Name: ____________________
Historiography of the Korean War
“To most diplomatic historians, there is no more exciting development than the release by a government of new documentation
regarding its foreign relations. For historians of the Korean War, the last quarter century has been a prolonged feast, as first American,
then British, Canadian, and Australian, and finally Chinese and Soviet records emerged in substantial quantities.” 1
-William Stueck, 1998
Traditional/Orthodox view:

Responsibility of North – view endorsed by British author David Rees, ‘Korea: Limited War’ 1964

Truman intervened to protect Koreans from Communist aggression

UN was used as a cover for US foreign policy

US feared further Communist expansion – domino theory – after revolution in China, 1949
Revisionist view:

Stalin was too cautious to prompt a war in Korea – view endorsed by Kathryn Weathersby in ‘Stalin, Kim il Sung & the
Prelude to War’, Khrushchev's memoirs & recent Russian historian
o
o


“While the Korean question remained unresolved, Stalin was reluctant to support the activities of the communist
party in South Korea or to engage in any direct Soviet agit-prop work in the American zone.”2
“The flaw in Soviet policy toward Korea was that while Stalin was not interested in extending Soviet control into
southern Korea, the highly nationalistic Korean communists whom Soviet occupation officials placed in power in
North Korea were quite determined to extend their authority over the rest of the country.” 3
Stalin was a facilitator rather than originator of war
Stalin wished to forestall an attack by South
Local / international factors:

Local war which drew in superpowers – view endorsed by Bruce Cumings, ‘Origins of the Korean War
o
“Bruce Cumings’s “Korean War,” a powerful revisionist history of America’s intervention in Korea. Beneath its
bland title, Mr. Cumings’s book is a squirm-inducing assault on America’s moral behavior during the Korean War, a
conflict that he says is misremembered when it is remembered at all. It’s a book that puts the reflexive antiAmericanism of North Korea’s leaders into sympathetic historical context.” 4
o
5


US policy of containment escalated civil war into Cold War
US, USSR & China used Korea to play out international differences
Stueck, William. "The Korean War As History:David Rees' Korea: The Limited War In Retrospect." Cold War International History Conference. 1998.
http://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/cold-war/conference/stueck.html
1
WEATHERSBY, KATHRYN. SOVIET AIMS IN KOREA AND THE ORIGINS OF THE KOREAN WAR, 1945-1950:NEW EVIDENCE FROM RUSSIAN ARCHIVES.
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Cold War International History Project. P.16, November 1993. Accessed March 28, 2013.
http://slantchev.ucsd.edu/courses/nss/documents/weathersby-soviet-aims-in-korea.pdf.
2
3
IBID, p.23
Dwight, Garner. "Carpet-Bombing Falsehoods About a War That’s Little Understood." New York Times, July 21, 2010. Accessed February 28, 2012.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/books/22book.html?_r=0
4
5
Leffler, Melvyn P., and Odd Arne. Westad. The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Truman’s foreign policy:

Domestic political pressure – Truman accused of being ‘soft’ on Communism

Red Scare & McCarthy witch hunt gathering popular support in US in early 1950s

Hawks in US administration put pressure on Truman to act decisively
o “Revisionists going all the way back to journalist I. F. Stone in 1952 and forward to Bruce Cumings in 1990
have advanced another hypothesis: the Americans, or at least key ones such as Secretary of State Dean Acheson,
either knew an attack was coming and did nothing to deter it because they needed a crisis abroad to implement their
plans for rearmament at home; and/or, for the very same reason, they actually tried to provoke it.” 6
International Perspectives:
Russia and the War:

