The Korean War by Max Hastings Read Free Book Online

terms of imprisonment under the Japanese. Also, at least half could be identified as leftists or communists. But prominent exiles such as Syngman Rhee, Mu Chong, Kim Ku, and Kim Il Sung were granted places in absentia , although few subsequently accepted the roles for which they had been chosen. It is significant that the men of the right nominated to the KPR leadership were, on average, almost twenty years older than those of the left.
    It was not surprising that the Americans, on their arrival, knew nothing of the KPR. The chaotic struggle to fill the political vacuum in Korea was further confused by the arrival from Chungking of the self-proclaimed Korean Provisional Government, an exile grouping which included some nominated members of the KPR. In the weeks that followed, the military government’s scepticism about the KPR – energetically fostered by the Japanese – grew apace. Here, there was more than a little in common with Western attitudes to Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues in Vietnam of the same period. There was no attempt to examine closely the communist ideology of the leftists, to discover how far they were the creatures of Moscow, and how far they were merely vague socialists and nationalists who found traditional landlordism repugnant. No allowance was made for the prestige earned by the communists’ dominant role in armed resistance to the Japanese. Hodge and his men saw no merit in the KPR’s militant sense of Korean nationalism – this merely represented an obstacle to smooth American military government. It would be naive to suppose that such a grouping as the KPR could have formed an instantly harmonious leadership for an independent Korea. The group included too many irreconcilable factions. But it also represented the only genuine cross-section of Korean nationalist opinion ever to come together under one roof, however briefly. Given time and encouragement, it might have offered South Korea its best prospect of building a genuine democracy.
    But the strident tones in which the KPR addressed the American military government ensured that the group was rapidly identified as a threat and a problem. ‘There is evidence [wrote Benninghoff on 10 October] that the [KPR] group receives support and direction from the Soviet Union (perhaps from Koreans formerly resident in Siberia). In any event, it is the most aggressive party; its newspaper has compared American methods of occupation [with those of the Russians] in a manner that may be interpreted as unfavorable to the United States.’ 11
    It was another group, which could call upon only a fraction ofthe KPR’s likely political support, that seemed infinitely more congenial to Hodge and his advisers: ‘. . . the so-called democratic or conservative group, which numbers among its members many of the professional and educational leaders who were educated in the United States or in American missionary institutions in Korea. In their aims and policies they demonstrate a desire to follow the Western democracies, and they almost unanimously desire the early return of Dr Syngman Rhee and the “Provisional Government” at Chungking.’ 12 Barely three weeks after the American landings in Korea, official thinking in Seoul was already focusing upon the creation of a new government for the South, built around the person of one of the nation’s most prominent exiles.
    Syngman Rhee was born in 1875, the son of a genealogical scholar. He failed the civil service exams several times before becoming a student of English. Between 1899 and 1904 he was imprisoned for political activities. On his release, he went to the United States, where he studied for some years, becoming an MA at Harvard and a Ph.D at Princeton – the first Korean to receive an American doctorate. After a brief return to his homeland in 1910, Rhee once more settled in America. He remained there for the next thirty-five years, lobbying relentlessly for American support for Korean independence,