The Korean War Remembered

Americans know little of the Korean War beyond its sad sobriquet as America’s “forgotten war.” This brutal war which lasted three years and killed four million Koreans has largely been forgotten by the US public. It has moldered with the passage of time; it has been subsumed beneath the routines of daily life; and it has been erased through an engineered forgetting which the very subtitle “forgotten war” reinforces. Since the Korean War ended, Americans have been fed the view that North Korea is a rogue state of godless unrequited evil, governed by the mentally unstable Kim family dynasty.¹ North Korea has been the object of repeated presidential threats, and it has provided justification for the US military’s obscenely bloated budget. Since Donald Trump took office, North Korea has built an atomic bomb and an ICBM capable of reaching the US mainland. Now the US actually does have something to fear from them.

Forgetting this particular war has been encouraged. I will argue that the events of the Korean War have been deliberately erased from cultural memory in order to hide the misdeeds of: 

1. President Harry Truman and members of his inner circle who cynically started the war to boost the stagnant postwar US economy, as much as from their fear of communism. 
2. The dishonorable conduct of top US military brass which deliberately stalled the truce talks for one year over the issue of prisoner repatriation. 
3. The mass executions of hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians by the ROK army and paramilitary groups such as the Northwest Youth League (NYL) under orders of Syngman Rhee. 
4. The total destruction of North Korea carried out by the US Navy and Air Force which bombed, firebombed, and strafed the country into a holocaust causing 90% of the war deaths.
5. The cover-up of war crimes of identifiable American soldiers who committed mass killings of civilians. 
6. The brutal treatment and physical torture of North Korean and Chinese prisoners of war (POWs) in the prison camps on Koje Island which led to prison insurrections and the murder of 3,000 POWs. 
7. The experimental use of germ warfare in combat for a full year by the US military when aerial bombardment was no longer effective.
8. The stirred up racial phobia of a “yellow peril” which made such wanton behavior possible, along with its underlying European colonial assumption of white supremacy.

Collectively, these criminal actions give evidence of the hidden, internal coup d’état of the American government approved by President Truman as the National Security Act of 1947. The national security state manufactures adversaries– labor unions, communists, socialists, revolutionaries, terrorists, and jihadist, etc. – to justify US militarism, terrorism, violent policing, class warfare and internal fear-mongering in support of its imperial goals.² I will argue here that the Korean War was the first manufactured international event which cemented the new power elite in Washington. This war has been banished to a remote corner of academia to obscure it from popular consciousness because of the viciousness and excess of the war’s brutality which would be repugnant to all Americans if the true story were widely known. The Korean War has been banished to hide its seminal role in the founding of the national security state.

Items #2,4,5, and 6 above will be taken up a future essay due to space limitations. In four previous articles I have focused on the history and evidence of US biological warfare (BW) in the Korean War, including discussion of the documents and literature surrounding that history.³ These articles argue that the case against the United States, charging it with “experimental germ warfare” for the full year’s duration of 1952, against North Korea and China, is conclusively proven from the physical evidence and the testimony of many eyewitnesses. It is documented in the 1952 Report of the International Scientific Commission for the facts concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China (ISC report), in the report’s Summary Findings, and from the lab analysis the victim autopsies, and many other documents published in the report’s 600 pages of Addenda. ⁴ It is further proven by the confessions of captured US combat pilots and by contrasting their confessions with their later retractions made under threat of court marshal. It has been verified from the subsequent research of many journalists and scholars, and finally, its truth is revealed from the exposed lies of US deniers. 

In this fifth essay I would like to focus on the broader tragedy of the war itself. This is necessary background so we might better understand both the ambition and the desperation of North Korea’s invasion of the South in the summer of 1950, and the US motivations, first in provoking the war, and next, in resorting to extreme racial hatred and violence to thwart Korean unification. This article takes us up to the war’s beginning. What were the historical actors of that moment thinking, not just in the US and North Korea, but also in South Korea, in Taiwan, Japan, China, and, the Soviet Union (USSR)? What were the stakes for Stalin and the Soviets? Given the extreme risks, why did China intervene? What of the war’s beneficiaries– Japan and Taiwan? What were the agendas of their leaders? What did each party to the war hope to accomplish? 

This painted backdrop of the Korean War is a very quick walk through Far East political and military history since Commodore Perry’s gunboat diplomacy chartered US imperial interests in Japan. Many informative but extraneous details have been left out to enhance clarity. The same is true of my discussions of American post-WWII policy-making which spotlights critical decisions, not details. Again, this focus on seminal events reveals the concealed coup d’état of the US government by actors of the national security state. President Truman presided during this takeover, but it is apparent that he did not fully comprehend his creation.

Harry Truman and the Atom Bomb

Harry Truman was a New Deal Democrat and machine politician from Missouri who served ten years in the US Senate before he was picked in 1944 to replace the left-wing Henry Wallace as Franklin Roosevelt’s 4^th term vice-president.⁵ As senator, Truman was well-versed in the domestic policies of the New Deal, but light on foreign affairs. He inherited the presidency eighty-two days into Roosevelt’s fourth term. He had not heard of the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb before he became president.⁶ When he assumed the office on April 12, 1945, Axis forces were in rout. The Nazis surrendered the following month. Japan fought on even as the US firebombed Tokyo and many other Japanese cities were bombed and napalmed. There was already great devastation across Japan by August 6, 1945 when Hiroshima was vaporized.

The atom bomb presented Harry Truman with both a strategic and a moral calculus which as the new commander in chief he could not philosophically separate. Truman’s frankness and everyman personality is much lauded by his admirers, but historian James Carroll gives a more nuanced and perhaps accurate view of Truman’s intellect and gruff personality. 

If the Russians did not wish to join us, Truman said after the meeting, ‘they could go to hell’. . . The new president’s crustiness masked a deep insecurity. The conventional American assessment celebrates Truman’s brusque decisiveness, but there is reason to believe that it reflected his inability to take in complexity, or to live with it.⁷,⁸

Truman was smart, likeable and politically intelligent. He was a politician without powerful enemies and naysayers, but he was not sophisticated like Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson. His Midwest ideology and Christian morality went unreflected. When Robert Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists petitioned for an internationally observed demonstration of the atom bomb’s destructiveness, Truman’s deferred to his cabinet advisers led by Navy Secretary, James Forrestal. They argued to keep the bomb as a US proprietary weapon. Newness on the job likely made Truman more acquiescent to pressure from the Roosevelt Cabinet on so momentous a decision. His personal experience with explosives as a gunnery captain in France during WWI also influenced his decision to drop the bomb. 

Regarding the 125,000 mostly civilians killed at Hiroshima, depopulation metrics presented to the president by his staff demanded that Truman weigh this carnage against what they viewed as the probable cost of many thousands of American soldiers’ lives in an invasion of Japan. In his memoirs, Truman professed that he chose to end the war quickly in order to save both American and Japanese lives. Thus he crossed that moral threshold of mass killing which most of us could not imagine. However, the decision three days later to drop the second available atom bomb on Nagasaki, the factory headquarters of Mitsubishi shipyards and aviation, home of the dreaded A6M Zero “kamikaze” warplane, was military revenge. 

During the Korean War, both President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur threatened to use the atom bomb against North Korea and China. MacArthur and John Foster Dulles, who was appointed Secretary of State by Eisenhower in 1953, also spoke enthusiastically of pre-emptive nuclear war against China and the USSR as the best method to stop the global spread of communism. MacArthur’s dramatic saber-rattling, not his conduct of the war in Korea, eventually got him fired from the Pacific command.⁹ North Korea, China and the USSR fought the war under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, and this was a factor impacting all their political and military decisions. 

Within the military branches of the US Army and Navy, and with the elevation of the Air Force to a co-equal service branch, rivalry between branches for possession and combat deployment of the A-bomb was fierce.¹⁰ The newly minted Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) asserted that atomic bombs, and later the hydrogen bomb, were tactical modern weapons which would allow their use in combat at the discretion of the supreme commander, in this case, General MacArthur. When the Korean War broke out, Truman had to wrest control of the atomic bomb back from MacArthur.¹¹ 

Truman’s rapid move to secure United Nations censure of North Korea was politically astute. He out-maneuvered the USSR in the UN Security Council,¹² and thus paved the way for seven subsequent decades of US military intervention and occupations on the Asia mainland. Legendary Washington journalist, I.F. Stone recounted the mechanics of the deal:

In much the same way the Security Council was led on June 27, 1950, to authorize by resolution what the President of the United States had done the night before and announced earlier the same day. The door was shut on mediation advocated by the United Nations Commission. American military intervention on behalf of the South Korean regime was given post facto legality, as UN military sanction, by a resolution recommending that “members of the United Nations furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area.” Three days later, Truman authorized the bombing of “specific military targets in Northern Korea,” a naval blockade of the entire Korean coast, and the use of American ground troops by MacArthur. The American intervention that MacArthur wanted was complete at last.¹³ [orig. italics and quotes]

Truman wanted the war too. It would be an immediate boon to the economy, Korea was far away and out of sight; the aggressiveness of global communism was proven; the anti-communism policy of NSC 68 was in place; there was ample legal justification for US military intervention. MacArthur and the JCS would run the war efficiently. The generals petitioned successfully for a robust military to meet the new demands of a world superpower. The Korean War wet nursed the postwar armaments industry into the megalithic military industrial complex. The Treasury printed more money, the economy flourished, and Truman had no desire to end the war once it started.¹⁴ 

Beyond pragmatism, Truman embraced theories of American exceptionalism which gave him the moral cover to begin the “rollback” crusade against global communism. It is not clear if Truman would have authorized the atom-bomb annihilation of the USSR and China if the Korean War had gone worse than a draw. He felt the mountainous weight of dead souls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he had ordered destroyed, and he would not delegate that authority to the generals on his watch. But that didn’t keep Truman from brandishing the threat of the bomb against China and the USSR as a terrible cudgel. Truman’s gravest intellectual shortcoming was his Christian belief of a world divided between forces of good and evil. This Manichean dualism is most poignantly revealed in the Truman Doctrine.¹⁵ In this policy paper, Truman radically organized the world into two rival and murderous camps: evil communism and tyranny on the one side; good democracy and freedom on the other. Non-alignment was not an option. The tragedy of such a paranoid and simplistic mental construct has been its longevity. We have lived under the doomsday clock ever since.

