Vol. 77/No. 34      September 30, 2013

In September 1945, at the end of World War II, the Korean people — after 40 years of fighting Japanese colonial rule — saw their country torn in two at roughly the 38th parallel by the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union.

What’s more, when U.S. occupation forces landed in Korea that month, they refused to recognize the Korean People’s Republic, which had been established in the South by representatives of People’s Committees that had been formed across the country. Instead, Washington not only imposed a U.S. military government but initially kept in place officials of the hated Japanese colonial administration.

U.S. military government

But the State Department official cautioned that Tokyo’s appointees should be removed “only in name,” since “there are no qualified Koreans for other than the low-ranking positions.” He did, however, call attention to a layer of Korean bourgeois figures who could be drawn into governing the country.

“Although many of them have served with the Japanese,” he said, “that stigma ought eventually to disappear.” It didn’t.

A 1947 assessment from the newly established Central Intelligence Agency reported that politics in South Korea was “dominated by a rivalry between Rightists” (whom the U.S. military government had ensconced in power) and a “grass-roots independence movement which found expression in the establishment of the People’s Committees throughout Korea in August 1945.”

Referring to the “numerically small class which virtually monopolizes the native wealth and education,” the CIA noted that “this class could not have acquired and maintained its favored position under Japanese rule without a certain minimum of ‘collaboration.’”

In short, the U.S. spy agency concluded, the newly established government in the South was “substantially the old Japanese machinery,” enforcing its authority through the Tokyo-established National Police, which had been “ruthlessly brutal in suppressing disorder.”

Hoping to pretty up the collaborationist character of the government it was imposing, Washington organized in October 1945 to fly Syngman Rhee from the United States to Tokyo, where he met with U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and then flew on to Seoul on Mac-Arthur’s personal plane — the Bataan.

“Through its puppet, Dr. Rhee, the [U.S. military government] attempted to engineer a working coalition of the reactionary political parties which would ‘govern’ the country” under U.S. control, the Militant reported in its Jan. 12, 1946, issue.

As U.S. occupation authorities stepped up their attacks on the Korean People’s Republic, they implemented measures that struck directly at the economic and social needs of workers and farmers. First, the military government halted distribution to working farmers of lands confiscated from Japanese landlords. Second, the regime lifted price controls on rice and “reformed” the rationing system, cutting in half by mid-1946 the amount of rice Koreans had been getting under Japanese rule.

Over several days at the end of December 1945 and early 1946, thousands of working people in Seoul poured into the streets and organized strikes calling for an end to the U.S. military government and protesting Washington’s and Moscow’s planned “joint trusteeship” over Korea.

The actions had initially been called by a coalition of the South Korean Workers’ Party and bourgeois currents that opposed the partition. But shortly thereafter — on orders not to embarrass Moscow for its complicity in the division — the South Korean Workers’ Party turned on a dime and condemned the mobilizations.

The Daily Worker, newspaper of the Communist Party in the U.S., denounced the “violent outbursts,” which it said “appeared to have been provoked by extreme right-wingers.” The Militant, to the contrary, said that “fighters for freedom throughout the world hailed the anti-imperialist demonstrations in Korea.”

Beginning in late September and October 1946, strikes protesting the American occupation and demanding food were organized by rail workers, postal workers, electrical workers, printers and others. What began as the Taegu uprising in southeastern Korea spread by November to some 160 villages, towns, and cities across North and South Kyongsang and South Cholla provinces, with peasant rebellions and attacks on the despised National Police.

The police, overwhelmed by the size and scope of the rebellion, relied on U.S. armed forces to crush it. The military government declared martial law. Hundreds of Koreans were killed or injured; thousands were beaten, tortured and imprisoned.

A U.S. soldier who witnessed this bloody repression, Sgt. Harry Savage of Yankton, S.D., described the horrors he had seen in a letter to President Harry Truman. “My name is Sergeant Savage,” he wrote. “I have just been discharged from the army after spending some ten months in the Occupation Forces in Korea. I am writing this now while I have it fresh in mind and while I am eager to do something about it. …

“Why were the American people not told of riots that took place in that country and of the hundreds of people who were killed in those riots?” Sergeant Savage asked. He recounted being deployed to put down an uprising in the coastal city of Tongyong, during which “scores of people were killed.”

