[News] August 12-22, 1945: Washington Starts the Korean and Vietnam Wars

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/14/august-12-22-1945-washington-starts-the-korean-and-vietnam-wars/
August
12-22, 1945: Washington Starts the Korean and Vietnam Wars
by H. Bruce Franklin - August 14, 2020
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/h-bruce-franklin/>
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Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

August 14, 1945. The day Japan surrendered. I was eleven year old. I was
crammed in the back of a pickup packed with other boys and girls, all
yelling our hearts out as loud as we could to be heard over the cacophony
of honking horns and howling air raid sirens. We were part of an impromptu
motorcade weaving through the evening streets of our Flatbush neighborhood
in Brooklyn. Everywhere we went—past the sidewalk fruit and vegetable
stands, the storefront A&P exuding the smell of freshly ground coffee, the
fish market and the kosher delicatessen along Avenue J, the small row
houses and big apartment houses on the side streets, along Coney Island
Avenue, with its rows of small stores dotted with small restaurants and
soda fountains, where the electric trolley cars were clanging their bells
nonstop—more and more cheering people poured onto the sidewalks, waving
American flags and homemade signs, hugging, dancing. We kids in the truck
were all screaming, “Peace! Peace! The war is over!” We believed this was
the end of not just this war but of war itself, that we were all going to
live the rest of our lives in a prosperous and victorious nation, on a
peaceful planet.

Little did we know that our government, in the two weeks spanning our
joyous day, was building the highway into two calamitous wars and a future
of unending war. Nor did we know that this would be the last victory
celebration of our lifetime.

On August 8, the Soviet Union (just as it promised at Potsdam) launched the
largest land battle of the entire war against Japan. In Manchuria, they
were joined by tens of thousands of Korean guerrillas, who had been
fighting the Japanese invaders since 1932. Within a few days, Soviet forces
destroyed the huge Japanese army on the Asia mainland. Six hundred thousand
Japanese soldiers and hundreds of Japanese generals surrendered. Eighty
thousand were killed, along with thirty thousand Soviet soldiers. Soviet
troops and Korean partisans poured across Korea’s northern border with the
USSR, pursuing the retreating Japanese forces and pro-Japanese Korean units.

Japan’s occupation of Korea was about to end. It had been brutal. During
World War II, hundreds of thousands of Koreans were forced to work in
Japanese mines and factories, and countless numbers perished under the U.S.
bombing, including ten thousand or more who died in the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima. Tens of thousands of Korean girls and young women had been
forced to become “comfort women,” sex slaves for the Japanese army.

The fate of Korea had not previously been discussed by Washington and
Moscow. The nearest U.S. forces were six hundred miles away in Okinawa and
would be unable to get there for about a month. Frantic, the U.S. War
Department (today called the Defense Department), decided to act, and to
act fast.

On the night of August 10–11, 1945, Army Colonels Dean Rusk and Charles
Bonesteel were ordered by the War Department to draw a line across Korea, a
nation with a two-thousand-year history. They were given thirty minutes to
complete the task. Neither of the two young men, each born a year before
Japan annexed Korea in 1910, was familiar with Korea’s history or even its
geography, other than what they could glean from a small outdated National
Geographic map.[1] The colonels chose the 38th parallel north latitude,
simply because that put the capital city of Seoul under U.S. control. Their
decision was forwarded to President Truman, who proposed to Premier Stalin
that Japanese forces south of the line would be instructed to surrender to
U.S. forces; those to the north were to surrender to the Soviets. Stalin
made no objection, although Soviet forces could easily have occupied all of
Korea weeks before American forces could arrive.[2] Neither Washington nor
Moscow consulted the Korean people about this decision.

Except for Seoul, most of southern Korea was agricultural, and most of the
people were peasants working for a small class of large landowners. When
the American military finally did arrive on September 8, they discovered
two competing infrastructures in their occupation zone. One was a police
state created by the Japanese occupiers, designed to protect the wealth and
power of the large landowners and the mercantile elite in the cities and
towns. The other consisted of hundreds of “People’s Committees” throughout
the land, all part of the “Korean People’s Republic” proclaimed in Seoul
just prior to the U.S. arrival. Guess which side the United States chose.
Thus very quickly the Japanese military occupation was replaced by a
strikingly similar American one.