Containment and Rollback

Truman’s advisors who had been Roosevelt’s advisers did not want to overly destroy Japan’s industrial infrastructure before Japan finally capitulated to the US’s might. Japan had never been colonized by Europeans, and Japan was the only Asian nation to radically transform the ancient feudal order of nobility and serfs into the modern fascist state of industrialists and laborers. Many powerful US interests, including the “China Lobby,¹⁶ had already envisioned a postwar re-armed Japan as America’s junior partner and enforcer in the future US dominant colonial regime in Asia. 

This rosy imperial vision faced serious obstacles. First, Indonesia, Malaya, Burma, Laos, India, in fact, all the European colonies of East Asia and South Asia did not want a restored colonial order. Viet Nam was already in open military revolt against the French colonial re-occupation. Nationalist sentiments ran high as independence hopes sprang up throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Secondly, all Asian nations which had experienced Japanese wartime occupation loathed Japan for its brutality. Even today, this is a problem for Japan with its continuing war-crime denialism. Third, within Japan, the end of the war did not bring class revolution. US military occupation, supervised by General MacArthur, ensured that many of the alliances which brought Japan to war remained in power. However, the Japanese public was generally sick of war and broadly opposed to re-armament. Finally, Truman had already signed the Potsdam Declaration with Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek that stipulated terms of surrender and divvied up the post-war spoils of Japan’s empire. Still, America’s new role as global superpower demanded new instruments of hegemony. Should the US enter into a multilateral or a bilateral peace treaty with Japan?¹⁷ 

China’s postwar struggles also proved problematic for Truman. The Anti-Japanese War in China and North China rapidly morphed into the Chinese Civil War (1945-49) between the Nationalist and the Communist armies. In spite of the generous arms sales and financial support the US provided to Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist Kuomintang government steadily disintegrated under the weight of corruption, mismanagement, loss of popular support, and the superior discipline and political strategy of the Communists.¹⁸ By 1949, the Nationalist Army was routed. The Kuomintang fled to the large island of Taiwan where 20,000 Taiwanese were massacred under KMT Army pacification.¹⁹ Truman was loudly blamed for losing China.

The administration refused to recognize the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) government in Beijing as China’s legitimate government. This was both an ideological over-reaction, and a deliberate provocation against the PRC and the USSR. Washington continued to recognize the defeated Kuomintang government in Taipei at the UN over the objections of both Great Britain and the USSR. This Cold War battle line had a resounding impact on later Korean War events as we will see, and refusal to recognize Red China persisted as official US policy until 1979. 

Fear of communism dominated America’s domestic politics in the postwar era, ratcheted up by rabid anti-communist such as Republican Senator Joe McCarthy, Democratic Senator Pat McCarran who openly supported the fascist General Franco in Spain, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Congressional investigations, finger pointing, and the loyalty oaths became the enduring symbols of those times. Fear and loathing of the USSR brought into existence the permanent national security state. James Carroll, whose father served as a top aide to Navy Secretary James Forrestal, a principle architect of the security state, gives us this insight. 

In the postwar period, whatever historians made of it later, a well-armed Soviet hostility satisfied the need for an enemy who justified the bureaucratic ambitions of the Navy and Air Force – but also, for that matter of a labor movement seeking to establish its distance from Communism, of industrialists hungry for the stimulus of ongoing military outlays, of universities looking to extend lucrative defense-related research contracts, and of a president looking to shore up support for his uncertain reelection prospects. The birth of the national security state had many midwives.²⁰ 

George Kennan was a central figure inflaming anti-Soviet passions. In February 1946, Kennan, a second tier State Dept. diplomat and “Russia expert,” sent an 8,000-word telegram from his embassy post in Moscow to his principals in Washington.²¹ In his “long telegram,” Kennan analyzed Soviet political behavior and social psychology, claiming the many hardships of Russian life had instilled an undercurrent of insecurity bordering on a national neurosis. Upon this substrate, he claimed, Marxist communism had launched Russia on a paranoid trajectory of perpetual war against capitalism. Russian leadership could not be expected to act rationally given its mission to advance worldwide the communist cause, but it was sensitive to force. The telegram came to the attention of Navy Secretary James Forrestal who circulated it widely. 

Under Forrestal’s patronage, Kennan polished his psychological analysis of the Russian state and its leaders. His article was published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym, Mr. X.²² Kennan concluded his thesis that once communism takes root in a land it cannot be uprooted, and therefore the best strategy was to resist its spread through constant vigilance and containment. The “X paper” in the hands of Forrestal and his clique, ideologically transformed for the American audience the image of the USSR which had been our recent stalwart ally against the Nazis. Postwar USSR was impoverished, overly-bureaucratic, internally traumatized, and war-exhausted state. But that didn’t greatly hinder Stalin’s hegemonic ambitions in Eastern Europe. The fascist totalitarian monsters the US had been fighting tooth and claw for five years seamlessly morphed into the communist totalitarian monster. The USSR became the all-pervasive, existential, bogeyman superpower bent on global domination. It was an orchestrated mass psychological pivot from one identified villain to another. It fueled the US/USSR postwar arms race and the global anxiety surrounding it so profoundly that four decades later Ronald Reagan could still rail against the “evil empire.” 

Secretary of the Navy Forrestal was instrumental in plunging the US into the Cold War nuclear arms race with the USSR. Forrestal prevailed in a critical 1946 policy debate with War Secretary Henry Stimson on whether to share atom bomb designs with the Soviets or to keep them secret. Stimson had been in government a long time, and previously served as Secretary of War under Taft, and Secretary of State under Hoover. Stimson had personally supervised General Leslie Groves and the Manhattan Project. He understood that the atom bomb was a categorically different weapon from any previous destructive device. He argued that maintaining atomic secrecy would be short lived, that secrecy would insure a very expensive arms race, it would guarantee perpetual animosity between the US and USSR, and it would likely result in the global annihilation of all human civilization. 

Initially, top military brass well understood the inevitability of the arms-race scenario and supported Stimson’s position. Forrestal countered that Stalin and the USSR could not be trusted. Communism was religious zealotry which aspired to global domination. Conflict was inevitable, the US and the entire “free world” were threatened. Therefore, the US military must be built up to contain this menace. Once the generals understood the budget implications of Forrestal’s proposition they switched allegiance. Truman sided with Forrestal, Stimson retired, and Forrestal was rewarded with the first appointment as Secretary of Defense. 

The National Security Act (NSA) of 1947 had re-organized the US military into the bureaucratic juggernaut of the Department of Defense (DOD), with its enormous Pentagon physical plant across the moat of the Potomac River from the other power centers in Washington, DC. The Act further created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to coordinate intelligence and espionage, and the National Security Council (NSC) to assist the president with foreign policy formulation. The NSA birthed the US security state.

Two startling events in 1949 greatly alarmed Washington policy makers. The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in April, and by fall the Communist swept to victory in the Chinese Civil War. World events appeared to justify the Administration’s ramped up paranoia about communism. Planners soberly realized the US did not enjoy a twenty-year science and technology lead over the USSR. Communism was expanding dynamically; the nuclear arms race was on. 

The US policy response came in a hawkish, 1950, secret, but leaked, National Security Council policy paper, NSC68. The paper’s lead author was former Forrestal business partner and protégé, Paul Nitze. Nitze held several important administration posts. However, his previous big assignment for Truman was his appointment to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. In Sept 1945 he accompanied the survey to personally inspect the atomic-bomb detonation sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nitze sounded the alarm the Truman administration wanted. His thesis went well beyond Kennan’s recommendations of “containment” to propose a new aggressive policy of “rollback.” In his view, the US should not sit idly by while Moscow expanded its sphere of influence. The US would be proactive in stopping communism politically, economically, and militarily. The postwar military draw down was over. Now, the situation would reverse as the military was to be greatly expanded with new weapons, increased personnel, and overseas bases. Communism would be aggressively confronted, uprooted, and pushed back. The US’s new reach would be global. It would be the American Century vigorously defended. The Nitze thesis buried the last remnants of American isolationism.

But what would be the cost to the federal budget of globally rolling back Communism? That detail was left out of NSC68, and that became a sticking point. Nitze assessment of the Soviet threat was also questioned. Hadn’t the US economy increased twofold over the Soviet economy in 1949? Wasn’t US annual farm and industrial production far greater than that of the USSR? Could the Soviets possibly be as heavily armored as NSC68 reported, given the budget demands on their economy for public housing and basic infrastructure following the war? The Truman administration’s new expensive internationalist foreign policy initiative faced an uphill fiscal battle in Congress.

Two things changed that, and changed the US forever. First, it was proposed that the entire military build-up could be accomplished by deficit spending.²³ Roosevelt had used deficit spending to bail the country out of the Depression in 1932, and deficit spending had financed the war effort. Deficit spending was inflationary, but it worked well as an economic stimulus. However, government borrowing was inimical to American core values. Fiscal conservatism would need overhauling if the US was to meet the Soviet threat, and that in turn would require a new motivating rationale. That rationale was provided on June 25, 1950 when the North Korean army invaded South Korea. 

