Opposing War in the Heart of the West: Cho Seung bog’s Antiwar Activism after the Korean War

Afro-Asian Intimacies Across Southern Cartographies:Race, Sex, and Gender in Toni Morrison's Home and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dao Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (bio) In 1953, following the Korean Armistice Agreement that ostensibly ended direct U.S. intervention in Korea (but, in reality, merely led to a recalibration of the unending Korean War), African American soldier Clarence Adams was one of twenty-one prisoners of war who refused repatriation back to the United States and instead migrated to the People's Republic of China. His decision was influenced by the antiblackness that structured the segregated U.S. South, curtailing his chances of upward mobility, as well as his compassion for the Korean civilians devastated by U.S. military intervention, prompting recognition of the shared oppression of Third World peoples.1 Twelve years later, during the Vietnam War, he broadcast a message to Black soldiers via Radio Hanoi, urging them to return to the United States: "You are fighting the wrong war. Brothers, go home. The Negro people need you back there."2 According to Daniel Y. Kim, "Adams mobilize[d] a historiography of a race war to cast both the Korean and Vietnam Wars as ones waged by a white empire against a colored population," exemplifying what Bill Mullens terms "Afro-Orientalism": a phenomenon in which Black activists turned to idealized Asian subjects for anti-imperialist and antiracist inspiration.3 I begin with Adams' story for three reasons. First, it highlights continuities between Black narratives of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Whereas historians have elucidated the experiences of Black soldiers during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, respectively, few studies have grappled with these two Cold War fronts in relation, noting patterns and [End Page 97] particularities in Black subject formation across the two U.S. imperial conflicts.4 With the signing of Executive Order 9981 in July 1948, President Harry S. Truman desegregated the U.S. military, exemplifying the United States' project of racial liberalism and bolstering the expansion of the liberal empire, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, even as Jim Crow laws continued to delimit the mobility of African Americans on the home front. Whereas the Korean War was the first U.S. experiment in militarized integration, it wasn't until the Vietnam War that the question of Black–white tensions in the military, transposed from the continental United States to the battlefront in Asia, gained widespread visibility. As Martin Luther King, Jr., famously observed in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 1967: "[We watch] Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago."5 Segregation at home was only interrupted by "brutal solidarity" abroad: the uniting of Black and white soldiers in a common project of racialized wartime destruction.6 But continuities between the Korean and Vietnam Wars also led to political mobilization: many civil rights and Black Power leaders active during the Vietnam War era, such as Bobby Seale, James Forman, Ivory Perry, and Robert F. Williams, were radicalized during their experiences as Black soldiers in Cold War Korea.7 Second, Adams' story stitches together three southern spaces that are rarely discussed in relation: the U.S. South, South Korea, and South Vietnam. To focus on the southern-ness of these three sites is to trace the convergence of white supremacy, antiblackness, imperialism, and anticommunism that cohere at the intersection of the U.S. Civil War and Cold War politics.8 Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, amid the structural antiblackness of the segregated U.S. South, Adams joined the U.S. Army to escape incarceration at the hands of white policemen. This military service brought him to South Korea: a decolonizing nation that the United States had taken upon itself to protect in the Cold War struggle against North Korea, Communist China, and the Soviet Union. These south-south relationalities—the transposition of a Black subject of the U.S. South to the southern warfront of a new...

