Part 1
After World War II, most American servicemen were desperate to go home. From Austria to the Philippines, tens of thousands of them marched and protested, sometimes violently, to speed up the pace of demobilization. Within two years, nine out of ten had returned to the States. Between 1945 and 1947 ,the number of military personnel plummeted from more than 12 million to fewer than 1.6.
[ Nichols was a carburetor repairman in the day and a mortician at night in Karachi during the war. “Our brass evidently forgot that people would die”, he wrote in his autobiography. This also happened to be the case in the early weeks of the D-Day campaign though soon Graves became one of the most efficient divisions in the Army. Nichols also served on a security detail at the port. After some months recovering in a hospital stateside, he re-enlisted, received three weeks training in Intelligence on Guam and shipped to Korea in 1946. Nobody could have possibly been as an active spy than he, independently building on one success after another without any extended leave until he was dismissed in 1957.]
For Americans officers and enlisted men who remained overseas as postwar occupiers, the placed to be in the Far East was Japan. Every private could feel rich and eat well there. It was safe. Soldierly responsibilities were few. “Shack girls” were abundant and affordable, easy money could be made in the black market. Back in the States, “Have fun in Japan” was an army recruitment pitch.
Kora was seen as a hellhole. Soldiers complained about the stink of human excrement, which was used to fertilizer rice paddies. Housing was limited, food bad, roads poor and weather extreme with harsh winter winds and sweltering summers punctuated by long bouts of rain. Mud brown was the color of a GI’s life in Korea. For Americans stationed in Japan, an American general said there was only three things to fear: “gonorrhea, diarrhea and Korea.” Only losers, it was said, were posted to Korea.
Korea was seen as a sideshow. Except for a few hundred Protestant missionaries, few Americans had ever travelled to Korea or knew anything about the place. There were no important American commercial interests in the Korea. The Joint Chiefs had declare it to be of little strategic value.
Chaos awaited Nichols in Korea. Rioters and police began killing each other in appalling ways in the autumn of 1946 – disemboweling, beheading, burying alive. The American public took no notice of the fratricidal war that was taking hold. The political culture of Korea had been crushed by more than three decades of colonial servitude. From 1910 to 1945, imperial Japan dominated the Korean Peninsula and humiliated the Koreans. The mistreatment only worsened during World War II, when Koreans were forced to abandon their names, language, and religious shrines. Korean men had to fight for the Emperor Hirohito; about two hundred thousand Korean women were forced to become sex slaves for his troops.
As a colonizer, Korea subjugated and industrialized Korea at the same time. It built state-of-the-art chemical factories, hydroelectric dams and delivered electricity to major cities. It increased food production and assembled the developing world’s best network of railroads, ports and highways [ all eventually destroyed during the Korean War]. But most of the food grown in Korea was exported and eaten in Japanese cities, while Koreans endured chronic hunger. Similarly, Japanese companies kept the profits from manufacturing. Four out of five Koreans had menial jobs, usually as tenant farmers. Most of the peninsula’s thirty million people were uneducated and landless.
The defeat of Japan in 1945 released decades of pent-up hatred- for the Japanese and for the well-heeled Koreans who had collaborated with them. The Korean people wanted a strong, independent government that would redistribute wealth and redress colonial injustices. The landless majority was attracted to the policies of the Left, which demand comprehensive land reform and punishment of collaborators. The Korean Right was controlled and financed by a small number of wealthy collaborators seeking to preserve vested property rights. The championed an American-style, free-market economy that they intended to dominate. . . . Neither the Right nor the Left was open to compromise; both sides were eager to kill and willing to die. Disagreements were sorted out by mobs, arson, and assassinations.
Nasty as all this was, the Korean Peninsula had an infinitely more explosive and globally significant problem. In the early maneuvers of the so-called cold war, the world’s two most powerful nations had sliced Korea in half and were picking sides ion the emerging civil war. The Russians rolled into the North, the part with heavy industry and hydroelectric dams. The United States occupied the South, home to two-thirds of the population and most of the fertile land. Between them lay the thirty-eighth parallel, an entirely arbitrary border drawn after midnight on August 11, 1945, by to American colonels using a small National Geographic map.
