Once the war in Europe came to an end in May 1945 and the booty in Europe was divided amongst the winners, the battle over the domination of Asia unleashed. Already when the fighting in Europe was drawing to a close, 3 zones of conflict immediately became fierce battle grounds in East Asia.
The first zone of conflict was the domination over Japan. It was obvious that the collapse of the Japanese military regime and its elimination from China and Korea would leave a power vacuum, which could only increase the appetites of all imperialist gangsters.
The first country to try and occupy this “vacuum” was Russia, which barely 4 decades earlier in the 1904-1905 war had suffered a big defeat by Japan. However, in a first phase, i.e. after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 (and also later in 1944/early 1945, at the time of the Yalta conference held in February 1945) the USA still assumed since fighting with Japan was reaching unheard of intensity in the far East that it would want Russian participation in defeating Japan, which meant that they wanted above all Russian cannon fodder for the final battles with Japan. Although economically exhausted and with a death toll of more than 20 million people, the USSR had been able to strengthen itself on the imperialist chess board. At the Yalta conference the USSR laid claim on Manchuria, the Kuril archipelago, Sakhalin and Korea north of the 38th parallel; the Chinese ports of Dalian and Lüshün (named Port Arthur when occupied by the Russians) should become a Russian navy base. Stalin’s regime targeted Japan directly. Thus Russia once again aimed at expanding its rule towards East Asia. With the war drawing to an end in Europe, Russia’s strategic interests had changed. Russia, had been benefiting from the carnage between China and Japan and later from the war between Japan and the USA. If Japan was tied down in war with China and the USA, Japan would not be able to attack Russia in Siberia, as Nazi-Germany had been trying to push Japan to do. Since Russia and Japan had the common interest to keep their back clear from any aggression, (Russia wanting to keep away Japan, the ally of its enemy Germany; and Japan wanting to keep Russia, the ally of the USA, in a neutral position) the two countries practised a “non-aggression policy” towards each other during World War II. But towards the end of 1944/45 when the end of the war in Europe was in sight, the USA pushed Russia to take part in the storm against Japan. Stalin even managed to wrist off US military and logistic support for the arming and transport of Russian troops to the east.
At Yalta, the USSR and the USA still agreed, that once the war had come to an end in Europe, the USSR would receive its share after the defeat of Japan. However, once the war was over in Europe, which saw the USSR as a big winner receiving large parts of Eastern Europe and the Eastern part of Germany, US-imperialism had already changed its strategy. The USA no longer wanted any Russian participation in the war against Japan.
Russian imperialism, however, stuck to its guns, it wanted to seize its chance and mobilised an army of 1.5 million soldiers, more than 5.000 tanks, and 3.800 planes within 100 days after the end of the war in Germany.1 Its troops marched through northern China and occupied a territory of the size of Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Poland taken together. Russia declared war on Japan on August 9th, the day when the USA threw the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and on August 10th Russian troops stormed into Japanese occupied Korea advancing rapidly to the 38th parallel just north of Seoul. With Russian troops having become the occupying force of large parts of China and of northern Korea and mobilising for a landing in Japan, the USA saw their position threatened. The USA had to pay an exorbitant price – having to throw two nuclear bombs on Japan, but at the same time this step was above all aimed at preventing Russia from falling over Japan.
Although militarily Japan was already substantially weakened through the massive carpet bombings before August 1945 and although parts of the Japanese bourgeoisie tried to settle for a truce, the USA decided to launch the first atomic bombs against two Japanese cities because the fight for domination over East Asia saw already a new polarisation between Russia and the USA.
Thus the first major, albeit indirect, clash between Russia and the USA occurred over Japan. But a second theatre of confrontation had already cropped up – the battle over China, where the collapse of Japanese rule sparked the appetites of all the imperialist gangsters.
1 “The defeat of the Russian army in 1904 left bitter memories in the hearts of our people. It has been a stain on our nation. Our people have waited, believing that they would one day have to smash Japan and wash away this stain. Our old generation has waited 40 years for that day to come.” (quoted by Jörg Friedrich, Yalu, An den Ufern des dritten Weltkrieges, (On the verge of the 3rd world war) Berlin, 2007).
During World War II, when an alliance of the USA, the USSR and the two rivalling factions of the Chinese bourgeoisie, Kuomintang and the Maoist led Red Army were fighting against Japan, Mao had proposed his “good services” to the USA, praising his troops as a more determined and more capable ally to the USA.
