"Introduction to the Korean War" by Allan Millett

["Mike Yared" <mikeyared@hotmail.com>]

Introduction to the Korean War.
The Journal of Military History;
Allan R Millett;
Oct 2001; Vol.65; I.4; Page:921-935
Abstract:
Millett examines the historical significance of the Korean War. The Korea 
War requires "new thinking" that deals with the conflict as a war of 
postcolonial succession, a People's War of revolutionary national 
liberation, and a war of regional and global great power intervention.

ROM his pedestal above the twelve lanes of traffic moving by fits and starts 
along King Sejong Boulevard in Seoul, the statue of Admiral Yi Sun-shin 
watches the Korean people enjoy the dubious luxuries of prosperity and 
peace. However perilous that well-being sometimes seems at the dawn of the 
twenty-first century, the Republic of Korea stands as a sturdy example of 
postcolonial survival. In a sense the Republic of Korea-Daehan Minguk-and 
its socialist sister the Democratic People's Republic of Korea-are "new 
nations," but they are built on the wreckage of a failed traditional 
society, forty years of Japanese colonialism, the leaching effect of Japan's 
wars (1937-45), and the trauma of political division and revolutionary 
social change. Koreans who were young in 1945 can hardly believe they live 
in the same county. But always there is the memory of "the war."

The Korean people know war. One bit of their lore is that the country has 
been invaded at least six hundred times in the last three millennia, 
although the counting includes incidents of piracy, minor punitive 
expeditions, and naval encounters along Korea's long and island-dotted 
coastline. Nevertheless, the Koreans have a record of victimization that 
rivals that of the Jews, Poles, and Irish. Four hundred years ago Admiral Yi 
Sun-shin battled the fleets of the Japanese tyrant Hideyoshi Toyotomi, but 
despite three miraculous naval victories-won by the novel armored "turtle 
boats" of revered memory-Admiral Yi could not prevent Hideyoshi's armies 
from ravishing Korea's villages, farmlands, and precious Buddhist temples. 
As Yi wrote in despair: "The mountains and the rivers tremble ... blood dyes 
hills and streams."1 According to Korean legend, the stone in the forehead 
of the Great Buddha of Sokkuram Grotto turns red every time Japan threatens 
to invade. It would be appropriate to have a similar warning system for 
China.

The Kingdom of Chosen-"The Land of the Morning Calm"-rose from the rubble of 
civil wars and Chinese invasions in 1392 and survived until 1910, but the 
ruling dynasty, founded by General Yi Song-gye, could never escape an awful 
geopolitical reality: the Korean peninsula served as the military marches 
for both Japan and China-and for waves of Mongols and Manchurians bent on 
visiting Japan. When the divisions of the Chinese People's Volunteers Force 
(Ren,min Zhiyuanjun) swept into the Ilan River valley in January 1951, they 
trod the same ground ravaged by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. When 
the Fifth Marines, a regiment of the U.S. 1st Marine Division, crossed the 
Ilan River on 20 September 1950 on its way to Seoul, the Marines marched by 
the monument of Haengjujuansong fortress, the site of a desperate and futile 
battle against the Japanese in 1592. There are few battlefields in Korea 
that are the site of only one past engagement. Koreans compare themselves to 
a school of shrimp caught between two whales. Whether the whales are 
fighting or making love-not to mention feeding-the shrimp have a short life 
expectancy.

The nineteenth century brought a new set of military adventurers to Korea: 
the Europeans and the now-Europeanized Japanese. On Kanghwa-do (island) at 
the mouth of the Han River, one can find monuments and restored 
fortifications dedicated to the valiant but out-gunned Koreans who opposed 
French, American, and Japanese naval expeditionary forces in 1866, 1871, and 
1875. The two major regional wars that sealed Korea's fate as a Japanese 
colony-the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese War 
(1904-5)-included battles on Korean soil or in Korean waters. Ironically, 
neither of the world wars made Korea a battlefield for foreign powers. A 
worse fate awaited the Korean people, a civil war of such devastating 
proportions that one had to look back to the Japanese invasions of the 1590s 
for appropriate precedents in suffering.

Although Korean folklore focuses upon the tragedy of foreign invasions, 
Korean history is hardly free of civil strife. The Korean people do not need 
the encouragement of foreign devils to fight each other. The Yi dynasty came 
to power in a war that followed the collapse of the Kingdom of Koryo (to 
which North Korea still traces its own legitimacy), which had succeeded in 
turn the Kingdom of Unified Shilla. The Shilla dynasty (based in Kyongju, 
today a national historical shrine in the Republic of Korea) had triumphed 
over an earlier Koguryo kingdom and the rival Paekche kingdom, based in the 
modern Cholla provinces of southwestern Korea, an area notorious for its 
rebelliousness.

