The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  IN JUNE 1950, then, there was no small degree of irony in the fact that Americans were now ready to fight and die for Korea. The United States valued Korea, not for its own sake, but because of U.S. fears of what would happen to a neighboring country—Korea’s longtime oppressor, Japan—if America did not intervene and answer a Communist challenge. In the whimsical, mischievous way that history moves along, Japan was becoming a new ally, just as China had been a seemingly valiant ally but now was in the process of becoming an enemy.

  But the prolonged period of Japanese colonialism had exacted a heavy price from the Koreans. It had destroyed any possibility of normal political evolution and modernization there—not just the sheer cruelty and oppression of the Japanese presence, but the fact that so many talented politicians had been arrested or murdered; while others, like Rhee and his future opponent Kim Il Sung, were driven into exile. Some in the South were contaminated as collaborationists by their connections to the Japanese. During World War II, as Robert Myers has pointed out, the people of the occupied nations of Europe always had the hope that help was coming, that the allies, who were mighty, were gathering and would end German domination on the continent. Koreans held on to no such hopes. Ten years, twenty years, twenty-five years passed, and there was no gathering force of nations determined to rescue the poor, subjugated Korean people and remove the Japanese from their land.

  Only in December 1941, when Japan overreached and attacked American, British, and Dutch possessions in South and Southeast Asia, were there the first stirrings of hope, and those were slight, given that most of the early victories in the Pacific War belonged to the Japanese, and when the tide began to turn, little news of it filtered down to the Korean people. The Western allies were coming, if not for the Koreans, then for their own reasons, and in time their success would spell Japan’s doom. But by 1945, the cynicism produced by the occupation had done its work: many people in the upper and middle classes had in differing degrees made their accommodations with the colonizers, accepting Japanese rule and becoming powerless, badly compromised parts of the Japanese power structure. Some Koreans had even begun to admire the Japanese, however cynically, for they were, whatever else, the first Asians to defeat the white rulers of much of the rest of Asia.

  In 1945, Korea was virtually a country without political institutions, and without indigenous leadership. In the North, when the Red Army swept in, institutions were imposed instantly from the top down by the Russians, as was a new leader, Kim Il Sung. In the South, Rhee, who had spent most of his life in exile, would be the American horse, like it or not. He was then seventy years old, intense, egocentric, volatile, fiercely nationalistic, patriotic, virulently anti-Communist, and no less authoritarian; he was very much a democrat, so long as he had complete control of all the country’s democratic institutions and no one else was allowed to challenge his will. He was what the Japanese and the Americans had made him: a lifetime of betrayal, prison sentences, political exile, and broken promises had changed and hardened him. He was one example of what his country’s harsh modern history had done to an ambitious young political figure, as Kim Il Sung in a very different way was another example of the same tragic result.

  Rhee had been a political prisoner as a young man and had barely missed being executed; he would eventually get a Harvard degree, and the Princeton PhD, but his lifetime was filled with hardships and disappointments that in many ways resembled the hardships and disappointments of his country. His essentially powerless status as an exile paralleled his country’s powerless status as an orphaned nation in the eyes of the great powers. After gaining his doctorate, he had returned briefly to Korea, before spending the next thirty-five years in the United States. He became a professional supplicant, not the most healthy of conditions; he had lobbied constantly for a Korea free of colonial bondage with himself at its head. If he was the most passionate kind of nationalist, he was an equally relentless self-promoter: when he finally took power, his success tended to confirm his monomania.

  When the war in the Pacific ended in 1945, Rhee had one great ace to play, and he had, by then, waited over three decades to play it—the support of the United States. Since the few Americans who were going to deal with postwar Korea had given almost no thought to the question of its postwar status, Rhee, with his longtime residency in the United States and his long years of lobbying, turned out to be the only Korean candidate with an American constituency. In addition, he had nurtured a long-standing connection to the Chinese Nationalists, who were exceptionally well connected in Washington. In Korea, as in China, the same people seemed to be searching for a leader who was both nationalist and a Christian; their nationalism had to meet Western religious and political standards.

  Chiang Kai-shek’s backing was the equivalent of a passport to influence in Washington. In fact, Rhee became known, for better or worse, both to admirers of Chiang and those who despised him, as Little Chiang. Unlike Chiang, he was a very serious Christian. Rhee had after all become a Christian in a land that was not Christian, and he had suffered for his faith on many occasions. To some of the Americans who backed him in those early years, his religious beliefs (and those of Chiang) were of great comfort—though Asian, these were men who were very much like them. When, in the years just before the Korean War, an American diplomat had made a critical comment about Chiang and Rhee to the influential John Foster Dulles, later to be Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, he had answered revealingly, “Well I’ll tell you this. No matter what you say about them, these two gentlemen are modern day equivalents of the founders of the church. They are Christian gentlemen who have suffered for their faith.”

