Korean War

Fatherland Liberation War
Date 25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953 (de-facto) 25 June 1950 – present (de-jure) Location Korean Peninsula, Sea of Japan, Yellow Sea Result Military stalemate, inactive conflict (post-1953)
Belligerents
DPRK PRC Major support: USSR	ROK USA UN
Strength
Peak strength: 266,600 1,450,000 26,000 Total: 1,742,000	Peak strength: 602,902 326,863 42,569 Total: 972,334

The Korean War, also known as the Fatherland Liberation War (Korean: 조국해방전쟁) in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), and the 6.25 War (Korean: 6·25 전쟁) in South Korea, was a highly devastating armed conflict which developed in Korea after the peninsula was divided between North and South at the end of the Second World War with the surrender of Japan, who had been occupying Korea since 1910. The war is conventionally considered to have occurred from 1950 to 1953, however, this time frame conforms to the bourgeois imperialist U.S. perspective of the conflict and is challenged by anti-imperialist narratives of the nature and timeline of the war. The main period of armed conflict ceased in 1953 with an armistice agreement, which the U.S. abrogated in 1958 by delivering nuclear weapons to South Korea. Although the armistice was signed in 1953, a peace agreement is still yet to be put in place, and the Korean peninsula remains divided.

The division of Korea into North and South was originally intended to be only temporary, with the United States and Soviet Union helping ease Korea's transition out of Japanese colonial rule. While the Soviet Union promptly withdrew its troops from the North in 1948, the imperialist United States took steps to ensure the entrenchment of the Southern regime, holding elections and declaring the formations of the Republic of Korea in 1948 despite widespread opposition among the Korean masses, which the U.S. and Southern forces, working jointly with far-right paramilitary gangs, repressed in mass arrests and killings, such as in the case of the Jeju Uprising. The North-South division of the Korean nation and the U.S. occupation of the South has persisted to the present day, South Korea being a "complete colony occupied by the U.S. military" in the words of the People's Democracy Party, a revolutionary workers' party in South Korea.

During the 1950-1953 conflict, the DPRK was supported by its sister socialist nations, the USSR and the People's Republic of China, and the Southern regime was backed by the United States and the U.S.-controlled United Nations Command (UNC). Although the United States led the UNC and provided the bulk of its troops and funding, the operation was referred to as "UN-led" and was called a "police action." The USSR was absent during the decisions to form this joint security operation, as it was boycotting the United Nations due to the non-admission of PRC.

Suppression of dissident narratives of the war

July 1950 U.S. Army file photograph once classified "top secret", South Korean soldiers walk among dead political prisoners, Taejon (Daejeon), South Korea.

In the work From Occupation to War: Cold War Legacies of US: Army Historical Studies of the Occupation and Korean War, Seoul National University professor Chung Yong Wook writes that "a divergent understanding" of this era "was repressed or rooted out by force in the US and around the ‘free world'" due to the official U.S. history of the war being written in the context of the emerging Cold War. Military historian Richard Robinson, who wrote a work critical of the U.S. role in Korea, Betrayal of a Nation, was unable to find a publisher for his work and it remained in manuscript form. I.F. Stone's work The Hidden History of the Korean War (1952) which was also critical of U.S. conduct in Korea was removed from many libraries. Professor Chung notes that "military historians were not, in essence, allowed to criticize information given to them, nor did they have leeway in interpreting and critiquing facts, they were left only to describe sanitized history" at all stages of the information-gathering and history-writing process.

July 1950 U.S. Army file photograph once classified "top secret," prisoners lie on the ground before their execution by South Korean troops in Taejon (Daejeon), South Korea. Photo by U.S. Army Maj. Abbott.

According to Richard Robinson, who had been working as a historian for the military during the occupation, the official American military history of the occupation is "highly prejudiced and inaccurate" adding that the official U.S. histories were "written upon explicit orders not even to imply criticism of anything American" and says that "if the truth were known, the American occupation of South Korea was incredibly bungled by an incompetent and corrupt administration—all in the name of American democracy." Robinson had his work suppressed as he expressed criticism of the U.S. military government's failures in Korea and eventually was compelled to leave the country.

Western civilian eyewitnesses of the Korean War, many of them leftists who published their eyewitness accounts as well as interviews and letters from captured soldiers behind North Korean lines, also had their work suppressed. In a research article entitled "Civil Liberties in the Korean War" appearing in the journal Modern Law Review, Ewing, et. al. write, "The atrocities committed by the US-led UN forces are beyond dispute [...] Almost as shameful as the atrocities in Korea were the extreme steps taken to silence and eventually to punish those who sought to expose them." According to their research, the British government threatened eyewitnesses reporting on what they had seen in Korea with allegations of treason, which would have carried a death sentence. The British government also refused to renew some of these witnesses' passports, such as that of Alan Winnington, author of the pamphlet "I Saw the Truth In Korea," whose passport the government did not restore for 14 years. Others subjected to silencing and intimidation tactics by the British government include women's movement activist Monica Felton, solicitor Jack Gaster, and journalist Michael Shapiro. Korean War eyewitness and Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett also had his passport revoked for several years due to his critical reporting, which included reporting on Korea.