Even when the dynastic and foreign wars faded in severity in the nineteenth 
century, the progressive erosion of Korean traditional society-based on 
hereditary land-holding and Confucian family and social deference 
patterns-brought a series of populist agrarian uprisings that fused economic 
discontent with millennialism of a distinctly Asian cast. The Yi Dynasty 
faced popular revolts of serious proportions in 1812 and 1862. Like the 
Taipings in China, the Korean rebels sought some sort of rejuvenation that 
drove off foreign-based modernity and restored some perfect (imagined) past 
of social harmony. In Korea the last and most significant of these 
revolts-the Tonghak ("Eastern Learning") Rebellion of 1895-led the Yi 
dynasty to seek aid from Russia, China, and Japan, thus setting the stage 
for its own demise. Apparently when the whales are otherwise engaged, the 
shrimp eat each other.2

For all these Korean wars, the war of 1950-53 still rises above all the 
other communal and international violence just as the great mountain of Paek 
Tu-san rises above all the other mountains as a symbol of Korean identity 
and endurance. For American historians, the war of 1950-53 could be either 
forgotten or misunderstood. Even within the context of World War II and the 
Cold War era, the Korean War was usually just ignored. Such a cavalier 
treatment simply reflected a historiographical phenomenon, which was to 
insist that what really made wars memorable was their lasting impact upon 
national domestic development, an insularity that has been the bane of 
American intellectual inquiry throughout the twentieth century. The American 
Revolution and the Civil War (or War of the Rebellion or the War Between the 
States) took their significance from their impact on the course of American 
socio-economic history. The War with Mexico or the War with Spain, forever 
important in the history of American foreign relations, are relatively 
unstudied except among eccentric American intellectuals and the whole 
Spanishspeaking world. World War II is the great exception since its impact 
on both American domestic life and international relations has been obvious, 
although the critique of American performance in that war is still based on 
domestic (corporatist-revisionist) criteria worthy of the Jeffersonian 
isolationists. The Vietnam War (1958-75) confused American thinking even 
further since it became a war lost by the United States and its Vietnamese 
allies that had virtually no international ramifications, unless one is 
Cambodian. Yet that war produced a social and national revolution in Vietnam 
and a generational political trauma in the United States. Caught between the 
whales of World War II and the Vietnam War, the Korean War shrank to 
shrimp-like proportions in the American consciousness.3

The historical significance of the Korean War must be sought elsewhere than 
in the popular memory of Americans, even those who fought in Korea. With an 
estimated three million-plus deaths of all nationalities, the Korean War 
still ranks behind only the two world wars as the most costly war of the 
twentieth century in terms of human lives lost. Even if some other conflict 
eventually lays a stronger claim to this dubious distinction of deadliness, 
the Korean War will still rank with the worst of the conflicts that followed 
World War II, wars that killed an estimated twenty million by the century's 
end.

In the history of international conflict the Korean War is one of many wars 
of decolonization and postcolonial political succession that swept away four 
centuries of European (and Japanese) imperialism. With all the World War II 
belligerents except the United States prostrated by their wartime losses, 
the client states of the Middle East and the colonies of Asia and Africa 
faced an unprecedented opportunity to declare their independent existence. 
"Declaring" often proved easy compared to the challenge of "being" a new 
nation, but rational policies and reforms seldom drove the "freedom 
fighters" of the 1940s and 1950s. Like generations of rebels before them, 
the leaders of "the wars of national liberation" proved more adept at taking 
power than governing.

Wars of postcolonial independence and political succession swept Asia in the 
wake of the dual collapse of European and Japanese colonialism. Only the 
Kingdom of Thailand, which maintained its delicate independence by playing 
Great Britain and France off against one another in the Southeast Asian 
version of "The Great Game," escaped a divisive civil war. The general 
pattern was first to drive out the European occupying power with terrorism 
and guerrilla warfare, balanced with deft negotiations and promises of 
useful future (usually economic) relationships. Often the independence 
fighters based their appeal and political organization on their resistance 
to the Japanese occupations-and sometimes their collaboration with the 
Japanese. Nothing prevented the independence fighters from fighting each 
other either since just who would succeed the banished foreigners carried 
high stakes. Not surprisingly, the withdrawing powers had strong preferences 
about just which nationalist leaders replaced the colonial government. By 
definition the Asian nations were dealing with revolution. Whatever new 
socio-economic system emerged after independence, it would not be premodern, 
and it would transform the village, communal, agrarian culture that 
characterized all of Asia except Japan.

In terms of long-term historical significance the Chinese civil war, which 
began in the 1920s and ended in the spring of 1950 with the conquest of 
Hainan Island, dominates the history of the Asian wars of national 
liberation, but it was only one of many. The division of British India into 
India and Pakistan turned communal violence into internal and international 
conflict that has not ended in more than fifty years; Pakistan, still stung 
by the loss of its Bengali "eastern state," faces India after three wars. 
India has fought pro-Pakistani China four times in the Himalayas and 
supports the Tamil rebellion in the island-state of Sri Lanka. It has 
attempted to crush Sikh dissidents for twenty years. Four wars finally 
brought an independent Laos, Cambodia, and unified Vietnam with Communist 
Vietnam regulars finally swaying the balance in Laos and Cambodia.

