The US military government in Korea, 1945 to 1948: from liberation to division

A line on the map

Japan had ruled Korea since 1910. When it surrendered in August 1945, there was no Korean government ready to take over, although the Allies had promised Korea its independence at Cairo in 1943. The United States and the Soviet Union agreed to divide the peninsula along the 38th parallel for the purpose of accepting the Japanese surrender, the Soviets in the north and the Americans in the south. The line was meant to be temporary, and it was the Americans who proposed it.²

American troops under Lieutenant General John R. Hodge landed in September 1945. The Library of Congress country study describes the three years that followed as a time of uncertainty and confusion, rooted in the absence of a clear American policy for Korea, the growing rivalry with the Soviet Union and the polarization of Korean politics.³

Direct rule

Koreans had not waited for the Americans. Local people's committees had formed across the country, and on 6 September 1945 their leaders proclaimed a Korean People's Republic. Exiles of the Korean Provisional Government, founded in Shanghai in 1919, returned from China. The United States recognized neither: Hodge held that the military government was the only government in Korea.⁴

On the mainland, the country study notes, the military government disbanded the people's committees and ruled directly, appointing American officers without Korean or knowledge of the country as governors at many levels. Local practice varied. On the island of Jeju, John Merrill writes, the small American unit worked with the island's People's Committee, which ran local affairs, for almost a year.⁵

In December 1945 the Allied foreign ministers meeting in Moscow decided on a trusteeship of up to five years before independence. To Koreans who had expected immediate freedom, the country study writes, the decision was humiliating, and the warm welcome given to the Americans cooled. A joint US and Soviet commission meant to prepare a single Korean government reached no agreement.⁶

Hunger and unrest

The economy was in chaos. According to the country study, the Japanese had built Korea's industry as part of their empire, most heavy industry and power plants lay in the Soviet zone, and some 700,000 Japanese managers, technicians and settlers left the south, while the population grew by about a fifth in a year as Koreans returned from Japan, China and the north.⁷

Merrill traces the worst of the anger to the handling of rice. The military government first abolished the Japanese system of compulsory grain collection without replacing it, then restored it with the police in charge. In the autumn of 1946 protests that began with a railroad strike in Busan spread to Daegu and beyond; Merrill writes that more than four hundred police were killed and several hundred protesters died before the unrest was put down. The country study adds that the left lost much of its following after this serious riot of October 1946, and that most of its leaders moved north.⁸

Politically, the country study recounts, the military government relied more and more on conservative Koreans, including landlords. Between 1946 and 1947 it tried and failed to build a coalition of the moderate left under Yo Un-hyong and the moderate right under Kim Kyu-sik, and in December 1946 it set up an interim legislative assembly that neither the left nor the main conservative party accepted.⁹

The exit

By 1947 Washington had decided that southern Korea was of little strategic value. The country study quotes one senior official calling it an exposed, unsound military position that was doing no good, and Merrill writes that the occupation was seen as a powder keg. In September 1947 the United States handed the Korean question to the United Nations, and a UN commission came to supervise elections.¹⁰

The election held in the south alone on 10 May 1948 was opposed by most political groups, including right-wing nationalists such as Kim Ku, who feared it would make the division permanent. Many boycotted it, leaving the field to Syngman Rhee. The assembly it chose adopted a presidential constitution, and on 15 August 1948 the Republic of Korea was proclaimed, with Rhee as its first president. The military government came to an end.¹¹

Jeju

The separate election was the background to the bloodiest episode of the occupation years. On Jeju, police fired on a crowd marking the anniversary of the 1919 independence movement on 1 March 1947, killing six people, and police and right-wing youth groups from the mainland were sent to the island. On 3 April 1948 armed members of the leftist South Korean Labor Party attacked police posts across the island, and one of their demands was to stop the 10 May election. The suppression that followed killed many thousands of islanders; Merrill cites an official estimate of up to 30,000 dead, most of them killed by government forces. Merrill and the historian Jeong-Sim Yang both argue that the United States shares responsibility, since the island was under American military government when the campaign began, and Merrill adds that the Korean authorities and the leftist party bear their own share of the blame.¹²