Since the 1990s, when previously classified and top secret Russian archival documents on the Korean War became open and accessible, it has become clear for post-communist countries that Kim Il Sung, Stalin and Mao Zedong were the primary organizers of the war. It is now equally certain that tensions arising from Soviet and American struggle generated the origins of the Korean War, namely the Soviet Union’s occupation of the northern half of the Korean peninsula and the United States’ occupation of the southern half to the 38th parallel after 1945 as well as the emerging bipolar world order of international relations and Cold War. Newly available Russian archival documents produced much in the way of new energies and opportunities for international study and research into the Korean War.2 However, within this research few documents connected to Mongolia have so far been found, and little specific research has yet been done regarding why and how Mongolia participated in the Korean War. At the same time, it is becoming today more evident that both Soviet guidance and U.S. information reports (evaluated and unevaluated) regarding Mongolia were far different from the situation and developments of that period. New examples of this tendency are documents declassified in the early 2000s and released publicly from the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in December 2016 which contain inaccurate information. The original, uncorrupted sources about why, how and to what degree the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) became a participant in the Korean War are in fact in documents held within the Mongolian Central Archives of Foreign Affairs. These archives contain multiple documents in relation to North Korea. Prior to the 1990s Mongolian scholars Dr. B. Lkhamsuren,3 Dr. B. Ligden,4 Dr. Sh. Sandag,5 junior scholar J. Sukhee,6 and A. A. Osipov7 mention briefly in their writings the history of relations between the MPR and the DPRK during the Korean War. Since the 1990s the Korean War has also briefly been touched upon in the writings of B. Lkhamsuren,8 D. Ulambayar (the author of this paper),9 Ts. Batbayar,10 J. Battur,11 K. Demberel,12 Balảzs Szalontai,13 Sergey Radchenko14 and Li Narangoa.15 There have also been significant collections of documents about the two countries and a collection of memoirs published in 200716 and 2008.17 The author intends within this paper to discuss particularly about why, how and to what degree Mongolia participated in the Korean War, the rumors and realities of the war and its consequences for the MPR’s membership in the United Nations. The MPR was the second socialist country following the Soviet Union (the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics) to recognize the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and establish diplomatic ties. That was part of the initial stage of socialist system formation comprising the Soviet Union, nations in Eastern Europe, the MPR, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the DPRK. Accordingly between the MPR and the DPRK fraternal friendship and a framework of cooperation based on the principles of proletarian and socialist internationalism had been developed.18 In light of and as part of this framework, The Korean War has left its deep traces in the history of the MPR’s external diplomatic environment and state sovereignty

Despite the lofty status of its director in American film history and genre study, Douglas Sirk's Battle Hymn (1957) has received remarkably little critical attention—a fact that reinforces the mar...

Introduction Suzy Kim (bio) Speaking to veterans on July 27, 2013, at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, President Obama declared the Korean War a victory for the United States in an effort to challenge its status in American memory as a forgotten war. It is worth quoting his remarks at length to appreciate the change in emphasis on the war’s “victory” from what had previously been a focus on the hardships of an unknown war: That July day, when the fighting finally ended, not far from where it began, some suggested this sacrifice had been for naught, and they summed it up with a phrase — “die for a tie.”… But here, today, we can say with confidence that war was no tie. Korea was a victory. When fifty million South Koreans live in freedom—a vibrant democracy, one of the world’s most dynamic economies, in stark contrast to the repression and poverty of the North—that’s a victory; that’s your legacy. When our soldiers stand firm along the DMZ; when our South Korean friends can go about their lives, knowing that the commitment of the United States to the security of the Republic of Korea will never waver—that is a victory, and that is your legacy. [End Page 1] When our allies across the Asia Pacific know—as we have proven in Korea for sixty straight years—that the United States will remain a force for peace and security and prosperity—that’s a victory; that’s your legacy. And for generations to come, when history recalls how free nations banded together in a long Cold War, and how we won that war, let it be said that Korea was the first battle—where freedom held its ground and free peoples refused to yield; that, too, is your victory, your legacy.1 The Korean War does not stand alone in this renewed effort to valorize American interventions during the Cold War. The last several years have seen milestone anniversaries of two American wars in Asia—the Korean War and the Vietnam War—that have generated a grandiose rhetoric of victory for two of the deadliest wars of the twentieth century outside the two world wars. The sixtieth anniversary of the Korean War Armistice Agreement in 2013 prompted the president to claim victory in his speech at the Korean War Veterans Memorial. In the previous year, the administration issued a presidential proclamation for an unusually long thirteen-year program to commemorate the Vietnam War, designating the period from May 28, 2012, through November 11, 2025, as the official tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the war, at a cost of five million dollars per year.2 Observing March 8, 1965, as the date when thirty-five hundred marines were deployed to start the American ground war in Vietnam, formal events are planned throughout 2015. The year 2015 also marks the seventieth anniversary of the division of the Korean peninsula, an action proposed by the United States (and accepted by the Soviets) at the end of the Asia-Pacific War in 1945. Indeed, American involvement in Vietnam must also be traced back to 1945, when the United States threw its support behind France in its bid to recolonize Vietnam. How can we explain the turn of perspective toward such triumphalist rhetoric at this point in time? Similar to the Vietnam War, but in a much shorter span of only three years, the Korean War resulted in an estimated three million civilian deaths, and the unended Korean War continues to elicit tensions along the demilitarized zone dividing the two Koreas, and throughout the Asia-Pacific region today. But unlike Vietnam, where American veterans have engaged in projects for peace and reconciliation with Vietnamese partners, peace in Korea seems like a distant dream at best.3 [End Page 2] The purpose of this special issue is twofold: first, to engage in a critical intervention into the memorialization of the Korean War among the chief participants—the two Koreas, the United States, and China—to disrupt monolithic understandings of its origins, consequences, and experiences; and second, to do so as a necessary step toward reconciliation by placing...

