The Korean War: The Untold Truth

Chapter 8 Whale Fighting Shrimp (2)
An anguished Rhee could not return to his homeland, knowing that his anti-Japanese political activities had made him a surveilled figure.The Methodist missionary group that founded the missionary middle school that Syngman Rhee attended in North Korea offered to help him maintain his student status in the United States.For the next five years, Rhee was a wandering scholar.He studied theology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and showed slides and gave lectures on missionary work and North Korean independence to earn some living expenses (one missionary supporter hailed him as "the gospel of Christ for North Korea"). An outstanding example of people's service"). In 1907, he graduated from George Washington University and moved to Harvard.Relying on the support of the Methodist Church, he obtained a master's degree in history and political science from Harvard.He was then supported to study at Princeton University for two years.He lives in a seminary and is doing a Ph.D. program in political science.He later called this period the "most peaceful" time of his life, largely because of his friendship with Princeton President Woodrow Wilson, his wife, and three daughters.Rhee Chengman looked serious in a black cashmere suit.While the other Princeton students were singing, he stood poker-faced by the piano in the Wilson family's living room, letting the Wilson girls banter and laugh with indifference.Wilson was fond of the introverted Syngman Rhee (who was 10 to 15 years older than his classmates), and often described Rhee as "the future savior of Korean independence."

In 1910, this idyllic life came to an end.The International YMCA offered Syngman Rhee a job as a teacher and evangelist at the YMCA in Seoul.Syngman Rhee's church friends hinted that the time had come for him to return their investment.They paid for his education as a missionary, and now they expect him to perform.

Syngman Rhee only stayed in North Korea for 17 months.Because of his record of political activities, the Japanese have always paid close attention to him.Seeing his countrymen living in slavery, Rhee was heartbroken, but could do nothing.He quit the YMCA and became the principal of a small school. In 1912, the Japanese began arresting Christian leaders. Rhee fled North Korea and began his 33-year exile until the end of World War II.

He settled in Hawaii, where there are a large number of Koreans, and devoted himself to political activities in exile (he became the principal of a missionary school to support himself).At the heart of the debate among the thousands of North Korean exiles scattered across Hawaii, the U.S. West Coast, and China and Japan is whether they should remove the Japanese by force or through Western diplomatic efforts.Despite previous disappointments with Theodore Roosevelt's administration, Rhee still trusted the public statements of Western diplomats.So Rhee rejoiced once again when his old Princeton friend Woodrow Wilson (now President of the United States) declared that the Paris Peace Conference ended World War I and would focus on the "right of peoples to self-determination" encouraged.Jubilant Korean nationalists met in Seoul, organized a "provisional government," and elected Syngman Rhee, who was not present, as president.With this title in his body, Syngman Rhee applied for a passport from the U.S. State Department in order to attend the Paris Peace Conference.To his anguish: President Wilson had ordered Syngman Rhee shut out.For the sake of peace in the East, Wilson needs the cooperation of Japan, and Rhee's presence will bring "disturbance". (Another Asian, Ho Chi Minh, who became famous during the Vietnam War, managed to get in, but no one took him seriously.)
A desperate Rhee tried to organize mass rallies and mobilize American public opinion to support his cause.Those Methodist churchgoers who enjoyed his slideshow about the life of a North Korean missionary a decade ago are now keeping Rhee at arm's length, speaking only to the meager number of North Koreans in the United States.Syngman Rhee traveled to Shanghai to meet the "cabinet" members of his interim government, but he saw more infighting than grand schemes.Syngman Rhee's leadership was quickly relinquished. For 20 years he had preached a gradualist approach to independence, to no avail.His "American friends" had the opportunity to help North Korea twice, but both times the United States turned into a whale helping to destroy the small shrimp of North Korea.For understandable reasons, Syngman Rhee has now come to have the reputation of being argumentative and stubborn.He quarreled with other exiled politicians and even his Methodist friends. At the beginning of 1922, the 47-year-old Rhee finally returned to Hawaii, where he preached, taught and taught.His reputation comes more from the past than from the present, let alone the future.

North Korean communists enter
Given the failure of Syngman Rhee's "gradual" campaign against the Japanese occupation, many North Koreans looked to stronger opposition elsewhere. There were two sources of this power in the early 20s: the fledgling communist movement in China, which was then in the early stages of the struggle against the Kuomintang regime; and the Soviet Union, which was eager to encourage any force to deal with the Japanese.The communists of North Korea suffered from the same infighting as Syngman Rhee's "peaceful reform" group, and Japanese repression forced them into exile in Shanghai, Japan, the Soviet Union, and "Manchuria", and their ranks were constantly divided by political infighting weaken.

