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that followed, the major units of XXIV Corps disembarked at Inchon, and dispersed by truck and train around the country, to take up positions from Pusan to the 38th Parallel. General Hodge and his staff were initially bewildered by the clamour of unknown Koreans competing for their political attention, and the disorders in the provinces which threatened to escalate into serious rioting if the situation was not controlled. There was also the difficulty that no Korean they encountered appeared to speak English, and the only Korean-speaker on the staff, one Commander Williams of the US Navy, was insufficiently fluent to conduct negotiations.
    Amid all this confusion and uncertainty, the occupiers could identify only one local stabilising force upon whom they could rely: the Japanese. In those first days, the Japanese made themselves indispensable to Hodge and his men. One of the American commander’s first acts was to confirm Japanese colonial officials in their positions, for the time being. Japanese remained the principal language of communication. Japanese soldiers and police retained chief responsibility for maintaining law and order. As early as 11 September, MacArthur signalled instructions to Hodge that Japanese officials must at once be removed from office. But even when this process began to take place, many retained their influence for weeks as unofficial advisers to the Americans.
    Within days of the first euphoric encounter between the liberators and the liberated, patriotic Koreans were affronted by the open camaraderie between Japanese and American officers, the respect shown by former enemies to each other, in contrast to the thinly veiled contempt offered to the Koreans. ‘It does seem that from the beginning many Americans simply liked the Japanese better than the Koreans,’ the foremost American historian of this period has written. ‘The Japanese were viewed as cooperative, orderly and docile, while the Koreans were seen as headstrong,unruly, and obstreperous.’ 6 The Americans knew nothing, or chose to ignore what they did know, of the ruthless behaviour of the Japanese in the three weeks between their official surrender and the coming of XXIV Corps – the looting of warehouses, the systematic ruin of the economy by printing debased currency, the sale of every available immovable asset.
    To a later generation, familiar with the dreadful brutality of the Japanese in the Second World War, it may seem extraordinary that Americans could so readily make common cause with their late enemies; as strange as the conduct of Allied intelligence organisations in Europe, which befriended and recruited former Nazi war criminals and Gestapo agents. Yet the strongest influence of war upon most of those who endure it is to blur their belief in absolute moral values, and to foster a sense of common experience with those who have shared it, even a barbarous enemy. There was a vast sense of relief among the men of the armies who still survived in 1945, an instinctive reluctance for more killing, even in the cause of just revenge. There was also a rapidly growing suspicion for some prominent American soldiers – Patton notable among them – that they might have been fighting the wrong enemy for these four years. McCarthyism was yet unborn. But a sense of the evil of communism was very strong, and already outweighed in the minds of some men their revulsion towards Nazism, or Japanese imperialism. In Tokyo, the American Supreme Commander himself was already setting an extraordinary example of post-war reconciliation with the defeated enemy. In Seoul in the autumn of 1945, General Hodge and his colleagues found it much more comfortable to deal with the impeccable correctness of fellow-soldiers, albeit recent enemies, than with the anarchic rivalries of the Koreans. The senior officers of XXIV Corps possessed no training or expertise of any kind for exercising civilian government – they were merely professional military men,