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US-CHINA: QUEST FOR
PEACE
Korea: Wrong war, wrong place, wrong
enemy
By Henry C K Liu
Part
1: Two nations, worlds apart
Part
2: Cold War links Korea, Taiwan
General Omar Bradley, as chairman of the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff, characterized the Korean War as the
wrong war, in the wrong place and against the wrong enemy.
In congressional testimony on May 23, 1951, he
stated: "I know my own opinion was - and I think it was
pretty generally held - that the chance of Russia or
China coming into the war in South Korea was rather
remote. There was that possibility, and it was
considered, but we did not think they would be coming in
to the fighting in South Korea."
General Bradley
was correct. Neither the USSR nor China was likely to
enter the war on South Korean territory. It was clear
that US intervention was preconditioned on this
judgment, to prevent the collapse of South Korea without
triggering a confrontation with either the USSR or
China. But it was another story for China when US forces
pushed beyond the 38th Parallel up against the Yalu
River at the Chinese border.
Secretary of state
Dean Acheson said in his Talent Associates interview, c
1961-62 (Papers of Merle Miller):
This [order regarding the 7th Fleet], you
will recall, was a recommendation which I had made the
night before and which the President had postponed. By
this time the fleet was in position and the President
was prepared to consider the recommendation. The third
[recommendation of June 26] ... was to strengthen our
forces in the Philippines. We felt that if the
situation degenerated, as it later on did in Korea,
there would be great nervousness and a great deal of
trouble, not merely on Formosa [Taiwan] but perhaps in
the Philippines also, where, as you will recall, the
[insurgent communist] Huks were making a great
difficulty ... for the government. The fourth
recommendation was to accelerate aid to Indochina and
to send a military operation to Indochina if the
French would accept it. This was for the same reason.
We supposed that whoever, the Russians or the
Chinese, who had instigated the attack ... that they
would undoubtedly stir up trouble all along the coast
and, therefore, we wished to strengthen all positions.
Our fifth recommendation was to instruct Ambassador
[to the United Nations Warren] Austin to report
everything that had happened to the UN. And we also
recommended to the President that we should continue
with some work, which we had ordered earlier ... which
was to make a survey of all trouble spots between us
and the Russians and to see what might develop
elsewhere.
These matters were talked over ...
and this evening the President asked us to go into
what was likely to happen if there was a catastrophe
in Korea. Suppose the Korean forces were not able to
rally, form a line, hold a line? Suppose air support
and naval support was not enough? What then? This led
to a very considerable talk in which I expressed the
view that it would be very important for the United
States to see that the support of South Korea did not
fail from a political point of view, from an
international point of view. It was essential that
this did not happen. Acheson again
("Princeton Seminar" comment, February 13, 1954, Papers
of Dean Acheson):
We had also called another meeting of the
UN for the afternoon of the 27th to put before them a
resolution which would call upon all members of the
United Nations to give assistance to the South
Koreans. We were confident that this meeting was going
to adopt the resolution; it had originally been
planned for the morning of the 27th. However, it was
put over to the afternoon because the Indians had not
yet gotten instructions and they thought if they
waited until 3 o'clock they would have instructions.
This produced a problem for us which has since
given the Russians some propaganda. After we met with
the Congressional leaders ... and people were going
out, and everybody knew that there were hundreds of
newspaper men waiting outside - all of this would come
out in all sorts of distorted [ways], and therefore we
had a statement prepared ... giving these decisions of
the President which he had approved. It was decided to
give that out. This created a difficulty in time,
because as you see, this says that the US air and sea
forces are ordered to give South Korean forces cover
and support. This is military action supporting South
Korea. It wasn't until 3 o'clock in the afternoon that
the UN asked us to do what we said we were going to do
at 11 or 12 in the morning.
[Soviet foreign
minister Andrei Y] Vishinsky has always had a great
time with this, saying that all this idea that we were
carrying out UN Orders was perfect nonsense, because
the President was doing this four hours before the UN
thought of it, etc, etc. Administrative
assistant to the president, George M Elsey, in a
memorandum for the file, June 30, 1951 (Papers of George
M Elsey):
[Under secretary of state] Jim Webb told
me ... that [at] his meeting with the President at
6:15 at the Blair House on Tuesday, June 27, 1950 ...
