The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [6]
What many Koreans consider the second American betrayalthe division of Korea-occurred in the final days of World War II. The United States, Britain, and China had declared in the Cairo Declaration in 1943 that "in due course, Korea shall become free and independent," and at the 1945 Yalta Conference President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a U.S.-Soviet-Chinese trusteeship over Korea. Beyond these few words, there was no agreement among the wartime allies and no practical planning in Washington about the postwar future of the peninsula. It was reported that in 1945 Secretary of State Edward Stettinius asked a subordinate in a State Department meeting to please tell him where Korea was.
Only in the last week of the war, when the Soviet Union finally declared war on Japan and sent its troops into Manchuria and northem Korea, did the United States give serious consideration to its postwar policy in the peninsula. Suddenly Washington realized that Russian occupation of Korea would have important military implications for the future of Japan and East Asia.
At this point, according to Yale University historian Richard Whelan, "the U.S. government would probably have been happiest if Korea simply had not existed." About two thousand civil affairs officers had been trained for military government duty in Japan, and elaborate plans had been drawn up for that country, but no one had been trained and no plans had been made for Korea. Despite Korea's well-known antipathy to its Japanese overlords, Washington had rebuffed efforts by Korean exile groups for recognition during the war. Thus as World War II drew to a close, there had been no consultation with Koreans about the future of their country.
On the evening of August 10, 1945, with Tokyo suing for peace and Soviet troops on the move, an all-night meeting was convened in the Executive Office Building next to the White House to decide what to do about accepting the impending Japanese surrender in Korea and elsewhere in Asia. Around midnight two young officers were sent into an adjoining room to carve out a U.S. occupation zone in Korea, lest the Soviets occupy the entire peninsula and move quickly toward Japan. Lieutenant Colonels Dean Rusk, who was later to be secretary of state under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and Charles Bonesteel, later U.S. military commander in Korea, had little preparation for the task. Working in haste and under great pressure, and using a National Geographic map for reference, they proposed that U.S. troops occupy the area south of the thirty-eighth parallel, which was approximately halfway up the peninsula and north of the capital city of Seoul, and that Soviet troops occupy the area north of the parallel.
No Korea experts were involved in the decision. Rusk later confessed that neither he nor any of the others involved were aware that at the turn of the century the Russians and Japanese had discussed dividing Korea into spheres of influence at the thirty-eighth parallel, a historical fact that might have suggested to Moscow that Washington had finally recognized this old claim. "Had we known that, we almost surely would have chosen another line of demarcation," Rusk wrote many years later.
The thirty-eighth parallel line was hastily incorporated into General Order Number One for the occupation of Japanese-held territory. Despite the fact that U.S. forces were far away and would not arrive on the scene for several weeks, the Soviets carefully stopped their southward advance at the parallel. Thus Korea came to be divided into two "temporary" zones of occupation that, as the cold war deepened, became the sites of two antagonistic Korean regimes based on diametrically opposed principles and sponsors.
U.S. forces were eventually sent from Japan for occupation duty, an assignment that was not popular with the troops. Colonel Harry Summers, who later became