South Korea was created from thin air by US generals
The history of Korea until the partition and the challenges the US poses to reunification.
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In May 1945, Berlin surrendered to the Soviets as Hitler, like a proper coward, shot himself rather than accept his judgment.
Back in February of that year, when capitulation seemed imminent, the USA and the USSR met together to discuss the next steps of the war. For the USSR, the capitulation of Germany was the end of the hostilities: they were only at war against Germany and their remaining Axis allies in Europe. But the USA entered the war through Japan, and had been at war with them since 1941. The USSR wasn’t, though the situation at the border was tense. Japan had occupied what they called Manchukuo (Manchuria) from China, which expanded their border with Russia noticeably. From this, border conflicts ensued — but no declaration of war had been made.
As part of these February discussions, the USSR agreed to join the war against Japan in the 3 months following Germany’s surrender.
This was a good deal for the USSR, as Russia had been at war with Japan before under the Tsar and the situation at the border was uneasy. Moreover, communist movements had existed in Asia for decades: in China, the communist party had been fighting a civil war since the early 20th century. In Korea, a young man named Kim Il Sung was starting to get noticed. He had been agitating for Korean independence from Japan since high school. In 1932, at the young age of 20, he founded his first guerilla unit.
Korea had been occupied by Japan since the late 19th century, but it was only in 1910 that the territory was finally incorporated into the Empire — becoming a vassal state of its emperor. There, the Japanese committed massacres and enslaved the population, with the intent to settle their own citizens into Korea. It’s in this context that many Koreans took up arms to fight for the independence of their country. Kim Il Sung himself was born only two years after the creation of Choson, the Korean vassal state to Japan.
Kim Il Sung’s unit found such success in their resistance tactics that by 1936, a special division led by Nozoe Shotoku was created, ordered with a single task: to kill Kim Il Sung.
As history shows, they never succeeded.
The struggles between Korea and China were intertwined. Both were resisting Japanese occupation, and both had a large communist movement fighting against the occupier. Despite the USSR having lost over 20 million people to the Nazis (most of them civilians) and being war-weary, they were also victorious over Germany and thus in a position to relocate to a single front. Their soldiers had gained much experience, especially against a technological peer: in Asia, Japan had mostly been fighting guerilla units. The Republic of China, which at the time was China’s recognized government, was more interested in using their resources (including leased US weapons and artillery) to fight against the communists rather than the Japanese — a mistake that cost them the trust of the people and rallied the Chinese to the Communist Party instead of the Kuomintang.
It took the Red Army only two weeks to liberate all of Manchuria and reach the Korean border. There were a few reasons for this: Soviet generals had pioneered new doctrines of warfare during the war against the Nazis. As we also saw, Soviet soldiers were also experienced by this point, while Imperial Japanese soldiers in Manchuria were mostly reservists. The resistance in Manchuria had also paved a lot of the way with their fight deep in occupied territory for the past few decades.
Still, this doesn’t diminish the achievement. While the Red Army was advancing in Manchuria and towards Korea, the US was fighting for islands in the Pacific. They were nowhere close to reaching Tokyo, much less Korea. At best, they could firebomb it with their bomber planes.
The US didn’t invite the USSR to the war because they wanted to share the spoils or have a good time with the boys. In May 1942, the British Joint Planning Staff said plainly that USSR participation was of the utmost importance: their aerial and naval bases in the theater were sorely needed, as the US was stretching itself thin in tiny atolls, capturing them one by one in naval invasions.
This posed a problem to US interests. They had miscalculated: armed with the nuclear bomb, the USSR wasn’t needed anymore for their plans to occupy Japan and align it towards their interests.
In July 1945, Stalin received a message from emperor Hirohito himself: Japan was willing to negotiate a peace deal, though unconditional surrender was out of the question. In this endeavor, the emperor said, he was approaching the USSR to act as a mediator — even as the USSR had not yet joined the war!
This expedited the decision of the USA to use the nuclear bomb not once, but twice. The idea was that if they could pull off this show of force, it would do two things:
The Red Army would back off from invading the Japanese islands, as their own soldiers could be put in jeopardy, and
It would force Japan to surrender in the United States’ favor fearing another bomb before the USSR came too close to the emperor’s palace [much like they had done in Germany].
The bombs were thus detonated on August 6 and 9 — the same day the Red Army started the liberation of Manchuria — over two Japanese cities. The USA didn’t want to share Japan; and indeed they didn’t. While Russia was able to regain territory they had lost in the war of 1905, that’s all they received from Japan. It was the US who installed an interim government, who forced a new constitution upon the Japanese state and who made it into one of their many properties in the Pacific.