As the war ceased with Japan, the conflict within the Chinese bourgeoisie burst again into the open – fuelled by the imperialist appetites of Russia and the USA. After 1945 the USA, who had backed up the Chinese United Front against Japan, mobilised all their support for the KMT. In a first step, following the Japanese surrender, the USA through its logistical facilities carried back about one million Japanese soldiers from China to Japan (about one fifth of the whole Japanese army), so that the Japanese soldiers would not fall into Russian hands.
Following this operation to rescue Japanese troops, between October and December 1945 half a million Kuomintang soldiers were also airlifted by US troops from south west to northern China and the coastal centres.
As we showed above, the “United Front” between the Stalinist Red Army and the KMT-forces was a very precarious one, interrupted by repeated conflicts and direct confrontations. Japan had fought against two rivalling wings of Chinese capital that were constantly at loggerheads. But once the “common enemy” – Japanese imperialism – had disappeared, the antagonism between the two warring Chinese factions exploded. In June 1946 war started again between Mao and Chiang. After the deluge of an 8 year long war between China and Japan, then another war ravaged the country. With some 3 million soldiers on its side at the beginning of the conflict, the KMT was initially superior in numbers to the Red Army. The KMT received massive support from the USA. In contrast Russia, which returned forcefully on the imperialist front in east Asia in August 1945, occupied Manchuria which Japan had to abandon, but in its first phase it could not offer as much material (above all military) support to the Red Army troops. On the contrary, due to lack of resources Russia dismantled local equipment and shifted it back to Russia.
With the background of an economic collapse largely due to the incessant war economy(the army used up to 80-90% of the budget), the KMT lost much of its support and many soldiers changed sides. Already between 1937-45 money supply increased 500 times. After 1945, under the impact of the war economy, hyperinflation continued with the ensuing pauperisation of the working class and peasants, who turned away massively from the KMT.
After almost 3 years of continuous fighting, the Red Army managed to impose a crushing defeat on the KMT troops. As many as two million KMT soldiers and supporters fled to Taiwan.
In October 1949 Mao’s troops declared ‘mainland’ China to be an independent state. The People’s Republic was proclaimed. However, this was not a “socialist revolution”; it marked the military triumph of one wing of the Chinese bourgeoisie (supported by Russia) over another wing of Chinese capital (supported by the USA). The new People’s Republic arose on the ruins of a country, which had gone through a 12 year long war - preceded by 3 decades of conflicts waged by insatiable warlords. And as so many other “new” states which were founded in the 20th century, it was proclaimed through a division into two parts, Taiwan and “mainland” China, leaving behind a permanent antagonism which has lasted until today.
Ravaged by decades of war economy, supported not by a technically superior USA, but by Russia, which as in eastern Europe initially plundered raw materials and dismantled equipment in Manchuria and could not offer the same material support, the People’s Republic was going to be marked by a great backwardness.
And no sooner had the China war finished in 1949 did the war between North and South Korea break out.
Two wars had already been fought for the control over the Korean peninsula at the turn of the 19/20th century. In the first one China and Japan clashed in 1894; and in 1904 Russia and Japan had gone to war over hegemony in Korea and Manchuria. Stalin, at the Yalta Conference in 1945, insisted on a division of Korea along the 38th parallel, i.e. a division into north and south, which Russia had already claimed in 1904 before being driven out of the area by Japanese imperialism.
Previously, in August 1945, Russia had occupied Korea down to the 38th parallel just north of Seoul. This constellation lasted from 1945 – 1950, i.e. during the period of the war in China. However, the formation of the Chinese People’s Republic added a new element to the imperialist crab basket. After receiving the Russian go-ahead, Kim Il Sung, who had fought for the Russians during World War II, started an offensive beyond the 38th parallel with the hope of driving off the US forces in a blitz from Korean territory.
The war went through four phases:
In a “blitz-offensive” North-Korean troops marched on Seoul on 25th June 1950. By September 1950 the whole of South Korea was conquered by North Korea, only the area around the city of Pusan resisted the North Korean offensive in a bloody siege and remained in South-Korean hands.
In a second phase – following the massive mobilisation of US led troops – Seoul was recaptured on September 27th.. The US led UN troops continued their offensive towards the north, and at the end of November 1950 they occupied Pyongyang and reached the Yalu, the border between China and Korea.
