International and European Studies

International Politics                                                                           

topic:

The Korean War

By: Khinh Sony Lee Ngo
Birkbeck, University of London, Faculty of Continuing Education, Academic 1997-8         

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Key words: Korean war, Korea North & South divided, world history. 

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Introduction

The perpetuation of the division of Korea in 1948 had different meanings for the people of the South and the North.  To the people of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), it was a situation they had to accept although they had no desire to maintain it.  What most concerned the Republic of Korea was the fear of communization of the whole peninsula.  Their attitude was that they would rather live divided temporarily than unified under communism.

On other hand, the division of Korea ran counter to the North Korean design.  The regime in the North felt it had been denied a good chance to extend its control over the South.  The North had already established a full-fledged army by February 1948, and its strength soon reached 200,000 regular soldiers in contrast to the small numbers of the South Korean constabulary.

The ultimate objective of North Korea’s unification policy was to take over South Korea by military means.  In order to pursue that objective, the North Korean regime improved its military preparedness through negotiation with the Soviet Union on the one hand, and attempted to undermine the Republic of Korea government by a peace offensive and subversive means on the other.  In the face of  unremitting Communist pressures, the Republic of Korea government tried to insure its security.  However, the peace and security that South Korea sought became a mirage.  On June 25, 1950, less than a week after North Korea had made another “peaceful unification” proposal, it launched a full-scale invasion of South Korea and started a war that was to continue for three years.

To repel the unprovoked aggression, the United Nations, led by the United States, quickly took steps to organize a collective police force and come to the aid of the South.  The war was finally brought to cease-fire in July 1953 with the conclusion of the Armistice Agreement between the  UN command and the North Korean and Chinese Communist forces.  This failed to bring about a unified Korea, leaving the country divided as before.

The Korean War addresses clearly the international dimensions of its diplomacy and its impact on global politics.  Although ideological confrontation between authoritarian communism and liberal capitalism often appeared to be most striking reality in the great power contest over Korea, it invariably was filtered through national perspectives, domestic pressures, and individual personalities.  Thus ideology usually holds limited explanatory power for specific decisions.  The Korea War explained the course of the war from the perspectives of the great powers most prominently involved the United States, the Soviet Union and China.

Part 1.  Korea divided, the Causes and Background Factors

1.1:  The Japanese gone home:

    The roots of the Korean War are deeply embedded in history. While few regions are less suited to warfare than is the mountainous—China, Japan, and the Soviet Union—vied for its control.  By 1910, Japan had established a supremacy that it was to maintain until its defeat in World War II.

    Korea had been  a Japanese possession for some 40 years, but collapsed after the dropping of the Atomic bombs.  Seven day after the Japanese surrender that ended World War II, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.  Soviet troops entered Korea. By agreement, the Soviet Union (Stalin regime) accepted the surrender of all Japanese forces in Korea north of the 38th parallel of latitude, while the United States accepted the surrender of Japanese units south of the 38th parallel.

1.2:  Soviet and USA occupation in Korea:

     The Soviet Union quickly sealed off the 38th-parallel border. It soon set up an interim civil government for the 9 million Koreans of the north, which contained most of Korea’s industry. The government was run by Soviet-trained Communist officials.

     The United States maintained a military government in the south. The 21 million Korean of the largely agricultural region were not satisfied with it.

1.3:  The Establishments of  Korea’s two governments:

   A United States-Soviet commission that was established to make plans for the reunification of Korea under a free government made no progress. In 1947 the United States took the problem before the United Nations, which voted that free elections—under its supervision—should be held throughout Korea in 1948 to choose a single government.  The Soviet Union refused to permit the United Nations election commission to enter the north.  Elections were thus held only in the south where a National Assembly and a president—Syngman Rhee—were chosen.  The new democracy was named the Republic of Korea.

     In the North, the Soviet Union proclaimed a Communist dictatorship - “Kim Il Sung”, and called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). Pyongyang was named its capital.

