Fatherland Liberation War
Although there remain murky aspects to the start of the Korean War, it now seems that the opening of conventional war on June 25, 1950 (thus, the term “6–25 War” that was used in South Korea; the North refers to the war as the Fatherland Liberation War), was mainly Kim’s decision, resisted by Stalin for many months and then acquiesced to in early 1950, and that the key enabling factor was the existence of as many as 100,000 troops with battle experience in China. When the Rhee regime, with help from US military advisers, severely reduced the guerrilla threat in the South in the winter of 1949–50, the civil war moved into a conventional phase. Kim clearly sought backing from Stalin for his assault, but documents from the Soviet and Chinese sides, which have appeared sporadically since the 1990s, suggest that he got more backing from China. The key meetings appear to have occurred in April 1950, when Kim made secret trips, first to Moscow and then to Beijing.
Had US forces not entered the war, the northern regime would have won easily; the southern army and state collapsed in a few days. As eventually occurred, however, it was Kim’s regime that the war nearly extinguished. The key year in which formal US policy moved from multilateral internationalism to unilateral containment in Korea was 1947. There were at this time severe global limits on US power, and the Truman administration could not publicly commit arms and money to Korea on the same scale as to Greece and Turkey.
But in secret US congressional testimony in early 1947, Acheson said that the United States had drawn the line in Korea, and he meant it. It was in pursuit of this basic containment policy that Acheson, by then secretary of state, urged Truman to commit military forces to save South Korea in June 1950.
But, as the fighting wore on in the summer of 1950, US policy changed once again. Had the United States simply sought to contain the communist thrust into the South, it would have restored the thirty-eighth parallel when it crushed the North Korean army. Instead, UN forces led by the United States under General Douglas MacArthur marched into North Korea and sought to destroy the northern regime and unify the peninsula under Syng-man Rhee’s rule. Again, declassified documentation now shows that this action reflected a change from containment to a new policy called rollback: as policy planners described it, the United States for the first time had the chance to displace and transform some communist real estate.
This thrust by UN forces in the fall of 1950, however, brought Chinese forces in on the northern side; these “volunteers” and a reinvigorated North Korean army pushed UN and South Korean forces out of the North within a month and caused a crisis in American domestic politics as backers of Truman fought with backers of MacArthur over the administration’s unwillingness to carry the war to China. Although the war lasted another two years, until an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, the outcome of early 1951 was definitive: a stalemate and a US commitment to containment that accepted the de facto reality of two Koreas — and that explains why US troops remain in South Korea today.
When the war finally ended, the North had been devastated by three years of bombing attacks that hardly left a modern building standing. Both Koreas had watched as a virtual holocaust ravaged their country and turned the vibrant expectations of 1945 into a nightmare. Furthermore, when Kim’s regime was nearly extinguished in the fall of 1950, the Soviets did very little to save it. China picked up the pieces, which the North Koreans have never forgotten.
From this moment on, it was clear that North Korea valued its relationship with China, whereas it dealt with the Soviet Union because it had to, not because it wanted to. And, in the end, South Korea did not sign the armistice agreement as a sign of disagreement over the decision not to pursue the war to the final defeat of the communist forces in the North.
The point to remember was that this was a civil war. The true tragedy was not the war itself, for a civil conflict solely among Koreans might have resolved the extraordinary tensions generated by colonialism and national division. The tragedy was that the war solved nothing: only the status quo ante was restored. The tensions and the problems remain.
The legacy of the Korean War remains unresolved. The Armistice Agreement recommended a political conference within three months of the ceasefire. The 1954 Geneva Conference was attended by the Republic of Korea, the DPRK, China, the Soviet Union, and 16 of the 17 states that had contributed forces under the United Nations Command. After two months, these talks collapsed and have not resumed. There has not been a comprehensive peace treaty. On both sides of the border, there remains fear of invasion and infiltration. In the DPRK, this fear has been instrumental in maintaining a state of emergency invoked to justify harsh governmental rule and its accompanying human rights violations. In this context, perceived political dissidents have been branded as spies in the service of foreign powers. Shortages in food and other essential means of survival have been blamed on a hostile outside world.
The war sacrifices were used to bolster the narrative of Kim Il-sung’s “forging of the nation”. In the DPRK, the authorized history remains that the Fatherland Liberation War was started by the United States, and that Kim Il-sung not only defended the nation but wrought devastation on the American military. This rhetoric continued for decades. For example, food aid from the United States provided during the mass starvation in the 1990s was reportedly explained to the population as war reparations.
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