Introduction to the Korean War

The George C. Marshall Lecture in Military History

Introduction to the Korean War

Allan R. Millett

TTVROM his pedestal above the twelve lanes of traffic moving hy fits andX starts along King Sejong Boulevard in Seoul, the statue of Admiral YiSun-shin watches the Korean people enjoy the dubious luxuries of pros-perity and peace. However perilous that well-being sometimes seems atthe dawn of the twenty-first century, the Republie of Korea stands as asturdy example of postcolonial survival. In a sense the Republic ofKorea—Daehan Minguk—and its socialist sister the Democratic People'sRepublic of Korea—are "new nations," but they are built on the wreck-age of a failed traditional society, forty years of Japanese colonialism, theleaching effect of Japan's wars (1937^5), and the trauma of politicaldivision and revolutionary social change. Koreans who were young in1945 can hardly believe they live in the same county. But always thereis the memory of "the war."

The Korean people know war. One bit of their lore is that the coun-try has been invaded at least six hundred times in the last three millen-nia, although the counting includes incidents of piracy, minor punitiveexpeditions, and naval encounters along Korea's long and island-dottedcoastline. Nevertheless, the Koreans have a record of victimization thatrivals that of the Jews, Poles, and Irish. Four hundred years ago AdmiralYi Sun-shin battled the fleets of the Japanese tyrant Hideyoshi Toyotomi,but despite three miraculous naval victories—won by the novel armored"turtle boats" of revered memory—^Admiral Yi could not preventHideyoshi's armies from ravishing Korea's villages, farmlands, and pre-cious Buddhist temples. As Yi wrote in despair: "The mountains and therivers tremble . . . blood dyes hills and streams."' According to Korean

1. Yi Ch'ungmu-gong Chonso, vol. 1 oí Imjin Changck'o: Admiral Yi Sun'sin'sMemorials to Court, transiated by Ha Tae-hung and edited by Lee Ghong-young(Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1981), 197.

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legend, the stone in the forehead of the Great Buddha of SökkuramGrotto turns red every time Japan threatens to invade. It would beappropriate to have a similar warning system for China.

The Kingdom of Ghosön—"The Land of the Morning Galm"—rosefrom the rubble of civil wars and Ghinese invasions in 1392 and surviveduntil 1910, but the ruling dynasty, founded by General Yi Song-gye,eould never eseape an awful geopolitical reality: the Korean peninsulaserved as the military marehes for both .Japan and China—and for wavesof Mongols and Manehurians bent on visiting .lapan. When the divisionsof the Ghinese People's Volunteers Force (Renmin Zhiyuanjun) sweptinto the Ilan River valley in January 1951, they trod the same groundravaged by the Mongols in the thirteenth eentury. When the FifthMarines, a regiment of the U.S. 1st Marine Division, erossed the HanRiver on 20 September 1950 on its way to Seoul, the Marines marehedby the monument of Haengjujuansong fortress, the site of a desperateand futile battle against the Japanese in 1592. There are few battlefieldsin Korea that are the site of only one past engagement. Koreans eomparethemselves to a sehool of shrimp eaught between two whales. Whetherthe whales are fighting or making love—not to mention feeding—theshrimp have a short life expeetaney.

The nineteenth eentury brought a new set of military adventurers toKorea: the Europeans and the now-Europeanized Japanese. OnKanghwa-do (island) at the mouth of the Han River, one ean find monu-ments and restored fortifieations dedieated to the valiant but out-gunnedKoreans who opposed French, American, and Japanese naval expedi-tionary forées in 1866,1871, and 1875. The two major regional wars thatsealed Korea's fate as a Japanese colony—the Sino-Japanese War(1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5)—ineluded battles onKorean soil or in Korean waters. Ironieally, neither of the world warsmade Korea a battlefield for foreign powers. A worse fate awaited theKorean people, a civil war of sueh devastating proportions that one hadto look baek to the Japanese invasions of the 1590s for appropriateprecedents in suffering.

Although Korean folklore foeuses upon the tragedy of foreign inva-sions, Korean history is hardly free of eivil strife. The Korean people donot need the encouragement of foreign devils to fight each other. The Yidynasty came to power in a war that followed the collapse of the King-dom of Koryo (to whieh North Korea still traees its own legitimacy),whieh had sueeeeded in turn the Kingdom of Unified Shilla. The Shilladynasty (based in Kyongju, today a national historieal shrine in theRepublic of Korea) had triumphed over an earlier Koguryô kingdom andthe rival Paekche kingdom, based in the modern Gholla provinces ofsouthwestern Korea, an area notorious for its rebelliousness.

