Images.)
Rhee’s crackdown facilitated the transition from the American occupation to the new Republic, ensuring no place existed for political dissent in his anticommunist state. The crackdown worked more broadly to secure South Korea’s place in the newly reconfigured Pacific region, the contours of which were becoming clearer by this time. In October 1948, the National Security Council outlined the first U.S. policy strategy toward building a new Pacific regionalism, centered on Japan and its economic recovery. The “reverse course” of U.S. occupation objectives in Japan meant several things, most notably the return of previously “purged” conservative leaders to power and the promotion of unfettered capitalism. Both of these objectives had been pursued against the increasing militancy of organized labor and communist movements. But the reverse course also signaled a broader transnational calculus to revive Japan’s industrial capacity and export markets in Asia, keeping the periphery firmly connected to the capitalist world.34 The security of anticommunism in South Korea and the resumption of Japan’s industrial economy emerged as integral projects to transform the Pacific region into a beacon of free trade and a part of the “free world.”
Since the end of World War II, in the span of a few years, American policy had gone full circle, from dismantling the Japanese empire to resuscitating it. Common people throughout Asia revolted against what they saw as the revival of Japanese dominance in the region through the aid of “American imperialists.”35 But to U.S. officials, this was to be a more liberal and democratic pan-Asianism than the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, one tempered by the U.S. commitment to support the independence of postcolonial nation-states. It was to be far removed from Japan’s erstwhile militarist endeavors. Yet this was no mere ruse for empire. In fact, the promise of “Asia for Asians” demanded a differentiation between “good” and “bad” Asians, between those to be incorporated into the postcolonial state and those to be expelled from it, and American officials put their faith in the military to accomplish both. The Korean Constabulary, driven by the dual mandates of disciplining martial subjects and making war on those who refused the American liberation, functioned as the quintessential vehicle for postcolonial state building.
The Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn Rebellion was not an aberration of an otherwise promising start toward the fulfillment of a national project. Instead, it was the result of the accumulated grievances of ordinary Koreans since the start of the U.S. occupation. It was their collective refusal of American designs for their postcolonial world. The failure of American officials to face this fact would haunt them not only in Korea but also in other contexts, wherever the U.S. military intervened.
MILITARY EXPANSION AND SUBVERSION
In November 1948, with the Yŏsu mutiny recently subdued, Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall issued a directive to all U.S. Army commands that outlined the protocol for handling “subversive and disaffected personnel.” The events in Korea made him nervous about the loyalty of his own American troops. The terms “subversive” and “disaffected” personnel described subjects who had engaged in any number of political activities or had “shown lack of loyalty to the Government and Constitution of the United States” by acts, writings, or speech.36 Royall’s directive breathed new life into these definitions by empowering commanders to “detect” and “investigate” such personnel. The directive tasked them with classifying and maintaining a detailed record of each individual, including name, rank, army serial number, and a statement indicating the basis for the subject’s classification.37 The suppression of the Yŏsu rebellion appeared to have contained one specter of communist subversion only to give rise to another within the U.S. military, one that gained increasing focus and clarity in the late 1940s yet would remain more elusive than ever.
In many ways, the problem of subversion in the U.S. armed forces was a product of popular front activism for racial equality in the early 1940s. In a memorandum dated February 1946 and titled “Communist Infiltration of and Agitation in the Armed Forces,” the War Department’s Director of Intelligence Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg made this connection clear. Admittedly, the problem had roots stemming back to 1920, he noted, when the Communist International first ordered communist parties around the world to “carry on a systematic agitation in its own Army against every kind of oppression of colonial population.” By the start of World War II, this global movement had transformed into active pursuits against the Jim Crow military in the United States. As Communist Party members entered the services in an attempt to organize from within, they targeted “negro [sic] soldiers and enlisted personnel” in particular. The Communist Party, under the guise of “front” organizations such as the American Youth Congress and other civil rights groups, had unleashed a “whispering campaign” to indoctrinate soldiers and sailors, stirring up black servicemen especially.38
But it was after the war, as the United States continued to keep American troops overseas, that such activities posed an actual global threat to U.S. security. “At first,” Vandenberg continued in his memo, “the apparent purpose of the Communists seemed to be propagandizing against this country’s occupation of certain areas in the Pacific and the Far East.” But by the end of 1945, “Communists” were actively agitating GIs wherever they were stationed abroad, fueling the growing sentiments of the American public that overseas servicemen ought to be returned home without delay.39 Handwritten letters—hundreds and thousands of them—flooded the offices of elected officials in November and December, written by GIs in Hawai‘i, Okinawa, Yokohama, Manila, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Paris, and other places. In Manila, “Home by Christmas!” became a seditious slogan that seemed to appear everywhere; as Nelson Peery, a radicalized black GI at the time, recalled, the words were scratched onto road signs and painted on the latrines, on the doors of officers’ quarters, in recreation rooms, and in mess halls.40 Authorities watched these signs nervously, convinced of sedition stirring in the military.
Then on Christmas Day 1945, as though confirming these worst fears, four thousand American soldiers in Manila staged a demonstration. The soldiers marched to the 21st Replacement Depot in response to the cancellation of a scheduled transport home and carried banners that read, “We Want Ships!”41 The Christmas Day protest was a sign of things to come, and they came more quickly and bigger than authorities could prepare for. The opening weeks of 1946, in fact, saw the largest wave of GI demonstrations ever to hit the U.S. military up to that time. It came on the heels of an announcement by the War Department on January 4 that there would be a further slowdown in troop demobilization; servicemen expecting to be released soon based on their number of years of service now remained uncertain of their future. The announcement touched off a chain reaction at U.S. bases around the world, beginning in the Philippines. On January 6 and 7, an estimated eight thousand to ten thousand GIs converged at City Hall in Manila and voiced dissatisfaction with the recent announcement, urging U.S. officials to scale back all overseas forces except those in Occupied Japan and Germany. On January 8, more than 3,500 enlisted men and officers at Andersen Air Base in Guam staged a hunger strike to express solidarity with those in the Philippines.42 Over the next ten days, similar actions organized by “soldier committees” took place in Hawai‘i, Le Havre, Paris, Rheims, Seoul, Shanghai, New Delhi, and elsewhere.43
The demobilization movement of January 1946 was the first concerted rebellion against the U.S. military and its growing worldwide presence. While few seemed to question the necessity of maintaining troops in Japan and Germany, in other parts of the world GIs asked probing questions about why they were needed. During Secretary of War Robert Patterson’s tour of U.S. bases in the Pacific, one soldier confronted him directly by asking, “Did you bring the 86th Division to suppress the aspirations of the Philippine people?”44 At a demonstration at Hickam Air Field in Hawai‘i, a GI and labor organizer named David Livingston stated, “We are here because there seems to be a foreign policy developing which requires one hell of a big army. It’s about time we joined with our buddies in the Philippines and said: ‘Yes, let’s occupy enemy countries, but not friendly countries.’ It doesn’t take a single soldier in the Philippines or on Oahu to wipe fascism off the earth.”45
