The Korean War

Steven Hugh Lee

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317882220
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

Tens of thousands of US soldiers and untold millions of Koreans died in this war the first major arena of the East-West conflict. This concise international history of the war offers a new approach to its understanding, tracing its origins and dynamics to the interplay between modern Korean history and twentieth century world history. The narrative also uniquely examines the social history of the conflict, and includes material on the newly racially integrated US fighting forces, war and disease, women and war and life in the Prisoner of War camps. While most surveys stop at 1953, with the signing of the armistice, Steven Hugh Lee carries the story through to the Geneva Conference in the spring of 1954 the last major international effort before recent years to negotiate a permanent peace for the Korean peninsula.

Part One The Background

Chapter One

Interpreting the Historical Context

History and Memory: The Korean War

Historical memory is a powerful source of state legitimacy. Over the past five decades the two Koreas have vigorously debated the events associated with the Korean War. Both sides continue to shape the public memory of the conflict as a means of legitimizing their respective world views. North and South Koreans may interpret the war differently, but all agree that it was a formative event in their recent past. Simply put, the struggle is central to the way Koreans define themselves in the contemporary world. By contrast, other nations which sent troops to Korea have retained little historical memory of the conflict. In the West, for example, relatively limited attention is paid to the Korean War compared to the sustained popular interest in the two twentieth-century world wars.

The reasons for public and official ignorance about the Korean War are partly a function of cultural orientation, original intentions, and the war’s outcome. United Nations troops were sent to fight in Korea not so much to defeat Korean communism per se as to provide tangible support for foreign policies designed to contain Soviet influence around the world and to get the Western public to support a vast expansion of the military power of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Korean conflict also ended in stalemate, without a victory for either side; this has made the war an ambiguous and painful event to remember. Those in the West and in South Korea who fervently believed in the righteousness of the moral crusade against communism were not appeased by the tenuous peace that emerged from the fighting. But after 1953 the United States was not prepared to continue the battle against North Korea and the People’s Republic of China. A thaw in the Cold War in the mid-1950s was welcomed by American liberals who sought to forget the repressive period of history linked with the rise of McCarthyism. A decade later, the Vietnam conflict overshadowed the earlier struggle over Korea. By the 1970s the Korean War came to be associated with the television series ‘MASH’. Ostensibly set during the Korean armistice negotiations, ‘MASH’ reflected feelings of alienation connected with the fighting in Vietnam, not Korea. As a consequence of these developments, the Korean War has been poorly understood and misrepresented in the West.

Korean History and World History

The relationship between history and memory is a useful way to approach the Korean War, but the focus of this book is not how societies have remembered or portrayed the conflict; neither is it simply a study of battles won and struggles lost. Rather, this monograph examines, in an introductory way, the genesis, international diplomacy, social history, and legacies of the war. These topics are intimately associated with the broad currents of twentieth-century history. Indeed, studying the Korean War leads one into a journey which illuminates some of the major themes and episodes of modern world history. For although the Korean conflict was not a watershed event like the Russian and Chinese Revolutions or the First and Second World Wars, it was shaped by many of the principal historical forces of the past 100 years. The history of Korean communism – part of the larger story of the ideological origins of the Korean struggle – sheds light on the global impact of the Russian Revolution; similarly, the division of Korea into Soviet and American spheres of influence in 1945 is inseparable from the momentous events and ‘superpower’ diplomacy surrounding the termination of the Second World War in Asia and the decolonization of the Japanese empire; China’s intervention in the Korean conflict in 1950 cannot be understood without reference to the broader relationship between North Korea and the Chinese Revolution; and America’s experiences in Korea exerted a significant influence over its later involvement in the Vietnam quagmire.

On its own terms, the Korean War was a major event in the twentieth century. It marked an important turning point in the postwar rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and accelerated Cold War trends already present in the international system. In its wake, military and diplomatic alliances crystallized on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the United States affirmed its global hegemony, previous centres of military and economic power were rebuilt in Japan and Germany, and new states in the developing world manifested a more mature historical consciousness as ‘neutralist’ powers. In the two Koreas, the fighting consolidated the political power of the two rival regimes and hastened the transformation of centuries-old socio-economic and class relations.

The war’s social impact on the world beyond Korea was less powerful. Its influence on public opinion was limited, especially when compared to the consequences of the First World War or the Vietnam conflict. After an initial surge of support for outside intervention, the war became unpopular or was conveniently ignored, particularly in the West. Still, the struggle was a crucial psychological turning point which separated the early Cold War from the more intense global competition between the two superpowers after 1950.

Historians, social scientists and policymakers have interpreted the Korean War in numerous and sometimes contradictory ways. Since 1950 the fighting has been described as a civil war, an exercise in collective security, a forgotten war, an international conflict, a necessary war, a police action, a proxy war, and a revolutionary struggle. This diversity has arisen in part because commentators have emphasized different aspects of the war’s character, evolution, and origins.