For nearly three decades after end of Korean War, American veterans of conflict--along with increasing numbers of historians and other scholars--bemoaned fact that Korea had become a war. fact, in United States there were signs that was being forgotten even as it was being fought. After fifty years of retrospection, however, it has become readily apparent that Korean War marked a great watershed in Korean and Cold War history, not to mention a sea change in U.S. history. Why, then, was there this early popular and academic amnesia toward a conflict that killed more than 34,000 Americans and several million Koreans and Chinese? As with all such sweeping historical dilemmas, explanation of such phenomena is at once complex and multi-faceted. First, it is helpful to view Korean War as one that was wedged tightly between good war and war; that is, between World War II and Vietnam War. (2) Occurring less than five full years after end of World War II, Korean War was often and perhaps unavoidably compared with and subsumed by myth and memory of Second World War. On surface, at least, Korean Conflict seemed to have emerged like an unwanted mutation from a linear, Darwinian-like process that seamlessly linked World War II with Cold War and its early evolutionary process. Thus, from start, Korean War became a prisoner of rigid mentality and ideology of early Cold War and furthermore seemed to have been denied full internal and external processes of memory and myth that Paul Fussell saw as such an integral of and memory of World War I. Perhaps on one hand Korean War inherited too much myth from World War II. And on other hand, perhaps it generated too little myth of its own. As a result, and its generated--and regenerated--myths never became part of fiber of our own lives, as Fussell put it. (3) And if that had not been bad enough, America's growing quagmire in Vietnam began in earnest and in large scale only ten years AFTER Korean armistice. Vietnam, of course, would quickly overshadow any lingering doubt--not to mention lessons learned or unlearned--from America's first of communist containment on another artificially-divided Asian peninsula. Second, it is imperative to examine structures of power and hegemony and how they worked at various levels in order to understand how and why Korean War was fought and how memory and of conflict have been thus far constructed. Indeed, discourse of and its immediate aftermath begs to be studied and interpreted more fully. Recently, adherents of discourse theory and new cultural have suggested use of Michel Foucault's methods to understand that the power to shape symbolic systems of language and meaning is power over `knowledge' and `reality.' (4) If this is case, then it seems only logical to extend that theory to include shaping of myth and memory, which are inextricably linked to knowledge, reality, and history in Foucauldian sense. Much more remains to be done from this perspective, both from a domestic and geopolitical vantage point. Understanding discourse and structure of war's representation from standpoints of myth, memory, and reality is key to unlocking historiographical vault surrounding Korean War. As far as hegemonic constructs are concerned, Korean War fit a forgettable trajectory of American Cold War foreign policy that kept certain nations--like West Germany and Japan--within America's sphere of defense dependency. As Bruce Cumings has written, In Korea, United States picked up glove of Japanese empire and sought to keep South Korea and Taiwan within Japan's historic economic area ... [similarly] in Vietnam [it] picked up French glove. (5) same fashion, American involvement in Korean War fit into a larger schema that viewed Northeast Asia as an integral of United States' imperative to maintain and expand liberal capitalism around world. …