In a third phase, Chinese and North Korean soldiers started a counter attack. On 4th January 1951 Seoul was recaptured by Chinese North Korean troops (with a mobilisation of 400,000 Chinese and 100,000 North Korean soldiers).
In yet another counter attack Seoul fell back into US hands in March 1951. Between spring 1951 and the end of the truce (July 27th, 1953) the front line hardly moved. The war quickly got “dead-locked” and no major gains were made for 2 years.
The war was a horrendous confrontation between the two superpowers and it became one of the most murderous, destructive ones in the period of the cold war.
During the war the USA tested all sorts of weapons (e.g. they used the chemical weapons Anthrax and Napalm). The intensity of the destructions was so big that almost all towns that were attacked were bombed to the ground, for example the two capitals Seoul and Pyongyang were both flattened under US bombs. The US commander said “we can no longer think of any North Korean town to be bombed, there is hardly any house left standing”. The air force had orders to “destroy every means of communication and every installation, factory, city and village”. The civilian population was taken hostage and fire bombed – in some cases cities were 95% destroyed by fire bombs. Within a year almost the whole country had been bombed to ruins. Neither side managed to impose its military goals. The war “unleashed” rapidly, but it took years to come to a truce. On a military level, the war ended where it started, the border line (as established before the unleashing of the war) did not move.
It is estimated that about two million people died in North Korea, and around one million people in the South. General Curtis LeMay, who directed the bombing of Tokyo in 1945, drew this balance sheet: “We burned down every town in North Korea anyway and some in South Korea too. Over a period of three years or so we killed off 20% of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure” 1
North Korea lost 11% of its population, with a very high death toll amongst the civilian population. The North Korean army lost some 500,000 soldiers (dead, wounded and missing), the Chinese army suffered some 900,000 casualties, the South Korean army some 300,000, and the USA suffered the fourth largest number of casualties in US history; 142,000 soldiers died altogether.
The war was the first massive military appearance of Chinese imperialism. China, which had been dependent on Russian arms sales, at the same time tried to compensate its limited arsenal of weapons by the almost unlimited use of human cannon-fodder. Mao did not hide the ruthless and reckless military ambitions of his regime, when he declared in 1952: “The war has been a great learning experience for us… These exercises are better than any military academy. If we continue fighting another year then we will have rotated all our troops to become acquainted with war”. 2 Even when the war was drawing to a close in 1953 China was preparing its sixth offensive with the largest number of soldiers ever mobilised for an offensive against the USA. Already by October 1951 China had mobilised 1.5 million soldiers, and the country was pulverising half of its state budget for the war.
In October 1951 the USA had to quadruple their defence spending to cover the spiralling costs of the war.
Both sides were ready to throw in all their military and economic weight. Stalin, Mao, Chiang and Truman had all formed one front against the Japanese only 6 years beforehand, at the time of World War II. During the Korean war they were searching for possible ways of annihilating each other. The military authorities envisaged the nuclear bombing of 24 Chinese cities, amongst the planned targets of nuclear attacks were Shanghai, Nanking, Beijing, Mukden.
Ever since, the country has been a permanent zone of conflicts with the highest level of militarization. South Korea is supported by the USA, for whom the country is an important bridgehead. Much like Japan, South Korea was quickly reconstructed with US help.
The North which is both a vital buffer zone but also an important bridgehead for threatening Japan is a crucial key for China’s and Russia’s imperialist strategies. Reconstructed following the Stalinist model, the Northern part shows many parallels with the former Eastern European regimes. Although more developed economically than the South before 1945 and more equipped in raw materials and energy resources, the North developed a similar backwardness –typical of regimes suffocated by militarism and run by a Stalinist clique. In the same way as the Soviet Union was unable to survive through economic competitiveness on the world market but only through military means and the permanent threat of the use of its army, North Korea is unable to compete with economic means on the world market. Its major export product are weapons.
The end of World War II and of the Korean war had left the whole of mainland China, Japan and the Korean peninsula in ruins. War had ravaged large areas of Asia. Moreover, one of the consequences of the new imperialist constellation of the cold war was that two countries, China and Korea were divided into two parts, (the People’s Republic and Taiwan, North and South Korea) each side being an ally of one of the blocks. Both Japan and South Korean, which had been flattened by war, quickly received US funds to speed up their reconstruction in order to turn them into strong economic and military supporters of the USA in their confrontation with the Russian rival and its allies.
1 (Jörg Friedrich, Yalu, p. 516).
2 (Jörg Friedrich, Yalu, p. 425)