Causes of the Korean War

9 Key excerpts on "Causes of the Korean War"

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  The Routledge Handbook of American Military and Diplomatic History

  1865 to the Present

  • Christos Frentzos, Antonio S. Thompson(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part VIIThe Korean War and its Aftermath Passage contains an image

  23The Korean War, 1950–1953

  A Historiographical Summary James I. Matray

  On July 27, 1953, an armistice halted the fighting in Korea. Coincidentally, interpretive peace also was taking hold among historians and political scientists on the causes, course, and meaning of the Korean War. Serious debate did not begin until scholars had rejected the credibility of an orthodox judgment that for almost two decades dominated accounts of the Korean conflict. Prior to the 1970s, few histories challenged President Harry S. Truman’s public declaration on June 27, 1950 that the North Korean attack on South Korea proved that “communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war.”1 To date, sharp differences persist on almost every critical issue, but with two notable exceptions. First, Korean War scholars have reached agreement that this conflict marked a watershed in postwar international affairs, militarizing the Soviet-American competition and extending the Cold War to the entire world. Second, a consensus now prevails that the origins of the Korean conflict date from at least World War II. By contrast, the most important question that has constituted for some time the great divide in the literature on the Korean War is whether it was more an international conflict or a civil war.

  Cold War assumptions influenced the authors of a long list of overviews that presented an orthodox interpretation of the Korean War before the release of archival documents. During the decade after the armistice, Rutherford M. Poats, John Dille, and Robert Leckie published straightforward narrative accounts of the conflict, congratulating the United States for acting to halt Communist expansion. Establishing an early interpretive baseline in 1963, T.R. Fehrenbach, in a full-length study, explained that the United States was not prepared militarily or mentally to fight a limited war in Korea. Preservation of U.S. credibility and prestige, however, demanded military intervention. British historian David Rees relied on research in documents available at the time to publish in 1964 what was for two decades the standard history of the conflict. He praised the United States for waging a limited war that defeated aggression.2 Other surveys confirmed conventional wisdom, as historians apparently thought that they had received the last word on the conflict, as Korea earned its status as the forgotten war during the next decade.3

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  Voices from the Korean War

  Personal Stories of American, Korean, and Chinese Soldiers

  • Richard Peters, Xiaobing Li(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  Part One The Korean War A Short History Passage contains an image

  Chapter 1

  Background and Origins of the War

  It is one of the more unfortunate and ironic events in history that Korea, a nation that prior to 1945 included the most homogeneous and united of all peoples, should become a nation divided. Whatever differences may have existed in regard to caste or class, the Korean people speak the same language throughout the peninsula and, with minor variations between north and south, are of the same culture. This cruel fate is made even more tragic by the fact that the Korean people were divided by other powers—clearly the victims of Cold War politics.1

  The tragedy of Korea, however, began long before the Korean War. Thanks to victories over China in 1894 and Russia in 1905, between 1905 and 1945 Japan governed Korea as a colony, with the blessings of Great Britain and the United States. The Japanese ruled harshly and backed up their policies with brutal police and army forces as they strived to destroy all vestiges of Korean culture. While Korea did make economic progress under Japanese rule, the political climate remained repressive. In the words of one historian, “Japanese imperialism stuck a knife in old Korea and twisted it, and that wound has gnawed at the Korean national identity ever since.”2

  The Japanese occupation was made even more difficult for Koreans to accept by their close cultural ties to China and their view of the Japanese as products of inferior culture. Partially for these reasons, in the end the Japanese were unable to extinguish Korean culture and nationalism. When World War II ended in 1945, Korean nationalists, bonded by their common hatred of the Japanese, competed for leadership in the attempt to establish a free and independent Korea.3

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  The Ashgate Research Companion to the Korean War

  • Donald W. Boose, James I. Matray(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  James I. Matray (1985) wrote detailed studies of U.S. involvement in Korea from the start of World War II to the outbreak of hostilities a decade later challenging the orthodox assignment of blame to the Soviet Union for igniting the Korean War on June 25, 1950.

