Korea

Korea’s history is thousands of years. We are concerned now with the last 72.

From about the middle of the 14th Century, Korea was a kingdom and then briefly claimed to be an empire. That ended in 1910 when Japan invaded, on its way to empire after defeating Russia in 1905, and annexed Korea – virtually enslaving its people. Such was the state of Korea as WWII drew to its atomic close.

Under agreements between the Big Three (the U.S., the Soviet Union and Great Britain), the Soviet Union had agreed that following the surrender of Germany in WWII it would enter the war against Japan, ready to shift massive forces from Europe to its borders with northern China and Manchuria — both under Japanese control.

The strategic thinking was that this would prevent the transfer of Japan’s huge army on the Asian continent to the home islands where the U.S. expected intense, horrific fighting after what had happened on Okinawa in the Spring of 1945 (An example? Thousands of brain-washed Japanese civilians, men and women, jumped from high cliffs to their deaths, often holding their children, having been told and believing American troops would savage and kill them all).

As it turned out, owing to our use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was no need for the Soviets to intercede as Japan quickly surrendered unconditionally except for the condition that they keep their emperor.

But the Soviets did enter the war about 10 days earlier than the use of the bombs with every intention of claiming some spoils form the war against Japan that had been fought almost exclusively by the U.S. with peripheral support from Britain.

As the allies determined who would get sway over what pieces of Japanese-held territory, the U.S. and the Soviets agreed pretty arbitrarily and almost as an after-thought to divide the Korean Peninsula. Neither thought Korea very important. They chose the 38th Parallel as the dividing line pretty much because it ran across the center of Korea. The Soviets occupied the north, the U.S. the south.

By 1948, with the advent of the Cold War in 1946, all thoughts of unifying the peninsula in one nation-state were abandoned as the two main adversaries, the U.S and the Soviets, hardened their lines in the new post-war geography.

The U.S. withdrew its forces and established a purported democratic state under the leadership of Syngman Rhee, an authoritarian dictator, and created the Republic of Korea and its army.

The Soviet Union in turn created the Peoples Democratic Republic of Korea in the north and gifted it with the leadership of Kim Il Sung (the first of the Kim dynasty). Kim had led an insurgency against the Japanese, claimed to be a Marxist and spent the war years in the Soviet Union. He gave the north the diseased cult of personality that yet infects and controls everything in North Korea and so too the beginnings of the bizarre tyranny that has owned North Korea ever since and is manifested today in his grandson, Kim Jong Un.

There were tension and friction and border incidents between the two nascent Koreas for the next two years. Each had a population of about 10 million.

A game changer during those two years was the triumph of the Communist Party and its forces in China over the Nationalist or Kuomintang forces of Chiang Kai-shek,  who found himself and his thoroughly corrupt regime driven into exile on Taiwan, where he claimed still to run China, and from which he held its seat on the U.N. Security Council  for decades until U.S. recognition of China in the 1970s  led to  realistic reordering of the world’s relations.

So today there is one China, a world power with the second largest economy in the world after ours; and there is an outlier called Taiwan that has almost no diplomatic recognition by anyone (another historic situation, you will recall, that got confused early this year by the American version of Kim – the creature  presently occupying the White House).

But in 1949 this meant that suddenly there loomed, on the northern border of the Korean Peninsula and North Korean, a massive Communist state and its army, which though poorly armed numbered in the millions and had just concluded a more than 20-year war against Chiang, then against the Japanese, then again against Chiang until it finally brought Mao Tse Tung to power with his party.

In late June 1950, armed with Soviet weapons and a Soviet plan, the North’s Kim struck. His army invaded the south and within weeks had over-ridden almost all of South Korea, reducing the resistance to a small pocket  in the southeast corner of the peninsula around the port of Pusan (had South Korea been Florida it would at that point have been reduced comparably, let us estimate, to Dade and Broward Counties).

To cut to the chase, the U.S. — taken entirely by surprise, driven by the new Cold War orthodoxy and led by the original Cold Warriors, the Truman administration — determined to go all in to resist what it saw as a move by Communism to assert worldwide dominance. The area military leadership was in the hands of Gen, Douglass MacArthur, the virtual American viceroy of post-war Japan, commander of all U.S. ground forces in the Pacific and a seemingly irreproachable American icon.

At first, with thin, badly trained forces the U.S. and the South Koreans suffered greater setbacks. But over the next several months the weight of American arms, a buildup of American forces and total American control in the air stopped the advance of the North Koreans and began to push them back.

MacArthur promoted a daring  end run attack that, despite serious reservations by the American military leadership in Washington, got a green light from them and Harry Truman.

On Sept. 15, only three months after the North Korean assault had begun, American forces accomplished MacArthur’s plan, a landing at Inchon on the northeast coast of South Korea. The U.S/U.N. forces, principally American marines, began marching south. Meantime  other American and allied U.N. forces (the U.S. had persuaded the U.N. to take on the fight, gaining Security Council approval when the Soviets were absent from a council meeting)  pushed out of and past the Pusan pocket.

North Korea’s army was caught in a classic pincer between the advancing U.S. and U.S.-allied armies attacking from   north and south, and retreated in disorder and haste.

Within weeks the U.S./U.N.  had recovered all of the lost territory and captured or destroyed about two-thirds of North Korea’s military forces and equipment and pushed them back to the 38th Parallel, retaking the south’s devastated capital of Seoul, located about 25 miles south of the parallel.