Webb talked with the President about [secretary of
defense] Louis Johnson's "leaks" to reporters about
the Blair House Meeting on Sunday, June 25, and
Monday, June 26. Johnson was feeding stories to the
reporters that [secretary of state Dean] Acheson had
been "soft" on Formosa and he, Johnson, was
responsible for the President's order that Formosa be
neutralized. A reporter had come directly to Webb from
Johnson's office to tell Webb that this kind of thing
was going on and Webb came straight to Blair House to
report it to the President. According the
US Army Center of Military History, during the
extraordinary conferences at Blair House after the
outbreak of the Korean conflict, General Bradley had
read to the assembled high officials a memorandum
General Douglas MacArthur had given secretary of defense
Johnson during the latter's Tokyo visit. This paper,
which Johnson thought brilliant and to the point, set
forth in cogent terms the reasons why Formosa should not
be allowed to pass to the control of communist China,
but should instead be fully protected by the United
States. President Truman, on June 27, 1950, ordered
MacArthur to deploy the 7th Fleet to prevent attacks on
Formosa by the Chinese communists and, conversely,
attacks by the Formosan garrison on the Chinese
mainland.
In a public announcement on the same
day, Truman explained that he had taken this action
because "the occupation of Formosa by Communist forces
would be a direct threat to the security of the Pacific
area and to United States forces performing their lawful
and necessary functions in that area".
General
George C Marshall had resigned as secretary of state on
January 20, 1949, to become president of the American
National Red Cross. Truman's surprise victory in
November 1948 and the Democrats' reclaimed control of
both houses of Congress meant that Marshall's
nonpartisan status was no longer essential to get
foreign-policy items through Congress. Three months
after the outbreak of the Korean War, Marshall was again
asked by Truman to replace Johnson, Truman's key 1948
campaign fundraiser and a southern conservative from
Virginia, as secretary of defense - a job Marshall
reluctantly agreed to take for a year. After the Truman
victory, Johnson, who had insisted on the post of
secretary of defense for his key role in political
fundraising, had replaced James Forrestal, the first
secretary of defense, who had been forced to resign
because of mental depression and eventually committed
suicide.
Acheson again ("Princeton Seminar"
comment, February 13, 1954, Papers of Dean Acheson):
The US 7th Fleet is directed to prevent
any attack on Formosa (Taiwan) and to see that the
Chinese (Nationalist) Government on Formosa cease
operations against the mainland People's Republic of
(Red) China. I think that the betting had been
everywhere that the United States would not do
anything, that we would find some way of referring
this to a committee or a commission or a protest to
the UN but that here the machine on the other
[Communist] side had started to roll and we wouldn't
do anything. When we did, there was a most
enthusiastic response from everyone. This had its good
effect, at that time; it also had its bad effect later
when the reverses in North Korea occurred - there was
an almost corresponding depression: that we had tried
to do our best [in Korea] but after all we weren't
even able to deal with this small outfit in a distant
part of the world. Acheson again:
At the meeting of the [congressional]
leaders [on June 30], there was an observation made
which later took on a great deal of significance but
it took on very little at the time. Senator [Howard]
Smith of New Jersey, in the course of the meeting,
asked whether or not it would be a good idea to ask
Congressional approval for the President's action in
regard to North Korea. This was referred to me by the
President, and I said that it was a matter which we
ought to take under advisement and think about ...
The fact of the matter was that I thought
about it, not very deeply, but just enough to come to
the conclusion that this was one of those steps like
the one more question in cross-examination which
destroys you, as a lawyer. We had complete acceptance
of the President's policy by everybody on both sides
of both houses of Congress. Now the question is,
should we bring a Joint Resolution in the Congress
approving this? The hazards of that step seemed to me
far greater than any possible good that could come
from it.
Now that may have been a mistake in
light of subsequent events. But looking at it from the
point of view of June 30, 1950, you can see that this
would be introduced, it would then be referred to the
Committee on Foreign Affairs in both Houses, and to
the Military Committees, you'd have great hearings at
which everybody would ask all sorts of ponderous
questions; by the time you get through with this you
might have completely muddled up the situation which
seemed to be very clear at the time. So I recommended
that we just drop this idea, since there was no great
pressure about it, to go ahead on our own.
Might it have been a mistake for the United
States to go ahead on its own with an undeclared war?
The real victim of the Korean War was the US
constitution and the democratic principles of due
process. It established the unconstitutional precedence
of undeclared wars launched secretly behind closed
doors. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Acheson argued
that an air attack and invasion represented the only
alternative available to the United States. He added
that the US president had the responsibility for the
security of the American people and of the whole world,
that it was his duty to take the only action which could
protect that security, and that this meant destroying
the missiles in Cuba. The prospect of a nuclear war did
not worry him in the least.