Even when the dynastie and foreign wars faded in severity in the

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- Introduction to the Korean War

nineteenth century, the progressive erosion of Korean traditional soci-ety—based on hereditary land-holding and Confucian family and socialdeference patterns—brought a series of populist agrarian uprisings thatfused economic discontent with millennialism of a distinctly Asian cast.The Yi Dynasty faced popular revolts of serious proportions in 1812 and1862. Like the Taipings in China, the Korean rebels sought some sort ofrejuvenation that drove off foreign-based modernity and restored someperfect (imagined) past of social harmony. In Korea the last and most sig-nificant of these revolts—the Tonghak ("Eastern Learning") Rebellion of1895—led the Yi dynasty to seek aid from Russia, China, and Japan, thussetting the stage for its own demise. Apparently when the whales are oth-erwise engaged, the shrimp eat eaeh othcr.^

For all these Korean wars, the war of 1950-53 still rises above all theother communal and international violence just as the great mountain ofPaek Tu-san rises above all the other mountains as a symbol of Koreanidentity and endurance. For American historians, the war of 1950-53could be either forgotten or misunderstood. Even within the eontext ofWorld War II and the Cold War era, the Korean War was usually justignored. Such a cavalier treatment simply reflected a historiographiealphenomenon, whieh was to insist that what really made wars memorablewas their lasting impaet upon national domestic development, an insu-larity that has been the bane of American intclleetual inquiry through-out the twentieth eentury. The American Revolution and the Civil War(or War of the Rebellion or the War Between the States) took their sig-nificance from their impact on the course of Ameriean socio-eeonomiehistory. The War with Mexieo or the War with Spain, forever importantin the history of American foreign relations, are relatively unstudiedexcept among eccentric Ameriean intelleetuals and the whole Spanish-speaking world. World War II is the great exception sinee its impaet onboth American domestic life and international relations has been obvi-ous, although the critique of American performance in that war is stillbased on domestic (corporatist-revisionist) eriteria worthy of the Jeffer-sonian isolationists. The Vietnam War (1958-75) confused Americanthinking even further since it became a war lost by the United States andits Vietnamese allies that had virtually no international ramifications,unless one is Cambodian. Yet that war produced a soeial and nationalrevolution in Vietnam and a generational political trauma in the United

2. Korean Overseas Information Service,/I i/andboofe of Korea (Seoui: Hoiiym,1990); Andrew C. Nahm, Korea: Tradition and Transformation (Seoul: Hollym,1988); Peter Hyun. Koreana (Seoul: Korea Britannica, 1984); and Keith Pratt andRichard Rutt, eomps., Korea: A Historical and Cultural Dictionary (Durham, U.K.:Curzon, 1999).

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States. Caught between the whales of World War II and the Vietnam War,the Korean War shrank to shrimp-like proportions in the Ameriean con-seiousness.-"

The historical signifieance of the Korean War must be sought else-where than in the popular memory of Amerieans, even those who foughtin Korea. With an estimated three million-plus deaths of all nationalities,the Korean War still ranks behind only the two world wars as the mostcostly war of the twentieth century in terms of human lives lost. Even ifsome other eonfliet eventually lays a stronger elaim to this dubious dis-tinetion of deadliness, the Korean War will still rank with the worst of theeontlicts that followed World War II, wars that killed an estimated twentymillion by the century's end.

In the history of international eonfliet the Korean War is one ofmany wars of decolonization and posteolonial political succession thatswept away four eenturies of European (and Japanese) imperialism. Withall the World War II belligerents except the United States prostrated bytheir wartime losses, the client states of the Middle East and the coloniesof Asia and Africa faced an unpreeedented opportunity to declare theirindependent existenee. "Deelaring" often proved easy compared to thechallenge of "being" a new nation, but rational policies and reforms sel-dom drove the "freedom fighters" of the 1940s and 1950s. Like genera-tions of rebels before them, the leaders of "the wars of nationalliberation" proved more adept at taking power than governing.

Wars of posteolonial independence and political succession sweptAsia in the wake of the dual collapse of European and Japanese colo-nialism. Only the Kingdom of Thailand, which maintained its delieateindependence by playing Great Britain and Franee off against oneanother in the Southeast Asian version of "The Great Game," eseaped adivisive eivil war. The general pattern was first to drive out the Europeanoccupying power with terrorism and guerrilla warfare, balaneed with deftnegotiations and promises of useful future (usually eeonomic) relation-ships. Often the independenee fighters based their appeal and politiealorganization on their resistance to the Japanese oeeupations—andsometimes their collaboration with the Japanese. Nothing prevented theindependence fighters from fighting each other either sinee just whowould succeed the banished foreigners carried high stakes. Not surpris-

3. See, for example, Russell R Weigley, The American Way of War: A History ofUnited States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Maemillan, 1973); John Shy,"The Ameriean Military Experience: History and Learning," Journal o/Interdiscipli-nary History 1 (Winter 1971): 205-28; David M. Kennedy, "War and the AmericanCharacter," Stanford Magazine 3 (Spring-Summer 1974): 14-18, 70-72; Reginald C.Stuart, "War, Society, and the 'New' Military History of the United States," CanadianReview of American Studies 8 (Spring 1977): 1-10; and Edward M. Goffman, "TheNew American Military History," Military Aßairs 84 (January 1984): 1-5.