Historians debate the significance of Truman’s statements, policy directives, the proclamations by generals and State Department hawks, the manic fear of global communism as espoused in the Truman Doctrine, the backroom promises to Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek, the various other demonstrations of administrative assertiveness and military belligerence, and the memoirs of crucial actors, to explain why the US rushed troops into South Korea to halt what appeared to be the certain defeat of the Republic of Korea (ROK) regime at the hands of the North’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) army. These explanations are routinely trotted out to justify the US call to war in Korea, when by all appearances, US political strategists had already written off South Korea and Taiwan as bad investments, and discarded them outside of America’s sphere of influence.²⁴ That strategic defensive line encircled the US’s indispensible possessions for which it would fight. In the Pacific it encircled only Japan, the Philippines, and a few remote Pacific island groups. It did not encircle Korea or Taiwan.

In explaining the US’s rush to defend South Korea, not enough historical analysis has addressed Truman’s domestic problems. These included his low voter-approval ratings, the moribund postwar economy, farmers refusing to sell grain because of the price controls then in effect. He also faced major nationwide steel and railroad strikes in 1946, and the prospect of still more labor unrest. Also complicating matters for Truman were the highly publicized, Congressional witch hunts against suspected communists and sympathizers in government, such as Owen Lattimore at the State Department. Moreover, Truman’s signature domestic initiative, the Fair Deal won only a tepid reception. Although Truman won achievements in civil rights with de-segregation of the Army, and he had successfully pitched to Congress the costly Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe to prevent the spread of communism, still, the US economy was stagnant. Truman’s popularity plummeted far below that of any previous president.²⁵ Under those circumstances, why not intervene in a limited war in a distant land of which most Americans knew little? It would fight communism at home and abroad, boost the economy, boost his popularity, and it would bring his presidency out from beneath the oversized shadow cast by his predecessor.

Deficit spending on the military, which began with Truman’s decision to intervene in Korea has increased dramatically for seven decades into a current multi-trillion dollar national debt. The deposing of foreign governments which the US disliked became another recurring theme.²⁶ Overseas military intervention and foreign wars became non-stop; US foreign policy from this point to the present has been perpetual political and military belligerency. Since the Korean War began, US militarism has been the greatest destabilizing political and economic force on the planet. Truman’s decision at the halfway point of the 20^th Century was fateful.

Chinese Civil War Background

The Korean War was the successor conflict of both WWII and the Chinese Civil War. Korea under the Manchu Dynasty was a protectorate of China. Japan began Korean colonization with the 1876 Japan-Korea Treaty. This unequal treaty mirrored the earlier Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1858 which Commodore Perry’s gunboat diplomacy had imposed upon Japan. The treaty gave Japan access to Korean ports and privileged status for its nationals.²⁷ It created political conflict in Korea between “progressives” who favored modernization and the Korean monarchy, and it brought Japan into direct conflict with the Qing government of China. 

The first Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 demonstrated Japan’s military strength and China’s weakness in modern warfare. China paid steep war reparations, and ceded the island of Taiwan (Formosa) to Japan.²⁸ Japan simultaneously captured the Kingdom of Korea²⁹ and fully annexed it with two unequal treaties in 1905 and 1910. In China, the Qing government was overthrown in a nationalist revolutionary struggle restoring Han Chinese to power following nearly three centuries of Manchu dynastic rule. Sun Yat-sen declared the Republic of China in 1912 under the Nationalist Party known as the Kuomintang (KMT). Factional fighting and warlord rebellions brought more than a decade of political turmoil. With the Northern Expedition, Chiang Kai-shek led the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) to consolidate Kuomintang power. 

Chiang next turned his attention toward eliminating the Communist Party of China (CCP). In the “Canton Coup” of 1926, Chiang purged communists and socialists from the KMT and consolidated military control over much of southern China. In 1927, Chiang ordered the round-up and execution of several thousand CCP union workers in the infamous “Shanghai Massacre”. Out of this treachery the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) or “Red Army” was formed during the “Nanchang Uprising” when troops loyal to the communist cause rebelled against the KMT. Subsequent CCP organized urban uprisings across China were suppressed, and by September 1934 following five more years of pitched military battles the Red Army in Jiangxi Province was encircled by Chiang’s army and faced annihilation. In a desperate break out move, the Red Army escaped to begin a 9,000-kilometer trek west and north across China. The “Long March” cemented Mao Zedong and Zhou En-Lai’s CCP leadership roles to create modern China. Other remnant CCP armies also avoided destruction by marching parallel west and north. The surviving armies regrouped in Shaanxi Province in late 1935 to re-form the PLA.

The Communist Party of China (CCP) was founded in Shanghai in1921 upon Lenin’s organizing principal of democratic centralism. The CCP was initially an urban, proletarian movement lead by a vanguard of students, intellectuals and labor organizers. The party had success organizing strikes and gaining labor concessions, and built a support base of militant laborers and factory workers. Sun Yat-sen brought the CCP into the left-wing of his coalition Nationalist KMT government. Chiang Kai-shek was Dr. Sun’s right-wing strongman. That the two sides should become mortal enemies following Sun’s death was inevitable. 

In northern Shaanxi, the CCP established a soviet stronghold not far from the Mongolian border with the support of the USSR. Czarist Russia had previously expanded eastward with the trans-Siberian Railroad. The Russian Revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union brought development and modernization into vast Siberia. Outer Mongolia also became a soviet socialist state. Chiang attempted to repeat his encirclement strategy around Shaanxi Province, but failed. The PLA responded by developing guerilla warfare tactics. Proletarian communist revolution under Mao’s leadership evolved into a peasant communist revolution.³⁰ 

Late in 1931, while Chang Kai-shek was preoccupied fighting communists, the Japanese Kwangtung Army launched an invasion of Manchuria (or North China as it is called in China) on the pretext of the Mukden Incident, a staged railroad bombing. Within a brief few months of token resistance, Japan controlled Manchuria and Inner Mongolia all the way to the Siberian border. Japan had acquired an enormous, resource rich, Manchurian empire. It promptly created the new puppet state of Manchukuo to administer it.

In 1937, following another “incident” at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing, Japan invaded mainland China. Many scholars maintain this was the start of WWII. Its army quickly captured Beijing, Shanghai, and the Nationalist capital at Nanjing where many horrific war crimes were committed. The Second Sino-Japanese War lasted 8 years until Japan surrendered ending WWII. During the war, Japan was able to capture major coastal cities in China, but lacked the vast manpower necessary to hold the countryside. The Japanese Army met strong guerrilla resistance from the PLA in North China, while the Kuomintang government moved west to Chongqing where the Allies could supply it first overland, then by air from Burma and India. The US became Gen. Chiang’s benefactor. Simultaneously, the USSR armed the PLA. Through surrogate armies both the US and the USSR pushed back in the China Theater against Japan’s occupation of China.

USSR in East Asia

Prior to the above events, in 1900, Russia had marched an enormous army into Manchuria responding to the Boxer Rebellion. Following the suppression of the Boxers, the Russian Imperial Army refused to leave Manchuria. The Russo –Japanese War of 1905 was the successful effort by Japan to evict Russia from Manchuria. It was an historic victory, the first by any Asian nation against a major European power, and the Japanese success raised nationalist fervor across Asia. However, the terms of the truce, negotiated by Theodore Roosevelt in the Portsmouth Treaty, heavily favored Czarist Russia. The pan-European racist fear of “the Yellow Peril” closed ranks between Western imperialist powers. In the end, Japan had decisively won the war, but lost the peace. While the treaty solidified its colonial control over Korea, Japan received no war reparations from Russia, no territorial dominion in Manchuria which was returned to Nationalist China, and only a few concessions in Siberia.³¹ The paltry spoils of war caused public riots in Japan. 

But fortunes of war and allegiances of power are endlessly fluid. In 1939 after again conquering Manchuria, this time taking it away from Nationalist China, Japan attempted to expand into Soviet Siberia. The incursion was soundly repelled by General Georgy Zhukov and the Soviet Red Army aided by Mongolia in the Battles of Khalkhin Gol. This major border war in remote Siberia is little known in the West, but it had a tremendous impact on subsequent events of WWII. The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact initiated by Joseph Stalin and signed in April 1941, halted further Japanese territorial ambitions in Siberia. The imperialist goals of Japan’s high command pivoted towards its “southern strategy” of capturing Southeast Asia and the Dutch West Indies. With its land grab in Manchuria secured, at least temporarily, against the Soviet threat, Japan felt confident to take on the British Empire, and to attack Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to destroy the US Navy which was the armada in the Pacific most capable of opposing its southern expansion plan.³² 

The pact likewise permitted Soviet Red Army redeployment to fight the inevitable Nazi invasion of Russia following the fall of France, and it kept the USSR out of the Pacific Theater until the final days of WWII. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, President Roosevelt pressed Stalin to declare war on Japan, and to send Soviet troops against the Japanese Kwangtung Army occupation in Northeast China in order to end the war quickly.³³ Stalin promised to invade Manchuria three months after German surrender. The USSR declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria on August 9, 1945, Nagasaki Day. The Red Army quickly overwhelmed Japanese resistance, capturing Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, South Sakhalin Island and the Korean Peninsula to the 38^th Parallel. 