On August 14, only a few days after the USSR launched their attacks in Manchuria and the Sakhalin and Kuril islands, Japan surrendered. They accepted the prior Potsdam Declaration, drafted in July 1945 by the US, UK and Republic of China. Notably absent from it was the USSR.
In Western mythology, the atomic bombs were dropped to prevent needless loss of good old American lives, as the “wily” and “fanatical” Japanese, who considered their emperor a “living god,” needed a “shock” to wake them up from their own propaganda and realize the war was lost.
But the timeline of events confirms that Japan feared not the atomic bomb, but the Red Army. To surrender to the Potsdam declaration (which put an end to the Empire of Japan and their imperial ambitions) was simply a bid by Japan to avoid an even worse deal if the USSR was able to get a seat at the negotiation tables. The Potsdam declaration was dated in July 1945; the atomic bombs were dropped only in August. The time elapsed between these two events show that the USA could have drafted an even worse deal for Japan; they were not in any rush: they had started the naval invasion of Okinawa, [The Ryukyu Islands] and their next step was going to be the Japanese islands themselves. The war could have easily lasted into September, October or November.
But for the US to delay the surrender so they could draft a better deal would only give the USSR power. Once they had liberated Manchuria in two weeks, Korea was next. In one week? Three weeks? The Soviets would have inevitably been part of this new peace deal. Thus, the US had to accept Japan’s surrender as soon as it was announced and on whatever (losing) terms Japan announced, and the Potsdam declaration was accepted for this reason as it already existed.
In this way, both states displayed a bit of authority and power. Japan said “We will only accept Potsdam and nothing else” (in August). The US could have refused — “no, you had your chance to accept Potsdam and refused. We’ll keep fighting”. But this was not in their interest: even if the USA could have received more concessions from Japan, they would also have had to give concessions to the USSR who entered the war after the Potsdam Declaration and so would have dictated terms as well. In this way the US was perhaps not gaining as much as they would have wanted from Japan, but they avoided losing terms to the USSR.
The partition of Korea
This lengthy introduction paved the way for the main topic: the occupation and later partition of Korea.
As we mentioned earlier, Korea had been occupied by Japan since the late 19th century. When the Red Army reached the Korean border from Manchuria on August 15, an agreement was made with the US military: they would both occupy one side of the 38th parallel militarily, up until the time Korea held elections and would thus become independent.
The partition was only ever meant to be a military partition, not an administrative or governing partition. It did not intend for the occupying powers to make laws, take care of Korean affairs, etc. Their job was to dismantle the Japanese occupation and ensure that Japanese settlers return to their country without causing trouble.
The Red Army obeyed this distinction. By all accounts, Koreans had no major problems with the Red Army being present on their land. Kim Il Sung himself was a major in the Red Army since 1942. They kept to themselves and respected the Koreans.
This was not the same story south of the 38th parallel.
When US troops finally arrived in Korea a month after the armistice, they left much of the old system in place, even as the Japanese were leaving the country. To govern in their place up until then, they asked the previous Japanese government — the same one that committed massacres against Koreans — to keep governing in their absence.
Some of the massacres the Japanese committed took decades to be proven. To this day, the Japanese government still denies them — and every other crime they committed during World War 2 and prior. Of course, locals and Koreans knew about these massacres and passed down the stories through the generations. But “proving” the allegations was a different beast.
During Japanese rule, Korean women were routinely kidnapped by the Imperial Army and sent to brothels, forced into prostitution for the Japanese army. It is reported that some “willingly” entered these contracts, which is a dishonest reading — they were forced by the dire conditions of colonial rule to sign these contracts: the other option was starving to death as all food was being hoarded, or be beaten until they signed. Some people use these contracts to deny the existence of comfort women.
One of their often-used method of killing was to bury civilians alive in the earth. The Japanese used this both in Korea and in China. I remember reading a comic drawn about such a massacre several years back, but I’m unfortunately unable to find it again (If you remember it, please send me the link and I’ll update the article.) The only reason some of those massacres are even known nowadays is because just one person survived and lived to tell their story.
In Japanese-occupied Korea, most rice was grown to be exported to Japan, leaving very little food for the locals: their own rice was being rationed out to them. This was immediately reversed in the Soviet zone where they introduced their methods of collectivization, but not taken care of in the US zone: the old colonial masters still demanded their shares of rice in the south. Doubly so as they they knew the clock was ticking, and they sought to get away with as much loot as they could, exporting and smuggling it out of the country and into the Japanese market.
