The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (11 page)

Roosevelt was impressed with the Japanese as being the kind of can-do nation he could admire, “entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world.” All of this put Korea, in the words of Robert Myers, a writer and former intelligence officer with considerable expertise in Korean affairs, “in a position not unlike that of a newborn calf, defenseless before the Japanese imperial wolf.” The only country that might have made a difference, given Korea’s unfortunate geography, was the very distant United States. In fact, back in 1882 the kingdom of Korea had made a treaty with the United States (and some European nations as well) that called for them to come to Korea’s defense if it was attacked. That aid was to remain altogether theoretical: Korea was too far away; the American Navy at the time of the Russo-Japanese War was pitifully small; and in any case, Teddy Roosevelt had his own priorities for Asia, and Korea was not one of them. The United States was not interested in helping Korea but in securing its own brand-new colonial domain in the Philippines. So with covert American agreement, the Japanese were allowed to control Korea ever more tightly, as a “protectorate” after the Russo-Japanese War, and then, in 1910, by open, brazen annexation—as a full-fledged Japanese colony.

Because he spoke such good English, the young Syngman Rhee had been chosen by some of his countrymen to visit Theodore Roosevelt in the summer of 1905 just as the president was about to negotiate the Russian-Japanese Peace Treaty. Rhee wanted Roosevelt’s help in stopping Japan’s colonization of his country. In the words of the journalist-historian Joseph Goulden, Roosevelt offered Rhee a dose of “polite and totally misleading doubletalk.” He knew that the pro-Japanese elements who ran the Korean embassy in Washington would give Rhee no help; and he did not mention that, even as they were talking, Secretary of State William Howard Taft was on his way to Tokyo to work out a secret treaty giving the Japanese control of Manchuria and Korea, with the Japanese in return pledging the United States a free hand in the Philippines.
No wonder that Rhee eventually became, in the eyes of his American associates, so neurotic and distrustful. America betrayed him more than once and lied to him systematically. Eventually, the Japanese, who renamed Korea
Chosen,
initiated a brutal colonial reign that lasted almost forty years. The United States, Roosevelt later wrote in his memoirs, could not do “for the Koreans what they were utterly unable to do for themselves.” The Japanese colonization of Korea would be an unusually cruel one, but it attracted little attention outside Korea’s borders.

Rhee himself stayed on in America, received a remarkable education for a Korean of his generation, and became a one-man Korean truth squad, with just enough connections to a few well-placed Americans, many of them church-connected, to reach other, more politically influential figures. If those associations gave him a good deal of access, and allowed him to press the case for his country’s freedom, he always fell short of genuine influence. He had attended graduate school at Princeton as a doctoral candidate in political science, becoming a favorite of its then president, Woodrow Wilson. Rhee was a regular at the informal social gatherings the Wilsons held in their home, where students came together around the Wilson family piano and sang. Rhee did not sing, but he liked to share in the warmth of an informal American evening, and Wilson seemed both to like and admire him, introducing him to strangers on occasion as “the future redeemer of Korean independence.”

But the Wilson who presided at Princeton and the Wilson who presided over the United States a little later, and who eventually brought America into World War I, proved to be two very different men. The postwar Paris Peace Conference, which was where Wilson hoped to create a new world order, was among other things supposed to grant colonized countries the right of self-determination. No one was more excited about this prospect than Wilson’s old friend and protégé Rhee: at this most august gathering the freedom of his country was going to be raised by his old mentor, who had once seemed to anoint him as the leader of a new, independent Korea. To Rhee, this was the moment he had been waiting for. He hoped to leave America for Paris, to lobby on behalf of his countrymen to his great friend, to loosen the Japanese fist. But Wilson wanted no part of him in Paris. The president, as it happened, needed Japan as a player in Asia, and besides, Japan had chosen sides well during the war, and so was one of the victorious allies, ready to inherit German rights in China. Rhee thus learned the first rule of global warfare: nations that ended up on the winning side got to keep their colonies; those on the losing side had to surrender them. The State Department was told not to give Rhee a passport.

IN JUNE
1950, then, there was no small degree of irony in the fact that Americans were now ready to fight and die for Korea. The United States valued Korea, not for its own sake, but because of U.S. fears of what would happen to a neighboring country—Korea’s longtime oppressor, Japan—if America did not intervene and answer a Communist challenge. In the whimsical, mischievous way that history moves along, Japan was becoming a new ally, just as China had been a seemingly valiant ally but now was in the process of becoming an enemy.