The Indonesians fought off an Anglo-Indian-Dutch occupation force in 
1945-47, but waited until the 1960s to kill each other in the hundreds of 
thousands in a war-of-succession waged between the Communists and Moslem 
nationalists, whose generals replaced the "father of his country" for almost 
forty years, Achmet Sukarno. Burma went into geo-political reclusiveness 
(and took the name Myanmar) in part through the ravages of continued wars 
between Burmese factions and non-Burmese mountain peoples (the Shan, the 
Chin, the Kachin) with grievances that are now at least over fifty years 
old. Contemporary Malaysia and Singapore were born in twenty years of 
guerrilla warfare that accompanied independence and pitted the Moslem-Malay 
majority (favored by the British) against a Chinese (largely Communist-led) 
minority. Even with independence guaranteed by the United States, the 
Philippines had to endure (and still endures) a civil war between the 
americanistas or prowestern nationalists and the Communist leaders of the 
Hukbalahaps, not to be confused, of course, with the continuing warfare 
against all Filipinos conducted by the Moslem tribes of Mindanao. Only 
Japan's timely surrender in 1945, followed by an occupation monopolized by 
the United States and the prompt but modest reform of some Japanese 
institutions, may have spared Japan its own civil war.

The contemporaneous history of conflict in the states between the 
Mediterranean and Indus River adds further insight into the transregional 
phenomenon of postcolonial wars of political succession. The first collapse 
came in World War I, not World War II, with the defeat and dismemberment of 
the Ottoman Empire and the creation of modern Turkey after a civil war and 
multinational foreign interventions in the 1920s. Since the French and 
British "special relationships" that emerged in the 1920s allowed native 
rulers to lead "independent" countries, the post-1945 transition to truer 
independence was less bloody, but certainly not peaceful as British veterans 
of the Palestinian occupation, 1945-47, can attest. With the independence of 
Israel setting the stage for four major wars and sixty years (and counting) 
of conflict in the Levant, the region was probably doomed to endless war. 
The Arab-Israeli confrontation, however, does not define the history of war 
and revolution in the Arab and Persian world. With the exception of the 
House of Saud, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and some of the smaller 
sheikdoms and sultanates of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, there is no other 
successor regime in the region that has maintained itself and none without 
civil repression or foreign intervention. The al-Sabahs would be, for 
example, gone from Kuwait without the international intervention of 1990-91. 
The monarchs of Egypt and Ethiopia are gone, along with the first generation 
of military strongmen and clan leaders of Eritrea, Somalia, and the Sudan. 
The pro-European elites of Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq are as departed as King 
Nebuchadnezzar, and the Pahlevi family's grasp on the Peacock Throne of Iran 
is just as dead as that of Darius and Xerxes. Who remembers the names of the 
last kings of Libya and Afghanistan?4 The postcolonial wars since 1945 may 
not change geography, but they have certainly reshaped the political terrain 
outside Europe and North America.5

Outside isolated rural villages in central Korea the enterprising traveler 
can still find an occasional pair of giant wooden, carved figures that look 
suspiciously to an American like totem poles. They are changsung, symbols of 
the dualism of good and evil and a plea to the mystical forces of nature to 
protect the village. Decorated to represent a male spirit and a female 
spirit, the changsung do not look friendly, certainly not to each other, but 
their powers are supposed to work in concert to protect the people. Like the 
changsung, two political movements arose in twentiethcentury Korea, both 
dedicated to the creation of a strong, modern, revived Korea, sufficiently 
transformed to use its national economic, military, and spiritual power to 
preserve its independence from both China and Japan, yet still remain Korean 
at its cultural core. The concept of juche-self-reliance-knows no 
Demilitarized Zone. Both movements were revolutionary, not just in their 
dedication to driving away the Japanese imperialists, but in their vision of 
a new Korea. Like the changsung they needed each other and thus hated their 
reciprocated interdependence.

The bitter rivalry of the Christian-capitalist modernizers and 
Marxist-Leninists in Korea dates from the 1920s. Neither movement enjoyed 
any special advantages in leadership, organizational skill, moral 
legitimacy, economic leverage, or good luck. Both movements became targets 
of all forms of individual and collective repression by the Japanese. Both 
by 1945 had become expatriate movements, tainted to some degree by their 
associations abroad with the Chinese, Japanese radicals, the Russians, and 
the Americans, but equally dependent on foreign toleration or assistance for 
their survival. By Liberation Day (15 August 1945) the two Korean 
revolutionary movements stood poised to transfer their parallel struggle 
against Japan to a direct confrontation with each other, a conflict that 
would have occurred whether the United States and Soviet Union had divided 
Korea into occupation zones or not.

The Christian-capitalist modernizers had the advantage of pride of 
historical place in Korean reformism, opposition to Japanese colonialism, 
and political activism. The modernizers' first organizational effort 
coincided with the arrival of the first wave of Methodist and Presbyterian 
missionaries after 1885 and the end of repression against the embattled 
Catholic church, whose first permanent mission had come to Seoul in 1791.