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ingly, the withdrawing powers had strong preferences about just whichnationalist leaders replaced the colonial government. By definition theAsian nations were dealing with revolution. Whatever new socio-eco-nomic system emerged after independence, it would not be premodern,and it would transform the village, communal, agrarian culture thatcharacterized all of Asia except Japan.

In terms of long-term historical significance the Chinese civil war,which began in the 1920s and ended in the spring of 1950 with the con-quest of Hainan Island, dominates the history of the Asian wars ofnational liberation, but it was only one of many. The division of BritishIndia into India and Pakistan turned communal violence into internaland international conflict that has not ended in more than fifty years;Pakistan, still stung by the loss of its Bengali "eastern state," faces Indiaafter three wars. India has fought pro-Pakistani China four times in theHimalayas and supports the Tamil rebellion in the island-state of SriLanka. It has attempted to crush Sikh dissidents for twenty years. Fourwars finally brought an independent Laos, Cambodia, and unified Viet-nam with Communist Vietnam regulars finally swaying the balance inLaos and Cambodia.

The Indonesians fought off an Anglo-Indian-Dutch occupation forcein 1945-47, but waited until the 1960s to kill each other in the hundredsof thousands in a war-of-succession waged between the Communists andMoslem nationalists, whose generals replaced the "father of his country"for almost forty years, Achmet Sukarno. Burma went into geo-politicalreclusiveness (and took the name Myanmar) in part through the ravagesof continued wars between Burmese factions and non-Burmese moun-tain peoples (the Shan, the Chin, the Kachin) with grievances that arenow at least over fifty years old. Contemporary Malaysia and Singaporewere born in twenty years of guerrilla warfare that accompanied inde-pendence and pitted the Moslem-Malay majority (favored by the British)against a Chinese (largely Communist-led) minority. Even with inde-pendence guaranteed by the United States, the Philippines had to endure(and still endures) a civil war between the americanistas or prowesternnationalists and the Communist leaders of the Hukbalahaps, not to beconfused, of course, with the continuing warfare against all Filipinosconducted by the Moslem tribes of Mindanao. Only Japan's timely sur-render in 1945, followed by an occupation monopolized by the UnitedStates and the prompt but modest reform of some Japanese institutions,may have spared Japan its own civil war.

The contemporaneous history of conflict in the states between theMediterranean and Indus River adds further insight into the trans-regional phenomenon of postcolonial wars of political succession. Thefirst collapse came in World War I, not World War II, with the defeat anddismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of modern

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Turkey after a civil war and multinational foreign interventions in the1920s. Since the French and British "special relationships" that emergedin the 1920s allowed native rulers to lead "independent" countries, thepost-1945 transition to truer independence was less bloody, but cer-tainly not peaceful as British veterans of the Palestinian occupation,1945-47, can attest. With the independence of Israel setting the stage forfour major wars and sixty years (and eounting) of conflict in the Levant,the region was probably doomed to endless war. The Arab-Israeli eon-frontation, however, does not define the history of war and revolution inthe Arab and Persian world. With the exception of the House of Saud, theHashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and some of the smaller sheikdoms andsultanates of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, there is no other successorregime in the region that has maintained itself and none without civilrepression or foreign intervention. The al-Sabahs would be, for example,gone from Kuwait without the international intervention of 1990-91.The monarehs of Egypt and Ethiopia are gone, along with the first gen-eration of military strongmen and elan leaders of Eritrea, Somalia, andthe Sudan. The pro-European elites of Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq are asdeparted as King Nebuehadnezzar, and the Pahlevi family's grasp on thePeaeoek Throne of Iran is just as dead as that of Darius and Xerxes. Whoremembers the names of the last kings of Libya and Afghanistan?* Thepostcolonial wars since 1945 may not ehange geography, but they haveeertainly reshaped the politieal terrain outside Europe and North Amer-

Outsidc isolated rural villages in central Korea the enterprising trav-eler can still find an oeeasional pair of giant wooden, carved figures thatlook suspieiously to an Ameriean like totem poles. They are changsung,symbols of the dualism of good and evil and a plea to the mystical forcesof nature to proteet the village. Deeorated to represent a male spirit anda female spirit, the changsung do not look friendly, eertainly not to eaehother, but their powers are supposed to work in eoneert to proteet thepeople. Like the changsung, two politieal movements arose in twentieth-century Korea, both dedicated to the ereation of a strong, modern,revived Korea, sufficiently transformed to use its national economic, mil-itary, and spiritual power to preserve its independence from both China

4. They happen to be the same: Idris.5. For a review of eonflict since 1945, see Patriek Brogan, World Conflicts: A

Comprehensive Guide to World Strife Since 1945 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press,1998); Dan Smith for the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, The State qfWar and Peace Atlas, 3d ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1997); and Field Marshal LordMichael Carver, War Since 1945, rev. ed. (London: Ashfield Press, 1990). On the phe-nomenon of rebellion, see J. Bowyer Bell, On Revolt: Strategies of National Libera-tion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).



and Japan, yet still remain Korean at its cultural eore. The concept ofjuche—self-reliance—knows no Demilitarized Zone. Both movementswere revolutionary, not just in their dedication to driving away theJapanese imperialists, but in their vision of a new Korea. Like the chang-sung they needed each other and thus hated their reciprocated interde-pendence.