Asian Perspective 40 (2016), 131-146 COMMENTARY A Chinese Admission of False Korean War Allegations of Biological Weapon Use by the United States Milton Leitenberg A LITTLE-REMEMBERED ASPECT OF KOREAN WAR HISTORY IS THE ALLEgation by North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union that the United States had used biological weapons on an enormous scale over both China and North Korea during the war. Despite the pub­ lic disclosure in 1998 of Soviet Central Committee documents declaring the allegations to have been fraudulent, China—and North Korea much more noisily—still maintains the charges. The issue is of great importance to those concerned with arms control and allegations of actual use of weapons of mass destruction. Those charges have now been refuted in a striking posthu­ mous publication written by Wu Zhili, who was Director of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army Health Division during the Korean War. Wu wrote a brief memoir in September 1997 that was found among his papers after he died in 2008. It was pub­ lished in a Chinese journal only in November 2013; an English translation first became available in April 2015 (Wu 2013).1 In 1952, Wu was critically involved in the Chinese government’s manipulations that produced the Korean War biological weapons allegations. His own testimonial contains a second one as well, by Huang Kecheng, chief of staff of the Chinese Army during the Korean War and later secretary-general of the Central Military Commission. Wu Zhili’s testimonial overturns everything previ­ ously published in a Chinese source. In addition, the full text of the cable from Mao Zedong to Josef Stalin on February 21, 1952, recently published by Russia’s State Archive of Social and Politi­ cal History (RGASPI), sheds more light on China’s responsibility for the allegations. 131 132 A Chinese Admission of False Korean War Allegations The Charges Two years before the war began, Soviet propaganda charged that the United States was testing biological weapons (plague) against the native Inuit peoples ofAlaska. In Soviet reporting on the 1949 trial in Khabarovsk of participants in the Japanese World War II biological weapons program, Pravda stated that the United States was “preparing for new crimes against human­ ity,” as in biological warfare. Chinese broadcasts reported that the US government was collaborating with Lt. General Ishii Shiro, one of the major figures responsible for Japan’s use of biological weapons in China, ostensibly in preparation for sub­ sequent use of biological weapons by the United States against China. In March 1951, China charged that General Douglas MacArthur “is now engaged in large scale production of bacteri­ ological weapons for use against the Korean Army and people” (Leitenberg 1998, 188).2 The first allegations of biological weapons use by the United States were made on May 8, 1951. North Korea’s foreign minister claimed that the United States had used biological weapons between December 1950 and January 1951, and was spreading smallpox in North Korea. Chinese statements were made on March 14; May 19, 24, and 25; and June 22. Between March 5 and May 13, 1951, the Chinese government also charged on ten occasions that the United States was using chemical weapons in the Korean War. North Korean statements continued into July, and then also stopped. The major campaign alleging US biological weapons use, however, began on February 22, 1952. The North Korean foreign minister again issued an official statement addressed to the United Nations Secretariat, charging that the United States had made multiple air drops over his country in January and February of infected insects containing plague, cholera, and other diseases. Two days later, China’s foreign minister Zhou Enlai supported the North Korean charges and on March 8, expanded them to claim that the United States had sent 448 aircraft on no fewer than sixtyeight occasions between February 29 and March 5 to drop germ­ carrying insects over Northeast China. The charges increased for Milton Leitenberg 133 months to come, with Chinese news agencies reporting many thousands of US air sorties to drop biological agents over China and North Korea. Nevertheless, on no occasion did the Chinese or North Koreans claim to have shot down a US aircraft...

