Prof. Kathryn Weathersby

In the last post we looked at the reasons President Truman sent Lieutenant General Albert Wedemeyer on a fact-finding mission to China and Korea in September 1947. We now know that Moscow’s postwar support for the Chinese Communists was quite limited, since Stalin was determined to hold onto his territorial gains in the Far East by remaining faithful to the treaty he had signed with the Nationalist government in 1945, which we discussed in an earlier post. Wedemeyer, however, with the limited information available to him, concluded that the success of the People’s Liberation Army was proof that the Soviet Union was carrying out a masterful plan to establish dominance throughout Asia. His first report to Secretary of State Marshall, sent from China, therefore confirmed the administration’s worst fears.

Continuing on to Korea, Wedemeyer reported that the “same sinister forces that militate against a program of democratization and rehabilitation in other areas of the world are present in Korea.” He thought the Soviets would not invade the South, but instead would use infiltration and subversion to gain control of the entire peninsula. Consequently, he argued that it would be useless to continue to try to cooperate with Moscow regarding Korea. In fact, it would be dangerous to do so because such cooperation would only help the Soviets expand their political domination. He also concluded reasonably that if the US withdrew its forces from Korea prematurely, the Soviets would win a complete victory on the peninsula. This would boost Soviet prestige throughout Asia and weaken the US position in Japan.

Given this analysis, Wedemeyer insisted that military forces in the South must be made strong enough to counter Soviet subversion. He recognized, however, that it would be difficult to create democracy in southern Korea. American occupation authorities relied on the police and the National Youth Movement to maintain order but those groups were widely hated for their brutality and arbitrary arrests. Given their power over potential voters, the far right could guarantee that election results would favor them.

Nevertheless, Wedemeyer optimistically argued that southern Korea could emerge as a vital “bulwark of freedom” in Asia if the US provided significant economic assistance and diluted the power of the police by forming an American-led “Korean Scout Force.” Understanding that the Soviets hoped to maintain a buffer zone in Korea, he unrealistically imagined that such American measures would eventually compel the Soviet Union to accept a “neutralized Korea” as a buffer.

Wedemeyer’s conclusions were strengthened within the administration by concerns about the situation in Europe. Francis B. Stevens of the Division of East European Affairs argued that Korea “is a symbol to the watching world both of the East-West struggle for influence and power and of American security in sponsoring the nationalistic aims of Asian peoples. If we allow Korea to go by default and to fall within the Soviet orbit, the world will feel that we have lost another round in our match with the Soviet Union, and our prestige and the hopes of those who place faith in us will suffer accordingly. In the Far East, the reliance of national movements on American support would be seriously shaken, and the consequences might be far reaching.”

Stevens concluded his analysis by warning that a complete Communist victory in Korea would reinforce Stalin’s strategy of expansion through subversion and indirect aggression. Since Stevens was driven by concerns over Soviet encroachments in Eastern Europe, the next post will examine the situation in that part of the world and how it shaped American and Soviet actions toward Korea.

[Sources: This post relies on William Stueck, The Wedemeyer Mission: American Politics and Foreign Policy During the Cold War (University of Georgia Press, 1984); and James I. Matray, The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941-1950 (University of Hawaii Press).]