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Americans could be landed in South Korea, the Red Army reached the new divide – and halted there. It is worth remark that, if Moscow had declined the American plan and occupied all Korea, it is unlikely that the Americans could or would have forced a major diplomatic issue. To neither side, at this period, did the peninsula seem to possess any inherent value, except as a testing ground of mutual intentions. The struggle for political control of China herself was beginning in earnest. Beside the fates and boundaries of great nations that were now being decided, Korea counted for little. Stalin was content to settle for half. At no time in the five years that followed did the Russians show any desire to stake Moscow’s power and prestige upon a direct contest with the Americans for the extension of Soviet influence south of the Parallel.
    Thus it was, late in August 1945, that the unhappy men of the US XXIV Corps – some veterans of months of desperate fighting in the Pacific, others green replacements fresh from training camps – found themselves under orders to embark not for home, as they so desperately wished, but for unknown Korea. They were given little information to guide their behaviour once they got there. Their commander, General John R. Hodge, received only a confusing succession of signals at his headquarters on Okinawa. On 14 August, General Stilwell told him that the occupation could be considered ‘semi-friendly’ – in other words, that he need regard as hostile only a small minority of collaborators. At the end of the month the Supreme Commander, General MacArthur himself, decreed that the Koreans should be treated as ‘liberated people’.From Washington, the Secretary of State for War and the Navy Coordinating Committee dispatched a hasty directive to Okinawa, ordering Hodge to ‘create a government in harmony with US policies’. But what were US policies towards Korea? Since the State Department knew little more about the country than that its nationalists hungered for unity and independence, they had little to tell Hodge. As a straightforward military man, the general determined to approach the problem in a straightforward, no-nonsense fashion. On 4 September, he briefed his own officers to regard Korea as ‘an enemy of the United States’, subject to the terms of the Japanese surrender. On 8 September, when the American occupation convoy was still twenty miles out from Inchon in the Yellow Sea, its ships encountered three neatly dressed figures in a small boat, who presented themselves to the general as representatives of ‘the Korean Government’. Hodge sent them packing. He did likewise with every other Korean he met on his arrival who laid claim to a political mandate. XXIV Corps’s intention was to seize and maintain control of the country. The US Army, understandably, wished to avoid precipitating entanglement with any of the scores of competing local political factions who already, in those first days, were struggling to build a power-base amid the ruin of the Japanese empire.
    The fourteen-strong advance party who were the first Americans to reach Seoul were fascinated and bemused by what they found: a city of horse-drawn carts, with only the occasional charcoal-powered motor vehicle. They saw three Europeans in a shop, and hastened to greet them, to discover that they were part of the little local Turkish community, who spoke no English. They met White Russians, refugees in Korea since 1920, who demanded somewhat tactlessly: ‘ Sprechen sie Deutsch? ’ The first English-speaker they met was a local Japanese who had lived in the United States before the war. His wife, like all the Japanese community eager to ingratiate herself with the new rulers, pressed on them a cake and two pounds of real butter – the first they had seen for months. Thatnight, they slept on the floor of Seoul Post Office. The next morning, they transferred their headquarters to the Banda Hotel. 5
    In the days