The bodies of people who die during political purges, genocides, and wars carry multivalent political values. This dissertation argues that the remains of US servicemen lost during the Korean War had a second life amid the political strife between the United States and the DPRK after 1953. Domestically, uncertainty over the servicemen’s fate due to the loss of their remains caused their relatives to doubt the US government’s Cold War policies; internationally, the remains were associated with both the unending saber-rattling between the two countries and their concurrent attempts at cooperation. Besides their traditional roles in familial mourning and war memory, the soldiers’ remains became bargaining chips in US-DPRK relations.Utilizing archival materials, periodicals, and interviews with the relatives of missing soldiers, this dissertation analyzes the repatriation of US soldiers’ remains from the Korean Peninsula since 1950. The US military adopted a milestone policy during the Korean War—repatriating all deceased servicemen to their homeland as quickly as possible. Because of this policy and the war’s inconclusive result, it was forced to negotiate with its enemy to recover the lost bodies in areas in which it had no access and to develop new forensic methods to minimize the number of unidentifiable remains. Procedures for identification differed significantly from those in previous conflicts.While the fate of thousands of servicemen remained uncertain, some American pundits and politicians depicted them as hostages of the Communist Bloc and recruited the families of missing soldiers for their domestic and international anti-communist campaigns. A similar situation after the Vietnam War reminded Americans of the soldiers missing in Korea and established the norm that the military could only account for its missing personnel with their identified remains. The end of the Cold War created favorable conditions for recovering soldiers’ bodies from Korea, and the DPRK grasped this chance to seek maximum political and financial concessions from the United States. This study furthers our understanding of the Korean War’s legacy for Americans, the security situation in Korea, and the contribution of forensic science to the nation’s war memories.

Parameters of Disavowal: Colonial Representation in South Korean Cinema

The purpose of this article is to provide a new perspective on the historiography of Korean War studies in American academia. Unlike previous studies that comprehensively cover the research of American academics, this article examines how the American Korean Studies community, which is part of the American academic community, has dealt with the topic of the Korean War, and explores historically how the Korean War could be transformed from a ‘forgotten war’ to an ‘unknown war’ in American academia. Initially, the focus of Korean War studies in the United States was on the ‘war’ in the Far East/Northeast Asia, and the Korean War was analyzed as part of the Soviet Union’s global strategy. To focus on the matter of ‘Korea’, several conditions had to be met. First, an intellectual climate had to emerge in which Asian nationalism was understood separately from communism. Next, American Korean studies had to grow to provide and interpret information about Korea in the United States. Through the growth of Korean studies in Amercia, the political dynamics of the Korean people in the Korean War began to receive attention. Paradoxically, the work of American Korean scholars has simultaneously enabled reflective questions about America’s role in the Korean War. Serious discussions began to take place about why the Korean War has been forgotten in the United States and what more needs to be learned about it if it is indeed an ‘unknown war’. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been an ‘international turn’ in U.S. academia to study the Korean War at an international level, with a focus on declassified documents from the former communist regime. But there is much more to learn about this ‘unknown war’ than what is in the archives. Through collaborations and connections with South Korean scholars, who have grown rapidly since democratization, American Korean studies has sought to pursue a different dimension of the study of the Korean War: a ‘socio-cultural turn’, or ‘humanistic turn.’ Through these activities, the ‘unknown war’ is remembered in new ways, and new questions are still being asked today.

This article briefly reviews the evolution of medical support during wars and conflicts from ancient to modern times and discusses the effect warfare has had on the development of civilian health care and emergency medical services (EMS). Medical breakthroughs and discoveries made of necessity during military conflicts have developed into new paradigms of medical care, including novel programs of triage and health assessment, emergency battlefield treatment and stabilization, anesthesia, and other surgical and emergency procedures. The critical role of organizations that provide proper emergency care to help the sick and injured both on the battlefield and in the civilian world is also highlighted.