But the prolonged period of Japanese colonialism had exacted a heavy price from the Koreans. It had destroyed any possibility of normal political evolution and modernization there—not just the sheer cruelty and oppression of the Japanese presence, but the fact that so many talented politicians had been arrested or murdered; while others, like Rhee and his future opponent Kim Il Sung, were driven into exile. Some in the South were contaminated as collaborationists by their connections to the Japanese. During World War II, as Robert Myers has pointed out, the people of the occupied nations of Europe always had the hope that help was coming, that the allies, who were mighty, were gathering and would end German domination on the continent. Koreans held on to no such hopes. Ten years, twenty years, twenty-five years passed, and there was no gathering force of nations determined to rescue the poor, subjugated Korean people and remove the Japanese from their land.

Only in December 1941, when Japan overreached and attacked American, British, and Dutch possessions in South and Southeast Asia, were there the first stirrings of hope, and those were slight, given that most of the early victories in the Pacific War belonged to the Japanese, and when the tide began to turn, little news of it filtered down to the Korean people. The Western allies were coming, if not for the Koreans, then for their own reasons, and in time their success would spell Japan’s doom. But by 1945, the cynicism produced by the occupation had done its work: many people in the upper and middle classes had in differing degrees made their accommodations with the colonizers, accepting Japanese rule and becoming powerless, badly compromised parts of the Japanese power structure. Some Koreans had even begun to admire the Japanese, however cynically, for they were, whatever else, the first Asians to defeat the white rulers of much of the rest of Asia.

In 1945, Korea was virtually a country without political institutions, and without indigenous leadership. In the North, when the Red Army swept in, institutions were imposed instantly from the top down by the Russians, as was a new leader, Kim Il Sung. In the South, Rhee, who had spent most of his life in exile, would be the American horse, like it or not. He was then seventy years old, intense, egocentric, volatile, fiercely nationalistic, patriotic, virulently anti-Communist, and no
less authoritarian; he was very much a democrat, so long as he had complete control of all the country’s democratic institutions and no one else was allowed to challenge his will. He was what the Japanese and the Americans had made him: a lifetime of betrayal, prison sentences, political exile, and broken promises had changed and hardened him. He was one example of what his country’s harsh modern history had done to an ambitious young political figure, as Kim Il Sung in a very different way was another example of the same tragic result.

Rhee had been a political prisoner as a young man and had barely missed being executed; he would eventually get a Harvard degree, and the Princeton PhD, but his lifetime was filled with hardships and disappointments that in many ways resembled the hardships and disappointments of his country. His essentially powerless status as an exile paralleled his country’s powerless status as an orphaned nation in the eyes of the great powers. After gaining his doctorate, he had returned briefly to Korea, before spending the next thirty-five years in the United States. He became a professional supplicant, not the most healthy of conditions; he had lobbied constantly for a Korea free of colonial bondage with himself at its head. If he was the most passionate kind of nationalist, he was an equally relentless self-promoter: when he finally took power, his success tended to confirm his monomania.

When the war in the Pacific ended in 1945, Rhee had one great ace to play, and he had, by then, waited over three decades to play it—the support of the United States. Since the few Americans who were going to deal with postwar Korea had given almost no thought to the question of its postwar status, Rhee, with his longtime residency in the United States and his long years of lobbying, turned out to be the only Korean candidate with an American constituency. In addition, he had nurtured a long-standing connection to the Chinese Nationalists, who were exceptionally well connected in Washington. In Korea, as in China, the same people seemed to be searching for a leader who was both nationalist and a Christian; their nationalism had to meet Western religious and political standards.

Chiang Kai-shek’s backing was the equivalent of a passport to influence in Washington. In fact, Rhee became known, for better or worse, both to admirers of Chiang and those who despised him, as Little Chiang. Unlike Chiang, he was a very serious Christian. Rhee had after all become a Christian in a land that was not Christian, and he had suffered for his faith on many occasions. To some of the Americans who backed him in those early years, his religious beliefs (and those of Chiang) were of great comfort—though Asian, these were men who were very much like them. When, in the years just before the Korean War, an American diplomat had made a critical comment about Chiang and Rhee to the influential John Foster Dulles, later to be Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
secretary of state, he had answered revealingly, “Well I’ll tell you this. No matter what you say about them, these two gentlemen are modern day equivalents of the founders of the church. They are Christian gentlemen who have suffered for their faith.”

