The War for Korea, 1945-1950

A House Burning

Allan R. Millett

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780700621095
• eBook ISBN: 9780700621859
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

Choice Outstanding Title

When the major powers sent troops to the Korean peninsula in June of 1950, it supposedly marked the start of one of the last century’s bloodiest conflicts. Allan Millett, however, reveals that the Korean War actually began with partisan clashes two years earlier and had roots in the political history of Korea under Japanese rule, 1910–1945.

The first in a new two-volume history of the Korean War, Millett’s study offers the most comprehensive account of its causes and early military operations. Millett traces the war's origins to the post-liberation conflict between two revolutionary movements, the Marxist-Leninists and the Nationalist-capitalists. With the U.S.-Soviet partition of Korea following World War II, each movement, now with foreign patrons, asserted its right to govern the peninsula, leading directly to the guerrilla warfare and terrorism in which more than 30,000 Koreans died. Millett argues that this civil strife, fought mostly in the South, was not so much the cause of the Korean War as its actual beginning.

Millett describes two revolutions locked in irreconcilable conflict, offering an even-handed treatment of both Communists and capitalists-nationalists. Neither movement was a model of democracy. He includes Korean, Chinese, and Russian perspectives on this era, provides the most complete account of the formation of the South Korean army, and offers new interpretations of the U.S. occupation of Korea, 1945–1948.

Millett’s history redefines the initial phase of the war in Asian terms. His book shows how both internal forces and international pressures converged to create the Korean War, a conflict that still shapes the politics of Asia.

1

The Years of Division, 1919−1945

“Daehan Tongnip Manse!”

“Long Live Korean Independence!” or “Korean Independence 10,000 [Years]”

Nothing ever went quite right for the Korean nationalists. After almost ten years of oppressive Japanese rule, a coalition of Korean patriots in 1919 joined the wave of anticolonialism sweeping the Middle East and Asia in the wake of World War I. Self-determination had become the demand of the moment, loudest between the armistice of November 1918 and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in May 1919. The Koreans understood that the Allies would carve up the carcasses of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, and they were not unhappy to see Russia plunged into a civil war between the Bolsheviks and the White Russians. They could not admit to themselves that the victorious Allies had rejected President Woodrow Wilson’s suggestion that self-determination apply to the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, and Italian colonies too. And the Japanese empire—hardly begun with the annexations of Formosa (1895) and Korea (1910)—was part of this winning coalition.

When some leaders of the independence movement in Korea met in February 1919, they knew that a delegation of their countrymen in exile in China and the United States had gone to the Paris Peace Conference. This delegation planned to pressure Japan to give up Korea, just as the Allies had pressured the Japanese not to control the former German colonies in China or czarist Russia’s holdings in north Asia. The patriots wanted the Japanese government to loosen its draconian rule of Korea; between 1911 and 1916, the prison population of Korea had soared from 16,807 to 32,836. The Japanese national gendarmerie and the colonial police had rounded up political dissenters with enthusiasm under the direction of the governor-general, Count Terauchi Masatake. In 1916 Tokyo sent another general, Hasegawa Yoshimichi, to Seoul, but he simply continued the policy of forced assimilation. As the prison population doubled, so, too, did the size of the colonial police force. The Korean notables who started the independence movement thus saw nonviolent demonstrations and moral suasion as the only alternative to rebellion, terrorism, and assassination, all of which had only added to the ranks of Korean martyrs. Civil disobedience as envisioned by the protest leaders also reflected their belief in spiritual renewal and moral conversion.¹

The leaders of the independence movement represented the two most powerful forces for spiritual revitalization in Korean society: Chondogyo and Protestant Christianity. The charismatic leader of Chondogyo, Son Pyong-hui, emerged as the single most important leader in bringing the Korean notables together in unified protest. His Christian counterparts were Kil Sun-ju, Yi Sang-jae, and Yi Sang-hun, who represented the core of the Christian protesters—the Methodists of Seoul and the Presbyterians of Pyongyang. The small group of Catholic dissidents refused to work with members of Chondogyo or followers of the “Teaching of the Heavenly Way,” a synthesis of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Shamanism that had ingested some forms of the Catholic faith, the first Christian religion to come to Korea in the late eighteenth century from China. In political terms, Chondogyo had become the refuge of the survivors and disciples of the Tonghaks, who had carried the principles of Korean nationalism, Eastern religions, social leveling, and economic justice into open warfare in 1871 and 1894. Much to their later dismay, the Japanese encouraged Chondogyo, since it might lure idealists and patriots away from the Korean Christian churches. Chondogyo might also be comfortably redirected toward Shintoism, and it had no powerful foreign sponsors such as Great Britain or the United States.²