From the beginning there were the Soviets—until they were written out of the history of the Korean War by their own hand
and by those Western historians who could not identify a bear even if he was eating out of one's garbage can. The Soviet
Union may not have started the war, but it certainly gave it a big bear hug and embraced it past Stalin's death and a period of
détente in the mid-1950s. The collapse of the Soviet Union has reopened the issue of Russian connivance and collaboration,
bolstered by tantalizing glimpses of communist internally oriented histories and supporting documents. Retired Russian
generals and diplomats have become regular participants in Korean War conferences, but Russian official histories are not
translated or widely available to Western scholars with the requisite language skills. Nevertheless, the Russian role as sponsor
continues to receive clarification and is not diminished. Early plans emerge in Eric Van Ree, Socialism in One Zone: Stalin's
Policy in Korea, 1945-1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Most recent admissions and revelations come from Soviet
veterans who have talked to the media or participated in international conferences, including pilots and air defense specialists.
Documentary evidence has come primarily from Communist Party and foreign ministry archives. Material from the armed
forces and KGB has been limited. Few documents have been translated and published, although Kathryn Weathersby —a
Russian historian at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.,—has taken up the grail of translation and
interpretation through the Bulletin of the Cold War International History Project and the working papers issued by the Wilson
Center. The British scholar Jon Halliday has also been active in interviewing Russian veterans.7
o
“It was not until 1989 that a Western scholar making extensive use of Russian language sources provided an indepth analysis of Soviet policy. In a work that received far less attention than it deserved, Erik Van Ree pointed out
that the lack of initiative from Moscow on Korea during World War II most likely reflected a belief that Soviet
bargaining power would improve after Germany was defeated and large numbers of Soviet forces moved from
Eastern Europe to northeast Asia. Even as late as the Potsdam conference in July 1945, Van Ree suggests, the
Soviets showed no sign of an interest in pinning down the Americans on Korea, believing as before that a waiting
game would produce a more advantageous position for them on the peninsula than the three- or four-power
trusteeship put forward earlier by the Americans.”8
Koreans on the War:

Treatments of the war written by Koreans and translated into English reflect a wide range of perspectives—except, of course,
in official (there is no other) accounts by North Korea. Among the South Korean sources, however, one can find various
degrees of outrage over intervention; remorse over the role of the Koreans themselves in encouraging foreign intervention;
deep sadness over the consequences of the war; pride and contempt over the military performance of Koreans; a tendency to
see conspiracy everywhere; and a yearning for eventual unification, peace, economic well-being and social justice. There is no
consensus on how to accomplish these goals, only the certainty that the war ruined the hope of a better Korea for the balance
of the century. The literature also reflects a search for innate order and the rule of law, against a pessimistic conclusion that
politics knows no moral order.9
6
Stueck, William. "The Korean War As History:David Rees' Korea: The Limited War In Retrospect." Cold War International History Conference. 1998.
http://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/cold-war/conference/stueck.html
7
Millet, Allan R. Historiography of the Korean War." Korean War 60th Anniversary. Accessed February 28, 2013.
http://koreanwar.defense.gov/factsheethistoriobiography.html.
8
Stueck, William. "The Korean War As History:David Rees' Korea: The Limited War In Retrospect." Cold War International History Conference. 1998.
http://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/cold-war/conference/stueck.html
9
Millet, Allan R. Historiography of the Korean War." Korean War 60th Anniversary. Accessed February 28, 2013.
http://koreanwar.defense.gov/factsheethistoriobiography.html.
China and the War:

The recent release or leakage of Chinese sources, especially the wartime correspondence of Mao Zedong, has resulted in a
new wave of scholarship by Hao Zrifan, Zhai Zhihai, Zhang Shu-gang, Chen Jian and Michael Hunt in both article and essay
form. These scholars add texture to such earlier works as Joseph Camilleri, Chinese Foreign Policy: The Maoist Era and Its
Aftermath (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1980); Tang Tsou, America's Failure in China: 1941-1950 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1963); and Melvin Gurtov and Byoong-Mo Hwang, China Under Threat: The Politics of Strategy and Diplomacy
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). The continued complexity of Sino-American relations (with Korean history
subsumed in this fatal and enduring attraction) continues to draw serious scholars to issues intricate and elusive.10
Japan and the War:

A major work by a Japanese scholar-journalist, Ryo Hagiwara, who covered North Korean politics for a Japanese communist
newspaper, places the onus for initiating the 1950 invasion on Kim Il Sung. In The Korean War: The Conspiracies by Kim Il
Sung and MacArthur (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju Press, 1993), he concludes that P'yongyang pursued a course of risky
opportunism that assumed reluctant support from China and Russia.11
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Assignment:

After reading all of the sections regarding historiography (see above) answer the following:
1. Where would you classify Chang and Halliday in regards to historiography? Justify your response
2. Which perspective do you identify with and why? Be analytical, cite evidence (‘Merica is not evidence)
3. Compare/Contrast the Berlin Crisis and the Korean War in regards to escalation of the Cold War.
4. Answer the following in an analytical paragraph: To what extent was the Korean War a turning point in the Cold
War?
10
Millet, Allan R. Historiography of the Korean War." Korean War 60th Anniversary. Accessed February 28, 2013.
http://koreanwar.defense.gov/factsheethistoriobiography.html.
11
IBID