Theodore C Sorensen,
counselor to president John F Kennedy, wrote ("The
leader who led", New York Times, October 18, 1997):
Kennedy was indeed in a pretty bad fix. He
had no good choices, no options free from the risk of
either war or the erosion of our security and
alliances, and no reliable forecasts on how Moscow
would respond to our response. Acheson, the secretary
of state under President Truman, in recommending to
our group (in an untaped meeting at the State
Department) an air strike against the Soviet missile
sites in Cuba, acknowledged that this would then
obligate the Soviets to knock out our missile complex
in Turkey, thereby obligating us to knock out a
missile complex inside the Soviet Union, thereby
obligating ... et cetera, et cetera. When Kennedy's
more cautious approach succeeded, Acheson wrote the
President an eloquent note praising his handling of
the crisis. But in a magazine article several years
later he said that "the Kennedys" had prevailed in
this perilous situation only through "dumb luck".
They were indeed lucky - lucky they didn't
take Dean Acheson's advice.
On Korea, Truman,
and unfortunately the world as well, were less lucky.
And since when did the president of the United States
have a responsibility for the security of the whole
world? Who elected him President of the World?
On the question of Chinese warning of possible
intervention, Acheson had this to say in congressional
testimony, June 1, 1951:
At the end of September, there were
reports which were sent out through the Government of
India that statements that had been made to their
representatives by Chinese officials that if we
crossed the 38th Parallel they would intervene. Those
were important matters to be considered, and they were
considered; and on the 3rd of October, for instance,
the Chinese Communist Foreign Minister [Chou Enlai]
informed the Indian Ambassador [K M Pannikar], at
Peiping [Beijing], that if the United States forces,
or UN forces crossed the 38th Parallel, China would
send troops to the Korean frontier to defend North
Korea. That was a cryptic statement made by him.
He said that this action would not be taken if
only South Korean troops crossed the parallel. That
was a matter which had to be given very considerable
attention, and information to that effect was given to
General MacArthur. At the time this statement was
made, the United Nations was preparing to vote on its
resolution [to cross the 38th Parallel], finally
adopted by the General Assembly on October 7. It was
acted on by Committee One, on October 4, so that you
also have to keep in mind that perhaps this statement
was put out to have some effect on that vote.
Acheson again ("Princeton Seminar" comment,
February 13, 1954, Papers of Dean Acheson):
This [purported warning from Communist
China] was discussed at considerable length among us,
and the question was whether this was really a serious
observation, whether this was supposed to affect the
vote on the [United Nations] resolution - the Indians
were bringing in reports that the Chinese really meant
this and we shouldn't cross the 38th Parallel; the
Indians had been saying this sort of thing quite
consistently and continued in the future with these
observations, and I don't think they were taken very
seriously ... We thought that Pannikar was not a good
reporter ... It seemed that it was Acheson
who was not a good listener.
Thus it was clear
from official US records that the United States intended
from the very beginning to regionalize and globalize the
escalation of the Korean civil war into a Cold War
beyond the Korean Peninsula, if South Korea were to
suffer military setbacks from a conflict sparked by the
South itself with US support. To the US, Korea was a
civil war only if South Korea won. It was naked
communist aggression if the South should lose. It was an
issue of US credibility and international prestige.
This attitude, in conjunction with the Truman
Doctrine of March 12, 1947, of combating global
communism, anchored by the Cold War rationale of
National Security Council Report 68, laid the foundation
for the "domino theory" that rationalized US hostile
containment of China, US involvement in Vietnam and US
support of anti-communist dictatorships all over the
world. It was a strategy hostile to populist liberation
movements in the former colonies, born out of US
leaders' distrust of the wisdom of the democratic
processes at home as stipulated by the US constitution.
The defense of capitalist democracy abroad
required the denial of democracy at home.
The US
linkage of Taiwan to Korea played a central role in
China's decision to enter to the Korean War in the event
US forces should approach the Chinese border by crossing
the 38th Parallel. General Xiao Jinguang, commander of
China's navy, wrote in Xiao Jinguang Huiyilu
(Xiao Jinguang's Memoirs, Beijing: People's
Liberation Army Press, 1990, p 26) on the postponement
of the Taiwan Campaign Plan in June 1950:
On June 30, 1950, the fifth day after the
Korean War broke out, Premier Zhou Enlai met with me
in his office. He told me about the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) Central Committee's consideration of and
the Chinese government's position on the current
development of the Korean War. Zhou said that this
change in the world situation made our liberation of
Taiwan more difficult because the United States now
protected Taiwan in the straits. This change, however,
might also have a positive result since we were not
fully prepared yet. At present, our government's
attitude was to denounce the American imperialists'
invasion of Taiwan and their intervention into China's
internal affairs. Our army's plans were to continue
the demobilization of the land forces, strengthen the
construction of the naval and air forces, and postpone
the schedule of liberating Taiwan. China
had not planned to enter Korean conflict
If
China had planned to enter the Korean conflict in June
1950, it would not have continued to demobilize its land
forces. By ordering the 7th Fleet, a key military asset
in the Pacific balance of power, with 50-60 warships,
350 aircraft and 60,000 sailors and marines, into the
Taiwan Strait to intervene in the ongoing Chinese civil
war on June 27, 1950, the United States brought into
existence a de facto state of war between itself and
China.