    “September 1947, US leaders decided to dump the Korean problem into the lap of United Nations General Assembly; —the move reflected US weakness in Korea.  Condition below the 38th parallel had steadily deteriorated.  The absence of land reforms combined with the division of the peninsula and the influx of Koreans from the Soviet zone and Japan to produce a depressed economy.  The Communists, aided by infiltractors from the North, took full advantage of this situation, and at least thirty percent of the people in South Korea are leftists, following Communist leaders who support the Soviets behind United States lines.” 1

1.4:  Soviet troops and USA troops withdraw from Korea:

        With the communist party firmly in control in the North, the Soviets announced withdrawal most of their occupation forces, completed by January 1949.  This move increased pressure on the Americans to withdraw from the South, a move that was being considered already for other reasons.  One of these was the hostility of the Korean to foreign occupation;  Americans anticipated demonstrations, riots, and other acts of violence that would make continued occupation difficult.  Also there was budgetary pressure from domestic sources to cut back military forces.  The military did not see any great need for retaining troops in Korea—they considered it would be a liability in any future war, which would undoubtedly be fought globally with nuclear weapons.  Therefore in June 1949, the United States withdrew its troops, leaving behind (as a Russians had in the North) military advisers— a total of 500 for the 65,000 men South Korean army.  But, to keep the South from going to war and reunifying the country by force, the United States took with its departing forces all weapons that could be used offensively—airplanes, tanks and heavy artillery.

            North Korea’s attack was clearly the most risky of these move. US signals on Korea had been ambiguous.  “During 1949 the United States withdrew its last occupation troops from the peninsula, and it responded coolly to overtures by the Philippines, Nationalist China, and South Korea regarding a ‘Pacific Pact’ along the lines of NATO.  In his address  on 12 January 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson omitted South Korea from the US defense perimeter in the Pacific while suggesting that, if attacked, the ROK (Republic of Korea) could expect help from the United Nation.” 2

1.5:  USSR “A” bomb test, and, Communist victory on Chinese mainland:

       In August 1949, the Soviet explosion of an atomic device which ended the US monopoly over the most potent weapon in human history.  Concern also existed about developments in the East. The Communist under Mao regime had won in China without consistent Soviet aid or a close relationship with Moscow over the past generation.

1.6:  Truman in trouble:

      In the United States, the Truman administration also had difficulty maintaining support for aid to Korea. “In mid-January 1950 the House of Representatives actually defeated an economic assistance bill for the ROK”. 3  Subversion, Communist-supported guerrilla activities, and border raids by North Korean. Understandably, Stalin gave a tentative green light to Kim. In addition, Kim saw every reason to seek unification by force.

      South Korea, however, successfully resisted North Korean attempts at forces.  Frustrated, North Korea early in 1950 decided upon war to achieve its goal of Korean unification under Communist rule.

     In June 1950 North Korea army—89,000 combat troops . North Korea’s infantry was also supported by approximately 150 Soviet-made medium tanks, ample artillery, and small air force.  South Korea’s ground forces included a 45,000-member national police force and an army of 65,000 combat troops. South Korea was armed largely with light infantry weapons supplied by the United States. It had no tanks or combat aircraft, and its artillery was inferior of that of North Korea. Its officers and enlisted men had generally less training and experience than did those of North Korea. 4

Part 2.  The Korean War (June 25, 1950 - July 27, 1953)

2.1: A civil war to International Conflict:

        Under such circumstances early on the Sunday morning of June 25, 1950, without any warning or declaration of war, North Korean troops invaded the unprepared South across 38th parallel. It was a well-prepared , all-out attack. South Korea’s troops fought bravely, but proved no match for the heavily armed Communists and their Russian T-3 tanks who were not checked until they reached the Naktonggang River near Taegu.

  —South Korea’s army, smaller and not as well trained and equipped as that of North Korea, was unable to stem the onslaught. By June 28, Seoul had fallen, and across the peninsula, everywhere south of the Han River, the shattered remnants of South Korea’s army were in full retreat.

2.2: The United Nations Reaction

       —within hours after the invasion of South Korea began, the United Nations Security Council called for an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of North Korean forces from South Korea. North Korea ignored the resolution. Two days later the Security Council urged United Nations members to assist South Korea in repelling its invaders. Both resolutions passed because the Soviet Union was boycotting Security Council meetings.  Had the Soviet delegate  been present, he surely would have vetoed the measures.

