The Ashgate Research Companion to the Korean War

Donald W. Boose, James I. Matray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317041498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This essential companion provides a comprehensive study of the literature on the causes, course, and consequences of the Korean War, 1950-1953. Aimed primarily at readers with a special interest in military history and contemporary conflict studies, the authors summarize and analyze the key research issues in what for years was known as the 'Forgotten War.' The book comprises three main thematic parts, each with chapters ranging across a variety of crucial topics covering the background, conduct, clashes, and outcome of the Korean War. The first part sets the historical stage, with chapters focusing on the main participants. The second part provides details on the tactics, equipment, and logistics of the belligerents. Part III covers the course of the war, with each chapter addressing a key stage of the fighting in chronological order. The enormous increase in writings on the Korean War during the last thirty years, following the release of key primary source documents, has revived and energized the interest of scholars. This essential reference work not only provides an overview of recent research, but also assesses what impact this has had on understanding the war.

PART I
Political Background and Participants

1
Prelude to Conflict, 1910–1948

Boram Yi

The 40 years of regional rivalries that characterized much of Korea’s challenging foreign relations after its “opening” in 1876 came to end in 1910 when Japan formally annexed the country. China, a traditional ally of Korea, failed to prolong its dominant position on the peninsula when it lost to the rising power of Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Thereafter, Tsarist Russia’s expansionist ambitions increasingly challenged the traditional East Asian world order, but met with only stiff resistance from Japan. Defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 allowed Japan to make Korea its protectorate. Five years later, it annexed the country, ending the international rivalry over what Westerners had labeled the “Hermit Kingdom.” On August 29, 1910, Sunjong, the last monarch of the Chosŏn dynasty, which had ruled for 500 years, relinquished his throne, marking the beginning of Japan’s colonial reign over Korea for the next 35 years.¹

The study of colonial Korea has been heavily affected by the tragic event that almost immediately followed Korea’s liberation from Japan, the Korean War. The short-lived excitement of liberation in the summer of 1945 soon dissipated, as Soviet–American partition of the country along ideological lines led to creation in 1948 of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK). By then, economic depression in response to the sudden disintegration of systems and deepening Cold War tension internationally moved Korea down a path that led to the carnage of war in June 1950. The bitter fighting on the battlefield temporarily ceased with an armistice in 1953, but the intense competition between the North and South Korean states did not.

Interpretation of Korea’s colonial history became a contested field between the two states. In their effort to legitimate one state and discredit the other, nationalist historians in each Korea would construct a master narrative of colonial history in which they celebrated Korean resistance under insurmountable Japanese oppression. In this diachronic depiction of resistance and exploitation and of good and evil heroes there were sacrificial nationalist fighters and villains, evil Japanese colonists, and self-serving Korean collaborators. The similarity of the two narratives, however, ended there. The heroes, in North Korea, were Manchurian-based anti-Japanese guerilla fighters, of which its founder Kim Il Sung was an important leader. By contrast, in South Korea, they were the cultural nationalists and members of the Korean Provisional Government, of which its first president Syngman Rhee occupied a ministerial position. The one-dimensional nationalist approach of both Koreas might help condemn the injustices of Japan’s colonial rule and erase the shame of colonization, but it also obscures other forces and dynamics, not to mention the plurality, complexity, and difference in the colonial experience. This analytical framework therefore sacrifices scholarly inquiry in favor of each state’s nationalistic and ideological pursuits.²

Earlier works in English on Japan’s colonial rule in Korea tended to follow the simple binary framework of repression and resistance. Essays in Andrew Nam’s edited volume characterize Japan’s governance as “harsh and highly exploitive” and illustrate how it “failed to win the approval and support of Koreans.” If there was anything positive about Japanese domination, the editor argued, it fostered the “growth of ethnic and national consciousness among the Koreans” (Nahm 1970: 13). David Brudnoy (1970), in a useful analysis of Japan’s failed assimilation policy in Korea, describes Japan’s rule as repressive and stifling. Koreans reacted to it, he emphasizes, with nothing but rage and resentment.

Studies of colonial Korea that distanced themselves from a monolithic nationalist narrative and were more critical examinations of colonial Korea were nonetheless not completely immune to the presence of two separate Koreas and the heat of the Cold War. For example, Chong-sik Lee and Dae-sook Suh, pioneers of Korean studies outside Korea, center their early works on the colonial legacy in the establishment of two separate Koreas. Lee’s landmark study of modern Korea and its ideological subcultures under Japanese colonial rule traced the evolution of Korean nationalism from 1876 to 1945. Defining nationalists as intellectuals and critical masses who aspired to establish a modern nation-state of Korea, he interprets Korean nationalism essentially as a political movement (Lee 1963). Although Lee registered disapproval of Japan’s ruthless rule, he was more critical of Korean nationalists for their failure to sustain a unified nationalist movement. The ideological division and rivalry between the “traditional” or “right-wing” nationalists on one hand and the Communists on the other, he argued, was the most serious roadblock to regaining national independence (Lee 1963: 179). The problem of factionalism was so fraught that Korea, he concluded, was almost “doomed to be divided into two camps when liberation came” (Lee 1963: 213). Although Lee argued that the Communists posed a formidable opposition to the right-wing nationalists, he provided only scant details about the Korean Communist movement.

