The Korean War: A History (29 page)

The restorative truths told by the survivors and living victims of the Korean conflict are fruits of the popular struggle for democracy in Korea; this surge of civil society is also a surge of suppressed information, and would never have been possible during the long decades of dictatorship. Suppressed memory is history’s way of preserving and sheltering a past that possesses immanent energy in the present; the minute conditions change, that suppressed history pours forth. Thus, in the past twenty years Koreans have produced hundreds of histories, memoirs, oral accounts, documentaries, and novels that trace back to the years immediately after liberation.

This Korean outpouring is also, however, akin to what writers such as Ambrose Bierce did for Americans in the aftermath of their civil conflict, penning poignant stories that captured the terrible truths of fratricidal war. Survivors such as Chon Chun-ja did something wonderful for Art Hunter, too: by coming forward and telling their stories, they made it possible for him to begin purging himself of a terrible guilt. The personal truths of the victims and survivors should become a restorative truth, a requiem for the “forgotten war” that might finally achieve the peaceful reconciliation that the two Koreas have been denied since Dean Rusk first etched a line at the 38th parallel in August 1945.

T
he Korean conflict was the occasion for transforming the United States into a very different country than it had ever been before: one with hundreds of permanent military bases abroad, a large standing army and a permanent national security state at home. Americans assume that the Vietnam War is far more important, and it is, in that it created within the massive baby boom generation decades-long anxieties and a neuralgic war of movement regarding such a host of issues (the limits of American power, the proper uses of force, the coincidence of the war with major social change in the 1960s) that most of them remained alive in recent presidential elections—George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John McCain, for example, are still at odds over what happened back then; Barack Obama was the first president to campaign on a post-’60s platform—and he won (a harbinger, finally, of a new era?). If the Vietnam War seared an entire generation, beyond that it had little effect on American foreign policy or intervention abroad (which was resurgent within a few years under Reagan), and had a minuscule impact on the domestic American economy (primarily the surge of inflation caused by Lyndon Johnson burying expenses for the war in other parts of the federal budget). Korea, however, had an enormous refractory effect back upon the United States. It didn’t brand a generation, and it may be forgotten or unknown to the general public, but it was the occasion for transforming the United States into a country that the founding fathers would barely recognize. Is this phenomenon well known? It has been to some scholars for a generation.
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Otherwise it isn’t.

The Korean War was fought for mutually unknown and incommensurable (if not incomprehensible) goals by the two most important
sides, North Korea and the United States. The North Koreans attacked the South because of fears that Japan’s industrial economy and its former position in Korea were being revived by recent changes in American policy, because native Koreans in the South who had long collaborated with Japanese colonizers were the Korean midwives of this strategy (and now would finally get what they deserved), and because the North’s position relative to the South would likely weaken over time. Kim Il Sung weighed the possibility that the United States might intervene in defense of the South, but probably downplayed its significance because he felt he had gotten joint backing for his invasion from both Stalin and Mao. What he could not have known was that his invasion solved a number of critical problems for the Truman administration, and did wonders in building the American Cold War position on a world scale.

Korea was a critical presence in American policy at the dawn of the Cold War. As we have seen, the Truman administration identified its stake in Korea in the same “fifteen weeks” in which the containment doctrine and the Marshall Plan were hammered out. Dean Acheson, then undersecretary of state, and George Marshall, the new secretary of state, reoriented American policy away from the Pentagon’s idea that the Korean peninsula had no strategic significance, toward seeing its value in the context of rebuilding the Japanese economy and applying the containment doctrine to South Korea—in George Kennan’s original, limited meaning of using economic and military aid and the resources of the United Nations to prop up nations threatened by communism. It was at this time, in early 1947, that Washington finally got control of Korea policy from the Pentagon and the occupation; the effect was essentially to ratify the de facto containment policies against the Korean left
wing that the occupation had been following since September 1945. George Marshall, as we saw, told Acheson in late January to draft a plan to connect a separate South Korea with Japan’s economy, and a few months later Secretary of the Army William Draper said that Japanese influence would again develop in Korea, “since Korea and Japan form a natural area for trade and commerce.”
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Around the same time Acheson remarked in secret Senate testimony that the United States had drawn the line in Korea, and sought funding for a major program to turn back communism there on the model of “Truman Doctrine” aid to Greece and Turkey.

Acheson was the prime mover in 1947 and again when the United States intervened to defend South Korea in June 1950. He understood containment to be primarily a political and economic problem, of positioning self-supporting, viable regimes around the Soviet periphery; he thought the truncated Korean economy could still serve Japan’s recovery, as part of what he called a “great crescent” from Tokyo to Alexandria, linking Japan with Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and ultimately the oil of the Persian Gulf. However, Congress and the Pentagon balked at a major commitment to Korea ($600 million was the State Department’s figure, compared to the $225 million for Greece and Turkey that Congress approved in June 1947), and so Acheson and his advisers took the problem to the United Nations, thus to reposition and contain Korea through collective security mechanisms. But the UN imprimatur also gave the United States an important stake in the continuing existence of South Korea. This, in turn, was the worst nightmare of the top leaders in North Korea, all of whom saw a revival of Korea’s links to the Japanese economy as a mortal threat.

