eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Winner of the Westminster Medal for Military Literature
On June 25, 1950, the North Korean People’s Army shocked American troops by crossing the 38th parallel into South Korea. After five years of relative quiet following the close of World War II, the US Army was unprepared to face a battle-ready enemy. After an initial defeat, General MacArthur turned the tides along with significant contributions from UN allies. Joining the Americans were troops from Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Turkey, and elsewhere, working together despite problems of culture and logistics.
In The Korean War, Michael Hickey frames the conflict in the larger context of international power politics. A veteran of the war himself, he recounts such masterstrokes as MacArthur’s landing behind the enemy lines at Inchon, the drama of the glorious Glosters episode, and both collaboration and mutiny in the prisoner-of-war camps of either side.
Drawing on many previously unexamined sources from several countries, including recently declassified documents, regimental archives, diaries, and interviews, Hickey adds extensively to our knowledge of one of the most significant conflicts of modern times.
“[A] fine, opinionated contribution to Korean War literature . . . Not to be missed.” —Publishers Weekly
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468305579 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 397 |
| Sales rank: | 655,224 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Doomed Peninsula
The people of Korea have long dwelt between rival cultures, pulled this way and that between China, historically the 'Elder Brother', Japan, and increasingly in the nineteenth century, Imperial Russia. A Japanese invasion force was routed at sea in the sixteenth century by the great Korean admiral Yi, who used a revolutionary turtle-backed galley to sink the enemy's warships. As a result, Korea, under the enduring Yi dynasty, remained a Chinese tributary state, whilst retaining its own unique cultural identity, until further Japanese interference in 1895. Five centuries of the Yi dynasty's rule were finally ended as the result of Japan's decisive defeat of the Russians in the war of 1904–5.
From 1910 to 1945, when the country was no more than a Japanese colonial territory, Korea's national culture and language were all but erased. After 1910 all higher education, law, commerce and administration were conducted in Japanese. Old Korean place names were transliterated into Japanese and the national identity of an ancient people was deliberately suppressed.
As the Japanese tightened their grip on Korea they discovered that there were two strands of resistance to their rule. Christian evangelicals, converted by western missionaries in the latter part of the nineteenth century, counselled a policy of non-violence. Many of their leaders had attracted the attentions of the Japanese secret police, and they feared for the lives and safety of their supporters. On the other hand, the communist resistance, steadily gaining strength in the years between the two world wars, fomented industrial and terrorist action in order to discomfit the Japanese overlords. Both these resistance movements might have been working towards a self-governing Korea but their methods and ultimate objectives were far apart. The Christians, probably with tacit Japanese approval based on the principle of 'divide and rule', identified with the administrative, landowning and commercial elites. This marked them indelibly as collaborators with the hated Japanese and thus as targets for the communists.
During the Second World War Korea was used by Japan as a ricebowl and as provider of many essential minerals for the imperial war effort. Its economy, though stretched to the limit, prospered, and with it many individuals in the mercantile, landowning and industrial sectors. Thousands of Koreans were, however, forcibly recruited into Japan's armed forces or used as industrial slave labour. Many worked on the Pacific islands where the Japanese required airfields and fortifications. The 40,000 or so Koreans drafted into the imperial army seldom served in its front-line combat units, but were to be found as often brutal guards in the notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in which thousands of British and Empire troops laboured and died. Thousands of Korean women were forcibly conscripted to be 'comfort girls' in Japanese military brothels. Many Koreans, in order to evade military service under the Japanese, fled to China where they enlisted with either Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang or Mao Tse-tung's 8th Route Army. Other Korean exiles migrated to the Soviet Union and served with Stalin's armies. Here, like their comrades in Mao's forces, they were thoroughly indoctrinated politically as they picked up a sound, if arduous, military education.
Although many of the Koreans exiled in the United States offered their good offices to help in the war against Japan, the American government rebuffed them. One of the leading lights was a certain Yi Sung-man. After several brushes with the Korean authorities at the start of the century, including spells of imprisonment and torture, he had gone into exile in the United States where he westernized his name to that of Syngman Rhee. Returning to Korea in 1910 he had been forced to flee back to America in 1919 after a failed rising against the Japanese. There he pursued a successful academic career, headed a self-styled Korean government-in-exile, married a formidably gifted Austrian lady, and bided his time until circumstances might permit his return to the country for which he had a fiercely patriotic love.