Ewing, et. al. write in "Civil Liberties in the Korean War":

What the experience of Winnington, Felton and Gaster expose is the importance of the administrative power of the state to threaten, intimidate and punish. That power could hardly be greater than in the use of treason as a weapon [...] Despite intimidation of the most appalling kind, Winnington, Felton and Gaster have left a body of work that is now of great contemporary significance, and it is work to which we may be encouraged to return if we are fully to understand the modern crisis in Korea. Those who need to read this work most urgently, however, are the ministers and officials in the government departments that so aggressively abused legal authority, unsuccessfully to deny the British people information about the full scale of the atrocities alleged to have been committed in their name.

Alan Winnington's reports of mass executions of political prisoners, reported in the Daily Worker, were denounced as an "atrocity fabrication" by the U.S. Embassy in London, although the Daejeon Massacre, of which he made a report including photos of the mass graves, has since been proven true, with additional abundant photographic evidence now available. CIA and U.S. military intelligence documents were circulating before the Winnington report, but were classified as "secret" and have since been declassified. These reports told of the executions that Winnington had reported on.

A 2008 article in the Telegraph states that British journalist James Cameron wrote about mass prisoner shootings in the South Korean port city of Busan in the fall of 1950, but publisher Edward Hulton ordered the story removed at the last minute. The article further states that in 1953, after the war ended in stalemate, after the deaths of at least 2 million people, half or more of them civilians, "a US Army war crimes report attributed all summary executions here in Daejeon to the 'murderous barbarism' of North Koreans" and adds that "Such myths survived a half-century, in part because those who knew the truth were cowed into silence."

The Telegraph article also comments on the suppression of the narrative concerning the mass killings conducted by South Korean forces, sometimes under U.S. supervision at the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, as well as "cases in which the U.S. military is accused of the indiscriminate killing of South Korean civilians in 1950-51, usually in air attacks." Regarding the suppression of such realities, the article states "Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims' fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped 'secret' and filed away in Washington. Communist accounts were dismissed as lies." The article notes that it was not until South Korean truth commissions began investigations that the truth started to come out after the 1990s, sometimes prompted by chance discoveries of mass graves unearthed by natural disasters, stating that "corroboration comes from a trickle of declassified U.S. military documents" and refers to the hiding of this information as a "long-running cover-up."

In 1992, investigators from the 4.3 Research Institute study the long-hidden remains of massacre victims in Darangshi cave on Jeju island, where civilians including men, women, and children were suffocated to death 45 years prior, when government forces set fire to the narrow cave entrance.

An article in the Asia-Pacific Journal notes that "Even educated South Koreans remained ignorant of their country's past. As a young researcher in the late 1980s, Yonsei University's Park Myung-lim, today a leading Korean War historian, was deeply shaken as he sought out confidential accounts of those days from ordinary Koreans. "I cried," he said. "I felt, 'Oh, my goodness. Oh, Jesus. This was my country? It was true?'". As a doctoral student in the late 1980s, when South Korea's right-wing dictatorship was beginning to weaken somewhat, Park was among the few scholars to begin researching the mass killings. He was regularly harassed by the police. Previous attempts at exposing the killings, mainly by groups of aggrieved families of the victims, saw their leaders arrested and punished.

The facts of the Jeju massacre, which occurred from 1948-49, just prior to the Korean War, were also officially suppressed for decades, only coming to light in January 2000 when a Special Act was decreed by the South Korean Government calling for an official investigation of the incident. According to researcher Kim Hun Joon in The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea, "the massacres were systematically hidden from the general public, and calls for truth and justice were totally suppressed under consecutive anti-Communist military regimes until 1987."

Author Hyun Ki Young is noted in an article from The Jeju Weekly as being credited with writing the first public mention of the Jeju massacre in a 1978 short story. According to the article, Hyun "was unofficially arrested and tortured after the story’s publication," this being one example of the kind of violent suppression measures taken to silence mentions of the massacres in South Korean history. The article quotes Hyun and describes his experience with violent political repression:

“After the publication of his story he attended a protest with a friend of his. They were both arrested. “I was tortured for three days. I was tortured by the NIS [the Korean equivalent to the CIA],” said Hyun. There were two men, one holding Hyun from behind while the other beat him, threatening him to not write about the massacre again. In the booth of the restaurant Hyun, slight in stature, demonstrated how he was restrained and mimicked taking blows to his ribs. They made sure not to break his bones, he said. “If bones were broken there would be problems.” Evidence that this unofficial arrest and torture occurred. Technically Hyun had committed no crime. If they arrested him there would have to be a trial, one that would expose to the rest of Korea the truth of the Jeju Massacre.”