This almost caused a famine and the US had to send tons of grain urgently to avoid it. It’s estimated that in the south in 1945, all the rice harvest had been sent out of Korea, with a quarter of it being smuggled out on the black market (page 7 in this PDF). When the people in the south urged the military government to do something about this, their response was as follows:
In a democracy the free play of supply and demand must be allowed to operate unhampered; any control imposed on that free play would operate against the democratic system of government.
To give a sense of perspective, Koreans received higher rice rations under Japanese colonial rule! By 1946, the deteriorating food situation pushed the US occupation to revive the old Japanese colonial system, which resulted in farmers being arrested and beaten for not meeting their quotas. At the same time, South Korea imported rice from the North — both the Soviet zone and Manchuria.
General MacArthur notably proclaimed himself to be the dictator and sole holder of power in Korea. His Proclamation No. 1 stated black-on-white that
[Article I] All powers of Government over the territory of Korea south of 38 degrees north latitude and the people thereof will be for the present exercised under my authority . . . [Article III] All persons will obey promptly all my orders and orders issued under my authority.
Furthermore, he proclaimed that all civil servants (from Japan) would keep their jobs. He made English the official language of the southern part of Korea. He made all acts of resistance illegal and punishable — despite the Koreans resisting against Japanese occupation since 1910 and still effectively living under it.
In MacArthur’s Korea, Japanese colonists and Korean collaborators were swiftly brought back into the police force, instead of creating a fully-Korean police. All popular movements, that sought unification with the north, were repressed.
The occupation of Korea from both countries would last for a few years. By then, Koreans were starting to grow impatient and wanted independence. Thus, the USSR started to withdraw and by 1948, Korea north of the 38th parallel was free and mostly independent. The collectivization methods had been a success and most land had been reappropriated by Koreans.
The problem was they needed a government, and for that the newly created UN had Korea agree to hold elections.
The original plan was that Korea would hold elections for the entirety of its territory. Korea had been one for thousands of years, and the partition at the 38th was only a demarcation for military occupation, not one meant to ever create new governments (hence why the USSR did not hold its own elections in the north but withdrew).
As the first ever elections in Korea were nearing, a problem arose for the US: the communists and Kim Il Sung were clearly set to win. At best for them, they would be part of a ruling coalition.
This shouldn’t have been a huge surprise. The US mismanagement in the south left people resentful. Some of the people the US partition promoted or aligned themselves with were collaborators during the occupation. People knew this, and they remembered this. They couldn’t do anything about it, but they knew. Kim Il Sung and his Worker’s Party meanwhile had the trust of the people.
Letting the WPK win over Korea would have meant a socialist Korea, something the US didn’t want — this was why they helped the Republic of China originally, after all, and why they did not want to let the USSR in on the negotiations with Japan.
Thus MacArthur proposed something that he was allowed to do on the reason that he gave himself the powers to do this: the south would hold its own elections. For this, they would rely on the newly-established UN, which at the time was a US puppet (some would argue this is still the case today but that’s a matter for another time).
The USA led a resolution in the UN to hold their own elections in the South, which would create two different countries. The UN swiftly agreed to this resolution.
This was not well-received by Koreans living in the south, as one might expect. First beacuse they didn’t want to separate their own country in two, and secondly because they didn’t want the UN to meddle in their internal governance. Unrest grew and it became increasingly clear to Koreans that in the south they had traded one occupier for the other. Protests started. Uprisings followed. Koreans had fought for independence for decades, this was not new to them.
Keep in mind that this happened between 1948 and 1950: the USSR had withdrawn already and left the north of Korea to take care of its own affairs. What the Koreans wanted was to elect a People’s Assembly from all over the country, which would be tasked with approving a constitution and establishing a democratic government.
The only way elections in the South could happen was by first putting down these uprisings, and then getting rid of every other popular leader. Other nationalist, capitalist or rightist figures were not necessarily open to the idea of a divided country; this was against their interests, that of being able to make profits.
All those uprisings, however, were swiftly put down. Perhaps they were not organized enough, or too sporadic. The most famous of these massacres is probably the Jeju massacre, even though it only became known decades after the fact. In 1948, following the elections in the south, the island of Jeju picked up arms with a demand: to become part of North Korea. 60,000 people were killed by US Marines and local police, out of a population of 300,000 on the island. The Jeju uprising led to other riots and attempted revolutions that were similarly massacred.
