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Causes of the Korean War Historiography
- Summary for GCSE
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The traditional interpretation of the Cause of the Korean War saw it as an act of wanton aggression, by the USSR, which used its
puppet state North Korea to launch a surprise attack on the South on 25 June 1950.
- In the 1960s, the historian TR Fehrenbach fully blamed the Russians, but
suggested they were encouraged to attack by weakness in the US government, when it gave the impression that it did not think Korea worth going to war.
- In the 1970s, ‘revisionist’ historians still saw the War as a Cold War clash of the superpowers … but blamed the USA which, for reasons of imperialism
and self-interest, had given the impression that it supported South Korea in its intention to invade the North.
- In the 1990s, many historians began to see the War as a Korean Civil War, part of a longer war for independence, fought between rival nationalist factions … which the
USA & USSR could not restrain.
- Recent histories look at aspects of the conflict
other than just the political/diplomatic side of the story.
First interpretations
A cartoon by the British cartoonist David Low, from the Daily Herald
(30 Jun 1950).
This famous Low cartoon sums up how most of the Western
world felt at the time, and what we might call the ‘traditional’ interpretation
of the causes of the war.
Unless you look closely, you might miss the most important element of the cartoon – the words ‘wanton aggression’ on the tombstone. The word ‘wanton’ means – according to the Oxford dictionary – "(of a cruel or violent action) deliberate and unprovoked" … and that was precisely how people saw 25 June 1950. US President Truman, therefore, flying with the United Nations to South Korea’s aid, is portrayed as a determined (look at his jaw) hero (note the Superman pose).
And therefore the gun (= going to war) was entirely justified; indeed, a good
deed.
The ‘traditional’ interpretation, therefore, saw the Korean
War as a Cold War confrontation between the USA and the USSR, and emphasized
Soviet involvement/aggression – enacted through its North Korean ‘puppet’ regime
– as the cause.
Thus historian David Rees (1964):
WAR came to Korea
at dawn on a Sunday morning.
At 0400 hours
local time’ on 25 June 1950 the Korean People’s Army launched its offensive
against the Republic of Korea… It was a Soviet war plan, reportedly worked out
by the Russian General Antonov, and during the winter of 1949-50 … large scale
Russian deliveries of tanks, artillery and heavy equipment were made to North
Korea. The historian Philip Mosely (1952) went further, accusing the Soviets of ordering the war:
The signal for the
attack of the North Korean forces against South Korea was given by the Soviet
leadership. This interpretation still has its strong supporters today,
and there are masses of primary documents in Russian and captured North Korean
archives to support it.
It is the version that appears in most school textbooks.
This Kind of War (TR Fehrenbach, 1963)
Theodore R Fehrenbach was an American historian who served as a US officer in the Korean War. In many ways, his history of the War was traditionalist in its approach:
The Korean problem
could not be solved of itself; it was part of a larger problem: that freezing of
boundaries and attitudes men were beginning to call the ‘cold war’. Written, however, at a time when the Vietnam problem was just beginning to impact on US foreign policy – and, I would guess, as an (ultimately forlorn) attempt to steel the American people to that conflict – it was a scathing attack on a US government and military which, having won the Second World War, had ‘gone soft’, lost its discipline, lost its stomach for the realities of war, and thought that the only war it needed to prepare for was a global nuclear war. At issue, was Truman’s policy of ‘containment’:
For the first time in history … America had embarked upon a foreign policy that was not at least partially a crusade. The policy was the restoration of order in the world and the orderly containment of communism…
It was hard for a
nation … to fight and die for limited goals. In short it was hard to grow
up. Although he fully blamed the war on the Russians, who had
been planning for an invasion of South Korea since 1947, for Fehrenbach the trigger for war was
a speech by US Secretary of State Dean Acheson to the National Press Club in
Washington on 12 January 1950, in which he revealed that Korea was not part of
the United States security cordon in the Far East; ie it was the moment the
Russians were satisfied that the USA did not consider Korea to be worth a
nuclear war.
Fehrenbach imagined that realisation:
The United States
could not be bought, or even intimidated, but it had a long history of looking
the other way if not immediately threatened. And thus Acheson’s admission was the green light for
invasion.
The Limits of Power (Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, 1972)
In the 1970s, as America’s policy failings in the Far East were exposed by the disaster of Vietnam, historians became less prepared to accept that its intentions had been noble in Korea. At the forefront of this ‘revisionist’ approach to US international relations were Joyce and Gabriel Kolko.
Put simplistically, they blamed the United States for the War.
Their chapter on US involvement in Korea 1945-49 was a
30-page exposé of ignorance, incompetence, arrogance, and turning a blind eye to
the atrocities of Syngman Rhee, whom they described as a "liquidationist".
And their chapter on the causes of the war in Korea started from the premise that:
The crisis that
arose in Korea in June 1950 was but one aspect of America's international vision
… with its head turned backward to the consequences on European problems, as
well as to domestic economic needs and broad military planning. ie for the Kolkos, the Korean War was not a crusade against
communism, or even a ‘holding the line’ against Soviet expansionism -- it was
pure, cynical, imperialist US self-interest.