At the end of July, in the midst of
battlefield reverses in Korea, MacArthur flew to Taiwan
for two days of talks with Guomindang [GMD, also
transliterated Kuomintang] leader Chiang Kai-shek. At
the end of these talks, MacArthur made a vague public
announcement praising Chiang's anti-communist efforts,
but further stated that "arrangements have been
completed for effective coordination between American
forces under my command and those of the Chinese
government".
This sounded as though Chinese
Nationalist troops were to be introduced into the Korean
fighting, which was not US government policy, albeit
considerations of it had been given by Truman and his
advisers. MacArthur cavalierly refused to give details
of his supposed plan to the State Department, and even
waited four days before reporting to the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, his superiors, on this important meeting. In
spite of his embattled situation along the Pusan
Perimeter, MacArthur nonetheless found time to criticize
administration policy in his message to the Veterans of
Foreign Wars (VFW) on August 20, saying that the United
States, as a matter of military logic, should keep
Taiwan as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier", as a
critical salient of a natural geographic arc of defense
to protect US interests in the Pacific.
MacArthur stressed the strategic importance of
Taiwan and insisted that the US must, at any cost,
retain control of that island. He strongly hinted that
the US would be able to use Taiwan as a base in any
future operations against the "Asiatic" mainland. He
also pointed out that Taiwan would be a formidable
threat to US security if controlled by an unfriendly
power, terming it an "unsinkable aircraft carrier and
submarine tender ... Nothing could be more fallacious,"
he charged, "than the threadbare argument by those who
advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that
if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia. Those
who speak thus do not understand the Orient."
He
dismissed any threat of the Korean War's expansion by
arguing that as the most knowledgeable expert on
"oriental psychology", he knew that "most Asiatics
admired his aggressive, resolute and dynamic
leadership". Truman ordered MacArthur to withdraw the
statement as being at variance with US policy. Mutual
ill-will continued to fester between the
self-aggrandizing soldier and his commander-in-chief.
Korean War creates Taiwan crisis
The
CCP leadership acted immediately to cope with the crisis
situation over Taiwan, as created by the outbreak of the
Korean War. The CCP leadership, in recognition of the
obvious gap of naval and air capabilities between the
two sides, quickly decided to postpone the People's
Liberation Army (PLA) Taiwan campaign plan to focus on
Korea, which is separated from China by the Yalu River
(Zhou Jun, "A Preliminary Exploration of Reasons Why the
PLA Failed to Carry Out the Taiwan Campaign Plan after
the Formation of the PRC", Zhonggong Dangshi Yanjiu
(The CPC History Study), No 1, 1991, p 72).
The CCP leadership had worried about direct US
military intervention on the mainland in the spring and
autumn of 1949 and had made contingent plans to
counteract it. As no US military invasion materialized
when the PLA mopped up GMD (Nationalist) stragglers in
China's coastal areas, especially in Shanghai and
Qingdao, CCP perception of an "American threat"
underwent complex adjustments in late 1949 and early
1950.
Chinese leaders concluded that the
prospect of a US invasion of the Chinese mainland was no
longer likely. Secretary of state Acheson's open
exclusion of Taiwan and South Korea from the US western
Pacific defensive perimeter suggested to Chinese
planners that the United States would not intervene in
the final campaign of the protracted Chinese civil war,
which had begun in 1927. This view was explicitly
expressed by General Su Yu, the officer assigned to take
charge of the Taiwan liberation campaign, in his reports
about the Taiwan problem on January 5 and 27, 1950. (He
Di, "The Last Campaign to Unify China: The CCP's
Unmaterialized Plan to Liberate Taiwan, 1949-1950",
Chinese Historians, Vol V, No 1, 7-8). By the end
of June 1950, the campaign to liberate Taiwan was
indefinitely postponed because of direct US intervention
as a result of developments in Korea.