A decade later, however, Lee provided the details in an imposing two-volume study of Korean communism that he co-authored with Robert Scalapino, an authority of Asian politics and communism (Scalapino and Lee 1973). Their work significantly expanded Suh’s first serious study of the Korean Communist movement (Suh 1967). While Suh in his own study covered the movement from its inception in 1918 in Khabarovsk to the founding of the DPRK in September 1948, Scalapino and Lee followed the establishment and development of the DPRK state system until 1972 and analyzed its political structure. All three authors demonstrated the intricate and almost fratricidal power struggles among members of various factions within the Communist movement and explained the eventual ascendance of Kim Il Sung and his Kapsan faction of Manchurian-based guerilla fighters promptly after liberation in August 1945. Most importantly, Suh, Scalapino, and Lee agreed that Japan’s relentless crackdown on Communists seriously constrained their activities in Korea and pushed them to northern border regions where they took refuge either in China or the Soviet Union. By the mid 1930s, all exiled Korean Communists became members of a foreign Communist party—Chinese, Japanese, or Soviet (Scalapino and Lee 1973). When they eventually returned to Korea after Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II, both the Chinese and Soviet Communist parties wanted to exert their influence over Korea through their affiliated members. All three authors located the roots of the political and ideological division of Korea in the nation’s colonial experience.

During the late 1970s, Bruce Cumings initiated a reexamination of Korea’s colonial history. He agreed with the conclusions of the first generation of scholars who wrote about modern Korean history that it was crucial to analyze Japanese rule in Korea to comprehend fully the origins of the division of Korea and the Korean War. However, he challenged the previous consensus of foreign Communist influence over post-liberation Korea. Instead, Cumings (1981) insisted that in 1945, Korea was ripe for socialist revolution as a result of social and cultural changes occurring under Japan’s domination. He put less emphasis on exiled nationalists and Communist activists, but more on the emerging working class and their class-consciousness in colonial Korea. This became the foundation of his revisionist thesis that the Korean War was a civil conflict.

Cumings’ seminal work titled The Origins of the Korean War, particularly the first volume, would reshape fundamentally the debate over the origins of the Korean War after its publication in 1981. However, it also contributed to interpretive shifts in the study of colonial Korea. After publication of this book, more scholars of Korea started to examine the political, economic, social, and cultural changes that had occurred within Korea and became more willing to apply various social-science theoretical frameworks in analyzing the colonial period. This coincided with the arrival of a new generation of Korea scholars who challenged the simple interpretation of colonial history as a monolithic confrontation between Japanese imperialism and the Korean struggle for independence.³ They criticized the conventional master narrative as the product of “the ideological warfare” between two Korean states (Robinson 1988: 189) that remained “largely unarticulated” (Eckert 1991: 2), “myopic” (Eckert 1999: 366), and “black-and-white” interpretations of the colonial period (Park 1999: 1). According to revisionist writers, an exclusive focus on Japanese repression and Korean resistance ignored the complexity of Korea’s colonial experience. They also questioned the obsessive focus of previous studies on the growth of Korean nationalism in studying modern Korean history (Robinson 1988, Schmid 2002). The heavily politically oriented bias of the traditional approach, revisionists argued, neglected and repressed the complexities of the historical process in which economic, social, and cultural changes played a critical role in determining the subsequent history of Korea.

Several factors explained the interpretive shift in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War freed scholarly inquiry from ideological constraints. Revisionist Carter J. Eckert well explained the need to depart from the Cold War framework when admitting that he, like many Koreanists, had been “captive” to nationalism and Cold War ideologies “to a greater or lesser extent” (Eckert 1999: 370). Instead, a new generation of scholars explored diverse theoretical frameworks to understand the colonial history of Korea, for example modernism and post-modernism (Em 1993), transnational examinations of colonialism (Manela 2007), and new imperial studies (Atkins 2010). In addition, South Korea’s rapid economic development attracted attention of scholars and motivated the re-examination of Korea’s colonial economic development (McNamara 1990, Eckert 1991). The democratization of South Korea also contributed to the development of a more liberal historiography in the study of the colonial Korea.

The difference between traditionalists and revisionists was most obvious in their contrasting interpretations of the March First Movement of 1919. The largest nationwide protest for Korean independence under Japanese rule, scholars consider it a significant turning point in Korean history because it would give birth to modern Korean nationalism (Baldwin 1969, Brudnoy 1970, Lee 1984). During the first decade of its rule in Korea after 1910, Imperial Japan used direct military governance to tightly control the political and cultural activities of Koreans. Almost overnight, Korea became a Japanese barrack. The Governor-General, the top administrator ruling the colony, had to be an active-duty military officer who kept order and security with sword-bearing military police. Colonial authorities shut down Korean nationalist presses, outlawed nationalist organizations, and suppressed any sign of Korean resistance with stern punishment. Scholars of the period, not surprisingly, often refer to these years as the “dark times” in Korean historiography.

