Content area
Full text
Although we often refer to Korea as the "forgotten war," news- paper headlines in the last ten years have forced Americans to remember a painful chapter of Korean War history. The stories, most recently published in August 2008, have focused on the killing by American troops of hundreds, if not thousands, of South Korean civilians suspected of being North Korean infiltrators and spies. Most notably, an intense controversy has arisen over an alleged massacre of South Korean refugees by members of the 2nd Battalion of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment (ist Cavalry Division, 8th Army) in late July 1950 at a village called No Gun Ri (1). Just as the documents on the My Lai Massacre of 1968 can illuminate the military history of the Vietnam War, a 1950 letter from U.S. Ambassador to South Korea John Muccio to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk for Far Eastern Affairs, on the subject of Korean refugees, as well as the excerpt from an oral history of U.S. soldier Don F. Adams can help teachers and students better understand the history of the Korean War
Traditionally, the Korean War has been portrayed as a conflict between North and South Korea. Each side was allied with superpowers, which fought the first "hot war" of the cold war era. Increasingly, however, historians have recognized that in the five years before North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, Koreans were also fighting a civil war. In the aftermath of World War II, powerful movements for independence and social change gripped Korea, a former Japanese colony. In the north, these movements - powered by local grassroots "people's committees" - led to the 1948 declaration of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), headed by Kim H- Sung, a leader of the Korean Workers Party, supported by the Soviet Union. In the south, the people's committees, and associated peasant protests and armed revolts, were largely repressed by the U.S. military occupation authorities, who worked closely with conservative anticommunist Koreans like Syngman Rhee. A prominent long-time supporter of independence for Korea, Rhee was elected presi- dent of the newly-created Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south in 1948. Despite his election, Rhee was increasingly unpopular because he ap- pointed...