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Introduction to the Korean War The George C. Marshall Lecture in Military History Introduction to the Korean War Allan R. Millett TTVROM his pedestal above the twelve lanes of traffic moving hy fits and X starts along King Sejong Boulevard in Seoul, the statue of Admiral Yi Sun-shin watches the Korean people enjoy the dubious luxuries of pros- perity and peace. However perilous that well-being sometimes seems at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Republie of Korea stands as a sturdy example of postcolonial survival. In a sense the Republic of Korea—Daehan Minguk—and its socialist sister the Democratic People's Republic of Korea—are "new nations," but they are built on the wreck- age of a failed traditional society, forty years of Japanese colonialism, the leaching effect of Japan's wars (1937^5), and the trauma of political division and revolutionary social change. Koreans who were young in 1945 can hardly believe they live in the same county. But always there is the memory of "the war." The Korean people know war. One bit of their lore is that the coun- try has been invaded at least six hundred times in the last three millen- nia, although the counting includes incidents of piracy, minor punitive expeditions, and naval encounters along Korea's long and island-dotted coastline. Nevertheless, the Koreans have a record of victimization that rivals that of the Jews, Poles, and Irish. Four hundred years ago Admiral Yi Sun-shin battled the fleets of the Japanese tyrant Hideyoshi Toyotomi, but despite three miraculous naval victories—won by the novel armored "turtle boats" of revered memory—^Admiral Yi could not prevent Hideyoshi's armies from ravishing Korea's villages, farmlands, and pre- cious Buddhist temples. As Yi wrote in despair: "The mountains and the rivers tremble . blood dyes hills and streams."' According to Korean 1. Yi Ch'ungmu-gong Chonso, vol. 1 oí Imjin Changck'o: Admiral Yi Sun'sin's Memorials to Court, transiated by Ha Tae-hung and edited by Lee Ghong-young (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1981), 197. TAeJourmi/o/Aíiíttuo'Wf--"oO' US ("i-'tober 20(11 ): y2]-.16 © .Society for Militan-Histon- * 921 ALLAN R. MILLETT- legend, the stone in the forehead of the Great Buddha of Sökkuram Grotto turns red every time Japan threatens to invade. It would be appropriate to have a similar warning system for China. The Kingdom of Ghosön—"The Land of the Morning Galm"—rose from the rubble of civil wars and Ghinese invasions in 1392 and survived until 1910, but the ruling dynasty, founded by General Yi Song-gye, eould never eseape an awful geopolitical reality: the Korean peninsula served as the military marehes for both .Japan and China—and for waves of Mongols and Manehurians bent on visiting .lapan. When the divisions of the Ghinese People's Volunteers Force (Renmin Zhiyuanjun) swept into the Ilan River valley in January 1951, they trod the same ground ravaged by the Mongols in the thirteenth eentury. When the Fifth Marines, a regiment of the U.S. 1st Marine Division, erossed the Han River on 20 September 1950 on its way to Seoul, the Marines marehed by the monument of Haengjujuansong fortress, the site of a desperate and futile battle against the Japanese in 1592. There are few battlefields in Korea that are the site of only one past engagement. Koreans eompare themselves to a sehool of shrimp eaught between two whales. Whether the whales are fighting or making love—not to mention feeding—the shrimp have a short life expeetaney. The nineteenth eentury brought a new set of military adventurers to Korea: the Europeans and the now-Europeanized Japanese. On Kanghwa-do (island) at the mouth of the Han River, one ean find monu- ments and restored fortifieations dedieated to the valiant but out-gunned Koreans who opposed French, American, and Japanese naval expedi- tionary forées in 1866,1871, and 1875. The two major regional wars that sealed Korea's fate as a Japanese colony—the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5)—ineluded battles on Korean soil or in Korean waters. Ironieally, neither of the world wars made Korea a battlefield for foreign powers. A worse fate awaited the Korean people, a civil war of sueh devastating proportions that one had to look baek to the Japanese invasions of the 1590s for appropriate precedents in suffering. Although Korean folklore foeuses upon the tragedy of foreign inva- sions, Korean history is hardly free of eivil strife. The Korean people do not need the encouragement of foreign devils to fight each other. The Yi dynasty came to power in a war that followed the collapse of the King- dom of Koryo (to whieh North Korea still traees its own legitimacy), whieh had sueeeeded in turn the Kingdom of Unified Shilla. The Shilla dynasty (based in Kyongju, today a national historieal shrine in the Republic of Korea) had triumphed over an earlier Koguryô