For example, those who stress the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union as the context for the conflict within the Korean peninsula have highlighted the international setting of the war. For many social scientists the clash was the first post-1945 proxy war in the developing world, fought at the behest of the dueling superpowers by their South and North Korean allies. Others have located the origins of the war in the dynamics of local events occurring on the Korean peninsula itself. In this interpretation, Koreans were the primary actors in the road to war, and the battle was primarily civil in character. Another influential way of looking at the war has been to contrast it with other major conflicts of the twentieth century, particularly the First and Second World Wars. Seen in this light, the Korean conflict, though fought with great intensity, was more limited in its scope and geographical boundaries [Doc. 1].

Western and allied nations initially described their decision to send troops to contain the June 1950 North Korean offensive as a ‘police action’ and they attempted to legitimize their diplomacy by saying it was part of a wider UN effort to impose ‘collective security’ on a chaotic postwar world and to contain perceived Soviet aggressiveness. When President Harry Truman (plate 1) ordered the use of US troops in Korea, he did so with the events leading to the Second World War in mind, and he contended that a policy of ‘appeasing’ the Soviet-backed North Koreans would lead to another world war [Doc. 2], Critics of this interpretation have pointed out that the UN effort was largely led and paid for by the United States, which pursued its own global containment objectives in the context of the hostilities, and that the UN was neither a neutral nor objective agency in the fighting. Thus while historical experience partly informed Truman’s thinking about what to do in face of the perceived global communist challenge in Korea, rearming America and its Western allies was at the forefront of the US military effort.

1 President Harry Truman shakes hands with NATO Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1951. Eisenhower became President in 1953. US National Archives, 306-PS-A, 51–20. Source: State/O’Donnell Original Negative. Photograph © Archival Research International/Double Delta Industries Inc. and Pike Military Research.

If President Truman tried to legitimize US involvement in the conflict by claiming that sending troops to fight in Korea would prevent another world war, more recently historians William Stueck (1996) and Kathryn Weathersby (1998) have argued that the Korean War served as a substitute for a Third World War. Stueck’s work implies that Korea was a ‘necessary’ war and that it staved off a third global conflict. In reality, however, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States wanted or was prepared for a global war, and for the most part both sides were careful not unduly to provoke the other. There was nothing inevitable about another world war and neither superpower wanted such a conflict, though the Chinese communists and Americans came close to moving towards full-scale war with each other. By the spring of 1951 the acceptance and recognition of a military stalemate on the Korean battlefield brought the Chinese and Americans to the bargaining table.

Although the notion that the Korean War was at its roots a civil war among Koreans became more widespread in the 1980s, the idea that the origins of the conflict lay in the domestic competition of opposing Korean forces can be traced back at least to the summer of 1945, when one of Korea’s conservative leaders-in-exile, Syngman Rhee (plate 2), wrote a letter to President Truman from Washington DC warning him of the possibility of a civil war developing between the ‘communist’ and ‘nationalist’ factions in Korea (US Department of State, 1969: 1031).

2 South Korean President Syngman Rhee embraces General Douglas MacArthur, August 1948. US National Archives, 306-A, 51–3922. Source: US Army, SC306875. Photograph © Archival Research International/Double Delta Industries Inc. and Pike Military Research.

After 1950 Soviet and North Korean officials publicly condemned South Korea for instigating a civil war between the two Korean states. For many decades the origin of the war was vigorously contested and debated, as a living legacy of the Cold War itself. The issue was drawn into the vortex of superpower attempts to justify their respective positions in their international rivalry. The communists blamed the West for its intervention in Korea’s ‘civil’ war, arguing that the conflict was started by South Korea, at the instigation of the United States, and that North Korea’s offensive in June 1950 was simply a response to an unprovoked aggressive attack [Doc. 3]. By contrast, the Western alliance placed responsibility for the war on the communists, particularly the Soviet Union, for ordering the North Korean offensive. In this version of history, presented to posterity by, for example, American Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the North Koreans were simple pawns or proxies of Soviet global expansionism [Doc. 4].

From the perspective of the new millennium, both interpretations have serious flaws. Documents released from Russian and Chinese archives in the 1990s have shown conclusively that North Korea and the Soviet Union were primarily responsible for the planning and execution of the 1950 offensive. However, they also show that Sino-North Korean cooperation played a critical role in the events leading to the conflict and that the North was not a simple pawn of Soviet great power intrigues. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung campaigned very hard to get Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin to support his offensive across the border with South Korea, which at the time ran along the entire length of the 38th parallel.

