,000 and 520,000 are the total numbers for those on the side of the South, respectively. The Korean casualties alone were approximately 8 times greater than the casualties in the Iraq War, during which there was a suicide bombing almost every day. Additionally, the fact that the Korean War lasted less than 3 years, compared to nearly nine years in Iraq, provides a sense of the scale of the Korean War.
East Asia was secondary to Europe in the U.S. struggle with the Soviet Union (Stueck, 2002). Cumings (2010) and Halberstam (2007) note that America intervened in this war without a plan, and MacArthur, as commander, did not even consider that China would dare present a challenge. What was China’s interest in the war? There are lengthy discussions about whether China knew of the North Korean invasion, which means questioning whether Stalin informed Mao Tse-tung of the forthcoming attack. Whiting (1960) notes that the transfer of troops from China to Korea certainly shows that Beijing knew of North Korea’s attack on the South well in advance. In addition, the hasty redeployment of Lin Piao’s crack Fourth Field Army from southeastern to northeastern China during May and June 1950 indicates that China anticipated direct involvement in the war (1960: 45). In terms of Sino-Soviet and Sino-American relations, these facts are significant because victory in the war would serve China’s interests. North Korea launched a surprise attack on June 25, 1950. However, the Korean War , refers not only to North Korea’s invasion of South Korea but also to a brutal war game between the great powers during the Cold War era. Leckie says, “So the decision to invade was made probably by Premier Stalin, whose retouched photograph graced the wall behind Premier Kim’s massive mahogany desk in Pyongyang” (1962: 38). As Johnson writes, “It is also worth remembering that what we call the Korean War ended as a war between the United States and China fought on Korean soil” (2000: 140).
When Eisenhower was elected President...