The decision to stop the Soviet army advance at the 38^th Parallel in Korea was made in Washington DC on August 10th. It was a hurried political decision made at the State Department without prior high-level discussion of Korea’s future. Two young officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel III were tasked the job of partitioning the country. They discovered the 38^th Parallel bisected the country roughly in half, leaving the capital city of Seoul in the US occupation zone. This same arbitrary pie slice across Korea had previously been floated between rival powers, imperial Russia and Imperial Japan, in the 1904 negotiations preceding the Russo-Japanese war.³⁴

Soviet military intervention in Manchuria, which had seemed like a good idea to Franklin Roosevelt at the height of the war, looked less attractive to US postwar planners and allies once it became a fait accompli. Chiang Kai-shek, jockeying for position vis a vis the CCP quickly proposed a Treaty of Friendship and Alliance with the USSR. The treaty affirmed China’s territorial sovereignty over Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, in exchange for recognition of political autonomy of the Soviet aligned Mongolian People’s Republic. The Soviet Red Army then withdrew from Manchuria in 1946, handing over positions not to the KMT but to the People’s Liberation Army along with the confiscated Japanese weapons. The US responded with a massive airlift of Nationalist army troops into Mukden. Positional war in North China had begun.

Korean War Background

Ethnic Koreans had migrated for generations into Manchuria forming a part of the local peasant underclass. With the Japanese occupation of Korea, many more Koreans fled across the Yalu River into Manchuria to escape Japanese political repression. Kim Il Sung and other Korean youth joined the Chinese communist cause, and fought in the guerilla war against the Japanese occupation. The Korean “volunteers” military participation in the Anti-Japanese War was substantial. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who witnessed the Far East during WWII, the Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and the Viet Nam War provides this analysis of military cooperation between Chinese and Korean communist soldiers fighting the Japanese occupation of China. 

Chinese and Korean patriot fighters fought side by side as brothers, sometimes Chinese under Korean leaders, sometimes Koreans under Chinese leaders. Wherever they operated Korean and Chinese peasants supported them, fed them, hid them, acted as their eyes and ears of intelligence. Koreans and Chinese in Manchuria lived and worked and fought as one family against the common enemy. Under the leadership of the Korean and Chinese Communist Parties the political and military anti-Japanese united front became a living reality.³⁵ 

Burchett goes on to explain that the military partnership continued following the defeat of Japan. Korean communist divisions joined the PLA to fight in the Chinese Civil War against the KMT. Korean soldiers were crucial partners in the military success of the Chinese Communist Revolution. This created the reciprocity which both nations felt, and in part explains China’s willingness to fight the US in Korea in spite of the tremendous costs of war and the risk involved.³⁶ 

The land reform policy of the CCP in newly liberated areas brought land confiscation upon landlords and redistribution to their former impoverished serfs. Land reform was a widely popular leveling mechanism, and it gave credibility to the communist cause. By contrast, the KMT was systemically corrupt; government functionaries operated on commissions and bribes. The KMT also curried favor with the foreign factory owners by suppressing labor strikes, but such repressive tactics eroded popular political support, and by 1948 the tide of the Civil War turned in favor of the Communists. 

The Nationalist cause appeared lost once Chiang Kai-shek and his army fled to Taiwan in 1949, and Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The US Congress, under pressure of the China Lobby which represented US business interests, had funded Chiang and the Kuomintang Army for a decade, but the regime’s brutality, its corruption, and its lack of military success against communism caused disillusionment in Washington, and a growing rumble for cutting ties with the general. Republicans who controlled Congress and administration hawks clung to the hope of a Nationalist restoration. The Truman administration refused to normalize relations with the victorious PRC.³⁷

The division of Korea at the 38^th Parallel was never considered to be a permanent arrangement by any of the major players at that time. That it remains divided today is a tragic demonstration of human folly in war. Japanese scholar Wada Haruki illustrates the universal desire for Korean unification expressed in the political sloganeering of both North and South. 

The two Korean governments shared a common goal, but it was an antagonistic one: to remove the other by any means available. From the outset, the North called for “completion of the national territory (kukdo wanjong), a euphemism for destroying the Rhee regime. A little later, the South adopted the slogan “Advance North, Unify the Nation” (pukchin tongil), code words for unification by force.³⁸

Wada continues to explain that both sides reached the same conclusion, that unification could only be decided by civil war. And both sides had superpower backers. War became inevitable and it was a matter of when it would erupt.³⁹

The North was led by Kim Il Sung and Pak Hon-yong. Kim’s father had moved the family from Korea to Manchuria to escape Japanese repression. Kim was arrested for anti- Japanese subversion as a young teenager. In 1931 at age 19, Kim joined the Chinese Communist Party, and led armed resistance against Japanese occupation in China for the next decade. Kim became a hunted political criminal, but escaped capture by fleeing to the USSR where he enlisted in the Soviet Red Army in 1942. The Red Army trained and indoctrinated Kim, and he became Stalin’s personal choice to lead the North Korean provisional government. Pak Hon-yong was 12 years older than Kim (b. 1900) and came from the South. From his youth onward he worked as an organizer within the Korean communist movement. He was arrested and imprisoned by the Japanese occupation authorities from 1922-24, and re-arrested in 1926. Feigning madness he escaped to the USSR where he received further education and training. Returning to Korea he lived underground fighting the Japanese occupation. In 1945 following liberation, Pak helped organize the Korean Communist Party which was suppressed by US occupation authorities. In 1946 he organized the Worker’s Party of South Korea (SKWP) which grew to 360,000 party members. SKWP initiated armed guerilla struggle against the Rhee regime, and led the Jeju Island uprising.

The South was led by Syngman Rhee. He was a Western educated convert to Christianity, and patriarchal man four decades older than the soldier Kim. Rhee became involved in the Korean independence movement when the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 transferred political jurisdiction over Korea to the Japanese. Rhee was arrested and imprisoned for anti-Japanese subversive activities, but later released through the intervention of influential friends. He departed for the US in 1904 where he unsuccessfully petitioned for Korean Independence with Theodore Roosevelt. The latter brokered the peace talks to end the Russo-Japanese War. Rhee subsequently obtained university degrees from George Washington University, Harvard, and Princeton. He spent the next few decades as a prominent organizer in the capitalist West for Korean independence. He served in the Korean provisional government and attended international symposiums to press for Korean independence. MacArthur installed Rhee as “our man” in Seoul in 1945.

Who Started the Korean War?

Who started the Korean War seems an odd question as clearly North Korea launched a massive and coordinated invasion of South Korea along the 38^th Parallel on June 25, 1950. But the question of how the war started has bothered historians since the war began, and what was once obvious has become an open question. Journalist I.F. Stone made the case at the time that US intelligence was well aware of the build-up of Korean People’s Army (KPA) forces along the border. Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first chief of the CIA, made vague responses to questions from the press about the extent of US intelligence the morning after the invasion, but his private reports to President Truman and to the Senate Appropriations Committee seemed to pass muster.⁴⁰ Stone suggests the US only appeared to be surprised by the invasion. It knew in advance of the pending invasion and the timing, and kept it quiet. He quotes a DOD source, “the fact that ships were ready to evacuate the families of American officers and others in South Korea as evidence that the invasion was not a surprise.”⁴¹

In Tokyo, General MacArthur operated a parallel intelligence network, G2, run by General Charles Willoughby, a soldier with long fascist sympathies.⁴² The North’s troop build-up along the border was reported to Washington by G2, but downplayed as not significant. Stone observed: 

The absence of inspired press reports out of Tokyo warning of a possible Communist aggression in Korea was all the more puzzling because it was so out of keeping with MacArthur’s character and his usual mode of operation.⁴³

MacArthur, always ready to showboat for the press, deliberately lied to Congress on this topic. Stone continues:

This fact appears from two documents introduced in the record of the MacArthur inquiry by Secretary of State Dean Acheson a month after the MacArthur testimony. These documents showed that one reason some quarters in Washington may have been surprised by the outbreak of the war in Korea is that MacArthur’s intelligence service had brushed aside advance warnings, and had informed Washington, “It is believed that there will be no civil war in Korea this spring or summer.”⁴⁴

Four days preceding the invasion, MacArthur received a personal visit at Tokyo Headquarters from another public persona, UN attaché John Foster Dulles. Stone called Dulles “the Godfather of South Korea” for his role at the UN General Assembly which sanctioned the ROK’s creation. Dulles arrived in Tokyo after a 3-day visit to Seoul for consultations with Syngman Rhee. While in Seoul, Dulles spoke to the Korean National Assembly, and was chauffeured to the 38^th Parallel for an inspection tour and photo op. This border visit by Dulles on June 19, 1950 occurred just six days prior to the North Korean invasion. The timing of Dulles visit may have been coincidental, but it seemed unlikely to Stone, given Dulles meetings with MacArthur, and his timeliness on the scene in Tokyo to play State Department spokesperson to this flagrant Communist aggression.⁴⁵

The ROK government in Seoul had informed the UN Commission on Korea (UNCOK) on several occasions of the KPA build-up along the border in the months of 1949-50 leading up to the attack.⁴⁶ Syngman Rhee’s own spies had informed him of the North’s troop build-up which brought the two armies into numerical parity. The KPA reinforcements comprised several divisions of battled hardened veterans of the Anti-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War. These were the shock troops which led the charge. When the attack finally did occur, the ROK Army (ROKA) buckled quickly at the front, and was then routed southward down the peninsula with token resistance. Seoul was captured by the KPA early on the 3^rd day of the war. It appeared the ROKA collapsed under the KPA attack, but this is not the full story.

In the aftermath of the initial rout, US Congressional investigations clamored to discover the obvious that the South had been caught off guard, out-manned and out-gunned. UN investigators came to similar conclusions. This became the official story of both the US and UN— it was a devious communist “surprise attack” which overwhelmed the South Korean army.⁴⁷ These official war findings released funding from Congress. However, the shortcomings of ROKA were well known to both MacArthur and Rhee long before the attack. Yet both kept tight-lipped about the precarious border situation, and MacArthur took no corrective measures to beef up the armament and manpower of ROKA.⁴⁸

The People’s Committees

Japanese authority ceased in South Korea in mid-August 1945 with the surrender of Japan. Before US military occupation forces arrived in September, there occurred a power vacuum of centralized authority south of the 38^th Parallel. During this interregnum a rare and sociologically remarkable form of spontaneous self governance arose. Local People’s Committees (PC) formed to administer work places, to run the markets, schools, factories, villages, and civic functions in an orderly transition as Korea emerged with little physical destruction from WWII. The Korean people, without the presence of a coercive central government, instinctively took charge of governance of their own affairs through locally chosen decentralized volunteer committees. Wilfred Burchett explains the power transition from Japanese control.

