A War Never Known

A candid look at a brutal war

The Korean War: A History, by Bruce Cumings. Modern Library, 2010. $24.00, 320 pp.
In June, as American troops struggled through the deadliest year yet in Afghanistan, the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War came and went with little fanfare. This might have been inevitable; the war, according to University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings, has been “forgotten, never known, abandoned.” In The Korean War: A History, Cumings blames the United States for entering a war with little understanding of its historical roots and fighting it with a savagery unreported then and seldom discussed today.  In his telling of a ferocious and forgotten war, Cumings gives us some much-needed perspective on U.S.-Korean relations and the current American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Casus Belli


The Korean War, Cumings argues, began long before fighting broke out at Ongjin on June 24, 1950. The roots of conflict date back to 1905, when Japan made Korea a protectorate.  The Japanese were oppressive rulers— between 1931 and July 1940, they murdered about 200,000 Koreans suspected of being communist guerillas. At the end of World War II, the Koreans were glad to be rid of the Japanese ruling class. However, within weeks of the end of the war, the U.S. and the Soviet Union drew an artificial dividing line along the 38th parallel. This infuriated the Koreans, who feared a continuation of the oppression they had struggled against for 40 years.
Cumings maintains that Americans were, and remain, unaware of this history and that for this reason they cannot understand the mentality of North Korean leaders. Cumings points out that the leaders of the North Korean government and specifically the North Korean army are “the keepers of the past, and the prisoners of it,” so although the United States may have forgotten the causes and history of Korean War, the North Koreans most certainly have not.
An Unknown History
The Korean War, writes Cumings, is “surrounded by residues and slippages of memory” more than “any other war in modern times.” He argues that the problem is “not a matter of forgetting; it is a never-knowing, a species of unwilled ignorance and willed incuriosity.” According to Cumings, this national amnesia arose from the McCarthyite “culture of repression,” from the racism of Americans at home and of troops on the front lines, and from our vast geographical and psychological distance from what was essentially a civil war.
Cumings seeks to rectify this loss of collective memory by accentuating American and South Korean atrocities. He tells of the violent suppression of peasant uprisings and the inaction of U.S. troops as they watched and even photographed South Korean soldiers and policemen murdering civilians and POWs. One particularly haunting story is that of Art Hunter, an American GI who, in July 1950, participated in a machine-gun massacre of hundreds of civilians in a railroad tunnel at Nogun-ri. He and his fellow soldiers returned to the tunnel several times over the course of three days to ensure that there would be no survivors. The faces of an elderly Korean couple, Cumings tells us, stalk Hunter’s dreams to this day. Cumings’s stories give power to statistics so obscene that they could otherwise be numbing: 32,557 tons of napalm used, 1,312,836 South Korean casualties, and an estimated 2 million North Korean casualties.
Lessons from Korea
While of obvious interest to the student of history, this book is also useful for politicians, policymakers, and citizens seeking to understand some of the current tension in U.S.-North Korean relations. While obviously much has happened in recent years to exacerbate the strain, historical memories of the Korean War no doubt play a significant role, contributing to a paranoia among North Koreans about American intentions.
Cumings does not spend much time explicitly comparing the Korean War to America’s current undertakings in Iraq and Afghanistan, but when he does draw connections they are quite forceful. Cumings believes that “Americans have… replicated their Korean experience.” The book closes by referring to the United States as “the policeman of the world.” He argues that the problems in Iraq, like those in Korea, arose from the fact that “without forethought, due consideration, or self-knowledge, the United States barged into a political, social, and cultural thicket without knowing what it was doing, and now it finds that it cannot get out.”  This is certainly a provocative thesis, but as Cumings demonstrates, the history of the Korean War itself is quite provocative.
Henry Shull ‘13 is the Business Manager.