It was Chiang, among others, who had recommended Rhee to Douglas MacArthur, and when Rhee finally returned to Korea to take up the country’s presidency, he arrived in MacArthur’s plane, in itself a defining political statement. The Americans, it seemed, had their man—or perhaps more accurately their man had them. Roger Makins, a senior British diplomat friendly to the United States, believed that the Americans in that period, reflecting an isolationist nation being pulled ever so reluctantly into a new role as a world power, always showed a propensity to go for an individual—someone they felt comfortable with. Choosing Rhee, Makins believed, reflected the fact that “Americans have always liked the idea of dealing with a foreign leader who can be identified and perceived as ‘their man.’ They are much less comfortable with movements.” Those most comfortable with Rhee did not, however, include the Americans in Korea who actually had to deal with him on a daily basis, many of whom came to loathe him. General John Hodge, the unusually rough and undiplomatic commander of American troops in South Korea, despised Rhee. He considered him, as Clay Blair, the military historian, wrote, “devious, emotionally unstable, brutal, corrupt, and wildly unpredictable.”

I
N THE NORTH,
Kim Il Sung had been installed with a good deal more foresight by his sponsors from the Soviet Union, who had had their eye on Korea for a much longer time. He arrived at the end of World War II through the dictate of Joseph Stalin and through the sheer muscle of the occupying Red Army. Because of that, from the start he employed the brutal model of the Soviet system, and was surrounded by Soviet advisers and sponsors. By the spring of 1950, Kim had been in power for almost five years; and, for at least two of them, he had been pushing, with ever greater aggressiveness, for his right to invade the South. That invasion was sure to be supported, so Kim promised the Russians, by a spontaneous national uprising all over the South. Two hundred thousand Southern Communists and patriots would take up arms as one against Syngman Rhee, who was, in a favorite phrase of the Communist vernacular of that era, the running dog of the American imperialists. There was, however, only one person who could give the green light for such an invasion—Stalin himself.

Of the three critical players on the Communist side of the Korean War, Kim Il Sung had the least legitimacy. Stalin, if he had not been the principal architect of the Russian Revolution, had at least been there from the beginning, a harsh, cruel enforcer who had systematically gathered ever greater power from those around him and, by the postwar years, had guided Soviet totalitarianism for almost a quarter of a century. He had gained immense stature from the victory of Russia’s armies over Hitler’s Germany, despite his own catastrophic miscalculations about Hitler’s intentions, and perhaps even worse, his almost suicidal destruction of the Red Army, purging its high command and destroying its officer corps in the months before Hitler launched his invasion. Whatever his miscalculations, Stalin had become the symbolic leader of the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians called it. Those mistakes, which had allowed the Germans to come so close to defeating Russia, had, ironically enough, made him more of a hero to the Russian people, thereby strengthening his personal hold on his nation and melding its spiritual myths with his own myth of leadership. He came to
embody not so much Russia’s early defeats, but its very survival at Stalingrad, and then the final triumph of the Red Army in Berlin. That victory alone seemed to seal his greatness for ordinary Russians, making him nothing less than a modern incarnation of the legendary tsars and so, for better but mostly for worse, the principal figure of twentieth-century Russia.

Mao Zedong, in 1950 the leader of the revolutionary Chinese government that had come to power after years of oppression, strife, and civil war, might have been if anything an even grander figure on the historical landscape. He was the principal architect of the Chinese revolution and led it through long, difficult days, often against fearsome odds, saving it from the combined forces of Chiang Kai-shek and various warlords. He was both political and military strategist in the Chinese civil war and the creator of a new kind of warfare where politics and war were constantly linked and blended, and where the military side was always an instrument of the political side. His adaptations of Marxist beliefs to a peasant society and his theory of revolution would have a far greater resonance internationally in the second half of the twentieth century than anything Stalin had ever done. By the 1960s, Stalin, his crimes against his own people and against those in Eastern Europe now public, would seem something of an embarrassment to bright, idealistic young leftists in the West and in the underdeveloped world, a leader they preferred to avoid talking about, who represented little but brute power. By contrast Mao, for a long time, until the darker side of his personality and the terror he had let loose on his own people became better known, was a far more romantic figure, more like the personification of
revolution.
In those years, he, far more than Stalin, was seen as the leader of the world of the have-nots against the world of the haves.

