had been, into four zones, each individually controlled by the Four Powers—France, England, Russia, and the United States. But that wasn’t going to happen.
The English and French presence in occupied Japan was negligible. Japan and the Japanese economy were in ruins. Japan could not be levied upon to support an occupation army, because they simply didn’t have the where-withal. And the English and the French, themselves reeling from the expense of World War II, simply couldn’t afford to pay for an Army of Occupation of Japan. The English were having great difficulty with India—which wanted out of the British Empire—and with the French, in what was known as Cochin-China and became known as Vietnam.
And, of course, the French and English had the expense of maintaining their armies in occupied Germany, now not so much to keep the defeated Germans in line as to prevent the Soviet Union from charging their armies through the Fulda Gap to take over continental Europe.
The British, additionally, were having a hard time supporting their forces in liberated Greece, where Communist forces—primarily Albanians supported by the Soviet Union—were trying to bring Greece into the Soviet orbit. In 1948, the British simply announced they could no longer afford to stay in Greece and were pulling out.
Truman picked up that responsibility, supplying the Greek army, and dispatching Lt. General James Van Fleet and an American military advisory group to Athens. The American anti-Communist battle in Greece—almost unknown to the American public—is considered by many to be the first “hot war” of the Cold War, and the American “advisors,” many of whom fought in small groups “advising” Greek units in the lines, as the precursor of U.S. Special Forces.
The absence of British and French forces in Japan made it easier for the Supreme Commander in Japan, Douglas MacArthur—who had no doubts of Soviet intentions, and didn’t want his occupation of Japan facing the same problems the Army of Occupation of Germany was facing vis-à-vis the Communists—simply to refuse to permit any Soviet presence in Japan.
The Soviets protested their being kept out of Japan to Truman, who ignored them.
Washington also ignored what was going on in Korea. The American commander, General John R. Hodge, in the absence of specific orders—in fact, any orders—from Washington, took matters into his own hands.
As early as late 1945, he began to establish, first, a South Korean police force, and then a South Korean army. To counter the Soviet surrogate, Kim Il Sung, Hodge permitted an anti-Communist Korean, Syngman Rhee, then living in exile in the United States, to return to Korea.
By 1948, the division of Korea along the 38th parallel was complete. North and South Korea each had a president, a government, and armed forces, and each proclaimed it was the sole legitimate government for the whole country.
The sole substantial difference between the two was that North Korea was far better armed—with captured Japanese and newly-furnished Soviet equipment—than South Korea. Fearing that the fiery Syngman Rhee would march against North Korea, the U.S. State Department prevailed upon Truman to deny South Korea heavy artillery, modern aircraft, and tanks, and ultimately to order all but a few hundred soldiers in a Greek-style “Korean military advisory group” out of the country.
Hostility between North and South Korea grew. In the eight months before June 1950, more than 3,000 South Korean soldiers and border policemen died in “incidents” along the 38th parallel.
On January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson outlined President Truman’s Asian policy in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Acheson “drew a line” of countries the United States considered “essential to its national interests,” a euphemism everyone understood to mean the United States would go to war to defend.
Acheson placed Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines within the American defense perimeter. Taiwan and Korea were not mentioned.
Five months later, on June 25, 1950, the North Koreans invaded across the 38th parallel.
I
[ONE]
ABOARD TRANS-GLOBAL AIRWAYS FLIGHT 907 NORTH LATITUDE 36 DEGREES 59 MINUTES, EAST LONGITUDE 143 DEGREES 77 MINUTES (ABOVE THE PACIFIC OCEAN, NEAR JAPAN) 1100 1 JUNE 1950
“This is the First Officer speaking,” the copilot of Trans-Global Airways Flight 907 said into the public-address system microphone. “We are about to begin our descent into Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, and have been advised it may get a little bumpy at lower altitudes. So please take your seats and fasten your seat belts, and very shortly we’ll have you on the ground.”
Trans-Global Flight 907 was a triple-tailed, five-months-old Lockheed L-1049 Constellation, christened Los Angeles.