Elements of the Court of King Kojong favored countering Japanese influence 
by allowing American, Canadian, British, and European missionaries and 
entrepreneurs more freedom. Education, medicine, and engineering were the 
most favored missionary projects. The Japanese won the political race, but 
not before the nationalist modernizers had gained footholds in the Pae Chae 
Boys School, Chosen Christian College, the Independence Club, Severance 
Hospital, and the Seoul Central YMCA, as well as the Protestant 
congregations and mission headquarters. Some modernizers never identified 
themselves as Christians for various philosophical and personal reasons. For 
example, the Christians discouraged anti-Japanese violence, which did not 
sit well with those ultra-nationalists who had survived the Righteous Armies 
War of 1907-9, a populist uprising against the Japanese that took eighteen 
thousand Korean lives. These secular ultra-nationalists, however, were 
willing to cooperate in a limited way with the Christians' passive 
resistance.

The key event for the Christian-modernizer movement occurred in the Samil (1 
March 1919) Independence Movement, a popular antiJapanese demonstration in 
Seoul occasioned by the death of former King Kojong. A coalition of fifty 
nationalist leaders signed and published a Declaration of Independence near 
Independence Gate (Tongnimun), a monument to antiforeign resistance. All but 
one of the signatories was a practicing Christian or member of Chondogyo 
("Heavenly Way"), a Korean religious movement that mixed Christianity with 
traditional Asian spiritual values. The Declaration brought a million 
Koreans into the streets of the major cities where the protest marchers 
chanted "Daehan Tongrip Mansei" or "Long Live Korean Independence" and 
waived the outlawed taegukki or Korean national flag. The Japanese colonial 
police and army crushed the movement, killing more than 1,000 Koreans at a 
cost of nine security forces lives. The Japanese arrested 19,500 Koreans, 
executed or jailed 3,000, and burned thousands of homes, schools, churches, 
and temples. Movement survivors and simply terrified members of the urban 
middle class fled to Manchuria, China, Russia, and the United States.

The collapse of the Samil Independence Movement encouraged the 
self-proclaimed "revolutionary option" of Marxist-Leninism to fill the 
nationalist vacuum. The first organized Korean Communists formed the 
People's Socialist Party in 1918 in Siberia, a Bolshevik effort to enlist 
the Korean expatriates in the war against the Russian "Whites" and Japanese 
Siberian expeditionary force. These Koreans provided the initial leadership 
of the Korean Communist Party and Korean Communist Youth Association, which 
set up organizing committees within Korea in 1925. For twenty years the 
Korean Communists surged and ebbed in power, mounting five different protest 
movements and enduring five periods of successful repression by the 
Japanese-Korean colonial police and military units. Communist-Christian 
conflict became a war within a war after the Communists, which now included 
Chinese-sponsored Koreans, subverted and betrayed Shinganhoe, a promising 
mass nationalist association led by Christians and secular nationalists, 
between 1927 and 1931. The Japanese drove various Communist guerrilla bands 
(part of larger Chinese Communist partisan divisions) from Korea and 
Manchuria into the Soviet Union in 1940-41. When the Asia-Pacific War of 
1941-45 began, the Communists had no decisive advantage over the other 
expatriate Korean nationalists.

The Asia-Pacific war deepened and accelerated the prerevolutionary 
socio-economic upheaval of the Korean people and heartened the leaders of 
the two Korean revolutionary movements. The Japanese war effort drained 
Korea: tens of thousands of "comfort women," hundreds of thousands of 
industrial and military construction workers, tens of thousands of auxiliary 
Korean soldiers to guard prison camps or conduct counter-- partisan 
operations, millions of tons of coal and minerals, and millions of tons of 
rice. Korean rice production doubled despite the loss of chemical 
fertilizers and pesticides; Korean rice consumption dropped by half. Even 
though Korea escaped direct physical destruction, civic despair deepened and 
the public social and economic infrastructure deteriorated. Moreover, 
wartime mobilization forced Koreans-especially the Christian 
nationalists-into an ever more difficult position in their relations with 
the Japanese. The police power of the colonial government, ruthlessly 
applied, made survival and collaborationism virtually synonymous. "Pure" 
patriots existed only in hiding or exile. Of the postliberation competing 
leaders, the Christian-modernizers and ultra-nationalists (Kim Ku, Syngman 
Rhee, Yi Pom-sok, Kim Kyu-sik) remained in exile or remained out of public 
life (Cho Man-sik, Yo Un-hyong) in Korea. The Communists disappeared 
underground and became inactive (Pak Hon- yong, Ho Kia-I) or joined some 
part of the anti-Fascist war effort in China or Russia (Kim Tu-bong, Kim 
Mu-bong, Kim Chaek, Chae Yong-gun, Nam 11, Kim II-sung). With weak 
organizations and overweening political ambition, both sets of 
revolutionaries waited for the Japanese Empire to commit seppuku with the 
assistance of the American armed forces.6