Competition was either killed or boycotted the elections leaving only, by default, the hand-picked US candidate running.
Syngman Rhee was a US-educated nobody. Very tellingly, Rhee was his last name but he is usually named under his first name + last name (instead of the other way around in Korean customs) due to the length of time he spent in the US.
While Korea was fighting for its liberation, he was studying in the US. He was the perfect person to pluck out of an Ivy League university and rule the new country. His term lasted from the 1948 election to 1960 and was mostly remembered for corruption, autocratic rule (in this case ignoring laws and the constitution) and the wanton killing of anyone who seemed to harbor anti-Rhee thoughts. This was confirmed by hundreds of South Korean NGOs.
South Korea has never been a thing. It did not exist historically and was created for political purposes by outside interests. South Korea — also known as the Republic of Korea — was born outside the will of the Korean people and only to serve US interests in Asia — a location that is nowhere near the United States, but very near to… Korea.
One could easily (but mistakenly) argue that the DPRK was never meant to be a country either. But Kim Il Sung won the free and secret ballot elections that the Koreans wanted; it was the decision of the US to not recognize (and participate) in those elections and hold their own puppet elections instead.
Korean civil war
Conflict boiled over in 1950. After the two separate elections, the Korean people still wished for a unified Korea. Border conflicts happened at the 38 parallel, with raids launched by South Korea into the north.
In 1950, on the orders of John Allen Dulles, South Korea breached the 38th parallel and invaded North Korea. South Korea started the war — or more accurately, the US did. The term invasion is kind of a misnomer; while the South Korean forces were ordered around by a foreign power, a nation can’t really invade itself. Thus, the Korean War began as a civil war.
This proved disastrous to the US puppet of South Korea. This timelapse puts it into perspective:
Not even three months into the conflict, the DPRK forces had pushed their adversaries to Daegu in the southeast, and was set to win. This prompted the US to urgently deploy GIs to Korea, and make an appeal to the UN (which at the time was barely a few years old, created by the victors of World War 2) to deploy troops too. This was the point at which the civil war turned into an invasion.
It was only with this help that South Korea, now the Republic of Korea, managed to push back. Once again, the United States meddled in the affairs of another country and caused millions of death until they could get their way.
The DPRK forces quickly withdrew from the front and were pushed back to the Chinese border. All of this was still in 1950. This was when China entered the war on the DPRK’s side, providing volunteer troops and aid. Famously, Mao Zedong’s own son, Mao Anying, died in this war. Later, the USSR provided troops and equipment as well to the DPRK.
By 1951, the front settled at the 38th parallel. It would remain there almost unchanged until a ceasefire was negotiated in 1953. Not peace — a peace deal has still not been signed, as the US prevents it at every turn. Famously, both North and South Korea were making great progress in dialogues held in the early 2000s, but in 2003 President Bush proclaimed the DPRK to be part of his “Axis of Evil” along with Iran and Iraq (which they had just invaded), which prompted the DPRK to pull out and restart their nuclear programme — a condition for the dialogue.
As per Curtis LeMay’s own words (he was the general in charge of the invasion’s air force), they killed up to 20% of the population living in North Korea at the time. Again, the words are very precise: they said population, not soldiers. 75% of Pyongyang was destroyed. 635 thousand tons of explosives were dropped on the north.
To this day, Korea exists in a stalemate. After the war, the US didn’t seem very interested in solidifying their economy in the south. Until the early 1980s, South Korea was famously a succession of dictatorships with no free elections, funneling money to a succession of dictators and their friends. Syngman Rhee fled in 1960 to Hawaii after unrest grew in the South, and a president was appointed for a few months before being ousted in a military coup.
The next “President” to follow after the coup was Park Chung Hee. He had been a collaborator during the War, even serving in the Imperial Japanese Army in China. His Japanese name was Okamoto Minoru. His rule was even worse than Rhee’s, lasting until 1979. In many aspects, he was more Japanese than Korean, even bringing originally Japanese reforms to Korea.
For most of its history, South Korea was poorer than the north. This isn’t to say that was the case before 1950, however. Korea is a very mountainous country and the center of agriculture was, historically, the southern portion of the peninsula. However, their economy was predicated on A- pleasing the USA and B- funneling money to corrupt dictators. Hence South Korea was a failure of a capitalist experiment until the US pumped billions into it in the 70s under Park Chung Hee to create the poster child of capitalism, which we now associate with K-pop and hi-tech (Samsung, Hyundai, etc.)
