Yet despite the decline of China into a society of competing warlords, and the preoccupation of Russia with her own revolution, even before the Second World War it was apparent that Korea’s geographical position, as the nearest meeting place of three great nations, would make her a permanent focus of tension and competition. The American Tyler Dennett wrote presciently in 1945, months before the Far Eastern war ended:
Many of the international factors which led to the fall of Korea are either unchanged from what they were half a century ago, or are likely to recur the moment peace is restored to the East. Japan’s hunger for power will have been extinguished for a period, but not for ever. In another generation probably Japan will again be a very important influence in the Pacific. Meanwhile the Russian interest in the peninsula is likely to remain what it was forty years ago. Quite possibly that factor will be more important than ever before. The Chinese also may be expected to continue their traditional concern in the affairs of that area.
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And now, suddenly, the war was over, and the Japanese empire was in the hands of the broker’s men. Koreans found themselves freed from Japanese domination, looking for fulfilment of the promise of the leaders of the Grand Alliance in the 1943 Cairo Declaration – that Korea should become free and independent ‘in due course’.
The American decision to land troops to play a part in the occupation of Korea was taken only at the very end of the war. The Japanese colony had been excluded from the complex 1943–45 negotiations about occupation zones between the partners of the Grand Alliance. The Americans had always been enamoured of the concept of ‘trusteeship’ for Korea, along with Indochina and some other colonial possessions in the Far East. They liked the idea of a period during which a committee of Great Powers – in this case, China, the US and USSR – would ‘prepare and educate’ the dependent peoples for self-government and ‘protect them from exploitation’. This concept never found much favour among the British or French, mindful of their own empires. And as the war progressed, concern about the future internal structure of Korea was overtaken by deepening alarm about the external forces that might determine this. As early as November 1943, a State Department sub-committee expressed fears that when the Soviets entered the Far East war, they might seize the opportunity to include Korea in their sphere of influence:
Korea may appear to offer a tempting opportunity to apply the Soviet conception of the proper treatment of colonial peoples, to strengthen enormously the economic resources of the Soviet Far East, to acquire ice-free ports, and to occupy a dominating strategic position in relation both to China and to Japan . . . A Soviet occupation of Korea would create an entirely new strategic situation in the Far East, and its repercussions within China and Japan might be far reaching.
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As the American historian Bruce Cumings has aptly pointed out, ‘what created “an entirely new strategic situation in the Far East” was not that Russia was interested in Korea – it had been for decades – but that the United States was interested’.
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Yet by the time of the Potsdam Conference of July 1945, the United States military were overwhelmingly preoccupied with the perceived difficulties of mounting an invasion of mainland Japan. They regarded the Japanese armies still deployed in Korea and Manchuria as a tough nut for the Red Army to crack, and were only too happy to leave the problem, and the expected casualties, to the Russians. The Pentagon had anyway adopted a consistent view that Korea was of no long-term strategic interest to the United States.
Yet three weeks later, the American view of Korea had altered dramatically. The explosion of the two atomic bombs on Japan on 6 and 9 August brought Japan to the brink of surrender. The Red Army was sweeping through Manchuria without meeting important resistance. Suddenly, Washington’s view of both the desirability and feasibility of denying a substantial part of Korea to the Soviets was transformed. Late on the night of 10 August 1945, barely twenty-four hours after the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee reached a hasty, unilateral decision that the United States should participate in the occupation of Korea. The two officers drafting orders for the committee pored over their small-scale wall map of the Far East, and observed that the 38th parallel ran broadly across the middle of the country. South of this line lay the capital, the best of the agriculture and light industry, and more than half the population. Some members of the committee – including Dean Rusk, a future Secretary of State – pointed out that if the Russians chose to reject
this proposal, the Red Army sweeping south through Manchuria could overrun all Korea before the first GI could be landed at Inchon. In these weeks, when the first uncertain skirmishes of the Cold War were being fought, the sudden American proposal for the divided occupation of Korea represented an important test of Soviet intentions in the Far East.
To the relief of the Committee in Washington, the Russians readily accepted the 38th Parallel as the limit of their advance. Almost a month before the first Americans could be landed in South Korea, the Red Army reached the new divide – and halted there. It is worth remark that, if Moscow had declined the American plan and occupied all Korea, it is unlikely that the Americans could or would have forced a major diplomatic issue. To neither side, at this period, did the peninsula seem to possess any inherent value, except as a testing ground of mutual intentions. The struggle for political control of China herself was beginning in earnest. Beside the fates and boundaries of great nations that were now being decided, Korea counted for little. Stalin was content to settle for half. At no time in the five years that followed did the Russians show any desire to stake Moscow’s power and prestige upon a direct contest with the Americans for the extension of Soviet influence south of the Parallel.
Thus it was, late in August 1945, that the unhappy men of the US XXIV Corps – some veterans of months of desperate fighting in the Pacific, others green replacements fresh from training camps – found themselves under orders to embark not for home, as they so desperately wished, but for unknown Korea. They were given little information to guide their behaviour once they got there. Their commander, General John R. Hodge, received only a confusing succession of signals at his headquarters on Okinawa. On 14 August, General Stilwell told him that the occupation could be considered ‘semi-friendly’ – in other words, that he need regard as hostile only a small minority of collaborators. At the end of the month the Supreme Commander, General MacArthur himself, decreed that the Koreans should be treated as ‘liberated people’.
