The Korean War: A Historiography Alyssa Lizotte Senior Research Seminar Dr. Tona Hangen November 25, 2013 Lizotte 2 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 Lizotte 3 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 Lizotte 4 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 Lizotte 5 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 Lizotte 6 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. Lizotte 7 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. Lizotte 8 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. Lizotte 9 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. Lizotte 10 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. Lizotte 11 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. Lizotte 12 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. Lizotte 13 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. Lizotte 14 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. Lizotte 15 Bibliography Cumings, Bruce in Crossing the Line, BBC Documentary, 2006. Dwight, Garner. Carpet-Bombing Falsehoods about a War that’s little understood. New York Times, July 21, 2010. Accessed October 20, 2013. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/books/22book.html?_r=0 Halberstam, David. The Fifties. Random House Publishing: Toronto, Canada, 1993. Print. Korean War." History.com. A&E Television Networks. Accessed October 21, 2013.Web. http://www.history.com/topics/korean-war Leffler, Melvyn P., and Odd Arne. Westad. The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print. Millett, Allan. The Korean War: A 50 year Critical Historiography. Published Online: Ohio State University, 2008. Accessed October 20, 2013. Web. Rees, David, Book Review of: The Korean War: An International History. The National Interest, 1995. Stueck, William, Revisionism and the Korean War. Published Online: The University of Georgia, 2002. Stueck, William. The Korean War As History:David Rees' Korea: The Limited War In Retrospect." Cold War International History Conference. 1998. Accessed November 1, 2013. Web. http://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/coldwar/conference/stueck.html. US National Security Council, “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” April 14, 1950. Web. www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.html. Accessed November 1, 2013. Lizotte 16 Weathersby, Kathryn. Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War 1945-1950. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Cold War International History Project. P.16, November 1993. Accessed October 20, 2013. Web. http://slantchev.ucsd.edu/courses/nss/documents/weathersby-soviet-aims-in-korea.pdf Word Count: 4178