Then, a few days later in nearby Masan, “our entire Battalion patrolled that town all day with dead bodies lying all over the streets, and we kept our machine guns blazing.” Many Koreans were beaten and subjected to torture by members of the National Police, he said.

“Many of the GI’s got very angry at this,” Sergeant Savage reported. “Most of the [U.S.] officers however stood calmly by and let these beatings go on without letup. In fact our Division Artillery sent a letter to our Battalion to the effect not to criticize what the police were doing. …

“Most of us thought surely these things would reach American newspapers. About two weeks later the ‘Stars and Stripes’ had an article about it. They said that there had been a riot in Masan, ‘but American troops restored law and order without firing a shot.’”

Syngman Rhee regime

The new assembly established the Republic of Korea, with Syngman Rhee as president. Inaugural ceremonies were held in August. Rhee maintained his corrupt and brutal regime until 1960, when a mass uprising by workers and youth overturned it.

As Rhee was being anointed in Seoul, South Korean troops and police, backed by Washington’s occupation forces, were brutally suppressing a rebellion on Cheju Island, 60 miles below the peninsula’s southernmost tip.

Actions denouncing the U.S.-engineered elections and demanding food and jobs had begun there in March 1948. In face of government arrests and killings, there was an armed uprising on April 3, led by the South Korean Workers’ Party and other forces.

Expressing the imperial arrogance and contempt for working people that distinguished the U.S. occupiers, Col. Rothwell Brown wrote at the time that the ranks of the fighters were “ignorant, uneducated farmers and fishermen.”

The uprising had largely been crushed by the summer of 1949. “The job is about done,” U.S. Ambassador John Muccio wired the State Department in May.

According to the government’s own figures, at least 30,000 people on Cheju Island had been killed out of a population of no more than 300,000. More recent estimates place the figure as high as 80,000 dead.

In a brutal campaign later used by Washington during the Vietnam War as a model for its “strategic hamlets” program, South Korean troops and police drove peasants from their homes into heavily fortified villages. By the end of the bloodletting, only 170 of 400 villages remained on Cheju; nearly 40,000 homes had been destroyed; and tens of thousands had taken refuge in Japan.

Another uprising began in October 1948, in the southeastern city of Yosu. There many soldiers in the Korean army’s 14th and 6th regiments rebelled in face of orders to go to Cheju and take part in a bloody crackdown on fellow Koreans.

According to an article by Joseph Hansen in the Nov. 8, 1948, issue of the Militant, a dispatch in the New York Herald Tribune reported that when orders came for deployment to Cheju, rebel troops instead killed “all the loyal officers at Yosu and seized an arsenal of American and Japanese weapons.” Hansen wrote that soldiers seized a train and went to nearby Sunchon, where they “ran up the flags of the North Korean People’s Republic” — established just weeks earlier on Sept. 9 — and were joined by hundreds of local residents.

The rebellion was quelled by Korean troops under the command of U.S. officers.

The Militant’s account of the Herald Tribune dispatch continued:

More than 5,000 men were rounded up on the playing field of a school [in Sunchon] for questioning “to find out where they were during the rebellion and how they acted.” Batches were then executed on the spot. “One of the first sights to meet the eyes of American correspondents reaching here today was a rifle squad of executioners standing over fallen enemies.” …

The report concludes: “The four American correspondents at the scene of the fighting here have been urged strongly to point out that if the American troops are taken from the area in the discernible future, the whole country is sure to be conquered by organized Communists.”

By July 1950, even before Washington launched its murderous war in Korea, more than 100,000 workers, peasants, and youth had already been killed by the landlord-capitalist regime and the U.S. occupation army that imposed it on the southern half of the divided country.

(To be continued)  
 
 
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