In addition to being high-handed and insulting, American plans for the peninsula’s future were delusional. Division proved to be an irreversible blunder. The nonsensical border squeezed the life out of Korea’s already anemic economy. Electricity stopped flowing south. Food stopped moving north. Store shelves emptied. A relatively insignificant postcolonial struggle between the landed and landless Koreans was transformed into a proxy fight between superpowers.
From Tokyo, MacArthur sensed trouble. Days after American soldiers arrived in Seoul, he sent a top secret cable to Secretary of State George Marshal: “The splitting of Korea into two parts for occupation by force of nations operating under widely divergent policies and no command command is an impossible situation.” No fool, MacArthur assigned day-to day management to a subordinate commander, General John R. Hodge, telling him to “use your best judgement as to which action is to be taken.”
A much decorated hero of the Pacific War, Hodges had no experience as an occupation administrator. He was ignorant of Korea’s colonial history and did not understand the reasons for the civil war he was presiding over. During his first week in Seoul he was quoted in the press- inaccurately and out of context, American officials would later claim- as saying the Koreans were ‘the same breed of cats’ as the Japanese. He also said, for the sake of efficiency, Japanese officials would temporarily retain their posts. Truman apologized, Hodges hustled the Japanese out of Korea. Within four months, nearly four hundred thousand of them were gone. But the damage had been done. Hodges was viewed as a racist and a dictator, Americans perceived to have taken sides in favor of land owners while turning their backs on the poor. This perception was largely correct.
MacArthur spelled out the ‘father-knows-best role the Americans would try to play: “ The Koreans themselves have for so long a time been down-trodden that they cannot now or in the immediate future have a rational; acceptance of the situation and its responsibilities.” He argued that Lefty-leaning political groups in Korea “are being born in emotion.” The wise course, he wrote, was to embrace and empower the Right: “Some older and more educated Koreans despite being now suspected of collaboration are conservatives and may develop into quite useful groups.”
The United States chose sides in Korea’s civil war while paying little attention to questions of social justice, economic equality, or majority will. It was a blinkered decision similar to those Washington would later make in Iran, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Hodge was an inflexible anti-communist who could not stomach the sweeping land reform most Koreans wanted. In a cable to MacArthur, he aid that events on the ground in Kora were forcing him into “a declaration of war’ on “communistic elements.”
There was a lot of hand-wringing, no direct crushing of human rights or colonial subjection seemed in keeping with American prestige in the world; attempts were made to form a coalition government. Dodge even suggested a mutual withdrawal of Russia and the U.S. from the peninsula.
North of the thirty-eighth parallel, there was no such hand wringing among Soviet generals, no talk of giving up and going home. . The hated pillars of Japanese rule quickly remove. Power was given to compliant Koreans of the Left, while exiling, locking up and executing everyone else. In the the first weeks of occupation, Soviet soldiers ran wild, looting, raping and terrifying Korans. But after Stalin personally ordered the troops ‘not to offend the population”, the Soviet zone became much quieter and more manageable than the American occupied South. Soon, Soviet-style reforms redistributed farmland, nationalized factories, and began teaching millions of poor Koreans to read. . .
Part 2
After World War II, most American servicemen were desperate to go home. From Austria to the Philippines, tens of thousands of them marched and protested, sometimes violently, to speed up the pace of demobilization. Within two years, nine out of ten had returned to the States. Between 1945 and 1947 ,the number of military personnel plummeted from more than 12 million to fewer than 1.6.
[ Nichols was a carburetor repairman in the day and a mortician at night in Karachi during the war. “Our brass evidently forgot that people would die”, he wrote in his autobiography. This also happened to be the case in the early weeks of the D-Day campaign though soon Graves became one of the most efficient divisions in the Army. Nichols also served on a security detail at the port. After some months recovering in a hospital stateside, he re-enlisted, received three weeks training in Intelligence on Guam and shipped to Korea in 1946. Nobody could have possibly been as an active spy than he, independently building on one success after another without any extended leave until he was dismissed in 1957.]