These companies are known as Chaebol in Korea, and are the direct descendents of Korean noble families turned Japanese collaborators. They received, and continue to receive, huge subsidies from the South Korean government as they are deemed too big to fail.
South Korea certainly looks successful from the outside. It has big, shiny buildings, and their music is now a worldwide sensation, full of pretty faces that dance and sing perfectly to a catchy pop beat. The numbers do not support this facade, however. South Korea leads the world in number of suicides. Violent misogyny is a very big problem in the country: just the other day, a woman was attacked by a man at her place of work as he thought she was a feminist. Koreans work long hours; the 5-day work week was only introduced in 2004. After all, someone needs to prop up the chaebols. While the law states that the contractual work week should be 40 hours, it more often is set at 52 hours a week, the maximum legal limit.
This “success story” of South Korean capitalism was also made possible by exacerbating the conditions in the North. In 1991, the USSR was overthrown and the union broke up violently. The first few years that followed were dire for Russia (I talked about this here) and all of their allies, who relied heavily on them, entered into a difficult economic situation too. In the DPRK, this translated into a famine, a period known as the Arduous March. It is recounted that in these years, many Koreans moved through the Chinese border daily to trade and find work. There, the CIA had set up agents to offer a deal to travelling Korean citizens: they would give them a bag of rice in exchange for each ox’s tail they brought them. With the breakdown of the Soviet Union and fuel shortages, Koreans in the DPRK went back to using farm animals to work the fields. Without his tail, an ox can’t stabilize itself and becomes useless for farm work. A bag of rice lasts maybe 3 days; an ox lasts a dozen harvest seasons. By doing this, the CIA wilfully and purposely worsened the crisis in the north.
To this day, the US maintains a military presence on the DMZ, the zone separating the borders of the two countries. Twice a year, they conduct a mock invasion of the north with the ROK Army. The Republic of Korea’s army is copied from the US structure and was created by the US military occupation: they have four-star generals, they have a Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Republic of Korea (versus a Joints Chiefs of Staff of the United States of America). It shouldn’t come as a surprise: their military was created wholepiece in 1945 by the US presence in Korea. The South Korean equivalent of the CIA was named, you guessed it, the KCIA (now the National Intelligence Service).
More notably, ROK Forces obey the US officers present in Korea through the CFC, the Combined Forces Command. This is the only country in the world which is under this arrangement. While the CFC has changed its mandate a little bit in the past few years, it still states that in case of war involving the Republic of Korea, the US Army will take over command of the Korean forces. A state that has no agency over its military cannot be said to be a sovereign state.
South Korea also promulgated the National Security Law under Syngman Rhee, which is still in effect to this day and is used to arrest dissidents of the regime. Under this law, support for socialism and communism was illegal in South Korea. This isn’t a matter of opinion over communism; the same people that promoted a “free and fair democratic market” in South Korea by not restricting the export and smuggling out of rice also decided that vocal support of socialism was apparently a step too far and not free democratic expression. The law was amended in later years and South Koreans can now express support for socialism, but can’t explicitly say anything positive about the North.
To get around the Security Law, South Koreans are using satire such as the term “Hell Joseon” [Hell Korea]. Under this law, so-called “dissidents” from the DPRK (North Korea) are sequestered into the ROK and subjected to propaganda education until they are deemed fit to integrate with South Korean society; that is, until the National Intelligence Service knows that they won’t be a risk to their power. Many people that “fled” North Korea were actually kidnapped while on vacation in China, or promised a job and good conditions in the South. Many of them would like to go back to their families in the north, but can’t because they are under surveillance from the NIS and their passport seized. This is effectively a form of kidnapping and human trafficking, in which the South Korean state participates every day of the year. It is all recounted in this documentary (free Youtube link).
In early 2024, the DPRK dropped the policy of peaceful reunification with the South.
I don’t know what reunification will look like for Korea. I think that with the US depleting its stockpile of weapons in “Israel” and Ukraine, while trying to pivot the fight against China, might give DPRK the opportunity to rescind the ceasefire agreement and resume what was started over 70 years ago. But what I do know is that as we’ve seen in history, it is not my or anyone’s place to tell the Koreans how to take care of their problems, and this goes doubly for the USA.
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Small edit: I originally said Syngman Rhee was a Japanese collaborator. He was actually a US puppet, having studied at Princeton while his country was being massacred by the Japanese, and the next dictator (Park Chung Hee) was the collaborator. I've updated the article and I think I got all instances.
Very informative. Thank you!