Both north and south of the parallel, a great deal of the disarming of the Japanese garrison forces and police was done, in the early days after August 15, by the Korean people themselves. The People’s Committees which had been elected both north and south of the parallel, in composition and in action were democracy at work in the best sense of the term. They were the people, chosen by the people and working for the people. In South Korea for the three weeks prior to the American landing, it was the democratic people’s committees that virtually administered the country.

The Japanese were disarmed, except in Seoul and a few other centers. The people felt for the first time in centuries they had power firmly in their hands. They awaited the arrival of the American forces to hand over their Japanese captives, to round up the Japanese in Seoul, arrest Governor-General Abe and the worst of the Korean traitors.⁴⁹

However, South Korean expectations of national liberation by American forces were quickly trampled when General McArthur broadcast the terms of occupation. McArthur bestowed upon himself dictatorial powers. He proclaimed English as the official language of governance, ordered all people to return to their daily jobs, and demanded the restoration of prior individuals and structures of Japanese colonial management and governance. The volunteer people’s committees which had spontaneously formed to run the fisheries, the fire departments, public transportation and such resisted the return of Japanese managers and their collaborators to power, and thus the people’s committees became the first targets of US Army suppression.⁵⁰ 

MacArthur biographer John Gunther gives us this assessment of how the Korean occupation was bungled from the very start.

The Russians, under General Chistiakov, entered Korea on August 12, 1945, and proceeded to occupy the peninsula down to the parallel. They did not cross the parallel. The United States was unable to get troops in from Okinawa till September 8, almost a month later. Our commander might have been General Joseph W. (“Vinegar Joe”) Stillwell, but according to one widely believed story, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would not accept him. Had Stillwell been our leader in Korea, the whole story might have turned out profoundly for the better. Instead, the American commander became Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, a tough, bluff soldier who had a good grisly record as a combat general, but who knew nothing whatever of Korea and who was not, let us be gentle, what anybody would call a political genius.⁵¹

Gunther introduces us to the extremely important but little known personage in this history, General John Hodge, who served as military governor from 1945-1948 of USAMGIK, the US Army Military Government In Korea. Though subordinate to MacArthur, Hodge was given a wide mandate to govern as he saw fit with little oversight from MacArthur, the JCS, or from the State Department. He and Syngman Rhee shared both a rabid hatred of communists, and the devotion to authoritarian rule. Under Hodges patronage, Syngman Rhee gained political control of the South and built his reign of terror. 

The US occupation brought an appalling campaign of repression upon the Korean people by the US Army and its surrogate ROKA that has few equivalents for carnage and viciousness in world history. Historian Bruce Cumings has written, “Lest is known to Americans how appallingly dirty this war was, with a sordid history of civilian slaughters amid which our ostensibly democratic ally was the worst offender.”⁵² This is the real reason why Americans know so little of the Korean War.

Burchett writing in 1952 contextualizes the violence of US occupation within the longer view of Asian history, especially the last 300 years of European colonialism. 

The history of all Asian peoples throughout the past centuries is one of unrelieved bitter suffering. They have all ground under the yoke of semi-barbarian feudalism. In the case of Korea amid a number of other Asian countries the people during the past century have had a ruthless imperialism grafted on to their own native variety of oppression. . . .

It is the nature of imperialism to be brutal and vicious, to deal in wholesale slaughter and plunder, to stamp out national cultures, suppress native arts and customs and even the language of a people. There is no racial distinction about imperialist methods and lest any western readers should think that the form imperialism assumed in Korea was particularly vicious because it was Japanese imperialism, then they must be reminded that British imperialism in Malaya and elsewhere today, as well as French and Dutch imperialism assume precisely the same forms – and American imperialism in Korea has far surpassed in sadistic violence and wanton destruction the worst excesses of Japanese imperialism.⁵³ 

The first order of business under General Hodge’s command was to set up a South Korean national police force which recruited former members of the Japanese colonial constabulary, Nationalist KMT soldiers, and remnants of the Imperial Japanese Army. The ROK Army was similarly recruited, trained and equipped by the US Army. Violent political repression became the governing modality of US military occupation. This did not happen all at once, but through confrontations with the PC’s which escalated to violence, killings, and mass arrests. The National Police and ROKA trained by the US, and later by Japanese officers, became the agents of violent repression backed up by US tactical forces. Historian, Gavin McCormack shows how government rule by vicious terrorism became banal and routine to the oppressors. He quotes this letter to the Home Office by the British Minister in Seoul, Captain Holt.

Opportunities for the abuse of authority were many and seldom neglected and the corruption and oppression of the police has become an outstanding feature of life in the country. Torture is regularly applied to those arrested on political or serious charges and ‘died under torture’ is a routine entry in the police records.⁵⁴

The first major escalation of violence began in the fall of 1946 following the one year anniversary of US occupation and the ongoing suppression of the People’s Committees. A series of violent labor and peasant rebellions broke out across South Korea. The “Autumn Harvest Uprising” began with a railroad workers’ strike in Pusan on September 26, 1946 which rapidly spread into a torrent of spontaneous workers’ strikes, student strikes and peasant rebellions across large swathes of the South Korean peninsula. The violence of the revolt matched the violence of the centuries of repression which brought it to be. Mob anger was directed against the cruel landlords and exploiting factory owners, and their agents the police and the officials of the hated Japanese masters who protected the expropriator class interest, and who had been restored to power by the new US colonizers. Police outposts were attacked and burnt to the ground by peasant mobs. Policemen, landlords, officials, and predators of various stripes were dragged into the street, beaten, tortured and murdered. Bruce Cumings argues that the PC’s and the uprising they fostered represent socio-political events which occur rarely within human history, phenomena of themselves deserving greater academic study. First, there was the spontaneous genesis of self-governance across a broad geographical area to take civic control in a power vacuum of state. Secondly, under what conditions of opportunity and desperation will slaves rise up to kill their masters and their master’s agents? ⁵⁵

This violence was not unleashed indiscriminately. It was directed at hated officials, many of whom had been responsible for similar brutalities against Koreans during the colonial era, and the first year of liberation. In no instant were Americans the objects of such attacks. As in Hunan in 1927, the peasant’s eyes were very discerning. Racist or class prejudices cannot strip these acts of their historical content. It was the inchoate violence of the oppressed—political in the sense that it was directed at the agents of oppression, but apolitical in that no organization capable of channeling and utilizing the social force that Korean peasants represented existed in sufficient strength.⁵⁶

Cumings argues that while many of the participants in the rebellion were no doubt communists, the leadership of the uprisings was the local PC’s which were independent and autonomous, and not controlled by the Communist Party. 

Thus the autumn uprisings represented a last, massive attempt by the people’s committees and the groups associated with them to seize power in the provinces.⁵⁷

News of uprisings traveled quickly from town to town causing copy cat rebellions in neighboring provinces. In this way the spread of rebellion was organic, not directed. Additionally, there was no larger social agenda demanded by the rebels beyond desires for better pay, improved working conditions, removal of despised officials, land reform, and a more equitable distribution of the rice harvest. Cumings concludes the uprising failed as a revolution for lack of a central political organization to direct it.⁵⁸ 

General Hodge immediately assumed the uprising was communist led by the North. He declared martial law and began a systematic repression of the uprising with US tanks and tactical forces which resulted in thousands of peasant and worker deaths and thousands more arrested in the suppression of the revolt. Villagers, workers, government employees, students, intellectuals, suspected communists, and guerilla resistance fighters were tortured and murdered often in mass executions by South Korean security forces and armed paramilitary thugs of the Northwest Youth League and the Daedong Youth League. One of the most egregious genocides of the occupation period took place in 1948 when 30,000 people, about one quarter of the population of Jeju Island were killed or wounded in a state directed genocide which began as a peasant uprising.⁵⁹ 

In the 1948 National Assembly elections, Rhee’s party, the National Association for the Rapid Realization of Korean Independence, won 55 of the 200 seats. Rhee formed a coalition government, but his real hold on power was his backing from the US. Few Koreans spoke fluent American dialect as he did following his long sojourn in the US and Hawaii. Rhee became an ardent convert to capitalism, and shared the anti-communist phobia which had swept postwar US government and he was willing to do the bloody work of purging leftists. Syngman Rhee was also imminently corruptible, willing to line his pockets, reward his backers, and squander Korea’s natural wealth to foreign expropriators. Worst of all for most Koreans, Rhee was willing to reconcile with the Japanese imperialists, and this made him loathed in both North and South. Rhee’s political situation before the war began was always precarious, but Rhee survived by ratcheting up the domestic terrorism. In November 1949, Rhee unleashed the “winter mobilization,” a mass killing spree which we will return to shortly.

Rhee also held on to power by greatly increasing his belligerent rhetoric towards the North. This was accompanied by a similar escalation of border conflicts between ROKA and the KPA. Gavin McCormack informs us:

As Rhee’s position deteriorated, his calls for a march north against the communists grew more strident. And not only did he talk often about a ‘march north’, but his forces engaged in numerous incursions across the parallel, sometimes on a scale that must have been little short of a war, as in the attacks of August 1949 on the North Korean port of Monggump’o, which were later admitted by the man who commanded the raids, Admiral Lee Yong Wun.⁶⁰

The head of the American Military advisor group, General Roberts, is also on record as placing the blame for the clashes of the summer of 1949 squarely on the South Korean side.⁶¹ Border clashes increased in frequency and violence, and took on the character of deliberate provocations. The rural population along the North’s border was relocated for safety out of the attack zones.