The Korean War began in August 1945 in the classical pattern of what Mao 
Zedong and other Asian revolutionaries called a "people's war of national 
liberation." The conflict in Korea, however, was a people's war with a 
difference because two revolutionary liberation movements followed parallel 
paths to power, but succeeded in dominating only half the country. The 
division was assymetrical in almost every way. The Republic of Korea got a 
population twice the size of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and 
the best arable river valleys, but North Korea got all the hydro-electric 
power and coal and mineral resources, as well as the Japanese-built 
industrial base sited near the energy sources. Both sides attempted to 
establish a single national government for Korea through all measures short 
of full-scale war: economic intimidation, the creating of "fronts" and 
coalitions, denouncing the American and Russian occupation governments, 
bribery and corruption-patronage, political assassinations and betrayals, 
street demonstrations and strikes, urban terrorism directed at police and 
civic leaders, purges and pogroms, and the manipulation of occupation 
officials. Although the Communists (with Soviet assistance) crushed all 
non-Communist opposition north of the 38th Parallel by 1950, the 
nationalist-modernizers had far more difficulty eliminating the challenge of 
the South Korean Labor Party, in part because of American ambivalence about 
the goals and methods of the modernizers, eventually dominated by Syngman 
Rhee. A partisan war that began in March 1948 could not stop the creation of 
the Republic of Korea, but it could create a situation that matched the 
second phase of a People's War, the use of unconventional warfare to erode a 
central government's ability to defend itself.7

The role of the American and Russian occupation governments was that of 
willing patron to the most acceptable revolutionaries-from their 
perspective. The Russians in Pyongyang (political officers all) seem to have 
embraced Kim II-sung with little hesitation, although they forced him to 
tolerate other Communist challengers, if not indefinitely. They had no need 
to fuel his ambition to rule all Korea. The American patronage pattern is 
more complex and ambiguous. The initial occupation regime-U.S. Army Forces 
in Korea and U.S. Army Government in Korea-in southern Korea had one 
over-riding mission: to disarm and repatriate all the Japanese to the Home 
Islands. Thereafter, USAMGIK and all its Korean employees and advisers 
struggled to keep the peace while someone, somewhere figured out how to 
create a legitimate national government for all of Korea. It was an 
impossible task at which Korean political leaders, an American-Soviet 
trusteeship commission, and a United Nations Commission all failed.

The American military officers wanted USAFIK (mostly the U.S. XXIV Corps of 
three divisions) to be relieved of its peacekeeping duties and its units 
redeployed or demobilized. The U.S. Army accepted a continuing 
responsibility for advising and training a Korean Constabulary (Army after 
December 1948), and it accepted Syngman Rhee as the least objectionable 
Korean leader. The State Department wanted American troops to remain in 
Korea, but could not counter the Army's budgetary and strategic arguments 
for withdrawal, even after the outbreak of guerrilla warfare and border 
clashes between regular Korean forces in 1948-49. The diplomats wanted 
American engagement in Korea-- largely for the leverage that engagement 
provided American influence in Japan-but they did not regard Syngman Rhee 
with much enthusiasm. The North Korean invasion of June 1950 did not solve 
this problem.s

Convinced that South Korea had reached an economic and spiritual breaking 
point and had been abandoned by the United States, Kim 11sung persuaded 
Stalin and Mao Zedong (with the aid of his Soviet advisers) to back an 
escalation to conventional war in June 1950, the third phase of People's 
War. The co-conspirators agreed that the South Korean army and government 
("puppets") would collapse and that American military intervention-if 
any-would be ineffective and tardy. This reasonable but completely wrong 
calculation would cost millions of people-mostly Koreans-their lives.

The Korean War that everyone knows (1950-53) is the third phase of the 
Korean People's War, the war that began with an invasion across an 
international border (as established by the United Nations) and ended with 
an Armistice Agreement (still in force) in July 1953. Of course, a more 
accurate description is that the People's War reverted to Phase II: 
political and military coercion. This war is best understood as a set of 
interacting diadic relationships. The first diad-and most obvious-is 
determined by war aims: (1) victory in terms of a unified Korea as pursued 
by both the Koreas, the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the 
United States, and the United Nations; and (2) some sort of negotiated 
temporary status quo ante bellum, acceptable to all the belligerents but 
only to the two Koreas after their great power patrons assured them of 
continued military protection and economic assistance. The second diad is 
strategic-operational and also obvious: (1) the war of maneuver, June 
1950-October 1951 in which both coalition armies conducted major offensives; 
and (2) the "stalemate," "trench warfare" period in which military 
operations had limited goals tied to the course of the armistice 
negotiations. Americans might call this the "Pork Chop Hill war," although 
the Chinese have greater reason to memorialize the Battle of Shangangling 
and the South Koreans the Battle of Paekmasan (White Horse Mountain). These 
first two diadic relationships, however, reflect several less appreciated 
causal duds that define the Korean War in truly Asian ways. What one thinks 
one sees is not necessarily the essential truth.

The conduct and consequences of the Korean War should be understood in terms 
of at least six diadic conflicts. One is the tension between Far East 
Command (Tokyo) and the American civil-military leadership coalition in 
Washington. This conflict is not just the Truman-MacArthur controversy, but 
includes two wartime presidents, a group of State Department officials and 
two Secretaries of State, two Secretaries of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of 
Staff, and three theater commanders. At issue was the current and future 
role of the United States in Asia and the meaning of forward, collective 
defense and nuclear deterrence. This diadic relationship, however, was also 
affected by conflict between three 8th Army commanders and three theater 
commanders over strategy and the relative balance between air and ground 
operations. Interservice relations were not a critical problem, nor were 
there serious difficulties with the United Nations military contingents. It 
is far more important to focus on the American-South Korean political and 
military collaboration and conflict since Syngman Rhee proved to be a 
determined national leader and very difficult ally.

