The Korean War: A Historiography
Alyssa Lizotte
Senior Research Seminar
Dr. Tona Hangen
November 25, 2013
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Introduction
. The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when the 38th parallel was crossed by 75,000
soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army. This boundary between the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea in the North, supported by the Soviet Union, and the pro-Western Republic of
Korea to the South represented something more than just coordinates on a map. In the post-war
world, Communism eventually began to rise within nations devastated from war and oppressed
by the foreign interests plaguing their own countries. As early as 1947, United States President
Harry S. Truman took measures to counteract Soviet influence, as the United States government
adopted the foreign policy of containment. To the people of Korea, the United States and Soviet
Russia, the crossing of a mere latitudinal coordinate would set the stage for a war that would
have lasting effects and connections to events of much larger proportions, with even greater
risks. The tension and arms race that would ultimately ensue between the Soviet Union and the
United States was something unparalleled by any other conflict the world has ever known.
The Korean War, and the Cold War that would envelope it, are historical events of such
depth and magnitude that informational text and historical data widely are available. Though the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the official end of the Cold War, it has been nearly
sixty years since the armistice of the Korean War, and yet the conflicts still persists in our
modern world. Numerous historical accounts on both of these events exist on a wide variety of
platforms (i.e. print, websites, online blogs, journal articles and databases) while Korea’s
continuous internal dispute creates new content, data and perspective on the matter frequently.
The cultural, ideological and racial differences between the American, Korean and Russian
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people are fairly obvious; making the primary documents, firsthand accounts and critiques of
historians from each nation so valuable and compelling.
Though the conflicts of North and South Korea are still making history today, studying
past interpretations of these histories will warrant a greater understanding of our world and its
future. Two approaches, a traditional and a new, “revisionist,” approach have surfaced among
Korean War historians, making a seemingly divided history on the matter. Debate on the origin
and causes, the nature of the war itself and the aftermath are embedded with the work of
historians supporting each approach. Though my historiographical collection of the Korean War
is not necessarily organized chronologically, the traditionalist and revisionist approaches have
been developed and expanded upon over time. This paper will explore each historiographical
approach to the Korean War, using synthesis and relevant scholarly literature to expose the
arguments and themes composing each school of thought.
The Korean War
The Korean peninsula had been a part of the Japanese empire since approximately 1876
with the Japan-Korea Treaty, deeming Korea a protected state of Japan. However after the events
of World War II, it was up to the Americans and the Soviet Union to determine the next course
of action. As the 1940s came to a close, two separate states had formed, the anti-communist
South led by Dictator Syngman Rhee, and the communist North by Dictator Kim II Sung. Both
sides wanted to pursue efforts to cross and obtain the opposite side of the 38th parallel, with
nearly ten thousand men being slaughtered in border skirmishes before the war even began. The
invasion by North Korea on June 25, 1950 came as a surprise to American officials, and many
feared that war would represent something much greater than a border dispute. Not intervening
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was not an option for the Americans, where a North/Soviet victory could become a world war on
Communism.
In April 1950, the National Security Council issued the NSC-68, a report that mentions
the United States use of “containment” to prevent or cease communist expansion in any area
vulnerable. It was apparent that the fighting in Korea was representative of a global struggle, a
proxy war that would amount to the Soviets preserving Communism and the United States trying
to banish it. As North began to reach the Southern Capital of Seoul, American troops prepared
for war. The armies of the North were well-trained, highly disciplined and equipped with
excellent weapons and materials. This drastically contrasted with Rhee’s men in the South, who
were scared and confused by battle. Also, disease, illness and malnutrition were common living
conditions for soldiers stationed in South Korea, making the North ultimately more successful at
first. By the end of the summer of 1950, President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur
decided to change the tide of the war from a South-Korean defensive strategy, to an offensive
strategy of liberation in the North.
MacArthur’s method proved to be successful, eventually pushing the North Koreans out
of Seoul and back to their side of the parallel. As Americans advanced and began to approach the
Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China, Chinese leader Mao Zedong sent troops
to North Korea and warned the Americans to keep away from their borders unless they wished
for a full-scale war with China. President Truman and his advisors did not want to provoke a war
with China, a conflict that would surely prompt further Soviet aggression, overall destruction and
the potential use of atomic weapons. General MacArthur did not believe in this guarded
approach and even referred to the lack of total-war as appeasing the communists. Truman fired
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MacArthur for insubordination after MacArthur sent a letter advocating war with China was sent
to House of Representatives member Joseph Martin, and subsequently leaked to the press.