The Korean War has been called America's forgotten war, a vaguely remembered and unpopular police action that took place between the glorious victories of the Second World War and the ignominious defeat of Viet Nam. But if the Korean War occupies only a small place in the popular memory, the role played by Turkey in the war has been almost entirely forgotten. In the United States, few who did not fight in Korea seem to remember the Turks were there at all. This really becomes apparent if you happen to be up at three in the morning watching M*A *S*H reruns hoping to go to sleep. Turkish soldiers rarely figure in the scripts of M*A *S*H, and when they do, their image is ambiguous. It is not entirely clear whose side they are on. Turkey's involvement in the Korean War is not seen by Turks as being a major event in their recent history. A few blocks from the Ankara train station there is a monument to those who died in the Korean War. The monument is unobtrusive, a fact of life, but not a major feature of the landscape. Yet Turkey's participation in the Korean War was a crucial point in recent Turkish history. Indeed, the decision to participate in the Korean War was an important aspect of a re-evaluation of Turkey's place in international politics and economics that emerged at the end of the Second World War. It came along with reconsideration of the meaning of westernization, democracy, civil-military relations, secularization and the role of Islam in society, the role of the state in the economy and state interference in social and cultural affairs. Participation in the war ended nearly 30 years of a policy of non-involvement in international conflicts, while this period laid the foundation of debates within Turkey, not only on domestic but also on foreign affairs, that continue even in the 1990s. This article concentrates on Turkey's participation in the Korean War in terms of three questions: 1. Why did Turkey participate in the Korean War, especially after

This paper reviews Chiang Kai-shek"s plan and will to regain the mainland before and after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Chiang Kai-shek, who moved to Taiwan after the defeat of the civil war, conceived a plan, that is called “Return to Mainland” in order to stabilize the regime. After losing Mainland, he needs to retaliate to consolidate internal unity.<BR> To Carry out a Plan “Return to Mainland”, Chiang Kai-shek must first solve the problems of US military support and participation. Chiang Kai-shek expected South Korea to play an important role here.<BR> At that time, the United States insisted on retreating from Asian issues as much as possible. Therefore, Chiang Kai-shek believed that the United States would intervene only if there were disputes in Asia. In Chiang Kai-shek’s view, the region with the greatest possibility of conflict in Asia was the Korean Peninsula. In addition, Shao Yu-lin made a suggestion that Korea is the most appropriate place to collect information and supplies for the “Return to Mainland”. Chiang Kai-shek hopes that will increase tensions on the Korean Peninsula, that he will be able to participate actively in the issue and will expand the anti-Communist front from the Korean Peninsula to mainland China.<BR> Although the crisis on the Korean Peninsula that the Nationalist government expected broke out, that is, the Korean War, but Chiang Kai-shek was unable to participate in the crisis on the Korean Peninsula and to link it to the plan “Return to Mainland”. Chiang Kai-shek conveyed to South Korea and the U.S. the intention to dispatch troops, but the U.S. refused to accept Chiang Kai-shek"s offer, fearing the intervention of the Chinese Communists. Chiang Kai-shek believed that in order to achieve a plan to counter-attack on the Mainland, co-operation among the anti-Communist camp must be established. Chiang Kai-shek applied this idea to the American anti-Communist, MacArthur.<BR> At the end of July 1950, MacArthur visited Taiwan, showed a very friendly attitude towards Chiang Kai-shek, and promised the National Government to provide assistance. But the United States had no intention of supporting Chiang Kai-shek"s “Return to Mainland” plan. Although MacArthur provided Chiang Kai-shek with promised aid, it was not enough to attack the mainland.<BR> In the late 1950s, what changed the situation on the Korean Peninsula was the dispatch of troops by the CCP. The U.S. is opposed to the dispatch of troops by KMT troops in fear of the intervention of the Chinese Communist forces, but in the end the Chinese Communist forces intervened in the Korean War.<BR> After the Chinese military intervened in the Korean War, Chiang Kai-shek also mentioned “Return to Mainland”, but his rhetoric changed. The reason was that the U.S. supported Army Commander-in-Chief Sun Li-jen rather than itself.<BR> In early 1950, Chiang Kai-shek proposed a plan “Return to Mainland” in order to stabilize his regime. But after the Chinese Communists entered the war, if they send KMT troops to South Korea or send to the mainland, the United States had to worry about the “defense of Taiwan”. And the United States believed that even if a second front was opened, its commander would not need to be Chiang Kai-shek.<BR> Finally, as President Truman opposed the intervention of the military, domestic discussions about the use of the military were suspended. Chiang Kai-shek also did not advocate active participation in the Korean War, so neither the Korean War nor Chiang Kai-shek"s “Return to Mainland” further link up.