All that was missing was a puppet government. This gap was filled a month
after the U.S. Army began its occupation. The Office of Strategic Services
(OSS, the predecessor of the CIA) anointed Syngman Rhee, who had been
living in the United States for thirty-five years, as the head of
government. A military plane flew Rhee from Washington to a secret meeting
with General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo, and MacArthur’s private plane, *The
Bataan*, then whisked Rhee to his new capital of Seoul. In the ensuing
three years of overt U.S. military occupation, Rhee’s Japanese- and now
American-trained police waged a remorseless campaign to eradicate all
dissidents suspected of being Communists or having communist leanings,
including land reformers and those seeking independence from the United
States.[3]

In March 1948, during the third year of the occupation, the year-old
Central Intelligence Agency, along with the intelligence divisions of the
Departments of State, Navy, Air Force, and Army, prepared an eye-opening
secret report: “The Current Situation in Korea.” This document recognized a
fundamental class conflict between the overwhelming majority of poor people
in the south and a “numerically small class which virtually monopolizes the
native wealth and education of the country,” a “class that could not have
acquired and maintained its favored position under Japanese rule” without
“collaboration” with the occupiers. Seeking a ruler untainted by this
collaboration left only such “imported expatriate politicians” as Syngman
Rhee, “demagogues bent on autocratic rule.” The report recognized a
“reservoir of popular resentment against the police,” who are “ruthlessly
brutal in suppressing disorder.” It predicted that “Extreme Rightist Rhee”
would sweep forthcoming elections held under the auspices of the U.N.
because of “the demagogic appeal of the Extreme Right” and because “the
Left will boycott the elections.” Then “Soviet propaganda would be provided
with a substantial basis in fact for charging the regime with being
‘corrupt, reactionary, and oppressive.’” As for northern Korea, the CIA
analysis acknowledged that “there is no reliable evidence of any serious
disaffection” because of “the characteristically shrewd Soviet recognition
of the basic needs of the native population (land reform, political
participation, education, etc.).”

The report concluded that it is “unlikely that any government erected in
South Korea under UN auspices could long survive the withdrawal of US
forces unless it were to receive continuing and extensive US economic,
technical, and military aid.”[4] The CIA was quite right. From the election
of Rhee until the outbreak of the full-scale Korean War in June 1950, civil
war raged in South Korea. Major rebellions were put down only with the
assistance of the U.S. military, and over a hundred thousand South Korean
civilians were killed, many tortured to death.[5]

Soviet forces withdrew from North Korea in 1948, leaving behind a
government led by Kim Il Sung, a Communist who had spent much of his life
as an anti-Japanese guerrilla leader in Manchuria. The southern government
in Seoul and the northern government in Pyongyang have always agreed, then
and now, on one thing: Korea is one nation, not two. Each has always
claimed, then and now, that it is the legitimate government of Korea.
Leading up to the events of June 1950, Seoul and Pyongyang each initiated
attempts to reunify the nation—on its own terms, of course. The southern
government’s attempts were crippled by several problems. As the CIA report
made clear, it lacked a viable economy independent of massive U.S. aid.
Historically, it had been dependent on the north for coal, industrial
products, and, crucially, electric power generated by power plants on the
Yalu River. In February 1950, the U.S. Congress enacted the Korean Aid
Bill, mandating that all U.S. aid would cease “in the event of the
formation in the Republic of Korea of a coalition government which includes
one or more members of the Communist Party or of the party now in control
of the government of North Korea.” The United States thus nullified any
possibility of near-term peaceful unification. Then in May, South Korea’s
first somewhat free election was a disastrous defeat for Rhee’s government,
leaving him with only forty-five seats in the 210-seat Assembly, but not
stopping his threats to invade North Korea.[6]

Armed conflict across the 38th parallel between the equal-size armies of
the two governments had been going on intermittently since 1949. There is
still conflicting evidence about which one started the fighting before dawn
on June 25, but the issue is unimportant. The North Korean army was in a
position to drive across the foreign-imposed and arbitrary dividing line of
the 38th parallel, taking advantage of the illegitimacy and unpopularity of
the Rhee government, which helps explain the immediate collapse of the
South Korean army.

But this was not the narrative we Americans heard. For us, the “beginning”
of the war was framed as a repeat of the beginning of our World War II
narrative: an unprovoked surprise attack by treacherous Asians. Washington
still insists the 38th Parallel, that line chosen by two young U.S.
colonels, is an international border between two independent nations. It
refuses to agree with North Korea that a state of war between the U.S. and
North Korea no longer exists.