For Americans officers and enlisted men who remained overseas as postwar occupiers, the placed to be in the Far East was Japan. Every private could feel rich and eat well there. It was safe. Soldierly responsibilities were few. “Shack girls” were abundant and affordable, easy money could be made in the black market. Back in the States, “Have fun in Japan” was an army recruitment pitch.
Kora was seen as a hellhole. Soldiers complained about the stink of human excrement, which was used to fertilizer rice paddies. Housing was limited, food bad, roads poor and weather extreme with harsh winter winds and sweltering summers punctuated by long bouts of rain. Mud brown was the color of a GI’s life in Korea. For Americans stationed in Japan, an American general said there was only three things to fear: “gonorrhea, diarrhea and Korea.” Only losers, it was said, were posted to Korea.
Korea was seen as a sideshow. Except for a few hundred Protestant missionaries, few Americans had ever travelled to Korea or knew anything about the place. There were no important American commercial interests in the Korea. The Joint Chiefs had declare it to be of little strategic value.
Chaos awaited Nichols in Korea. Rioters and police began killing each other in appalling ways in the autumn of 1946 – disemboweling, beheading, burying alive. The American public took no notice of the fratricidal war that was taking hold. The political culture of Korea had been crushed by more than three decades of colonial servitude. From 1910 to 1945, imperial Japan dominated the Korean Peninsula and humiliated the Koreans. The mistreatment only worsened during World War II, when Koreans were forced to abandon their names, language, and religious shrines. Korean men had to fight for the Emperor Hirohito; about two hundred thousand Korean women were forced to become sex slaves for his troops.
As a colonizer, Korea subjugated and industrialized Korea at the same time. It built state-of-the-art chemical factories, hydroelectric dams and delivered electricity to major cities. It increased food production and assembled the developing world’s best network of railroads, ports and highways [ all eventually destroyed during the Korean War]. But most of the food grown in Korea was exported and eaten in Japanese cities, while Koreans endured chronic hunger. Similarly, Japanese companies kept the profits from manufacturing. Four out of five Koreans had menial jobs, usually as tenant farmers. Most of the peninsula’s thirty million people were uneducated and landless.
The defeat of Japan in 1945 released decades of pent-up hatred- for the Japanese and for the well-heeled Koreans who had collaborated with them. The Korean people wanted a strong, independent government that would redistribute wealth and redress colonial injustices. The landless majority was attracted to the policies of the Left, which demand comprehensive land reform and punishment of collaborators. The Korean Right was controlled and financed by a small number of wealthy collaborators seeking to preserve vested property rights. The championed an American-style, free-market economy that they intended to dominate. . . . Neither the Right nor the Left was open to compromise; both sides were eager to kill and willing to die. Disagreements were sorted out by mobs, arson, and assassinations.
Nasty as all this was, the Korean Peninsula had an infinitely more explosive and globally significant problem. In the early maneuvers of the so-called cold war, the world’s two most powerful nations had sliced Korea in half and were picking sides ion the emerging civil war. The Russians rolled into the North, the part with heavy industry and hydroelectric dams. The United States occupied the South, home to two-thirds of the population and most of the fertile land. Between them lay the thirty-eighth parallel, an entirely arbitrary border drawn after midnight on August 11, 1945, by to American colonels using a small National Geographic map.
In addition to being high-handed and insulting, American plans for the peninsula’s future were delusional. Division proved to be an irreversible blunder. The nonsensical border squeezed the life out of Korea’s already anemic economy. Electricity stopped flowing south. Food stopped moving north. Store shelves emptied. A relatively insignificant postcolonial struggle between the landed and landless Koreans was transformed into a proxy fight between superpowers.
From Tokyo, MacArthur sensed trouble. Days after American soldiers arrived in Seoul, he sent a top secret cable to Secretary of State George Marshal: “The splitting of Korea into two parts for occupation by force of nations operating under widely divergent policies and no command command is an impossible situation.” No fool, MacArthur assigned day-to day management to a subordinate commander, General John R. Hodge, telling him to “use your best judgement as to which action is to be taken.”