The Korean nationalists seized on the death of the emperor of Chosun on January 20, 1919, to take their challenge to Japanese policy before a world audience. Kojong’s death encouraged the usual rumors of conspiracy, suicide, and murder; he had died in protest—or so the rumors went. In the meantime, news of the Paris Peace Conference came to Tokyo from young men associated with the YMCA and the Korean student associations in Japanese universities. Believing that the nationalist notables in Korea would not act, a group of students drafted a petition for independence. Student associations in Korea, many with links to the Protestant churches and Christian-sponsored private schools, became inflamed by the prospect of a demonstration at the time of the emperor’s funeral, something that their elders and the Chondogyo leaders regarded with anxiety. Although still divided about how to frame their protest, the nationalists agreed to draft their own document and assigned the task to Choe Nam-son, a gifted young journalist, literary figure, and former student leader. In the meantime, Son Pyong-hui forged a Chondogyo consensus on how the document should be presented: it would be a petition to the Japanese government and the Paris Peace Conference on behalf of all Korean political groups with the mass support of the Korean people. At a minimum, the document would receive mass circulation.

From the end of January until the fateful day that gave the protest its name—the March First, or Samil (3.1), Movement—the Chondogyo leaders continued meeting, maintaining contact with Choe Nam-son through their own young firebrand, Choe In. They communicated with the Christian leaders through Choe Namson and his close friend, Song Chin-u, a charismatic teacher at the elite Chungang Preparatory School. Direct contact between the Chondogyo and Christian leaders began on February 20 in Seoul. Each group regarded the other with suspicion. The Chondogyo leaders—who had persuaded two Buddhist monks to join their group—feared that the Christians would take their cause into the streets, where an enraged people, led by student demonstrators, could turn any assembly into a violent confrontation with the Japanese police. Christians questioned whether the Chondogyo leaders were spiritually sound and politically trustworthy. Both groups, however, had a declaration to read and review, and the leaders faced two related decisions: whether to sign the document, and under what circumstances. On February 24 the leaders agreed that the document would be a declaration of independence and that they would sign it as such. They would not, however, read the document to a crowd and thus inflame passions. Those men most committed to the protest—twenty-nine of those present, plus four who consented to have their names used—agreed to hold one last meeting to sign the document at Son Pyong-hui’s home on February 28, but not to authorize its release until March 1, three days before the emperor’s state funeral in Seoul.

The thirty-three signers—sixteen Christians, fifteen Chondogyos, and two Buddhists—proclaimed the independence of “the Kingdom of Korea” and the liberation of the Korean people from Japanese rule. The Japanese and Korean people could work together to bring peace and prosperity to their nations in “an age of restoration and reconstruction” that would use Western learning without compromising Asian values:

The age of Force is gone, and the Age of Reason and Righteousness has arrived. The spirit of moral law and humanity, nurtured and perfected during past centuries, is about to shed its light of new civilization upon the affairs of mankind. The arrival of the new spring to the earth calls for the revival of all creatures. If the forces of the past have suffocated the people like the cold snow and ice of winter, then the force of the present age is the revitalizing breeze and warmth of spring.³

After the inner secretariat of the March First Movement ensured that copies of the declaration would be distributed throughout Korea by March 1, many of the movement’s younger leaders left the country for China, traveled to other cities in Korea to work with students’ and women’s groups that supported the declaration, or disappeared to escape arrest. The movement already showed signs of fracture at the top. There was no single signing event; the signers came and went, and some leaders (including Yi Sang-jae) refused to sign at the last minute.

The Chondogyos learned, to their dismay, that the Christian leaders had acceded to student groups’ demand that mass rallies be held for a reading of the declaration. Most of the signers refused to address any rally. The Chondogyos urged the Buddhist signers to preach nonviolence at the first and largest rally at Independence Gate near Pagoda Park, a site symbolic of Korean liberty. The best the signers could do was to agree to meet for lunch at a fashionable Chinese restaurant nearby. The crowd in Pagoda Park expected one of the notables to read the declaration of independence, but those present at lunch (reported to be twenty-nine in number) did not even read the document to themselves on March 1, since they had already approved it and did not want to be associated with the rallies outside. Instead, they toasted ten thousand years of future Korean independence: “Daehan Tongnip Mansei!” They then surrendered to the Japanese police, who had surrounded the restaurant. Instead, a schoolteacher from Haeju, Hwanghae Province, read the declaration to the crowd with difficulty, since he did not understand some of Choe Nam-son’s Chinese characters. The crowd’s roaring “Mansei” needed no interpretation, nor did the columns of students and other young people who poured out of Pagoda Park toward other places where demonstrators had assembled to read and cheer the declaration of independence.

