Journal of Korean Studies

The start of the millennium saw a turning point in the transnational public memory of the Korean War. The year 2000 coincided with an unexpected shift in contemporary popular contestations of orthodox Korean War interpretation, which [End Page 464] suddenly ramped up to a high-profile transnational scale after the largely domestic controversies of the postdemocratization-era history wars in South Korea during the 1990s. That is, in April 2000 the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism was awarded to the Associated Press for reporting on a massacre of unarmed Korean civilians committed by US soldiers a half century earlier. Although stories told by survivors of the No Gun Ri massacre had already appeared for several years in South Korea's alternative press, the Pulitzer recognition of the AP team's coverage, which drew heavily upon similar oral accounts, meant such narratives of war trauma would become known to a much larger audience beyond Korea. As issues long taboo in South Korea received international attention and came into public discourse, this interest brought new momentum to using personal testimony as means for recognizing the social suffering of civilian victims of anticommunist violence stemming from the Korean War.

Su-kyoung Hwang's book Korea' s Grievous War represents a timely, significant, and well-researched contribution to the literature on the civilian experience of political violence in South Korea. The book focuses on aspects of the Korean War which, compared to the controversy surrounding No Gun Ri, have not elicited the same kind of recent global media attention but which resulted in ideologically driven violence on a much larger scale and a staggering number of Korean civilian deaths in the mid-twentieth century. These included the massacres in the wake of the 1948 Cheju Uprising, the mass executions of members of the National Guidance Alliance, and the aerial bombardment of civilians in North Korea during the war. The author sets out "to understand and articulate the vividness and immediacy of these profoundly destructive events from the perspective of those who suffered them" (p. 22). Hwang seeks to explore the circumstances surrounding deaths long regarded as effectively ungrievable and to document the ongoing suffering of the bereaved families and other survivors of political violence who for decades had been denied public empathy. Drawing upon field interviews, archival documentary evidence, and secondary literature in English and Korean, the book vividly succeeds in fulfilling those aims. Although the author'sframing of her study falls short of the book's promise in a key respect, as discussed below, the painstaking research and thoughtful analysis represented throughout its chapters are commendable, and the book deserves a wide audience among those interested in human rights, the history of emotions, and the history of the Korean War.

The book makes its strongest contributions in the first three chapters and in its final chapter. In chapter 1, the author begins with an examination of the suppression of the Cheju Uprising of April 3, 1948, which occurred during the transition from the US military government in Korea (1945–1948) to the new South Korean government. How did a revolt of a few hundred rebels eventually result in the deaths of thirty to eighty thousand island residents, roughly a tenth to a quarter of Cheju's population? Beyond the circumstances of the initial local uprising, Hwang details the factors surrounding a fierce battle for territory and a [End Page 465] counterinsurgency operation overseen by the USAMGIK—carried out by Korean police forces and rightist groups and also later by the South Korean Army—that amounted to one of the most violent events in Korea's modern history.

Using accounts from participants on both sides of the conflict, Hwang explains how the uprising in 1948 was not instigated by Soviet or North Korean forces, contrary to characterizations by the USAMGIK and later by the South Korean state. Rather, the initial smaller-scale civil unrest was rooted in multiple concerns over local autonomy: protests against police violence, resentment over interference by mainland authorities, and opposition to the May 1948 elections, which was widely seen as jeopardizing the prospects for Korean unification. Regarding the extreme measures taken in the suppression of the 1948 uprising, the author explains that, amid a series of clashes between rebels and police, what intensified the violence exponentially was the escalation of a counterinsurgency strategy to a scorched-earth policy, which the USAMGIK had initially opposed but eventually condoned, supported, and promoted. Arguing that the resulting state of siege rendered Cheju "a space of death" that terrorized the entire island's population, Hwang goes on to recount two interviews she conducted with Cheju massacre survivors in which they detail the excruciating suffering of being subject to torture, beatings, and imprisonment during the scorched-earth campaigns. The author thereby deftly illustrates how narratives of war trauma can only be fully understood by taking into account the incipient actions and historical circumstances that shaped the conditions of suffering, particularly those not immediately apparent.

As Hwang discusses in chapter 2, the suppression of the Cheju Uprising marked the onset of intense political violence rationalized by a wartime state of emergency, which effectively legalized the use of state-sanctioned violence not only against presumed enemies but also against the population at large. In addition to the emergency in wartime Korea, Hwang considers President Truman's declaration of national emergency in December 1950 following China's entry into the war in Korea. That declaration prompted rapid militarization in what amounted to waging total war against enemy troops, urban centers, and civilian populations despite the ongoing lack of a constitutionally mandated Congressional declaration of war. Hwang writes, "Unlike Rhee's emergency that took place in wartime Korea, Truman's emergency happened in a 'peacetime' United States, where citizens remained unaffected by the horrific scenes of destruction and suffering," a precedent that "fostered the perennial indifference of the United States to the disastrous effects of the emergencies used in foreign wars ever since" (p. 75).

