Brothers at War
The Unending Conflict in Korea
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Brothers at War
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Narrated by:
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Jackie Chung
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Written by:
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Sheila Miyoshi Jager
A major historical account of the Korean War, its origins, and its evolving impact on the world. Sixty years after North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea, the Korean War has not yet ended. Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents the first comprehensive history of this misunderstood war, one that risks involving the world’s superpowers - again. Her sweeping narrative ranges from the middle of the Second World War - when Korean independence was fiercely debated between Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill - to the present day, as North Korea, with China’s aid, stockpiles nuclear weapons while starving its people. At the center of this conflict is an ongoing struggle between North and South Korea for the mantle of Korean legitimacy, a “brother’s war,” which continues to fuel tensions on the Korean peninsula and the region.
Drawing from newly available diplomatic archives in China, South Korea, and the former Soviet Union, Jager analyzes top-level military strategy. She brings to life the bitter struggles of the postwar period and shows how the conflict between the two Koreas has continued to evolve to the present, with important and tragic consequences for the region and the world. Her portraits of the many fascinating characters that populate this history - Truman, MacArthur, Kim Il Sung, Mao, Stalin, and Park Chung Hee - reveal the complexities of the Korean War and the repercussions this conflict has had on the lives of many individuals, statesmen, soldiers, and ordinary people, including the millions of hungry North Koreans for whom daily existence continues to be a nightmarish struggle.
The most accessible, up-to date, and balanced account yet written, Brothers at War will become the definitive chronicle of the struggle’s origins and aftermath and its global impact for years to come.
©2013 Sheila Miyoshi Jager (P)2013 Audible, Inc.The conflict in Korea was an after-thought for the US and the USSR, but it was a constant concern for China and Japan, which brought the Cold War super-powers into the conflict. Before the Korean War started, the North was politically and militarily stronger, while the South was divided, mired in poverty and corruption. Kim saw the opportunity to unite the country, and finally gained Stalin’s authorization, with the proviso that the North Koreans secure the support of Mao’s newly victorious regime in China. For Stalin this was a power game where The Soviet Union had little or nothing to lose, playing China against the US: distracting China’s military strength, miring the US in a remote foreign conflict that it did not understand, bleeding and weakening both sides.
Kim’s forces almost succeeded in the initial invasion, but were driven back by UN (US) forces led by Douglas MacArthur after his brilliant, high-risk amphibious landing at Incheon. Convinced by his brilliance and success, MacArthur pushed the North Korean army back towards the border with China, which brought Mao’s “volunteer” army into the conflict. China (with North Korean forces playing a minor role) pushed the US/UN and South Korean forces back to the 38th parallel where the war started. A bloody stalemate for 2 years, encouraged by Stalin because it “gave the Chinese military an opportunity to learn modern military techniques”, and dragged the US further into a conflict that it could not win.
The costs were horrific: close to a million Korean soldiers in total killed, hundreds of thousands of Chinese, 36,000 US soldiers, and millions of Korean civilians murdered, bombed, or starved to death. Major cities outside of Busan were leveled (Seoul was captured and re-captured 4 times), villages and farms destroyed; the two Koreas were among the poorest countries in the world when the ceasefire was finally declared in July 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death.
Both sides committed terrible atrocities against civilians and political prisoners. Myoshi-Jager examines in depth the mistreatment of POWs, especially in the North, where captured US, UN and South Korean soldiers were starved to death, abused, tortured, brainwashed. The exchange of POWs became one of the key sources of friction during the ceasefire negotiations. One third of captured US soliders who were finally released were treated as communist collaborators because ot what they had undergone, and the compromises that they were forced to make in order to survive. Korean POW returnees were similarly shunned.
China and North Korea made bizarre and unfounded accusations against the US of biological warfare during the conflict. But the threat of nuclear escalation against both countries was real, especially under Eisenhower, who considered nuclear weapons more cost-effective than conventional military operations.
The US military’s inability to defeat the communists in Korea hardened US Cold War policy, especially its position on Vietnam, fed McCarthyism, and the globalization of the Cold War (the domino theory). The conflict also reversed demilitarization after the Second World War, increasing the militarization of US society and the US economy, creating the military industrial complex that Eisenhower famously warned against when he stepped down as president.
For Mao, China’s military success against the US increased his political strength internationally and domestically, helped convince him of his own genius, and set him on China’s Great Leap Forward, his disastrous economic shock therapy program to modernize China.
After the ceasefire, the North remained much more politically and economically powerful (economy twice the size), until a military coup removed Rhee from power in the South, after hundreds of millions of dollars of US aid had been wasted or stolen outright. The only successful, and the least corrupt, institution in the South was the military.
In the North, Kim was a Mao-like Messianic character, a power-hungry egomaniac. His Juche program of economic and political self-sufficiency was a failure, built on lies: the North Korean government was heavily dependent on economic and military aid from the USSR and/or China, and remains so today. North Korea’s economy failed in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was widespread famine between 1995-1998. In 2008 there were severe shortages again - the US stepped in to prevent starvation and instability.
During the Cold War, and after, up to today, North (especially) Korea continues to be an important pawn in geopolitical games between the US, the Soviet Union/Russia, China, and Japan.
The prospects of reunification are fading, and so is the case for it, as fundamental differences between the economic and political systems, cultures, and even histories of the two Koreas continue to widen. Germany’s experience of reunification proves that the economic and social costs of reunifying the two Koreas are prohibitive. Myoshi-Jager explores the possibility of China absorbing North Korea as an economic satellite but even that seems unlikely, as the current regime plays off China against Russia, and plays with nuclear missile threats against the rest of the world.
A balanced history of The Korean War: a brutal, high-takes conflict that remains unresolved more than 70 years later.
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