Hostname: page-component-55f67697df-sqlfs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-05-09T04:34:35.693Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950 - 1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Charles K. Armstrong
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This article is part of an ongoing series at The Asia-Pacific Journal commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the US-Korean War.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 7 , Issue 0 , March 2009 , e8
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2009

References

Notes

1Far East Command ordered General Walker to “destroy everything that might be of use to the enemy” as the Eighth Army fled South in December 1950. Roy E. Appleman, Disaster in Korea: The Chinese Confront MacArthur (College Station, TX: Texas A & M Pres, 1989), p. 360.

2Cited in Rosemary Foot, A Substitute for Victory: The Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice Talks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 207 – 208.

3Jon Halliday, “The North Korean Enigma,” New Left Review no. 127 (May – June 1981), p. 29.

4The extent of Soviet air involvement in the Korean War was long a secret of the Cold War, whose details only become known after the collapse of the USSR. See Xiaoming Zhang, Red Wings over the Yalu: China, the Soviet Union, and the Air War in Korea (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002).

5US National Archives, Record Group 242, shipping advice 2013, item 1/191. Organization of Armed Home Defense Units (DPRK), September 1950. Reports include graphic descriptions of an air attack on the city of Yŏch'ŏn on August 26, and the bombing of an elementary school on September 1.

6Conrad C. Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 1950 – 1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), pp. 42–43.

7US National Archives, Record Group 59. U.S. Embassy to State, “Economic Conditions in North Korea,” October 11, 1949, p. 8.

8“The Three Year Plan,” Kyŏngje kŏnsŏl [Economic Construction], September 1956, pp. 5–6.

9Nodong Sinmun, March 16, 1952, p. 1.

10Callum MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 241 – 242.

11The post-war reconstruction of South Korea was the world's largest multilateral development project at the time. See Stephen Hugh Lee, “The United Nations Korea Reconstruction Agency in War and Peace,” in Chae-Jin Lee and Young-ick Lew, eds., Korea and the Korean War (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 2002), pp. 357 – 96.

12John Yoon Tai Kuark, “A Comparative Study of Economic Development in North and South Korea during the Post-Korean War Period,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1966, p. 32; Joseph S. Chung, The North Korean Economy: Structure and Development (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1974), pp. 146-47.

13Cited in Ruediger Frank, Die DDR und Nordkorea: Dier Wiederaufbau der Stadt Hamhung von 1954 – 1962 (Aachen: Shaker, 1996), p. 23.

14Martin Radmann, “Ein Wirtschafstwunder im Fernen Osten,” Neues Deutschland, December 27, 1960.

15GDR Foreign Ministry, Korea section. “Visit of a Government Delegation of the DPRK in the GDR, June 1956.” MfAA A 6927, Fiche 1.

16Kim Il Sung, “On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work,” Works vol. 9, pp. 395 – 417.