The Korean War Read Online Free PDF Page A

occasional faces peering curiously at their liberators from windows and corners, they came upon a solitary Chinese restaurant bearing the sign ‘Welcome US’. Then, from the moment the Americans boarded the train for Seoul, they met uninhibited rejoicing. A little crowd of Koreans stood by the tracks in every village they passed, waving gleeful flags. At Seoul railway station, the group had planned to take a truck to their objective, the city post office. Instead, on their arrival, they decided to walk. To their bewilderment, they found themselves at the centre of a vast throng of cheering, milling, exultant Koreans, cramming the streets and sidewalks, hanging from buildings, standing on carts. The Americans were at a loss. They had arrived without any conception of what the end of the Japanese war meant to the people of this obscure peninsula. 1
    Throughout its history until the end of the nineteenth century, Korea was an overwhelmingly rural society which sought successfully to maintain its isolation from the outside world. Ruled since 1392 by the Yi Dynasty, it suffered two major invasions from Japan in the sixteenth century. When the Japanese departed, Korea returned to its harsh traditional existence, frozen in winter and baked in summer, its ruling families feuding among each other from generation to generation. By the Confucian convention that regarded foreign policy as an extension of family relations, Korea admitted an historic loyalty to China, ‘the elder brother nation’. Until 1876, her near neighbour Japan was regarded as a friendly equal. But early that January, in an early surge of the expansionism that was to dominate Japanese history for the next seventy years, Tokyo dispatched a military expedition to Korea ‘to establish a treaty of friendship and commerce’. On 26 February, after a brief and ineffectual resistance, the Koreans signed. They granted the Japanese open ports, their citizens extra-territorial rights.
    The embittered Koreans sought advice from their other neighbours about the best means of undoing this humiliating surrender. The Chinese advised that they should come to an arrangement with one of the Western powers ‘in order to check the poison with an antidote’; they suggested the Americans, who had shown no signs of possessing territorial ambitions on the Asian mainland. On 22 May 1882, Korea signed a treaty of ‘amity and commerce’ with the United States. In the words of a leading American historian of the period, this ‘set Korea adrift on an ocean of intrigue which it was quite helpless to control’. The infuriated Japanese now engaged themselves increasingly closely in Korea’s internal power struggles. The British took an interest, for they were eager to maintain China’s standing as Korea’s ‘elder brother’, to counter Russian influence in the Far East. By 1893, Korea had signed a succession of trade treaties with every major European power. The Japanese were perfectly clear about their objective. Their foreign minister declared openly that Korea ‘should be made a part of theJapanese map’. Tokyo hesitated only about how to achieve this without a confrontation with one or another great power.
    The Chinese solved the problem. Peking’s increasingly heavy-handed meddling in Korea’s affairs, asserting claims to some measure of authority over Seoul, provoked a wave of anti-Chinese feeling, and a corresponding surge of enthusiasm for the Japanese, who could now claim popular support from at least a faction within Korea. In 1894, Japan seized her opportunity, and landed an army in Korea to force the issue. The government in Seoul, confused and panicky, asked Peking to send its own troops to help suppress a rebellion. The Japanese responded by dispatching a contingent of marines direct to the capital. The Korean government, by now hopelessly out of its depth, begged that all the foreign troops should depart. But the Japanese scented victory. They reinforced their