The Korean War is not just an American war or a proxy Cold War conflict, but 
an Asian war. In November, 1951 the war became another Korean effort to 
defend itself from a Chinese invasion, a change that allowed a real national 
mobilization and strengthened the Rhee regime and made Japanese 
participation more acceptable. The Chinese-Soviet alliance created another 
important diadic relationship-also characterized by conflict-that shaped the 
war. After Stalin's death in March 1953, the Soviet leadership was ready to 
abandon the war, but Mao Zedong was not, largely because he believed the 
U.S.-ROK alliance was about to collapse. The Chinese also knew that both 
Korean regimes had internal conflicts, so Mao's concern was to support Kim 
II-sung while the Communists waited for the Rhee regime to commit political 
suicide as it almost did in a constitutional crisis in 1952 and in the 
dispute with the United States over POW repatriation in 1953. It is also 
worth remembering that the two Koreas conducted a partisan war against each 
other that continued after June 1950. United Nations partisan forces 
conducted raids into North Korea throughout the war while Communist 
guerrillas remained a serious problem in 1950-52 and a considerable nuisance 
in 1953 and afterwards.

The Chinese strategic dilemma illustrates the complex interaction of a 
People's War turned international. In January 1950 Mao Zedong finally pried 
a mutual security agreement from the Soviet Union that was aimed at Japan 
and the United States. Subsequent negotiations over 1950-51 produced three 
areas of military aid Mao and his generals desperately wanted, not just to 
defend the People's Republic but to conduct operations in Tibet, Formosa, 
and Korea. These requirements were a modern Chinese air force, the ordnance 
modernization and standardization of the People's Liberation Army, and the 
creation of an independent military-industrial infrastructure. Chinese 
intervention in Korea justified these programs and-perhaps-might drive down 
the Russian charges for military assistance, which was not free. The 
Chinese, however, had to keep fighting (and dying) to keep Stalin's military 
aid coming. The Russians refused to commit their air defense forces (air and 
ground) to anything but the defense of Manchuria, which meant a severe drain 
on Chinese and North Korean manpower and munitions to keep any sort of 
logistical system functioning within Korea to support a coalition ground 
army of 1.5 million after 1951. Although Communist artillery became a 
serious problem in 1952-53 for the United Nations troops, Chinese-North 
Korean shell expenditures still fell below those of United Nations Command 
by a factor of three or four. Although Chinese military effectiveness 
remained good through the end of the war, the People's Liberation Army that 
won the Chinese civil war was close to destruction by July 1953. The major 
Chinese offensives of autumn 1952 and springsummer 1953 cannot be explained 
only by some negotiating strategy for Panmunjom.

The Chinese-Russian "Great Game" over military assistance gave Kim II-sung 
an unparalleled opportunity to push aside and eventually purge Korean 
Communists who represented Chinese and Russian interests. Kim II-sung (like 
Syngman Rhee) emerged from the Armistice far more powerful than he had been 
in June 1950 when such potential rivals as Kim Tu-bong, Pak Hon-yong, and Ho 
Kai-i might still have forced some form of collective leadership upon Kim. 
By 1954 all three of these men were dead or disgraced. Senior North Korean 
army officers with Chinese and Russian military ties did not escape eventual 
purging but they managed to escape North Korea with their lives. A fast 
learner, Kim Il-sung perpetuated Stalinism more than forty years after his 
role model's death.9

The Korean War requires "new thinking" that deals with the conflict as a war 
of postcolonial succession, a People's War of revolutionary national 
liberation, and a war of regional and global great power intervention. It is 
certainly not the only war of such complexity. In addition to the 
contemporaneous wars in Asia, the wars of the last seventy years in Spain, 
Algeria, Greece, Cyprus, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, the Congo, and Afghanistan 
show similar characteristics.

If the postcolonial wars of liberation and political succession are viewed 
only as proxy wars caused and shaped by the great power rivalries of the 
Cold War, they will have little lasting meaning except as historical 
curiosities. If these wars were only the spawn of a global struggle of two 
competitive social and economic systems, they presumably would disappear as 
that rivalry waned. Such is not the case. The Korean War remains not only a 
contemporary security issue since it created the two Koreas, but stands as a 
cautionary tale for explaining wars already in progress and wars yet to 
come.

