Division of Korea

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The division of Korea was set in motion on the 10th of August 1945, when two young American officers named Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel were handed a National Geographic map and told to draw a line. Working on extremely short notice and with no expertise in the region, they picked the 38th parallel as the dividing line between a proposed American occupation zone in the south and a Soviet one in the north. They chose it because it placed the capital Seoul under American control. No experts on Korea were consulted.

  What neither man knew was that, forty years earlier, Japan and pre-revolutionary Russia had floated the idea of dividing Korea along that same parallel. Rusk later said that had he known, he almost surely would have chosen a different line.

  The line they drew that afternoon would separate sixteen million Koreans in the American zone from nine million in the Soviet zone. It would produce two governments that each claimed sovereignty over the entire peninsula, a war that killed hundreds of thousands, and a division that has lasted, unresolved, to the present day. How a temporary occupation arrangement became a permanent partition is the story this documentary will trace.

• 2. A Nation Under Japan

  ›

  When the Russo-Japanese War ended in 1905, Korea, then known as the Korean Empire, became a nominal protectorate of Japan. Emperor Gojong was removed, and in 1910 Japan formally annexed the peninsula.

  In the decades that followed, nationalist and radical groups emerged to struggle for independence. Divergent in their outlooks and approaches, these groups failed to come together into a single national movement. The Korean Provisional Government in exile, operating from China, failed to obtain widespread recognition from the Allied powers.

  By the time World War II was underway, the Allied leaders were already debating what would happen to Korea after Japan's inevitable defeat. At the Cairo Conference in November 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek declared that they were "mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea" and determined that Korea "shall become free and independent." Roosevelt floated the idea of an international trusteeship over Korea but did not obtain agreement from the other powers.

  Roosevelt raised the trusteeship idea again with Joseph Stalin at the Tehran Conference in November 1943 and at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Stalin did not disagree but advocated that any trusteeship period be kept short. At Tehran and Yalta, Stalin also promised to join the Allied war effort in the Pacific within two to three months after victory in Europe, a commitment that would prove decisive for Korea's fate.

• 3. The Last Days of War

  ›

  On the 8th of August 1945, two days after the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima but before the second bomb struck Nagasaki, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, Commander-in-Chief of Soviet Forces in the Far East, called on Koreans to rise up against Japan, declaring that "a banner of liberty and independence is rising in Seoul."

  Soviet troops advanced rapidly through northern Korea. They began amphibious landings by the 14th of August, landed at Wonsan on the 16th, and had secured most major cities in the north, including Pyongyang, by the 24th of August. Japanese resistance was light, and Soviet forces were well received by Koreans who had chafed under colonial rule.

  In Seoul, the last Japanese Governor-General of Korea, General Nobuyuki Abe, was already trying to arrange the handover of power. He first offered a leading role to Song Jin-woo, the former head of The Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, who was regarded as a champion of Korean independence activism within the peninsula. Song refused. He saw the position as equivalent to the role of Wang Jingwei, the ruler of the Japanese puppet state in China, and preferred to wait for the return of the Korean Provisional Government from exile.

  On the 15th of August, Abe turned instead to Lyuh Woon-hyung, who accepted. Lyuh announced Japan's surrender to the public that day, to the jubilation of Koreans and to the horror of the roughly 777,000 Japanese residents still living on the peninsula. With a budget of 20,000,000 yen from the colonial government, Lyuh organized the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, known as the CPKI, which began taking over security and coordinating with local governments across the peninsula.

• 4. Two Occupations, Two Paths

  ›

  When Soviet troops entered Pyongyang on the 24th of August, they found a local branch of the CPKI operating under veteran nationalist Cho Man-sik. The Soviet Army allowed these People's Committees, which varied widely in political composition, to function. In September 1945 the Soviet administration issued its own currency, the "Red Army won."

  The Soviet occupiers brought with them Koreans who had been living in the Soviet Union, including members of the Soviet Communist Party, with the intention of establishing a socialist state. The Soviet Army also arrived in poor condition after the devastating losses of the European war: newly recruited soldiers sometimes landed lacking shoes and uniforms, and they lived off the Korean land and looted Japanese colonials and Korean capitalists. These abuses lessened after the arrival of military police in January 1946.

  In 1946, Colonel-General Terentii Shtykov took charge of the Soviet administration and lobbied Moscow for funds to support the struggling northern economy. His strong backing of Kim Il Sung, who had spent the final years of the war training with Soviet troops in Manchuria, was decisive in Kim's rise to power. A provisional government, the Provisional People's Committee of North Korea, was formed in February 1946 under Kim Il Sung.

  In March 1946, the provisional government launched a sweeping land reform program. Land belonging to Japanese and collaborator landowners was divided and redistributed to poor farmers. Landlords were permitted to keep only the same amount of land as poor civilians who had once rented from them. Official American sources noted that "the former village leaders were eliminated as a political force without resort to bloodshed, but extreme care was taken to preclude their return to power." Many collaborators, former landowners, and Christians fled south; according to the U.S. military government, 400,000 northern Koreans went south as refugees.

  In the American zone, the story was far less orderly. On the 7th of September 1945, General Douglas MacArthur issued Proclamation No. 1, announcing U.S. military control over Korea south of the 38th parallel and establishing English as the official language during military control. Lieutenant General John R. Hodge landed in Incheon the following day with troops trained for combat, not for diplomacy. None of the Americans in the military or the State Department in the Far East in late 1945 even spoke Korean, leading to jokes among Koreans that Korean translators were really running southern Korea.

