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obliged to improvise as they went along. In the light of subsequent events, their blunders and political clumsiness have attracted the unfavourable attention of history. But it is only just to observe that at thisperiod, many of the same mistakes were being made by their counterparts in Allied armies all over the world.
    Hodge’s State Department political adviser, H. Merell Benninghoff, reported to Washington on 15 September:
South Korea can best be described as a powder keg ready to explode at the application of a spark. There is great disappointment that immediate independence and sweeping out of the Japanese did not eventuate. Although the hatred of the Koreans for the Japanese is unbelievably bitter, it is not thought that they will resort to violence as long as American troops are in surveillance . . . The removal of Japanese officials is desirable from the public opinion standpoint, but difficult to bring about for some time. They can be relieved in name but must be made to continue in work. There are no qualified Koreans for other than the low-ranking positions, either in government or in public utilities and communications. 7
     
    The pressures upon the Americans in Korea to dispense with the aid of their newfound Japanese allies became irresistible. In four months, 70,000 Japanese colonial civil servants and more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians were shipped home to their own islands. Many were compelled to abandon homes, factories, possessions. Yet the damage to American relations with the Koreans was already done. Lieutenant Ferris Miller, USN, who had been one of the first Americans to land in the country, and subsequently enjoyed a lifelong association with Korea, said: ‘Our misunderstanding of local feelings about the Japanese, and our own close association with them, was one of the most expensive mistakes we ever made there.’ 8
    In the months that followed the expulsion of the Japanese, the Koreans who replaced them as agents of the American military government were, for the most part, long-serving collaborators, detested by their own fellow-countrymen for their service to the colonial power. A ranking American of the period wrote later of his colleagues’ ‘abysmal ignorance of Korea and things Korean, theinelasticity of the military bureaucracy and the avoidance of it by the few highly qualified Koreans, who could afford neither to be associated with such an unpopular government, nor to work for the low wages it offered.’ 9
    Before their enforced departure, the Japanese were at pains to alert the Americans to the pervasive influence of communism among South Korea’s embryo political groupings. Their warnings fell upon fertile soil. In the light of events in Europe, the occupiers were entirely ready to believe that communists were at the root of political disturbances, their cells working energetically to seize control of the country. Benninghoff reported: ‘Communists advocate the seizure now of Japanese properties and may be a threat to law and order. It is probable that well-trained agitators are attempting to bring about chaos in our area so as to cause the Koreans to repudiate the United States in favour of Soviet “freedom” and control.’ 10
    The principal losers in the political competition that now developed, to discover which Koreans could prove themselves most hostile to communism, and most sympathetic to the ideals of the United States, were the members of the so-called ‘Korean People’s Republic’, the KPR. In Korea in 1945, the phrase ‘people’s republic’ had not yet taken on the pejorative association it would so soon acquire. The KPR was a grouping of nationalists and prominent members of the anti-Japanese resistance who, before the Americans arrived, sought to make themselves a credible future leadership for Korea. More than half of the eighty-seven leaders chosen by an assembly of several hundred at Kyonggi Girls’ High School on 6 September had served