Faced with a population that seemed to grow increasingly resentful of the Military Government and its policies daily, Hodge pushed for an accelerated expansion of the Constabulary at the end of 1946, in preparation for potential future insurrections. To draw recruits, Military Government officials kept the entrance requirements to a minimum: a candidate had to be at least twenty-one years old, without a criminal record, and to hold the equivalent of an American eleventh-grade education to be admitted as an officer.23 The lax requirements helped drive the numbers, but other forces were at work. As the National Police continued to crack down on political dissidents, those who bore the brunt of the repression came to see the Constabulary as an armed haven. “Many of the men the Americans recruited for our constabulary service,” John Muccio, President Harry Truman’s representative to Korea acknowledged later, “were self-styled refugees newly arrived from the north of the 38th parallel, who were accepted without proper investigation.”24 Within a year’s time, between the spring of 1946 and 1947, the Constabulary had grown from a force of three thousand to ten thousand men.25 Their loyalties could not be determined with certainty.
In October 1948, two months after Syngman Rhee declared the founding of the Republic of Korea (ROK), a massive rebellion rocked the southern peninsula and reverberated around the world. On October 19, upon receiving orders to deploy to Cheju Island to suppress a growing insurgency there, elements of the 14th Regiment of the Korean Constabulary pursued other plans: they mutinied. Forty soldiers stationed at Camp Anderson murdered their officers. They seized control of the city of Yŏsu within hours. The next morning, the number of rebels had swelled to two thousand, drawing disaffected soldiers and local people into the ranks. Officers told their men, “The thirty-eighth parallel has been done away with. Go get your guns and assemble.”26
With this gathering force, the rebels quickly spread to the nearby city of Sunch’ŏn. They marched through the streets and waved red flags and sang communist slogans, announcing their victory. They established “people’s courts” that tried and executed members of the police and their families as well as other government officials and landowners. The American adviser to the Korean Constabulary James Hausman recalled of what came to be called the Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn rebellion, “All hell had broken loose and we had nothing to stop the onslaught.”27 Meanwhile, on that same day, the South Korean Labor Party called for a general strike in Taegu, rallying students and workers to demand the dissolution of Syngman Rhee’s government and the withdrawal of American troops from Korea.28
The Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn rebellion drew the attention of international observers and journalists; many who flocked to the area documented the bloodshed on the ground. “The city stank of death and was ill with the marks of horror,” Life photographer Carl Mydans wrote in his notes to his editors.29 In the eyes of the “free world,” the mutinous soldiers and the violence they unleashed belied a precarious South Korean state that seemed to have lost its handle on the “Red menace” completely. Military officials appeared to have seen the signs coming. Earlier that summer, counterintelligence agents intercepted instructions from North Korea urging communists to “infiltrate into the South Korean Constabulary and begin political attacks aimed at causing dissension and disorder”; by late summer, agents had identified the 14th Regiment as the most dangerous and suspected it was close to mutiny.30 A deeper look would have revealed that unheeded warnings stemmed back even earlier to the hasty recruitment drive of 1946–47. But there was no time to reflect on missed opportunities. Rhee struck back hard against the rebels. Led by American advisers and carried out by Korean colonels seasoned in Japanese antiguerrilla campaigns in Manchuria, the counteroffensive was swift and brutal. One week after the mutiny began, an estimated 821 rebels were killed and nearly 3,000 captured; 1,000 or more escaped and slipped into hiding. Peace was restored momentarily.31
The following weeks proved critical for Rhee in his drive to consolidate power in the budding South Korea. The conservative leader had been biding his time since his return from exile in 1945, and now he did exactly what he needed to demonstrate his legitimacy to his American backers. Soon after the pacification of Yŏsu and Sunch’ŏn, Rhee ordered the Constabulary to intensify investigation of all its units and to purge those with “communistic tendencies.” All who had taken part in the rebellion were brought before courts-martial and charged with mutiny and sedition.32 With the passage of the National Security Law in December 1948, the hunt for subversives grew more emboldened and led to the roundup and screening of more than two thousand officers and the imprisonment of more than four hundred on charges of conspiracy, murder, and mutiny, among other crimes.33 Such draconian measures reflected Rhee’s shortsighted understanding of what had happened: the Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn rebellion was only a problem of “Communist infiltration.” As such, it required bureaucratic solutions, starting with the prompt purging of subversives. During the process, American military advisers resumed the buildup of the Korean Constabulary and implemented better screening of new recruits.
FIGURE 2. Captured rebels of the Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn rebellion, October 1948. (Photograph by Carl Mydans; The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.)
Rhee’s crackdown facilitated the transition from the American occupation to the new Republic, ensuring no place existed for political dissent in his anticommunist state. The crackdown worked more broadly to secure South Korea’s place in the newly reconfigured Pacific region, the contours of which were becoming clearer by this time. In October 1948, the National Security Council outlined the first U.S. policy strategy toward building a new Pacific regionalism, centered on Japan and its economic recovery. The “reverse course” of U.S. occupation objectives in Japan meant several things, most notably the return of previously “purged” conservative leaders to power and the promotion of unfettered capitalism. Both of these objectives had been pursued against the increasing militancy of organized labor and communist movements. But the reverse course also signaled a broader transnational calculus to revive Japan’s industrial capacity and export markets in Asia, keeping the periphery firmly connected to the capitalist world.34 The security of anticommunism in South Korea and the resumption of Japan’s industrial economy emerged as integral projects to transform the Pacific region into a beacon of free trade and a part of the “free world.”
Since the end of World War II, in the span of a few years, American policy had gone full circle, from dismantling the Japanese empire to resuscitating it. Common people throughout Asia revolted against what they saw as the revival of Japanese dominance in the region through the aid of “American imperialists.”35 But to U.S. officials, this was to be a more liberal and democratic pan-Asianism than the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, one tempered by the U.S. commitment to support the independence of postcolonial nation-states. It was to be far removed from Japan’s erstwhile militarist endeavors. Yet this was no mere ruse for empire. In fact, the promise of “Asia for Asians” demanded a differentiation between “good” and “bad” Asians, between those to be incorporated into the postcolonial state and those to be expelled from it, and American officials put their faith in the military to accomplish both. The Korean Constabulary, driven by the dual mandates of disciplining martial subjects and making war on those who refused the American liberation, functioned as the quintessential vehicle for postcolonial state building.
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