The bitter rivalry of the Christian-capitalist modernizers and Marx-ist-Leninists in Korea dates from the 1920s. Neither movement enjoyedany special advantages in leadership, organizational skill, moral legiti-macy, economic leverage, or good luck. Both movements became targetsof all forms of individual and collective repression by the Japanese. Bothby 1945 had become expatriate movements, tainted to some degree bytheir associations abroad with the Chinese, Japanese radicals, the Rus-sians, and the Americans, but equally dependent on foreign toleration orassistance for their survival. By Liberation Day (15 August 1945) the twoKorean revolutionary movements stood poised to transfer their parallelstruggle against Japan to a direct confrontation with each other, a con-flict that would have occurred whether the United States and SovietUnion had divided Korea into occupation zones or not.

The Christian-capitalist modernizers had the advantage of pride ofhistorical place in Korean reformism, opposition to Japanese colonial-ism, and political activism. The modernizers' first organizational effortcoincided with the arrival of the first wave of Methodist and Presbyter-ian missionaries after 1885 and the end of repression against the embat-tled Catholic church, whose first permanent mission had come to Seoulin 1791.

Elements of the Court of King Kojong favored countering Japaneseinfluence by allowing American, Canadian, British, and European mis-sionaries and entrepreneurs more freedom. Education, medicine, andengineering were the most favored missionary projects. The Japanesewon the political race, but not before the nationalist modernizers hadgained footholds in the Pae Chae Boys School, Choson Christian College,the Independence Club, Severance Hospital, and the Seoul CentralYMCA, as well as the Protestant congregations and mission headquar-ters. Some modernizers never identified themselves as Christians forvarious philosophical and personal reasons. For example, the Christiansdiscouraged anti-Japanese violence, which did not sit well with thoseultra-nationalists who had survived the Righteous Armies War of 1907-9,a populist uprising against the Japanese that took eighteen thousandKorean lives. These secular ultra-nationalists, however, were willing tocooperate in a limited way with the Christians' passive resistance.

The key event for the Christian-modernizer movement occurred inthe Samil (1 March 1919) Independence Movement, a popular anti-Japanese demonstration in Seoul occasioned by the death of former King

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Kojong. A coalition of fifty nationalist leaders signed and published aDeclaration of Independenee near Independence Gate (Tongnimun), amonument to antiforcign resistance. All but one of the signatories was apracticing Christian or member of Chondogyo ("Heavenly Way"), aKorean religious movement that mixed Christianity with traditionalAsian spiritual values. The Deelaration brought a million Koreans intothe streets of the major cities where the protest marchers chanted "Dae-han Tongrip Mansei" or "Long Live Korean Independenee" and waivedthe outlawed taegukki or Korean national flag. The Japanese colonialpolice and army crushed the movement, killing more than 1,000 Kore-ans at a cost of nine security forces lives. The Japanese arrested 19,500Koreans, executed or jailed 3,000, and burned thousands of homes,schools, churches, and temples. Movement survivors and simply terrifiedmembers of the urban middle class fled to Manehuria, China, Russia, andthe United States.

The collapse of the Samil Independence Movement encouraged theself-proclaimed "revolutionary option" of Marxist-Leninism to fill thenationalist vacuum. The first organized Korean Communists formed thePeople's Socialist Party in 1918 in Siberia, a Bolshevik effort to enlist theKorean expatriates in the war against the Russian "Whites" and Japan-ese Siberian expeditionary force. These Koreans provided the initialleadership of the Korean Communist Party and Korean CommunistYouth Assoeiation, whieh set up organizing committees within Korea in1925. For twenty years the Korean Communists surged and ebbed inpower, mounting five different protest movements and enduring fiveperiods of successful repression by the Japanese-Korean colonial policeand military units. Communist-Christian conflict became a war within awar after the Communists, which now included Chinese-sponsoredKoreans, subverted and betrayed Shinganhoe, a promising mass nation-alist association led by Christians and secular nationalists, between 1927and 1931. The Japanese drove various Communist guerrilla bands (partof larger Chinese Communist partisan divisions) from Korea andManchuria into the Soviet Union in 1940-41. When the Asia-Pacific Warof 1941-45 began, the Communists had no decisive advantage over theother expatriate Korean nationalists.