  Contrasting sharply with prior works, histories of the war thereafter rarely excluded description of U.S. policy toward Korea during and after World War II. Cumings recently has argued that the Korean War—a conflict “fought primarily by Koreans from conflicting social systems, for Korean goals”—“did not last three years, but had a beginning in 1932, and has never ended” (Cumings 2011 : 65). Allan R. Millett (2005) also locates the origins of the Korean War before the traditional date, contending that it began on April 3, 1948 when Communist-led partisans staged an uprising on Cheju-do. The next month, the United Nations supervised elections in southern Korea alone, resulting in establishment on August 15 of the ROK. The Soviet Union responded in kind, sponsoring the creation in September of the DPRK. Now there were two Koreas each determined to achieve national reunification. While President Syngman Rhee installed a repressive, dictatorial, and anti-Communist regime in the south, Kim Il Sung emulated the Stalinist model for political, economic, and social development in the north. These events magnified the necessity for prompt U.S. withdrawal because Stalin, acting on a North Korean request, announced that Soviet troops would leave the north by the end of 1948. The United States already had taken steps to provide South Korea with the ability to defend itself against anything less than a full-scale invasion. By then, a U.S. Army advisory team had trained and equipped an army cadre of 25,000 men in the south. U.S. military advisors also had supervised formation and training of a National Police Force (Millett 1997 , Clemens 2002

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  A Theological Assessment of Reconciliation for Missiology in the Korean Context

  • Hyo Seok Lim(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Pickwick Publications

    (Publisher)

  6

  The Divided Contexts of the Korean Peninsula

  A Brief History of National Division in Korea From Liberation to the Korean War

  After the brief joyful moment of national liberation from Japanese forceful occupation on August 15 , 1945 , the Korean peninsula soon became entangled in nationwide “political and ideological division” under the Cold War’s influence.1177

  As Japan was defeated in the Pacific War by the Allied forces, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States (US) began an ideological contest on the Korean peninsula, each of whom were concerned that Korea might be ideologically taken by the other party.1178

  Bruce Cumings discusses this as follows:

  There was no historical justification for Korea’s division: if any East Asian country should have been divided it was Japan (like Germany, an aggressor). Instead Korea, China, and Vietnam were all divided in the aftermath of World War II. There was no internal pretext for dividing Korea, either: the thirty-eighth parallel was a line never noticed by the people of, say, Kaesŏng, the Koryŏ capital, which the parallel cut in half. And then it became the only line that mattered to Koreans, a boundary to be removed by any means necessary. The political and ideological divisions that we associate with the Cold War were the reasons for Korea’s division; they came early to Korea, before the onset of the global Cold War, and today they outlast the end of the Cold War everywhere else.1179

  The Foreign Affair ministers of the US, the United Kingdom, and the USSR met from December 16 to 2 6 , 1945 to discuss the issue of Korea. They decided to support Koreans’ own provisional government, yet also operate a trusteeship on the Korean peninsula for up to 5 years “under four-power trusteeship (US, Britain, China, USSR).”1180 Regardless of political orientation, a national struggle rose against the decision because Koreans had suffered enough from losing self-government under Japanese occupation.1181 Suddenly, from early in 1946 , the Communist Party of Korea began to support trusteeship.1182 The Joint Commission of the US and USSR eventually failed to reach an agreement.1183

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  The Korean War in World History

  • William Stueck(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  The desire to avoid repeating the disaster of the appeasement of Nazi aggression in the 1930s was so keen that sixteen nations agreed to intervene to repel the invasion, fighting under the flag of the United Nations. The question of Soviet responsibility for the attack has therefore rightfully been at the center of historical analysis of the war’s origins. Writings on the war in the 1950s and 1960s, most prominently David Rees’ history of the conflict, 1 followed policy makers in assuming that the Soviet client state in Korea had neither the physical means nor the political autonomy to launch a large-scale military offensive on its own. The journalist I. F. Stone challenged that view as early as 1952, 2 but until the release of Western documents in the 1970s prompted a new wave of literature on the war, his remained a minority view. The most influential of the revisionist historians whose work dominated the field in the 1980s, Bruce Cumings, concluded on the basis of newly released American documents that although Kim II Sung probably consulted with Stalin, he planned and carried out the attack largely on his own. Cumings also concluded that the North Korean action may in fact have been a response to a Southern attack, as the communist countries had always maintained, a provocation perhaps orchestrated by Chinese nationalists and by Americans eager to reassert a U.S. military presence in East Asia. At any rate, he argued, the war can best be explained as a civil war, a continuation of the violent struggle between the political right and left in Korea that had begun with the collapse of Japanese colonial rule in 1945