The harshly militaristic rule generated strong resentment among Koreans. The brewing resentment culminated in massive nationwide uprisings in the spring of 1919. Inspired by President Woodrow Wilson, championing of the idealistic principles of national autonomy and self-determination, on March first, 33 prominent religious and civic leaders declared Korean independence. Soon, waves of protests against Japan’s rule spread throughout the colony and continued for the next couple of months. It was a truly national movement in that Koreans of all ages and from all regions took part. The Japanese colonial authorities recorded that approximately one million Koreans from every walk of life and every province participated in the protest. The authorities, convinced that they had been transforming a “backward” colony successfully into a modern civilization, were surprised and reacted harshly. Although the movement was largely peaceful and non-violent, the Japanese government recorded 553 Koreans killed, 1,409 injured, and over 1,400 arrested in suppressing the movement in two months (Seth 2010). Another report recorded 7,509 people (both Koreans and Japanese) killed, 15,961 injured, and 46,948 arrested. Korean nationalists claimed far greater numbers for each recorded figure (Lee 1984).

This massive popular uprising resulted in Imperial Japan’s government conducting a reappraisal of its colonial policy, which led to the adoption of the “cultural policy” for the next decade. The Governor-General’s response to the protest in Korea horrified liberal Japanese, and even those who believed the authorities handled the crisis well suggested something needed to be done differently (Tsurumi 1984). The shift did not fundamentally change Japan’s position in Korea, but it reflected Tokyo’s recognition that a rule by brute force alone only would foster more nationalist demands for independence, thus hampering its effort to assimilate Koreans into the lower rungs of the Japanese Empire. The relaxation of Japan’s Korean policy, however, meant that the colonial authorities had to make an effort to include more Koreans in the colonial government, permit moderate nationalist organizations, and allow more cultural freedom, most notably selectively opening doors for printing and release of Korean publications. For instance, during the first decade of its rule, the Governor-General’s office simply did not issue any publication permits to Korean language newspapers, with the exception of its own Daily News (Maeil sinbo). During the second decade, the Governor-General issued permits for the operation of three Korean language newspapers—Chŏson ilbo, Tonga ilbo, and Chungoe ilbo (Robinson 1984).

The traditionalists, however, were critical of the ensuing “cultural” policy that Japan adopted after the March First Movement. Dae-sook Suh notes that the movement “resulted in the political reform” of the 1920s, but quickly points out that “it was initiated by Japanese administrators in an effort to court favor in restoring Japanese order in Korea” (Suh 1967: 55). Chong-sik Lee agrees that “the Japanese government would not have reexamined its policy, nor to have conceded so much” without the movement, but adds that “the price paid by the Koreans may have been too high” (Lee 1963: 124). David Brudnoy laments that “the repressive elements” and “the mitigating features” of the 1920s negated “to a large extent the effect of positive material improvements” the new policy produced (Brudnoy 1970: 179). Ki-baik Lee, in his influential Korean history textbook, echoes the nationalist interpretation when he concludes that Japan’s new policy was “no more than a superficial and deceptive moderation of its earlier policy of forceful repression” (Lee 1984: 347). One promising outcome of the movement for these scholars was that it imbued new hope to scattered liberation leaders abroad. Soon after March 1919, Korean exiles in China formed the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) in Shanghai. Through its alliance with the Chinese Guomindang, the KPG lobbied for international recognition as Korea’s only legitimate government, but without success. Witnessing the resistance spirit of Koreans, overseas Communists intensified their efforts to establish a base for political operations inside Korea. In 1925, they founded the first Korean Communist Party on the peninsula.

Revisionist scholars agreed that Japan’s “cultural” policy of the 1920s was no more than a tactical shift from repression to “manipulation” (Robinson 1984: 331), but argued that nevertheless it had a profound effect in changing Korean lives in political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. The relaxation of press control in the 1920s allowed Koreans to engage publicly in the discussion of Korean nationalism and Korean identity after 10 years of silence (Schmid 2002). It was during the 1920s that the “fissures” that later would divide Korean intellectuals and elites in liberated Korea began to emerge (Cumings 1981: 20). Michael Robinson further probes the ideological rifts among nationalist intellectuals in Korea, in his valuable Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920–1925 (1988).

When the Japanese authorities relaxed their grip over Koreans after the March First Movement, moderate nationalists—scholars also refer to them as “cultural nationalists”—seized the opportunity to launch gradual programs that would strengthen Korean cultural identity and economic autonomy, but within the confines of colonial rule (Robinson 1988). However, coming from the traditional elite yangban class, their approach was conservative and elitist. Historian Allan R. Millett agrees with Robinson’s characterization of moderate nationalists. “No Mao Zedong,” he highlights, “emerged from their polished, affluent, and educated ranks” (Millett 2005: 29). Moderate nationalists perceived themselves as enlightened l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of Maps, Figures, and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction
• Part I Political Background and Participants
• Part II Tactics, Equipment, and Logistics
• Part III The Course of the War
• Postscript
• Appendix: Order of Battle
• Index