Police goons

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 70. The complexity surrounding Korea after WWII and before the North Korean invasion.

In December 1945, the Russians agreed to an American proposal that Korea should be entrusted to a Four Power International Trusteeship lasting five years. This would ease the transition to an independent and unified Korean state. In reality, both the Americans and the Soviets encouraged the consolidation of their own client governments, as they had been doing in Germany. A provisional legislature and interim government emerged in Seoul, dominated by conservatives who had collaborated with the Japanese. The Chief of Staff of the new South Korean Army was a former colonel in the Japanese army and his successor was also a former soldier in the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. While the Russians proposed that they and the US simply pull out of Korea, leaving local rivals to battle it out, the US persuaded the United Nations to support nationwide elections under UN supervision as a preliminary to US–Soviet withdrawal.

After North Korea had refused to accept these arrangements, the majority of members of a UN General Assembly Interim Committee on Korea allowed elections to proceed only in the South. Although Rhee’s ‘police goons’ used considerable brutality to rig the outcome of elections, which the opposition boycotted, the UN accepted a result that brought Rhee to power in a coalition of conservative parties. After the establishment of the Republic of Korea (ROK) in July 1948, Syngman Rhee became its first president. Although he made a stab at eliminating former collaborators, under the December 1948 National Security Law some 58,000 leftist South Koreans were jailed amid endemic political violence, while the press was brought under stringent controls. In June 1949 one of Rhee’s most prominent critics was assassinated.

The regime emerging in the South was far from universally popular, and not all the opposition came from so-called Communists, a term Americans were bandying around with decreasing discrimination. The political consolidation of the ROK ran into a regional insurgency that owed little to the guerrillas the North Koreans infiltrated into north-eastern Kangwon Province. Throughout South Korea People’s Committees had spontaneously come into existence amid the collapse of Japanese rule. Some of these were dominated by adherents of the left, notably in south-westerly Cholla and Kyongsang, and on the island of Cheju. In November 1946 US troops joined the police in repressing a peasant rebellion in Cholla. Known as the Autumn Harvest Rebellion, it was sparked in part by a dry monsoon season and a poor rice crop.

On the island of Cheju socialism and separatism combined to fight against attempts by Syngman Rhee’s supporters to sideline the People’s Committees that had run the island’s affairs with minimal interference by the Americans since late 1945. The regime in Seoul introduced a rightist militia, called the North-west Youth Corps, to aid and abet the police in suppressing leftists with murderous violence. The rebels formed an insurgent force called the People’s Democratic Army. The US Army provided advisers to the police and militias, who then used Japanese counter-insurgency tactics to rid the island of rebels. This involved destroying interior villages and removing their inhabitants to the coast, where they could be closely controlled. The guerrillas were then attacked when the winter snows impeded their mobility and made them more visible. Anywhere between 30,000 and 60,000 islanders were killed in this pacification campaign, with a further 40,000 fleeing overseas to Japan.

Many members of the North-west Youth Corps were incorporated into the police, while a senior policeman from Seoul became one of the island’s deputies to the National Assembly. The rebellion on Cheju spread to ROK troops who refused to embark at a port called Yosu to fight the insurgents and then linked up with guerrillas. Korean officers who had fought for the Japanese in Manchuria used Japanese counter-insurgency methods to suppress them, with the Americans providing intelligence, aerial reconnaissance and C-47 transporters to move Korean troops into the war zones. It has been estimated that 100,000 Koreans died in these counter-insurgency operations, which ended a year before the Korean War broke out.