Moreover instead of focusing on the dastardly deeds of Kim Il Sung and the Russians, the chapter highlighted Rhee’s
secretly conspiring with US Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur to conquer the North. The ROK Army had ballooned to 114,000 men late-1949 to mid-1950:
Although the North
Korean military build up prior to June 1950 has always been interpreted as proof
of aggressive intent, in fact it was more a response to the military imbalance
of power that Rhee and the United States had created during 1949 and 1950. Then,
during a visit by US roving ambassador John Foster Dulles on 18-19 June 1950, Rhee announced that "we shall regain our freedom in the end by a hot war" and presented the Americans with his plans for reunification.
All the evidence, the Kolkos asserted, is that the North Korean mobilisation in
June 1950 was hurried and limited, and a response to a threat they had every right to
be worried about.
The war, concluded the Kolkos, had been pursued because it was useful to the Truman administration.
It had ended accusations about his weakness, got Congress and the public on
board, consolidated "wandering" allies, and helped "to make more credible the
vision of America as the masterful military giant".
On 18-19 June 1950 – just a week before the North Korean invasion -- US roving ambassador John Foster Dulles visited South Korea. He pledged US support in the fight against communism and – in a famous incident – visited the 38th parallel with South Korean ministers, ROK officers and KMAG representatives.
What might the North Koreans have thought? Even at the time, US
Congressmen asked Dulles whether he thought he had provoked the war.
The Kolkos blamed the US for the War, but it is worth noting
that they still presented it as an episode in the Cold War – as a clash,
essentially, between the USSR and the USA.
The Korean Civil War
In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union came crashing down, an American historian named Bruce
Cumings was working on a huge collection of more than 1½ million
Records seized by the US Military Forces in Korea during the War –
including letters, diaries, minutes of meetings, newspapers, court documents and photographs – which had been made available to the public in 1977.
What emerged from the studies of Cumings, his students and other historians was
a completely different way of looking at the war … from the Korean perspective.
One of the first things to change was the date.
Historians pointed out that the conflict we date as 1950-53 was in fact the
sharp end of a long and bloody war for independence which had started with the
'Righteous Army' rebellion against the Japanese in 1907, and which had continued with
guerrilla attacks throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
There was a further debate about when the ‘civil war’ element of this war of independence started. Was it in September 1945, when the USA and USSR summarily divided Korea in two? Or December 1945, when they took it into ‘trusteeship’? Was it 1948, when the Jeju islanders rebelled against Rhee’s government
and kick-started a guerrilla campaign that would last until 1950? Was it the large-scale border clashes of 1949?
Questions were raised even about the events of 25 June 1950 – were they a
planned North Korean invasion-of-conquest, or the massive repulse of a South
Korean border raid that turned into a rout?
Both Korean leaders had taken part in the struggle for independence prior to 1945. Rhee had been an activist in the 1890s and 1900s, and was President of the Provisional Korean government-in-exile 1919-25. Kim Il Sung was a genuine guerrilla hero in the 1930s.
Both saw 1945 as a victory for independence and – whilst their vision for what
kind of independence differed: Rhee for capitalism and Kim for communism –
NEITHER was prepared to suffer the tutelage of yet another foreign quasi-imperialist
power.
Both were anything but ‘puppets’. The relationship
with the USSR of the North Koreans – aware that Stalin had ethnically-cleansed 175,000 Koreans during WWII – was
uneasy, and Russian influence did not extend much beyond the capital, Pyongyang.
The Americans, similarly, found Rhee acerbic, reckless and embarrassingly ‘liquidationist’, to
the extent that the CIA was seriously considering orchestrating his removal.
And BOTH Kim and Rhee were militaristic nationalists determined to unite Korea by force. Kim visited Stalin multiple times in the late 1940s, seeking support and weaponry to invade the South. Rhee conspired with MacArthur and lobbied Washington hawks for support to launch a war of conquest.
Note that in this both Kim and Rhee were the proponents; far from setting up their ‘puppets’ to fight a proxy war, both superpowers had their work cut out restraining their Korean allies.
As late as 1949 Stalin admonished Kim not to attack the South for fear it would
start a nuclear war; and the United States – with disastrous consequences –
intentionally deprived Rhee of sufficient military materiel to wage a
large-scale invasion.
Other Interpretations
At the same time, we need to be aware that ALL the works
above were written by Western scholars, for Westerners. We need to
acknowledge that there are different perspectives on the War. Chinese
scholars – particularly public displays in Museums etc – portray the war primarily as the exploits of Chinese communist heroes. North Korean historians stick to the claim that it was the South that attacked on 25 June, and their standpoint can be clearly ascertained from the title of the official history of the war:
The US Imperialists Started the Korean War (1977, reprinted 1993).
Since 2000, historians have tended to take a multi-causal
view of the Korean War, arguing that while Cold War dynamics created the
context, the immediate causes lay in local ambitions and unresolved conflicts
from time of Japanese colonial rule.
Historiography has also moved away from a narrow
political/diplomatic interpretation of events, and historians have researched
the social and cultural experience of Koreans, the creation of national
identities, the transnational ‘ripple’ effects of the War, and the ways in which the memory of
the War has been narrated, commemorated … and suppressed.
< Insert your name here >
As you study the Causes of the Korean War, you are perfectly at liberty to choose to support one or other of the above interpretations
. Most historians do.
But what strikes me is that ALL the above have been
extracted from much the same body of facts – the different historians have
merely chosen to focus on certain facts they regarded as critical, and to
downgrade in significance others.
The joy of History is that there is nothing to stop you – as
you study the Causes of the War in this unit – re-analysing those facts,
discovering new ones, and formulating your own interpretation.
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