When CCP
Chairman Mao Zedong was visiting Moscow in September
1949, North Korean leader Kim Il-sung sent high-ranking
Kim Kwang-hyop, secretary of the central committee of
the Korean Workers' Party and commanding general of the
North Korean II Corps, to visit China. His mission:
asking the Chinese to return all remaining ethnic-Korean
soldiers in the PLA 4th Field Army, as troops were
needed to counter repeated South Korean incursions.
According to the memoir of Chinese Marshal Nie
Rong-zhen, chief of staff of the PLA, China agreed to
this request after discussions between himself and Kim.
On January 19, 1950, General Kim further asked
China to send these ethnic-Korean soldiers back to Korea
together with their military equipment. Nie felt
sympathetic to the request but he needed to ask
instructions from the CCP Central Committee. He sent off
a report for this matter to the CCP Central Committee on
January 21, and the Central Committee approved the
Korean request the next day. (Nie, Nie Rongzhen
Huiyilu, p 743-744.) The total number of
ethnic-Korean soldiers returned to Korea in the spring
of 1950 was about 23,000. These soldiers were mainly
from different units of the PLA's 4th Field Army and
later organized as the Korean People's Army's 7th
Division.
North Korea adopted Maoist, not
Soviet, theory
Led by Kim Il-sung, who had
developed his political experience from close
association with the Chinese communists in Manchuria,
the North Korean communists did not follow Soviet
orthodoxy, and instead adopted the Maoist model by
including masses of poor peasants in the party; indeed,
they described the party a "mass" rather than a
"vanguard" party.
Kim's ideology in the 1940s
tended to be revolutionary-nationalist rather than
internationalist communist. The juche ideology
had its beginnings in the late 1940s, although the term
juche was not used until a 1955 speech in which
Kim castigated some of his comrades for being too
pro-Soviet. The concept of juche, which means
placing all foreigners at arm's length, has resonated
deeply with Korea's Hermit Kingdom past. Juche
doctrine stresses self-reliance and independence, but
also draws on neo-Confucian emphasis on rectification of
one's thinking before action in the real world.
Soon after Kim assumed power, virtually all
North Koreans were required to participate in study
groups and re-education meetings, where regime ideology
was inculcated. In the 1940s, Kim faced factional power
struggles within his group. Factions included communists
who had remained in Korea during the Japanese colonial
period, called the domestic faction, also Koreans
associated with Chinese communism, called the Yen'an
faction, Kim's Manchurian partisans, known as the Kapsan
faction, and Soviet Union loyalists, the Soviet faction.
In the aftermath of the Korean War, amid much
fault-finding for the disasters of the war, Kim purged
the domestic faction, many of whose leaders were from
southern Korea. In the mid-1950s, Kim removed key
leaders of the Soviet faction. These factional power
struggles took place only during the first decade of the
regime. Later, there were conflicts within the
leadership, but they were relatively minor and did not
successfully challenge Kim's leadership.
The
Yen'an experience (1937-45) was formative for the
revolutionary soul of Maoism and the CCP. During his
sojourn in Yen'an, Mao was at the height of his
theoretical creativity. He identified the Chinese
peasantry as the revolutionary core, addressed himself
to his/her needs and carried out land reforms and rent
reduction programs. Peasants became fully involved in
the political, economic and military organizations in
the liberated areas.
In order to raise the
revolutionary consciousness of the peasantry, Mao
created a corps of poor peasants and encouraged them to
participate actively in the land reform movement. During
this period Mao also formulated the "Three-Thirds
System", which limited the participation of party cadre
in local government to one-third, leaving two-thirds of
the posts to poor peasants and progressive
intellectuals. The role of experts is to serve the
people, not to lord it over them, he argued. The bulk of
his writings, which later appeared as Thoughts of
Mao, were written in Yen'an. After 1949, the Yen'an
spirit, which was the key to the CCP triumph over the
GMD, was taken as a guiding principle for social
revolution in China as a whole.
Mao had a deep
influence on Kim. In the period 1946-48, there was much
evidence that the Soviet Union hoped to dominate North
Korea. In particular, it sought to involve North Korea
in a quasi-colonial relationship in which Korean raw
materials, such as tungsten and gold, were exchanged for
Soviet manufactured goods. The Soviet Union also sought
to keep Chinese communist influence out of Korea; in the
late 1940s, Maoist doctrine had to be infiltrated into
North Korean newspapers and books. Soviet influence was
especially strong in the media, where major organs were
staffed by Koreans returning from the Soviet Union, and
in the security bureaus.
