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Abstract
The US occupation of Korea from 1945 to 1948 was not notable for its success. The volatile interaction between the occupiers and the occupied provided an important context for its relatively rapid conclusion and for Washington's ineffective employment of deterrence in the lead-up to the June 1950 North Korean attack on South Korea. This essay describes the volatile interaction between Americans and Koreans on the peninsula and the circumstantial, psychological, and cultural factors behind it. The essay concludes by analyzing the psychological impact of the Korean War on the relationship and how this and later cultural changes have made possible an enduring alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea.
Notes
1For a persuasive, largely optimistic analysis of the future of the alliance, see Scott Snyder, China's Rise and the Two Koreas (London: Lynne Rienner 2009).
2US Department of State, F[oreign] R[elations of the] U[nited] S[tates], 1948 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office 1971), 6: 1326.
3For the Joint Chiefs' analysis, see FRUS, 1947, 6: 417–18. For the lack of congressional support for a large-scale aid program for Korea, see William Stueck, The Wedemeyer Mission: American Politics and Foreign Policy during the Cold War (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press 1984), 25–6.
4For an analysis of US policy toward Korea from 1947 through June 1949, see William Stueck, The Road to Confrontation: American Policy toward China and Korea, 1947–1950 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press 1981), 75–110, 153–9. For coverage of evolving conditions in South Korea, see Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2, The Roaring of the Cataract 1947–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1990), 185–290, and Allan R. Millett, The War for Korea, 1945–1950: A House Burning (Lawrence: UP of Kansas 2005), 159–85.
5‘H[istory of] US A[rmy] F[orces[ i[n] K[orea]’[henceforth ‘HUSAFIK’] Part I, Ch. 6, 69. This unpublished manuscript written by American servicemen attached to the historical office of the US Command in Korea is available in the US Army Center for Military History, Ft McNair, Washington DC and the Historical Office of the US military base at Yongsan, Seoul, Republic of Korea. The organization is erratic, as ‘Part’ is used both for separate volumes and for sections of chapters. To avoid confusion, we identify the largest organizational category as ‘Volume’ and a separately labeled section of a chapter as ‘Part’.
6Millett, War for Korea, 43.
7Key secondary sources include ibid., 43–52, and Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1, Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes 1945–1947 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1981), 68–100.
8Carter Eckert, Ki-baik Lee, Young Ick Lew, Michael Robinson, and Edward W. Wagner, Korea Old and New: A History (Seoul: Ilchokak 1990), 199–236.
9Cumings, Origins, 1: 68–100.
10‘HUSAFIK’, Vol. 1, Ch. 1, 51–2, 57–8, 83–4.
11Ibid., 67.
12Hodge's directive of 4 Sept. 1945, as quoted in Han-mu Kang, ‘The United States Military Government in Korea, 1945–1948: An Analysis and Evaluation of its Policy’ (PhD diss., Univ. of Cincinnati 1970), 34–5.
13‘HUSAFIK’, Vol. 1, Ch. 1, 68–71.
14 Department of State Bulletin 9 (4 Dec. 1943), 393.
15N[ational] A[rchives, College Park, MD], [State Department Records] RG 59, Records of Harley A. Notter, 1939–45, box 63, ‘Korea: Economic Developments and Prospects’, April 1943.
16See, for example, report by Roy P. McNair, Jr, 17 Dec. 1942, assistant military attaché to China, in Records of the Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of Korea, 1940–44 (microfilm edition), Reel 2.
17James I. Matray, The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941–1950 (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press 1985), 20–1.
18For a recent account of American maneuvering on Korea during the war, see Seung-Young Kim, American Diplomacy and Strategy toward Korea and Northeast Asia, 1882–1950 and After: Perception of Polarity and US Commitment to a Periphery (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009), 73–131.
19On the use of Korean manpower by the Japanese during World War II, Richard Frank provided us with key information. For the revealing experience on this matter of a young US Marine officer during the Saipan campaign of 1944, see Gregory Henderson, Korea: The Politics of the Vortex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1968), 416n29.
20Richard E. Lauterbach, Danger from the East (New York: Harper & Row 1947), 201; FRUS, 1945, 6: 1135.
21For Korean perspectives, see Sonny Che, Forever Alien: A Korean Memoir, 1930–1951 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland 2000), 143–6 and Maeil Sinbo, 9 Sept. 1945. For a recent account of the early behavior of Soviet troops in the north, see Ronald H. Spector, In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (New York: Random House 2007), 143–6.