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  The Korean War

  • Steven Hugh Lee(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In order to come to a fuller understanding of war, then, we should explore not only the origins and political outcomes of conflict, but also the complex social and cultural interchanges between the soldier, his or her society, and the ‘enemy’. The history of the Korean War provides us with such an opportunity. The brief North Korean occupation of southern Korea in 1950 is unintelligible without an understanding of the political structures and social goals which were embedded in the pre-1950 northern experience with anti-Japanese guerrilla warfare and social revolution. Significant changes in race relations which were beginning to occur in the United States shaped the lives of US soldiers on the peninsula. And prisoners of war on both sides were subjected to propaganda which reflected dominant cultural and political values and ways of thinking in the countries of their captors. We shall examine these and other themes as a way of illuminating the reciprocal relationship between war and society during the Korean conflict.

  Wartime Korea, 1950

  The Korean War was not a conventional military conflict, fought between professional standing armies in large-scale battles. It was a hybrid struggle which combined massive firepower – especially on the UNC side – with guerrilla warfare. The war's character was apparent from the initial North Korean advance. Although the Soviet Union provided tanks, and Russian military advisers played an important role in formulating North Korea's offensive strategy, a large percentage of the attacking troops were seasoned veterans of unconventional civil warfare in rural China. These battle-hardened soldiers were accompanied by guerrilla forces operating in tandem with the DPRK Army. During the summer of 1950, groups of up to 3,000 guerrillas fought alongside the ‘regular’ army forces.

  As northern armies penetrated deeper into the south in the summer of 1950, North Korean political cadres moved into occupied areas and began to shape local politics in the image of the DPRK regime. Leftist people's committees which had been disbanded by the American Military Government in 1945 and 1946 were reconstituted. North Korean propaganda emphasized the south's ‘liberation’ from the American-sponsored ‘puppet’ regime of Syngman Rhee and glorified the role of the Korean People's Army, which was portrayed as a guerrilla organization that had fought valiantly against Japanese imperialism. Significantly, this northern propaganda made few references to the indigenous South Korean communist movement before 1945. The clear leader of Korean communism was now Kim Il Sung, not Pak Hon Yong, and the brand of communism imposed on the south was one borne of the Manchurian guerrilla conflict against Japan in the 1930s.

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  The Korean War

  An Annotated Bibliography

  • Keith D. McFarland(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Child of Conflict . Seattle: University of Washington, 1983, pp. 133–162.

  A persuasive case is made that the origins of the war rested on internal rather than external factors. Tells of the guerrilla conflict in the South, including violent opposition to U.S. policy. With the defeat of Southern partisans in 1950, the war turned to conventional warfare. Covers a topic virtually ignored by those looking at the cause of the war.

  410. Moon, Chang-Joo. “Development of Politics and Political Science in Korea after World War II.” Koreana Quarterly 10 (Autumn 1968): 282–302.

  Survey of the political developments in South Korea and the role played by political scientists in the creation, emergence, development and demise of the Rhee government.

  411. Oh, John Kie-Chiang. Korea: Democracy on Trial . Ithaca: Cornell University, 1968.

  Analyzes the emergence of and political problems encountered in establishing the Republic of Korea and the fifteen years that followed. In spite of the difficulties, the transition to Western Democracy was successful and beneficial to South Koreans.

  412. Oliver, Robert T. “The Republic of Korea Looks Ahead.” Current History 15:85 (September 1948): 156–161; 15: 86 (October 1948) 218–221.

  Examines the establishment of the Republic of Korea and assesses its future. Positive factors include the homogeneity of its people, freedom of international debts, industriousness of its citizens and the fact that the new government represents a strong break with the past. Negative factors also loom large, especially the divisions brought about by the tug-of-war between Russia and the U.S. and the Soviet desire to gain control of the region; thus, the nation’s future is very questionable.

  413. Oliver, Robert T. “A Study in Devotion.” Reader’s Digest 69:411 (July 1956): 113–118.

  This study of the Austrian born wife of Syngman Rhee, Francesca Donner, whom he married in 1934, traces Rhee’s struggle through World War II, the post-war period and the Korean War through her eyes. Tells of her activities in those tumultuous times.

