Korean independence thus became a dead letter. In the years that followed a steady stream of Japanese officials and immigrants moved into the country. Japanese education, roads, railways, sanitation were introduced. Yet none of these gained the slightest gratitude from the fiercely nationalistic Koreans. Armed resistance grew steadily in the hands of a strange alliance of Confucian scholars, traditional bandits, Christians, and peasants with local grievances against the colonial power. The anti-Japanese guerrilla army rose to a peak of an estimated 70,000 men in 1908. Thereafter, ruthless Japanese repression broke it down. Korea became an armed camp, in which mass executions and wholesale imprisonments were commonplace and all dissent forbidden. On August 22, 1910, the Korean emperor signed away all his rights of sovereignty. The Japanese introduced their own titles of nobility and imposed their own military government. For the next thirty-five years, despite persistent armed resistance from mountain bands of nationalists, many of them Communist, the Japanese maintained their ruthless, detested rule in Korea, which also became an important base for their expansion north into Manchuria in the 1930s.

American policy was now set upon the course from which it would not again be deflected: to create, as speedily as possible, a plausible machinery of government in South Korea that could survive as a bastion against the Communist North. On December 12, 1946, the first meeting was held of a provisional South Korean Legislature, whose membership was once again dominated by the men of the Right, though such was their obduracy that they boycotted the first sessions in protest against American intervention in the elections, which had vainly sought to prevent absolute rightist manipulation of the results. A growing body of Korean officials now controlled the central bureaucracy of SKIG -- the South Korean Interim Government. In 1947 a random sample of 115 of these revealed that seventy were former officeholders under the Japanese. Only eleven showed any evidence of anti-Japanese activity during the Korean period. I have mixed emotions - Hastings is a superb historian and one I recommend. His wide view treatment of the Korean War is excellent. He lays out the political, military and ideological factors that led to the war and sustained it for the three years it ran, the inextricably interlaced influences of the leadership and decision making personalities, the tactics and strategic considerations - examined from the perspectives of both sides, the US, Britain, South Korea and the UN on one side and the Soviets, Red Chinese and North Koreans on the other. It is illuminating, and perceptive - and well worth reading the book. In addition to the conflict as a whole, he also devotes chapters to specialized topics such as the air war, intelligence, prisoners of war, that nicely examine their dedicated topics within the larger, wider narrative of the war as a whole to which the bulk of the book is devoted. Between 1945 and 1947 the foreign political patrons of North and South Korea became permanently committed to their respective protégés. The course of events thereafter is more simply described. In September 1947, despite Russian objections, the United States referred the future of Korea to the United Nations. Moscow made a proposal to Washington remarkably similar to that which General Hodge had advanced almost two years earlier: both great powers should simultaneously withdraw their forces, leaving the Koreans to resolve their own destinies. The Russians were plainly confident -- with good reason -- that left to their own devices, the forces of the Left in both Koreas would prevail. The Americans, making the same calculation, rejected the Russian plan. On November 14 their own proposal was accepted by the General Assembly: there was to be UN supervision of elections to a Korean government, followed by Korean independence and the withdrawal of all foreign forces. The Eastern bloc abstained from the vote on the American plan, which was carried by 46 votes to 0. Good intro to how Korea was split in two after WW2 like Germany. Here Soviet put in a strong leader in Kim Il-sung and gave them a ton of weapons and support making them a powerful nation. Of course Kim Il-sung wanted to conquer South Korea that the Western powers had left poor and defenseless. urn:lcp:koreanwar00hast_0:epub:196a2f09-ed99-4bbe-be7c-4d3fe1500fb8 Extramarc University of Michigan Foldoutcount 0 Identifier koreanwar00hast_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t34183b0z Isbn 9780671668341

Prison camps. Largely Chinese prisons as North Koreans just killed prisoners. The prisons were extremely poor and many Westerners died. But later China tried to improve their image by giving the prisoners a bit basic healthcare. They tried to make the prisoners communists, but they used terrible tactics. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-02-28 21:03:04 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA178901 Boxid_2 CH119501 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor While many books on war or military campaigns offer little to nothing to the student of history (many so fetishize tactics, casualty figures, and types of ordnance they read like firearms porn), it comes as something of a surprise when a war historian goes out of his way to place battle in a greater social and political context. No disrespect is intended to the careful and well-documented analyses by Peter Lowe and Callum MacDonald in suggesting that so complex and tragic a drama, involving such remarkable protagonists and causing such widespread suffering, needs the skills of a story-teller as accomplished as Max Hastings to do it justice. The fear and bewilderment of American troops pitchforked into a struggle for which they were psychologically and physically unprepared; the confusion and incompetence of their commanders; the nightmare sufferings of the Korean people themselves, caught between the brutality of their own countrymen and the American penchant for using air power to make up for the shortcomings of their troops; the bizarre affair of the Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war, terrorised by their own commissars under the indifferent or intimidated eyes of their Western guards – out of all this Max Hastings makes a brilliant and compelling book which must rank, even by the standards he has set, as a masterpiece. This book didn't suffer nearly so much as his Falklands work did and so was a more interesting read. I care less for the politics behind the conflicts and more on the men that fought it but I do understand that one needs an overall frame of reference and thus a need to fully detail the politics behind the scenes.

Everything is biased from a western perspective. He notes Chinese propaganda but not the U.S. propaganda. All fault lies with the North Koreans and Chinese and none with the U.S. He criticizes the Chinese for the same things he applauds the U.S. for. 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, earning an M.A. 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, financed by the contributions of Korean patriots. If he was despised by some of his fellow countrymen for his egoism, his ceaseless self-promotion, his absence from the armed struggle that engaged other courageous nationalists, his extraordinary determination and patriotism could not be denied. His iron will was exerted as ruthlessly against rival factions of expatriates as against colonial occupation. He could boast an element of prescience in his own world vision. As early as 1944, when the United States government still cherished all manner of delusions about the postwar prospect of working harmoniously with Stalin, Rhee was telling officials in Washington, "The only possibility of avoiding the ultimate conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is to build up all democratic, non-communistic elements wherever possible."In this readable,insightful, and well-written volume, Hastings aims to paint a “portrait” of the war and does not claim to provide anything resembling a comprehensive history, although in the end the book is a fine balance of both for the most part. The book is also mostly focused on military actions. But some young South Koreans did express their hostility to Rhee...and paid the price. Beyond those who were imprisoned, many more became "unpeople." Minh Pyong Kyu was a Seoul bank clerk's son who went to medical college in 1946 but found himself expelled in 1948 for belonging to a left-wing student organization. "There was an intellectual vacuum in the country at that time," he said. "The only interesting books seemed to be those from Noah Korea, and the Communists had a very effective distribution system. We thought the Americans were nice people who just didn't understand anything about Korea." Minh's family of eight lived in genteel poverty. His father had lost his job with a mining company in 1945, for its assets lay noah of the 38th Parallel. Minh threw himself into antigovernment activity: pasting up political posters by night, demonstrating, distributing Communist tracts. Then one morning he was arrested and imprisoned for ten days. The leaders of his group were tried and sentenced to long terms. He himself was released but expelled from his university, to his father's deep chagrin. Like hundreds of thousands of others, Mirth yearned desperately for the fall of Syngman Rhee. In 2008 he received the Westminster Medal of the RUSI for his lifetime contribution to Military Literature, and in 2009 the Edgar Wallace Trophy of the London Press Club.