Outbreak of the Korean War: 25 June 1950 Posted on: 25 June 2020 If you ask me where I think we might all be in for further trouble, I believe Korea is the place.1
Ernest Bevin (National Portrait Gallery)
Seventy years ago today, the North Korean People’s Army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) swept south across the 38th parallel. This had divided the Korean peninsula as Japanese troops were driven out by the Allies at the end of the Second World War.
The DPRK regime, under Kim Il-sung (grandfather of the current leader) was backed by the Soviet Union, and by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which entered the war in October 1950. The South Korean regime, led by Syngman Rhee, was supported by the United States. The DPRK invasion precipitated a conflict that lasted until 1953 at the cost of more than 1 million casualties, involving the Soviet Union, PRC and 21 nations (including UK) in the United Nations Command led by the US. The outbreak of war in Korea caught Western governments napping. But it should not have been such a surprise. Bevin was not the only one to foresee trouble. At the State Department, George Kennan also identified Korea as a hot spot in the spring of 1950. Monthly CIA reports described the build-up of DPRK forces, and on 10 May the South Korean Defence minister warned publicly of the invasion risk.2 But the Pentagon and General MacArthur dismissed these warnings. In Britain the Joint Intelligence Committee was more interested in Malaya and Hong Kong. Neither the US nor UK had reliable up-to-date sources of intelligence in the Far East. And disagreements over policy towards Communist China meant that US intelligence on Korea was withheld from the British. Still, there was sufficient evidence of approaching conflict, so why was the invasion such a surprise? Both the US and UK fell into the classic beartraps of intelligence: confirmation bias, and mirror imaging. They assumed that because the DPRK was a communist regime, its policies would be dictated by Moscow and/or Peking. (In fact, the invasion was Kim Ilsung’s idea, though he did consult Stalin and Mao). The US and UK did not believe that the Soviet Union, who they thought was pulling the DPRK strings, wanted a conflict with the West at that time. They thought the Soviet Union was distracted by other concerns, whether European (aftermath of Berlin crisis), or regional (Iran).
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