Korean War

I

Introduction

Korean War, civil and military struggle that was fought on the Korea Peninsula and that reached its height between 1950 and 1953.

The Korean War originated in the division of Korea into South Korea and North Korea after World War II (1939-1945). Efforts to reunify the peninsula after the war failed, and in 1948 the South proclaimed the Republic of Korea and the North established the People’s Republic of Korea. In 1949 border fighting broke out between the North and the South. On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces crossed the dividing line and invaded the South. Soon, in defense of the South, the United States joined the fighting under the banner of the United Nations (UN), along with small contingents of British, Canadian, Australian, and Turkish troops. In October 1950 China joined the war on the North’s side. By the time a cease-fire agreement was signed on July 27, 1953, millions of soldiers and civilians had perished. The armistice ended the fighting, but Korea has remained divided for decades since and subject to the possibility of a new war at any time.

II

Division of Korea

The Korean War was the result of the division of Korea, a country with a well-recognized, ancient integrity. Despite its long history as an independent kingdom, Korea had been forcibly annexed by Japan in 1910. Japan controlled Korea up to the end of World War II. Late on the night of August 10, 1945, as World War II was coming to a close, the United States made the decision that it would occupy the southern half of Korea. The U.S. government did so out of fear that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or Soviet Union)—which had joined the fight against Japan in northern Korea a week earlier—would take control of the entire Korea Peninsula. American planners chose to divide Korea at the 38th parallel because it would keep the capital city, Seoul, in the American-occupied southern zone; the USSR acquiesced to the division, with no official comment.

Both the Soviet Union and the United States proceeded, with much help from Koreans, to build regimes in their halves of Korea that supported their interests. In so doing, they had to contend with major rifts between Korean political factions representing left-wing and right-wing views. These factions originally were united against Japan but had begun to split as early as the 1920s. In the post-World War II era, the main conflict centered around the left’s call for—and the right’s resistance to—a thorough reform of Korea's land ownership laws, which had allowed a small number of wealthy people to own most of the land. As a result, many Korean farmers were forced to eke out an impoverished existence as tenant farmers.

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During its occupation of the South (1945-1948), the United States responded to the left-right conflict by suppressing the widespread leftist movement and backing Syngman Rhee. A 70-year-old expatriate who had lived for decades in the United States, Rhee had solid anti-Communist credentials and was popular with the right. In the North, the Soviet Union threw its support to the left, embodied by 33-year-old Kim Il Sung, who also received significant support from North Koreans and from China. Kim was a Korean guerrilla who had fought with Chinese Communist forces against the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s. Among Kim’s first acts in power was to force through a radical redistribution of land. By the end of 1946 the regimes of both North and South Korea were effectively in place, although the division of the peninsula was not formalized until 1948. In that year, the Republic of Korea (ROK), backed by the United States and the United Nations, emerged in the South under Rhee, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) emerged in the North under Kim, backed by the USSR and China.

III

Early Skirmishes

The southern government was barely inaugurated before it had to contend with a left-wing guerrilla movement. Although this movement received support from the North, it had its greatest strength in the South, particularly in the southernmost provinces and on Jeju Island off the southern coast. The ROK Army required the better part of 1948 and 1949 to suppress the rebellion, and it did so with the support—and often the direction—of a 500-man contingent of American advisers. By early 1950 the guerrillas appeared to be defeated.

Although the Soviets withdrew their troops from the Korea Peninsula at the end of 1948, the Americans, concerned about the rebellion in the South and the potential of invasion from the North, delayed their withdrawal until the end of June 1949. By this time, troops from both North and South Korea were concentrated along the 38th parallel. In May 1949 border fighting broke out and continued, on and off, through December. Thousands of troops were involved. According to formerly classified American reports, the South provoked the majority of the 1949 border fights, prompting American advisers to try to restrain the South. After a U.S. request, military observers from the United Nations were dispatched to Korea. In addition, the United States denied the ROK Army’s requests for combat airplanes and tanks. At about the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson delivered what became known as the “Press Club” speech in Washington, D.C., in which he was ambiguous about whether the United States would defend the ROK in a war.

Although Kim Il Sung would be eager to fight in 1950, he was not ready in the summer of 1949. Large contingents of his best North Korean soldiers were still in China, fighting on the side of the Communists in that country’s civil war. In the early months of 1950, however, tens of thousands of these soldiers returned to the DPRK, including the 6th Division under General Pang Ho-san, which had a distinguished record in China. In May 1950 Kim perched this division just above the 38th parallel. He hoped that the summer of 1950, like the summer of 1949, would bring South Korean provocations, which he could use to justify an invasion by the North. Kim claimed he got his provocation with a minor lunge by the South across the parallel in the early morning hours of June 25, 1950. Whether or not the South lunged across the parallel still awaits further evidence, but the North bears the major responsibility for escalating a minor skirmish to the level of massive conventional warfare.

IV

The War Begins: Soviet, Chinese, and U.S. Support

Throughout 1949 the Soviet Union feared the consequences that an invasion by North Korea would have on U.S.-Soviet relations. Consequently, for months Soviet leader Joseph Stalin declined to support Kim’s plans for war. In early 1950, however, Stalin appeared to give his endorsement to Kim; he also suggested that Kim seek support from Chinese leader Mao Zedong. The reasons for Stalin’s shift are still not clear but may have been related to American plans for a major Cold War military buildup. The Chinese response to Kim's entreaty is also still unknown, but it seems unlikely that the Chinese did not know of Kim's plans. Indeed, they sent many experienced Korean soldiers back to Korea from China just before the war erupted.

The United States maintained throughout 1949 and 1950 that it would not support an invasion of the North by the South. As early as 1947, however, Acheson and his advisers had come to see South Korea as important to the revival of the Japanese industrial economy, which provided goods and services to Korea. From that time on, U.S. policymakers were privately committed to extending the Truman Doctrine, which called for the containment of Communism, to South Korea. Even after U.S. combat troops left South Korea in 1948, a large military advisory group remained in the ROK, and the United States gave the republic great amounts of economic aid. When the Soviet-backed North invaded—unprovoked, in the perception of the U.S. government—Acheson and President Harry S. Truman led the United States into the war, despite objections from many U.S. military commanders who thought Korea was the wrong place to make a stand against Communism.

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