When Donaldson Koons was growing up in Seoul, there was one Korea. North designated a direction, not a regime. The 38th parallel was just another line on the map. "There was no physical or cultural basis for that split," said Koons, emeritus Dana Professor of Geology, whose father ran a high school for Korean students. Koons, who followed the Korean War from Mayflower Hill, where he began teaching in 1947, said, "The grain of the country ran north-south, not east-west, and the 38th parallel was wholly artificial. No basis in history, no basis in ethnology, in climate, in anything else. It need not have been done."
But it was. As Japan's surrender ended World War II, Korea was freed of its Japanese occupiers--and immediately was lopped in half at that now-famous boundary. In what Koons and some historians argue was a tragic blunder, Russia was given control of the northern section of Korea in return for having entered the war against Japan. A U.S.-backed government was put in place in the south. The newly invented country of North Korea was minted as a communist state. While the South Korean government fell short of Western-style democracy, it was a far cry from the rigid authoritarian rule of the north.
Dean of Faculty Ernest Marriner consults with Colby's resident Air Force ROTC officers
That was the groundwork for the Korean War, which lasted three bloody years before ending in a stalemate in 1953. In a war that gained no ground, more than 33,000 Americans died, an estimated 3 million Korean and Chinese soldiers were killed or wounded, and, according to some estimates, more than 3 million civilians were killed. When the truce was signed, the survivors found themselves at the pre-war status quo. A half century later, the border between North and South remains one of the most impermeable in the world, the two Koreas continue to skirmish as the world looks on with alarm and North Korea threatens the world with its nuclear weapons program. And 50 years since the "the first Cold War war" ended, the details are largely forgotten.
At Colby, as in the country as a whole, the Korean War was tucked between World War II, the war that galvanized the U.S. unlike any other, and the Vietnam War, which split the campus and the country apart. The College suffered 63 casualties in World War II, including a missionary couple executed by Japanese forces in the Philippines. Three Colby alumni were killed in Korea or in preparation for it. The Korean War is represented in Ernest Marriner's History of Colby College in one sentence.
Why so little attention to a war that caused millions of deaths, that pitted superpowers and ideologies, that flirted with World War III?
"Because it was a mess without any clear result," said Robert Weisbrot, the Christian A. Johnson Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at Colby and an authority on the Cold War. "There were no famous cities. For Americans there was no sense of shared cultural heritage, as with England during World War II. There was no familiarity whatsoever with Korean history. There was only a sense that we're fighting for principles--Korea happens to be the place. There was no clear resolution. There wasn't even a peace treaty at the end. There were only countries that suffered, but none that officially lost."