  It was Chiang, among others, who had recommended Rhee to Douglas MacArthur, and when Rhee finally returned to Korea to take up the country’s presidency, he arrived in MacArthur’s plane, in itself a defining political statement. The Americans, it seemed, had their man—or perhaps more accurately their man had them. Roger Makins, a senior British diplomat friendly to the United States, believed that the Americans in that period, reflecting an isolationist nation being pulled ever so reluctantly into a new role as a world power, always showed a propensity to go for an individual—someone they felt comfortable with. Choosing Rhee, Makins believed, reflected the fact that “Americans have always liked the idea of dealing with a foreign leader who can be identified and perceived as ‘their man.’ They are much less comfortable with movements.” Those most comfortable with Rhee did not, however, include the Americans in Korea who actually had to deal with him on a daily basis, many of whom came to loathe him. General John Hodge, the unusually rough and undiplomatic commander of American troops in South Korea, despised Rhee. He considered him, as Clay Blair, the military historian, wrote, “devious, emotionally unstable, brutal, corrupt, and wildly unpredictable.”

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  IN THE NORTH, Kim Il Sung had been installed with a good deal more foresight by his sponsors from the Soviet Union, who had had their eye on Korea for a much longer time. He arrived at the end of World War II through the dictate of Joseph Stalin and through the sheer muscle of the occupying Red Army. Because of that, from the start he employed the brutal model of the Soviet system, and was surrounded by Soviet advisers and sponsors. By the spring of 1950, Kim had been in power for almost five years; and, for at least two of them, he had been pushing, with ever greater aggressiveness, for his right to invade the South. That invasion was sure to be supported, so Kim promised the Russians, by a spontaneous national uprising all over the South. Two hundred thousand Southern Communists and patriots would take up arms as one against Syngman Rhee, who was, in a favorite phrase of the Communist vernacular of that era, the running dog of the American imperialists. There was, however, only one person who could give the green light for such an invasion—Stalin himself.

  Of the three critical players on the Communist side of the Korean War, Kim Il Sung had the least legitimacy. Stalin, if he had not been the principal architect of the Russian Revolution, h
ad at least been there from the beginning, a harsh, cruel enforcer who had systematically gathered ever greater power from those around him and, by the postwar years, had guided Soviet totalitarianism for almost a quarter of a century. He had gained immense stature from the victory of Russia’s armies over Hitler’s Germany, despite his own catastrophic miscalculations about Hitler’s intentions, and perhaps even worse, his almost suicidal destruction of the Red Army, purging its high command and destroying its officer corps in the months before Hitler launched his invasion. Whatever his miscalculations, Stalin had become the symbolic leader of the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians called it. Those mistakes, which had allowed the Germans to come so close to defeating Russia, had, ironically enough, made him more of a hero to the Russian people, thereby strengthening his personal hold on his nation and melding its spiritual myths with his own myth of leadership. He came to embody not so much Russia’s early defeats, but its very survival at Stalingrad, and then the final triumph of the Red Army in Berlin. That victory alone seemed to seal his greatness for ordinary Russians, making him nothing less than a modern incarnation of the legendary tsars and so, for better but mostly for worse, the principal figure of twentieth-century Russia.

  Mao Zedong, in 1950 the leader of the revolutionary Chinese government that had come to power after years of oppression, strife, and civil war, might have been if anything an even grander figure on the historical landscape. He was the principal architect of the Chinese revolution and led it through long, difficult days, often against fearsome odds, saving it from the combined forces of Chiang Kai-shek and various warlords. He was both political and military strategist in the Chinese civil war and the creator of a new kind of warfare where politics and war were constantly linked and blended, and where the military side was always an instrument of the political side. His adaptations of Marxist beliefs to a peasant society and his theory of revolution would have a far greater resonance internationally in the second half of the twentieth century than anything Stalin had ever done. By the 1960s, Stalin, his crimes against his own people and against those in Eastern Europe now public, would seem something of an embarrassment to bright, idealistic young leftists in the West and in the underdeveloped world, a leader they preferred to avoid talking about, who represented little but brute power. By contrast Mao, for a long time, until the darker side of his personality and the terror he had let loose on his own people became better known, was a far more romantic figure, more like the personification of revolution. In those years, he, far more than Stalin, was seen as the leader of the world of the have-nots against the world of the haves.

  Kim Il Sung was something of a contradiction, a fierce nationalist who was the creation of an imperial power, the Soviet Union. He was a man who had seethed with the nationalist fervor produced by Japanese colonization and had become, because of that colonial era, a dedicated Communist and resilient guerrilla fighter, yet he was also from the very beginning almost completely an instrument, and a quite dutiful one at that, of Soviet policy. Others looked at him and saw little but the Soviet hand on his shoulder; he looked at himself and saw the purest embodiment of Korean nationalism. Certainly, the era in which he had come of age helped shape him. To Kim there was no contradiction between being a Korean patriot, a dedicated Communist, and an instrument of the Russians.