    The Republic of Korea appealed to the United Nation. In response, the Security Council passed a resolution ordering the Communists to withdraw to the 38th parallel and encouraged all member countries to give military support to the Republic.  16 nations sent troops to the aid of South Korea.  The United States sent  an army; Great Britain , a division, and other nations, lesser units.   US troops soon began to arrive, and were subsequently joined by those from 15 other nations: Australia, New Zealand, Britain, France, Canada, South Africa, Turkey, Thailand, Greece, Netherlands, Ethiopia, Columbia, the Philippines, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The three Scandinavian countries sent hospitals along with medical personnel.

     The United States army in Korea ultimately numbered some 300,000 combat troops, supported by about 50,000 Marine, Air Force, and Navy combatants.

2.3: The United States Reaction

       The United States reacted even more quickly than did the United Nations. Upon hearing of the North Korean attack, President Harry S. Truman directed General of the army Douglas MacArthur, commander of the United States occupation forces in Japan, to insure the safe evacuation of the United States civilians and to supply weapons and ammunition to South Korea.

         As the decision to aid Korea was being made, it was also decided to go to the UN and request Security Council supported the United States because the Soviet was then boycotting the Security Council as a protest against its failure to seat the new Communist Chinese regime in place of Nationalist China.  Thus the Soviet was not there to use its veto,— “a mistake which is not repeated during the Cold War”4a

     On June 26, United States air and naval forces were directed to support South Korea ground units. The commitment of United States ground forces was authorized after General MacArthur inspected the battlefront. The ground forces available to General MacArthur in Japan were four understrength Army divisions composed largely of inexperienced, undertrained men and lacking in heavy weapons.

       Further actions taken by the United States at this time show the importance attributed to the interpretation that the war was part of an overall communist strategy. One thing the United States did was to reverse itself on the issue of Formosa, now putting it inside our defensive perimeter by sending the Seventh Fleet to patrol the Straits of Taiwan.  The United States also tempered its opposition to colonial regimes enough to give aid to the French, who were fighting Vietnamese Communists and Nationalists in Indo-China.

      Early in July the United Nations asked the United States to appoint a commander for all United Nations forces  in Korea. President Truman named General MacAthur. Soon thereafter, South Korea placed its forces under the United Nations command.

     After the fall of Seoul, North Korea’s forces paused briefly to regroup, then resumed their southward drive.  South Korea’s army resisted bravely but was pushed back steadily.  Three United States divisions sent to its aid were committed in small units. They too were driven into retreat.

     By late July the remnants of South Korea’s army and the United States units had been pressed into a small, roughly rectangular area surrounding the port of Pusan at the southeastern tip of Korea.  Here, defending a perimeter roughly 150 miles long, the United Nations forces finally were able to hold as reinforcements poured in.   Under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the allied forces began to take the initiative, and after a surprise landing at Inch’ön on 19 September  pushed the Communists out of South Korea and advanced into the North.

2.4: The Chinese Intervention: 

       But in October the Communist Chinese intervented, throwing such large numbers of troops into battle that the UN forces were forced to retreat.  Seoul one again fell into Communist hands on January 4, 1951. The UN Forces regrouped and mounted a counterattack, retaking Seoul on March 12.  A stalemate was reached roughly in the area along the 38th parallel, where the conflict had begun.

      At this point the Russians called for truce negotiations, which finally began at Kaesong in July of 1951 and were transferred to Panmunjöm in November that year. The talks dragged on for two years and the truce agreement was finally signed July 27, 1953, at 10:00 P.M., Korean time, the guns fell silent along the blood-soaked main line of resistance.    This failed to bring about  a unified Korea, leaving the country divided as before along a 4 kilometer-wide and 249 kilometer-long Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

    The conclusion of the cease-fire had probably been hastened by events outside of Korea.  First, General of the army Dwight D. Eisenhower, who succeeded Truman as president of the United States in January 1953, had hinted broadly that military pressure might be sharply increased if the fighting did not end soon.  Second, the death in March 1953 of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin caused a general turning inward of the Communist Soviet, however, it did not produce universal optimism outside the Communist world. In western Europe, many saw the dictator as a source of restraint on Soviet foreign policy.  Perhaps the most obviously is that the West in crisis, and, that the United States was having “considerable difficulties” with its European allies and that relations with the United Kingdom “had become worse”.