However, the communists had several advantages over Syngman Rhee.Most of them fought the Japanese fearlessly in Korea; they pledged not only to drive out the Japanese but to create a "better" (that is, communist) society.Nam Jun-woo, an anti-communist Korean historian, acknowledged that the communists were more popular with farmers and workers, and that they even managed to stage demonstrations and collective resistance to rent despite heavy-handed police tactics.Furthermore, exiled Korean communists formed guerrillas on the "Manchuria" front to fight the Japanese army, and they were also part of the Chinese Communist Party's People's Liberation Army.

In 1912, in South Pyongan Province in Northwest Korea, a guerrilla fighter Kim Sung-joo (who later became the prime minister of North Korea during the Korean War) was born, or so the propaganda media of modern North Korea claims.For a long time, without other sources, the U.S. intelligence community had to rely on the kind of sources it had to rely on in its analysis of Kim and other North Korean leaders to be as credible as a Hollywood fanzine in the 30s.Thanks to the propagandists, they did give Kim a background befitting of a Communist giant.His father was poor but bold, teaching young people about history and culture during the day and training them to fight the Japanese at night.His father was arrested, imprisoned and tortured, and forced to go into exile in "Manchuria", where he opened a clinic for the poor with his superficial medical knowledge.But prison life wrecked the body of his father, who was 32 when he died.

It is said that Xiao Jin knew how to hate the Japanese very early. When his mother told him to "grow up quickly and avenge his father", his eyes were "filled with tears".Part of the saga: the father gave his son two pistols on his deathbed.Use it, he exhorted.I will, the son replied.

King's first political activity is said to have been in 1928, when he was 16 years old.He may have led violent demonstrations in Jilin, the commercial city of "Manchuria," against the extension of North Korea's main railway to "Manchuria."He was imprisoned for a short time, then retired to the countryside "to agitate farmers, students, and small businessmen to organize against the Japanese."

King's organizing efforts clearly paid off, and when Japan invaded "Manchuria" in 1931-1932, a guerrilla force he led was one of many that rose up in the anti-Japanese movement.The Chinese Communists exercised total control over the guerrilla groups, naming them the Northeast Anti-Japanese Allied Forces (a title that sounded more intimidating than it was), and supplying them with weapons and political leaders. The man who was born as Kim Sung Joo 20 years ago has now accepted the name "Kim Il Sung".The name comes from a legendary guerrilla leader who fought the Japanese at the turn of the century.

The name change has enormous psychological significance.It gave Kim such mystifying qualities as a national hero that when he appeared in his homeland after World War II, many were so surprised to see such a young man that they actually thought of the party-welcoming Kim Il Sung Is it his real body?Later, North Korea's official history even praised the 21-year-old Kim Il-sung as leader who "solidified the unity" of comrades who fought in northern "Manchuria" in 1934 and 1935. (Korean historian Nam Jun-woo finds this dubious, since apparently there was no general leader in the region at the time.)
The veracity of this statement aside, the Communists did build up strong guerrilla units in Manchuria, using weapons they had seized from the Japanese and occasionally attacking Japanese garrisons with numbers in excess of 1 men.It is impossible to document Kim's specific activities and whereabouts, and official North Korean biographies attribute a series of unconscionable feats to him.Regardless of Kim's direct role, official Japanese figures attest to the guerrilla's effectiveness.From the mid-000s to the end of the war, Communist guerrillas in "Manchuria" killed more than 20 Japanese soldiers, equivalent to 30 divisions.

There is evidence that King's guerrilla achievements convinced the Soviets that the man would be of great use after the war.The Soviets implemented several different lines regarding North Korea during the war.On the one hand, they supported North Korea's independence movement as a means of torturing the Japanese.At the same time, they show prudent interest considerations.The Soviets hoped they would control "Manchuria" once the Japanese left, but worried that the North Koreans living there would help return the "country" to China, or even declare it a part of North Korea itself. (The people living on the North Korea-"Manchuria" border didn't care much about the official border, and there was a lot of mixed population going back and forth.) So, for "security reasons", the USSR in the late 30's cleanly moved the living Nearly 15 Korean men, women and children from the coastal provinces bordering "Manchuria" migrated to the interior of the Soviet Union.Young men were drafted into the army, apparently to use them against the Japanese should the Soviet Union and Japan go to war.

