The Korean War: A History (18 page)

Around September 15, a Captain Chapman of a USAMGIK civil affairs team arrived in town, visited the factory, and said that from then on, every important decision at the factory should be discussed with him first; he took over the Onoda housing facilities for his team’s headquarters. A short while later Oh Pyong-ho went to Seoul to ask the AMG for financial support to keep the factory going. He got some funds from Yu Han-sang of the Commerce and Industry Bureau, and on October 1 the plant was operating fully again, staffed by Korean engineers and factory workers. The next month organizers from the left-liberal Chonpyong labor union set up a branch at Onoda. According to U Chin-hong, 70 percent of the workers were “leftist,” probably meaning that they wanted a union.

In December 1945 the Military Government issued Ordinance #33, prohibiting self-governing committees at all factories; it also announced that all former Japanese-owned public and private properties now would be vested in the occupation—about three thousand properties, including all the large factories. Politically connected people in Seoul then got about appointing factory managers; the one appointed to run Onoda was a close friend of Yu Han-sang. An absentee manager, he lasted about a year, as did the next one appointed from Seoul—another friend of someone, and another absentee.

The Military Government decided finally to eliminate leftist elements in the factory in 1947. It had outlawed Chonpyong more than a year earlier, but the union was still flourishing, as was the self-governing committee. Thirty so-called leftists and Red elements were arrested, including all the leaders of the factory committee. The engineer Oh Pyong-ho, still on the self-governing committee, was one of them. Over a period of years, U Chin-hong remembered, the politics of the workers slowly reversed; by the 1950s, 70 percent were so-called rightists. They also had no union.

When the conventional war opened in June 1950, most people from the self-governing committee rejoined the factory workforce. Some of the managers and engineers fled to the Pusan perimeter, but not all. From the fall of 1950 until April 1952, South and North Korean forces wrested the factory away from each other several times, southerners finally getting it and keeping it after North Korean forces, who had operated the factory for three straight months, departed for good. At length, Syngman Rhee’s friends sold the factory in 1957 to the fifth Seoul-appointed absentee owner, Kang Chik-son. This was four years after the United States allocated $632,000 in United Nations relief funds to the factory, although the factory had not been destroyed in the war—supplies were pilfered, and the main crane was demolished, but otherwise it was intact. By the 1960s, the man tarred as a leftist and “Red element,” Oh Pyong-ho, who had learned his profession at the knee of Kusugawa Shintaro, was chief cement engineer for all of South Korea. The so-called leftist U Chin-hong owned his own cement-related business in Samchok.

There are many points one might draw out of this story, so redolent is it of Korean history in the middle of the twentieth century, but one thing is clear: it may have been a cement factory, but this story is about a consequent politics—political choices that seem small on the day they are made (say, the day Captain Chapman arrived) but that loom very large later on. What if Captain Chapman had said, “Great job, Mr. Oh; keep up the good work—and by the way, I’m a union man myself”? In these transactions there is no such thing as neutrality, evenhandedness, a polite demurral of noninvolvement, the American as innocent bystander in his own occupation government. Whatever Captain Chapman and his political superiors in Seoul did or did not do, they made choices. And it is those choices, made throughout the peninsula by Americans, Russians, and Koreans on those warm September days so long ago, that ultimately led to the civil conflict that Americans know as “the forgotten war.”

On Cheju Island something happened in “peacetime” under the American occupation—namely a major peasant war—and after decades of repression Cheju people are finally coming forward to tell their stories and demand compensation, and no special pleading about the exigencies of wartime will suffice to assuage the American conscience. What the formerly classified American materials document is a merciless, wholesale assault on the people of this island. No one will ever know how many died in this onslaught, but the American data, long kept secret, ranged from 30,000 to 60,000 killed, with upward of 40,000 more people having fled to Japan (where many still live in Osaka). More recent research suggests a figure of 80,000 killed. There were at most 300,000 people living on Cheju Island in the late 1940s.
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The effective political leadership on Cheju until early 1948 was provided by strong left-wing people’s committees that first emerged in August 1945, and later continued under the American occupation (1945–48). The occupation preferred to ignore Cheju rather than do much about the committees; it appointed a formal mainland leadership but let the people of the island run their own affairs. The result was an entrenched left wing, one with no important ties to the North and few to the South Korean Workers’ Party (SKWP) on the mainland; the island was also well and peaceably governed in 1945–47, when contrasted with the mainland. In early 1948, as Syngman Rhee and his American supporters moved to institute his power in a separate Southern regime, however, the Cheju people responded with a strong guerrilla insurgency that soon tore the island apart.

Before Rhee came to power, silenced his officials, and blamed the whole rebellion on alien Communist agitators, Koreans in USAMGIK attributed the origins of the insurgency to the long tenure of the Cheju governing committees and subsequent police and right-wing youth-group terrorism. General Hodge told a
group of visiting American congressmen in October 1947 that Cheju was “a truly communal area that is peacefully controlled by the People’s Committee without much Comintern influence.” Shortly thereafter a Military Government investigation estimated that “approximately two-thirds of the populace” on the island were “moderate leftist” in their opinions. The chairman of a big leftist organization, a former Cheju governor named Pak, was “not a Communist and [was] very pro-American.” The people were deeply separatist and did not like mainlanders; their wish was to be left alone. This survey determined, however, that Cheju had been subjected to a campaign of official terrorism in recent months. According to Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) information, the current governor, Yu Hae-jin, was an “extreme rightist,” a mainlander with connections to right-wing youth groups; he was “ruthless and dictatorial in his dealing with opposing political parties.” He thought anyone who did not support Syngman Rhee was “automatically leftist”; for months in 1947 he had sought to prevent “any meeting by any party except those he definitely approves.”