In a Washington preoccupied with the defeat of the Japanese in the Pacific and the formidable problems of invading their home islands, there were few with time to spare for Syngman Rhee and his band of supporters. American efforts, as far as mainland Asia was concerned, were concentrated on supporting the campaign of Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist Kuomintang forces, with their headquarters in Chungking, in their fight against the Japanese who had invaded China in 1937. As for the British, their policy since the turn of the century had been to accept Japanese hegemony over Korea, which in any case lay far beyond the British sphere of interest.
The first inklings of Korea's destiny in the second half of the century surfaced at the Cairo summit conference of 1943 when the Allies started to ponder the shape of the post-war world, and began seriously to allot the possible spoils of a still uncertain victory. Even now, British interest in Korea remained marginal, although Anthony Eden, as Foreign Secretary in 1943, drew the attention of the US State Department, and of President Roosevelt, to the problem of dealing with the outlying fragments of the Japanese empire, including Korea and Indo-China, once the war was over. He vaguely suggested an international trusteeship for these territories but made no mention of the United Kingdom being one of the trustees, proposing instead that these should be the Soviet Union, the United States and China (where it was assumed that Chiang Kaishek's Kuomintang would remain in power indefinitely). The Koreans in exile were unimpressed by the Cairo communiqué, as it seemed that the Allies were about to dispose of their country without consultation.
The Korean patriots were even less pleased with the outcome of the Teheran conference later in the same year when Stalin was formally invited by his American and British allies to join in the war against Japan three months after the defeat of Germany; in accepting, he demanded certain political compensations: Roosevelt hinted that Russia might be granted a Pacific warm-water port and also mentioned in passing to Stalin that Korea would need up to forty years' 'apprenticeship' before achieving full independence. At this time Roosevelt placed total trust in Stalin and entertained grand designs for postwar co-operation with the Soviet Union. He felt that since the Soviets had the military strength to obtain any of their territorial designs, whether overt or secret, there was no point in seeking confrontation when the immediate American aim was to wind down their war machine as quickly as possible and 'get the boys home' once Japan had been defeated.
By the beginning of 1944, with a clearer prospect of victory, Stalin's demands were more specific. He demanded the Kurile Island chain, the lower Sakhalin peninsula, long leases on the warm-water ports of Port Arthur and Dairen, control of the trunk railway systems in eastern China and south Manchuria, and international recognition of the independence from China of Outer Mongolia. There was as yet no mention of any intention by the Soviet Union to occupy any part of Korea. Stalin was in a strong moral position for hard bargaining with his allies; they had failed to invade northern Europe as promised in 1943. But by this time, the United States government was convinced of the need for a military occupation of Korea on the fall of Japan. Alarming signs of the surge of communism in China, combined with increasing disenchantment about Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt nationalist regime, were beginning to affect American Far Eastern policies. The insertion of an occupying force and the establishment of military government in Korea after the defeat of Japan appeared a suitable way of establishing a toehold on the Asiatic land mass even though little attention had hitherto been paid in Washington to the strategic significance of the Korean peninsula.
At the Yalta conference in February 1945, Stalin, sensing the drift of American policy towards Korea, proposed the setting up of a joint trusteeship for Korea by the United States, the USSR, China and the United Kingdom. Roosevelt was now paying little attention to the proceedings; he was tired and sick, but continued to delude himself that he had a special understanding with Stalin, putting it to him in private that any arrangement for Korea should exclude the United Kingdom. Instead, he proposed a Soviet–Chinese–American trusteeship which would prepare Korea for full self-government in anything up to twenty or thirty years. Stalin, on the other hand, favoured the inclusion of the United Kingdom, and a far shorter trusteeship. Nothing was committed to writing, and Churchill was certainly never informed of these discussions. The Foreign Office in London, not wishing to become embroiled in the politics of a remote country in which British interests were minimal, made no attempt to plumb these secrets. Nor was anyone in the State Department aware of what had transpired between the two men. Not even Vice-President Harry Truman, who succeeded to the presidency on Roosevelt's death in April 1945, was informed of the scheme. It was not an auspicious basis on which to lay the foundations of Korea's future.