In King's official biography, this population shift coincided with the announcement that King's guerrillas would be forced to undertake a "Long March" into northern "Manchuria" to ward off mounting Japanese military pressure. This should This was when Kim became a Red Army officer and came under direct Soviet control. Regardless of the truth, Kim wore the uniform of a Soviet Red Army major when he appeared in Korea in late 1945 as the leader of the Soviet-chosen Communist regime in late [-]. Comments on Kim's career Western experts, who have studied the few details in rare cases, believe that it would be impossible for the Soviets to entrust King with such a heavy responsibility if he had not stayed under their wing for a considerable period of time.

Whatever Kim Il Sung's background and the truth about his wartime career, he was clearly someone the Soviet Union could trust and control.

Syngman Rhee's Years in Exile
During Kim's guerrilla days, the indomitable Rhee continued to toss the offices of Western dignitaries, hoping Americans would recognize him as North Korea's legitimate leader.His time is split between his school in Hawaii and visits to Washington, where his "interim government" also maintains a South Korean commission to the United States.Despite the almost unanimous cold reception he has received, Rhee still believes that "our efforts must be focused on the United States, at least for now."One sympathizes with the old man's zeal and questions his realism, as the United States has said it has little interest in extending aid to a vassal state that most U.S. citizens can't find on maps. The "Los Angeles Times" may be displeased with the fact that Syngman Rhee insisted on being interviewed every time he came to Los Angeles, and published a report titled "Sungman Rhee, the Failed North Korea", the first sentence said: "Dr. Syngman Rhee, the leader of the failed cause in the East... is in Los Angeles today, meeting with Chinese businessmen and politicians, in an attempt to get their assistance in the freedom movement in North Korea." Syngman Rhee even turned to the Soviet Union at one point, and he told the Soviet ambassador in Paris He emphasized the need for a united front on the Asian continent to counter the growing Japanese threat.Syngman Rhee managed to secure a Soviet visa and embarked on a journey to Moscow, only to be told that it had all gone wrong and that he had to leave the Soviet Union immediately.

This trip really brought Syngman Lee a great harvest.Before taking the train to Moscow, he happened to be sitting next to Francesca Donna at the dinner table one evening.She was the eldest of three daughters of a wealthy Viennese factory owner.A strict follower of the rules, Mr Turner taught his daughters "the fundamentals of business management and manly self-reliance" and emphasized self-responsibility.Francesca has a resolute face and blond curly hair. She knows a thing or two about international affairs and has read Syngman Rhee's works on North Korea's independence.The two were attracted to each other and fell in love at first sight.Two years later, in 1934, they were married in New York.Since then, she has become Syngman Rhee's wife, secretary, housewife and like-minded person, "the warmest supporter, advisor and caregiver".

By the end of the 30s, it was clear that Syngman Rhee was leading a "lost business".Members of his provisional government turned to anti-Japanese violent attacks and guerrilla warfare, some even defecting to the North Korean People's Army, which Rhee denounced as "communists and heretics"; others collaborated with the Chinese Communists.In the words of the friendly biographer Oliver:

His policy of recovering his lost country by appealing to Western interests and goodwill appears bankrupt.His leadership has never impressed the American officials he was trying to woo.Year after year, as his plans came to nothing, his followers began to fall apart.

Even Rhee's friends have come to call him a stubborn, difficult old man, clinging to his notorious tactics for some overt or implicit personal gain.

When World War II began, Rhee moved back to Washington and lived in a small house overlooking the National Zoo.There he "listened to the roar of the tiger and the roar of the lion ... with a depressing sense of sympathy".Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he visited the State Department and asked Stanley Hornbeck, director of Far Eastern Affairs, to recognize his "interim government" as the legitimate North Korean regime.The clichés about "fighting Japan" certainly didn't work anymore, and Hornbeck bluffed, babbled, and finally ignored him, as if he were a commoner wandering in from the street.Later, Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Burr told Syngman Rhee in an oblique and formal letter that the United States did not currently intend to recognize the "legitimate" governments claimed by exile groups in countries involved in the war.All in all, let's win this war first, and then tackle the politics.

Syngman Rhee even lost the support of the majority in the "provisional government". In 1942, the "provisional government" voted to remove him from the presidency and elected Jin Jiu, who had taken political asylum in China, to succeed him.Kim Koo, a moderate, wanted to form a "congress of all revolutionary organizations," including even the communist Korean National Revolutionary Party. At the end of 1942, Hornbeck abruptly informed Syngman Rhee that the State Department believed that he was completely unknown in North Korea, and that the Provisional Government was nothing more than "a self-organized club within an exile group with a limited number of members."Syngman Rhee is obviously not someone the US government likes.

Meanwhile, the Korean communists fought the Japanese in the ice and snow of "Manchuria."

(End of this chapter)