2.5: The war’s outcome:   

       It would be inadequate to end by arguing simply that the Korean War generated a modicum of international stability in the wake of dangerous conflict, represented a victory of sorts for the United States, a defeat for the Soviet Union, and that its most tragic dimensions resulted from its prolongation through miscalculation from both sides.  Those conclusions alone would assure the conflict a central place in the history of the cold war, but they would ignore numerous other dimensions of Korea’s impact;—“Korea losses in number of people killed, wounded, and missing approached 3 million, a 10 of the entire population, another 10 million Korean saw their families divided;  5 million became refugees.  In property, North Korea put its losses as US$ 1.7 billion, South Korea at $ 2 billion, the equivalent of its gross national product for 1949.  North Korea lost some 8,700 industrial plants, South Korea twice that number. Each area saw 600,000 homes destroyed.” 5

Part 3.  Conclusion - The Korean War as International History

3.1:  The Cold war was as close to becoming Hot:

        October 1950 was a pivotal month in the Korean War. Despite Chinese warnings, UN ground forces crossed the 38th parallel and pushed their way toward the Manchurian border. China responded by sending hundreds of thousands of troops to the peninsula.  Unaware of Beijing’s decision, President Truman and General MacArthur met at mid-month on Wake Island in the Pacific Ocean. Brimming with self-confidence, the UN commander assured his commander in chief and a team of advisers that the war was all but won, that US troops could begin to be reassigned from the theater by the end of the year, were US units in Korea would be fighting  for their survival in the face of a Chinese onslaught. — With the possible exception of a few days in October almost a dozen years later, the cold war was as close to becoming hot on a global scale as at any time in its forty-year history.

3.2:  Korean War was a limited war:

    —Yet the Korean War did not escalate beyond the country’s boundaries.  The Soviets, while using many of their own planes and pilots to assist their Chinese and North Korean allies, restricted their operations to the extreme northern reaches of the peninsula.  Although US flyers sometimes breached the Yalu River boundary and even strafed airfields in Manchuria, such attacks were limited in scale and clearly contrary to Washington policy. (On both Soviet and US air activities, see Halliday, “Air Operations in Korea”).

     The leaders of the two countries with the greatest capacity to expand the war—Stalin and his successors on the Soviet side, Truman and Eisenhower on the American—consistently preferred to limit the conflict.  When pressures on Truman to expand the war became acute in the months following China’s intervention in later 1950, US allies joined with the Third World neutrals in the UN General Assembly to discourage US adventurism.

3.3:  Korean War as a substitute for World War III:

    Though limited in geographical scope to a small Asian country and beginning as a struggle between armies of Koreans, the conflicts eventually included combatants representing twenty different governments from six continents. Of the estimated casualties to military personnel, more than half were non-Korean.  The war rendered terrible destruction to indigenous peoples and failed to resolve the political division of the country, which remain a source of tension and danger to the present day.  Yet it contributed significantly to the evolution of an order that escaped the ultimate horror of a direct clash of superpowers. In its timing, its course, and its outcome, the Korean War served in many ways as a substitute for World War III.

     Of the foreign participants, the United States and China played by far the largest role in actual fighting, yet several other nations had a major impact on the course of the war. In the Soviet bloc, the Soviet Union itself provided large-scale material assistance to North Korea and China; its pilots flew hundreds of combat missions over the northern reaches of the peninsula; and the presence in Manchuria of army units, plus a substantial portion of its air force, all represented a major deterrent to US action beyond the Yalu River.  Soviet posturing in other areas, especially in Europe, achieved a similar end.  Soviet diplomats played an active role in the United Nation and elsewhere as advocates of the North Korean and Chinese cause and as intermediaries between their allies and the United States.  In the West, at crucial times, US allies, especially Great Britain and Canada, provided counterweights to tendencies in Washington to start along a road of escalation in Korea that could have ended in World War III.  In their urging to restraint, the allies received valuable support—at times even leadership—from India and other Asian neutrals.

       However, the United Nation played a limited role, which could described as little more than an instrument of US policy.  To be sure, the international organization often played that role, but just as  often it provided the setting for allied and neutral pressure on the United States, an institutional framework within which weaker nations could coordinate their efforts to influence the world’s greatest powers.  Such efforts frequently succeeded, in part because many of those nations had contributed forces to Korea.  The UN in the Korean War merits attention not only as an agency of collective security against “aggression”, but as a channel of restraint on a superpower that occasionally flirted with excessively risky endeavors;—Thus, “the most obvious point is that the war did not turn the international body into an effective agency of collective security. North Korea’s attack at June 1950 came three years after members of the United Nations Military Staff Committee had failed to agree on the nature of an international armed force.” 6

    The United States dominated the Korean enterprise, but it was unable to build on the venture to provide the United Nations with the wherewithal to protect other states in the future. The trials and tribulations of US diplomacy in the UN General Assembly from late 1950 to the end of the war discouraged such an effort, which, in the face of Soviet opposition and allied reservation, never had much prospect for success anyway.