In an effort to find out what Roosevelt had promised Stalin at Yalta Truman decided to despatch the experienced Harry Hopkins to Moscow to probe and confirm the private Yalta arrangements, and in particular to sound out the Russians on the trusteeship plan for Korea. Hopkins questioned Stalin on the date of Russia's proposed entry into the war against Japan and obtained the promise that it would be on 8 August. Stalin also told Hopkins that he endorsed the idea of a four-power trusteeship for Korea.
In July 1945 the Allied leaders met at Potsdam amid the ruins of Nazi Germany to discuss the way forward against Japan. Only Stalin remained of the old triumvirate. A Labour government had come to power in Britain, now represented by Prime Minister Clement Attlee. If Truman approached his first summit with trepidation he showed little sign of it. The Americans had successfully detonated a nuclear device and were well advanced with manufacture of the first atomic bombs, for use against Japan. Stalin showed curiously little interest when Truman, in strictest confidence, told him of this. He had almost certainly been briefed already by his own intelligence chiefs, informed by a highly placed Soviet agent in Washington, Alger Hiss.
With Stalin now aware of the atomic bomb, any idea of using it to destroy Japan's will to fight before the Russians could join in the war against them was stillborn. There was a real fear in the Pentagon and White House that an Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands would prove a bloodbath unless the bomb was dropped; and if such an invasion involved the use of Soviet troops, they would have to be accorded an occupation zone, as had been the case in Germany and Austria. Since this would effectively neutralize plans for the American occupation prior to the completion of a Japanese peace treaty favourable to Washington, it was not an acceptable option. Truman also knew that there were still intact Japanese combat formations in Manchuria and northern Korea and intended that the job of defeating and disarming these should fall to the Russians.
Truman therefore supported the idea of a Korean trusteeship. He had a brief before him, prepared by the State Department, for a three-stage plan: military occupation by the Allies, international administration under UN auspices, and finally full sovereignty. This was not put to the Potsdam meeting, however, for the Allies were already at odds over other issues such as plans for the dismemberment of the former Italian colonies in Africa. Later in the conference there was talk by the Russians of unspecified military operations across the Manchurian border and into northern Korea, in concert with American amphibious landings in the south of the peninsula; all this came to nothing. One thing, however, was becoming all too clear to the Americans: there was a distinct chance of a race against the Russians for possession of all Korea once Japan had been defeated. They began hurriedly, if belatedly, to plan the occupation of the southern half of the country.
On 6 August 1945, only four days after the end of the Potsdam conference, the first of two atomic bombs fell on Japan, at Hiroshima. A second followed days later at Nagasaki. Early on 9 August the Red Army struck at the Japanese army in Manchuria. Japan, with her fleet gone, cities wasted by American strategic bombers, her armies defeated in the field, scattered and out of supplies, was in no condition to fight on and surrendered at the Emperor's behest on 14 August; it is questionable whether the bombs actually accelerated the end, as secret overtures for a negotiated peace had been going on between Moscow and Tokyo for some time. All the old dreams of Far Eastern power which had eluded first the tsars, then the commissars of the early revolutionary period, Stalin now saw within his grasp.
In Washington, an emergency strategy had to be evolved rapidly by the State Department, where there was still a very strong 'China lobby' which believed that the USA had an important role to play in a post-war China ruled by Chiang Kai-shek. Here were huge untapped markets for America's industrial strength, galvanized by its stupendous war efforts since Pearl Harbor. State Department officials had felt themselves snubbed by Roosevelt in his last months, and they were now obsessed with the need to checkmate Soviet plans for outward expansion – above all, to avoid Soviet predominance in Korean affairs through the establishment of a pro-Moscow government in Seoul.
However, on 10 August the Russian 25th Army under Colonel-General Ivan Chistyakov entered Korea and quickly occupied the northern provinces down as far as Pyongyang. The Americans had been spectacularly wrong-footed; they had no significant body of troops closer than Okinawa, where a bloody campaign to exterminate the Japanese garrison had only just ended. It was now essential to agree the limits of the respective occupation zones as a prerequisite for the disarming of the large Japanese garrisons in Korea. Colonel Dean Rusk, a staff officer in the US Army's Strategy and Planning branch, later to make his mark as Kennedy's Secretary of State at the time of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 – already present in Korea as part of a US military mission – came to an agreement with officers of the Red Army that the demarcation line should be the 38th parallel of latitude, which runs east–west across the Korean peninsula from the coast north of the Han river estuary. In the afterglow of victory it was not anticipated that there would ever be any need to control movement between the two zones, so it seemed irrelevant that the line was totally indefensible from a military point of view. A strong China, as one of the allies victorious over Japan, might have exercised its influence over the arbitrary partitioning of Korea; but China now lay ravaged by its eight-year struggle with Japan, by the civil wars that had preceded it, and by ominous signs that the uneasy wartime alliance between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung was coming apart.
