Play as · Cold War 1947 · L2 · US Military Government

South Korea - 1947

South Korea in 1947 is not yet a country - it is the southern half of a liberated nation held under American military government, waiting to see whether Korea will be reunited or split in two. When Japan surrendered in 1945, its thirty-five-year colonial rule ended, and Korea was divided at the thirty-eighth parallel into a Soviet occupation zone in the north and an American one in the south, meant as a temporary line for accepting the Japanese surrender. Two years on, the line has hardened. In the south the United States Army Military Government in Korea governs a poor, overwhelmingly agricultural society that was suddenly severed from the industry and power of the north, amid inflation, food shortages and fierce political struggle between a rising anti-communist right around Syngman Rhee, a suppressed left, and moderates who still hope for unity. The strategic identity is the occupation zone becoming a state: a half-nation under foreign administration, its permanent shape not yet fixed, on the fault line where the Cold War in Asia will soon turn hot.

Starting position

The starting board is a divided, occupied peninsula with reunification failing in real time. The joint US-Soviet commission charged with forming a provisional Korean government has met and deadlocked, each side insisting on terms that would deliver a Korea aligned to itself, and in 1947 the effort collapses - the United States responds by referring the Korean question to the United Nations, a move the Soviets reject for their zone. The thirty-eighth parallel, drawn as an administrative convenience, is becoming a border: two economies, two emerging political orders, two sponsors. The south holds most of the population and the farmland but little of the industry, hydroelectric power or fertiliser that the north inherited, and its politics are turbulent - strikes, uprisings and assassinations punctuate the military government's rule. Real authority rests with the American command; Korean political forces jockey beneath it for the succession. The south holds no sovereignty, no army of its own to speak of, and a society straining under division, poverty and the pressure of a hostile, better-armed north taking shape across the line.

What turns the campaign

What the forces in the south want divides them: the nationalist right wants a separate, anti-communist South Korean state under its own leadership if unity on acceptable terms proves impossible; moderates and the left want a unified Korea, fearing that two states means permanent division and eventual war. What the American occupier wants is to leave behind a stable, non-communist Korea without being drawn into an open-ended commitment. The campaign turns on the question the deadlocked commission could not answer: unification or division, and on whose terms. The levers are American backing, which underwrites the south's security and shapes its politics; the emerging UN involvement, which offers international legitimacy to a separate southern state; and the internal contest to lead whatever emerges. The fears are a communist takeover from within or from the north, abandonment by an occupier eager to go home, and the hardening of the parallel into a permanent frontier that could only be erased by war. The campaign turns on steering the zone through the collapse of reunification toward a viable state - or toward the catastrophe that division was setting up.

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