The War for Korea, 1945-1950

The War for Korea, 1945-1950
Author: Allan R. Millett
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2015-02-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700621091
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When the major powers sent troops to the Korean peninsula in June of 1950, it supposedly marked the start of one of the last century’s bloodiest conflicts. Allan Millett, however, reveals that the Korean War actually began with partisan clashes two years earlier and had roots in the political history of Korea under Japanese rule, 1910–1945. The first in a new two-volume history of the Korean War, Millett’s study offers the most comprehensive account of its causes and early military operations. Millett traces the war’s origins to the post-liberation conflict between two revolutionary movements, the Marxist-Leninists and the Nationalist-capitalists. With the U.S.-Soviet partition of Korea following World War II, each movement, now with foreign patrons, asserted its right to govern the peninsula, leading directly to the guerrilla warfare and terrorism in which more than 30,000 Koreans died. Millett argues that this civil strife, fought mostly in the South, was not so much the cause of the Korean War as its actual beginning. Millett describes two revolutions locked in irreconcilable conflict, offering an even-handed treatment of both Communists and capitalists-nationalists. Neither movement was a model of democracy. He includes Korean, Chinese, and Russian perspectives on this era, provides the most complete account of the formation of the South Korean army, and offers new interpretations of the U.S. occupation of Korea, 1945–1948. Millett’s history redefines the initial phase of the war in Asian terms. His book shows how both internal forces and international pressures converged to create the Korean War, a conflict that still shapes the politics of Asia.

The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950
Author: Charles K. Armstrong
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2013-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801468795
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North Korea, despite a shattered economy and a populace suffering from widespread hunger, has outlived repeated forecasts of its imminent demise. Charles K. Armstrong contends that a major source of North Korea's strength and resiliency, as well as of its flaws and shortcomings, lies in the poorly understood origins of its system of government. He examines the genesis of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) both as an important yet rarely studied example of a communist state and as part of modern Korean history.North Korea is one of the last redoubts of "unreformed" Marxism-Leninism in the world. Yet it is not a Soviet satellite in the East European manner, nor is its government the result of a local revolution, as in Cuba and Vietnam. Instead, the DPRK represents a unique "indigenization" of Soviet Stalinism, Armstrong finds. The system that formed under the umbrella of the Soviet occupation quickly developed into a nationalist regime as programs initiated from above merged with distinctive local conditions. Armstrong's account is based on long-classified documents captured by U.S. forces during the Korean War. This enormous archive of over 1.6 million pages provides unprecedented insight into the making of the Pyongyang regime and fuels the author's argument that the North Korean state is likely to remain viable for some years to come.

The War for Korea, 1950-1951

The War for Korea, 1950-1951
Author: Allan R. Millett
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 664
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700633111
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In The War for Korea, 1945–1950: A House Burning, one of our most distinguished military historians argued that the conflict on the Korean peninsula in the middle of the twentieth century was first and foremost a war between Koreans that began in 1948. In the second volume of a monumental trilogy, Allan R. Millett now shifts his focus to the twelve-month period from North Korea's invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, through the end of June 1951-the most active phase of the internationalized "Korean War." Moving deftly between the battlefield and the halls of power, Millett weaves together military operations and tactics without losing sight of Cold War geopolitics, strategy, and civil-military relations. Filled with new insights on the conflict, his book is the first to give combined arms its due, looking at the contributions and challenges of integrating naval and air power with the ground forces of United Nations Command and showing the importance of Korean support services. He also provides the most complete, and sympathetic, account of the role of South Korea's armed forces, drawing heavily on ROK and Korea Military Advisory Group sources. Millett integrates non-American perspectives into the narrative—especially those of Mao Zedong, Chinese military commander Peng Dehuai, Josef Stalin, Kim Il-sung, and Syngman Rhee. And he portrays Walton Walker and Matthew Ridgway as the heroes of Korea, both of whom had a more profound understanding of the situation than Douglas MacArthur, whose greatest flaw was not his politics but his strategic and operational incompetence. Researched in South Korean, Chinese, and Soviet as well as American and UN sources, Millett has exploited previously ignored or neglected oral history collections-including interviews with American and South Korean officers—and has made extensive use of reports based on interrogations of North Korean and Chinese POWs. The end result is masterful work that provides both a gripping narrative and a greater understanding of this key conflict in international and American history.

Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950
Author: Suzy Kim
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2013-08-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801469368
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During the founding of North Korea, competing visions of an ideal modern state proliferated. Independence and democracy were touted by all, but plans for the future of North Korea differed in their ideas about how everyday life should be organized. Daily life came under scrutiny as the primary arena for social change in public and private life. In Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950, Kim examines the revolutionary events that shaped people’s lives in the development of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. By shifting the historical focus from the state and the Great Leader to how villagers experienced social revolution, Kim offers new insights into why North Korea insists on setting its own course. Kim’s innovative use of documents seized by U.S. military forces during the Korean War and now stored in the National Archives—personnel files, autobiographies, minutes of organizational meetings, educational materials, women’s magazines, and court documents—together with oral histories allows her to present the first social history of North Korea during its formative years. In an account that makes clear the leading role of women in these efforts, Kim examines how villagers experienced, understood, and later remembered such events as the first land reform and modern elections in Korea’s history, as well as practices in literacy schools, communal halls, mass organizations, and study sessions that transformed daily routine.

The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the emergence of separate regimes, 1945-1947

The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the emergence of separate regimes, 1945-1947
Author: Bruce Cumings
Publisher: Cornell
Total Pages: 648
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN:
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Distributed for Yuksabipyungsa Press Bruce Cumings maintains in his classic account that the origin of the Korean War must be sought in the five-year period preceding the war, when Korea was dominated by widespread demands for political, economic, and social change. Making extensive use of Korean-language materials from North and South, and of classified documents, intelligence reports, and U.S. military sources, the author examines the background of postwar Korean politics and the arrival of American and Soviet troops in 1945. Cumings then analyzes Korean politics and American policies in Seoul as well as in the hinterlands. Arguing that the Korean War was civil and revolutionary in character, Cumings shows how the basic issues over which the war was fought were apparent immediately after Korea's liberation from colonial rule in 1945. These issues led to o the effective emergence of separate northern and southern regimes within a year, extensive political violence in the southern provinces, and preemptive American policies designed to create a bulwark against revolution in the South and Communism in the North.

The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950–1951

The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950–1951
Author: I. F. Stone
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2014-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1497655153
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“A great journalist” raises troubling questions about the forgotten war in this courageous, controversial book—with a new introduction by Bruce Cumings (The Baltimore Sun). “Much about the Korean War is still hidden, and much will long remain hidden. I believe I have succeeded in throwing new light on its origins.” —From the author’s preface In 1945 US troops arrived in Korea for what would become America’s longest-lasting conflict. While history books claim without equivocation that the war lasted from 1950 to 1953, those who have actually served there know better. By closely analyzing US intelligence before June 25, 1950 (the war’s official start), and the actions of key players like John Foster Dulles, General Douglas MacArthur, and Chiang Kai-shek, the great investigative reporter I. F. Stone demolishes the official story of America’s “forgotten war” by shedding new light on the tangled sequence of events that led to it. The Hidden History of the Korean War was first published in 1952—during the Korean War—and then republished during the Vietnam War. In the 1990s, documents from the former Soviet archives became available, further illuminating this controversial period in history.