22‘HUSAFIK’, Vol. 1, Ch. 4, 6; New York Times, 9 Sept. 1945. See also the recollections of an American officer in ‘My Most Memorable Day: Korea, Sept. 8, 1945’, Monadnock Ledger, 24 May 2001.
23Lawrence E. Gelfand to Yi Boram, 22 Sept. 2005. Gelfand was a member of the unit. See also the description of Col. Brainard E. Prescott, who arrived at Inchon on 6 Sept. 1945 and soon became the Civil Administrator of the occupation, in Department of State Bulletin 24 (27 Jan. 1946), 106.
24Harold R. Isaacs, No Peace for Asia (New York: Macmillan 1947), 81–3; see also ‘HUSAFIK’, Vol. 1, Ch. 6, 10, 15–16, 51–2.
25NA, [Records of GHQ Far East Command, Supreme Commander Allied Powers and United Nations], RG 554, Entry A1 1378, box 21, ‘Notes on Corps Staff Conference’, 13 Sept. 1945.
26Ibid.; ‘Notes of Staff Conference’, 15 Sept. 1945.
27 FRUS, 1945, 6: 1050–1.
28 New York Times, 10 Sept. 1945.
29‘HUSAFIK’, Vol. 1, Ch. 4, 17; FRUS, 1945, 6: 1049.
30Cumings, Origins, 1: 138–9.
31 FRUS, 1945, 6: 1045.
32For example, see ‘HUSAFIK’, Vol. 3, Ch. 2, 16.
33Richard D. Robinson, ‘Betrayal of a Nation’, 57. This unpublished manuscript was written by a member of the US occupation in the fall of 1947, immediately after he left Korea. It is available at the Harvard-Yenching Library, Cambridge, MA.
34Ibid., 55–6; ‘HUSAFIK’, Vol. 1, Ch. 8, 55–8.
35Cumings, Origins, 1: 188–93.
36 FRUS, 1945, 6: 1131.
37Ibid., 1148.
38As quoted in ‘HUSAFIK’, Vol. 1, Ch. 1, 143–4.
39On the encouragement of political groups and its impact, see Henderson, Korea, 113–36; on efforts to create a free rice market, see Cumings, Origins, 1: 202–206
40E. Grant Meade, American Military Government in Korea (New York: King's Crown Press 1951), 60–1.
41Ibid., 48–51.
42Macdonald Oral History, ‘Frontline Diplomacy’, <http://memory.loc.gov/ammen/collections/diplomacy/>.
43See, for example, Chon Suk-hi, ‘Memory of August 15, 1945: Oral History of Forty Koreans’ (Seoul: Hangilsa 2005), 109–10.
44Meade, American Military Government, 8.
45Young Ick Lew, Byong-kie Song, Ho-min Yang, and Hy-sop Lim, Korean Perceptions of the United States: A History of Their Origins and Formation, trans. Michael Finch (Seoul: Jimoondang 2006), 1–306.
46RG 554, Entry A1 1370, box 50, ‘Message from the Commanding General, US Armed Forces in Korea’, attached to Col. Charles Ennis, Adjutant General, ‘Distribution A’, 17 Jan. 1947.
47In the 6th Division, for example, many officers and enlisted men who, theoretically, had accumulated enough points to be released immediately after Japan's surrender, were required to go to Korea in late September. See ‘HUSAFIK’, Vol. 1, Ch. 6, 35.
48RG 554, Entry A1 1370, Box 1, Brig. Gen. Donald J. Myers to Col. Edwin A. Henn, 12 Dec. 1945.
49The cases are Howard L. Waldron, 5 Nov. 1945, Box 241; Jerry L. Whitecotton, 13 Nov. 1945, Box 241; William J. Smith, 12 Jan. 1946, Box 238; Paul Jones, 24 Jan. 1946, Box 230; all in RG 554, General Courts-Martial.
50RG 554, Entry A1 1370, Box 1, Hodge to Maj. Gen. Gilbert R. Cheeves, 8 Dec. 1945.
51Russell E. McLogan, Boy Soldier: Coming of Age During World War II (Reading, MI: Terrus Press 1998), 21–2.
52Isaacs, No Peace in Asia, 7–8. In a survey of early 1944 in Great Britain, American soldiers often expressed shock at the ‘backwardness’ of the English and their ‘lower standard of living’, responses that provide insight into how their compatriots in the Pacific theater felt in experiencing the far more primitive conditions there. See NA, [Office of Secretary Defense Records] RG 330, Headquarters, European Theater of Operations, US Army, Research Branch, SSD, Box 1015, ‘What American Enlisted Men in England Think of the English’, 21 March 1944.
