Just before dawn on Sunday 25 June 1950, following a brief bombardment, the 150,000-strong army of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, backed by Soviet Russia, crossed the border and invaded its southern neighbour, the Republic of Korea, backed by the United States. To many observers, it looked as though it was here, on a far-flung East Asian peninsula which some in the West would struggle even to place on a map, that the Cold War was about to turn ‘hot’ for the first time. But what had led up to this? And what happened next?
The Korean peninsula had been divided since the end of the Second World War, much like Germany in Europe. With no natural boundary, the 38th Parallel marked the line of the border, dividing Korea roughly in half; Soviet troops occupied North Korea, and the US occupied the South. In the North, Joseph Stalin established as leader a man who had spent much of the war in Moscow, very much as he had set up pro-Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe. This was Kim Il-Sung – the grandfather of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s current supreme leader. In the South, the US established Syngman Rhee as leader, a man who had spent much of his adult life in the US, and who was known to be strongly anti-Communist, but also had no ties with the Japanese who had occupied the Korean peninsula for 35 years, between 1910 and 1945.
Over the ensuing years, Kim Il-Sung built up a hardline Communist state. Land was nationalised, and opponents were hunted down and imprisoned or executed. At the same time, Syngman Rhee built up a supposedly democratic state in the South – but he had little support in Korea, and his regime was soon marred by corruption and complacency, reliant on American backing.
A chicken coup