The Korean War: A History (31 page)

At the same time, Acheson’s political economy—the “great crescent”—was a masterstroke. The Korean War decisively interrupted American plans to restitch American and Japanese economic relations with other parts of East Asia; indeed the repositioning of Japan as a major industrial producer in response to a raging antiimperial revolution on the Asian mainland is the key to explaining most of East and Southeast Asian history for three decades, until the Indochina War finally ended in 1975. This forced a number of temporary compromises to Acheson’s vision that lasted far longer than anyone expected, as East Asia remained divided for decades. But once Japanese economic influence flowed back into South Korea and Taiwan in the early 1960s, along with a generous showering of American aid, these two economies were the most rapidly growing ones in the world for the next twenty-five years. At the same time all three states were deeply penetrated by American power and interests, yielding profound lateral weakness. They were
both strong and weak, and not by accident, because the external shaping had its origins in the workings of an American-led world economy. But the Asian divisions began dramatically to erode after the Indochina War ended, as People’s China was slowly brought into the world economy. Now, with the growing integration of the economies of the region, Cold War impediments have nearly disappeared. In that sense, the East Asian region has returned to the “first principles” that Americans thought appropriate before the Chinese revolution and the Korean War demolished their plans.

N
othing amazes more than the mutability of human beings. Within one generation both the old
yangban
elite and the militarists who served Japan and then imposed an analogous dictatorship on their own people had lost their power. (Aristocratic families, of course, always have their own special type of affirmative action for their children, but their ties to the land and to the state were fundamentally severed.) Likewise, Japan changed, seemingly in the wink of an eye, from an anti-American militarist dictatorship to a friendly ally with a well-rooted democracy. Neither Japan in the 1930s nor South Korea in the 1970s or ’80s were totalitarian; if you kept quiet and didn’t cause problems for the leadership, you could go about your business. The decades-long struggle of young people and workers (many of them women) to democratize Korea and build a remarkably strong civil society has its relevance here only in the wonders that democracy does for history.

One major fruit of this struggle was the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, pursuing a comprehensive and penetrating inquiry into the truth, defined as it was in the South African experience, in the interests of healing and restoration, in the interests of peace and reconciliation. Healing not just the people but the nation—the restorative and therapeutic value of victims and perpetrators telling and knowing the truth. The revelations of the Nogun village massacre, for example, established all those meanings of truth for the courageous survivors who have pressed their case against all odds for years—like Chun Chun Ja, a twelve-year-old girl at the time who witnessed American soldiers “play[ing] with our lives like boys playing with flies.”
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For Americans, the forensic truths establish lies at all levels of their government, perpetrated
for half a century, but they also (in the commission’s words) “reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse.”

This ferment in Korea also prompted a fundamental revaluation of the Korean War, now widely seen as a civil war that had its origins in the 1930s if not earlier, but was made inevitable by the thoughtless decision, taken the day after the obliteration of Nagasaki, to etch a frontier along a line no one had ever noticed before in Korea’s continuous history: the 38th parallel. What American scholars learned from declassified American archives thirty years ago is now the subject of continual historical research in South Korea. Scholars have begun to come to grips with the whirlwind of Communist and anti-Communist violence, the colonial backgrounds of the leaders on both sides, and the civil war, and have poured out book after book on North Korea, studies that are generally far better—and much less biased—than the American literature on the North. The previously forbidden subject of South Korea’s left-wing people’s committees has also gotten attention since the mid-1980s with much new information coming available. Historians from the southwestern Cholla provinces, in which the left was strongest and which suffered the severest repression in the postwar period, have been particularly active. This work comes from a multitude of historians, and novelistic chroniclers of postwar history such as Choe Myong-hui. (Ms. Choe comes from Namwon, a hotbed of rebellion in 1945–50, and the headquarters of the U.S.-ROK guerrilla suppression command in 1949–50. When South Korean forces retook the area, they massacred so many people that the living honor the dead in mass ancestor worship, on the anniversary day of specific massacres.) This basic difference between the consensus on the Korean War among elite Americans and a new generation of Korean scholars and leaders is at the root of a growing estrangement between Seoul and Washington.

The Korean tide of suppressed memory and contemporary
reckoning with the past has established important truths for people who, after the dictatorships ended, have pressed their case against all odds for years. For scholars, the strong democracy and civil society that emerged from the bottom up in the South, in the teeth of astonishing repression and with very little support from agencies of government in the United States, validates a method of going back to the beginning and taking no received wisdom for granted. I remember how, as a young man working in the U.S. archives, I came across internal records of the suppression of peasant rebels in the fall of 1946, the breaking of strong labor unions in the cities, the American-directed suppression of the Cheju and Yosu rebellions and the many guerrillas that operated from Mount Chiri in the southwest in the period 1948–55 (finally extinguished in the joint U.S.-ROK counterinsurgent program known as Operation Rat-Killer), and wondered how all this could have disappeared without
an apparent trace. Then one day I read Kim Chi Ha’s poem “Chirisan” (Mount Chiri),
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and came to believe that I did not know the half of it:

South Korean guerrillas in front of the Chonju police headquarters. They were captured by a joint Korean-American suppression force during Operation Rat-Killer.
U.S. National Archives