On the same day as our celebration of V-J Day, eight thousand miles away
another people were celebrating the surrender of Japan quite differently.
August 14 was the first day of the August Revolution, when the Vietnamese
people rose up and in less than three weeks swept away Japanese and French
control and established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

On September 2, Ho Chi Minh read Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence to
half a million Vietnamese people jam-packed before him in Hanoi, the old
capital of a new nation that had been fighting for its independence for
more than two thousand years. “‘All men are created equal,’” he began.
“‘They are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among
them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ This immortal
statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States
of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the
earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be
happy and free.”[7] Suddenly two warplanes appeared overhead. The crowd
gazed up. They saw two of those weird-looking P-38 Lightning
fighter-bombers. When they recognized the U.S. insignia on the planes,
those half million people, acting like a single being, let out an
earthshaking cheer. Just as we kids in the truck believed in America’s
peaceful future, the Vietnamese believed that we Americans were their
friends and allies, that we would be the champions of their freedom and
independence from colonialism.

Little did they know that ten days earlier, on August 22, French president
Charles de Gaulle had flown to Washington, where the Truman administration
had agreed to finance, arm, transport, and sponsor a French invasion
designed to overthrow the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and restore French
colonial rule. This would be a joint French-American project. The United
States would not only supply the weapons and the financing. It would also
turn over to the French tens of thousands of Nazi troops, including
Waffen-SS units, many of whom would be forced into the French Foreign
Legion to be shock troops for invasion. A dozen U.S. troopships would be
diverted from bringing GIs home from Europe to carrying the French invasion
army—equipped with American weapons, tanks, warplanes, and jeeps—to Vietnam.
[8] This was arguably the beginning of America’s Vietnam War. It was also,
as it turns out, the beginning of the American people’s movement against
that war.

British troops that had been sent to Saigon to disarm the remaining
Japanese forces had instead rearmed the Japanese, who had already been
disarmed by the Vietnamese. Soon the Japanese joined the British and
remnants of the French colonial forces to wage war against the newly
declared independent nation of Vietnam. What was left of the Japanese air
force, together with the British RAF, bombed and strafed any concentrations
of armed Vietnamese they could find.[9] Japanese troops were deployed to
control the Saigon waterfront and port facilities.

So when the U.S. troopships carrying the French invasion army arrived in
Saigon in the late fall of 1945, they were met by uniformed and armed
Japanese soldiers, who saluted them on the docks and commanded machine guns
on towers overlooking the U.S. ships. The sailors manning the American
flotilla were profoundly shocked and outraged. Every single enlisted
crewman on these ships signed petitions to Congress and the president
condemning the U.S. government for participating in “imperialist policies”
designed “to subjugate the native population of Vietnam.”[10]

Much of the essay is excerpted from Franklin’s book *Crash Course: >From the
Good War to the Forever War
<https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1978800916/counterpunchmaga>.*

*Notes.*

1/ <NTX> James F. Schnabel, *United States Army in the Korean War: Policy
and Direction; The First Year *(Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of
Military History, United States Army, 1972), 8–11; Dean Rusk as told to
Richard Rusk, *As I Saw It* (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 124. Rusk
remembers the date of the line drawing as August 14, but here as in many
places in this book, his memory is faulty. ↑

2/ Schnabel, *United States Army in the Korean War.* ↑

3/ Bruce Cumings, *The Korean War: A History *(New York: Modern Library,
2011), 104–107. This widely available paperback is essential reading with a
fine updated introduction to Cumings’s prodigious scholarship and cogent
analysis, which have fundamentally changed our (and certainly my) knowledge
and understanding of the history of Korea and the Korean War. ↑

4/ Central Intelligence Agency, “The Current Situation in Korea,” ORE
15-48, March 18, 1948. The nine-page report can be downloaded from the
CIA’s online library at
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000258335.pdf. ↑

5/ See the excellent and well-documented account in Cumings, *The Korean
War*, 110–146. ↑

6/ I. F. Stone, *The Hidden History of the Korean War *(New York: Monthly
Review Press, Second Modern Reader Paper Edition, 1971), 18. Originally
published in 1952 after being rejected by twenty-eight publishers at the
height of the Red Scare, Stone’s volume, with its priceless information and
piercing analysis, remains an essential read for anyone interested in the
political history of the Korean War even though subsequent scholarship has
of course contradicted some of his surmises. ↑

7/ Ho Chi Minh, *Selected Works*, 4 vols. (Hanoi: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1960–1962), 3:17–21. ↑

8/ Michel Gillen, “Roots of Opposition: The Critical Response to U.S.
Indochina Policy, 1945–1954” (unpublished dissertation, New York
University, 1991), 106–107. ↑

9/ Archimedes L. A. Patti, *Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America’s Albatross*
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 325. ↑

10/ Gillen, “Roots of Opposition,” 117–122. ↑
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