If Hajimu Masuda would consider a new subtitle for his book, he should remove “Korean Conflict” from it. To the degree that I can untangle his interlocking arguments, he believes the Cold War and Korean War are inadequate descriptors of the root causes of the international conflict and domestic oppression of the 1950s. On the other hand, the Korean War awakened and deepened popular fears of another global conflict, the violence of which would beggar World War II.Masuda divides his book into three parts. The first section deals with the immediate postwar period, 1945–1950, as experienced by the United States, China, and Japan. This comparison of an undamaged and highly affluent victor in North America with two war-ravaged countries in Asia, including one that had dissolved into civil war, is far-fetched. In the second part, Masuda claims that Korean War–era mobilization policies in China and the United States created a public “Cold War” mentalité that exaggerated any real threat. To make this argument, Masuda sedulously ignores the impact of nuclear war fears (excessive to be sure) in the United States.The third section of the book makes comparisons of the suppression of domestic dissent justified by the fear of subversion. Although there may be some merit in using China, Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines as comparative case studies, the inclusion of the United States and Great Britain, where legal relief and media exploitation remained possible, is inappropriate.Matsuda sets out to argue that the Cold War, defined as a global competition for influence between the United States and the Soviet Union, was an “imagined reality” (p. 9). To do so, he must ignore too much of the history of the 1950s and attach too much influence to the Korean War outside Northeast Asia.Like the Platte River, Masuda's research is wide and shallow. Although his use of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean sources is impressive, most of these sources, like those in English, are contemporaneous social commentary or scholarly cultural history, not documentary evidence. The book has no central intellectual focus or theme other than the observation that many people suffered from police-state actions justified by anti-Communism or socialist revolution.The strongest linkage between domestic oppression and a foreign threat appeared in the People's Republic of China. Masuda's treatment of the “Hate America” campaign, clearly linked to the Korean War, is the most persuasive part of his book. In fact, he might have made more of the Chinese fears of an unholy trinity of counterrevolutionary allies: the United States, Japan, and Taiwan.Masuda admits that excluding the Soviet Union and the two Germanys from his analysis weakens his comparative focus. This is a crashing understatement. The omission of these countries also destroys any symmetry to his use of the United States as a case study in which the crusade against imagined subversives linked dissidents to the Soviet Union, not to China. Masuda's argument that the U.S.-Soviet rivalry had little influence on the politics of decolonization is persuasive, although it is a point already established by Odd Arne Westad and Michael West.The revolutionary threat was China, which had influence in Burma, French Indochina, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines. However, to lump the United States in the same “decolonizer” category as Japan and Great Britain—and to exclude Portugal and the Netherlands—is a bit of historical sleight-of-hand.Whatever my reservations about Cold War Crucible, Masuda has written a serious study of the nature and influence of regional and national politics on postwar Asia. He makes the important point that the Korean War was all too real to Asians, not a “fantasy” or “imagined reality” that can be called the Cold War. The unresolved issue is whether the question is one of history or historiography.

