Free The Korean War by Max Hastings

September 1948 and April 1949, there were a total of 89,710 police arrests in South Korea. Only 28,404 of the victims were released without charge. Kim Ku, the seventy-four-year-old veteran of the ‘Provisional Government’ who had suffered grievously for his opposition to Japanese rule and still commanded widespread respect in South Korea as the President’s most credible rival, was assassinated in his study by a creature of Rhee in June 1949. In the same month, the last United States occupation troops, excepting a five-hundred-man assistance and training group – the KMAG – left Korea. Rhee pleaded desperately for a continued American military presence. But the Russians had already pulled their army out of the North, and Washington was anyway reluctant to allow its forces to linger longer in Korea, whose occupation had cost so much pain and treasure. The United States had done all that it believed possible. With so many other demands upon America’s resources as the Cold War intensified, its leaders were unwilling to allow Korea to assume a disproportionate importance. It was a measure of Washington’s determination to limit the mischief that could come out of Korea, that Dr Rhee’s new army was denied armour and heavy artillery. The intention was to provide South Korea solely with the means for her own defence, above all against mounting internal guerrilla activity.
    The peaceful departure of the Red Army from North Korea diminished American fears of overt communist aggression in the peninsula. North of the 38th Parallel, the Soviets left behind aruthlessly disciplined totalitarian Stalinist society, in the hands of their protégé, Kim Il Sung. Russian advisers helped to set up a national network of ‘people’s committees’, and a central government based upon a ‘Provisional People’s Committee’. In November 1946, the first election to membership was held, based upon a single list of candidates, all members of a ‘Democratic Front’. Moscow reported that Kim Il Sung’s grouping collected 97 per cent of votes cast. In February 1947, a ‘Convention of People’s Committees’ met for the first time in Pyongyang, and established the ‘People’s Assembly of North Korea’. The ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’ was proclaimed on 9 September 1948. But North Korea was an undeveloped society. The prospect that it might embark upon a war without the direct support of its Russian masters still appeared remote. Among those in the Pentagon and the State Department conscious of Korea’s existence, there were considerable misgivings about what had been done and what had been created in the South in America’s name. Yet there was also the feeling that the best had been made of an impossible situation. Diplomatically, it was a considerable achievement that the United States had been able to maintain the support of the Western Allies for its anti-communist programme. The United Nations Commission on Korea, charged with pursuing the eventual objective of supervising the unification of the divided nation, now maintained a permanent presence in the South, monitoring the mutually hostile activities of Seoul and Pyongyang, and seeking ‘to observe and report any developments which might lead to or otherwise involve military conflict in Korea’. It is a backhanded tribute to the vestiges of democracy that persisted in the South that, in the elections for a new National Assembly in May 1950, Syngman Rhee’s bitter unpopularity was fully reflected. The parties of the right gained only forty-nine seats, against 130 seats won by Independents and forty-four by other parties.
    With the advantage of hindsight, it is evident that United States policy in post-war Korea was clumsy and ill-conceived. It reflected not only a lack of understanding, but a lack of interest in the country and its people, beyond their potential as bricks in the wall against communist aggression. This failure, it may be suggested, lay close