As outriders of the US occupying forces the American XXIV Corps arrived by sea at Inchon, the port serving Korea's capital at Seoul, from Okinawa on 8 September 1945. Its commander, Lieutenant-General John R. Hodge, was immediately appointed commanding general, US Forces Korea by General Douglas MacArthur, Allied Commander-in-Chief in the Pacific theatre, now installed in Tokyo. Hodge, a competent fighting soldier who had worked his way up from the ranks, was a hard worker, tough and decisive but deficient in the political, intellectual and diplomatic skills needed for the thankless task ahead. He made his way directly to Seoul where he accepted the surrender of the Japanese garrison and established his military government as though taking over a defeated hostile territory.
From the outset, Hodge was adrift, openly branding the Koreans as 'the same breed of cats as the Japs'. He failed to sense or respect the extreme feelings of the people for their newly liberated country and their loathing for the Japanese. Matters got worse when Hodge proscribed as illegal the 'Korean People's Republic', formed more or less spontaneously on the Japanese surrender and before the arrival of the Americans. The KPR was a nationalist coalition of widely differing political factions which at least shared a common will to unite the country and included many of the former exiles who had returned to Korea from Russia, China, America and several countries of Europe. The KPR nursed hopes that it would be recognized by the new occupying power, and had already set up its own regional governments. Paradoxically, those in North Korea were dominated by the centrist parties, whilst those in the south came mainly from the extreme left. Within a month, all were declared illegal by Hodge (whose political leanings were far to the right). Immediately, strong opposition came from the communist party in the south. And when Washington sacked the Japanese governor-general without consulting Hodge, Hodge promptly lost face in the eyes of the Korean people. If one thing united the peoples of Korea at this time, it was frustration at the way in which the dream of unification had been snatched from their hands by their supposed liberators at the moment of Japan's defeat.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Korean War"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Michael Hickey.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
By the Same Author,
Copyright,
Illustrations,
Preface,
Acknowledgements,
Prelude: November 1950,
Part One: Into the Fray,
Chapter 1: The Doomed Peninsula,
Chapter 2: Confrontation, Frustration,
Chapter 3: Assault and Battery,
Chapter 4: Bilko Goes to War,
Chapter 5: Forming Freedom's Team,
Chapter 6: In the Perimeter,
Chapter 7: MacArthur's Master-Stroke,
Chapter 8: The Road North,
Chapter 9: Reinforcements,
Chapter 10: High Hopes, Fearful Discoveries,
Part Two: The Alliance in Crisis,
Chapter 11: Enter the People's Volunteers,
Chapter 12: The Dragon Strikes,
Chapter 13: Advance to the Sea,
Chapter 14: The Great Bug-Out,
Chapter 15: Winter of Discontent,
Chapter 16: Road to Recovery,
Chapter 17: Confidence Returns,
Part Three: On the Offensive,
Chapter 18: Change of Management,
Chapter 19: The Fifth Phase,
Chapter 20: Back to Back,
Chapter 21: Marshal Peng's Last Throw,
Chapter 22: The Commonwealth Division,
Chapter 23: On to the Heights,
Chapter 24: Time for Reflection,
Part Four: Final Confrontations,
Chapter 25: Tests of Strength,
Chapter 26: The Secret War,
Chapter 27: Navel Operations,
Chapter 28: A New Air War,
Chapter 29: The Last Battles,
Chapter 30: The Waters of Babylon,
Chapter 31: The Great Prison Mutinies,
Postscript,
Glossary,
Appendix I: Casualty Figures,
Appendix II: Outline Order of Battle,
Appendix III: The Republic of Korea Army (ROKA),
Appendix IV: The North Korean People' Army (NKPA),
Bibliography,
Index,