On the first day of the March First Movement, also known as the Mansei Revolution, the protest remained relatively peaceful, and the Japanese police and soldiers acted with restraint. By day’s end, only 134 people had been arrested in Seoul. In the Pyongyang area, however, the demonstrations produced fights between the police and protesters, and in two places a mob attacked police stations with rocks and torches. News of the movement spread rapidly in the north and more slowly in the south, but within two weeks, city dwellers all over Korea had seen the declaration. Within one week, Koreans in twenty-one cities had organized mass rallies and demonstrations, with participants numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The outlawed Korean flag—the taegukki—bloomed in every city like spring flowers; forbidden songs of patriotism and liberty filled the streets. The streets also filled with Japanese police and soldiers; fights broke out almost immediately and continued to do so from March 5 until the movement collapsed in May. A shadowy group called the “National Congress” urged violence. Were they Korean extremists or Japanese agents? The Japanese did not care. At a cost of 6 dead and 134 wounded, the Japanese security forces killed an estimated 1,200 Koreans, wounded an estimated 16,000 marchers of all ages and both sexes, and destroyed more than 1,000 churches, schools, and homes. Almost 20,000 Koreans went to jail, of whom 2,656 were convicted and either executed or imprisoned. This superficial clemency is misleading, since torture and deprivation short of an actual trial were standard practice in Korea, and the Japanese soldiers conducted their own field executions. The rank and file of the March First Movement became the target of retribution; only four signers died in 1919−1929, and only one of them died in jail—of illness. Eleven signers lived to see the liberation of Korea in 1945. None of the signers played a crucial role in the years of resistance that followed, although their average age in 1919 was only forty-eight. Like the March First Movement they created, these men unleashed disciples and critics who would take the cause of national liberation into a political winter of violence and frustration.⁴

THE CREATION OF TWO REVOLUTIONS

The March First Movement represented the latest and most dramatic demonstration of Korean rage against a historic role as the first-order victim of northern Asia. Through the millennia, invaders had come to the Korean peninsula from two directions—the Asian mainland and the islands of Japan. In the early nineteenth century, however, the pressure of visitors became more complicated with the introduction of foreign influence; the Korean response was to retreat into militant isolation, expelling or killing the occasional travelers who visited the Kingdom of Chosun. Having built a society founded on the precepts of Buddhism and Confucianism, the Koreans had no desire to change their agrarian society of highly formalized, rigidly structured communal values and premodern attitudes toward nature, economics, intellectual activity, and governance. Confucianism demanded prescribed and enforced social relationships. Korean society took on hierarchical characteristics that produced little individual social mobility. Monopolizing a standard Confucian examination that controlled entry to official positions, the yangban, the educated landholders, produced the political and military leaders who served the king.

With European influence growing in Japan and China during the nineteenth century, Korea could not have maintained its status as the Hermit Kingdom. What made Korea’s political history unique is that its eroding isolation set off a court struggle over which foreign power should assume the role of Korea’s protector against the other powers. This competition hastened the end of the Chosun dynasty and created the foundation of the two revolutions that attempted to build a new Korea. The problems started with a Chosun dynasty succession crisis when King Chol-chong died in 1863 without a direct heir. The throne went to a nephew, Yi Myong-bok, who became King Kojong, but he was not the real ruler, since he was only twelve years old. Instead, Kojong’s father, Yi Ha-ung (1820–1898), took office as regent under the title Hungson Taewongun. Grand Prince Yi, known simply as the Taewongun, brought to his office a degree of energy and reform-mindedness that no recent king had shown. The Taewongun, however, only improved the efficiency and ruthlessness of an archaic central government, which alienated some of the yangban and much of the chunmin population, city and town dwellers who served the government and ran the service businesses. The farmers, freeholders and tenants alike, simply felt the yoke of more taxes. Although the Taewongun worried about the growing Russian, French, and British presence in China and the American, British, and German influence on Japan, he believed that imperial China was Korea’s best partner to form an alliance that would hold the foreigners at bay. Even after Japan and China reluctantly made trading concessions to the Europeans in the 1850s, the Taewongun persecuted Chinese and French Catholics who had entered Korea and approved the harsh treatment of foreign merchant vessels, including the burning of an American vessel, the General Sherman (1866), and the execution of its crew, which included two Americans and an Englishman.⁵

The Taewongun continued his war of isolation by blunting a French punitive expedition to Seoul in 1866 and a similar American expedition in 1871. Although both Western forces won local battles, their commanders regarded the risk of running the forts that guarded the Han River estuary as prohibitive. King Kojong’s wife, Queen Min Myong-song, and her talented and ambitious Min relatives forced the Taewongun to surrender power to his son in 1873, when Kojong came of age. Thereafter, Korea’s fortunes declined with dramatic speed. After his retirement, the Taewongun waged war against the Min clan, often with the encouragement of Chinese and Japanese agents. Cowed by a Japanese naval expedition, Kojong signed the Treaty of Kanghwa (1876) with Japan, which recognized Korea’s independence in exchange for commercial concessions and access. The Chinese court (still favored by the Taewongun) responded by demanding similar concessions and urging Korea to open its doors to the United States and Great Britain, both of which might check Japan’s hegemonic instincts.

