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.

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.