In July 1951, President Truman and his new military personnel began peace talks at
Panmunjom. Though fighting still continued along the 38th parallel as the negotiations were in
progress, both sides were willing to accept a ceasefire. The North and the South were not in
disagreement in regards to the boundary line, but could not agree on whether or not prisoners of
war should be repatriated. After more than two years of negotiations, an armistice was signed on
July 27, 1953, under which POWs were allowed decide themselves where they would stay. The
new boundary line was near the 38th parallel but gave the South 1,500 square miles of extra land,
in addition to the creation of a two mile-wide demilitarized zone that is still present today. The
Korean War was relatively short but resulted in the deaths of five million people, with more than
half of the casualties being civilians. This permanent partition of the once-united Korean people
would shape the events to come in our modern world.
Almost directly following World War II and especially after the events in Korea, the
relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was filled with tension. The Soviet
Union’s resentment of the American interventionist approach to international relations and their
postwar expansion into Eastern Europe manifested America’s fear of communism right before
their eyes. In such a hostile atmosphere, an unspoken rivalry occurred where a race to create
nuclear arms, a race to space and colonial tensions in the third world ensued. The Cold War
would last nearly forty years and would encompass eight Presidential Administrations, making it
one of the longest conflicts in American history. The deterioration of the economic and political
power of the Soviet Union, in addition to Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost reform policy, would
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serve as the Soviet Union’s demise. The destroying of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the final
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 represented the official end of the Cold War.
The Revisionists
Many recent historical pieces written about the Korean War contain citations from the
2008 text, The Korean War: A 50 year Critical Historiography, written by Allan R. Millett.
Millett surveys the Korean War from the perspectives of United States, the Soviet Union and
Korea. He opens with the disclaimer,
Just how one views the Korean War depends upon where one stands in space, cultural
time and Cold War historiography. In the United States the war pales as a national trauma
beside the war in Vietnam. For the Russians and the Chinese the Korean War seemed
essential to preserving the Chinese Revolution and disrupting a growing JapaneseAmerican rapprochement. The war to Koreans does not look the same as it does to all
participants. It terms of war aims, the divided Koreans had turned against one another in
a complex struggle to create a new Korea built upon political wreckage that had dated to
the 1870s.
1
Right away Millett is conscious of the fact that war in Korea meant something entirely
different for all of the parties involved, making the motives and future interpretation from each
nation varied. Millett then goes on to describe the traditional/orthodox view of the Korean War,
where responsibility is given to the North, a view he notes was established by British author
David Rees in his Korea: Limited War analysis of 1964. This traditional view is characterized
also by the notion that Truman’s intervention was to protect the Koreans from Communist
aggression and that the United States feared Communist Expansion after the 1949 Chinese
Revolution, through the understanding of the domino theory. A more modern, revisionist view of
1
Allan Millett. The Korean War: A 50 year Critical Historiography. (Ohio State University, 2008), 2-3.
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the Korean War was endorsed by Russian historian and author Kathryn Weathersby through her
article, “Stalin, Kim il Sung & the Prelude to War,” from the 1995 Cold War National History
Project, based out of Washington D.C. The revisionist approach by Weathersby suggests that
Stalin was too cautious to prompt a war in Korea, and that he was simply a facilitator rather than
a creator of the proxy war seen in Korea. Bruce Cumings, another historian supportive of the
revisionist approach, wrote it was a “local war which drew in superpowers,” in his Origins of the
Korean War book published in 1981. Cumings attributes the escalation of Korean civil war into
the Cold War because of the United States containment policy and promotes the idea of a proxy
war through the United States, Soviet Union and China, playing out their own international
differences through Korea. Many revisionists also believe that Truman was initially “soft” on
communism, and that the Red Scare and McCarthyism promoted Truman to act decisively. 2
The Soviet Union may not have started the [Korean] 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. 3
Most recent additions to the Russian side of the Korean War come from Soviet veterans
who have talked to the media or participated in international conferences. Documentary evidence
from the Communist Party and foreign ministry archives have been viewed openly, however
material from the armed forces and KGB has been limited. Few documents have been translated
2
3
Allan Millett. The Korean War: A 50 year Critical Historiography. (Ohio State University, 2008)
Allan Millett. The Korean War: A 50 year Critical Historiography. (Ohio State University, 2008), 24-25.
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and published, although Kathryn Weathersby has begun translation and interpretation through
the Bulletin of the Cold War International History, a project issued by the Woodrow Wilson
Center in Washington D.C. The British scholar Jon Halliday has also been active in interviewing
Russian veterans, though I could not locate any published of such nature.