On the topic of general censorship during the Korean War era, author Jeffrey Kaye writes that "When it comes to documents from the period of the Korean War, most Americans are totally unaware that during the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, the U.S. government 'engaged in wholesale confiscation of publications mailed into this country' from Communist countries. This meant any materials emanating from North Korea, China, the Soviet Union or other allied countries (such as those in East Europe at that time) were intercepted and destroyed by U.S. postal officials." In his article, he cites a 1959 article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, "Foreign Communist Propaganda in the Mails: A Report on Some Problems of Federal Censorship" which deals with this policy in detail, stating that "thousands of publications containing 'foreign political propaganda' are intercepted on arrival in this country and destroyed. Precisely how much is destroyed and precisely what is destroyed (e.g., by title) remain somewhat a mystery because security policies censor much information on this censorship program." After listing a number of examples of the very broad application of this policy, which resulted in the seizure of many non-propaganda foreign materials as well as the loss of many "irreplaceable" materials that could have been used for academic study of international affairs, the authors state that "The total impact of this censorship on American, culture, science and research during this period can hardly be estimated in any quantitative way [...] It would seem unnecessary, here and now, to labor the point that what happened from 1951 to 1955 was unfortunate and undesirable as a matter of national policy--even if that policy is to be formulated in terms of the most narrow national self-interest."

Events

U.S. forces lower the Japanese flag in Seoul and replace it with the U.S. flag.

Background

The Soviets had agreed to an impromptu proposal from the American side that Korea should be divided along the 38th parallel for the purpose of acceptation of military surrender. The persistence of this divide in the Korean peninsula had been the result of a class conflict which broke out following the departure of the occupying Japanese colonial forces and differing occupation regimes. A revolutionary tide was sweeping the peninsula with People's Committees being formed and a united Korean People's Republic had been formed, constituting a heavy socialist presence much to the anguish of the then-temporary American Occupation forces.

According to Ahn Hak-sop, a former officer in the Korean People’s Army who was captured in 1952 and endured decades of torture as a political prisoner in the South until 1995:

At first, I thought the US Army was a liberation army. But soon General MacArthur referred to the US as an occupying army. There was no word of liberation, only occupation; so I was suspicious, but only partly so. Although I was young, the whole nation was full with division between the rule of the US and Soviets. In September of 1945, Koreans went out to greet the US Army, but the US Army shot at them. After the Moscow Committee, the US Army said explicitly that they were there to block the Soviet Union. But in 1948, the Soviet Union withdrew all of their troops. But the US Army didn’t withdraw. In almost every town, there was a People’s Committee for self-rule, but the US Army crushed the People’s Committees with tanks and soldiers. There was a lot of resistance and revolt at that time.

The Syngman Rhee regime in the South was marked by mass repressions against the revolutionary movements and political activity generally. He abolished the press and liquidated left-wing political opposition. Rhee claimed that South Korea's army would be able to take the northern capital of Pyongyang in three days. There was a lot of migration between the two occupation zones: political refugees went to the North, the dispossessed classes of landlords and merchants who supported the Japanese occupation fled to the South. Extreme right-wing anti-communist gangs, such as the Northwest Youth League, proliferated in the South and worked jointly with U.S. and Southern forces to repress South Korean dissidents and suspected communists.

Invasion

South Korea invaded the DPRK on June 25, 1950. Years later, Rhee stated that the purpose of the war was to destroy communism.

International involvement/reactions

United Nations

At the time the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council due to the dispute over the Chinese seat in the UN going to the representatives of the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan, effectively disenfranchising the Chinese. While American influence already dominated the UN vis-a-vis the Marshall Plan, taking advantage of Soviet absence the US hijacked the United Nations Security Council for its own designs upon Korea.

USSR

The Soviet Union provided MIG fighter planes to depend the DPRK, which were flown by Chinese, Soviet, and Korean pilots. They were limited in number to avoid too much direct conflict with the United States, which could have caused a larger war.

People's Republic of China

The Chinese People's Volunteers fought alongside the Korean People's Army. After the war, they helped the DPRK rebuild its infrastructure.

Non-Aligned Nations

The delegates of India and Egypt both initially voted in favour of the UN resolution declaring DPRK aggressor. Though the Egyptian delegate, Mahmoud Fawzi Bey, reverted to abstention. However, the Indian delegation went on to endorse even the second resolution which sanctioned the use of armed force against the DPRK, under American pressure. This achieved in deceiving the opinions of several Asian people that DPRK was indeed the aggressor here. These acts undertaken without sufficient inquiry are termed by historian Karunakar Gupta as "not consistent with its professed policy of its non-alignment." [1]

Impact and Legacy

Although DPRK survived and claimed victory against U.S. forces, the war had been very disastrous. 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,557 tons of napalm were used by the United States. More than 8,700 factories were destroyed and 90,000 hectares of farmland had been spoilt.[2] Even biowarfare was said to have been used against communist forces in the form of infected fleas. Massive civilian losses were incurred—approximately 4 million have been estimated. The strategic bombing operations against civilian populations is laid bare by the following words of General Curtis LeMay:

There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.