Читать книгу The Korean War: History in an Hour - Andrew Mulholland - Страница 8

As the Second World War drew to a close, the Allies turned their attention to the future status of those areas which had been under Axis control. Between 1945 and the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, Korea would be divided into two. By 1950 there was a Russian-dominated Communist North Korea and a US-dominated quasi-democratic South Korea.

It was the Americans who proposed the division of the peninsula into two, along the 38th Parallel. North of this line would become a Russian-controlled zone, with the Americans occupying the south. There is nothing particularly special about the 38th Parallel, other than it being an internationally recognized line on the map. It happens to run across the waist of Korea and the Americans noticed that if it were used in this way, the southern zone would include the capital city of Seoul, and both of the country’s major ports.

Such a slicing up of the map by the great powers was commonplace at the time. Little real account was taken of the interests or aspirations of the local inhabitants. From an American perspective this was a bold proposal, in that the Russians were likely to emerge as the more powerful player in the region. Russia had undertaken to attack Japan within three months of the defeat of Nazi Germany. The obvious means of doing this would be to invade Japanese-occupied Manchuria, including Port Arthur and the Chinese border with Korea. They could then move south into Korea. This is what transpired. Other allied forces in Asia (chiefly American and British) were thinly spread. It would be months before any kind of garrison could be sent to the south of Korea.

Despite the obvious weakness of the American position, the Russians accepted the 38th Parallel proposal at the Potsdam conference. Their chief focus was on Europe and they may have imagined that in due course, the whole of Korea would fall to them.

Therefore, as two Koreas began to emerge from the dust of the Second World War, they did so against the backdrop of the nascent Cold War. With considerable justification, Churchill described an ‘Iron Curtain’ falling across Europe. In Eastern Europe, democratic sensibilities were ignored and brutal Communist regimes imposed at the behest of Moscow. In 1948 the Russians had come close to provoking a Third World War by blockading West Berlin. The Chinese Civil War had reached its climax in 1949, with the establishment of Mao Zedong’s government in Beijing and the rump of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists confined to the island of Taiwan (Formosa).

In American public life and within President Harry S. Truman’s Administration, there was a tendency to view such developments as a monolithic and malevolent conspiracy, driven by Moscow. There was a widely held view, for example, that the West had ‘lost China’ through a lack of political and military resolve. This may seem an over-simplification to the modern reader. Yet given the appeasement which had allowed fascism to gain such a grip on Europe, it was understandable. Communism did seem to be on the march, and it was trampling human rights and democracy underfoot. Sentiments in Western Europe, even among governments with socialist agendas, were not so different from the US point of view.

For all of these tensions, the Russians stuck to their side of the deal when occupying northern Korea in 1945. Although weeks ahead of the Americans, their forces remained north of the 38th. There was a notional commitment from both parties to seek a solution for the entire peninsula, thereby creating a united Korea. However, in both the Russian and American zones, it was not long before each party was pursuing policies designed to preclude the opposing ideology from taking hold.

In the North between 1945 and 1950, the Russians built a totalitarian Communist regime under Kim Il Sung, formally declaring the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948. The measures introduced included land reform and a semblance of worker control; corruption was largely eliminated. These were popular policies. It would, therefore, be wrong to suggest that the new regime was devoid of support. Kim had fought the Japanese in Manchuria during the 1930s and then spent five years studying in the Soviet Union, before returning to his country of origin in 1945. Although he was never simply a Soviet puppet, by 1945 Kim was much closer to Stalin’s regime than he was Mao’s. Kim was still only 38 when the Korean War broke out.

In the South, US General John Hodge headed a somewhat inept military administration which relied on former Japanese collaborators – notably their brutal police force – and repressed any left-leaning political activists. At the same time, Syngman Rhee became the Americans’ favoured contender for political leadership. Rhee had spent much of his life in exile in the United States. He was a highly educated Christian, with decades of experience in Korea’s volatile political history. This included imprisonment by the Japanese and advising at the Treaty of Portsmouth negotiations in 1905. By 1945 he was already 70 years old. Virulently anti-Communist, Rhee was elected the first President of South Korea in July 1948.

While Rhee and Kim manoeuvred themselves into power between 1945 and 1948, there were parallel efforts by the USA, Russia and the United Nations to reach some kind of agreement which would unify the country. The Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in December 1945 had agreed to establish a joint US-USSR Commission for the government of Korea. Largely ineffectual, the Commission at least served to prevent open conflict between the Americans and Russians in Korea. In the South, Rhee’s ‘Democratic Council’ opposed the Commission’s timetable for independence and provoked riots and strikes. Eventually the Americans took the Korean problem back to the UN General Assembly, which called for elections across Korea. The Russians rejected this proposal and the two elections which brought Rhee to power in the summer of 1948 were confined to the US zone. In May, Rhee’s party secured control of the National Assembly. In July, he won a personal mandate when elected directly to the South Korean presidency. These were followed by one party ‘elections’ in the North later that year.

By 1949, both the USA and Russia had withdrawn their military forces from the peninsula. Korea was split into two hostile mini-states, each beholden to its super-power. The rhetoric between them was heated, with claim and counterclaim. Rhee and Kim were Nationalists – both sought dominance over the whole of Korea. Neither recognized the legitimacy of the other. Border incidents and guerilla attacks in the South became commonplace. The scene was set for war.