A much decorated hero of the Pacific War, Hodges had no experience as an occupation administrator. He was ignorant of Korea’s colonial history and did not understand the reasons for the civil war he was presiding over. During his first week in Seoul he was quoted in the press- inaccurately and out of context, American officials would later claim- as saying the Koreans were ‘the same breed of cats’ as the Japanese. He also said, for the sake of efficiency, Japanese officials would temporarily retain their posts. Truman apologized, Hodges hustled the Japanese out of Korea. Within four months, nearly four hundred thousand of them were gone. But the damage had been done. Hodges was viewed as a racist and a dictator, Americans perceived to have taken sides in favor of land owners while turning their backs on the poor. This perception was largely correct.
MacArthur spelled out the ‘father-knows-best role the Americans would try to play: “ The Koreans themselves have for so long a time been down-trodden that they cannot now or in the immediate future have a rational; acceptance of the situation and its responsibilities.” He argued that Lefty-leaning political groups in Korea “are being born in emotion.” The wise course, he wrote, was to embrace and empower the Right: “Some older and more educated Koreans despite being now suspected of collaboration are conservatives and may develop into quite useful groups.”
The United States chose sides in Korea’s civil war while paying little attention to questions of social justice, economic equality, or majority will. It was a blinkered decision similar to those Washington would later make in Iran, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Hodge was an inflexible anti-communist who could not stomach the sweeping land reform most Koreans wanted. In a cable to MacArthur, he aid that events on the ground in Kora were forcing him into “a declaration of war’ on “communistic elements.”
There was a lot of hand-wringing, no direct crushing of human rights or colonial subjection seemed in keeping with American prestige in the world; attempts were made to form a coalition government. Dodge even suggested a mutual withdrawal of Russia and the U.S. from the peninsula.
North of the thirty-eighth parallel, there was no such hand wringing among Soviet generals, no talk of giving up and going home. . The hated pillars of Japanese rule quickly remove. Power was given to compliant Koreans of the Left, while exiling, locking up and executing everyone else. In the the first weeks of occupation, Soviet soldiers ran wild, looting, raping and terrifying Korans. But after Stalin personally ordered the troops ‘not to offend the population”, the Soviet zone became much quieter and more manageable than the American occupied South. Soon, Soviet-style reforms redistributed farmland, nationalized factories, and began teaching millions of poor Koreans to read. . .
Part 2
The quiet
passing of Donald Nichols in the psychiatric ward of the Veteran Administration
Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on 2 June 1992
occasioned no examination of his behavior in Korea or the blinkered
acceptance of it by his commanders. Nichol’s battlefield achievements- assembling of code breakers
that helped save the U.S. Eighth Army in the Pusan Perimeter, identifying
weaknesses in Soviet-made tanks and fighter jets, and finding thousands of
targets behind enemy lines- altered the course of a major war of the twentieth
century and saved untold numbers of American and South Korean lives.[1] For
this he deserved his medals. But his closeness to Syngman Rhee made him, at the
very least, a passive accomplice to atrocities that occurred both before and during
the war.
Nichols,
along with not a few other American military personnel, attended mass executions of South Korean civilians,
trained the murderous Korean National police, and regularly sat in on torture
sessions. While there is no documentary evidence or eye-witness testimony
showing that Nichols personally took part in mass killings or torture, he
acknowledge in his autobiography that his career benefited from the
intelligence that torture extracted. If he had interfered ‘in the methods our
Allies used during interrogation,” Nichols said, “a good source of information would have dried
up.”[2] Nichols was compromised by his closeness top Rhee In much the same way.
It gave him exclusive information, high-level contacts[3] , and an
inside-the-palace cache that thrilled his commanders, who rewarded him with
promotions, power and autonomy. He did not see – or care to see – (as Harden dubiously puts it) Rhee’s criminal
excesses or his incompetence. Nichols convinced himself that Rhee was “a great
Democrat and a “deeply trusted leader of
the South Koreans.”[4]
In the
confused early days of the Korean War, when the air force was utterly dependent
on Nichol’s Intelligence, he was allowed, even encouraged to operate outside
the normal military chain of command. When he got into a bloody shoot-out with
agents who feared that Nichols would send them to die in North Korea, his
behavior ( mistaking a protest for an attack, he killed two and wounded
others), his behavior did not raise eyebrows: the gunfight in his own quarters
with his own men never entered his military service record. When he pushed
double suspected double agents out of boats and aircraft, commanding officers
in the air force did not know or did not care.