In chapter 3, Hwang discusses the formation and disastrous fate of the National Guidance Alliance, tracing influences from Japanese colonial policies of ideological conversion and the McCarthyist Red Scare in the United States. A South Korean state-established organization, the National Guidance Alliance presumably offered former or alleged communists the chance to return to the fold of [End Page 466] mainstream society, but in fact the Alliance would largely become comprised of those who had been apolitical. Instead of offering protection, the Alliance primarily served to keep its members under surveillance and control. Then, in the days and weeks after the North Koreans invaded in June 1950, Alliance members were rounded up to be jailed and summarily put to death in mass executions that killed an estimated two hundred thousand people. Challenging the conventional implications of terror as illegitimate or delegitimating violence used by political insurgents, Hwang here analyzes state terror wielded on a catastrophic scale in order to create an atmosphere of fear and a docile society, consolidating power at the expense of an enormous number of innocent lives.

In chapters 4 and 5, Hwang shifts to examine the subjective position of those present at the scenes of political violence, but not as victims. The author considers the ambiguous position of third-party observers who witnessed but did not stop civilian wartime executions, and these observers included US military personnel, foreign war correspondents, Syngman Rhee, ordinary citizens, and International Committee of the Red Cross representatives. Chapter 5 addresses the massive bombing campaigns by the US Air Force, whose scale exceeded the destructiveness of more widely known wars: more bombs were dropped in Korea in the 1950–1953 period than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II; despite the association of napalm with the Vietnam War, the air raids in Korea dropped more napalm in the incendiary bombing of North Korea than was used in Vietnam.¹ These merciless aerial bombardments were simultaneously conventional and psychological warfare, a strategy of overwhelming force that induced fear in the civilian population but failed to break morale. Refuting the sterilized depictions of aerial bombings, Hwang argues these campaigns should not be presumed to have been emotionally detached activities. She cites phenomena such as the fear-of-flying syndrome that afflicted US bomber pilots who, even at a distance from the ground, became demoralized and physically sickened by their awareness of the gruesome attacks they had been charged to unleash upon civilians below.

In the final chapter, Hwang returns to considering the ongoing grief of the massacre survivors as itself a focus of historical inquiry. Recounting narratives of seven South Korean individuals, the chapter details how they coped in the 1960s and 1970s during the period of authoritarian rule when bereaved families of massacre victims faced discrimination and stigmatization as a result of the "guilt-by-association" system (yŏnjwaje). The chapter carries the book's narrative into recent decades of the postdemocratization era, when some of the bereaved family members became activists to seek formal redress through the legal system. Acknowledging their tenacity despite external setbacks and psychological hurdles, the author attributes emotional familial bonds as "the driving force behind their will to fight for the honor of the dead" (p. 184). In the book's brief conclusion, Hwang's final coda calls for the necessity to recognize the experiences of these bereaved families amid ongoing ideological warfare in contemporary divided [End Page 467] Korea, a relentless condition that reflects how legacies of the Cold War have yet to be overcome.

Regarding the book's weakness, in a monograph so animated with rigorous personal and scholarly commitment to a deeper understanding of the Korean War, it is disappointing to see how the author refrains from critically recontextualizing the orthodox interpretation that the war started with the North Korean invasion of the South on June 25, 1950. In other words, she sidesteps the question of how one might take a wider view to reevaluate the war's outbreak through an analytical interrogation of mainstream assumptions. Given that the book is intended not only for Koreanists but also for nonspecialists likely to be unfamiliar with Korean War historiography, one wishes she had been consistent at the book's outset with her critical perspective wary of Cold War bias, which would have been more in keeping with the approach taken in the body chapters. Although Hwang does provide background for understanding the Korean War in terms of its character as a postcolonial struggle, it is important also to stress how both Syngman Rhee in the South and Kim Il Sung in the North were determined to unify the peninsula on their own terms and had made repeated attempts to secure outside support to realize those ambitions through military means. On that point, regarding the context for the invasion in 1950, recovered political-education materials and high-level documents have indicated how the North Koreans and Soviets perceived an alarming threat in a remilitarizing Japan allied with the United States and the Rhee regime. To understand the precipitous urgency behind the calculus that led to support for the North Korean invasion by Stalin and also Mao, one must therefore take into account that an unquestionable factor at the time was the intensifying US push for Japanese rearmament, which itself reflected the US panic response to the communist victory in the Chinese civil war. It would have been helpful to bear in mind this broader scope of reciprocal developments that shaped the disastrous course of the war's escalation into all-out military conflict.² Giving scrutiny toward unsettling the conventional portrayal of Korean War origins would have only strengthened the book's approach toward evaluating the war's tragic outcomes. After all, a narrow characterization of one side's culpability for starting the war was precisely what was often invoked as a cover to misrepresent the perpetrators of wartime atrocities and was routinely cited as a pretext of blame used to rationalize extreme violence against civilians.

That caveat aside, this is an impressive and valuable book. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, the book complements a literature that includes among others Bruce Cumings's The Korean War, Hun Joon Kim's The Massacres at Mt. Halla, Heonik Kwon's The Other Cold War, and Dong-choon Kim's The Unending Korean War. Adding significantly to our understanding of anticommunist political violence against civilians, Korea's Grievous War interweaves the subjective and empirical dimensions of its well-documented, grounded analysis to offer a compelling study of war's human costs in Korea. [End Page 468]