The colonels consulted a National Geographic map and focused on the 38th parallel, a degree of latitude north of the equator, passing through the middle of the Korean peninsula. The 38th parallel followed no river or mountain range. It went indifferently through farms and villages, roads, and railroad lines. The colonels recommended to Truman that the parallel separate the two zones.
Truman offered the idea to the Soviets, and they accepted. Korea was split into the communist north and the democratic south. Thirty million Koreans would be affected, but not a single one of them had a say. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian David Halberstam wrote that after Truman committed troops, he sought to downplay the conflict by calling it a police action.
In the new Cold War, he needed to avoid confronting Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, the only other world leader beside himself with atomic weapons. His troops drove past the 38th parallel into the Republic of Korea with a swiftness reminiscent of the German invasion of France a decade earlier.
South Korea then put its army under the jurisdiction of the United Nations. The United States supported a U. By late summer , North Korea controlled most of the peninsula. On September 15, MacArthur launched a major counter-offensive, directing a fleet of U. Navy and British warships in a bold amphibious assault against North Korean troops holding the port city of Inchon on the Yellow Sea. Marines stormed the beach and captured Inchon.
MacArthur, iconic in photos depicting him in a khaki shirt, open collar, sunglasses on the bridge of his nose, reinstalled Rhee in Seoul, president of the Republic of Korea. By October 20, the U. MacArthur, age seventy, still held his six-foot frame straight as a sword and planned to take the campaign all the way into China. That same month, Truman flew nearly seven thousand miles to Wake Island in the Pacific Ocean to talk directly with the general, who told the president the Chinese would never attack his U.
Worse, the temperature plunged, resulting in one of the coldest winters in a hundred years. Machine guns froze. Vastly outnumbered, the Marines and the U. Months of hard combat followed, with Seoul having been captured and liberated four times. The armistice line meanders in an east-west fashion across Korea, connecting what Koreans call the East Sea with Gyeonggi Bay, miles kilometers away off the peninsula's west coast.
Although it approximates the positions held by communist and U. That line was the 38th parallel, whose origins as modern Korea's first intra-national boundary can be traced back to the final hours of World War II, when officials from the U.
War and State Departments were preparing to negotiate with the Soviet Union over how Japanese-occupied Korea would be administered following Japan's surrender. Future U. Charles "Tic" Bonesteel were assigned with identifying a line of control that both the U. Time was of the essence: the Soviets had just entered the war against Japan, and American officials worried that they would rush in to occupy the entire Korean peninsula before the U. Rusk knew that the 38th parallel "made no sense economically or geographically"—Korea, in fact, had enjoyed unity and a high degree of geographic continuity for the better part of a millennium—but this was now the Cold War.
Korea, it was thought, would be divided only temporarily. During a meeting on August 14, , the same day as the Japanese surrender, [Bonesteel] and I retired to an adjacent room late at night and studied intently a map of the Korean peninsula.
Working in haste and under great pressure, we had a formidable task: to pick a zone for the American occupation. Neither Tic nor I was a Korea expert, but it seemed to us that Seoul, the capital, should be in the American sector.
We also knew that the U. Army opposed an extensive area of occupation. Using a National Geographic map, we looked just north of Seoul for a convenient dividing line but could not find a natural geographical line. We saw instead the thirty-eighth parallel and decided to recommend that Thus was the Korean peninsula first divided. Early attempts to merge the two occupation zones back into a single, united Korea failed.
Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. A Unified Korea For centuries before the division, the peninsula was a single, unified Korea, ruled by generations of dynastic kingdoms.
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