Korean fighters
tempered in Manchuria warfare
Nonetheless, the
Korean guerrillas who fought in Manchuria were not
easily molded and dominated. They were tough, highly
nationalistic and determined to keep Korea for Koreans.
This was especially so for the Korean People's Army
(KPA), which constituted an important political base for
Kim Il-sung and which was led by Choe Yng-gn, another
Korean guerrilla who had fought in Manchuria. At the
army's founding ceremony on February 8, 1948, Kim urged
his soldiers to carry forward the tradition of the
Koreans who had fought against the Japanese in
Manchuria.
The Democratic People's Republic of
Korea was established on September 9, 1948, three weeks
after the Republic of Korea had been formed in Seoul.
Kim Il-sung was named premier, a title he retained until
1972, when, under a new constitution, he was named
president. At the end of 1948, Soviet occupation forces
were withdrawn from North Korea. This decision echoed
Soviet withdrawal from Austria and contrasted with
Soviet policies in Eastern Europe. Tens of thousands of
Korean soldiers who had fought in Manchuria alongside
the Chinese communists against the Japanese also
filtered back to Korea. All through 1949, tough crack
troops with Chinese, not Soviet, experience returned to
be integrated with the KPA; the return of these Korean
troops inevitably moved North Korea toward China with
which Koreans always share a cultural affinity.
These returning troops enhanced Kim's bargaining
power with the Soviet Union and enabled him to maneuver
between the two communist giants. Soviet advisers
remained in the Korean government and military, although
far fewer than the thousands claimed by South Korean
sources. There probably were 300-400 Soviet advisers
posted to North Korea, far fewer than the US advisers in
the South. Both Koreas continued to trade, and the
Soviet Union sold World War II-vintage weaponry to North
Korea while the US armed South Korea with new weapons.
The KPA was built up through recruiting campaigns and
bond drives to raise funds to purchase Soviet arms. The
tradition of the Manchurian guerrillas was burnished in
the party newspaper, Nodong simmun (Workers' Daily).
On August 1, 1950, little more than a month
after US intervention in the Korean civil conflict, the
decision was made by Truman immediately to send the US
9th Bomber Wing to Guam as an atomic task force. Ten
B-29s, loaded with unarmed atomic bombs, set out for the
Pacific. On August 5, one of the planes crashed during
takeoff from Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base near San
Francisco, killing a dozen people and scattering
radioactive uranium around the airfield. The other
planes reached Guam, where they were kept on standby.
This was the beginning of the nuclearization of the
Korean Peninsula.
Korea was not a key issue at
the end of World War II.
One of the earliest
signs of the Allied Powers' concern about Korea appeared
in a joint statement by the US, China (Nationalist) and
Great Britain in December 1943, after the Cairo
Conference, which read: "The aforesaid three great
powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of
Korea [by Japan], are determined that in due course
Korea shall become free and independent" (Foreign
Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Cairo
and Tehran, 1943, Department of State Publication
7187, Washington, 1961, p 448).
Increased
divergence between US and Russian policies in the latter
stages of World War II affected the fate of Korea. The
destruction of the Axis powers in 1945 left power
vacuums in many areas of the world and brought the
escalating conflicts between the US and the Soviet Union
into sharp focus. Countries newly freed from German or
Japanese subjugation assumed significance as pawns of
clashing American-Soviet interests.
US gave
little strategic weight to Korea, unlike
Soviets
Unlike the Soviet Union, the US
traditionally attached little importance to Korea as a
strategic point. Korea had a relatively small
population, and had neither important industrial
facilities nor many natural resources not found
elsewhere. If at some future date Korea should fall into
hands unfriendly to the US, the occupation of Japan
might be vulnerable and US freedom of movement might be
restricted in the region. But with China in 1945 under
control of a friendly Nationalist government, such a
situation appeared unlikely. The USSR, on the other
hand, maintained its traditional regard for Korea as a
strategic focus. The USSR would be less likely to
countenance control of Korea by another power and sought
to control Korea itself.
US president Franklin
Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at the Yalta
Conference in February 1945 touched upon Korea's future.
Roosevelt advocated a trusteeship for Korea administered
by the US, the Soviet Union and China. Mindful of US
experience in the Philippines, he surmised that such a
trusteeship might last decades. Stalin suggested that
Britain should also be a trustee. No actual mention of
Korea was made in the document recording the agreements
at Yalta. The secret protocol developed by Roosevelt and
Stalin and agreed to by British prime minister Winston
Churchill only provided territorial and other
geopolitical concessions to the USSR in the Far East,
such as recognition of Outer Mongolia as a Soviet
satellite - at China's expense - as conditions for
Soviet entrance into the war against Japan after the
defeat of Germany.