McCormack identifies the Ongjin peninsula far from Western observers as the starting point of the war.⁶² In spite of Rhee’s threats, the ROK’s official policy stated that it would not attack North Korea to achieve military reunification of Korea, but if attacked by the adversary, it would fight to win the ensuing civil war. North Korea had a similar stated policy.⁶³ The trick then became provocation; how to provoke the other to attack first? Ongjin became the remote staging ground for final provocations. 

North Korean Motivations

Political power was transferred under UN auspices from the US military provisional government (under Supreme Commander for Allied Powers or SCAP in Tokyo) to the ROK in August 1948. The ROK became the legal government of South Korea. The US began its troop withdrawal. The North’s DPRK government was quickly formed on September 9, 1948 in response to this development. The hostile rhetoric of each side since liberation from Japan in 1945 had always presupposed a national reunification under its own system.⁶⁴ Historian Bruce Cumings who has led the way in a post-Cold War scholarship on the Korean War points out that mutual goal of North-South reunification changed with the US power transfer to the ROK. The North quickly suspected that Rhee planned to make the separation permanent. There would not be reunification.^{65 66}

In Seoul, Rhee was open for business, and had been funneling contracts to his cronies for services, concessions, rice, tungsten and gold mines.⁶⁷ Rhee was imposing a crash program of Western colonial liberalism on Korea with an iron fist. Initially, Rhee resisted US pressure for South Korean economic reintegration with Japan because of its broad unpopularity in both North Korea and South Korea which he blamed on communist agitation in the SKWP. At this point, Rhee unleashed second great escalation of mass murder across South Korea, the winter mobilization of 1949-50. In a three month period, November to January, the ROK Army attacked the South Korean citizenry in a round-up and mass murder spree killing 70,000 accused leftist and their families. Hundreds of bodies at a time were burned or buried in trenches. Many burial sites are still not all accounted for. 

Following this horrific act of genocide, a confident Rhee visited MacArthur in Tokyo on February 16, 1950 where he reversed his policy announcing new rice sales to Japan and future economic cooperation. Rhee pledged that the ROK and Japan now had a “common enemy.” Cumings quotes an intelligence source which states:

. . . in the February meeting Rhee and MacArthur agreed to put the ROKA under the latter’s command in case of war, work together with former Japanese military officers, train ROKA officers in Japan, and have South Korea play a leading role in touching off a war for all of East Asia.⁶⁸

For the DPRK, collaboration with Japan was the ultimate betrayal of Korean nationalism and the decades of struggle for independence against Japanese subjugation. The DPRK constitution expressly forbade cooperation with Japanese militarists. Cumings paints a grim picture. In a critical January 19, 1950 DPRK Central Committee meeting, Foreign Minister Pak Hon Yong, chairman of the South Korean Worker’s Party appealed for an early invasion of the South because their supporters were being mass murdered.

“Patriots cannot sit quietly by while the Rhee ‘country-selling clique’ and the US imperialists create a situation of unbearable misery and wretchedness unprecedented in our nation’s history.”⁶⁹

There were practical considerations too. Rhee’s government had borrowed from the communists’ playbook by enacting land reform legislation, but it had delayed putting it to effect. The rice harvest had been good and improving for three years. Would these conditions erode rural support of the PC’s? The DPRK suspected the Rhee/MacArthur meeting was to plot the invasion of the North. The Chinese Civil War was over; there was urgency as circumstances in South Korea demanded it, and the window of opportunity for reunifying Korea would not remain long open. The decision to invade South Korea was made by the DPRK leadership at the January meeting. Over the next five months they prepared the invasion. 

Cumings gives the US understanding of the DPRK mindset. US planners assumed they were Soviet pawns, the KPA was a proxy army, that all weapons were supplied by the Soviets, and that the decisions leading to war would be made at the Kremlin.

The CIA’s last summary report on the DPRK before the war started began with the following statement: “The Democratic People’s Republic of northern Korea is a firmly controlled Soviet Satellite that exercises no independent initiative and depends entirely upon the support of the USSR for existence.⁷⁰

This ideological assessment is far from accurate. Cumings shows the DPRK had built up its invasion force since 1949 with reassigned Korean divisions from the Chinese Civil War. These soldiers brought their own weapons. The KPA purchased large amounts of surplus WWII Soviet weapons including tanks, and the KPA had stockpiled captured Japanese weapons from armories in Manchuria including weapon and ammo production factories. They had the manpower and the weapons to invade and win. They also anticipated a mass uprising in the South led by the SKWP and the people’s committees in support of the invasion. Would the US intervene was the question.

From the great distance of Moscow, the Soviet view of the approaching war was considerably more philosophical. Cumings offers us this assessment of Soviet deliberations. 

It was far more likely that the Soviet position was a general one arrived at in 1949 or earlier, to distance the Soviets from the volatility of the North Korean leadership, and reasoned as follows: a war in Korea is likely. There is a great possibility that either the North or the South will launch it. We do not want to involve our prestige in it, but it could bring benefits if North Korea succeeds and swallows the South, this is a gain for the communist world. More likely they will fail, by bringing on American intervention: this will teach all communist a lesson about going against Moscow’s wishes, or acting outside its directions; it will raise the distinct possibility of getting the Chinese into the war, bloodying them against the Americans and making them more dependent upon us; it may bog the US down in a stupid peripheral war and exhaust their blood and treasure for no good purpose.⁷¹

What Stalin did not want was for this looming internecine bloodbath among Koreans to expand into a general war which would bring the USSR and the US into direct battlefield confrontation, and therefore a careful distance had to be maintained, especially in consideration of the US’s new atom bomb weapons. 

US Preparations for War

The US decision to defend South Korea against the North Korean invasion was not the “spontaneous and courageous rising to the occasion to meet the challenge of global communist expansionism as US policy hawks would like us to believe.⁷² Cumings also provides insight into that deliberative process:

In the year before the Korean War. . . American policy towards East Asia underwent a profound transformation, embodied in NSC48, the new paper for Asia, and the process of decision behind it. Beneath the formal policy documents were a host of new assumptions— on containment and rollback, Japan’s position in the world economy, China’s presumed expansionist tendencies. As these assumptions worked their way through the bureaucracy and into established policy, most of the decisions usually thought to have come as a result of the fighting in Korea were already made or prefigured: the extension of containment to East Asia, the provision of military aid to the French in Indochina, the refusal to recognize the People’s Republic of China, the hegemonic conception linking an Asian hinterland to the needs of the Japanese economy, and the containment /rollback dialectic of the Korean War.^{73 74}

Cumings argues that there exists ample circumstantial evidence to conclude the US cleverly provoked North Korea into invading the South with provocative actions and false signals.⁷⁵ In a controversial speech at the time by Secretary of State Dean Acheson to the Washington Press Club on January 12, 1950, Acheson excluded South Korea from the US’s declared sphere of influence in East Asia.⁷⁶ This “oversight” blinked green light to the DPRK. The US was also clearly complicit in Rhee’s murderous rampage across the South. It was the US Army using Japanese training techniques which had armed and trained the ROK soldiers who committed the winter mobilization massacres. The US was also fully aware of Rhee’s escalating border provocations. 

The hawkish clique in the Truman Administration, Acheson, Rusk, and Nitze at State, Dulles at the UN, Marshall and Lovett at DOD,⁷⁷ Hillenkoeter at the CIA, and the JCS, all collaborated with MacArthur, Hodge and Rhee, to clandestinely set up the DPRK through violent provocations and deceptive statements to launch its invasion. How much Truman knew in advance of this plot is not fully revealed, but clearly he supported a limited war in Korea. The US military build-up required by the Truman Doctrine and the aggressive NSC68 policy would fight global communism and it would bring a needed economic boost.⁷⁸

Not only were White House hawks aware of the pending North Korean invasion, but UNCOK had also been forewarned repeatedly by the ROK Foreign Minister about the North’s troop build-up, and threatened invasion of the South. I.F. Stone explained it this way: 

When we add the information in the United Nations reports to that which emerged from the Hillenkoetter hearing and couple this with the public statements of the South Korean government itself, it is impossible to accept the flat statement of the UN Commission that the South Koreans had “no reason to believe from intelligence sources that invasion was imminent. This statement, with no supporting evidence, was made in the Commission’s cable of June 27 to the Security Council, the very day sanctions were voted.⁷⁹

Stone also reveals the full extent of John Foster Dulles role in creating the South Korean regime, precipitating the Korean War, and imposing the national security state in the US. He quotes Dulles and continues:

“I had the responsibility in the United Nations General Assembly of representing the United States in the sponsorship of the resolution which led to the reestablishment of Korea’s independence under representative government administering the free parts of Korea.” He might have added that the South Korean Republic was also the first fruit of another institution he had successfully sponsored at the UN—the Interim Committee or “Little Assembly,” a device to circumvent Soviet veto power on the Security Council. It was the Interim Committee which, despite serious misgivings of Canada and Australia, voted to authorize the separate elections in South Korea that led to the establishment of the Republic. For Dulles, Korea was a symbol. As acting chief United States delegate to the General Assembly during the debate on Korea he had “made it clear that the United Nation action of Korea was to be taken as an endorsement of the wider opposition of American foreign policy to Communism.”⁸⁰

The UN Security Council vote of sanction on June 27, 1950 branded North Korea as the aggressor, while authorizing the United States and willing allies to intervene in the conflict on behalf of the South. It was a blank check to the US to begin the military rollback of communism. The Korean nation, framed by many centuries of feudalism, and a half-century of Japanese subjugation, had sought political independence and self-determination. Now, because of great power intervention, what would have been a violent domestic bloodletting amongst Koreans grew to exponential proportions. 