  Hodge refused to meet with delegates from the Korean Provisional Government when they arrived from China with interpreters. He outlawed the People's Republic of Korea on the 12th of December. Over the following years, the U.S. occupation faced a series of left-wing insurgencies; between 30,000 and 100,000 people were killed, with most casualties resulting from the Jeju uprising.

• 5. The Trusteeship That Failed

  ›

  At the Moscow Conference in December 1945, the Allied powers agreed that the Soviet Union, the United States, the Republic of China, and Britain would administer a trusteeship over Korea for up to five years in the lead-up to full independence. The agreement energized Korean nationalists who demanded immediate independence and rejected any trusteeship, while the Korean Communist Party, closely aligned with Moscow, supported it.

  A US-Soviet Joint Commission met in 1946 and 1947 to work toward a unified administration, but Cold War antagonism and Korean opposition to the trusteeship made progress impossible. In May 1946 it was made illegal to cross the 38th parallel without a permit. The Soviet Union proposed Lyuh Woon-hyung as the leader of a unified Korea, but the United States rejected the proposal.

  On the 19th of July 1947, Lyuh, the last senior politician genuinely committed to left-right dialogue, was assassinated by a 19-year-old named Han Chigeun, a recent refugee from North Korea and an active member of the right-wing nationalist group known as the White Shirts Society. At the final meeting of the Joint Commission in September 1947, Soviet delegate Terentii Shtykov proposed that both occupying forces withdraw and allow Koreans to form their own government. The United States rejected that proposal as well.

  With the commission deadlocked, the United States brought the Korean question before the United Nations in September 1947. The UN passed a resolution on the 14th of November 1947, calling for free elections, the withdrawal of foreign troops, and the creation of a UN commission for Korea called UNTCOK. The Soviet Union boycotted the vote and refused to recognize the resolution as binding. The commission's own chairman, K. P. S. Menon, argued against holding a separate election in the south only, and some UNTCOK delegates felt the conditions in the south gave unfair advantage to right-wing candidates. They were overruled.

• 6. Two Governments, One Peninsula

  ›

  Separate elections in the south were deeply unpopular among many Koreans who saw them as a path to permanent partition. General strikes began in February 1948. In April, Jeju islanders rose up against the looming division. The rebellion was largely defeated by May 1949, but by then between 25,000 and 30,000 people had been killed and 70% of the island's villages had been burned by South Korean troops.

  On the 10th of May 1948, the south held its general election amid widespread violence, intimidation, and a boycott by opponents of Syngman Rhee. In the north, the All-Union Communist Party Politburo instructed Shtykov to implement the North Korean constitution. The People's Assembly voted on the 10th of July to establish the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Legislative elections followed on the 25th of August, and Kim Il Sung was appointed prime minister on the 9th of September.

  In the south, on the 15th of August 1948, the Republic of Korea formally declared its statehood with Syngman Rhee as its first president. On the 12th of December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly accepted UNTCOK's report and declared the Republic of Korea to be the "only lawful government in Korea." None of the members of UNTCOK, however, considered that the election had established a legitimate national parliament. The Australian government declared it was "far from satisfied" with the election.

  In December 1946, Shtykov and two other generals had designed the election results of the North Korean Assembly without any Korean input, deciding the exact distribution of seats among parties, the number of women members, and the precise social composition of the legislature. The original 1948 North Korean constitution was written primarily by Stalin and Shtykov. Soviet forces withdrew from the north on the 10th of December 1948, and U.S. forces completed their withdrawal from the south by 1949, leaving behind the Korean Military Advisory Group to train and support the South Korean army.

• 7. War and Its Aftermath

  ›

  From 1948 until the start of the civil war on the 25th of June 1950, the armed forces of each side fought a series of bloody conflicts along the border. The full-scale invasion began when North Korean forces crossed into the south on that date, triggering the Korean War. The United Nations intervened with a U.S.-led force, while North Korean forces overran 90% of the south before a counterattack pushed them back.

  South Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel on the 1st of October 1950, and American and other UN forces followed a week later, despite Chinese warnings that it would intervene if they advanced past the parallel. China then launched a counterattack that drove U.S.-led forces back into the south. By 1951 the front line had stabilized near the 38th parallel.

  Syngman Rhee refused to accept a ceasefire and demanded the war continue until Korea was unified under his rule. The Communist side wanted the armistice line drawn at the 38th parallel; the United Nations supported a line based on the territory each side actually held at the time. The Americans initially proposed a line that passed through Pyongyang, far to the north of the front line. The drawn-out disagreement produced a tortuous and protracted negotiating process.

  The Korean Armistice Agreement, signed after three years of war, created a 4-kilometer buffer zone called the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ. The Armistice also established a Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission to monitor compliance; since 1953, members of the Swiss and Swedish armed forces have served in it near the DMZ. A Geneva Conference was held in 1954 to address the Korean question but ended without a declaration for a unified Korea.

  In October 2024, the North Korean constitution was amended to remove all references to reunification and to label South Korea a "hostile state." This was preceded by the physical destruction of roads connecting the two halves of the peninsula, a deliberate act intended, in Pyongyang's own framing, to "completely separate" the two states.