Footnote
1. Yi Chungmu-gong Chonso, vol. 1 of Imjin Changch'o: Admiral Yi Sun'sinh 
Memorials to Court, translated by Ha Tae-hung and edited by Lee Chong-young 
(Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1981), 197.
2. Korean Overseas Information Service, A Handbook of Korea (Seoul: Hollym, 
1990); Andrew C. Nahm, Korea: Tradition and Transformation (Seoul: Hollym, 
1988); Peter Hyun, Koreana (Seoul: Korea Britannica, 1984); and Keith Pratt 
and Richard Rutt, comps., Korea: A Historical and Cultural Dictionary 
(Durham, UX: Curzon, 1999).
3. See, for example, Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History 
of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1973); 
John Shy, "The American Military Experience: History and Learning," Journal 
of Interdisciplinary History 1 (Winter 1971): 205-28; David M. Kennedy, "War 
and the American Character," Stanford Magazine 3 (Spring-Summer 1974): 
14-18, 70-72; Reginald C. Stuart, "War, Society, and the 'New' Military 
History of the United States," Canadian Review of American Studies 8 (Spring 
1977): 1-10; and Edward M. Coffman, "The New American Military History," 
Military Affairs 84 (January 1984): 1-5.
4. They happen to be the same: Idris.
5. For a review of conflict since 1945, see Patrick Brogan, World Conflicts: 
A Comprehensive Guide to World Strife Since 1945 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow 
Press, 1998); Dan Smith for the International Peace Research Institute, 
Oslo, The State of War and Peace Atlas, 3d ed. (London: Penguin Books, 
1997); and Field Marshal Lord Michael Carver, War Since 1945, rev. ed. 
(London: Ashfield Press, 1990). On the phenomenon of rebellion, see J. 
Bowyer Bell, On Revolt: Strategies of National Liberation (Cambridge, Mass.: 
Harvard University Press, 1976).
6. Carter J. Eckert et al., Korea: Old and New: A History (Seoul: II-chokak, 
1990), 199-253; James B. Palais, Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea 
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975); Homer B. Hulbert, The 
History of Korea, 2 vols. (Seoul: Methodist Publishing House, 1905); Edward 
S. Mason et al., The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of 
Korea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); Chong-sik Lee, The 
Politics of Korean Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 
1963); Kenneth M. Wells, New God, New Nation: Protestants and 
Self-Reconstruction in Korea, 1896-1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii 
Press, 1990); Donald N. Clark, Christianity in Modern Korea (Lanham, Md.: 
University Press of America, 1986); George L. Paik, The History of 
Protestant Missions in Korea, 1832-1910 (Pyongyang: Union College Press, 
1929); Wi Jo Kang, Christ and Caesar in Modern Korea: A History of 
Christianity and Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 
1997); Robert Scalapino and Chong-sik Lee, Communism in Korea, vol. 1, The 
Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Suh Dae-Book, The 
Korean Communist Movement, 1918-1949 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University 
Press, 1967); and Suh Dae-Book, Kim Il-sung (New York: Columbia University 
Press, 1988). For personal stories, see J. Earnest Fisher, Pioneers of 
Modern Korea (Seoul: Christian Literature Society of Korea, 1977), and 
Richard Saccone, Koreans to Remember (Seoul: Hollmy, 1993). For the 
American-Korean connection, see TaeHwan Kwak et al., eds., 17.S.-Korean 
Relations, 1882-1982 (Seoul: Kyungnam University Press, 1982).
7. Gregory Henderson, Korea: The Politics of the Vortex (Cambridge, Mass.: 
Harvard University Press, 1968); Joungwon A. Kim, Divided Korea: The 
Politics of Development, 1945-1972 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 
Press, 1975); Christopher Thorne, The Far Eastern War: States and Societies, 
1941-45 (London: Unwin, 1985); Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 
vol. 1, Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes (Princeton, N.J.: 
Princeton University Press, 1981); Nam Koonwoo, The North Korean Communist 
Leadership, 1945-1965 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974); 
Robert T. Oliver, Syngman Rhee and American Involvement in Korea, 1942-1960 
(Seoul: Panmun, 1978); and James I. Matray, The Reluctant Crusade: American 
Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941-1950 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 
1985).
8. John Merrill, Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War (Newark: 
University of Delaware Press, 1989); Chi-Young Pak, Political Opposition in 
Korea, 1945-1960 (Seoul: Seoul National University, 1980); Bruce Cumings, 
The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, The Roaring of the Cataract, 
1947-1950 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). Scholarly 
accounts of the Korean conflict and the roots of the Cold War in Asia 
include Peter Lowe, The Origins of the Korean War (London: Longman, 1986); 
Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye, eds., The Origins of the Cold War in Asia 
(New York and Tokyo: Columbia University Press and University of Tokyo 
Press, 1977); Bruce Cumings, ed., Child of Conflict: The Korean-American 
Relationship, 1943-1953 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983); 
William W. Steuck, Jr., The Road to Confrontation: American Policy toward 
China and Korea, 1947-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 
1981); Huh Nam-sung, "The Quest for a Bulwark of Anti-Communism: The 
Formation of the Korean Army Officer Corps and its Political Socialization, 
1945-1950" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1987); Lee Young-woo, "The 
United States and the Formation of the Republic of Korea Army, 1945-1950" 
(Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1984). My own documentary research, however, 
in the records of the Korean Military Advisory Group and the records of the 
971st CIC Detachment (Korea) is the basis of my understanding of the 
