Fighting with the Soviets in Central Asia, with British Indians in Burma, and beating up Allied
POWs in the Pacific, Korea had its fingers in more than a few pies during the Second World War.
But how did Korean soldiers end up in several different warzones,
fighting for three different factions? In this video, we tell their story.
Well before the Japanese set foot in China in the 1930s, the Korean peninsula was already a part of
their empire. Since 1905, when the Japan–Korea Treaty was signed, Korea was economically,
politically, and culturally dominated by Japan. Korea was run as a colony, and was brimming with
all the oppression that usually entails. The obliteration of traditional culture, forced
labour, one-sided business deals, corruption, exploitation, and environmental degradation
were all actively encouraged by the ruling Japanese elite, who were eager to strip Korea
of all it was worth, all while proclaiming to “Civilize” the so-called “Backward” Korean people.
Naturally, some decided to take up arms against the occupiers.
Grouped in various small bands, Korean guerillas launched small-scale raids from bases in Korea’s
mountainous north or from over the Chinese border. For the Japanese administration,
these freedom fighters were considered more of an annoyance than a tangible threat to their
authority, yet the Japanese Army still went out of its way to hunt the guerillas down.
Jumping forward to 1939, Japan was facing a critical labour shortage on the Home Islands.
Huge numbers of young men had been conscripted for service in the Army,
and there simply wasn’t enough workers left behind to fill their old jobs.
The solution the Japanese government came up with was Koreans. Between 1939 and 1945,
5.4 million Koreans were taken from their homes as forced labourers. Around 670,000
were offshored to the Japanese islands, where they were put to work in factories. Most of their
compatriots on the Peninsula were forced to mine or farm raw materials for the Japanese Empire.
Generally, Koreans were seen as racially closer to the Japanese and therefore were treated
slightly better than other forced labourers, but they still had a death rate of around 9%.
Most of the forced labourers were men, and they could be considered lucky compared with
what many Korean women faced. Lured by false promises of well-paid work and opportunities
for higher education, tens of thousands of Korean women and girls were kidnapped and
forced into sexual slavery in so-called “comfort stations” in both Japan and Korea. We’ve done
a video discussing this crime against humanity before, so we won’t go into detail here. We’ll
leave it with this summary from a United Nations report: "Large numbers of women were forced to
submit to prolonged prostitution under conditions which were frequently indescribably traumatic."
Despite their status as second-class citizens, many Koreans willingly signed up to fight for
the Japanese Army. Until 1944, Koreans weren’t conscripted into the military;
instead, they volunteered. What might surprise you even more was that the Japanese were actively
turning away potential recruits. From 1938 to 1944, 802,047 Korean men tried to join
the Japanese Army. Of these, only 17,664 were accepted. The average acceptance rate was just
4.7%, and this wasn’t for officer training, this was regular infantry!
But why were the recruiters so picky? The most likely answer is they were worried about loyalty.
Only the most diehard recruits could be trusted to fight against their own countrymen.
In the Jiandao region, to the north of Korea, is an area known traditionally as “Gando.” During
the Second World War, it was populated mostly by ethnic Koreans but was within Chinese territory.
Gando was a hotbed of anti-Japanese guerilla activity, with weapons flowing from China to
various pro-independence rebels. The Manchukuo Imperial Army, the military of the Japanese puppet
state in Manchuria, was given the unenviable task of dislodging the rebels for good.
To do this, they put together a purely Korean unit called the Gando Special
Force. The men of Gando Special Force rivalled the Japanese in their brutality,
with historian Philip Jowett noting they “Earned a reputation for brutality
and [were] reported to have laid waste to large areas which came under [their] rule.”
As the war dragged on into 1944, Japanese planners were aware they were losing. Well
trained men and vital materials were being lost every day to the Allied advance in the Pacific.
This is largely what lead to the conscription of Koreans into the Japanese Army.
All Korean men of military age were either drafted into the Army or forced into military factories.
They received only the most basic training, and few could even communicate with their officers.
This, when combined with Japanese racial beliefs, led Korean units to predominantly be
given support roles away from the combat zone, though some were thrown onto the front lines.
Korean units were often given the demeaning task of guardian POWs, and in this role, they
gained a malevolent reputation. Colonel Jacobs, an American survivor of the Bataan Death March,
discussed the Korean conscripts in his memoirs: “The Korean guards were the most abusive.
