2005, Vol., No.55

military history 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.94

pISSN : 1598-317X / eISSN : 2713-8992
https://journal.kci.go.kr/imhc

Korean scholars' rigorous studies on the Korean War increased in the period after the 1970s. The traditional explanation prevailed over the academic circle in the late 1970's. But in the 1980's the revisionist interpretation began to dominate a group of junior scholars. Confronted with the expansion and growth of revisionism, a group of traditionalists organized their academic circle in the late 1980's. The debate between traditionalism and revisionism brought to emerge the post-revisional synthesis based on revisionism or traditionalism plus archive in the early 1990. A new trend of the post-Cold War era after the 1990's is a multi-archival research which was made possible by Soviet archives and Chinese documents. The debate on revisionism and traditionalism was revitalized within academic circles through this post-revisional multi-archival method. To liquidate the past and to meet the clean future, oral history is very important.

The Korean War is a historical event in which all of North-east Asian nations were directly or indirectly intervened. Therefore it is the first step to the relaxation of international tensions and a peace settlement to developmentally solve tensions and the division of the Korean Peninsula that was caused by the Korean War. For this, the need for new understanding about the war is brought up. Disruption of the Soviet Union has brought a big change on studying the Korean War. First, scholars became to be free to see the war from a cold war viewpoint. Second, opening a large amount of secret documents and archieves to the public, that has been kept in Russia, makes us to be easy to approach the reality of history. Studying the Korean War in China was not able to be free from the effect of these changes. So the Chinese government began to open the official documents about the Korean War to the public and vigorous research on the war was started to develop in China. Nevertheless the research on the Korean War is not beyond a cold war. The important cause is the relation between North Korea and China, and responsibility of China for the outbreak of the Korean War. It will take long to provoke openly anti-authoritative devate about Chinese entry into the Korean War and for the devate to be an issue in the groves of Academe. This will be also impacted by the political situation in China and changes of relation between China and North Korea. But we can not deny a possibility of this point of view rising to the surface when various aspects of evaluations of the motive of Chinese entry into the Korean War and entry itself are making.

The purpose of this study is to examine and analyze the Violation of the 38th Parallel, 1945-1948. Most of previous articles on this subject have been simply concerned for the origin of the Korean War. However, this thesis has traced what is the structure and characteristics of The cold War and the Violation of the 38th Parallel. The South and North Korean Separate Government, which politically was under the international circumstances of the Cold War structure, competed with each other for the reinforcement of their regime and military forces. At this level, this paper analyzed the courses of both's reinforcement of the regime, the military build-up, and the violations of 38th parallel, operation plan, leadership and command structure. In this periods, the U.S. policy toward Korea had been driven with the same interrelationships as the breakdown of U.S.-U.S.S.R Joint Conference, the founding of the Separate government, the withdrawal of U.S. army. The violation's event of 38th parallel, which contained political intention of both sides, was developed with relations of the political claim by military means, so it's mean had a variety according to periods of events too. Both used of the violation of 38th Parallel to amplify their enmity greatly. When the both army took over the 38th Parallel's patrol responsibilities and began to build up defensive positions, the both army guards disrupted the work by firing to each other. In consequence, these complex historical factors contributed to the origin of outbreak of the Korean War. We also could know these factors had made the Korean War for a civil war originating in the national problems and an international war originating at Cold War.