Kim Il Sung was something of a contradiction, a fierce nationalist who was the creation of an imperial power, the Soviet Union. He was a man who had seethed with the nationalist fervor produced by Japanese colonization and had become, because of that colonial era, a dedicated Communist and resilient guerrilla fighter, yet he was also from the very beginning almost completely an instrument, and a quite dutiful one at that, of Soviet policy. Others looked at him and saw little but the Soviet hand on his shoulder; he looked at himself and saw the purest embodiment of Korean nationalism. Certainly, the era in which he had come of age helped shape him. To Kim there was no contradiction between being a Korean patriot, a dedicated Communist, and an instrument of the Russians.

All of Korea had been fertile terrain for rebellion because of the Japanese. As their occupation stretched on, a certain fatalism settled in among much of the educated middle class, and many members of the privileged classes reluctantly made their peace with the Japanese and prospered as collaborators.
A large number of them would emerge after the war as influential players in what became South Korea, both in business and the military. By contrast, many Koreans whose roots were in the peasantry, who hated the Japanese and had no economic reason to make accommodations, were pulled toward a deeply alienated left. There was, after all, much to feel alienated about, for the Japanese colonization of Korea had been unusually harsh. The Koreans were regarded by the Japanese as a lower species of humanity, all the more inferior for having been so readily conquered.

The Japanese, sure of their imperial mission and their superiority as a race, had set out to destroy almost all vestiges of Korean independence. What they wanted was nothing less than to obliterate Korean culture, starting with the language. The official language of Korea was proclaimed to be Japanese; in schools, lessons were to be taught in Japanese. The Japanese language test book was called
The Mother-Tongue Reader
. Koreans were to take Japanese names. The Korean language was to become a regional dialect, nothing more. What the Japanese, like so many would-be colonialists, were to learn, of course, was that if you want to make something valuable to a conquered people, you need but suppress it. Only then did such ordinary things—history, language, local religions, things so easy to take for granted—gain real meaning. The divisions caused by the Japanese colonization went much deeper into the society than most foreigners realized. The country was not merely split at the thirty-eighth parallel, but in some ways the separation ran through the entire population—in effect it had to do with which side any Korean had been on in those heartbreaking times. It helped create all kinds of great internal divisions, ones that would collide during the Korean War. It was not only a border crossing war, the North invading the South, but something more as well, for there were ghosts from the recent colonized past there, and so long-standing political struggles that had simmered for decades were at stake too. Both sides were out to settle arguments that had, in different ways and under different labels, been on the table for nearly half a century. The unusual harshness of the Japanese rule had also ensured that the nationalists could barely exist on native soil. In a way, much of the story of contemporary Korea flowed from that fact—those patriots who stayed would generally be tainted in some way or another by association with the Japanese, while those who went into exile were also tainted, or at the very least profoundly affected, by association with the foreign powers—Russian, Chinese, or American—who housed them.

As that hopelessly poor, occupied, and colonized Korea had sent Syngman Rhee into his mendicant’s exile in America, so on a very different track it had produced Kim Il Sung, whose own family had suffered because of the economic
imbalance of the earlier order. Kim had been politicized in his childhood, gone into exile as a boy, and spent much of what should have been his youth struggling against the Japanese. He represented in his own way the rage and bitterness of the country’s recent history.

He was born Kim Song Ju in the village of Nam-ri on April 15, 1912, just two years after the Japanese began their colonial era in Korea. If one imagines some child of modern Europe growing up in Holland or France under a Nazi occupation that lasted for the first thirty-three years of his life, Kim’s anger and his rigidity can be better understood. His paternal grandparents lived in a village named Mangeyondai, which eventually became known as his family home. In time he claimed that his great-grandfather had been one of the leaders of an assault on an armed American merchant ship, the
General Sherman
, that had made the mistake of straying too far up the Taedong River in 1866, and then the even bigger mistake of allowing itself to become grounded, whereupon local Koreans stormed the beached boat and hacked the foreigners to pieces. Whether or not Kim’s relative was actually involved is another question, for Kim was always exceptionally creative in upgrading his autobiography—a task he took very seriously.