What happened next is the reason we are in the current predicament that finds two very ignorant, dangerous men, each completely ignorant of one another, one another’s nations, those nations’ histories and cultures — ignorant of anything but their own fragile and dangerous ids and egos — confronting each other and causing the rest of us to imagine the unimaginable: The first direclty hostile use of nuclear weapons since  Aug. 8, 1945 (all nuclear tests are hostile acts, but as tests they are aimed to send messages not to destroy others totally and remorselessly).

Finding his forces on the 38th Parallel, MacArthur advocated forcefully to continue his counter-attack, cross the parallel, destroy the North Korean forces and unify Korea as a western-allied state. He confidently predicted that China would do nothing, would not intervene and that the entire war would be concluded by Thanksgiving 1953.

So the U.S. and the small U.N. contingents with it drove on and kept going right up to the boundary between North Korea and China, the Yalu River– in some places stopping virtually on the river’s southern bank. China is on the northern bank.

MacArthur of course had been wrong. The Chinese took this as a threat, as a prospect that the U.S. would cross into China and attempt to dislodge and dismantle their new Communist state.

They attacked in waves and waves, hundreds of thousands of them it is believed, sending American Army forces in northwest Korea reeling and Marines fighting their way out in Northeast Korea in an episode known as “the Frozen Chosin” for the Chosin Reservoir along which their epic fight for survival took place.

They had marched north in the extreme heat of a Korean summer. They retreated under mortal siege in the harshest winter conditions; and winter is beyond harsh in North Korea. Dressed in warm weather uniforms the Americans battled temperatures below freezing as well as masses of Chinese troops wearing warm, padded winter uniforms. In all, the U.S suffered more than 8,000 dead during the month-long retreat, nearly a quarter of all U.S. losses in what one historian of the conflict has called “the forgotten war”.

Suffice it to say that the entrance of the Chinese turned a near victory into a stalemate that lasted over two more years. President Truman, who had taken on the war in Korea, was succeeded by President Dwight Eisenhower, who would have won in a landslide regardless after 20 years of Democratic control of the White House but cinched his victory by pledging “I will go to Korea”.

He did go, keeping the campaign promise, visited the troops, consulted the commanders and so his administration decided quicly to cut U.S. losses and find a way to end the hostilities. The American people had not wanted the war, had long since stopped supporting it and wanted it ended. Eisenhower gave them what they wanted.

The end came not in a victory but a truce  negotiated because it was very much in the interest of the U.S. to end the fighting, having lost 38,000 men killed and in the interest of both Koreas, which together suffered an estimated combined loss of 3 million people, and also in the interest of the Chinese for whom the war had become an insupportable drain for the new, economically primitive Communist state.

Also, the Soviets had no interest in their proxy, North Korea, continuing the fruitless war when its eyes were on the prizes it had taken in Eastern Europe in WWII, its political push into Western Europe through the French and Italian Communist Parties,  expanding interests in the Middle East and on a tenuous and already troubled relationship with the new China as well as growing nuclear tensions with the U.S.

A truce and an armistice — but not peace and no treaty. It provided for division of the country on a line that weaves just north of the 38th parallel, creation of a demilitarized zone — the one that is all too familiar to us now, bristling with hate, fueled by endless insane propaganda and headquartered at Panmounjon, a village where the border between north and south literally runs through and across the table at which the two sides face off from time to time.

In the 70 years since the armistice took effect in June 1953 the situation has hardened, North Korea has become the bizarre, truly insane place we have read about and see carrying out its insanity today, a place where (as best we can tell) the people really believe we want to destroy their nation and kill them all.

The south became an industrial colossus with one of the largest economies in the world, still hosts about 25,000 U.S. military personnel and is a quasi-democracy whose underlying politics are not to be trusted and unstable and whose economy is corruptly controlled by a few families like the one that created and dominates Samsung.

What then got us to this place? Besides the accident of the election last year of an American madman with no knowledge and a primal instinct for but one thing, the satisfaction of his malformed ego and personality, who is opposed by an equally unstable leader produced by 70 years of madness?

Among the factors that got us to this place manfestly was the decision in late 1950 to take the U.S. attack north to the very border of China.

No one knows or can know what accommodations might have been arranged between us and the Soviet Union and China in late 1950 had we used the leverage of the fact that we had all but destroyed the North’s military, could take more but were willing not to do so. No one knows or can know what might have been arranged had U.S./U.N. forces taken Pyongyang, the north’s capital and stopped then and there.

But it seems reasonable to speculate that whatever accommodations might have been achieved and put into effect the result could have been different, might have ended the Kim dynasty at the start long before it morphed into the present monstrosity. Maybe there could have been a tense but acceptable coexistence between the two Koreas. Unification? Never. No party would have agreed to that. But something different and better from what now exists.

But could there have been something short of what brings us to the present madness being overseen by two unstable men — one of whom has the codes to the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world (Russia has a few hundred more nuclear warheads than the U.S.,  but who’s counting when both have enough for repetitive days of doom?). Could  something have been agreed short of the bitter, evil, ongoing, perilous Korean armistice that has now produced the prodding stand off between Trump and the third Kim?

So for the first time in 50 years men with the power to order the use of nuclear weapons but little comprehension of their power are thumping their chests and moving forward the hands on the nuclear clock.

We need to remember now and understand better “the forgotten war” and how it got us to this place — a place all our eyes avert.

Above all the people who run this country need to read and learn this and a lot more history. The ones who have run the nation the past 70 years, from both parties, have read the history, know these things and take them into account.

But this crew? This supposed administration? Clearly not.