  All of Korea had been fertile terrain for rebellion because of the Japanese. As their occupation stretched on, a certain fatalism settled in among much of the educated middle class, and many members of the privileged classes reluctantly made their peace with the Japanese and prospered as collaborators. A large number of them would emerge after the war as influential players in what became South Korea, both in business and the military. By contrast, many Koreans whose roots were in the peasantry, who hated the Japanese and had no economic reason to make accommodations, were pulled toward a deeply alienated left. There was, after all, much to feel alienated about, for the Japanese colonization of Korea had been unusually harsh. The Koreans were regarded by the Japanese as a lower species of humanity, all the more inferior for having been so readily conquered.

  The Japanese, sure of their imperial mission and their superiority as a race, had set out to destroy almost all vestiges of Korean independence. What they wanted was nothing less than to obliterate Korean culture, starting with the language. The official language of Korea was proclaimed to be Japanese; in schools, lessons were to be taught in Japanese. The Japanese language test book was called The Mother-Tongue Reader. Koreans were to take Japanese names. The Korean language was to become a regional dialect, nothing more. What the Japanese, like so many would-be colonialists, were to learn, of course, was that if you want to make something valuable to a conquered people, you need but suppress it. Only then did such ordinary things—history, language, local religions, things so easy to take for granted—gain real meaning. The divisions caused by the Japanese colonization went much deeper into the society than most foreigners realized. The country was not merely split at the thirty-eighth parallel, but in some ways the separation ran through the entire population—in effect it had to do with which side any Korean had been on in those heartbreaking times. It helped create all kinds of great internal divisions, ones that would collide during the Korean War. It was not only a border crossing war, the North invading the South, but something more as well, for there were ghosts from the recent colonized past there, and so long-standing political struggles that had simmered for decades were at stake too. Both sides were out to settle arguments that had, in different ways and under different labels, been on the table for nearly half a century. The unusual harshness of the Japanese rule had also ensured that the nationalists could barely exist on native soil. In a way, much of the story of contemporary Korea flowed from that fact—those patriots who stayed would generally be tainted in some way or another by association with the Japanese, while those who went into exile were also tainted, or at the very least profoundly affected, by association with the foreign powers—Russian, Chinese, or American—who housed them.

  As that hopelessly poor, occupied, and colonized Korea had sent Syngman Rhee into his mendicant’s exile in America, so on a very different track it had produced Kim Il Sung, whose own family had suffered because of the economic imbalance of the earlier order. Kim had been politicized in his childhood, gone into exile as a boy, and spent much of what should have been his youth struggling against the Japanese. He represented in his own way the rage and bitterness of the country’s recent history.

  He was born Kim Song Ju in the village of Nam-ri on April 15, 1912, just two years after the Japanese began their colonial era in Korea. If one imagines some child of modern Europe growing up in Holland or France under a Nazi occupation that lasted for the first thirty-three years of his life, Kim’s anger and his rigidity can be better understood. His paternal grandparents lived in a village named Mangeyondai, which eventually became known as his family home. In time he claimed that his great-grandfather had been one of the leaders of an assault on an armed American merchant ship, the General Sherman, that had made the mistake of straying too far up the Taedong River in 1866, and then the even bigger mistake of allowing itself to become grounded, whereupon local Koreans stormed the beached boat and hacked the foreigners to pieces. Whether or not Kim’s relative was actually involved is another question, for Kim was always exceptionally creative in upgrading his autobiography—a task he took very seriously.

  His father, Kim Hyong Jik, came from the peasant class, attending, though not finishing, middle school. At the age of fifteen, the senior Kim married the daughter of the local schoolmaster, then worked as an elementary schoolteacher, an herbal doctor, and on occasion, a grave keeper. His wife, Kang Pan Sok, was seventeen, two years older than her husband. Hers were educated people. There were schoolteachers and Christian ministers in her lineage. Her people were thought to be less than enthusiastic about the wedding because Kim’s station was lower and he had only two acres of land to his name. When Kim Il Sung
was born, his father was only seventeen and still lived in his own parents’ home. There were Christian missionary connections on both sides of Kim’s family, though in the cleansing of his curriculum vitae, he later claimed that his family members were nonbelievers and that his father went to church only because the Presbyterians offered a missionary school. “Believe in a Korean God, if you believe in one!” he later quoted his father as saying. While the truth of this is unknowable, it was true that in many underdeveloped places in the world, part of the allure of missionaries was the chance they offered for a better education and in time a certain economic advantage. Of the fact that Kim’s family was political there was no doubt; his father and two of his uncles were put in jail at different times for independence activities. In 1919, when he was seven, the family, like thousands of highly nationalistic Koreans, became part of a great migration moving across the country’s northern border into Manchuria, trying to escape Japanese rule. They settled in the town of Jiandao, where there was a large Korean community, and the young Kim attended Chinese schools, learning the language.