His father, Kim Hyong Jik, came from the peasant class, attending, though not finishing, middle school. At the age of fifteen, the senior Kim married the daughter of the local schoolmaster, then worked as an elementary schoolteacher, an herbal doctor, and on occasion, a grave keeper. His wife, Kang Pan Sok, was seventeen, two years older than her husband. Hers were educated people. There were schoolteachers and Christian ministers in her lineage. Her people were thought to be less than enthusiastic about the wedding because Kim’s station was lower and he had only two acres of land to his name. When Kim Il Sung was born, his father was only seventeen and still lived in his own parents’ home. There were Christian missionary connections on both sides of Kim’s family, though in the cleansing of his curriculum vitae, he later claimed that his family members were nonbelievers and that his father went to church only because the Presbyterians offered a missionary school. “Believe in a Korean God, if you believe in one!” he later quoted his father as saying. While the truth of this is unknowable, it was true that in many underdeveloped places in the world, part of the allure of missionaries was the chance they offered for a better education and in time a certain economic advantage. Of the fact that Kim’s family was political there was no doubt; his father and two of his uncles were put in jail at different times for independence activities. In 1919, when he was seven, the family, like thousands of highly nationalistic Koreans, became part of a great migration moving across the country’s northern border into
Manchuria, trying to escape Japanese rule. They settled in the town of Jiandao, where there was a large Korean community, and the young Kim attended Chinese schools, learning the language.

When he was eleven, his father sent him back to Korea, so he could have a better sense of his own country and language, even if it was never to be spoken publicly. There he lived for a time with his maternal grandparents, before returning to Manchuria, where he attended a military academy founded by Korean nationalists. Later, he would claim that he was too radical for the school and left after only six months. In any case, he soon moved on to Jilin, a town with a large number of Korean émigrés—and a great many Japanese agents as well. These were fertile times for revolutionaries. He and his friends would argue, Kim later said, about which should come first, the revolution to end the economic cruelty, or the revolution to end the Japanese occupation. They also discussed whether the revolution could come first in Korea, or whether the Koreans would have to wait until Japan itself was taken over by Communist forces. Like so many Koreans of his generation, he became more radical as time passed and the hardships inflicted by the Japanese seemed more permanent. His father died in these years and his mother began to work as a seamstress. Kim himself attended a Chinese middle school, where he encountered Shang Yue, a Communist teacher and party member who took an interest in him, opening his own library to the young man. (Shang was soon fired because of his radical views and eventually became one of the leading historians of Communist China.)

Kim moved steadily to the left, becoming a junior founding member of a Communist youth group. In the fall of 1929, at the age of seventeen, he was arrested by the local Manchurian authorities and imprisoned. He was quite lucky, notes biographer Bradley Martin, that he was not turned over to the Japanese. Six months later, he was released, and the next year he joined the Communist Party—the
Chinese
Communist Party. Somewhere in that period, it was believed, he took the nom de guerre Kim Il Sung. His critics claimed he stole the name from another noted Korean patriot famed for fighting as a guerrilla, and so enjoyed a ready-made reputation as something of a Korean Robin Hood. Because of this alleged switch in identities, some detractors were convinced that Kim’s entire service as a guerrilla fighting in Manchuria was a lie. That was not the case: as in all other things, once he came to power, he exaggerated his role as a guerrilla leader, but he had been a serious opponent of the Japanese starting around 1931, and during those years he had lived a difficult, dangerous life as a guerrilla leader, just barely staying ahead of Japanese troops who were intent on hunting him down.

That meant that by the time he was twenty, he had taken up arms against
the Japanese, and by the spring of 1932 he had his own guerrilla band. Kim and others like him were part of what was known as the Kapsan Group, named after Manchuria’s Kapsan Mountains, where he and other Korean Communists had relocated after fleeing their country. The Japanese, their hunger for domination in East Asia growing with each success, were extending their colonial mandate into Manchuria—giving it the new name, as it was Japanized, of Manchukuo. Kim’s was one of many groups fighting the Japanese, some of them Korean and some of them Chinese. The guerrilla struggle against the Japanese went on for much of a decade, a war with few victories for the guerrillas. The Japanese had many more troops, far better weapons, and—so it seemed to the beleaguered Koreans—unlimited supplies of ammunition. They also had the ability to offer the local peasants a painful choice: handsome rewards for information on the guerrillas, who were sometimes their friends and countrymen, or, if they failed to cooperate, death.