An American Rabbi in Korea: A Chaplain's Journey in the Forgotten War

Prelude

Dipping into the waters de¤ned by the Yellow Sea on the west and the Sea of Japan on the east rises the troubled peninsula of Korea. Its land mass borders China, Manchuria, and Russia and faces, across a small expanse of sea, a historic nemesis, Japan. Its tumultuous, largely Chinese dominated history spans at least twenty-¤ve hundred years, approximately the last two centuries of which encompass uninvited contact with such western powers as Russia, Germany , Great Britain, and the United States. Prior to the summer of 1950, however, it is doubtful if more than a minute percentage of Americans were conscious of Korea’s existence. Under the suzerainty of the Empire of Japan from 1910 to 1945, during which all vestiges of Korean national identity were brutally suppressed, it was treated as a colony, the sole purpose of which was to provide support for the Japanese economy and, ultimately, for the Japanese military machine. Yet it was not regarded as a major military base during World War II, either by the Japanese or the Allies. It was not situated among the forti¤ed islands that constituted the roadways of Allied conquest on the path to the mainland of Japan, thus escaping the notice of some of the more avid followers of the wartime geography of the Paci¤c. In 1943, however, when the tides of World War II evinced hopeful surges in favor of the Allies, certain major heads of state began to consider the disposition of the postwar world. The ¤rst of¤cial probes in this regard were inaugurated in late 1943 at the Cairo Conference, when the United States, Great Britain, and China (under Chiang Kai-shek) took up the issue of Prelude postliberation Korea as part of the agenda. Representing the United States and Great Britain were Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, respectively. The composition of participants in this conference provides a view into some of the unfounded assumptions under which it labored. One of the most important of these was related to the issue of the present and future geopolitical role of China and Chiang Kai-shek. China was still, at that time, to be the principal player around which postwar U.S. Asia policy would revolve. Although the Kuomintang government under Chiang was weak and corrupt, expending its limited resources in an ongoing struggle against the Chinese Communists rather than against the Japanese for much of the war, it was Roosevelt’s hope that China’s status quo could be strengthened by the incorporation of Russia into a postwar cooperative structure. In Roosevelt’s view, the presence of Russia would work to dampen any tendency to civil war between the Chinese Communists and Chiang. The China that emerged from this con¤guration would prove amenable to American interests and those of the formerly colonized nations of the region. On the background of this perspective , Korea was given the vague promise of independence “in due course.” During the crucial conference at Yalta, February 1945, attended by Roosevelt , Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, Roosevelt pursued his planned Far East policy by acquiring Stalin’s agreement to enter the war against Japan. In return , there would be territorial concessions from Japan relating to Russian losses in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, as well as rail and port concessions in Manchuria. In addition, Outer Mongolia would be recognized as independent of China. The bene¤t of Russia’s entry into the war against Japan was likely of less intrinsic importance than the hope that Russian support for a Chinese Communist–driven civil war could be avoided following Japan’s defeat . At Yalta, Stalin agreed in principle to a four-power trusteeship in Korea, consisting of the United States, Great Britain, the Republic of China, and the Soviet Union, but it was not promulgated at that conference. Indeed, at the Potsdam Conference in July of 1945, although it was declared that the intent of the Cairo conferees to establish the ultimate independence of Korea would be realized, a framework for accomplishing this was not ¤rmly dealt with at that time either. President Roosevelt had died in the interim between the two meetings. President Harry Truman was now representing the United States and may well have had no knowledge of the previous understanding regarding Korea, except for the vague, written statement emanating from the earlier Cairo accord. 2 / Prelude Change of leadership in the United States, however, was by no means the salient cause of the failure of Roosevelt...