Setting the Record Straight on the Korean War. - Review - book review

Monthly Review, Oct, 2000 by Martin Hart-Landsberg

Deane, Hugh, The Korean War 1945-1953 (San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, Inc., 1999), 246 pp., $14.95, paperback.

Hugh Deane has written a concise, political, and engaging history of the Korean war. One reason this book is special is that Deane was in southern Korea during the late 1940s as a reporter, and his experiences there enable him to provide a more immediate and personal perspective on events than one normally finds in histories of the Korean war.

In The Korean War, 1945-1953, Deane challenges conventional understandings of the war. Most importantly, he argues that it began in 1945, not 1950; that primary responsibility for the war lies with the U.S. government, which actively and intentionally divided Korea to further its imperialist ambitions; and finally, that the fighting between 1950 and 1953 is best characterized as a civil war rather than an unprovoked invasion of one nation by another.

Although Deane makes little attempt to explain the contemporary relevance of his work, it is an easy task. A peace treaty ending the Korean war has never been signed. Technically, the United States and North Korea remain in a state of war; the United States has rebuffed numerous North Korean attempts to negotiate its end. In fact, the United States and Japan still refuse to recognize North Korea. This continuing state of hostilities (intensified by the ongoing presence of U.S. military personnel in South Korea) has the potential to trigger a new, and potentially nuclear, Korean war. It has also provided useful cover for rightists in Japan to pursue remilitarization and for the military-industrial complex in the United States to sustain high levels of military spending. Finally, this situation, along with the tensions generated by Korea's division, has also provided justification for the governments of both North and South Korea to distort and limit progressive political and social possibilities on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel. [1]

While the events surrounding the Korean war cannot fully explain all of the above, the taproot of current tensions and struggles does lie in the period between 1945 and 1953. And, because the carefully managed conventional history of the Korean war has helped U.S. policymakers maintain popular support for their foreign policy, it is necessary to challenge that history if we are to build support for a new U.S. policy towards Korea and meaningful solidarity with the Korean people.

Cracks in the conventional history are slowly becoming visible. In September 1999, the U.S. government was finally forced to admit that the U.S. army might have committed an atrocity during the Korean war--specifically, that U.S. soldiers murdered several hundred Korean civilians near Nogun village in late July 1950. [2]

While the U.S. government acknowledges that atrocities were committed during the war, it previously blamed them all on North Korea, not itself or South Korea. However, as Deane shows, the opposite is closer to the truth. For example, the Syngman Rhee regime "ordered a blood bath in the southern regions retaken from the north after Inchon in the fall of 1950 ... Gregory Henderson [a U.S. official stationed in Seoul] estimated ... that probably more than 100,000 were killed without any trial whatsoever when soldiers and the Counter-Intelligence Corps recaptured areas where the left was known to be strong" (96). Deane also highlights the normally overlooked period from October through November 1950, when U.S. and South Korean forces occupied North Korea. The result was a reign of terror. "After reoccupying Pyongyang, the North Koreans claimed that 15,000 people had been massacred there--the bodies filled the courtyard of the main prison and 26 air raid shelters" (101).

The True Start of the Korean War

Deane's book is divided into five sections (with the middle sections dominating): History That Shapes the Present, The True Start of the Korean War, The 1950 War in the Making, Armies at War, and Armistice and Aftermath. While mainstream accounts of the start of the Korean war normally begin with North Korean forces "invading" South Korea, Deane's aim in section two is to show that the war started in 1945 as a result of U.S. policy. He therefore begins his analysis with the 1945 arrival of U.S. troops in southern Korea.

Although American troops were allegedly sent to oversee the surrender of Japanese forces, their mission was much bigger. Significantly, even before U.S. forces had landed in Korea, they were told by their commanding officer that the Korean people were to be considered enemies of the United States. The United States sought domination over as much of Korea as possible because of its strategic proximity to Japan, China, and the Soviet Union. Because the great majority of Koreans had their own vision of a democratic, independent, and socialist country, they stood in the way of U.S. plans.

The logic of the situation quickly led the United States to ally with the existing Japanese colonial administration in Korea and with rightwing Koreans against the popularly supported Korean People's Republic and its associated mass organizations. Deane describes in some detail how the U.S. occupation proceeded to smash any and all opposition to its rule over the south.