Later, soon after Roosevelt's
death in April 1945, Stalin told Harry Hopkins,
president Truman's representative in Moscow, that the
USSR was committed to the policy of a four-power
trusteeship for Korea (Foreign Relations of the
United States: The Conferences at Malta and Yalta,
1945, Department of State Publication 6199,
Washington, 1955, pp 770, 984; Harry S Truman,
Memoirs, Vol II: Years of Trial and Hope, New
York: Doubleday and Co Inc, 1956, pp 316-17).
Korea was only briefly considered at the Potsdam
Conference held between July and August 1945, two months
after the surrender of Germany in May. Truman as the new
US president attended and Churchill was replaced in
mid-conference by Labor prime minister Clement Atlee.
Among the questions discussed were the Soviet timetable
for entering the war in the Pacific and the Allied
proclamation demanding Japan's unconditional surrender.
Looking ahead to the surrender of the Japanese on the
Asian mainland, the Allied military representatives drew
a tentative line across the map of Manchuria, above
which the Soviet Union was to accept surrender of
Japanese forces.
No mention was at first made of
Korea. But since Japanese troops were stationed in
Korea, there was a later discussion of Allied operations
in that area. At Potsdam, the chief of the Soviet
General Staff told General Marshall that the USSR would
attack Korea after declaring war on Japan. He asked
whether the Americans could operate against Korean
shores in coordination with this offensive. Marshall
told him that the US planned no amphibious operation
against Korea until Japan had been brought under control
and Japanese strength in the south of Korea was
destroyed by Soviet forces. Although the chiefs of staff
developed ideas concerning the partition of Korea,
Manchuria and the Sea of Japan into US and Soviet zones,
these had no connection with the later decisions that
partitioned Korea into northern and southern political
units.
The Soviet entry into the war against
Japan on August 9, 1945, three days after the first
atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and signs of
imminent Japanese collapse on August 10 - one day after
the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki - changed
US military planning from defeating Japan to accepting
its surrender.
Emperor Hirohito's Surrender
Rescript to Japanese Troops issued on August 17, 1945,
read in part:
To the officers and men of the Imperial
Forces: Three years and eight months have elapsed
since we declared war on the United States and
Britain. During this time our beloved men of the army
and navy, sacrificing their lives, have fought
valiantly on disease-stricken and barren lands and on
tempestuous waters in the blazing sun, and of this we
are deeply grateful. Now that the Soviet Union has
entered the war against us, to continue the war under
the present internal and external conditions would be
only to increase needlessly the ravages of war finally
to the point of endangering the very foundation of the
Empire's existence. With that in mind and although the
fighting spirit of the Imperial Army and Navy is as
high as ever, with a view to maintaining and
protecting our noble national policy we are about to
make peace with the United States, Britain, the Soviet
Union and Chungking. Japan omits term
'surrender'
The term "surrender" was not used and
atomic bombs were neither mentioned nor acknowledged as
the reason for ending the war, which was ascribed
directly to Soviet entry into the war. China was not
named because Japan never declared war on China. So
Japan made peace with Chungking, the wartime capital of
China. Between August 9, the day of the Nagasaki bomb,
and August 17, fierce fighting continued in Manchuria
between Soviet troops and the dilapidated Kwangtung
Army, long stripped of fighting capability to reinforce
the Pacific campaign against US troops.
According to US Army Lieutenant-Colonel David M
Glantz (August Storm: The Soviet 1945 Strategic
Offensive in Manchuria, Fort Leavenworth, Combat
Studies Institute, February 1983), the Soviets abrogated
their Neutrality Pact with Japan in April 1945 and
commenced a massive redeployment effort, which doubled
Soviet forces in the Far East to 80 divisions. During
the months of May-July 1945, more than 40 infantry, tank
and mechanized divisions plus artillery and combat
support units were transferred from the European theater
to the Far East.
This monumental effort,
code-named August Storm, required maximum utilization of
the Trans-Siberian railroad and 136,000 railroad
carloads to move these assault units to the Far Eastern
border areas. During the peak troop redeployments in
June and July, an average of 22-30 trains per day moved
Russian units under strict secrecy. Surprise was the
essential element in the Soviet offensive plan. The
Russians successfully deployed 30 divisions to western
Manchuria without Japanese detection.
Deception
and surprise were achieved by heavy reliance upon night
movement, utilization of assembly areas far removed from
the border and simple but strict measures such as
instructing senior Soviet officers not to wear rank
insignia and to use assumed names. The 6th Guards Tank
Army left all tanks, self-propelled artillery and
vehicles behind in Czechoslovakia and picked up new
equipment manufactured in Soviet Ural factories.
