MODERN LIBRARY CHRONICLES Currently Available KAREN ARMSTRONG on Islam DAVID BERLINSKI on mathematics RICHARD BESSEL on Nazi Germany IAN BURUMA on modern Japan PATRICK COLLINSON on the Reformation FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO on the Americas LAWRENCE M. FRIEDMAN on law in America PAUL FUSSELL on World War II in Europe F GONZÁLEZ-CRUSSI on the history of medicine PETER GREEN on the Hellenistic Age ALISTAIR HORNE on the age of Napoleon 3/655 PAUL JOHNSON on the Renaissance FRANK KERMODE on the age of Shakespeare JOEL KOTKIN on the city STEPHEN KOTKIN on the fall of Communism HANS KÜNG on the Catholic Church MARK KURLANSKY on nonviolence EDWARD J. LARSON on the theory of Evolution MARGARET MACMILLAN on the uses and abuses of history MARTIN MARTY on the history of Christianity MARK MAZOWER on the Balkans JOHN MICKLETHWAIT AND ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE on the company ANTHONY PAGDEN on peoples and empires RICHARD PIPES on Communism COLIN RENFREW on prehistory KEVIN STARR on California 4/655 MICHAEL STÜRMER on the German Empire GEORGE VECSEY on baseball MILTON VIORST on the Middle East A.N. WILSON on London ROBERT S. WISTRICH on the Holocaust GORDON S. WOOD on the American Revolution Forthcoming TIM BLANNING on Romanticism ALAN BRINKLEY on the Great Depression JASON GOODWIN on the Ottoman Empire BERNARD LEWIS on the Holy Land PANKAJ MISHRA on the rise of mod- ern India ORVILLE SCHELL on modern China ALSO BY BRUCE CUMINGS The Origins of the Korean War, Volume I: Liberation and the Emergence of Se- parate Regimes, 1945–1947 The Origins of the Korean War, Volume II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950 Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American–East Asian Relations 6/655 Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power DEDICATED TO PRESIDENT KIM DAE JUNG (1925–2009): dissident, politician, statesman, concili- ator, peacemaker CONTENTS Other Books by this Author Title Page Dedication Chronology Glossary Introduction Map CHAPTER ONE: The Course of the War CHAPTER TWO: The Party of Memory CHAPTER THREE: 10/655 The Party of Forgetting CHAPTER FOUR: Culture of Repression CHAPTER FIVE: 38 Degrees of Separation: A Forgotten Occupation CHAPTER SIX: “The Most Disproportionate Result”: The Air War CHAPTER SEVEN: The Flooding of Memory CHAPTER EIGHT: A “Forgotten War” That Remade the Un- ited States and the Cold War CHAPTER NINE: Requiem: History in the Temper of Reconciliation Acknowledgments Notes Further Reading About the Author 11/655 Copyright CHRONOLOGY Mythical founding of the 2333 B.C. Korean nation by Tangun and his bear wife. Silla kingdom rules a A.D. Korea unified up to the 668–918 Taedong River flowing through Pyongyang. Koryo dynasty governs Korea from its capital at 918–1392 Kaesong and produces the world’s most exquisite ce- ladon pottery. 13/655 Mongols sweep through 1231 China and invade Korea. Establishment of the Cho- son dynasty by Gen. Yi 1392 Song-gye, who makes Seoul the capital. Invention of hangul, Korea’s unique alphabet, 1443 by scholars working for King Sejong. Japanese invasions under the warlord Hideyoshi devastate Korea, but are 1592–1598 turned back by Adm. Yi Sun-shin’s forces; Hidey- oshi dies. Japanese gunboats open Korea’s ports to foreign 1876 trade and impose the first unequal treaty. 14/655 United States and Korea 1882 sign a similarly unequal treaty. Tonghak peasant uprising 1894 defeated. Japan defeats China in 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War. 1894 Slavery abolished. Japan wins Russo-Japan- 1904–1905 ese War; Korea becomes a Japanese protectorate. Japan annexes Korea as 1910 its colony and abolishes the Choson dynasty. Independence movement against Japanese rule be- 1919 gins on March 1, and after many months of nation- wide protest is crushed. Japanese establish the 1932 puppet state of 15/655 Manchukuo on March 1, comprising three north- eastern provinces of China. Japan provokes Sino- 1937 Japanese War. Japan attacks the United 1941 States at Pearl Harbor. Korea liberated following 1945 the surrender of Japanese forces to the Allies. U.S. Army Military 1945–1948 Government in Korea. Republic of Korea and Democratic People’s Re- 1948 public of Korea established. 1950–1953 Korean War. General Park Chung Hee 1961 leads the first military coup. 16/655 General Chun Doo Hwan crushes the Kwangju re- 1980 bellion and leads the second military coup. Nationwide protests force the military dictatorship 1987 to hold presidential elections. Kim Young Sam elected president and ushers in a 1992 more democratic political era. Kim Il Sung dies and his 1994 son, Kim Jong Il, becomes top leader in the North. Kim Dae Jung becomes the first member of the 1997 opposition to win the presidency in the South. First summit between 2000 Korean heads of state held 17/655 in Pyongyang; Kim Dae Jung awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 2002 Roh Moo Hyun elected. 