Liberation and division
Freed from Japan, Korea is split at the 38th parallel by the US and USSR, and by 1948 two rival states claim the whole peninsula.
- Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History — Bruce Cumings, W. W. Norton (1997)
- Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History — William Stueck, Princeton University Press (2002)
- The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea — Hun Joon Kim, Cornell University Press (2014)
Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945. Days earlier, as Soviet troops entered northern Korea, two US officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, picked the 38th parallel as a line to divide American and Soviet occupation zones; Moscow accepted it. Korean “people’s committees” sprang up everywhere, but the occupiers had their own plans.
- Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History — Bruce Cumings, W. W. Norton (1997)
- Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History — William Stueck, Princeton University Press (2002)
In the North, the Soviets backed Kim Il-sung, a former guerrilla, and carried out land reform that won peasant support while driving landlords and Christians south. In the South, the US military government relied on conservatives and many colonial-era police and officials, and suppressed the left. Talks on a unified government failed, and the UN oversaw elections in the South only.
- Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History — Bruce Cumings, W. W. Norton (1997)
- The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History — Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin, Basic Books (2014)
The Republic of Korea, led by Syngman Rhee, was proclaimed on 15 August 1948, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea under Kim Il-sung on 9 September. Each claimed to be the only legitimate Korea. The independence leader Kim Gu, who opposed separate elections, was assassinated in 1949.
- Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History — Bruce Cumings, W. W. Norton (1997)
- A Concise History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present — Michael J. Seth, Rowman & Littlefield (2016)
Violence came before the war. A leftist uprising on Jeju island on 3 April 1948 was met with a counter-insurgency in which government forces and right-wing youth groups burned villages; South Korea’s later truth commission and historians estimate that up to 30,000 islanders, around a tenth of the population, were killed. In 2003 President Roh Moo-hyun apologised on behalf of the state.
- The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea — Hun Joon Kim, Cornell University Press (2014)
- Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History — Bruce Cumings, W. W. Norton (1997)
Why it still hurts
Historians still argue about how much blame belongs to Washington, Moscow and Koreans themselves. Bruce Cumings stresses that the Americans propped up a conservative minority and crushed a popular left; others, such as William Stueck, emphasise that Stalin and Kim Il-sung were building a separate communist state in the North from the start.
- Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History — Bruce Cumings, W. W. Norton (1997)
- Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History — William Stueck, Princeton University Press (2002)
- Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History — Bruce Cumings, W. W. Norton (1997)
- The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History — Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin, Basic Books (2014)
Why it matters today
Koreans did not choose division; it was drawn on a map by foreign officers in a single night. That sense of a nation cut in two by outsiders runs through both Koreas' politics, and the violence of these years, above all on Jeju island, was buried for decades before South Korea began to confront it.