a massive revolt in the fall of 1946 that shook the American occupied zone. He argued that the revolt exposed once and for all the Koreans’ “latent savagery and incapacity for self-government.” Langdon blamed the uprisings on the Koreans as well as the Japanese, whose authoritarianism taught Koreans “to only respect force,” hence the reason why they “now submit meekly to a dictatorial alien controlled regime in North Korea.”17 What was once the Japanese empire’s “Korean problem” (that of “uncivilized” colonial subjects within the body politic) had turned quickly into a communist problem for the U.S. Military Government. The task at hand, U.S. officials understood, entailed “teach[ing] the responsibilities [and] advantages of democracy” to Koreans and steering them clear away from communism.18
These dual projects—of civilizing Koreans and suppressing their radicalism—cohered in an experiment that Americans had tested long ago in a different colonial setting in the Philippines: to instill martial discipline in the population and to build up an indigenous security force. This process began with the arrival of Lt. Col. Russell D. Barros in September 1945 as part of the XXIV Corps. Barros was an officer in the Philippine Army who had mobilized a band of Filipino guerrillas as part of the liberation of Luzon in 1944, and who was prized for his experience working with Asian soldiers.19 His travel from one U.S. colonial outpost to another, and the knowledge he acquired and implemented along the way, exemplified the kinds of transnational circuits that would shape the U.S. military empire in Asia over the next two decades. With Barros’s guidance and with SCAP approval, Hodge directed the formation of a Korean Constabulary in January 1946, which served as an auxiliary to the National Police, with infantry units established at each province.20 Similar to the one formed at the start of the U.S. colonial rule of the Philippines, the Korean Constabulary was tasked with maintaining “internal security” of the liberated colony in order “to get a start for the future” when a viable government was established.21
In the early months of 1946, young Korean men flocked to the recruiting stations, heeding the calls of newspaper ads and street recruiters, and eager for the chance to resume earning a steady wage. Many had been officers of the Imperial Japanese Army before liberation ended their careers abruptly. They tended to hail from middle-class backgrounds and had seen joining the Imperial Army as an opportunity to further their education and training, driven by the prospect of job security and an elevation of their class status. When the war ended, some envisioned an even greater purpose: they wanted to be the leaders of the new nation’s army. To American officials, these men were exactly whom the Constabulary needed. They were ambitious and educated Koreans with the right blend of patriotic zeal, some English-language facility, and above all military experience. As recruitment progressed in the spring of 1946, U.S. advisers began making necessary changes: they replaced Japanese weapons and uniforms with American ones, translated U.S. military training manuals into Korean, and even added Korean history to the curriculum.22 In short, the Constabulary was to become an American experiment in building a Korea for Koreans.
Faced with a population that seemed to grow increasingly resentful of the Military Government and its policies daily, Hodge pushed for an accelerated expansion of the Constabulary at the end of 1946, in preparation for potential future insurrections. To draw recruits, Military Government officials kept the entrance requirements to a minimum: a candidate had to be at least twenty-one years old, without a criminal record, and to hold the equivalent of an American eleventh-grade education to be admitted as an officer.23 The lax requirements helped drive the numbers, but other forces were at work. As the National Police continued to crack down on political dissidents, those who bore the brunt of the repression came to see the Constabulary as an armed haven. “Many of the men the Americans recruited for our constabulary service,” John Muccio, President Harry Truman’s representative to Korea acknowledged later, “were self-styled refugees newly arrived from the north of the 38th parallel, who were accepted without proper investigation.”24 Within a year’s time, between the spring of 1946 and 1947, the Constabulary had grown from a force of three thousand to ten thousand men.25 Their loyalties could not be determined with certainty.
In October 1948, two months after Syngman Rhee declared the founding of the Republic of Korea (ROK), a massive rebellion rocked the southern peninsula and reverberated around the world. On October 19, upon receiving orders to deploy to Cheju Island to suppress a growing insurgency there, elements of the 14th Regiment of the Korean Constabulary pursued other plans: they mutinied. Forty soldiers stationed at Camp Anderson murdered their officers. They seized control of the city of Yŏsu within hours. The next morning, the number of rebels had swelled to two thousand, drawing disaffected soldiers and local people into the ranks. Officers told their men, “The thirty-eighth parallel has been done away with. Go get your guns and assemble.”26
With this gathering force, the rebels quickly spread to the nearby city of Sunch’ŏn. They marched through the streets and waved red flags and sang communist slogans, announcing their victory. They established “people’s courts” that tried and executed members of the police and their families as well as other government officials and landowners. The American adviser to the Korean Constabulary James Hausman recalled of what came to be called the Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn rebellion, “All hell had broken loose and we had nothing to stop the onslaught.”27 Meanwhile, on that same day, the South Korean Labor Party called for a general strike in Taegu, rallying students and workers to demand the dissolution of Syngman Rhee’s government and the withdrawal of American troops from Korea.28
The Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn rebellion drew the attention of international observers and journalists; many who flocked to the area documented the bloodshed on the ground. “The city stank of death and was ill with the marks of horror,” Life photographer Carl Mydans wrote in his notes to his editors.29 In the eyes of the “free world,” the mutinous soldiers and the violence they unleashed belied a precarious South Korean state that seemed to have lost its handle on the “Red menace” completely. Military officials appeared to have seen the signs coming. Earlier that summer, counterintelligence agents intercepted instructions from North Korea urging communists to “infiltrate into the South Korean Constabulary and begin political attacks aimed at causing dissension and disorder”; by late summer, agents had identified the 14th Regiment as the most dangerous and suspected it was close to mutiny.30 A deeper look would have revealed that unheeded warnings stemmed back even earlier to the hasty recruitment drive of 1946–47. But there was no time to reflect on missed opportunities. Rhee struck back hard against the rebels. Led by American advisers and carried out by Korean colonels seasoned in Japanese antiguerrilla campaigns in Manchuria, the counteroffensive was swift and brutal. One week after the mutiny began, an estimated 821 rebels were killed and nearly 3,000 captured; 1,000 or more escaped and slipped into hiding. Peace was restored momentarily.31
The following weeks proved critical for Rhee in his drive to consolidate power in the budding South Korea. The conservative leader had been biding his time since his return from exile in 1945, and now he did exactly what he needed to demonstrate his legitimacy to his American backers. Soon after the pacification of Yŏsu and Sunch’ŏn, Rhee ordered the Constabulary to intensify investigation of all its units and to purge those with “communistic tendencies.” All who had taken part in the rebellion were brought before courts-martial and charged with mutiny and sedition.32 With the passage of the National Security Law in December 1948, the hunt for subversives grew more emboldened and led to the roundup and screening of more than two thousand officers and the imprisonment of more than four hundred on charges of conspiracy, murder, and mutiny, among other crimes.33 Such draconian measures reflected Rhee’s shortsighted understanding of what had happened: the Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn rebellion was only a problem of “Communist infiltration.” As such, it required bureaucratic solutions, starting with the prompt purging of subversives. During the process, American military advisers resumed the buildup of the Korean Constabulary and implemented better screening of new recruits.
FIGURE