2007 Lee Myung Bak elected. GLOSSARY U.S. Army Military AMG Government Counter-Intelligence Corps CIC (American) Democratic People’s Re- DPRK public of Korea (North) G-2 U.S. Military Intelligence Joint Chiefs of Staff JCS (American) Korean Central Intelli- KCIA gence Agency 19/655 Korean Military Advisory KMAG Group (American) Korean National Police KNP (South) Korean People’s Army KPA (North) Korean Truth and Recon- KTRC ciliation Commission (South) Korean Workers’ Party KWP (North) NSC National Security Council Northwest Youth Corps NWY (South) OSS Office of Strategic Services People’s Liberation Army PLA (China) PRC People’s Republic of China RAF Royal Air Force (British) ROK Republic of Korea (South) 20/655 ROKA Republic of Korea Army Supreme Command, Allied SCAP Powers South Korean Workers’ SKWP Party United Nations Command UNC (1950–present) UNCOK UN Commission on Korea UN Commission on the UNCURK Unification and Recon- struction of Korea USAF U.S. Air Force U.S. Army Military USAMGIK Government in Korea (1945–48) INTRODUCTION This is a book about the Korean War, written for Americans and by an Amer- ican about a conflict that is fundament- ally Korean, but one construed in the United States to have been a discrete, encapsulated story beginning in June 1950 and ending in July 1953, in which Americans are the major actors. They intervene on the side of the good, they appear to win quickly only to lose sud- denly, finally they eke out a stalemated ending that was prelude to a forgetting. Forgotten, never known, abandoned: Americans sought to grab hold of this 22/655 war and win it, only to see victory slip from their hands and the war sink into oblivion. A primary reason is that they never knew their enemy—and they still don’t. So this is also a book seeking to uncover truths that most Americans do not know and perhaps don’t want to know, truths sometimes as shocking as they are unpalatable to American self- esteem. But today they have become commonplace knowledge in a democrat- ized and historically aware South Korea. The year 2010 marks the sixtieth an- niversary of the Korean War’s conven- tional start, but also the centennial of Japan’s colonization of Korea. This war had its distant gestation in that imperial history, and especially in northeast Ch- ina (or Manchuria as it was called) at the dawn of Japan’s aggression in 1931. Japan’s ambitions to colonize Korea co- incided with Japan’s rise as the first 23/655 modern great power in Asia. Seizing on a major peasant rebellion in Korea, Japan instigated war with China in 1894 and defeated it a year later. After anoth- er decade of imperial rivalry over Korea, Japan smashed tsarist Russia in light- ning naval and land attacks, stunning the world because a “yellow” country had defeated a “white” power. Korea be- came a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and a colony in 1910, with the blessing of all the great powers and especially the United States (President Theodore Roosevelt admired the skills and “virility” of Japan’s leaders, and thought they would lead Korea into modernity.) It was a strange colony, coming “late” in world time, after most of the world had been divided up and after progress- ive calls had emerged to dismantle the entire colonial system. Furthermore, Korea had most of the prerequisites for 24/655 nationhood long before most other countries: common ethnicity, language, and culture, and well-recognized nation- al boundaries since the tenth century. So the Japanese engaged in substitutions after 1910: exchanging a Japanese ruling elite for aristocratic Korean scholar-offi- cials, most of whom were either co-op- ted or dismissed; instituting a strong central state in place of the old govern- ment administration; exchanging Japanese modern education for the Confucian classics; eventually they even replaced the Korean language with Japanese. Koreans never thanked the Japanese for these substitutions, did not credit Japan with creations, and instead saw Japan as snatching away their an- cien régime, Korea’s sovereignty and in- dependence, its indigenous if incipient modernization, and above all its nation- al dignity. 25/655 Unlike some other colonized peoples, therefore, most Koreans never saw im- perial rule as anything but illegitimate and humiliating. Furthermore, the very closeness of the two nations—in geo- graphy, in common Chinese civilization- al influences, indeed in levels of devel- opment until the mid-nineteenth cen- tury—made Japanese dominance all the more galling to Koreans, and gave a pe- culiar intensity to the relationship, a hate/respect dynamic that suggested to Koreans, “there but for accidents of his- tory go we.” The result: neither Korea nor Japan has ever gotten over it. In North Korea countless films and TV dra- mas still focus on atrocities committed by the Japanese during their rule, pro- paganda banners exhort people to “live like the anti-Japanese guerrillas,” and for decades the descendants of Koreans deemed by the government to have 26/655 collaborated with the Japanese were subject to severe discrimination.