partisan war, 1948-50; these records are in USAFIK Historical Files, RG 332, 
National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. My own 
assessment appears in "Captain James H. Hausman and the Formation of the 
Korean Army, 1945-1950," Armed Forces and Society 23 (Summer 1997): 503-39, 
and "The Forgotten Army in the Misunderstood War: The Hanguk Gun in the 
Korean War, 1946-1953," in Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey, eds., The Korean 
War, 1950-1953: A Fifty Year Retrospective (Canberra, Australia: The Chief 
of Army's Military History Conference, 2000), 1-26. My assessment is based 
on extensive interviews with Lt. Col. Hausman, former officers of KMAG and 
their contemporary diaries and letters, and retired general officers of the 
Korean army. See also the dissertations by To-Woong Chung, "The Role of the 
U.S. Occupation in the Creation of the South Korean Armed Forces, 1945-1950" 
(Kansas State University, 1985), and Kim Kook-hun, "The North Korean 
People's Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1945-1950" (University of London, 1989).
9. The best of the published works are William Stueck, The Korean War: An 
International History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); 
Clay Blair, The Forgotten War: Korea, America in Korea, 1950-1953 (New York: 
Times Books, 1987); Callum MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam (New 
York: Free Press, 1986); and Anthony Farrar-Hockley, The British Part in the 
Korean War, 2 vols., (London: HMSO, 1990 and 1995). The best perspectives on 
the U.S. experience of the war are Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of 
Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War 
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992); Doris M. Condit, 
History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: The Test of War, 
1950-1953 (Washington: Historical Office, OSD, 1988); James F. Schnable, 
U.S. Army in the Korean War: Policy and Direction: The First Year 
(Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1972), and Burton I. 
Kaufman, The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command 
(Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1986); MIS/Gs, GHQ, UNC, "One 
Year in Korea, A Summary, 15 June 1950-25 June 1951," 1951, copy in the 
General James A. Van Fleet Papers, George C. Marshall Library, Lexington, 
Virginia, a significant new source of Korean War documentation in the United 
States, and Hdqs. Eighth United States Army, transcript, "Year-End Tactical 
Briefing," Correspondents Billets, Seoul, Korea, 24 December 1952; Hdqs. UNC 
(OAC/S G-5 Civil Affairs), transcript, "Briefing Conference on Republic of 
Korea for Unified Command Mission to the ROK," Tokyo, 9-12 April 1952, Gen. 
Thomas Herren Papers, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle 
Barracks, Pennsylvania; Military History Department, Korean Institute of 
Military History, The Korean War, 3 vols. (Seoul: Ministry of National 
Defense, 1999-2001).
For the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China, see, for example, 
Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: 
Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University 
Press, 1993); Shu-Guang Zhang, Deterrence and Strategic Culture: 
Chinese-American Coi-ontations, 1949-1958 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University 
Press, 1992) and Mao's Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 
1950-1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Chen Jian, China's 
Road to the Korean War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Harry 
Harding and Yuan Ming, eds., Sino-American Relations, 1945-1955 (Wilmington, 
Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989); Mark A. Ryan, Chinese Attitudes Toward 
Nuclear Weapons: China and the United States During the Korean War (London: 
M. E. Sharpe, 1989); Robert Simmons, The Strained Alliance: Peking, 
Pyongyang, Moscow, and the Politics of the Korean Civil War (New York: Free 
Press, 1975); Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the 
Kremlin's Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 
University Press, 1996); Eugeniy P. Bajanov and Natalia Bajanova, "The 
Korean Conflict, 1954-1953," MS history, Institute for Contemporary 
International Problems, Russian Foreign Ministry, 1997 (?). The author has 
been privileged to join Professor Yu Bin and Li Xiobing in editing an 
anthology of memoirs and reports by the senior commanders of the Chinese 
People's Volunteers Force, Mao's Generals Remember Korea (Lawrence: 
University Press of Kansas, 2001). Essential to discussion of the Communist 
side of the war are the materials published by the Cold War International 
History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 
Washington, D.C., especially The Cold War in Asia 6-7 (Winter 1995-96). For 
an important collection of participant testimony on Chinese and Soviet 
participation in the war, see Kim Chull-baum, ed., The Truth about the 
Korean War (Seoul: Eulyoo Publishing 1991). Dr. Kim was a pioneer in Korean 
war studies and president of the Korean War Studies Association, Seoul, 
Korea, until his untimely death in 1995. For a literature review, see Allan 
R. Millett, "The Korean War: A 50-Year Critical Historiography," Journal of 
Strategic Studies 24 (March 2001): 188-224. See also Yasuda Jun, "A Survey: 
China and the Korean War," Social Science Japan Journal 1 (1998): 71-83.


Author note
Allan R. Millett-Major General Raymond E. Mason, Jr., Professor of Military 
History at Ohio State University-is the author of four books on the U.S. 
Army and U.S. Marine Corps and is the co-author of For the Common Defense 
(1985) and A War To Be Won (2000). For ten years he has studied the Korean 
War and has written or edited twenty-three works that will culminate in two 
books on the war in 2002 and 2003.


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