Remembering the Forgotten War

Post-WWII

The years 1950-53 were eventful around the world and in the United States, politically as well as culturally. The economy, technology, and population of the United States were booming. In 1950, Charles Schultz published the first Peanuts strip, Pope Pius XII declared The Assumption of Mary to be Catholic doctrine, and Shirley Temple retired from show business at age 22. In 1952, Albert Einstein was offered and declined the presidency of Israel, Mother Teresa opened the first Home for the Dying in Calcutta, and every other American household had a television, on which they watched new shows like I Love Lucy and Howdy Doody. Tennessee Waltz sung by Patty Page was a jukebox favorite, and other favorite artists included Nat King Cole, and Perry Como. 1950-3 produced hit movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, War of the Worlds, An American in Paris, Singing in the Rain, and Disney's Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

But while life was flourishing at home, things were heating up abroad. Though the Axis Powers had been defeated in 1945, it was clear that peace was a long way off from realization. The spectre of Fascism had been replaced with that of Communism, Germany and Japan with Soviet Russia. No sooner did the world stage curtains close on WWII did they open on the Cold War.

On April 4, 1949, the United States, Canada, and ten nations of Western Europe formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This was a mutual defense pact to counter the looming behemoth of the Soviet Bloc to the East; if any one member was attacked, all the others would come to its defense.

In February 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy (R) presented a list which he claimed contained the names of 205 Communist sympathizers and agents within the United States government. This began the Second Red Scare, a kind of witch hunt frenzy in which dozens of suspects' reputations were ruined or were arrested. It is hard to tell who was actually guilty or to what degree, though it is certain that the actual danger was exaggerated, if unintentionally, in the national paranoia that followed.

Though NATO and the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) never went directly to war, they fought a series of contained wars around the world against each other, in which they supported opposite sides in a country's civil war. These were political investments in the form of military actions, attempting to get a small country to become either Communist or Democratic and Capitalist. One of the first of these proxy wars was fought on a little peninsula in East Asia, which most Americans had never heard of, called Korea.

For over 50 years, other Asian powers had fought for control over the weaker kingdom of Korea. In 1894-5, Japan and Qing China fought the Sino-Japanese War over Korea, which had previously been a Chinese vassalage. Japan won, gaining dominance over the peninsula as well as the island of Taiwan. In 1904-5, Japan and Russia fought the Russo-Japanese War, also mostly over who would have dominance in the region, particularly regarding Korea. President Theodore Roosevelt brokered the peace negotiations in the Treaty of Portsmouth, in which he confirmed Korea as a protectorate of Japan. This negotiation earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906, thought no one in Europe or America imagined or cared about the oppressive manner in which Japan ruled her "protectorate." Finally, in 1910, Japan completely annexed Korea, making it one of the first territories in what would become the Japanese Empire.

Korea remained occupied until 1945, when Japan was defeated in WWII. Soviet Russia and the United States agreed to partition Korea at the 38th parallel into a northern Communist and a southern Capitalist and Democratic spheres of influence, each molding their partitions into their own image. The intention had been for the country to be reunited, but obviously, neither superpower was willing to give up their half to the other, and it became clear, to the grief of the Koreans, that the country would be not peacefully united. In 1948, both superpowers recognized their newly founded states, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north, and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south, and in 1949 they withdrew their forces, each supporting a prominent Korean to govern them.

Kim Il-Sung, born in 1912 in Pyongyang Korea, was raised in China, and spent several years training in Communist Russia. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, he became a guerrilla fighter against Japanese occupation in Manchuria. With the patriotic and heroic reputation this brought him, Kim was elected Premier of North Korea, and began instigating land and labor reforms, the like of which Russia had seen under Stalin, and China would see under Mao Zedong.

During the Russo-Japanese war, Syngman Rhee had traveled to America to meet with President Roosevelt to beg for Korean independence to be recognized. Though this request was denied, Rhee remained in the United States for most of the next forty years, studying at George Washington University, Harvard, and Princeton. During this time in which his homeland was occupied by Japan, his life work was campaigning for Korean independence, including speaking at the League of Nations Convention in 1933. Amid the complex political uncertainty of US/Soviet divided Korea in 1945-50, America begrudgingly supported Rhee as leader of the South. This was not so much because they liked him or his policies, so much as simply because he was anti-communist, was fluent in English, and had spent so long in America; his and the United States' relationship were cordial at best. There is obviously more to be said about both Kim and Rhee and this period of political change, but unfortunately any more in this direction goes beyond the scope of this essay.

Following WWII, thinking the world could return to a state of "normalcy," United States President Harry Truman's administration greatly cut military spending in the budget. The defense budget decreased from around 900 billion dollars (adjusted to the dollar in 2009) in 1945 to around 200 billion by 1949, a drop from about 40% of the federal budget to about 8%. Truman and his staff believed that having a monopoly on the atomic bomb would be deterrent enough to prevent the USSR from overt aggression. This hope, however, was shattered in 1949 when Stalin announced that the Soviet Union had produced an atomic bomb of their own, even more powerful than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 1949 brought another blow against the United States and NATO, when the Chinese civil war ended in a Communist victory. With Russia and China now allied, and the United States apparently demilitarizing, the Communist powers were ready to attack.