So Kim Il Sung attacked in June 1950, hoping to unify Korea, and quickly dispatched the Southern army and government. That led the United States to intervene to reestablish the Republic of Korea, essentially under a containment doctrine commitment that was three years old by then. That goal was nearly accomplished in late September, three months into the war, but in the meantime
Truman and Acheson had decided to roll back the Northern regime as part of a general offensive against communism, exemplified by NSC 68 in April 1950. The defeat of American and allied forces in North Korea by Chinese and Korean peasant armies in the early winter of 1950 caused the worst crisis in U.S. foreign relations between 1945 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, led Truman to declare a national emergency, and essentially “demolished” the Truman administration (as Acheson put it)—Truman could have run again in 1952, but like Lyndon Johnson confronted by another impending defeat in 1968, he chose not to do so. China had no stomach for unifying Korea at great cost to itself, however, and so within a few months the fighting stabilized roughly along what is now the DMZ.

The Korean War was the crisis that, in Acheson’s subsequent words, “came along and saved us”; by that he meant that it enabled the final approval of NSC 68 and passage through Congress of a quadrupling of American defense spending. More than that, it was this war and not World War II that occasioned the enormous foreign military base structure and the domestic military-industrial complex to service it and which has come to define the sinews of American global power ever since. Less obviously, the failure of the Korean rollback created a centrist coalition behind containment that lasted down to the end of the Cold War. This consensus deeply shaped how the Vietnam War was fought (no invasion of the North), evolved into the stalemate in the 1980s between those who wanted to contain Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime and those who wanted to overthrow it, and governed the 1991 decision to throw Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait, but not to march on Baghdad. Tellingly, in the early 1950s it was public advocates of rollback or “liberation” such as Dulles and Richard Nixon who privately told the National Security Council that rollback was impossible against anything that the Communist side took seriously; general war might well be the result otherwise.

These two Korean wars—the victory for Kennan-style containment, and the defeat of Acheson’s rollback—reestablished the two
Korean states and created a tense but essentially stable deterrent situation on the peninsula that has lasted ever since; the DMZ, Panmunjom, two huge Korean armies, and other artifacts of this war (even the United Nations Command) are still standing today as museums of this distant conflict. Both Koreas became garrison states and the North remains perhaps the most amazing garrison state in the world, with more than a million people under arms and young men and women both serving long terms in the military. The South suffered through three decades of military dictatorship while building a strong economy, and after a political breakthrough in the 1990s is both a flourishing democracy and the tenth-largest industrial economy. There are many other effects that this hot war had on the two Koreas, but the impact of the war on the United States was determining as well.

The indelible meaning of the Korean War for Americans was the new and unprecedented American military-industrial complex that arose in the 1950s. Until that time Americans never supported a large standing army and the military was a negligible factor in American history and culture, apart from its performance in wars. The Constitution itself “was constructed in fear of a powerful military establishment,” C. Wright Mills wrote, the constituent states had their own independent militias, and only the navy seemed consonant with American conceptions of the uses of national military force. Americans loved victorious generals such as Washington, Jackson, Taylor, Grant, and Eisenhower, enough to make them presidents. But after each victory the military blended back into the woodwork of American life. After reaching 50,000 during the war with Mexico in the 1840s, the army dropped to about 10,000 soldiers, 90 percent of them arrayed against Indians in the trans-Mississippi West at seventy-nine posts and trailside forts. The
military ballooned into millions of citizen-soldiers during the civil war and the two world wars, but always the army withered within months and years of victory—to a 25,000-soldier constabulary in the late nineteenth century (at a time when France had half a million soldiers, Germany had 419,000, and Russia had 766,000), a neglected force of 135,000 between the world wars, and a rapid shrinkage immediately after 1945. A permanent gain followed each war, but until 1941 the American military remained modest in size compared to other great powers, poorly funded, not very influential, and indeed not really a respected profession. Military spending was less than 1 percent of GNP throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.
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The army was reorganized under the McKinley-Roosevelt secretary of war Elihu Root, raising its strength to 100,000, and in 1912 the War Department created a Colonial Army for the Philippines, Hawaii, and the Canal Zone that, although often understaffed, lasted until World War II and created a “cadre of semipermanent colonials” (in Brian Linn’s words) with much Pacific experience. Officers and soldiers quickly settled into the unhurried, idyllic life of the Pacific Army; U.S. forces in the Philippines were almost entirely unprepared for the Japanese attack that came a few hours after Pearl Harbor. Then came instantaneous national mobilization to more than eleven million people in uniform, but again after the war Truman shrank the military: the army had 554,000 soldiers by 1948, and the air force watched most of its contracts get canceled (aircraft industry sales dropped from $16 billion in 1944 to $1.2 billion in 1947). In 1945 the navy, favored under Roosevelt for four terms, had 3.4 million officers and men and nearly 1,000 ships of all kinds; fifteen months later it had 491,663 men and just over 300 ships, and its 1945 budget of $50 billion had slipped to $6 billion. The draft ended in that same year (but got reinstated after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia). Defense spending fell to $13 billion a year, or about $175 billion in current dollars.
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