Unlike the unidimensional analyses of the Korean War which emerged out of Cold War political calculations on both sides of the Iron Curtain, this book takes the view that the Korean conflict was multidimensional, and argues that in order to unlock a more complete meaning of the events the local and international aspects of the struggle must be seen as an integral unity. The fighting arose not simply out of the machinations of the great powers; nor was it the product of the two Koreas deciding their fates independently of outside interference. Both sides – Korean and superpower – shaped the other’s perspective and the options that each attempted to pursue; the interplay of domestic and international factors must be understood together as a fundamental part of the larger process which led to the war and which then underpinned its dynamic.

The very distinction between civil war and international war is somewhat arbitrary and misleading, since the Korean ‘civil war’ was intimately associated with the decisions the two superpowers made about Korea from 1945 onwards. The fate of the ‘international war’ was also shaped in fundamental ways by the actions of Koreans. In short, our effort to understand the history, significance, and meaning of the Korean War must first come to grips with the symbiotic nature of the interrelationship between the domestic and international dimensions of this bloody confrontation.

This book interprets the battle in and over Korea after 1945 within the framework of a series of decisions to escalate a growing dispute between rival Korean political factions and their superpower protectors. This conflict had its roots in the pre-1945 era, but the division of the Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel in 1945 by the Soviet Union and the United States established the structural framework in which the violent rivalry was played out. The division of Korea set the stage for the emergence of two mutually antagonistic Korean regimes by late 1948.

Civil conflict in the two Koreas was escalated by Premier Joseph Stalin’s decision in 1950 to back Premier Kim Il Sung’s pleas to unify the country through an armed attack. The entry of the United Nations into the fighting in the summer of 1950 constituted the next stage in the escalation, of which there were two phases: the first, represented by President Truman’s decision to order a counter-offensive and to send US troops into the battle, was given formal UN blessing, and various member states provided limited military contributions. Without US and UN support South Korea would have been incorporated into the northern regime’s political system, and the war would have ended in 1950.

The second phase of escalation began when the Western allies unwisely decided in the late summer to move beyond the 38th parallel with an offensive of their own, into North Korean territory. This was soon followed by a critical event which added to the intensity of the war and which portended to lead to global war: the entry of Chinese communist ‘volunteers’ – in reality Chinese armies – into the fighting in the late fall of 1950. This chaotic stage of the war was characterized by misperception and misunderstanding by both sides; neither side understood the objectives of its enemy and neither had a clear sense of where its decisions might ultimately lead.

After China’s intervention, the South Korean government, led by President Syngman Rhee, attempted to get the United States to back a further escalation of the war, but unlike Stalin’s calculations in early 1950, US Presidents Harry S. Truman and, later, Dwight D. Eisenhower (plate 1), did not believe it was in the global containment interests of the United States or its allies to back a second offensive to unify the country. The main series of great power decisions to escalate the Korean crisis thus ended by the spring of 1951, though a final effort to expand the war occurred in the spring of 1953 when, in the wake of Joseph Stalin’s death, the United States threatened the Chinese and North Koreans with nuclear war if its armistice terms were not met.

The turning point in the negotiations came in early June 1953 when the communists accepted US and UN terms for the armistice, which was formally concluded in late July. The momentum for a peaceful settlement carried over into 1954 at the Geneva Conference on Korea, held as part of a larger effort to deal – at the same venue – with the ongoing conflict in Indochina, several thousand miles south of Korea in Southeast Asia. The failure of the Korean conference consolidated the uneasy status quo on the Northeast Asian peninsula which has lasted to this day. The war has never formally ended nor has it yet been resolved through a peace treaty.

Approaching Korea

Comparisons are often a useful way to understand major historical events or large processes. We have seen how the concept of ‘limited war’ – as distinguished from global or world war – has been employed by social scientists to describe and analyze the Korean conflict. However, we must also be sensitive to the unique historical character of the struggle in Korea -the war occurred just five years after Japanese colonial rule came to an abrupt end over the entire peninsula – and to the historical consciousness of the antagonists tangled in the decisions surrounding the conflict.

An indispensable and practical tenet in the study of history is that we should be conscious of how the era in which we live shapes our perspective on the past. We should not evaluate history from the simple viewpoint of the present; rather, the historical project should take into account and assess how past actors viewed their own history. The Korean War influenced the trajectory of twentieth-century history, but the people involved in the conflict were also intimately shaped by the events preceding it, during the first half of the century.

Understanding the twentieth-century historical experience of Koreans is crucial for interpreting the motivations of Koreans themselves, who, ironically, are often the least talked about actors in books on the Korean War but who played a critical role in its origins and who continued to shape, and be shaped by, great power diplomacy before, during and after the conflict.

To understand the Korean War – one of the most devastating of modern conflicts – we will begin by examining how Koreans and the great powers responded to and influenced, in their own historical and cultural contexts, some of the m...