Between 1882 and 1886, the Chosun court negotiated treaties of amity and commerce with the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, and France. In the meantime, the conflict between Queen Min and the Taewongun continued, with the deposed regent now looking to the Japanese for help as the Chinese, including Gen. Yuan Shi-kai and various diplomats from Beijing, threw their weight behind King Kojong. For a decade, a Japanese faction battled the Russian-Chinese faction for control of the government; palace revolts in 1883 and 1884 were followed by the rural Tonghak revolts of the 1890s. Although King Kojong and his son, Crown Prince Sunjong, escaped assassination, the king lost his modernized palace guard (American and Russian trained) and the support of the Min clan, including the queen, who was murdered by Japanese assassins in 1895. Korean nationalism, however, focused more on opposition to the Chinese influence, which was viewed as far more reactionary than the Japanese influence; the latter appealed to some Korean nationalists as a force for modernization based on the British and German models. The Japanese government simplified the problem of Chinese influence by defeating the Chinese armed forces in Korea and Manchuria in the war of 1894–1895. The Japanese completed the destruction of the Russian-Korean coalition ten years later in another war that left Korea a Japanese protectorate.

Korean opponents of the monarchy and the Chinese and Japanese influence in court often found a common bond in Christianity. With the treaties that opened Korea to European influence came a wave of Protestant missionaries, as well as an end to the persecution of Catholics, who emerged from their underground parishes to form a church organization governed by the bishopric of Seoul. The two most influential Protestant denominations, the Presbyterians and the Methodists, drew personnel from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. The missionaries were not necessarily ordained ministers but included church-sponsored educators, doctors, nurses, and music teachers. The first church-sponsored Protestant missionary was Horace N. Allen, a Presbyterian medical doctor from Ohio; he arrived in 1884 as a legation physician and later became the American minister as well as a wealthy entrepreneur and champion of Japanese modernization. The first two regular missionaries, Horace Grant Underwood (Presbyterian) and Henry G. Appenzeller (Methodist), were ordained ministers; their wives, Lillias Horton Underwood and Ella Dodge Appenzeller, were a doctor and a teacher, respectively. These two couples arrived as planned on Easter Sunday 1885. By 1919, the number of Western residents of Korea numbered 1,143, of whom 709 were American citizens and 238 British, Canadian, and Australian. More than 400 Europeans were officially registered as church-sponsored missionaries representing the Methodists, Presbyterians, Church of Canada, and Seventh Day Adventists, as well as the Oriental Missionary Society and the Salvation Army. The dominant Methodists and Presbyterians worked reasonably well together; they even divided Korea into “missionary zones,” with the American Presbyterians concentrating around Pyongyang, the Canadians and British of all denominations along the northeastern coast from the border to Wonsan, all denominations in Seoul and the Han River valley, and the Methodists throughout southern Korea.⁶

Although the Protestant missionaries attempted to reach the common people of Korea—mostly in the coastal cities—they found themselves embroiled in Seoul politics and the violence that led to the end of the Chosun dynasty. The missionaries risked harassment by antiforeign, anti-Christian forces, but their Korean converts suffered imprisonment, torture, and banishment, not for their religious convictions but because their new faith encouraged them to advance Western concepts of freedom of the press, liberal education, and democratic government. Church membership and the rate of conversion to Protestant Christianity showed an undeniable political rhythm. Between 1885 and 1895, Korean Christians numbered less than 1,000; they increased to 12,500 in the next decade as the Chosun dynasty faded away. The Christian population then soared to 200,000 in the first five years of Japanese domination (1905–1910), viewed as a “Great Awakening,” Korean style. Once the Japanese took complete control, they immediately used their police to cow the Korean churches, many of which had native clergymen and supported themselves financially. Conversions slowed or stopped, and in some areas the Protestant churches lost members in the face of Japanese harassment. By 1912, the Japanese were...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Years of Division, 1919–1945
• 2 Defeat and Division: Korea on the Brink, 1945–1946
• 3 Putting Korea Together Again: The Rise and Fall of the US-USSR Joint Commission, 1946–1947
• 4 The Moscow Agreement Is Abandoned, 1947
• 5 The United Nations Enters the Struggle, 1947–1948
• 6 The Republic of Korea Enters the World and Almost Dies Stillborn, 1948–1949
• 7 “We Are Fighting for Our Lives!” 1949–1950
• 8 The Once and Future Invasion, 1949–1950
• Epilogue and Prologue, June 1950
• Appendix: The Romanization of Korean and Chinese
• Notes
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index
• Photo Gallery 1
• Photo Gallery 2
• Back Cover