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. Much of the
text also reflects a search for innate order and the rule of law, against a pessimistic
conclusion that politics knows no moral order.4
Millett’s book references nineteen different historians and authors with multiple texts
derived from each. Millett notes the date of publication, core themes and ideas within each
author’s work, in addition to noting their own personal backgrounds and potential bias. Millet’s
work summarizes nearly fifty -years of Korean War historiography in fewer than five hundred
pages of text, making his work concise and valuable for the organization of future
historiographical arguments.
Traditionalists
William Stueck, another historian cited in Millett, is explicitly self-described as a
“traditional” Korean War historian. Stueck has written an assortment of books, articles and
4
Allan Millett. The Korean War: A 50 year Critical Historiography. (Ohio State University, 2008), 30.
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critiques about the Korean War, most published through the Ohio State University and the
University of Georgia. In his article, “Revisionism and the Korea War,” from 2002, Stueck
references many of the revisionist authors cited in Millet and attempts to point out and correct
any “flaws” in their argument,
What is revisionism as it applies to the Korean War? First let me say that I do not regard
revisionism as a pejorative label. John Lewis Gaddis and Bruce Cumings, leading
scholars on opposite sides of the Cold War historiographical divide, both have been heard
to complain of old categories - and I happen to think that they are both misguided. The
old categories of traditionalist (or orthodox) have their limits, but they remain accurate
and useful in placing many scholars on broad issues. The fact that in the largest sense I
disagree - in degree at least - with these arguments has nothing to do with my use of the
label revisionist. That usage simply has to do with the time frame within which the
arguments became prominent among American scholars. It so happens that this was over
a generation after the war began and that the arguments challenged the views that the war
was largely international in nature and that the American participation in it was - with at
least one prominent exception - defensive and wise.5
Stueck attributes the revisionist approach to modern criticisms that he feels are skewed
because they are being created so long after the conflict occurred. Stueck supports some aspects
of the revisionist approach because it does acknowledge the “dark side” of the United States’
role in the conflict, something that is seldom mentioned by American historians. The “ignorance,
arrogance, racism and brutality” of the Americans are key in understanding the truth about the
Korean War, and Stueck feels that the misguided perspective of many historians is as a result of
that factor not being mentioned in many historical texts. Though Stueck believes it is important
5
William Stueck, Revisionism and the Korean War. (The University of Georgia, 2002), 1.
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to take the shortcomings of the United States into consideration, he believes that the revisionist
historians dwell too much on the mistakes of the Americans prior to the war, when they should
be focusing their attention on the mistakes of the Americans during the war. In an earlier work,
The Korea War as a History¸1998, Stueck says,
In this light the greatest mistakes of the United States were not the intervention in Korea
in 1945 or 1950 or the support for collaborators with the Japanese, but the withdrawal of
American troops in 1949 and the crossing of the 38th parallel in October of the following
year. The Korean War as we know it could have been avoided, even in a divided country;
or it could have been far more limited in duration and destructiveness. Once the conflict
was in motion action could have been taken to halt the turmoil in Korea. Korea also
might have been ruled in its entirety by Kim Il Sung, and that is a possibility the
revisionists need to contemplate along with their spirited condemnation of the United
States.6
Much of Stueck’s work is notorious for critiquing the revisionist approach. In his earlier
work he mentions historian Kathryn Weathersby, and in his latter he mentions Bruce Cummings
and John Lewis Gaddis – all revisionist historians. The revisionist approach is more modern
theory of interpreting the Korean War, where the origin and reasoning for war drastically differs
from that of the traditionalist approach.
The traditional approaches to the war were created primarily by historians who were alive
during the time period and were written in the decades that immediately followed. David Rees, a
traditional historian, is often mentioned by Stueck, for his 1964 text, Korea: Limited War. Millett
also cited Rees’s work, where his concept of the blame being placed on the North, is a general
guideline and framework for most traditional approaches. In 1995, Rees produced a book review
6
William Stueck, The Korean War as a History, (National Archives of the Cold War International History
Conference, 1998), 5.
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on William Stueck’s, The Korean War: An International History of 1994, where he admits that
his analysis of the Korean War, and the Cold War even, has been rigid in the past,
Any assessment of the Korean War is a complicated business. During the prolonged crisis
of the Korean War, the United States transformed a paper commitment to the defense of
Western Europe into reality, "demonstrating an intention to keep major forces on the
continent permanently and taking the lead in coordinating their operations with NATO
partners." Without the Western response to the North Korean attack "a tragedy of far
greater magnitude might have occurred. In my early years of writing I withheld the idea
that the United States played a role in the initiation and development of the crisis, though
as time passes on I am opening my eyes to the possibility. 7
Though Rees and Stueck are both traditional historians, their approaches have been
slightly different. Rees goes on to discuss how many Korean War histories focus on the events
that caused the outbreak of war, and he applauds Stueck’s analysis of the war as a whole. Rees
notes that his initial belief formulated in 1964, that the North is to blame, still holds true.