Before WWII brought them to the same side, the two victorious great powers of WWII, the US and the USSR, had no previous history of state animosity. They had only one passing history of accommodation from the mutually beneficial land sale of Alaska. Czarist Russia had also benefitted from Theodore Roosevelt’s brokering of the Russo-Japanese War.⁸¹ Both nations had been birthed from revolution against tyrant monarchies Both nations were enormous land masses at northern latitudes, populated by a dominant majority of white-skinned, Christian people. It seemed there was much in common to cement a lasting bond of friendship. But that possibility crashed in a grand hegemonic struggle between capitalism and communism as predicted by both Marxism and the Truman Doctrine. That is the conventional wisdom; but what really occurred was self-recognition. Two brutal, patriarchal, expansionist empires, one founded in the east moving westward, the other anchored in the west moving eastward; they inevitably collided. Each regime with its glorious history of war, and its private history of genocides, land grabs, slavery, serfdom, and massacres. Two well-oiled imperialist regimes on the same expansionist trajectory bumped against each other in Korea. A small nation with dreams of liberty and self-determination, found itself in the middle of the first battleground between giants. 

The Soviet Intervention

The passage of the UN sanction against North Korea was a critical victory for Truman and the anti-communist ideologues in Washington. It set the legal precedent of anti-communism as justification for future US military interventionism. It set the US on the path towards global military domination, and it serves as additional evidence the US scripted the North Korean invasion. 

In hindsight, the biggest political blunder of the entire Korean War was the Soviet Union’s absence from the June 27 UN Security Council meeting where the sanction against North Korea was decided. The USSR in absentia could not veto the sanction. Soviet UN Ambassador Joseph Malik had been boycotting the Security Council for six months because the US was refusing to recognize the CCP as the government of China, and denying China U.N. membership and a permanent seat on the Security Council. The vote gave the US Army tremendous authority with international permission to invade and occupy the Asian mainland. Wada Haruki who has researched the Korean War in documents from the US, USSR, China, North Korea, Japan and Taiwan, argues that Stalin did not want the USSR to be viewed as a partner to the North’s invasion. 

After January 30, when Stalin had endorsed North Korea’s policy of armed unification, he may have seen the boycott in a different light than he had earlier. If war started in Korea, the problem would be taken to the Security Council. . . . ⁸²

Wada makes it clear that Kim Il Sung and Pak Hon-yong were petitioners to Stalin in January 1950. The DPRK Centra Committee had the previous week decided to invade South Korea to unify the Korean peninsula, come what may. They presented Stalin with their decision to go to war as a fait accompli, and asked his blessing and help. Stalin did the calculus; the war costs to the Soviet Union could be offset by selling WWII surplus arms to the North. Stalin understood their revolutionary fervor and their desperation over the masacres perpetrated by Rhee, and he decided the USSR was better served by helping North Korea, rather than hanging them to dry as they were determined to attack the South, and he could not prevent them. But there were conditions to this assistance; first, Kim Il Sung and Pak Hon-yong had to get Mao Ze-dong to commit China to enter the war if the US intervened, and second, the USSR must be positioned to be held harmless from US reprisal.

Wada speculates that Stalin continued the Security Council boycott at the UN because he reasoned that “international public opinion would turn sharply against Moscow for using its veto to block a resolution.”⁸³ This explanation seems an insufficient motivation. Stalin had ecellent penetration of US policy decisions at the highest level because the Philby spy ring in the UK kept him well-informed. He also knew of US hydrogen bomb developments. He was well aware of Truman’s political shift to the right, the administration’s vehement anti-communist rhetoric, and the rise of American militarism. It is far more likely Stalin bailed on his protégé Kim Il Sung at the UN because he feared the US atomic bomb, and the bellicose rise of US militarism. He did not want to risk nuclear confrontation.

It remains for historians to speculate if the USSR had vetoed the June 27 Security Council resolution would Truman have attacked the Soviet Union with A-bombs? Would the US have invaded Korea to support the Rhee puppet regime on its own without international backing? What would have happened to the Cold War? In hindsight it can be argued that Stalin blinked at this historic moment of international brinksmanship.⁸⁴ Kim and Pak were likely informed they were on their own in advance. However, the USSR did stick by North Korea and China throughout the war by pipelining supplies, weapons, fighter planes, DDT and gasoline to the front. 

Stalin also insisted on Soviet micromanagement of the initial attack to assure the best chance for success. General Terentii Shtykov was sent to Pyongyang as Soviet Ambassador to manage the war effort. Wada digs up:

Shtykov’s report along with captured North Korean documents make it abundantly clear that the attack order itself— the “command to counterattack” the invading ROKA —and indeed every aspect of the North Korean offensive was meticulously planned by the DPRK military in conjunction with Soviet advisors.⁸⁵

Wada quotes at length Shtykov’s 2^nd day report of the attack. While KPA morale was high, field communication between high command in the rear and front line command had broken down. Clashes were sporadic, the KPA was advancing, the ROKA was retreating, and few ROKA prisoners were being taken.

China Commits to War

The North Koreans had invested a lot of sweat equity in the successful Chinese Civil War, but the decision of Chinese leaders to back the North Koreans in war against the South with its US sponsor was not an automatic decision. There was much debate of the pros and cons. What would be the military strategy? What were the desired outcomes, and what were the possible catastrophes? What were the acceptable costs in lives and treasure of the campaign, the logistical hurdles of raising a large army, equipping and training it, the short time frame in which to mobilize, and how much support would the Soviets provide?⁸⁶

More specifically, if the South won the war and took control of the North, China would have a hostile enemy on its frontier. Rhee would likely continue the border attacks against China to draw it into inevitable conflict with the US. The US could also build military bases along China’s border to launch bombing raids and amass an invading army. A second security issue was the dozen hydro electric complexes on the Yalu River built during Japanese occupation which not only supplied North Korea with electricity but much of Northeast China as well. A third concern of a DPRK defeat would be the mass exodus of North Korean refugees into China which would ensue. 

After their meeting with Stalin, Kim Il Sung and Pak Hon-yong next appeared in Beijing in February to pitch their enterprise to Mao and the CCP Central Committee. China would consult Moscow before committing to a likely war with the US. China could supply North Korea, and increase its border military presence, but it would not commit to send troops into battle. Privately, what assurances Mao gave to Kim and Pak aren’t known, but Mao was the main proponent for joining the Korean War. He may have wanted to fight the US in Korea for prestige, but he faced stiff opposition on the Central Committee. When the war started in June 1950, China had still not agreed to become a combatant. The KPA’s war effort would be supplied by the USSR and China, but it was on its own with troops in the invasion. That arrangement was fine as long as the KPA was winning the ground war. 

In the long view of history which hindsight provides, China’s wait and see decision may also have been a serious tactical blunder. China could have opted to send a massive army into South Korea with the KPA invasion to insure a swift victory for the North before the US had time to respond. China could have demanded its seat on the UN Security Council on the basis of that daring action, and world affairs would be very different today. But China didn’t do that because it feared the atomic bomb, and the mental stability of MacArthur.⁸⁷ Instead China took a cautious military approach which dragged the war out for three additional years.

The North’s invasion of the South met token resistance from the ROKA, and Seoul quickly fell. However, The ROKA’s retreat southward was orderly, and brought about the third mass killing spree in South Korea. During the winter mobilization, many suspected leftist not outright murdered during this killing rampage were forced to enroll in the Bodo League re-education program. When the war broke out, Rhee ordered the massacre of all Bodo League registrants blaming them for the North’s invasion. Instead of fighting the KPA, the Republic of Korea Army fled south turning their guns on the civilian population. Whole villages and city neighborhoods, political strongholds of SKWP and the people’s committees were slaughtered in the ROKA retreat. Estimates of the death toll in the Bodo League genocide exceed 100,000 victims, perhaps as many as 200,000 victims. Mass burial sites are still being discovered. Some of these mass executions were witnessed and assisted by US soldiers. This was not the rout of ROKA by the invading KPA forces as reported to Congress and the UN. This was a designed retreat and massacre. This heinous criminal act was an operationally planned mass genocide conceived as a battle tactic by that brilliant military strategist, General Douglass MacArthur. Given the systematic nature of this butchery, nobody should believe this killing of civilians was not the pre-planned ROKA retreat. MacArthur has received great praise for the strategic brilliance of his landing at Inchon, but it was really this horrific slaughter which set it up. ⁸⁸

This abominable genocide stirred KPA rage and lured them far down the Korean peninsula in pursuit of the enemy to Pusan. They would drive the ROKA and the US devils into the sea and rid the Asian mainland once and for all of foreign colonizers and lackeys. But the Korean peninsula is long, Pusan was distant, and the DPRK advance became over-extended. In July, the US began bombing bridges, oil refineries, and rail lines in the South behind the advance to cut off KPA supply lines. KPA tanks and artillery were sitting targets from the air. The siege of Pusan bogged down in August and was ultimately futile because the KPA had no navy. The US was able to resupply its perimeter fortifications and bombard KPA positions from the sea. The US/UN also gained precious time to mount its counter attack. China warned North Korea multiple times of a US naval build-up in the Yellow Sea, but the urgency of these communiqués did not reach the KPA front or were ignored. Instead, the KPA launched a series of costly, fruitless, and increasingly desperate attacks on Pusan. A strategic retreat at this point would have been wise, but apparently “giving up” for Kim and Pak when the goal was so close at hand was not possible.

