The Korean War Read Online Free PDF Page B

American decision to land troops to play a part in the occupation of Korea was taken only at the very end of the war. The Japanese colony had been excluded from the complex 1943–45 negotiations about occupation zones between the partners of the Grand Alliance. The Americans had always been enamoured of the concept of ‘trusteeship’ for Korea, along with Indochina and some other colonial possessions in the Far East. They liked the idea of a period during which a committee of Great Powers – in this case, China, the US and USSR – would ‘prepare and educate’ the dependent peoples for self-government and ‘protect them from exploitation’. This concept never found much favour among the British or French, mindful of their own empires. And as the war progressed, concern about the future internal structure of Korea was overtaken by deepening alarm about the external forces that might determine this. As early as November 1943, a State Department sub-committee expressed fears that when the Soviets entered the Far East war, they might seize the opportunity to include Korea in their sphere of influence:
Korea may appear to offer a tempting opportunity to apply the Soviet conception of the proper treatment of colonial peoples, to strengthen enormously the economic resources of the Soviet Far East, to acquire ice-free ports, and to occupy a dominating strategic position in relation both to China and to Japan . . . A Soviet occupation of Korea would create an entirely new strategic situation in the Far East, and its repercussions within China and Japan might be far reaching. 3
     
    As the American historian Bruce Cumings has aptly pointed out, ‘what created “an entirely new strategic situation in the Far East” was not that Russia was interested in Korea – it had been for decades – but that the United States was interested’. 4 Yet by the time of the Potsdam Conference of July 1945, the United States military were overwhelmingly preoccupied with the perceived difficulties of mounting an invasion of mainland Japan. They regarded the Japanese armies still deployed in Korea and Manchuria as a tough nut for the Red Army to crack, and were only too happy to leave the problem, and the expected casualties, to the Russians. The Pentagon had anyway adopted a consistent view that Korea was of no long-term strategic interest to the United States.
    Yet three weeks later, the American view of Korea had altered dramatically. The explosion of the two atomic bombs on Japan on 6 and 9 August brought Japan to the brink of surrender. The Red Army was sweeping through Manchuria without meeting important resistance. Suddenly, Washington’s view of both the desirability and feasibility of denying a substantial part of Korea to the Soviets was transformed. Late on the night of 10 August 1945, barely twenty-four hours after the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee reached a hasty, unilateral decision that the United States should participate in the occupation of Korea. The two officers drafting orders for the committee pored over their small-scale wall map of the Far East, and observed that the 38th parallel ran broadly across the middle of the country. South of this line lay the capital, the best of the agriculture and light industry, and more than half the population. Some members of the committee – including Dean Rusk, a future Secretary of State – pointed out that if the Russians chose to rejectthis proposal, the Red Army sweeping south through Manchuria could overrun all Korea before the first GI could be landed at Inchon. In these weeks, when the first uncertain skirmishes of the Cold War were being fought, the sudden American proposal for the divided occupation of Korea represented an important test of Soviet intentions in the Far East.
    To the relief of the Committee in Washington, the Russians readily accepted the 38th Parallel as the limit of their advance. Almost a month before the first