Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
Panmunjom has also seen hopeful moments: meetings of special emissaries and political leaders, both publicized and secret; the transit of official delegations from one side to the other; the passage of relief supplies to ameliorate the effects of floods and famines; the return of prisoners and detainees from both sides; and the arrival and departure of would-be peacemakers and political leaders from the United States and other countries. If the hostility and tension on the Korean peninsula are ever to be alleviated through negotiation, the clearing at Panmunjom is likely to play a major role.
Korea is a peninsula of approximately eighty-five thousand square miles, roughly the size of New York and Pennsylvania combined, that juts down from the northeastern part of the vast mainland of Asia. It is well defined, with seas on the east, west, and south and two large rivers, the Yalu and the Tumen, providing a natural boundary with the landmass on the north. Archaeological exploration has confirmed that it was inhabited at least twenty thousand years ago, and some sites suggest that its human habitation began much earlier. By the fourth century BC the antecedents of the Korean state, a tribal kingdom called Choson, had emerged near the Chinese border in northern Korea. By AD 300 the Koreans had thrown off Chinese rule and developed three separate kingdoms in the north, southeast, and southwest of the peninsula. In AD 668 the Silla kingdom, with Chinese help, overwhelmed the other two and unified nearly all of Korea.
From that early time on, for nearly thirteen hundred years until the mid-twentieth century, Korea developed as a unified country under a single administration with a distinctive language and strong traditions. It invented its own ingenious writing system and the first known movable metal type a century before Gutenberg’s invention in Europe.
Geography dealt Korea a particularly difficult role. Located in a strategic but dangerous neighborhood between the greater powers of China, Japan, and Russia, Korea has suffered nine hundred invasions, great and small, in its two thousand years of recorded history. It has experienced five major periods of foreign occupation—by China, the Mongols, Japan, and, after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union.
Of the major powers, China had by far the greatest influence and was the most acceptable to Koreans. Like many others on the rim of the Middle Kingdom, the Korean kings embraced Chinese culture, paid tribute to the Chinese emperor, and received recognition and a degree of protection in return. When unified Japan began its major expansion in the sixteenth century, its leader, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, attacked Korea as the first phase of an invasion of the Chinese mainland. The Korean navy under Admiral Yi Sun Sin fought back with an early class of ironclad warships, known as turtle ships, which inflicted severe losses on the Japanese. Eventually, the Japanese were driven out, but only after laying waste to the land, thus setting a lasting pattern of enmity.
In the wake of the Japanese invasion and a subsequent invasion by the Manchus, who were soon to take power in China, Korea established a rigid policy of excluding foreigners, except for the Chinese and a small Japanese enclave that had been established at the southern port of Pusan. The imperial rulers of the Hermit Kingdom, as it was often called, created a governmental and social system modeled on Chinese Confucianism, with strictly regulated relations between ruler and subject, father and son, and husband and wife.
Korea’s isolation ended in the mid-nineteenth-century age of imperialism, when major powers, including the United States, European countries, and Japan, sent warships forcibly to open the country to trade. In 1882, as a defensive measure against its neighbors, Korea signed a “Treaty of Amity and Commerce” with the United States, its first with a Western power, in which the United States promised to provide “good offices” in the event of external threat. It was reported that the Korean king danced with joy when the first American minister to Korea arrived. Among the treaties that followed shortly was one with czarist Russia, which had recognized the importance of the strategic peninsula and would soon begin building the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Russian foreign minister Count Vladimir Lamsdorff would later write, “Korea’s destiny as a component part of the Russian empire, on geographical and political grounds, had been foreordained for us to fulfill.”
In 1902 Japan carved out a strong position for itself by entering into an alliance with Britain, the most important European power in the area. Japan recognized British interests in China in return for British recognition of Japanese special interests in Korea. Sensing the weakness along the rim of the Chinese mainland, Russia began moving forces into Korea and immediately came into conflict with Japan. In an attempt to head off a clash, Japan proposed that the two countries carve up Korea into spheres of influence, with the dividing line at the thirty-eighth parallel—the same line chosen by the United States for the division of Korea after World War II. Russia’s refusal to accept this and other proposed compromises led eventually to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Japan’s surprise victory, its first over a Western power, put the Japanese in a powerful position to dominate Korea.
In 1905, in what many Koreans consider their first betrayal by the United States, Secretary of War (later president) William Howard Taft approved Japan’s domination of Korea in a secret agreement with the Japanese foreign minister, in return for assurances that Tokyo would not challenge US colonial domination of the Philippines. Later the same year, Japan’s paramount political, military, and economic interests in Korea were codified in the Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire), in which President Theodore Roosevelt played peacemaker and deal maker between Japan and Russia, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. With no opposition in sight, Japan occupied Korea in 1905 and annexed it outright as a Japanese possession in 1910. Japan then ruled as the harsh colonial master of the peninsula until its defeat in World War II.
What many Koreans consider the second American betrayal—the division of Korea—occurred in the final days of World War II. The United States, Britain, and China had declared in the Cairo Declaration in 1943 that “in due course, Korea shall become free and independent,” and at the 1945 Yalta Conference President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a US-Soviet-Chinese trusteeship over Korea. Beyond these few words, there was no agreement among the wartime allies and no practical planning in Washington about the postwar future of the peninsula. It was reported that in 1945, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius asked a subordinate in a State Department meeting to please tell him where Korea was.
Only in the last week of the war, when the Soviet Union finally declared war on Japan and sent its troops into Manchuria and northern Korea, did the United States give serious consideration to its postwar policy in the peninsula. Suddenly, Washington realized that Russian occupation of Korea would have important military implications for the future of Japan and East Asia.