kingdom and the rival Paekche kingdom, based in the modern Gholla provinces of southwestern Korea, an area notorious for its rebelliousness. Even when the dynastie and foreign wars faded in severity in the 922 * THE JOl'RNAL OF - Introduction to the Korean War nineteenth century, the progressive erosion of Korean traditional soci- ety—based on hereditary land-holding and Confucian family and social deference patterns—brought a series of populist agrarian uprisings that fused economic discontent with millennialism of a distinctly Asian cast. The Yi Dynasty faced popular revolts of serious proportions in 1812 and 1862. Like the Taipings in China, the Korean rebels sought some sort of rejuvenation that drove off foreign-based modernity and restored some perfect (imagined) past of social harmony. In Korea the last and most sig- nificant of these revolts—the Tonghak ("Eastern Learning") Rebellion of 1895—led the Yi dynasty to seek aid from Russia, China, and Japan, thus setting the stage for its own demise. Apparently when the whales are oth- erwise engaged, the shrimp eat eaeh othcr.^ For all these Korean wars, the war of 1950-53 still rises above all the other communal and international violence just as the great mountain of Paek Tu-san rises above all the other mountains as a symbol of Korean identity and endurance. For American historians, the war of 1950-53 could be either forgotten or misunderstood. Even within the eontext of World War II and the Cold War era, the Korean War was usually just ignored. Such a cavalier treatment simply reflected a historiographieal phenomenon, whieh was to insist that what really made wars memorable was their lasting impaet upon national domestic development, an insu- larity that has been the bane of American intclleetual inquiry through- out the twentieth eentury. The American Revolution and the Civil War (or War of the Rebellion or the War Between the States) took their sig- nificance from their impact on the course of Ameriean socio-eeonomie history. The War with Mexieo or the War with Spain, forever important in the history of American foreign relations, are relatively unstudied except among eccentric Ameriean intelleetuals and the whole Spanish- speaking world. World War II is the great exception sinee its impaet on both American domestic life and international relations has been obvi- ous, although the critique of American performance in that war is still based on domestic (corporatist-revisionist) eriteria worthy of the Jeffer- sonian isolationists. The Vietnam War (1958-75) confused American thinking even further since it became a war lost by the United States and its Vietnamese allies that had virtually no international ramifications, unless one is Cambodian. Yet that war produced a soeial and national revolution in Vietnam and a generational political trauma in the United 2. Korean Overseas Information Service,/I i/andboofe of Korea (Seoui: Hoiiym, 1990); Andrew C. Nahm, Korea: Tradition and Transformation (Seoul: Hollym, 1988); Peter Hyun. Koreana (Seoul: Korea Britannica, 1984); and Keith Pratt and Richard Rutt, eomps., Korea: A Historical and Cultural Dictionary (Durham, U.K.: Curzon, 1999). MILITARY HISTORY * 923 ALLAN R. MILLETT ' States. Caught between the whales of World War II and the Vietnam War, the Korean War shrank to shrimp-like proportions in the Ameriean con- seiousness.-" The historical signifieance of the Korean War must be sought else- where than in the popular memory of Amerieans, even those who fought in Korea. With an estimated three million-plus deaths of all nationalities, the Korean War still ranks behind only the two world wars as the most costly war of the twentieth century in terms of human lives lost. Even if some other eonfliet eventually lays a stronger elaim to this dubious dis- tinetion of deadliness, the Korean War will still rank with the worst of the eontlicts that followed World War II, wars that killed an estimated twenty million by the century's end. In the history of international eonfliet the Korean War is one of many wars of decolonization and posteolonial political succession that swept away four eenturies of European (and Japanese) imperialism. With all the World War II belligerents except the United States prostrated by their wartime losses, the client states of the Middle East and the colonies of Asia and Africa faced an unpreeedented opportunity to declare their independent existenee. "Deelaring" often proved easy compared to the challenge of "being" a new nation, but rational policies and reforms sel- dom drove the "freedom fighters" of the 1940s and 1950s. Like genera- tions of rebels before them, the leaders of "the wars of national liberation" proved more adept at taking power than governing. Wars of posteolonial independence and political succession swept Asia in the wake of the dual collapse of European and Japanese colo- nialism.
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