An official investigation by the USAMGIK judge Yang Won-il conducted in June 1948 found that “the People’s Committee of Cheju Island, which was formed after the Liberation … has exercised its power as a
de facto
government.” He also found that “the police have failed to win the hearts of the people by treating them cruelly.” A Seoul prosecutor, Won Taek-yun, said the troubles began because of official incompetence, not “leftist agitation”; Lt. Col. Kim Ik-yol, commander of Constabulary (military) units on the island when the rebellion began, said that the blame for the uprising “should be laid entirely at the door of the police force.”

Governor Yu had filled national police units on the island with mainlanders and refugees from northern Korea, who worked together with “ultra rightist party terrorists.” Some 365 prisoners were in the Cheju city jail in late 1947; an American investigator witnessed thirty-five of them crowded into a ten-by-twelve-foot cell. “Direct control of food rationing” had also been placed in the
hands of “politicians” responsive to Yu, who operated out of township offices. Unauthorized grain collections had been five times as high as official ones in 1947. When Americans interviewed Governor Yu in February 1948 he acknowledged that he had utilized “extreme rightist power” to reorient the Cheju people, “the large majority” of whom were leftist, in his judgment. He justified this by saying that “there was no middle line” in island politics; one supported either the left or the right. He said the police controlled all political meetings, and would not allow the “extreme leftists” to meet. Although the author of the survey called for Governor Yu’s dismissal, Gen. William F. Dean decided in late March 1948 not to remove him.
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Perhaps the affair that most inflamed the island population was the unleashing of the right-wing terrorist group known as the Northwest Youth Corps (NWY) to control and reorient leftists. In late 1947 the CIC had “warned” the NWY about their “widespread campaign of terrorism” on Cheju. Under the American command, these same youths joined the police and Constabulary in the Cheju guerrilla suppression campaigns. As a special Korean press survey put it in June 1948,

The NWY was said to have “exercised police power more than the police itself and their cruel behavior has invited the deep resentment of the inhabitants.”
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In the formerly secret internal reports of the U.S. occupation this outfit was routinely described as a fascist youth group engaged
in terrorism throughout southern Korea. Its members primarily came from refugee families from the north, and the “youths” ran from teenaged to middle-aged thugs. To try to counter them the United States officially sponsored its own group, which modeled itself on Chiang Kai-shek’s “Blue Shirts” (black, brown, and green having already been spoken for). In putting down one strike or uprising after another in the late 1940s (and there were many), this and other youth groups worked hand in glove with the hated National Police.

The documented violence was so extreme, so gratuitous, as to suggest a peculiar pathology. As I was getting to know the furious and unremittingly vicious conflicts that have wracked divided Korea, I sat in the Hoover Institution library reading through a magazine issued by the Northwest Youth Corps in the late 1940s. On its cover were cartoons of Communists disemboweling pregnant women, running bayonets through little kids, burning down people’s homes, smashing open the brains of opponents. As it happened, this was
their
political practice. In Hagui village, for example, right-wing youths captured a pregnant twenty-one-year-old woman named Mun, whose husband was allegedly an insurgent, dragged her from her home, and stabbed her thirteen times with spears, causing her to abort. She was left to die with her baby half-delivered. Other women were serially raped, often in front of villagers, and then blown up with a grenade in the vagina.
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This pathology, perhaps, has something to do with the self-hatred of individuals who did Japanese bidding, now operating on behalf of another foreign power, and with extremes of misogyny in Korea’s patriarchal society.

After a March 1, 1948, demonstration against the separate elections on the mainland, the police arrested 2,500 young people; islanders soon fished the dead body of one of them out of a river: he had been tortured to death. This, Colonel Kim thought, was the incident that provoked the original rebellion on April 3 that subsequently marked the start of the insurgency.
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The April 3 uprising occurred mostly along the north coast of Cheju, with attacks on eleven police stations and various other incidents—roads and bridges destroyed, telephone wires cut. The demonstrators denounced the separate elections and called for unification with the North. Three rebels died, as did four police and twelve rightists. When news of the rebellion spread to the mainland, signal fires were lit in the hills near the port of Mokpo, and demonstrators came out to shout hurrah for “the Korean People’s Republic” (the one organized in Seoul in 1945, not the North Korean one).

Women and children refugees from the insurgency on Cheju Island, 1948.
U.S. National Archives

In May, as the election proceeded on the mainland, the rebellion spread to the west coast of the island, with some thirty-five police and rightists killed by May 15; the next day police began rounding up civilians, taking 169 prisoners in two villages thought to have assisted the guerrillas. No election could be conducted on the island. By the end of May the violence had left only the eastern coast untouched;
Constabulary units swept the mountains from east to west.
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