The Korean War: History in an Hour. Andrew Mulholland

warriors. By the sixteenth century, Japan had emerged as a powerful regional player and it too sought the conquest of the peninsula. The result was devastation, widespread slaughter, economic and agricultural collapse. Little surprise, then, that by the early nineteenth century, Korea had become something of a hermit nation, anxious to minimize contact with outside cultures.

      Under the Joseon dynasty this policy worked for a time, with a period of relative tranquillity and prosperity. Chinese suzerainty was formally acknowledged, but without onerous conditions. The growing imperial ambitions of Japan and Russia, however, combined with their superior technology and large armed forces, would shortly undermine this wish to be left alone.

      In 1876 the Joseons signed an overtly exploitative treaty with Japan, granting her significant trading rights. Six years later, in what for a time proved a shrewd piece of diplomacy, Korea signed a treaty with the United States. Brokered by China, this deal helped to offset the influence of the Japanese, who were already basing troops in Korea. Tensions were high, as China and Japan controlled different factions within the weak Korean government. In 1885, both China and Japan agreed to withdraw all of their forces from the peninsula. Yet when in 1894 the Korean emperor requested Chinese assistance in putting down a rebellion, Japan used this as a pretext to send an expeditionary force of her own. This resulted in the First Sino-Japanese War.

      Within nine months China had capitulated and Japan’s influence in Korea became even stronger. Now though, she found she had another major power competing for influence in the region: Russia. As early as 1896 at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, the Japanese had proposed the formal division of Korea, into zones of Russian and Japanese ‘influence’. Foreshadowing things to come, a dividing line was suggested along the 38th Parallel. The Russians were interested in the area for strategic reasons. They had no warm water port on the Pacific Ocean. The large Russian naval base at Vladivostok froze during the winter. Port Arthur in Chinese Manchuria was different – it remained open. It was an excellent natural harbour and fortress and, indeed, had been briefly seized by Japan. Direct military threats from Britain and France had eventually forced her to return it to China.

      The Korean peninsula lies between Vladivostok and Port Arthur. The Russians leased Port Arthur from China in 1898 and built a railway connecting it to Harbin in China and thence Vladivostok, running along the northern border of Korea. The components were in place for increasing rivalry with Japan.

      After years of fruitless negotiation, Japan attacked Russia in 1904 and inflicted a devastating defeat on the Tsar’s armies and fleet. She now emerged as the dominant military power in the region. A corollary of that was the eventual full colonization of Korea. It was the USA, also an emerging power during this period, that oversaw the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth which facilitated this. In exchange, President Theodore Roosevelt is alleged to have secured tacit Japanese acceptance of US dominance in the Philippines. Article Two of the treaty explicitly recognized that Japan had ‘paramount political, military and economical interests’ in Korea. That same year, the Japanese forced Korea to accept a ‘Protectorate Treaty’, followed in 1911 by the ‘Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty’. These were not signed by the Korean emperor, but their dubious legal standing did not prevent Japan from taking complete control.

      Japanese rule in Korea was brutal and totalitarian. In essence, the ambition was to eradicate the Korean culture and supplant it with Japan’s own, extending to language, the legal system and religion. The animosities which this regime was to engender would last way beyond the Second World War. Between 1941 and 1945, Japan ruthlessly exploited its colony for raw materials as well as men and women, forced to serve as soldiers and prostitutes for the Imperial Japanese Army. As the war drew to a close and Japan’s imminent defeat became inevitable, the Allied powers turned to consider the break-up of her empire.

      After the Second World War: Two Koreas Emerge

      As the Second World War drew to a close, the Allies turned their attention to the future status of those areas which had been under Axis control. Between 1945 and the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, Korea would be divided into two. By 1950 there was a Russian-dominated Communist North Korea and a US-dominated quasi-democratic South Korea.

      It was the Americans who proposed the division of the peninsula into two, along the 38th Parallel. North of this line would become a Russian-controlled zone, with the Americans occupying the south. There is nothing particularly special about the 38th Parallel, other than it being an internationally recognized line on the map. It happens to run across the waist of Korea and the Americans noticed that if it were used in this way, the southern zone would include the capital city of Seoul, and both of the country’s major ports.

      Such a slicing up of the map by the great powers was commonplace at the time. Little real account was taken of the interests or aspirations of the local inhabitants. From an American perspective this was a bold proposal, in that the Russians were likely to emerge as the more powerful player in the region. Russia had undertaken to attack Japan within three months of the defeat of Nazi Germany. The obvious means of doing this would be to invade Japanese-occupied Manchuria, including Port Arthur and the Chinese border with Korea. They could then move south into Korea. This is what transpired. Other allied forces in Asia (chiefly American and British) were thinly spread. It would be months before any kind of garrison could be sent to the south of Korea.

      Despite the obvious weakness of the American position, the Russians accepted the 38th Parallel proposal at the Potsdam conference. Their chief focus was on Europe and they may have imagined that in due course, the whole of Korea would fall to them.

      Therefore, as two Koreas began to emerge from the dust of the Second World War, they did so against the backdrop of the nascent Cold War. With considerable justification, Churchill described an ‘Iron Curtain’ falling across Europe. In Eastern Europe, democratic sensibilities were ignored and brutal Communist regimes imposed at the behest of Moscow. In 1948 the Russians had come close to provoking a Third World War by blockading West Berlin. The Chinese Civil War had reached its climax in 1949, with the establishment of Mao Zedong’s government in Beijing and the rump of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists confined to the island of Taiwan (Formosa).

      In American public life and within President Harry S. Truman’s Administration, there was a tendency to view such developments as a monolithic and malevolent conspiracy, driven by Moscow. There was a widely held view, for example, that the West had ‘lost China’ through a lack of political and military resolve. This may seem an over-simplification to the modern reader. Yet given the appeasement which had allowed fascism to gain such a grip on Europe, it was understandable. Communism did seem to be on the march, and it was trampling human rights and democracy underfoot. Sentiments in Western Europe, even among governments with socialist agendas, were not so different from the US point of view.

      For all of these tensions, the Russians stuck to their side of the deal when occupying northern Korea in 1945. Although weeks ahead of the Americans, their forces remained north of the 38th. There was a notional commitment from both parties to seek a solution for the entire peninsula, thereby creating a united Korea. However, in both the Russian and American zones, it was not long before each party was pursuing policies designed to preclude the opposing ideology from taking hold.

      In the North between 1945 and 1950, the Russians built a totalitarian Communist regime under Kim Il Sung, formally declaring the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948. The measures introduced included land reform and a semblance of worker control; corruption was largely eliminated. These were popular policies. It would, therefore, be wrong to suggest that the new regime was devoid of support. Kim had fought the Japanese in Manchuria during the 1930s and then spent five years studying in the Soviet Union, before returning to his country of origin in 1945. Although he was never simply a Soviet puppet, by 1945 Kim was much closer to Stalin’s regime than he was Mao’s. Kim was still only 38 when the Korean War broke out.

      In the South, US General John Hodge headed a somewhat inept military administration which relied on former Japanese collaborators – notably their brutal police force – and repressed any left-leaning political activists. At the same time, Syngman Rhee became the Americans’ favoured contender for political leadership. Rhee had spent much of his life