The Asia-Pacific war deepened and accelerated the prerevolutionarysoeio-eeonomie upheaval of the Korean people and heartened the lead-ers of the two Korean revolutionary movements. The Japanese war effortdrained Korea: tens of thousands of "comfort women," hundreds of thou-sands of industrial and military construetion workers, tens of thousandsof auxiliary Korean soldiers to guard prison camps or conduct counter-partisan operations, millions of tons of coal and minerals, and millions oftons of rice. Korean rice produetion doubled despite the loss of chemical



fertilizers and pesticides; Korean rice consumption dropped by half.Even though Korea escaped direct physical destruction, eivie despairdeepened and the publie soeial and eeonomic infrastructure deterio-rated. Moreover, wartime mobilization foreed Koreans—espeeially theChristian nationalists—into an ever more difficult position in their rela-tions with the Japanese. The police power of the colonial government,ruthlessly applied, made survival and eoUaborationism virtually synony-mous. "Pure" patriots existed only in hiding or exile. Of the postlibera-tion competing leaders, the Christian-modernizers and ultra-nationalists(Kim Ku, Syngman Rhee, Yi Pom-sok, Kim Kyu-sik) remained in exile orremained out of publie life (Cho Man-sik, Yo Un-hyong) in Korea. TheCommunists disappeared underground and beeame inactive (Pak Hon-yong. Ho Kia-I) or joined some part of the anti-Fascist war effort in Chinaor Russia (Kim Tu-bong, Kim Mu-bong, Kim Chaek, Chae Yong-gun, NamII, Kim Il-sung). With weak organizations and overweening politicalambition, both sets of revolutionaries waited for the Japanese Empire toeommit seppuku with the assistance of the American armed forces.'

The Korean War began in August 1945 in the classical pattern ofwhat Mao Zedong and other Asian revolutionaries called a "people's warof national liberation." The conflict in Korea, however, was a people'swar with a difference because two revolutionary liberation movementsfollowed parallel paths to power, but succeeded in dominating only half

6. Carter J. Eekert et al., Korea: Old and New: A History (Seoul: Il-ehokak,1990), 199-253; James B. Palais, Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Har\'ard University Press, 1975); Homer B. Hulbert, The History ofKorea, 2 vols. (Seoul: Methodist Publishing House, 1905); Edward S. Mason et al.. TheEconomic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1980); Chong-sik Lee, The Polities of Korean Nationalism(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); Kenneth M. Wells, New God, NewNation: Protestants and Self-Reconstruction in Korea, 1896-1937 (Honolulu: Uni-versity of Hawaii Press, 1990); Donald N. Clark, Christianity in Modem Korea (Lan-ham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986); George L. Paik, The History ofProtestant Missions in Korea, 1832-1910 (Pyongyang: Union College Press, 1929);Wi Jo Kang, Christ and Caesar in Modem Korea: A History of Christianity and Pol-itics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Robert Sealapino andChong-sik Lee, Communism in Korea, vol. 1, The Movement (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1972); Suh Dae-sook, The Korean Communist Movement,1918-1949 (Princeton, N.J : Princeton University Press, 1967); and Suh Dae-sook,Kim Il-sung (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

For personal stories, see J. Earnest Fisher, Pioneers of Modem Korea (Si lul :Christian Literature Society of Korea, 1977), and Richard Saecone, Koreans toRemember (Seoul: HoUmy, 1993). For the Ameriean-Korean eonnection, see Tae-Hwan Kwaii et al., eds., U.S.-Korean Relations, 1882-1982 (Seoul: Kyungnam Uni-versity Press, 1982).

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the country. The division was assymetrical in almost every way. TheRepublic of Korea got a population twice the size of the Democratic Peo-ple's Republic of Korea and the best arable river valleys, but North Koreagot all the hydro-electric power and coal and mineral resources, as wellas the Japanese-built industrial base sited near the energy sources. Bothsides attempted to establish a single national government for Koreathrough all measures short of full-scale war: economic intimidation, thecreating of "fronts" and coalitions, denouncing the American and Russ-ian occupation governments, bribery and corruption-patronage, politicalassassinations and betrayals, street demonstrations and strikes, urbanterrorism directed at police and civic leaders, purges and pogroms, andthe manipulation of occupation officials. Although the Communists(with Soviet assistance) crushed all non-Communist opposition north ofthe 38th Parallel by 1950, the nationalist-modernizers had far more dif-ficulty eliminating the challenge of the South Korean Labor Party, in partbecause of American ambivalence about the goals and methods of themodernizers, eventually dominated by Syngman Rhee. A partisan warthat began in March 1948 could not stop the creation of the Republic ofKorea, but it could create a situation that matched the second phase ofa People's War, the use of unconventional warfare to erode a central gov-ernment's ability to defend itself.'

The role of the American and Russian occupation governments wasthat of willing patron to the most acceptable revolutionaries—from theirperspective. The Russians in Pyongyang (political officers all) seem tohave embraced Kim Il-sung with little hesitation, although they forcedhim to tolerate other Communist challengers, if not indefinitely. Theyhad no need to fuel his ambition to rule all Korea. The American patron-age pattern is more complex and ambiguous. The initial occupationregime—U.S. Army Forces in Korea and U.S. Army Government inKorea—in southern Korea had one over-riding mission: to disarm andrepatriate all the Japanese to the Home Islands. Thereafter, USAMGIKand all its Korean employees and advisers struggled to keep the peacewhile someone, somewhere figured out how to create a legitimate

7. Gregory Henderson, Korea: The Politics of the Vortex (Gambridge, Mass.: Har-vard University Press, 1968); Joungwon A. Kim, Divided Korea: The Politics of Devel-opment, 1945-1972 (Gambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975); CiiristopherThome, The Far Eastern War: States arul Societies, 1941-45 (London: Unwin, 1985);Bruee Gumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 1, Liberation and the Emergenceof Separate Regimes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); Nam Koon-woo. The North Korean Communist Leadership, 1945-1965 (Tuscaloosa: Universityof Alabama Press, 1974); Robert T. Oiiver, Syngman Rhee and American Involve-ment in Korea, 1942-1960 (Seoul: Panmun, 1978); and James L Matray, The Reluc-tant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941-1950 (Honolulu: Universityof Hawaii Press, 1985).