53Isaacs, No Peace in Asia, 8–9.
54For a description of Korean attire, see National Geographic Magazine 88 (Oct. 1945), 436. For examples of American soldiers' reaction to the smell of Korea, see McLogan, Coming of Age, 306; W. L. Dixon, ‘Recollections of Korea’, Baltimore and Ohio Magazine Aug. 1950, 8–9; and Richard A. Ericson, Jr., Oral History, ‘Frontline Diplomacy’, <http://memory.loc.gov/ammen/collections/diplomacy/>.
55‘HUSAFIK’, Vol. 1, Ch. 8, 64.
56As quoted in ‘HUSAFIK’, Vol. 1, Ch. 8, 66. Chon Sang-in, ‘haepang kong’ ganui sahoesa’[Political geography and social history of Korea, 1945–1950], in Park Chi-hyang et al. (eds.), haepangchonhusaui/chaeinsik (chaeinsik)[The New Interpretation of Korean History between Liberation and the Korean War], (Seoul: Ch'aeksesang 2006), Vol. II, 159.
57Lawrence Gelfand to William Stueck, 27 Feb. 2009. Rapes by Western standards did occur and, when reported, sparked considerable outrage among Koreans. In Jan. 1946, for example, four armed GIs raped three Korean female passengers in a railroad compartment while threatening the lives of other passengers. All the perpetrators were captured, tried by court martial, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. For expressions of outrage over the incident in the Korean press, see Choson Ilbo, 10 and 12 Jan. 1946. For the conviction and sentencing, see New York Times, 6 March 1947.
58Japanese census reports on Korea from 1940 and 1944 both indicated a slightly larger male population than female. See George M. McCune, Korea Today (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1950), 328. On the interaction of American GIs with German women after the war in the context of a shortage of German men, see Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 2003). On American GIs and Japanese women, see John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton 1999), 121–67; on Japanese war casualties, see John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books 1986), 296–9.
59In addition to the documents cited in footnotes 44 and 46 above, see RG 554, Entry A1 1370, Box 1, Maj. Gen. C. E. Hudris to Hodge, 14 Dec. 1945.
60On the shortage of experienced officers, see RG 554, Entry A1 1370, Box 1, Brig. Gen. Donald J. Myers to Col. Edwin A. Henn, 12 Dec. 1945, and Maj. Gen. C.E. Hudris to Hodge, 14 Dec. 1945.
61Ibid., Hodge to USAFIK, 3 March 1946, and Hodge to major commanders, 3 March 1946.
62See ibid., Box 24, Circular ‘Courtesy Drive’, 6 Nov. 1946.
63Mark Gayn, Japan Diary (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle 1981), 349, 354.
64 Chicago Tribune, 16 Dec. 1946.
65RG 554, Entry A1 1378, Box 50, ‘Message from the Commanding General, US Armed Forces in Korea’, attached to Col. Charles Ennis, Adjutant General, ‘Distribution A’, 17 Jan. 1947.
66Lauterbach, Danger from the East, 225.
67Gayn, Japan Diary, 409–10.
68NA, [War Department Records] RG 165, box 249, ‘Letter from a civilian contractor to her family’, 25 Dec. 1946.
69RG 59, 740.00119 CONTROL (KOREA)/1-2047, Box 3825, Memorandum of Conversation on Korea between Dr Robert T. Oliver and John Z. Williams, 20 Jan. 1947.
70RG 554, Entry A11378, Box 83, Col. Charles Ennis, ‘Complaints to Members of Congress’, 12 Feb. 1947.
71RG 554, Entry A1 1370, Box 2, Eisenhower to MacArthur, 21 March 1947.
72The report is quoted extensively in Col. Charles H. Donnelly, ‘Autobiography’, 869–71, unpublished manuscript, US Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, PA, Donnelly Papers.
73RG 554, Entry A1 1370, Box 2, Attachment to Hodge to Maj. Gen. Floyd L. Parks, 8 June 1947.
74Fred Ottoboni, Korea Between the Wars: A Soldier's Story (Sparks, NV: Vincente Books 1997), 128–33. The only point on which Ottoboni's account disagrees with that of the ‘Sissies’ is medical care, which Ottoboni considered adequate and timely.
75RG 554, Entry A1 1370, Box 2, ‘Communistic Letter from “Moms” of America’, [undated].