The Japs didn't trust them in battle, so used them as service troops; the Koreans
were anxious to get blood on their bayonets; and then they thought they were veterans.”
But not all Koreans were toiling in factories or fighting alongside their oppressors.
Some decided to take up weapons and fight for the liberation of their homeland.
But like any liberation struggle, they couldn’t decide which group got to be in charge.
On one hand was the Korean Liberation Army or KLA. This was a collection of guerrilla bands
that saw action in Manchuria, northern Korea, and China against the Japanese.
It was tied to the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, a government-in-exile,
but had strong links to the Chinese Nationalists. At the Army’s head was General Ji Cheong-Cheon,
a venerated hero of Korea’s independence struggle in the 1920s.
Surprisingly, the KLA didn’t stay put in the Korean borderlands but travelled extensively
to fight the Japanese. They deployed to Burma in 1943 and fought alongside
Allied troops in the Battle of Imphal — the turning point of the Burma campaign.
In May 1944, Japanese General Mutaguchi launched an attack on the Allied-held city of Imphal in
northeastern India. The Allies were in the process of building a road between India and China
and had been using airbases around Imphal to supply Chinese forces by air. These supplies
were a godsend for the embattled Chinese Army, and the Japanese were keen to cut them off. The first
offensive pushed the Allies right back to the city’s outskirts, but an armoured counter-attack
stopped the Japanese in their tracks. To facilitate mobility, they had left their medium
tanks and heavy artillery behind, meaning they had nothing capable of destroying Allied armour.
The Japanese situation was hopeless, but the infantry continued to attack until
their supplies ran out. Eventually, they were forced to fall back to their original positions.
In only 56 days of fighting, the Japanese suffered 54,879 casualties, mostly from starvation.
Back in the Korean borderlands, another army was fighting for Korean independence. Ideologically
opposed to both Imperial Japan and the KLA was the communist-backed Korean Volunteer Army.
It was initially formed by roughly 1,000 deserters of the Imperial Japanese Army in mid to late 1944,
well after the Japanese introduced conscription. Once they had established a base of operations,
the leader of the KVA, a chap by the name of Kim Mu-Chong, began recruiting ethnic Koreans
out of Chinese units attached to both the Nationalist and the Communist Armies.
Before taking over the KVA, Kim had been put in charge of the Korean Battalion of the Soviet 88th
Separate Rifle Brigade. This was a special military unit composed of everyone who had been
thrown out of Manchuria by the Japanese advance, including Koreans, Chinese, Kazakhs, Mongols,
Kyrgyz, and Turkmen. The 88th never saw any combat, and instead had to sit through ideological
lectures about how great communism was from mid-1942 to July-1945. Stationed in the Turkmen
SSR, now Turkmenistan, Kim and the other communist Koreans couldn’t have been further from the
action, unlike the KLA and the Japanese-aligned Koreans, who were in the thick of it.
But Kim got a breakthrough in August 1945 with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.
The 88th Separate Rifle Brigade swept through Manchuria and northern Korea
on the coattails of the Red Army, picking up recruits and helping everyone become
good little communists. Korean members of the unit were released to become part of the KVA and Kim
marched his victorious forces through the streets, after the Red Army had done all the fighting.
While the Soviets were cascading down from Russia, the Americans flooded in from the Pacific. At
an emergency meeting, they split Korea in two at the 38th parallel. The KLA that had fought
with the British in Burma and China became the core of the new Republic of Korea Army.
Kim’s KVA, which had sat through three years of lectures in Central Asia, became the Army
of the fledgling DPRK. The Koreans who fought with the Japanese were labelled as Chinilpa,
meaning collaborationist traitors, and their descendants’ assets were still being confiscated
as recently as 2010. A majority of the Koreans who were sent overseas to work came home,
but around 600,000 chose to stay in Japan and what is now Russia to continue their lives.
THAT was the untold story of Korea in the Second World War. But what do YOU think? Did YOU know
there were so many Korean factions? Or that Korean POW camp guards were often considered the most
brutal? Could YOU have sat through three years of lectures about communism? And lastly, what do YOU
think Koreans thought about fighting in Burma, so far from home? Let us know in the comments!