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national government for all of Korea. It was an impossible task at whichKorean politieal leaders, an Ameriean-Soviet trusteeship eommission,and a United Nations Commission all failed.

The American military officers wanted USAFIK (mostly the U.S.XXIV Corps of three divisions) to be relieved of its peaeekeeping dutiesand its units redeployed or demobilized. The U.S. Army accepted a con-tinuing responsibility for advising and training a Korean Constabulary(Army after Deeember 1948), and it aeeepted Syngman Rhee as the leastobjectionable Korean leader. The State Department wanted Americantroops to remain in Korea, but eould not eounter the Army's budgetaryand Strategie arguments for withdrawal, even after the outbreak of guer-rilla warfare and border elashes between regular Korean forées in1948-49. The diplomats wanted Ameriean engagement in Korea—largely for the leverage that engagement provided American influenee inJapan—but they did not regard Syngman Rhee with mueh enthusiasm.The North Korean invasion of June 1950 did not solve this problem."

8. John Merrill, Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War (Newark: Universityof Delaware Press, 1989); Chi-Young Pak, Political Opposition in Korea, 1945-1960(Seoul: Seoul National University, 1980); Bruce Cumings, The Origins qf the KoreanWar, vol. 2, The Roaring qf the Cataract, 1947-1950 (Princeton, N.J.: Prineeton Uni-versity Press, 1990).

Scholarly aeeounts of the Korean eonflict and the roots of the Cold War in Asiainclude Peter Lowe, The Origins qfthe Korean War (London: Longman, 1986); Yono-suke Nagai and Akira Wye, eds.. The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York andTokyo: Columbia University Press and University of Tokyo Press, 1977); Bniee Cum-ings, ed-. Child of Conflict: The Korean-American Relationship, 1943-1953 (Seattle:University of Washington Press, 1983); William W. Steuck, Jr., The Road to Con-frontation: American Policy toward China and Korea, 1947-1950 (Chapel Hiil: Uni-versity of North Carolina Press, 1981); Huh Nam-sung, "The Quest for a Bulwark ofAnti-Communism: The Formation of the Korean Army Officer Corps and its PolitiealSocialization, 1945-1950" (Ph.D. diss.. Ohio State University, 1987); Lee Young-woo,"The United States and the Formation of the Republic of Korea Army, 1945-1950"(Ph.D. diss.. Duke University, 1984). My own documentary researeh, however, in therecords of the Korean Military Advisory Group and the reeords of the 971st CICDetachment (Korea) is the basis of my understanding of the partisan war, 1948-50;these reeords are in USAFIK Historical Files, RG 332, National Archives and RecordsAdministration, Washington, D.C. My own assessment appears in "Captain James H.Hausman and the Formation of the Korean Army, 1945-1950," Armed Forces andSociety 23 (Summer 1997): 503-39, and "The Forgotten Army in the MisunderstoodWar: The Hanguk Gun in the Korean War, 1946-1953," in Peter Dennis and JeffreyGrey, eds.. The Korean War, 1950-1953: A Fifty Year Retrospective (Canberra, Aus-tralia: The Chief of Army's Military History Conference, 2000), 1-26. My assessmentis based on extensive inter\'iews with Lt. Col. Hausman, former offieers of KMAG andtheir eontemporary diaries and letters, and retired general offieers of the Koreanarmy. See also the dissertations by To-Woong Chung, "The Role of the U.S. Occupa-tion in the Creation of the South Korean Armed Forces, 1945-1950" (Kansas StateUniversity, 1985), and Kim Kook-hun, "The North Korean People's Army: Its Rise andFall, 1945-1950" (University of London, 1989).

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Convinced that South Korea had reached an economic and spiritualbreaking point and had been abandoned by the United States, Kim II-sung persuaded Stalin and Mao Zedong (with the aid of his Soviet advis-ers) to back an escalation to conventional war in June 1950, the thirdphase of People's War. The co-conspirators agreed that the South Koreanarmy and government ("puppets") would collapse and that Americanmilitary intervention—if any—would be ineffective and tardy. This rea-sonable but completely wrong calculation would cost millions of peo-ple—mostly Koreans—their lives.