Disrupting War:Women Cross the Korean DMZ Christine Ahn (bio) In 1945, on the eve of Japan's surrender to the United States, rather than liberate Korea, which had been colonized for thirty-five years by Japan, two young military officers were assigned by the US State and War Departments to divide Korea. The two officers tore out a map from National Geographic and literally drew a line across the thirty-eighth parallel because it placed Seoul in the US zone. President Harry S. Truman sent a memo to Joseph Stalin informing him that the Soviets could take Pyongyang and the area north of the thirty-eighth parallel, and that the US would take Seoul and the region south of it. It is through this arbitrary, imperial border-making process that Korea became divided over seventy years ago and still remains divided. In 1948 separate elections were held creating two nation-states, the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea). The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is a man-made partition dividing the North and South. The DMZ was established in 1953 by the Armistice Agreement, when military commanders from the United States, North Korea, and China signed the ceasefire that halted the 1950–53 Korean War. With barbed wire fences lining the 155-mile territory across the Korean Peninsula, armed soldiers patrolling the border with heavy artillery, and 1.2 million land mines in the DMZ, it is no wonder President Bill Clinton once called it the "scariest place on earth."1 As one of the most militarized borders in the world, the DMZ has become a site of imperialism, militarization, and division for millions of Korean families and the Korean people. It has also become the location for people's resistance to the unresolved Korean War. In this essay, I discuss the importance of women's mobilization in peace building, focusing on the 2015 women's DMZ crossing that I helped organize, and why we must have a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. The Korean War, from 1950 to 1953, claimed four million lives. US bombing campaigns flattened 80 percent of North Korean cities, dropping 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea, more than in the Asia-Pacific in World War II, and [End Page 1045] splattering 33,000 tons of napalm in Korea, more than in Vietnam. Although the July 27, 1953, ceasefire halted fighting, no peace agreement has been signed even though under Article 4, Paragraph 60 of the Armistice Agreement, North Korean and American leaders promised to return within three months to forge a peace agreement. This never happened, and thus a state of war has since defined US–DPRK relations. In 2017 the Korean Peninsula became the focal point for a potential outbreak of war as tensions escalated between the United States and North Korea. In his first year in office, at the United Nations—the forum for international peace and diplomacy—President Donald Trump threatened to "totally destroy" North Korea, a sovereign nation. North Korea became determined to complete its mission to develop its nuclear capability to prevent the United States from regime change (like the US attacks against authoritarian rulers in Iraq and Libya). That year, North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb and over twenty missiles, including a long-range missile that many experts said had the capability to strike the continental United States. The Trump administration seriously weighed a "bloody nose strike" on North Korea, which would have had devastating consequences for the seventy million Koreans on the peninsula and others throughout the region. On the Division of Korea While the Korean War was predominantly a civil war between North and South, it was also an international conflict involving the US and twenty other nations, which led to hundreds of thousands of casualties and losses, and millions of civilians killed and wounded. Given the importance of the DMZ as a militarized border, it is critical to understand the origins of Korea's division. In 1905 William Howard Taft, the US secretary of war, negotiated a secret agreement with Japan in which the US and Japan agreed to not interfere...

America's Wars Fact Sheet . Compiled by the Department of Veterans Affairs, this sheet shows the number of people who served and died during every conflict in which the United States was involved, including the Korean War. For recent wars, the number of living veterans is also given. This compilation of data facilitates the comparison of wars and U.S. involvement in each. AP Wins Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting: . In 1999, the As sociated Press uncovered a civilian massacre committed by U.S. troops during the Korean War, a story which garnered a Pulitzer Prize. This massacre was unknown in the United States, though stories of the incident have been circulating in South Korea since the war. A link to the investigative series is provided with this article on the AP's award. Black Soldier, White Army: The 24th Infantry in Korea: . This online version of a United States Army Center of Military History report explores the controversy surrounding the 24th Regiment of the 25th Infantry Division, the only all African American infantry unit that fought in the Korean War. The 24th was the last African American regiment before President Truman ended segregation in the armed forces. This report provides a starting point for research on racial issues within the U.S. military. CNN-ColdWar: . This site is dedicated to an episode on the Korean War from CNN's documentary series Cold War. Historical docu ments, interviews, articles on recent events, the script of the episode, and interactive features supply an interesting resource page for students and teachers. An online educator guide offers suggestions for teaching the Korean War within a larger Cold War context. Daily Lesson Plan?On the Brink of a Mountain: . This lesson plan examines the division between North and South Korea. The plan covers the ramifications of the division as well as current events in North Korea. Also covered