The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [7]
Summing up, Gregory Henderson, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and noted Korea scholar, wrote in 1974, "No division of a nation in the present world is so astonishing in its origin as the division of Korea; none is so unrelated to conditions or sentiment within the nation itself at the time the division was effected; none is to this day so unexplained; in none does blunder and planning oversight appear to have played so large a role. Finally, there is no division for which the U.S. government bears so heavy a share of the responsibility as it bears for the division of Korea."
As these events and those of its more distant past illustrate, Korea has been a country of the wrong size in the wrong place: large and well located enough to be of substantial value to those around it and thus worth fighting and scheming over, yet too small to merit priority attention by more powerful nations on all but a few occasions. Korea's fate was often to be an afterthought, subordinated to more immediate or compelling requirements of larger powers, rather than a subject of full consideration in its own right.
Yet Koreans are neither meek nor passive, but a tough, combative, and independent-minded people with a tradition of strong centralized authority. They are characteristically about as subtle as kimchi, the fiery pepper-and-garlic concoction that is their national dish, and as timid as a tae kwon do (Korean karate) chop. Confronted with the reality of their bitter division, North and South Korea have grappled unceasingly for advantage and supremacy over each otherand with the greater powers outside. How they have done so in the past quarter-century, and with what risks and results, is recounted in these pages.
WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH
To head its regime in the North, the Soviet Union chose a 33-year-old Korean guerrilla commander who had initially fought the Japanese in China but had spent the last years of World War II in Manchurian training camps commanded by the Soviet army. Kim Il Sung, as he called himself (his birth name was Kim Song Ju), had a burning ambition to reunite his country. In the South the United States gave the nod to 70-year-old Syngman Rhee, who had degrees from George Washington University, Harvard, and Princeton and had lived in exile throughout most of the Japanese occupation. Rhee had a messianic belief that he was destined to reunite Korea under an anticommunist banner.
Late in 1948 the Soviet army went home, turning North Korea over to the regime it had created. The following June, U.S. troops followed suit. Before the summer was over, civil war broke out in clashes of battalion size along the thirty-eighth parallel. Each side was building its forces with an eye to gaining military supremacy.
On June 25, 1950, North Korea, with Soviet and Chinese backing, invaded the South in an effort to reunify the country by force of arms. The invasion was contested and ultimately repulsed by the forces of the United States, South Korea, and fifteen other nations under the flag of the United Nations. The Chinese intervened massively on the other side to save North Koreans from defeat. Internationally, the bloody three-year Korean War was a historic turning point. It led the United States to shift decisively from post-World War II disarmament to rearmament to stop Soviet expansionism, tripling