From Washington, the Secretary of State for War and the Navy Coordinating Committee dispatched a hasty directive to Okinawa, ordering Hodge to ‘create a government in harmony with US policies’. But what were US policies towards Korea? Since the State Department knew little more about the country than that its nationalists hungered for unity and independence, they had little to tell Hodge. As a straightforward military man, the general determined to approach the problem in a straightforward, no-nonsense fashion. On 4 September, he briefed his own officers to regard Korea as ‘an enemy of the United States’, subject to the terms of the Japanese surrender. On 8 September, when the American occupation convoy was still twenty miles out from Inchon in the Yellow Sea, its ships encountered three neatly dressed figures in a small boat, who presented themselves to the general as representatives of ‘the Korean Government’. Hodge sent them packing. He did likewise with every other Korean he met on his arrival who laid claim to a political mandate. XXIV Corps’s intention was to seize and maintain control of the country. The US Army, understandably, wished to avoid precipitating entanglement with any of the scores of competing local political factions who already, in those first days, were struggling to build a power-base amid the ruin of the Japanese empire.
The fourteen-strong advance party who were the first Americans to reach Seoul were fascinated and bemused by what they found: a city of horse-drawn carts, with only the occasional charcoal-powered motor vehicle. They saw three Europeans in a shop, and hastened to greet them, to discover that they were part of the little local Turkish community, who spoke no English. They met White Russians, refugees in Korea since 1920, who demanded somewhat tactlessly: ‘
Sprechen sie Deutsch?
’ The first English-speaker they met was a local Japanese who had lived in the United States before the war. His wife, like all the Japanese community eager to ingratiate herself with the new rulers, pressed on them a cake and two pounds of real butter – the first they had seen for months. That
night, they slept on the floor of Seoul Post Office. The next morning, they transferred their headquarters to the Banda Hotel.
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In the days that followed, the major units of XXIV Corps disembarked at Inchon, and dispersed by truck and train around the country, to take up positions from Pusan to the 38th Parallel. General Hodge and his staff were initially bewildered by the clamour of unknown Koreans competing for their political attention, and the disorders in the provinces which threatened to escalate into serious rioting if the situation was not controlled. There was also the difficulty that no Korean they encountered appeared to speak English, and the only Korean-speaker on the staff, one Commander Williams of the US Navy, was insufficiently fluent to conduct negotiations.
Amid all this confusion and uncertainty, the occupiers could identify only one local stabilising force upon whom they could rely: the Japanese. In those first days, the Japanese made themselves indispensable to Hodge and his men. One of the American commander’s first acts was to confirm Japanese colonial officials in their positions, for the time being. Japanese remained the principal language of communication. Japanese soldiers and police retained chief responsibility for maintaining law and order. As early as 11 September, MacArthur signalled instructions to Hodge that Japanese officials must at once be removed from office. But even when this process began to take place, many retained their influence for weeks as unofficial advisers to the Americans.
Within days of the first euphoric encounter between the liberators and the liberated, patriotic Koreans were affronted by the open camaraderie between Japanese and American officers, the respect shown by former enemies to each other, in contrast to the thinly veiled contempt offered to the Koreans. ‘It does seem that from the beginning many Americans simply liked the Japanese better than the Koreans,’ the foremost American historian of this period has written. ‘The Japanese were viewed as cooperative, orderly and docile, while the Koreans were seen as headstrong,
unruly, and obstreperous.’
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The Americans knew nothing, or chose to ignore what they did know, of the ruthless behaviour of the Japanese in the three weeks between their official surrender and the coming of XXIV Corps – the looting of warehouses, the systematic ruin of the economy by printing debased currency, the sale of every available immovable asset.
To a later generation, familiar with the dreadful brutality of the Japanese in the Second World War, it may seem extraordinary that Americans could so readily make common cause with their late enemies; as strange as the conduct of Allied intelligence organisations in Europe, which befriended and recruited former Nazi war criminals and Gestapo agents. Yet the strongest influence of war upon most of those who endure it is to blur their belief in absolute moral values, and to foster a sense of common experience with those who have shared it, even a barbarous enemy. There was a vast sense of relief among the men of the armies who still survived in 1945, an instinctive reluctance for more killing, even in the cause of just revenge. There was also a rapidly growing suspicion for some prominent American soldiers – Patton notable among them – that they might have been fighting the wrong enemy for these four years. McCarthyism was yet unborn. But a sense of the evil of communism was very strong, and already outweighed in the minds of some men their revulsion towards Nazism, or Japanese imperialism. In Tokyo, the American Supreme Commander himself was already setting an extraordinary example of post-war reconciliation with the defeated enemy. In Seoul in the autumn of 1945, General Hodge and his colleagues found it much more comfortable to deal with the impeccable correctness of fellow-soldiers, albeit recent enemies, than with the anarchic rivalries of the Koreans. The senior officers of XXIV Corps possessed no training or expertise of any kind for exercising civilian government – they were merely professional military men, obliged to improvise as they went along. In the light of subsequent events, their blunders and political clumsiness have attracted the unfavourable attention of history. But it is only just to observe that at this
period, many of the same mistakes were being made by their counterparts in Allied armies all over the world.
Hodge’s State Department political adviser, H. Merell Benninghoff, reported to Washington on 15 September:
South Korea can best be described as a powder keg ready to explode at the application of a spark. There is great disappointment that immediate independence and sweeping out of the Japanese did not eventuate. Although the hatred of the Koreans for the Japanese is unbelievably bitter, it is not thought that they will resort to violence as long as American troops are in surveillance . . . The removal of Japanese officials is desirable from the public opinion standpoint, but difficult to bring about for some time. They can be relieved in name but must be made to continue in work. There are no qualified Koreans for other than the low-ranking positions, either in government or in public utilities and communications.
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