At this point, according to Yale University historian Richard Whelan, “the U.S. government would probably have been happiest if Korea simply
had not existed.” About two thousand civil affairs officers had been trained for military government duty in Japan, and elaborate plans had been drawn up for that country, but no one had been trained and no plans had been made for Korea. Despite Korea’s well-known antipathy to its Japanese overlords, Washington had rebuffed efforts by Korean exile groups for recognition during the war. Thus, as World War II drew to a close, there had been no consultation with Koreans about the future of their country.
On the evening of August 10, 1945, with Tokyo suing for peace and Soviet troops on the move, an all-night meeting was convened in the Executive Office Building next to the White House to decide what to do about accepting the impending Japanese surrender in Korea and elsewhere in Asia. Around midnight two young officers were sent into an adjoining room to carve out a US occupation zone in Korea, lest the Soviets occupy the entire peninsula and move quickly toward Japan. Lieutenant Colonels Dean Rusk, who was later to be secretary of state under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and Charles Bonesteel, later US military commander in Korea, had little preparation for the task. Working in haste and under great pressure, and using a
National Geographic
map for reference, they proposed that US troops occupy the area south of the thirty-eighth parallel, which was approximately halfway up the peninsula and north of the capital city of Seoul, and that Soviet troops occupy the area north of the parallel.
No Korea experts were involved in the decision. Rusk later confessed that neither he nor any of the others involved were aware that at the turn of the century, the Russians and Japanese had discussed dividing Korea into spheres of influence at the thirty-eighth parallel, a historical fact that might have suggested to Moscow that Washington had finally recognized this old claim. “Had we known that, we almost surely would have chosen another line of demarcation,” Rusk wrote many years later.
The thirty-eighth-parallel line was hastily incorporated into General Order Number One for the occupation of Japanese-held territory. Despite the fact that US forces were far away and would not arrive on the scene for several weeks, the Soviets carefully stopped their southward advance at the parallel. Thus, Korea came to be divided into two “temporary” zones of occupation that, as the Cold War deepened, became the sites of two antagonistic Korean regimes based on diametrically opposed principles and sponsors.
US forces were eventually sent from Japan for occupation duty, an assignment that was not popular with the troops. Colonel Harry Summers, who later became a prominent military strategist, recalls arriving for duty as a US Army private and being lectured by the occupation commander, General John R. Hodge, that “there are three things American troops in Japan are afraid of: diarrhea, gonorrhea, and Ko-rea.” Under Hodge’s
guidance, the US-backed Republic of Korea was officially proclaimed on August 15, 1948. The Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North, was proclaimed on September 9, 1948. The South inherited a larger population and more of the agriculture and light industry, while the North obtained most of the heavy industry, electric power, and mineral resources. Each regime claimed sway over the entire peninsula; these claims persist today.
Summing up, Gregory Henderson, a former US Foreign Service officer and noted Korea scholar, wrote in 1974, “No division of a nation in the present world is so astonishing in its origin as the division of Korea; none is so unrelated to conditions or sentiment within the nation itself at the time the division was effected; none is to this day so unexplained; in none does blunder and planning oversight appear to have played so large a role. Finally, there is no division for which the U.S. government bears so heavy a share of the responsibility as it bears for the division of Korea.”
As these events and those of its more distant past illustrate, Korea has been a country of the wrong size in the wrong place: large and well located enough to be of substantial value to those around it and thus worth fighting and scheming over, yet too small to merit priority attention by more powerful nations on all but a few occasions. Korea’s fate was often to be an afterthought, subordinated to more immediate or compelling requirements of larger powers, rather than a subject of full consideration in its own right.
Yet Koreans are neither meek nor passive, but a tough, combative, and independent-minded people with a tradition of strong centralized authority. They are characteristically about as subtle as
kimchi
, the fiery pepper-and-garlic concoction that is their national dish, and as timid as a
tae kwon do
(Korean karate) chop. Confronted with the reality of their bitter division, North and South Korea have grappled unceasingly for advantage and supremacy over each other—and with the greater powers outside. How they have done so in the past forty years, and with what risks and results, is recounted in these pages.
To head its regime in the North, the Soviet Union chose a thirty-three-year-old Korean guerrilla commander who had initially fought the Japanese in China but had spent the last years of World War II in Manchurian training camps commanded by the Soviet army. Kim Il Sung, as he called himself (his birth name was Kim Song Ju), had a burning ambition to reunite his country. In the South the United States gave the nod to seventy-year-old Syngman Rhee, who had degrees from George
Washington University, Harvard, and Princeton and had lived in exile throughout most of the Japanese occupation. Rhee had a messianic belief that he was destined to reunite Korea under an anticommunist banner.
Late in 1948 the Soviet army went home, turning North Korea over to the regime it had created. The following June, US troops followed suit. Before the summer was over, civil war broke out in clashes of battalion size along the thirty-eighth parallel. Each side was building its forces with an eye to gaining military supremacy.
On June 25, 1950, North Korea, with Soviet and Chinese backing, invaded the South in an effort to reunify the country by force of arms. The invasion was contested and ultimately repulsed by the forces of the United States, South Korea, and fifteen other nations under the flag of the United Nations (UN). The Chinese intervened massively on the other side to save North Koreans from defeat. Internationally, the bloody three-year Korean War was a historic turning point. It led the United States to shift decisively from post-World War II disarmament to rearmament to stop Soviet expansionism, tripling US military outlays and doubling its troop presence in Europe to bolster the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The war cemented the alliance between the Soviet Union and China for most of a decade and made the United States and China bitter enemies for more than twenty years. The battle for Korea firmly established the Cold War and brought the Korean peninsula to the center of global attention.