American historians have consistently revised their views on the Korean War: called a “police action” in the 1950s, it became the “limited war” in the 1960s, a civil war or “forgotten war” or “unknown war” in the 1970s and ’80s, and in the 1990s new archives in Moscow were used to argue that it was exactly the war Truman said it was at the time: Kremlin aggression, which he rightly resisted. For the majority of Americans the war is forgotten and buried. But what is the epitaph on the American tombstone? It is not singular; the tombstone has two messages: for the Truman Cold War liberal, Korea was a success, the “limited war.” For the MacArthur conservative, Korea was a failure: the first defeat in American history, more properly a stalemate, in any case it proved that there was “no substitute for victory.” The problem for MacArthur’s epitaph is that if MacArthur saw no substitute for victory, he likewise saw no limit on victory: each victory begged another war. The problem for the Truman liberal is that the limited war got rather unlimited in late 1950.

So we need another verdict: a split decision—the first Korean War, the war for the south in the summer of 1950, was a success. The second war, the war for the north, was a failure. Secretary of State Dean Acheson produced this schizophrenic epitaph: the decision to defend South Korea was the finest hour of the Truman presidency; the decision to march to the Yalu occasioned “an incalculable defeat to U.S. foreign policy and destroyed the Truman administration”; this was “the worst defeat … since Bull Run.” However, Acheson assumed that the latter happened not to him but to his bête noire: he squares the circle by blaming it all on MacArthur, and liberal historiography has squared the circle in the same way. The Korean War happened during the height of the McCarthy period, and it was the handiwork of Dean Acheson and Harry Truman; McCarthy attacked both, and so the experience of the war disappeared in the shaping of the Cold War consensus: Truman and Acheson were the good guys. Cold War debate was almost always between the middle and the right, the consensus anchored by the McCarthys on one end and the Achesons or Hubert Humphreys on the other. Furthermore, the Korean War is no icon for the conservative or the liberal, it merely symbolized an absence, mostly a forgetting, but also a never-knowing. The American split verdict on the Korean War, coming closely on the heels of a failed war to liberate the North, was an agreement to disagree, a stitched-together mending of a torn national psyche—you remember one verdict, and forget or condemn the other; each verdict implies a corresponding amnesia. The result is a kind of hegemony of forgetting, in which almost everything to do with the war is buried history in the United States.

As the Korean War ground on it became deeply unpopular and vastly demoralizing for the American home front. Not only were American boys defeated in 1950–51 and stalemated for the next two years by rough peasant armies, but the cream of World War II generals could do nothing about it. Heroes all, their names alone conjure their glory: Almond, Clark, Dean, LeMay, MacArthur,
Ridgway, Stratemeyer, Van Fleet, Walker. Take just three lesser-known officers: Brig. Gen. Edward Craig, assistant division commander of the 1st Marine Division in Korea, had commanded the 9th Marine Regiment in the battles of Bougainville and Guam, for which he received the Bronze Star and Navy Cross for gallantry. Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gray had fought in both world wars and also chased Pancho Villa along the Mexican border; commander of the 1st Cavalry Division in Korea, he had been Patton’s chief of staff. Meanwhile, the leader of the 5th Marine Regiment in Korea, Lt. Col. Raymond Murray, battled through Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Saipan, winning the Navy Cross and two Silver Stars.
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One could hardly ask for a more experienced officer class—and yet the war was never won.

The Korean War is also marked by physical sites of forgetting and burial in the United States. The American versions are mundane—a stretch of interstate highway dedicated to war veterans—and appalling: the Republic of Korea listed next to Luxembourg among UN participants in Washington’s Korean War Memorial, and nowhere else. Still, this memorial is a tasteful, enigmatic display that represents on the faces of the stone soldiers the mysteries and unresolved tensions of the Korean War. In a recent article about old and new monuments on the National Mall, it failed to appear—even on the map showing all the others.
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Maya Lin’s Vietnam masterpiece is what we still need for Korea. Her artful rendering, Vincent Scully wrote, “is hopeful, personal … but profoundly communal, too. We, the living, commune with the dead, are with them, love them. They have their country still. That is why this monument so broke the hearts of veterans of this war—who felt that their country had cast them out forever.” Here is “America’s greatest such monument,” Scully said. Why? Because it expresses “the single, incontrovertible truth of war: that it kills a lot of people.”

Meanwhile another Korean War memorial opened in Seoul in 1994. It was planned and developed during the Roh Tae Woo administration
(Paek Son-yop was a key planner), and is a symbol in stone of the conservative ROK perspective, at least after the passing of four decades, that the North can now be “forgiven” for its invasion, and join the embrace of the successful and wealthier South: in a featured statue, a much larger ROK soldier comforts a small and weak DPRK brother.
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The North Korean perspective on this war, of course, was virtually absent in American commentary at the time and has been ever since. Indeed, in our media North Korea has no perspective and no interests worthy of respect; it just functions as a universal and all-purpose menace. It goes without saying that its leaders haven’t begun to face up to the crimes North Koreans committed in the war; as in the South, it will require an entirely different leadership to make it happen. But someday the Hermit Kingdom will open and so will its archives, and finally a full and many-sided account of the Korean War will be possible.