This extraordinary effort resulted in the Soviet
Union's ability to field a force in the Far East
comprised of 11 combined-arms armies, one tank army and
three air armies. Thus, without discovery by the
Japanese at the start of war with Japan, the Russian
army fielded 1,577,725 men, 26,137 guns and mortars, and
5,556 tanks and self-propelled artillery pieces. The air
force possessed 3,800 aircraft while the Soviet navy
(Pacific Fleet and Amur River flotilla) had distinct
superiority on the seas with 600 fighting ships and an
additional 1,500 amphibian crafts. This vast array of
men and arms gave the Russians a 2.2:1 ratio advantage
in men, 4.8:1 in artillery and tanks and a 2:1 advantage
in aircraft.
The threat which kept 40 Soviet
divisions, including two tank divisions, from the
European front all though the war was Japan's Kwangtung
Army. In existence since 1919, the Kwangtung Army was
more than a million men strong in early 1941. Manchuria
was the breadbasket and military warehouse for the
Japanese armed forces. However, as the Allied effort in
the Pacific war intensified, the Japanese Imperial
General Headquarters (IGHQ) began to withdraw elite
divisions from the Kwangtung Army to counter the Allied
threat elsewhere. By early 1943, the Japanese had
approximately 600,000 troops protecting Manchuria
against an estimated 750,000 Soviet troops deployed on
its borders.
Huge Soviet force vs Japan's
decimated army
Approaching the end of 1944, this
former vanguard of Japanese military prowess found its
strength reduced half again from its number in December
1942. The Japanese army was short in more than manpower.
It was severely deficient in aircraft engineer support,
communications and armor. What few tanks the Japanese
did possess were armed with 57mm guns and were grossly
overmatched by the Soviet T-34s. On March 7, 1945, the
Japanese forces on Iwo Jima were annihilated and the
Allies moved closer to the Japanese homeland. The
Japanese IGHQ issued orders on March 15, 1945, to
withdraw all remaining elite divisions from Manchuria to
the homeland, including two divisions on the border.
This also removed the Kwangtung Army's 1st Tank
Division, the last armor division in Manchuria.
The result left the Kwangtung Army a mere shadow
of its former self - its most seasoned division was
formed only as late as the spring of 1944. By August
1945, the Kwangtung Army had pieced together a combat
force of 1,155 tanks, 5,360 guns and 1,800 aircraft,
mostly of obsolete vintage. Discounting Japanese forces
in South Sakhalin, Korea and the Kuril Islands, the
Soviets faced an inexperienced army totaling little more
than 710,000 men.
The Japanese emperor's decree
to surrender was issued over the radio on August 14,
1945, after the Japanese officially notified Allied
powers that Japan would accept the Potsdam offer for
surrender. However, Japanese IGHQ did not issue a formal
ceasefire order to the Kwangtung Army in the name of the
emperor until August 17. The result was continued
fighting in some areas, surrender in others and
confusion everywhere. The continuing combat impaired
already poor communications between Japanese
headquarters and field units. This delayed transmissions
of ceasefire orders on August 17, during which time the
Kwangtung Army was preparing for a counter attack in the
southeast.
This atmosphere of confusion and
anxiety by the Japanese was intensified by the Japanese
warrior code of bushido, fight to the death.
Existing army/navy regulations expressly prohibited
servicemen from surrendering. Giving in to the enemy was
considered shameful and dishonorable in Japanese
military culture, punishable by court martial and
execution. To absolve soldiers of the traditional stigma
of surrender and to remove legal liabilities, Japan's
military headquarters published an order that stated the
nation and government would not regard servicemen
"delivered" to the enemy as a result of the ceasefire
order as having surrendered under the old regulations.
This had an important psychological effect on the
Japanese soldiers: with no dishonor there was no reason
to commit suicide. Still, many officers did.
On
August 19, the Kwangtung Army transmitted this order to
its field commands and the Japanese capitulated
everywhere in China. Soviet meticulous planning and bold
offensive tactics took 594,000 Japanese prisoners
including 143 generals and 20,000 wounded. The Kwangtung
Army suffered over 80,000 men and officers killed in the
final campaign of the war which lasted less than two
weeks. In contrast, the well-prepared Soviet Army had
8,219 killed and 22,264 wounded. These battle deaths and
casualties occurred after the first atomic bomb was
dropped on Hiroshima.
Next: Act IV in
conjoined Korean/Taiwan debacles
Henry
C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu
Investment Group.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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