However, after reading Stueck’s work, he now understands how Western involvement shaped the
events that would follow. Much of Rees’ work was written prior to the end of the Cold War, a
factor that may very well have made his traditional approach different from Stueck, who has the
benefit of hindsight in regards to some of the events discussed.
Revising the Revisionists
Revisionist historian, Bruce Cumings, has also published many research texts regarding
the Korean War, starting with his 1981, Origins of the Korean War. Cumings is the History
Department Chair at the University of Chicago, has appeared on CNN as an expert historian and
is even featured in the 2006 documentary, Crossing the Line. The film is centered around US
7
David Rees, Book Review of: The Korean War: An International History. (The National Interest, 1995) 8.
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Army member, James Dresnok, who is currently living in North Korea, after fighting against
North Korea in the war. Cumings comments in the documentary about the origins of the Korean
War, views he also discusses in several videos available on YouTube. In Crossing the Line,
Cummings described the state of affairs in Korea prior to 1950:
By Mid-1942, however, South Korean State Department planners began to worry that
Korea in the wrong hands might threaten the security of the postwar pacific. North Korea
had most of the heavy industry concentrated there, put in place from Japan, and inherited
all that after the US and Soviet Union took over. The North started out ahead of the
game, where South Korea’s industry did not flourish until the 1960s. There was quite an
imbalance between these economic regimes, something that would affect the war
immensely.8
Cumings approach, like that of many revisionist historians, considers factors outside of
what is typically considered when discussing the Korean War. Cumings and the revisionists in
general, believe that the economy and state of affairs in Korea prior to the division and
introduction of the United States and Soviet Union is a crucial part of the story, despite the fact
that many historians feel that the story does not begin until 1950. Cumings has also studied the
idea that ethnic racism towards the Asian people has hindered, consciously or subconsciously,
the study of the Korean War.
Both traditional and revisionist historians contain arguments plausible in terms of to
Korean War history. Though the beginning of Korean War historiography was solely
traditionalist, the introduction of revisionist historians in the 1980s has seemingly “changed the
8
Bruce Cumings in Crossing the Line, ( BBC Documentary, 2006), 34:58.
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game” for Korean War history. Allan R. Millett’s work in 2008 is cited in almost any Korean
War historiographical text since, where his work paves the way for a new age of historians.
Revisionist approaches to studying the Korean War tie in innovative factors that have been
uncovered after years of studying the topic, where the traditional approach takes the facts and
knowledge derived right after the event to formulate an opinion. Millett notes in his text that
there are “two Korean Wars” that historians study: the Korean War as a civil war, and the
Korean War as an international war. One of the crucial determining factors in whether or not a
historian is a revisionist or a traditionalist, is what side you are on. Millett notes that historians
seeking to produce an accurate and unique argument must combine properties from each
approach, in order to produce new and innovative history on the subject matter.
The Korean War is one of the most popular historical topics of all time. If you want to get
noticed as an author, or for your work to be deemed an official history, you have to
separate yourself from what is already out there. Within the last fifty-years there has been
numerous information presented on Korea, mostly all written in a generic context. This
fifty-year historiography was produced to organize and explain these productions, to aid
myself and other historians in their future endeavors.9
Conclusion
The Korean War has been discussed, studied and analyzed by historians for decades.,
with hundreds of thousands of informational outlets are currently available. Though the conflicts
of North and South Korea are still making history today, studying past interpretations of these
histories will warrant a greater understanding of our world and its future. It is no secret that
9
Allan Millett. The Korean War: A 50 year Critical Historiography. (Ohio State University, 2008), Foreword.
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historians use previous work to build off of when making their own conclusions on any given
topic, making historiography essential for the craft of history. The traditionalist approach
contained some of the first analyses ever created on the Korean War and established the content
and frameworks for future historians. As more modern revisionists began to study the Korean
War and non-traditional ideas were considered, the results were cutting-edge and deemed radical.
Now, sixty years later, with more information available than ever before, it is up to historians to
take information from each approach, and forge a new path of history.
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Bibliography
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Dwight, Garner. Carpet-Bombing Falsehoods about a War that’s little understood.
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Korean War." History.com. A&E Television Networks. Accessed October 21, 2013.Web.
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Millett, Allan. The Korean War: A 50 year Critical Historiography. Published Online:
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November 1, 2013.
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Weathersby, Kathryn. Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War 1945-1950.
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