By Jim Lea and Jeremy Kirk
Stars and Stripes

Although relations between South Korea and the United States have been mostly friendly and cooperative for more than 50 years, there is a large thorn that has stuck in the Korean psyche since the end of World War II.

Why are there two Koreas? That question is the foundation of anti-American feelings among some South Koreans.

"Was it really necessary to divide Korea into two?" said retired Gen. Chang Chi-ryang, a former chief of staff of the South Korean air force.

Even today, he said, Koreans consider the decision to divide the peninsula "regrettable."

That sentiment is even more pronounced as people who remember the three miserable years of the Korean War are replaced by a generation with no memory of the conflict. Some ask louder than their parents did, "Why?"

Historians give the answer — blame America and the former Soviet Union. Washington made the proposal to divide Korea so it would be easier to move it toward independence.

Moscow eagerly supported America’s plan for what history records as self-serving reasons. The Russians had for decades wanted to establish a toehold in Korea.

Japanese bureaucrats had ruled Korea for 35 years, and their eventual withdrawal would leave a dilemma: How would the Japanese surrender be coordinated without leaving Korea ungoverned?

President Franklin Roosevelt proposed to temporarily divide the peninsula when the war was won to expedite the surrender of Japanese troops and put Koreans in charge of their country. Stalin and Great Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.

On Aug. 10, 1945, with the end of the war in the Pacific in sight, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Because the Soviets played no part in the war against Japan until then, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was adamant they would not share in the postwar occupation of Korea.

He had no say, however. Russian troops were already moving into the northern part of Korea.

Five days before Tokyo surrendered, a meeting was held in Washington to determine how to implement the Yalta accord.

Two Army lieutenant colonels — Dean Rusk, who later became U.S. secretary of state, and Charles Bonesteel, who later served as head of the U.N. Command in South Korea — were handed a National Geographic map and told to figure out how the peninsula would be occupied.

Because the 38th parallel cuts across Korea’s waist, they picked it as the logical dividing line. They thought the division would last only about five years.

Chang voices the opinion of millions of Koreans when he says the dividing line should have been the Yalu River, the northern boundary between Korea and China.

While the United States allowed free passage across the 38th parallel, the Soviet Union refused to let Americans on its side. Early on, Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, in charge of the U.S. occupation force, tried to maintain normal trade, transportation and communication between the two sides, but no agreement could be reached.

The Soviets even dammed water flowing south across the parallel into rice paddies.

Korea had always been coveted because of its placement. Close to Japan and China, whoever controlled Korea had a solid military position in Asia.

Japan had fought wars with China and Russia over Korea a few years before it annexed the peninsula in 1910. With the Japanese leaving, the Soviet Union saw Korea as a perfect ground to encourage the growth of communism.

Soviet-trained Koreans were placed in communist committees. Moscow picked Kim Il Sung to lead the Korean communists.

Kim was young and not well-known, an intentional calculation that the Soviets thought would make him dependent on Soviet direction.

In late 1945 on the southern side, Koreans resented the U.S. occupation force and blamed it for the country’s division.

Syngman Rhee, who had spent years in the United States advocating Korean independence from Japan, emerged as South Korea’s president in 1948. Educated in the United States, Rhee won Washington’s support for his anti-communist stance.

By this time, the North was well on its own course. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was established, the Supreme People’s Assembly was elected and Kim Il Sung became premier. In three short years, Korea had gone from a liberated land to an ideological battleground.