Honoring American and Korean Veterans of the Korean War
HONORING AMERICAN AND KOREAN VETERANS OF THE KOREAN WAR
Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, today marks the 53rd anniversary of the official beginning of the Korean war.
Korea has often been called the forgotten war, but for the thousands of Alaskans who are veterans of that war it is hardly forgotten. The memory is with them daily.
The heroic American and Korean veterans of that war fought under the most adverse circumstances to free the people of the Republic of Korea from the yoke of Communism.
These veterans learned the hard way the lesson that is engraved on the Korean war Memorial here in Washington, "Freedom is not free."
While today marks the beginning of the Korean war, this anniversary does not mark the beginning of the war between freedom and Communism in that troubled country. From the moment that the Korean peninsula was divided in 1945, that battle had begun.
While Korea was one of the first examples of Imperial Japan's lust for land when it became a Japanese possession in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a side show in World War II. The U.S. had no plan for what to do with Korea when the war was over.
Although we had had U.S. representativesgovernmental, business and missionaryin Korea from 1882 until the outbreak of the war, we made no plans for what would happen when at war's end, we might return to Korea.
The United States remained committed to the December 1945 decision of the Allied foreign ministers in Moscow that a trusteeship under four powers, including China, should be established with a view toward Korea's eventual independence. As a result, we were slow to draw-up long-range alternative plans for South Korea.
We had made no decisions on how to govern Korea, or to assist Korea in governing itself. We had not made plans for the defense of the country, nor for its economic development. We didn't even have a plan for how we might accept a Japanese surrender on the peninsula.
The most convenient way to deal with the surrender issue was to allow the Soviets to accept the surrender in the north and for U.S. forces to take the surrender in the south. Such a division of Korea, which to modern eyes, seems so normal on our maps, was totally foreign to the long history of Korea. Further, the division, which was drawn on a large-scale map in the Pentagon and had no rational basis on the actual terrain, did not represent any known political division of the peninsula. When it took place, it left freedom loving Koreans in the north and communist insurgents in the south.
The Korean war did not begin with the full scale invasion of the Republic of Korea on June 25, 1950. It had been underway as an insurgency in the south since, at least, 1946. One of the first tasks facing the United States was to train and replace existing Japanese police and security forces. The United States, with insufficient forces in-country to deal with the insurgency problem, acted quickly to stem the insurgency by creating a Korean defense force to combat it.
This Korean Constabulary, consisting of Korean veterans of the various armies who had fought World War II in the area, was led by U.S. officers and fought under U.S. orders. The Constabulary had an initial force of 2,000 men in 1946, but built up to approximately 26,000 over the next two years.
It was equipped with the very little military materiel left behind by U.S. forces as they withdrew. The young American officers, mostly reservists, with few regulars had little in the way of education, language or experience for their task, but they had good will and a devotion to duty which they infused in their Korean troops. In contrast, the army that the North Koreans were forming north of the divide was well equipped with Soviet equipment and led by well trained and well indoctrinated communist zealots.
While all out invasion would wait until 1950, substantial insurgency and guerrilla warfare was a constant theme in the southern half of the peninsula from 1946 to 1948. When the Republic of Korea was founded in August of 1948, the Korean Constabulary became the Korean Army and brought with it a level of devotion to country and duty which has been, since that time, the envy of most of the world's fighting forces.
Today is a time, therefore, not just to remember the heroic men and women who served from 1950 to 1953, but to honor the heroic Koreans and Americans who defended Korean freedom in the days before 1950.