At moments
in his autobiography, Nichols raised questions about the morality of his
behavior, even if he was not honest or rigorous in examining it. He knew, for
example, that he needed tighter supervision, complaining that he “received
absolutely no training.” He was unequipped, he said, to manage what he called
his “legal license to murder”.
“Who should
have this kind of authority?” he wrote. “Perhaps, if I had the benefits of a
higher education, an education which included something of philosophy and an
understanding of lifer and man and their inter-relationships with morals,
honor, and duty, it would be easier for me to assay our wartime conduct . . .
.I was a small cog in a big machine, the one that had to do a lot of dirty work
for higher headquarters.” [5]
Why was a
poorly educated, minimally trained American agent allowed to befriend – and
serve the interests of a foreign head of state? Who allowed him to work for
years with South Koran enforcers who sent severed heads to Seoul to demonstrate
their loyalty? Who allowed Nichols to push people out of planes? To send
hundreds of South Koran agents to their deaths in the North. There are no
answers for these questions, in part because no one outside the Far East Air
Forces knew enough about Nichols to asks them- until more than a quarter century
after he was dead.[6]
Nor is there
an easy explanation for Nichols decades-long pattern of secretly abusing young
men and boys. The hospital based psychiatric care Nichols received in the air
force failed him – and the boys he later victimized in Florida. According to
his clinical record, air force psychiatrists- between lockdowns, heavy doses of
thorazine, and multiple rounds of electroshock – never made an effort to
explore his family history. They diagnosed and treated a “schizophrenia” who
did not exist. They failed to notice or help the sexual predator who did.
[Herden
misses, as the others did- what might have been the correct diagnosis: Nichols
was a ‘sociopath’. The trouble is that, generally speaking, sociopaths make
great soldiers until their crimes are discovered or become inconvenient in the
ever changing world of politics and war. As President Rhee’s positions and
behaviors became more and more inconvenient for the Americans after the
armistice, Nichols intimate relationship with that tyrant became a problem and
he was relieved of command and ‘disposed off’ as best they could without raking
up the mud.
[1] His early warnings of the North’s invasion of
the South and, later, the Chinese invasion of the North were dismissed by top
brass.
[2] On the
other hand, he also recognized that those subjected to torture would say
anything so that they information they gave was often useless. Furthermore,
Harden also reports than many of the dozens of medals Nichols received were for
actions actually performed by the young Korean soldiers under his command which
accounts to some extent for his ‘wonderful luck under fire.’ Harden has a bit
of difficulty connecting the dots in his
own story.
[3] e.g.
including Kim ‘The Snake” Chang-ryong, the former Japanese military officer who
became Rhee’s right-hand man for anti-Communist vengeance and score settling.
[4] This is
from Harden’s concluding chapter. In previous chapters he does discuss the
enormous sums of cash Nichols often displayed at his headquarters and managed
to bring back with him from Korea when he was dismissed in 1957. He speculates
it was derived from the black currency markets, a common practice among U.S.
occupation forces which Command did not police systematically. Nichols himself
never explained the source of his
ubiquitous bags of cash.
Nichol’s
autobiography is tainted by his efforts to conform to official history of the
war, sometimes quite lamely. Reporting
that a huge mass execution of civilians, including women and children, occurred in the location official history said it did (where it hadn’t- he
witnessed it) while admitting the perpetrators were South Korean though it had
officially been attributed to the Norths.
[5] Nobody
ever saw Nichols read a book. After he returned to the States he never
attempted to enroll in school. On several occasions in Korea he had
opportunities for reassignment. He fought to keep and expand his powers. He was
a big and largely incognito cog in a
very dark machine.
[6] At one
point General Willoughby, MacArthur’s
chief of Intelligence ordered the burning of the Far East Command. Many
existing records of the Korean War remain classified.. . its in the book!
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