  414. —— . Syngman Rhee: The Man Behind the Myth

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  Interpreting China's Military Power

  Doctrine Makes Readiness

  • Ka Po Ng(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3   The Genesis of the Chinese Local War Doctrine

  At the end of the Second World War, the Iron Curtain fell and divided the world into two camps headed by rival superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. When communist North Korea under Kim Il Sung ventured south in June 1950 for national unification, a new hot war commenced. It eventually involved, on the one side, a United Nations coalition force led by the United States and, on the other, communist forces of North Korea and China with the backing of the USSR. But the first large-scale postwar conflict between the world’s two rival ideological camps on the Korean peninsula turned out to be different from what had been anticipated.1 In the course of the three-year conflict, both sides had tried to limit the scope of the conflict instead of seeking total annihilation of the enemy.

  On the eve of the Korean War, the United States observed a policy endorsing nothing short of total victory in conflict.2 But the Korean War changed this posture. American scholars and analysts began to articulate an outcome short of a complete military triumph. A growing and flourishing literature on limited wars emerged. The names and works of such civilian proponents as William Kaufmann, Robert Osgood, Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn and Henry Kissinger became predominant in the field of strategic studies.3 Limited war even became the Kennedy administration’s official military doctrine, only to be called into question during the Vietnam fiasco.4

  The Russians at first devoted little attention to limited wars which they preferred to call ‘local wars’. As reflected in their choice of terminology, they initially viewed limited wars differently from the Americans. By the 1960s, however, they had followed the United States and began to explore the concept more systematically. Beginning with a study on foreign military research dealing with local wars, the Russian military gradually developed its own work on the subject and such efforts received the official blessing of the Soviet government. Over time, its publications showed increasing interest and demonstrated greater sophistication on the subject.5

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  North Korea and the World

  Human Rights, Arms Control, and Strategies for Negotiation

  • Walter C. ClemensJr.(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  Tensions between Stalin and Mao affected their willingness and ability to assist and channel Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. Even when weak and unsteady, both the DPRK and the ROK usually managed to go their own ways. Both Seoul and Panmunjom proved adept at manipulating the larger states that financed, armed, and backed them diplomatically.

  All this formed the context for the increasingly important roles played by North and South Korea on the global stage. Passage contains an image

  5

  How a Civil War Became Global

  He calls it Reason, but uses it only to act more beastly than any animal. (Er nennt’s Vernunft und braucht’s allein, nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein.)

  —Mephistopheles to the Lord in Goethe’s Faust (lines 285–286)

  The partition of Korea left the peninsula with two governments, each determined to unify all Koreans under its rule. Korea was not a priority for the Kremlin or the White House: each focused more on its nuclear arms competition and on Europe. Still, Stalin gave a green light and equipped the DPRK to invade South Korea in June 1950. Despite earlier signs that Korea lay beyond the U.S. defense perimeter, the Truman administration dispatched U.S. forces and acquired UN approval to drive back the North Korean invaders. Feeling threatened, China joined the fray. The USSR sent pilots as well as arms to sustain DPRK and Chinese forces. After three years of combat, the parties signed an armistice in July 1953. The putative lessons and consequences of the Korean War ricocheted around the globe.

  NORTH KOREA PLAYS ITS SOVIET AND CHINESE CARDS

  Each leader—Kim Il Sung in the North and Syngman Rhee in the South—struggled to unify Korea under his own rule. Starting in 1949, if not earlier, Kim Il Sung importuned Stalin on several occasions for permission to march North Korean forces across the 38th parallel and unify all Korea. The DPRK leader assured Stalin that Communists in the South would mobilize popular support for unification with the Communist North. However, neither Stalin nor Mao Zedong wanted a war on the Korean peninsula that might bring U.S. forces to their doorstep. Stalin initially rejected Kim Il Sung’s appeals, but changed his stance after the USSR successfully conducted a nuclear explosion and after Communists took control of China. In January 1950 Stalin instructed Soviet ambassador Terentii F. Shtykov to inform Kim Il Sung that the USSR stood ready to assist his campaign to liberate the South, provided that it be organized to avoid U.S. intervention. Stalin authorized the dispatch of 400 senior Soviet officers to plan the war. He also dictated such details as whether the DPRK could issue a bond, form an additional three infantry divisions, convene the Supreme People’s Assembly, or send textile workers to the Soviet Union for training. Still, Stalin did not want a major war on the Soviet doorstep that could also lead to war with the United States or a renewed threat from Japanese militarism.

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