ABSTRACT
The war to create a unified Korea moved through three phases before the Korean belligerents and their sponsors accepted an armistice in July 1953. The first phase began with an insurrection designed to prevent the creation of the Republic of Korea (ROK) in August 1948. This insurgency, led by the South Korean Workers (Communist) Party (SKWP), may have begun in the fall of 1946 in the Autumn Harvest Rebellion, a violent protest against tax collections by the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) and the hated Korean National Police (KNP). This partisan war certainly started with the outbreak of the Cheju-do revolt of April 3, 1948, which involved coordinated attacks on KNP stations by organized guerrillas and mutineers from the Korean Constabulary (KC). Before the suppression of the revolt in the spring of 1950, every province of the ROK had been plagued by terrorism, raids on government offices, political assassination, and pitched battles. On the offensive, the KC, the KNP, and assorted “youth associations” of murderous bent conducted counter guerrilla operations in the Japanese colonial tradition, which assumed that all villagers were rebel sympathizers. The KNP and KC burned homes, killed villagers, and herded the rural population into defended camps outside the Korean mountains. In an operational sense, this war resembled similar contemporaneous counterinsurgency campaigns in Malaya, Greece, and the Philippines (Cumings 1981, 1990, Millett 2002, 2007, Birtle 2006).
