The Hidden History of the Korean War (1950-1953)
Book Review by Jay Hauben, "The Hidden History of the Korean War" by I. F. Stone, Monthly Review Press, 1952, 1970.
by Jay Hauben
The controversial book, The
Hidden History of the Korean War by I. F. Stone was originally published
in 1952 during the Korean War (1950-1953) and republished in 1970
during the Vietnam
War (1960-1975). It raised questions about the origin
of the Korean War, made a case that the United States government
manipulated the United Nations, and gave evidence that the U.S. military
and South Korean oligarchy dragged out the war by sabotaging the peace
talks.
Publishing such a book in the
U.S. during the time of McCarthyism, while the war was still continuing
was an act of journalistic courage. Forty years later, declassified
U.S., Soviet and People’s Republic of China documents both confirmed
some and corrected some of Stone’s story.
Until his death in 1989, Stone
was an experienced and respected, independent, left-wing journalist and
iconoclast. This book-length feat of journalism, with over 600 citations
for his quotes and materials, is a testament to Stone’s search for a
way to strengthen his readers to think for themselves, rather than be
overwhelmed by official stories and war propaganda.
The standard telling was that
the Korean War was an unprovoked aggression by the North Koreans
beginning on June 25, 1950, undertaken at the behest of the Soviet Union
to extend the Soviet sphere of influence to the whole of Korea,
completely surprising the South Koreans, the U.S., and the U.N.
But was it a surprise? Could an
attack by 70,000 men using at least 70 tanks launched simultaneously at
four different points have been a surprise?
Stone gathers contemporary
reports from South Korean, U.S. and U.N. sources documenting what was
known before June 25. The head of the U.S. CIA, Rear Admiral Roscoe H.
Hillenloetter, is reported to have said on the record, “that American
intelligence was aware that ‘conditions existed in Korea that could have
meant an invasion this week or next.'” (p. 2) Stone writes that
“America’s leading military commentator, Hanson Baldwin of the New York
Times, a trusted confidant of the Pentagon, reported that they [U.S.
military documents] showed ‘a marked buildup by the North Korean
People’s Army along the 38th Parallel beginning in the early days of
June.'” (p. 4)
How and why did U.S. President
Truman so quickly decide by June 27 to commit the U.S. military to
battle in South Korea? Stone makes a strong case that there were those
in the U.S. government and military who saw a war in Korea and the
resulting instability in East Asia as in the U.S. national interest.
Stone presents the ideas and actions of them, including John Foster
Dulles, General Douglas MacArthur, President Syngman Rhee and
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, which appear to amount to a willingness
to see the June 25 military action by North Korea as another Pearl
Harbor in order to “commit the United States more strongly against
Communism in the Far East.” (p. 21). Their reasoning may have been,
Stone thought, the sooner a war with China and/or Russia the better
before both become stronger. President Truman removed Secretary of
Defense Louis Johnson, according to Stone’s account, because Johnson had
been selling this doctrine of preventive war. (p. 93)
Stone shows that Truman
committed the U. S. military to the war in Korea, then went to the U.N.
for sanctions against North Korea. “It was neither honorable nor wise,”
Stone argues, “for the U.N. under pressure from an interested great
power to condemn a country for aggression without investigation and
without hearings its side of the case.” (p. 50) But that is what the U.
S. insisted should happen using, Stone argues, distorted reports to rush
its case.
Then when the war came to a
stalemate at the 38th Parallel, Stone makes a strong case that U.S. Army
headquarters provoked or created incidents to derail the ceasefire
negotiations. When the North Koreans and Chinese had ceded on Nov. 4,
1952 to the three demands of the U.N. side, the U. S. military spread a
story that “The Communists had brutally murdered 5,500 American
prisoners.” The talks were being dragged out, the U.S. military argued,
because “The communists don’t want to have to answer questions about
what happened to their prisoners” and they are lower than “barbarians.”
(pp. 324-25) At no time after these reports were these “atrocities”
reported again or documented. But hope of a ceasefire subsided.
Stone takes the story in time
only a little beyond the dismissal of MacArthur on April 11, 1951. He
quotes press reports as late as January 1952 that “there still could be
American bombing and naval blockade of Red China if Korean talks
fail.”(1)
The evidence which Stone
presents is solid but circumstantial. What else could it be, with the
official documents still unavailable? In the 1960s, the Rand
Corporation, a major think tank originally funded by the U.S. Air Force,
conducted studies with additional information and according to one
reviewer came to “almost identical conclusions” as Stone.(2)
Stone’s telling of the history
of the Korean War, emphasizing the opportunistic response by the forces
in the U.S. advocating rollback and also downplaying the role of the
Soviet Union challenged the dominant assumption that this was Stalin’s
war. “Until the release of Western documents in the 1970s, prompted a
new wave of literature on the war, his remained a minority view.”(3)
Then in the 1990s, documents
from the former Soviet archives became available, as did telegrams and
other sources from the PRC archives. Scholars examining these documents
and fitting the pieces together were able to make the case that Kim
Il-sung had sought and eventually received Soviet support for a military
effort to unify Korea. Stone had been wrong to suspect that General
MacArthur and John Foster Dulles somehow colluded in the start of the
Korean War.
But Stone did a service by
documenting the role of sectors of U.S. policymakers looking for an
opportunity to push the USSR and the PRC back from Northeast Asia. Bruce
Cummings studied the detailed policy debate in the U.S. which led to
the policy of active containment. Cumings’ book, The Origins of the
Korean War, Volume II gives substance to the internal fight between
supporters of rollback and those who supported containment, which for
Stone was journalistic speculation.
In 1952 when it was published,
The Hidden History of the Korean War met with almost a complete press
blackout and boycott. But that included no rebuttals or answers from
official U.S. sources. There was a republication in 1970 and the book
has been translated at least into Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. Some
chapters also appeared in French. Used copies are still available,
especially from online booksellers.
I. F. Stone’s case is thought
provoking and helpful, especially when tensions are being stirred up
again on the Korean Peninsula, and manipulated wars are still in style.
Perhaps however journalism like that of Stone’s and lessons from the
first Korean War are making a second Korean War less likely.
Notes
1. Wall Street Journal, Jan. 17, 1952
2. Stephen E. Ambrose, Professor of Maritime History at the Naval College in the Baltimore Sun
3.
Kathryn Weathersby, “The Soviet Role in the Korean War: The State of
Historical Knowledge,” in The Korean War in World History, edited by
William Stueck, University Press of Kentucky, 2004, page 63.
4.
Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Volume II: The Roaring of
the Cataract 1947-1950, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990
This article first appeared in OhmyNews on Feb.14, 2007
The original source of this article is OhmyNews
Copyright © Global Research News, OhmyNews, 2013
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