Cumings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History. Modern Library, New York, 2010. 3/26.
I’ve just finished and reviewed a powerful disturbing novel involving the Korean War We Do Not Part. After reading that story I realized I had close to zero knowledge about that conflict which happened when I was a young child. So I looked up nonfiction history books and this one was my first choice because it seemed to take a conceptual point of view. Another by historian David Halberstam was much more detailed and appeared to come from an American on-the-ground point of view.
What’s clear about the conduct and outcome of the Korean War is that the United States in the 1950s and ever since misunderstood and to some extent has ignored the conflict:
Least known to Americans is how appallingly dirty this war was, with a sordid history of civilian slaughters amid which our ostensibly democratic ally was the worst offender, contrary to the American image of the North Koreans as fiendish terrorists.
Although the dates nominally run 1950-1953, the fighting was confined to the early year or so and then there was a long period of negotiation. The result although half a million people including both sides died was essentially no geographical advantage to either side. Internecine, someone said. There also exists with respect to the war a stance of “presentism” as fewer and fewer people alive today can realistically put themselves in the cultural, military, and psychological situation at the beginning of the Cold War and understand the fear of communism that drove US decision-making for a generation. Occupation of the whole country by Japan ended of course in 1945 but the cultural and bureaucratic influence to some extent persisted.
Briefly there is still no agreement about who “started” fighting. It was understood that the North down to the 38th parallel of latitude was primarily communist, and the South liberal and democratic. North Korean forces including veterans of the Chinese Civil War at first occupied territory south of the 38th parallel including Seoul. In response American forces were deployed, and drove the enemy back northward past Pyongyang.
American soldiers’ (some veterans of WW II) mindset included “gooks, napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally, a cunning enemy” and the US participation is described as “fundamentally untrained GIs fighting a war their top generals barely understood.” The terrain and style of combat were nothing like WW II. Chinese and North Koreans easily surrounded the Americans and again drove them back south with heavy losses.
General Douglas MacArthur arrived in September 1950 with Marines and orders “to destroy every means of communication and every installation and factories and cities and villages.” President Harry Truman is said to have “rattled the atomic bomb” in support. Eventually the North Korean forces were driven back beyond the 38th parallel, and shortly afterward Soviet representatives and Americans began negotiations.
Important to why Americans and to some extent modern South Koreans dissimulate about the war’s events was strong conviction among aggressive right-wing elements in the South that communism needed to be weeded and stamped out at all costs. There were as well “peoples” (socialist or communist-minded) groups in hundreds of South Korean villages. These existed independent of Soviet Union and North Korean influences. Terrible indiscriminate atrocities occurred targeting these “communists” in particular on the island of Jeju, where after whole-population killing and burning, out of 400 villages only 170 remained. Recent information counts about 80,000 people killed including pregnant women, small children, and the elderly.
This rebellion and its brutal response forms the basis of the novel I’ve recently read. It’s pretty clear that that fiction is no exaggeration in respect of the dreadful things that happened to so many people.
No score on this book but I find myself better informed about the Korean War and its very troubling conduct apparently on both sides, and failure of anything amounting to victory, on either side.
