Soldiering through Empire. Simeon Man
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project. Instead, it was the result of the accumulated grievances of ordinary Koreans since the start of the U.S. occupation. It was their collective refusal of American designs for their postcolonial world. The failure of American officials to face this fact would haunt them not only in Korea but also in other contexts, wherever the U.S. military intervened.
MILITARY EXPANSION AND SUBVERSION
In November 1948, with the Yŏsu mutiny recently subdued, Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall issued a directive to all U.S. Army commands that outlined the protocol for handling “subversive and disaffected personnel.” The events in Korea made him nervous about the loyalty of his own American troops. The terms “subversive” and “disaffected” personnel described subjects who had engaged in any number of political activities or had “shown lack of loyalty to the Government and Constitution of the United States” by acts, writings, or speech.36 Royall’s directive breathed new life into these definitions by empowering commanders to “detect” and “investigate” such personnel. The directive tasked them with classifying and maintaining a detailed record of each individual, including name, rank, army serial number, and a statement indicating the basis for the subject’s classification.37 The suppression of the Yŏsu rebellion appeared to have contained one specter of communist subversion only to give rise to another within the U.S. military, one that gained increasing focus and clarity in the late 1940s yet would remain more elusive than ever.
In many ways, the problem of subversion in the U.S. armed forces was a product of popular front activism for racial equality in the early 1940s. In a memorandum dated February 1946 and titled “Communist Infiltration of and Agitation in the Armed Forces,” the War Department’s Director of Intelligence Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg made this connection clear. Admittedly, the problem had roots stemming back to 1920, he noted, when the Communist International first ordered communist parties around the world to “carry on a systematic agitation in its own Army against every kind of oppression of colonial population.” By the start of World War II, this global movement had transformed into active pursuits against the Jim Crow military in the United States. As Communist Party members entered the services in an attempt to organize from within, they targeted “negro [sic] soldiers and enlisted personnel” in particular. The Communist Party, under the guise of “front” organizations such as the American Youth Congress and other civil rights groups, had unleashed a “whispering campaign” to indoctrinate soldiers and sailors, stirring up black servicemen especially.38
But it was after the war, as the United States continued to keep American troops overseas, that such activities posed an actual global threat to U.S. security. “At first,” Vandenberg continued in his memo, “the apparent purpose of the Communists seemed to be propagandizing against this country’s occupation of certain areas in the Pacific and the Far East.” But by the end of 1945, “Communists” were actively agitating GIs wherever they were stationed abroad, fueling the growing sentiments of the American public that overseas servicemen ought to be returned home without delay.39 Handwritten letters—hundreds and thousands of them—flooded the offices of elected officials in November and December, written by GIs in Hawai‘i, Okinawa, Yokohama, Manila, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Paris, and other places. In Manila, “Home by Christmas!” became a seditious slogan that seemed to appear everywhere; as Nelson Peery, a radicalized black GI at the time, recalled, the words were scratched onto road signs and painted on the latrines, on the doors of officers’ quarters, in recreation rooms, and in mess halls.40 Authorities watched these signs nervously, convinced of sedition stirring in the military.
Then on Christmas Day 1945, as though confirming these worst fears, four thousand American soldiers in Manila staged a demonstration. The soldiers marched to the 21st Replacement Depot in response to the cancellation of a scheduled transport home and carried banners that read, “We Want Ships!”41 The Christmas Day protest was a sign of things to come, and they came more quickly and bigger than authorities could prepare for. The opening weeks of 1946, in fact, saw the largest wave of GI demonstrations ever to hit the U.S. military up to that time. It came on the heels of an announcement by the War Department on January 4 that there would be a further slowdown in troop demobilization; servicemen expecting to be released soon based on their number of years of service now remained uncertain of their future. The announcement touched off a chain reaction at U.S. bases around the world, beginning in the Philippines. On January 6 and 7, an estimated eight thousand to ten thousand GIs converged at City Hall in Manila and voiced dissatisfaction with the recent announcement, urging U.S. officials to scale back all overseas forces except those in Occupied Japan and Germany. On January 8, more than 3,500 enlisted men and officers at Andersen Air Base in Guam staged a hunger strike to express solidarity with those in the Philippines.42 Over the next ten days, similar actions organized by “soldier committees” took place in Hawai‘i, Le Havre, Paris, Rheims, Seoul, Shanghai, New Delhi, and elsewhere.43
The demobilization movement of January 1946 was the first concerted rebellion against the U.S. military and its growing worldwide presence. While few seemed to question the necessity of maintaining troops in Japan and Germany, in other parts of the world GIs asked probing questions about why they were needed. During Secretary of War Robert Patterson’s tour of U.S. bases in the Pacific, one soldier confronted him directly by asking, “Did you bring the 86th Division to suppress the aspirations of the Philippine people?”44 At a demonstration at Hickam Air Field in Hawai‘i, a GI and labor organizer named David Livingston stated, “We are here because there seems to be a foreign policy developing which requires one hell of a big army. It’s about time we joined with our buddies in the Philippines and said: ‘Yes, let’s occupy enemy countries, but not friendly countries.’ It doesn’t take a single soldier in the Philippines or on Oahu to wipe fascism off the earth.”45 Military officials sought to explain away the protests by attributing them to “confused and disheartened” GIs who simply wished to go home; but as the statements above indicate, GIs understood precisely what was at stake.46
More than a simple agitation to return home, the demobilization movement was part of a much wider and spontaneous anti-imperialist revolt that reverberated across the post–World War II world. During the same time, on January 24, one thousand Indian airmen of the British Royal Air Force staged a hunger strike in Cawnpore, India, against delays in demobilization and for equal pay, food, and housing conditions with British airmen. The strike lasted several days and incited a wave of similar “sit-down” strikes at British air bases in Ceylon, Egypt, and Palestine.47 While these protests were under way, a far more violent mutiny struck the British empire. On February 21, lascars of the Royal Indian Navy seized control of nine vessels off the coast of Bombay. They engaged British forces in an armed confrontation that spilled into the streets of Bombay and soon to Calcutta and Karachi, and claimed the lives of more than two hundred people. What began as strikes over equal pay and living conditions quickly turned into bolder demands, which included the withdrawal of Indian troops from Indonesia where they had been sent to help the Dutch suppress an anticolonial movement.48 These worldwide revolts told the same story: as empires scrambled to restrain the pulse of freedom in the decolonizing world, their soldiers and sailors, many of them dark-skinned colonial conscripts, refused.
Global decolonization and U.S. military expansion brought American servicemen into proximity with some of these radicalized Asian subjects, and it was the specter of their politicizing affinities that most alarmed U.S. officials. The “eyes of the world, and particularly the Japanese people, are watching with interest,” the Eighth Army’s acting commander, Lt. Gen. Charles P. Hall, warned his troops during their rebellion in Yokohama: “Subversive forces, quick to sense dissension in your ranks, will take their cue for sabotage of plans for our future action.”49 Hoyt Vandenberg had the same concern in mind when he noted in his February 1946 memo that the GI demonstrations “were not instigated on Communist Party orders emanating from the United States,” but by communists in Asia.50 These were not unfounded concerns. A year later, one counterintelligence report from the Philippines-Ryukyus Command confirmed that “there were approximately 300 American GIs, white and Negro,” who had joined ranks with the Huks in Bataan in 1946. The report went on to state that “an American GI, disguised by a long beard and dressed in old khakis,