The Korean War that everyone knows (1950-53) is the third phaseof the Korean People's War, the war that began with an invasion acrossan international border (as established by the United Nations) and endedwith an Armistice Agreement (still in force) in July 1953. Of course, amore accurate description is that the People's War reverted to Phase II:political and military coercion. This war is best understood as a set ofinteracting diadic relationships. The first diad—and most obvious—isdetermined by war aims: (1) victory in terms of a unified Korea as pur-sued by both the Koreas, the People's Republic of China, the SovietUnion, the United States, and the United Nations; and (2) some sort ofnegotiated temporary status quo ante bellum, acceptable to all the bel-ligerents but only to the two Koreas after their great power patronsassured them of continued mihtary protection and economic assistance.The second diad is strategic-operational and also obvious: (1) the war ofmaneuver, June 1950-October 1951 in which both coalition armies con-ducted major offensives; and (2) the "stalemate," "trench warfare"period in which military operations had limited goals tied to the courseof the armistice negotiations. Americans might call this the "Pork ChopHill war," although the Chinese have greater reason to memorialize theBattle of Shangangling and the South Koreans the Battle of Paekmasan(White Horse Mountain). These first two diadie relationships, however,reflect several less appreciated causal diads that define the Korean Warin truly Asian ways. What one thinks one sees is not necessarily theessential truth.

The conduct and consequences of the Korean War should be under-stood in terms of at least six diadie conflicts. One is the tension betweenFar East Command (Tokyo) and the American civil-military leadershipcoalition in Washington. This conflict is not just the Truman-MacArthurcontroversy, but includes two wartime presidents, a group of StateDepartment officials and two Secretaries of State, two Secretaries ofDefense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and three theater commanders. Atissue was the current and future role of the United States in Asia and themeaning of forward, collective defense and nuclear deterrence. This



diadic relationship, however, was also affeeted by conflict between three8th Army commanders and three theater eommanders over strategy andthe relative balanee between air and ground operations. Interservicerelations were not a critical problem, nor were there serious difficultieswith the United Nations military contingents. It is far more important tofoeus on the American-South Korean political and military collaborationand conflict since Syngman Rhee proved to he a determined nationalleader and very difficult ally.

The Korean War is not just an American war or a proxy Cold Warconflict, but an Asian war. In November, 1951 the war became anotherKorean effort to defend itself from a Chinese invasion, a change thatallowed a real national mobilization and strengthened the Rhee regimeand made Japanese participation more acceptable. The Chinese-Sovietalliance created another important diadic relationship—also eharacter-ized by conflict—that shaped the war. After Stalin's death in Mareh 1953,the Soviet leadership was ready to abandon the war, but Mao Zedong wasnot, largely because he believed the U.S.-ROK alliance was about to eol-lapse. The Chinese also knew that both Korean regimes had internalconflicts, so Mao's concern was to support Kim Il-sung while the Com-munists waited for the Rhee regime to commit political suicide as italmost did in a constitutional crisis in 1952 and in the dispute with theUnited States over POW repatriation in 1953. It is also worth remem-bering that the two Koreas eondueted a partisan war against each otherthat continued after June 1950. United Nations partisan forces con-ducted raids into North Korea throughout the war while Communistguerrillas remained a serious problem in 1950-52 and a considerablenuisance in 1953 and afterwards.

The Chinese Strategie dilemma illustrates the complex interaetion ofa People's War turned international. In January 1950 Mao Zedong finallypried a mutual security agreement from the Soviet Union that was aimedat Japan and the United States. Subsequent negotiations over 1950-51produced three areas of military aid Mao and his generals desperatelywanted, not just to defend the People's Republic but to conduct opera-tions in Tibet, Formosa, and Korea. These requirements were a modernChinese air foree, the ordnance modernization and standardization ofthe People's Liberation Army, and the ereation of an independent mili-tary-industrial infrastructure. Chinese intervention in Korea justifiedthese programs and—perhaps—might drive down the Russian ehargesfor military assistance, which was not free. The Chinese, however, hadto keep fighting (and dying) to keep Stalin's military aid coming. TheRussians refused to commit their air defense forces (air and ground) toanything but the defense of Manehuria, whieh meant a severe drain onChinese and North Korean manpower and munitions to keep any sort oflogistical system functioning within Korea to support a coalition ground

MILITARY HISTORY 933

ALLAN R. MILLETT-

army of 1.5 million after 1951. Although Communist artillery became aserious problem in 1952-53 for the United Nations troops,Chinese-North Korean shell expenditures still fell below those of UnitedNations Command by a factor of three or four. Although Chinese militaryeffectiveness remained good through the end of the war, the People's Lib-eration Army that won the Chinese eivil war was close to destruetion byJuly 1953. The major Chinese offensives of autumn 1952 and spring-summer 1953 cannot be explained only by some negotiating strategy forPanmunjom.

The Chinese-Russian "Great Game" over military assistance gaveKim Il-sung an unparalleled opportunity to push aside and eventuallypurge Korean Communists who represented Chinese and Russian inter-ests. Kim Il-sung (like Syngman Rhee) emerged from the Armistice farmore powerful than he had been in June 1950 when such potential rivalsas Kim Tu-bong, Pak Hon-yong, and Ho Kai-i might still have forced someform of collective leadership upon Kim. By 1954 all three of these menwere dead or disgraced. Senior North Korean army offieers with Chineseand Russian military ties did not escape eventual purging but they man-aged to escape North Korea with their lives. A fast learner, Kim Il-sungperpetuated Stalinism more than forty years after his role model'sdeath."