76In the aftermath of the Japanese surrender, local draft boards often failed to meet their quotas, thus placing pressure on army recruiters to entice young men to enlist. See unpublished manuscript in the Office of the Chief of Military History, Ft McNair, Washington DC, OCMH-66, ‘The All-Volunteer Army of 1947–1948’.
77Stueck interview with Carl Vipperman, 29 July 2008. Vipperman subsequently used his GI benefits to pursue a higher education, including a PhD in history. Eventually he became a professor of history at the University of Georgia.
78Ottoboni, Korea Between the Wars, 78–9, 85, 129–30, 140, 146–7.
79On the poor general quality of officers in Korea and/or the inclination of the Tokyo command to keep the best in Japan, see RG 554, Entry A1 1370, Box 2, Paul S. Anderson to Hodge, 27 June 1947; Box 1, Hodge to Maj. Gen. Cheeves, 8 Dec. 1945; Box 1, Brig. Gen. Donald J. Myers to Col. Edwin A. Henn, 12 Dec. 1945; Box 2, Hodge to major commanders, 3 Jan. 1948. See also Lauterbach, Danger from the East, 223–4; Meade, American Military Government in Korea, 87–9; William C. Sherman Oral History, 27 Oct. 1993, 3, ‘Frontline Diplomacy’, <http://memory.loc.gov/ammen/collections/diplomacy/>; and Robert Smith, MacArthur in Korea: The Naked Emperor (New York: Simon & Schuster 1982), 18.
80The quoted phrase was allegedly uttered publicly by Hodge as a widespread perception in Japan in Nov. 1947. See Harry G. Summers, ‘The Korean War: A Fresh Perspective’, Military Affairs, April 1996, 2.
81RG554, A1 1370, Box 2, Hodge to Cecil Brown, 10 June 1947.
82Much of the effort by Hodge and his command is documented in correspondence in ibid., Boxes 1–3. Hodge also wrote ‘With the US Army in Korea’, which appeared in the June 1947 issue of the popular magazine National Geographic, 829–40.
83Gen. William O. Reeder, an army supply officer in Washington during this time told Stueck in an interview on 21 Oct. 1974 that the chief reason for the withdrawal of troops from Korea was the constant complaints of American soldiers and their loved ones to the Pentagon and Congress.
84 Department of State Bulletin, 19 Jan. 1947, 128.
85 FRUS, 1949, 7: 1011–12.
86See documents in ibid., 1013–21; also Ambassador Muccio's oral history at the Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. Muccio gave a similar account in his interview with author Stueck on 27 Dec. 1973 in Washington DC.
87Lew et al., Korean Perceptions of the United States, 315–18.
88Stueck interview with Muccio, 27 Dec. 1973, Washington DC.
89Stueck, Road to Confrontation, 185–90.
90For an elaboration on this point, see William Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2002), 192–206.
91John Kie-chiang Oh, ‘The Forgotten Soldiers of the Korean War’, in Mark F. Wilkinson (ed.), The Korean War at Fifty: International Perspectives (Lexington: Virginia Military Institute 2004), 101–15. Jack Cox, who graduated from West Point in 1949 and served in the Korean War as an army lieutenant from Oct. 1950 to Feb. 1952, recalled recently that he heard all kinds of negative stories about Koreans before he went to the peninsula, including that they would constantly steal from Americans and would never truly be friends with foreigners. He took about three months to develop a positive attitude toward Koreans. The realization that South Koreans really cared about their country, were willing to fight and die for it, and were more often than not willing to police each other to contain pilfering from their foreign benefactors produced the change. Stueck interview with Cox, 26 Nov. 2007, Fayetteville, NC.
92In stark contrast to the situation prior to the war, ‘by 1953’, historian Steven Casey concludes, ‘South Korea could count on an enormous amount of sympathy inside the United States’. See Steven Casey, Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion 1950–1953 (New York: OUP 2008), 352–3. On Korean War rearmament in the United States, see William Stueck, ‘Reassessing US Strategy in the Aftermath of the Korean War’, Orbis 53 (Fall 2009).
93See, for example, Yoichi Funabashi, The Peninsula Question: A Chronicle of the Second Korean Nuclear Crisis (Washington DC: Brookings 2007), 218; Mike Chinoy, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (New York: St Martin's Press 2008), 100, 154–5, 160, 190, 202; Chae-jin Lee, A Troubled Peace: US Policy and the Two Koreas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 2006), 193, 226–7, 247.
