KOREA: More Important than Battles

Old Rockbottom budged last week. Foreign Minister Molotov’s note to Washington on Korea broke a long deadlock that had made the 38th parallel across Korea the most opaque of all the curtains between the Russian sphere and the rest of the world. It also meant that the world’s 13th largest nation could move a step toward the independence it had not known for 40 years and toward the democracy it had never known.

Tension over Tenses. Not that Molotov conceded much. To understand his note it was necessary to go back to the Moscow agreement of December 1945, when the U.S. and Russia decided to partition Korea during a period of trusteeship while the Koreans learned to rule themselves. After liberation, when the Koreans heard about this deal, they were unanimously enraged. Demonstrations against trusteeship broke out all over the country. In Seoul, the capital, the liberal People’s Republic Group, which turned out to be a Communist front, said it was going to demonstrate against trusteeship, too. The U.S. commander of the southern zone, Lieut. General John Reed Hodge, refused permission. The Communists went away mad, said they would parade anyway.

They came back shortly to tell the Americans that everything was all right; now they wanted to demonstrate in favor of trusteeship instead of against it.

By this quick switch to the Moscow line the Communists became just about the only Korean group not on record against the Moscow agreement. Later, when Hodge and the Russian officials in the north got together to discuss a joint occupation plan, all negotiations broke down over Russian insistence that no Koreans who had opposed trusteeship be allowed to participate in the Government. The Americans, who had won over many Korean leaders to the idea that independence must come gradually, wanted to put the exclusion clause in the future tense, and exclude only those who should try to fan up opposition to the joint occupation after it went into effect.

Molotov, pressed by U.S. Secretary of State Marshall, finally agreed. A joint commission can start work immediately on putting together the pieces of a country which has been more impoverished by division that it was under Japanese rule.

Midwife in Boots. The Molotov note was a victory for chunky, trap-jawed John Hodge, who had won at Guadalcanal and Okinawa victories more suited to his soldier’s temperament. No diplomat, Hodge had made his mistakes in Korea. But what he lacked in subtlety and tact, Hodge made up in tenacity. He grasped the essentials of the Korean problem. Three months ago, he returned to Washington, steamed in & out of offices telling officials that if the Russians would not play ball, then the U.S. must organize its zone of Korea so effectively that, when the occupying armies pulled out, the Communists who now run northern Korea would not be able to swallow the whole country. Since Korea, now that Japan is demilitarized, can be made the base for dominating the coast of east Asia, Hodge’s message began to get a hearing.

Then he returned to Korea for a whirlwind tour which made one correspondent who had been on Wendell Willkie’s train in 1940 gasp: “Damned if this isn’t the same thing.”

Hodge told his men: “We are midwives at the rebirth of a nation.” He applied the forceps with characteristic vigor. At Kwangju, Hodge, with his old cavalryman’s gait, rolled up to a bearded elder, beamed: “You know me? Hodgey!” “Hodgey!” cried the elder, and Koreans took it up. He waved from the back platform of his train (formerly Hirohito’s) to crowds who turned out from sleepy grass-thatched villages. When a children’s brass band serenaded him, he was delighted, and told the 63rd Infantry to get the kids better clothes. At one station, when a baby cried, the General went over and pinched its cheek. “I think it was sick,” said Hodgey.

Trek Toward Freedom. Much as the Koreans liked this evidence that the Americans really cared, they liked better the arrival of U.S. supplies to rebuild their country’s shattered economy. The Communist Korean Government in the north was having its own difficulties; its food supply was shorter than that in the south, its regime unpopular with many of the people. But it had a Russian-equipped army at least 100,000 strong, and it did not have to contend with the confused intrigue of 200 political parties as Hodge did in the south. Nevertheless, there was still a chance, thanks largely to Hodge, that Korea would not become a Communist puppet state.

What that chance meant, TIME Correspondent William Gray cabled this week from Seoul:

“One cloudy afternoon at the sleepy town of Tosong, just south of the mountainous 38th parallel, I renewed an old experience. I watched again—as during last May—the routine phenomenon of people escaping from the Soviet north (2,000 daily).

“Here is a teacher, a tall young Korean in a threadbare suit, whose Christian faith has given him courage to have doubts about Communism. Here are some ill-dressed students who feared conscription (men 19 to 25) into the Korean Communist Army. Here is a round-faced child of two, shoeless, sitting between the ties of the old railroad track. Her sad-eyed mother wearily joggles the baby on her back, then pulls the child to her feet and shuffles along the track with the other refugees going south.

“This escape to the south is the surest demonstration I know that masses of men still believe there remains something better in their world than they have found under Communism. There are signs that the American administration in Korea knows its opportunity—to give some 20 million Koreans sound justification for that belief.

“General Hodge has said: ‘The job we are doing in Korea is more important than the job done on any battlefield.’ “