9. The best of the published works are William Stueck, The Korean War: AnInternational History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Clay Blair,The Forgotten War: Korea, America in Korea, 1950-1953 (New York: Times Books,1987); Callum MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam (New York: Free Press,1986); and Anthony Farrar-Hockley, The British Part in the Korean War, 2 vols.,(London: HMSO, 1990 and 1995). The best perspectives on the U.S. experience of thewar are Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the TrumanAdministration, and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992);Doris M. Condit, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: The Test of War,1950-1953 (Washington: Historical Office, OSD, 1988); James F. Schnäble, U.S. Armyin the Korean War: Policy and Direction: The First Year (Washington: Office of theCiiicf of Military History, 1972), and Burton 1. Kaufman, The Korean War: Challengesin Crisis, Credibility, and Command (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press,1986); MIS/Gs, GHQ, UNG, "One Year in Korea, A Summary, 15 June 1950-25 June1951," 1951, copy in the General James A. Van Fleet Papers, George G. MarshallLibrary, Lexington, Virginia, a significant new source of Korean War documentationin the United States, and Hdqs. Eighth United States Army, transcript, "Year-End Tac-tical Briefing," Correspondents Billets, Seoul, Korea, 24 December 1952; Hdqs. UNG(OAG/S G-5 Civil Affairs), transcript, "Briefing Conference on Republic of Korea forUnified Command Mission to the ROK," Tokyo, 9-12 April 1952, Gen. Thomas Her-ren Papers, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania; Mil-itary History Department, Korean Institute of Military History, The Korean War, 3vols. (Seoul: Ministry of National Defense, 1999-2001).

For the Soviet Union and People's Republie of Ghina, see, for example, Sergei N.Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and theKorean War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993); Shu-Guang Zhang,

934 * THE JOIIRNAL OF

- Introduction to the Korean War

The Korean War requires "new thinking" that deals with the conflictas a war of postcolonial succession, a People's War of revolutionarynational liberation, and a war of regional and global great power inter-vention. It is eertainly not the only war of sueh eomplexity. In additionto the contemporaneous wars in Asia, the wars of the last seventy yearsin Spain, Algeria, Greece, Cyprus, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, the Congo, andAfghanistan show similar eharacteristies.

If the postcolonial wars of liberation and political succession areviewed only as proxy wars eaused and shaped by the great power rival-ries of the Cold War, they will have little lasting meaning exeept as his-torieal curiosities. If these wars were only the spawn of a global struggleof two eompetitive social and economic systems, they presumably woulddisappear as that rivalry waned. Such is not the ease. The Korean Warremains not only a contemporary security issue since it created the twoKoreas, but stands as a cautionary tale for explaining wars already inprogress and wars yet to come.

Deterrence and Strategic Culture: Chinese-American Cor\frontations, 1949-1958(Ithaea, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992) and Mao's Military Romanticism: Chinaand the Korean War, 1950-1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 1995); ChenJian, China's Rqad to the Korean War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994);Harry Harding and Yuan Ming, eds., Sino-American Relations, 1945-1955 (Wilming-ton, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989); Mark A. Ryan, Chinese Attituiles TowardNuclear Weapons: China and the United States During the Korean War (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1989); Robert Simmons, The Strained Alliance: Peking, Pyongyang,Moscow, and the Politics of the Korean Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1975);Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, inside the Kremlin's Cold WarfromStalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Eugeniy PBajanov and Natalia Bajanova, "The Korean Conflict, 1950-1953," MS history. Insti-tute for Contemporary International Problems, Russian Foreign Ministry, 1997 (V).The author has been privileged to join Professor Yu Bin and Li Xiobing in editing ananthology of memoirs and reports by the senior eommandcrs of the Chinese People'sVolunteers Foree, Moo's Generals Remember Korea (Lawrence: University Press ofKansas, 2001). Essential to discussion of the Communist side of the war are the mate-Hals published by the Cold War International History Projeet, Woodrow Wilson Inter-national Center for Seholars, Washington, D.C. especially The Cold War in Asia 6-7(Winter 1995-96). For an important collection of participant testimony on Chineseand Soviet participation in the war, see Kim ChuU-baum, ed.. The Truth about theKorean War (Seoul: Eulyoo Publishing 1991). Dr Kim was a pioneer in Korean warstudies and president of the Korean War Studies Association, Seoul, Korea, until hisuntimely death in 1995.

For a literature review, see Allan R. Millett, "The Korean War: A 50-Year Criti-cal Historiography," Journal of Strategic Studies 24 (March 2001 ): 188-224. See alsoYasuda Jun, "A Survey: China and the Korean War," Sociai Science Japan Journal 1(1998): 71-83.

MILITARY HISTORY * ^ ^ 5

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Introduction to the Korean War