     Nor did the United Nations emerge from Korea with an enhanced reputation for resolving international disputes. The war failed to end Korea’s division, and it was instrumental in barring from membership in the United Nations the government in control of the world’s most populous nation.  With the People’s Republic China and the Democratic People’s Republic  Korea, not to mention Republic of Korea, standing outside the organization, it hardly could expect to play a key role in future negotiations regarding the peninsula.  Even the UN’s part at crucial moments in containing the conflict in Korea by restraining the United States was not widely appreciated at the time.  The war, in short, did not leave the United Nations with a measurably enhanced reputation.

    The participation in the war—its origins or its course or both—was often the result, at least in the part, of calculations having little to do with Korea.  “In 1949, Communists marched to victory in a civil war on Chinese mainland, thus the role of China lobby”,7 plus Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gave Kim Il Sung the green light in the spring of 1950 primary to serve his purposes regarding China and Europe.  Smaller backers of the UN cause in the fighting contributed largely in hopes of influencing the United States, frequently in places other than Korea.—This point leads to the conclusion, namely, that the war’s impact was global, despite the limited geographical scope of the fighting.—Thus the Korean War played a pivotal role in the rearming of the West and in expanding US military commitments on a global scale.

   —At that result, the military buildups in both the West and the Soviet bloc had important economic and political consequences, which, in turn, influenced both the course and final impact of the war.—Japan became an essential supplier of material for the UN cause in Korea and this role assisted greatly in Japan’s final recovery from World War II and integration into the Western alliance system.

   — In Western Europe, higher military spending produced deficits in budgets and dollar accounts that were exacerbated by increased prices in raw materials and reduced economic assistance from the United States.  The United States complained of what they considered to be the slow pace of European rearmament, and the Europeans resented US pressure for greater efforts from their already trained economies.  Such squabbling, often in public, encouraged leaders on the other side to believe that contradictions in the enemy camp ultimately would tear apart the enemy coalition.  For a substantial period, this belief undermined US bargaining power directed toward bringing the Korean War to an end.

     The Korean War raised cold war tensions to new heights, but its impact actually  induced Stalin’s successors to pursue a measure of détente with the West and with the wayward Communist regime of Josef Broz Tito in Yugoslavia.

      Between Beijing and Washington, the barriers to a constructive relationship proved more difficult to overcome.  Although U.S. and China never formally at war, however, China and the United States had confronted each other directly in Korea, both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, and the experience produced lingering bitterness and fears on both sides. —The war also provided the occasion for US intervention to prevent China from conquering the last bastion of the Nationalist government on Taiwan.

      Nonetheless, the Korean War contributed enormously to the international prestige of the new China, which fought the world’s greatest power to standstill, and to China statue in North Korea as well as “marks the entry of China as a significant actor in international politics” 8 ;—Thus , Korea was a conflict fraught with ‘paradox’. It pushed China and the Soviet Union closer together in an immediate sense only to generate forces that afterward would split them apart more rapidly than otherwise would have been the case.  “China emerged from the war an overall winner, but so too did its arch enemy the United States” 8a . —Perhaps the greatest ‘paradox’ of all was that the conflict wrought terrible devastation to Korea, militarized the cold war as never before, and often threatened to escalate out of control, yet at its end the great powers were less likely to become directly embroiled on the battlefield than before it began (as with Vietnam war later).  “Whatever the problems it left unresolved, the war was a defining event in ‘the long peace’ between the Soviet Union and the United States, the two ideologies that marked the era following the holocausts of the two world wars”9 .

      “Today, Tuesday 9th December 1997, after 44 years since 1953, North and South Korea, again sitting down to the negotiating table in Geneva, together with the United States and the Russian” 10 .  Hopefully, they all had learn their previous lesson in the part, for I hope if they would to avoiding a another Korean War.

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