The partition of Korea imposed by U.S. imperialism half a century ago remains the most explosive unresolved national division in the world today.

In 1910, the rising imperialist Japan formally annexed Korea. The invaders stole land from thousands of peasants and suppressed the Korean language. They forced the now-landless peasants to serve in the Japanese army or labor in Japanese mines, construction sites, and munitions factories. By the end of World War II, 10 percent of Korea’s population had been “relocated,” against their will, to Japan. These included tens of thousands of Korean “comfort women”—sexual slaves in Japanese military brothels. Thousands of Koreans were killed for resisting Japanese domination.  
 
Anti-colonial uprising
Coming out of World War II, the Korean people took advantage of the weakened position of their colonial occupier to deepen their struggle for national independence. “People’s committees,” uniting forces from the anti-colonial struggle and other popular movements, sprang up and began to assume control of both cities and rural areas. On Sept. 6, 1945, a new government with close links to the people’s committees was formed in Seoul. It declared the country’s independence from Japanese colonial rule. It also announced plans for a sweeping land reform, nationalization of major industry, universal suffrage for men and women over 18, an eight-hour workday, minimum wage, and democratic rights.

Two days later, the U.S. government landed troops commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Korea with the aim of blocking these anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist measures. MacArthur announced U.S. military control of the southern part of Korea and organized the occupation forces to brutally crush workers and peasants’ organizations there. The U.S. forces imposed a military puppet government, which enforced all laws established by the Japanese occupiers. Among other measures, MacArthur declared English as the official language.

At the same time, workers and peasants in China were engaged in a revolutionary struggle against the dictatorial, capitalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek. With the invasion of Korea, Washington hoped not only to bring the entire Korean peninsula under its control but also to prevent the Chinese workers and peasants from removing the yoke of imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation there.

In carving up Korea, the U.S. government had the complicity of the bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union, at that time headed by Joseph Stalin. Through a bloody reign of terror that overturned many of the gains of the October 1917 revolution led by the Bolsheviks, Stalin and a bureaucratic caste around him had usurped political power and driven working people in Russia out of politics. The Stalinist regime subverted revolutionary struggles around the world in order to defend its privileges and give itself more leverage to negotiate with capitalist powers as part of its policy of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism.

But hundreds of thousands of Korean workers and peasants refused to go along with the deal. Between 1945 and 1950, nearly 100,000 Koreans who participated in strikes, peasants’ protests, and armed resistance in the south were killed by U.S. and south Korean troops and government-sanctioned right-wing thugs. In the north, capitalist property relations were overturned, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was founded in September 1948.

In 1950 the Democratic Party administration of President Harry Truman launched the Korean War. Even though the war unfolded during the anti-communist witch hunt, it was unpopular among working people in the United States.

“This is more than a fight for unification and national liberation. It is a civil war,” Cannon wrote in his letter to Truman. “On the one side are the Korean workers, peasants and student youth. On the other are the Korean landlords, usurers, capitalists and their police and political agents. The impoverished and exploited working masses have risen to drive out the native parasites as well as their foreign prosecutors.”

In 1950, Truman said Washington, which had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan five years earlier, would consider using “every weapon we have.” Three years later, Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened to “remove all restraints in our use of weapons.”  
 
‘Nape scrapes’
While stopping short of using nuclear weapons, the U.S. military acknowledges dropping 250,000 pounds of napalm per day during the Korean War. The Korean estimates of U.S. napalm use are about three times higher. In addition, U.S.-led forces unleashed 428,000 “conventional” bombs on Pyongyang, which had a population of only 400,000 at the time.

In a 1997 interview, former U.S. Senator John Glenn, who was a Marine pilot in the war, described flying jets with “hundred gallon napalm tanks with the white phosphorous grenade cap on there, so that when it hit the ground…it would burst into flame and ignite the napalm.” Such “nape scrapes” and other aerial bombs took out giant sections of the population, leaving those who survived permanently scarred with painful second-degree burns. Thousands of civilians, many of them south Korean refugees, were strafed during the bombing raids.

“There was hardly a single house left standing,” recalled Yan Von Sik, a soldier in the Korean People’s Army, in a CNN documentary. By the end of the war, the U.S. bombing command said it had no more targets left—it had destroyed all structures that could be seen from the air, including huts.

An estimated 4 million Koreans—some 13 percent of the population—were killed during the war, half of whom were civilians. An additional 5 million were left homeless. In addition, 132,000 Chinese volunteers who joined the war to aid their Korean brothers and sisters, were killed. Fifty-four thousand U.S. troops died during the three-year war, “a more lethal combat exchange than was the Vietnamese War,” as Glenn put it.

Despite the massive destruction wrought by U.S. forces, the Korean and Chinese people refused to be beaten and fought Washington to a stalemate. In July 1953, the DPRK forced U.S. generals to sign an armistice agreement. The agreement divided the country at the 38th parallel and set up a 2.5-mile-wide “Demilitarized Zone” (DMZ) across the peninsula. Washington and Seoul have refused to sign a peace treaty in the five decades since U.S. imperialism was handed its first-ever military defeat.

As the Aug. 3, 1953, Militant noted, “There can be no possibility for a lasting peace in the Far East until the U.S. troops are withdrawn from Korea and brought home.” To this day, 30,000 U.S. soldiers remain on Korean soil to keep the country divided. But working people on both sides of the 38th parallel have not been derailed in their struggle for reunification.
 
 
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