In September, the second invasion of South Korea began when US/UN forces landed at Inchon harbor. This invasion quickly collapsed the thin defense left behind the front line. Pusan was massively reinforced from the sea allowing US/UN and ROK forces to break out of the perimeter on Sept 16, and counter attack the KPA. The main host of the KPA was caught between pincers. Only a quarter of Kim’s army escaped to retreat north. Many units dissolved into the mountains to become guerillas bands moving north, but 130,000 KPA soldiers surrendered and became POWs. A great reversal of fortunes of war had happened. Stalin was outraged by the military incompetence of the KPA leadership. When China took control of the war in November, General Peng Dehuai relieved Kim Il Sung and Pak Hong-yon of their military command. 

The next question of the war was whether MacArthur and the US/UN would be content to reclaim South Korea for the ROK to the 38^th Parallel and stop the war at that line, or would they try to reunite all of Korea for the South? Real negotiation between Beijing and Moscow on China’s entry into the war began in early October. Peng Dehuai backed Mao on the Central Committee, and took command of the newly created People’s Volunteer Army (PVA). Zhou En-lai and Lin Biao, shopping list in hand, flew to Stalin’s health spa on the Black Sea to cut the deal. Soviet Vice-Premier Nikolai Bulganin became supply master. China would need a lot of material support, but mostly China wanted fighter jets to challenge US air domination. Wada argues that Mao and Zhou waffled China’s commitment to war to get the best deal with Stalin,⁸⁹ but Zhou had publically stated in September that China would enter the war if the UN/US crossed the 38^th Parallel in pursuit of the KPA or conquest of the North. 250,000 PVA troops were moved to the China/North Korea border to back up its ultimatum. Again MacArthur downplayed the intelligence.⁹⁰ By the end of October the PVA had smuggled thousands of troops into North Korea without detection to begin its “First Phase” attacks. China’s prosecution of the war clearly reveals a caution towards the possibility of nuclear attack.

War Beneficiaries: Japan and Taiwan

Japan’s role in the Korean War also deserves scrutiny. Wada informs us that on the day of the North’s invasion of the South, June 25, 1950,

“Japan did not have diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea; there were no Japanese diplomats, wire services, or newspaper reporters in Seoul. All accounts consequently came from non-Japanese sources: nevertheless, every Japanese Newspaper carried war news on the front page for fifteen days”⁹¹ 

While the lack of formal relations may be true, there were plenty of Japanese spies in Seoul with information back channels. Japan’s investment in Korea was long and bureaucratic. News coverage reporting the North’s victories was immediately censored by MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP). General Head Quarters (GHQ) initiated a “Red purge” and 336 suspected communists were immediately fired from eight major newspapers in Japan. By August that number reached 704 journalists across Japan. By the end of 1950 about 13,000 suspected Japanese Communist Party (JCP) members had been fired from their jobs.⁹²

Article 9 of the postwar Japanese constitution largely written by GHQ lawyers required Japan to renounce war and practice a strangely Zen concept, “non-possession of war potential.” However, the government of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru was called to provide wide ranging support for the US war effort. A 75,000 man National Police Reserve was hurriedly assembled to free up US occupation soldiers for combat duty, and Japanese mine sweepers cleared the Inchon harbor in preparation for the US invasion.

Japan had by now become not only a base for US bombing of North Korea but a military camp organized to support the war more broadly. From the coast guard and the national railroads to merchant marine vessels and Red Cross nurses, Japan was organized and duty bound to comply with SCAP orders. But the government did not acknowledge the nation’s role in the war, and the people were unaware of it.⁹³ 

Yoshida professed to respect the Japanese public’s aversion to warmongering in spite of the pressure applied by MacArthur and the China Lobby to rearm Japan. However, Wada shows us Yoshida’s de facto policy from a July 14, 1950 address to the Japanese House of Representatives.

The UN decision to impose military sanctions against the North Korean “aggression” was appropriate, Yoshida said: “the Red invaders” were exerting “an evil power . . . and Japan itself is already endangered.” Action by the international alliance had already alleviated anxiety about how a “disarmed Japan could be secure.” “Although Japan is not in a position to participate positively, to join in actions by the United Nations, it is wholly appropriate for Japan to cooperate to the extent possible.”⁹⁴

One such secret collaboration was the work of Unit 406 Medical General Laboratory which was a US biological warfare (BW) factory located at Atsugi Air Base in Yokohama. This US medical facility, along with satellite production sites in Tokyo and Kyoto employed Japanese nationals in the lab production of BW pathogens. Unit 406 also bred insects as delivery vectors (EW) for the US germ warfare campaign against North Korea and China.⁹⁵ The terrifying germ war science of Shiro Ishii and Unit 731 developed at the Ping Fan water purification complex near Harbin, China was now, in 1951-52, taken up again by Japanese lab scientists inside Japan under the direct supervision of the occupying US Army.⁹⁶

Japan was very much an active participant on the US/UN side in the Korean War. The war brought jobs and investment, and greatly helped Japan to rebuild its devastated postwar economy. To this day, Japan hides behind its non-combatant status to mask its very active participation in the Korean War. 

Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang government on Taiwan was the other great beneficiary of US military intervention in Korea. The KMT island stronghold in 1950 was held by brutal terrorism. The Nationalist Army had been disgraced in battle and forcibly expelled from mainland China just months earlier. Taking possession of Taiwan in 1946 the KMT had brutally massacred 20,000 leading citizens and civic functionaries of the former Japanese colony. Billeting a large, battered army strained the Island’s capacity. When Dean Acheson excluded Taiwan from America’s necessary sphere of influence in the Pacific, it was generally believed by many parties that it was only a matter of time before China would invade to capture the Island.⁹⁷ 

Chiang did what he could to drum up funding and political support with help from his old friends in the China Lobby, but there was a growing opposition to Gen. Chiang in some Washington circles; concern that he had been bankrolled far too long and his goal to recapture China was a lost cause. But Chiang’s fortunes dramatically about-faced with the war’s start. Truman ordered the 7^th Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to curtail any invasion attempt by China during the distraction caused by the North Korean attack. When the US invaded Korea, Chiang offered MacArthur 30,000 KMT soldiers to fight the North Koreans. MacArthur declined the offer of combat troops. He envisioned Korea as the provocation to begin WWIII against the USSR with pre-emptive atom bomb attacks on major cities in Russia and China. MacArthur’s strategy would have the KMT army open a second front in South China. 

The Korean War extended Chiang Kai-shek’s tenure on Taiwan three decades until his death, and the Kuomintang Party continues its political domination still today. MacArthur did employ a KMT contingent of 100 pathological murders as prison guards on Geoje (Koje) Island who played a major role in provoking the prison riots that left 3,000 dead Chinese and North Korean POW’s. The story of Korean War POWs, both US/UN and Communist POWs, is a major piece of the whole story because prisoner treatment was highly controversial, and prisoner repatriation became a huge issue at the truce talks, and dragged the war out an additional one year. That discussion will also come in the next installment of this series. There remains much to tell of this sad history of the Korean War. Only a full reckoning of this forgotten history will lead us out of our ongoing impasse with North Korea.

Works Cited

Burchett, Wilfred, This Monstrous War, Joseph Waters: Melbourne, 1953.

Carroll, James, House of War: the Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company 2006. 

Cumings, Bruce, The Korean War: A History, New York: Modern Library Chronicles Book, 2010.

________, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol 1: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1947-1950, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

_______, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol 2: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Domhoff, G. William, The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America, New York: Random House, 1970

Dujarric, Robert, Korean Unification and After: The Challenge for U.S. Strategy, Indianapolis: The Hudson Institute, 2001

Gunther, John, The Riddle of MacArthur: Japan, Korea and the Far East, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950.

Halberstram, David, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, New York: Hyperion, 2007

Jegu 4•3 Peace Foundation, ed., The JEGU 4•3 Mass Killing: Atrocity, Justice, and Reconciliation, Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 2018. 

Halberstam, David, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, New York: Hyperion, 2007

Hinton, William, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1966

Lockwood, Jeffrey A., Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

McMullough, David, Truman, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992

McCormack, Gavan, Cold War Hot War: An Australian Perspective on the Korean War, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1983.

Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jack, Brave New World Order, Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books 1992

Peterson, Michael, “The Intelligence that Wasn’t: CIA Name Files, the U.S. Army, and Intelligence Gathering in Japan”, in Drea, Edward, et al., Researching Japanese War Crimes Records: Introductory Essays, Washington D.C.: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, 2006

Pollack, Jonathan D. and Chung Min Lee, Preparing for Korean Unification: Scenarios & Implications, Santa Monica CA: RAND, the Arroyo Center, 1999.

Powell, Thomas, “Biological Warfare in the Korean War: Allegations and Cover-up”, Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 31, No. 1, March 2017.

________, “Korean War Biological Warfare Update”, Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 31, No. 3, November 2017.

________, “On the Biological Warfare Hoax Thesis”, Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 32, No. 1 March 2018.

________, “Biological Warfare in Korea: A Review of the Literature”, Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 33, No.2, July 2019.

Report of the International Scientific Commission for the facts concerning Bacteriological Warfare in Korea and China, Beijing: 1952

Shackleton, Allan J., Formosa Calling: An Eyewitness Account of the February 28^th, 1947 Incident, Upland CA: Taiwan Publishing Co., 1998.

Stone, I.F., The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950-1951: A Non-conformist History of our Times, Boston, Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1988. Originally published in 1952 by Monthly Review Press

Truman Doctrine, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman/Doctrine

United Nations Security Council Resolution 82, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United/Nations?Security/Council/Resolution/82

United Nations Security Council Resolution 83, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United/Nations?Security/Council/Resolution/83

Wada, Haruki, translated by Frank Baldwin , The Korean War: An International History, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

 

<> “X” (Kennan, George F.) “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”, Foreign Affairs, Vol 24, No 4, July 1947