GIs and Missionaries in the Land of Orphans

The American soldiers' love for Korean children was very impressive. They did everything to take care of us. You were like a father to us.

—Yang Yun-hak, evacuated from Seoul to Chejudo in 1950 by American forces

The Korean War (1950–1953) devastated and divided a country that was in the initial stages of recovering from thirty-five years of brutal Japanese colonial occupation and the destruction of World War II. The children of that war—orphans who lost their parents and the newly created mixed-race "GI babies"—could find little assistance from any quarter. The government of the new Republic of Korea (ROK) had neither the money nor the resources to assist any of its citizens, young or old. In the absence of government welfare, American servicemen and missionaries, along with a host of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), provided what little social welfare was available. Together, these groups built and supported orphanages and stimulated massive donations of food, clothing, and money from Americans at home by raising awareness of the plight of Korean children. Additionally, servicemen cared for Korean boys under a semiformal "mascot" system.

Child sponsorship programs such as Foster Parents' Plan, Christian Children's Fund, and World Vision provided a way for Americans to virtually "adopt" Korean children. Those virtual adoptions quickly became real: as servicemen began returning to the United States with their adopted Korean children, such adoptions entered the realm of possibility for ordinary Americans. This chapter surveys the Korean orphan problem and some of the ways that American servicemen and missionaries cared for Korea's children. It also examines how these servicemen and missionaries created the institutional and imaginative preconditions for the establishment of Korean adoption in the second half of the 1950s.

War Orphans and GI Babies

At eighty-five thousand square miles, the Korean Peninsula is roughly the same size as Utah. Unified as one kingdom since the seventh century, Korea's isolationism and hostility to outsiders had earned it the nickname "Hermit Kingdom." It remained fiercely independent until Japanese annexation in 1910, which ended with Japan's defeat at the end of World War II. Following Japan's withdrawal, returned Korean exiles, landlords, collaborators, and freedom fighters struggled to gain control of their newly liberated country. Instead, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel. The Soviet Union took stewardship of North Korea while the United States established a military government in the south. This division prompted an influx of refugees from the north, foreshadowing the enormous population movements that would occur during the Korean War. South Korea experienced economic, political, and social disorder: increased crime, political and labor violence, leftist uprisings, and retaliatory rightist purges. This chaos resulted in part in "heavy dependence" on the United States, which would have important consequences for Korea's future development. As a result of developing Cold War politics and a US-Soviet deadlock, separate governments were established on the peninsula in 1948. In the south, the Republic of Korea was declared, with US-educated Syngman Rhee as its president; in the north, Kim Il Sung proclaimed authority over the new Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The United States withdrew its forces by mid-1949, leaving behind about 2,500 personnel, including five hundred soldiers to train the ROK Army.

On 25 June 1950, the Korean War started when North Korean forces launched a surprise invasion of the south. They quickly pushed southward, overwhelming unprepared ROK troops, and by early August had gained control of at least 90 percent of the peninsula. The next month, American and ROK troops, led by General Douglas MacArthur, made their celebrated amphibious landing at Inch'on, dramatically reversing the course of the war. By late November UN, Korean, and American forces had advanced almost to the Yalu River that formed most of the North Korean border, and they talked of being home for Christmas. Those hopes were thwarted by China's entry into the war; its troops joined with the North Koreans and, in another dramatic reversal, drove UN forces back south of Seoul. By March 1951, the two sides found themselves facing off at the 38th parallel— essentially the same point at which they had begun—marking the start of a two-year period of stalemate during which truce negotiations dragged on against a backdrop of limited ground and air wars. In July 1953, North and South Korea signed an armistice that remains in effect today.

Fleeing the fighting, approximately 5.8 million Koreans (one out of every five) became a refugee. The port city of Pusan, on the southeast tip of the Korean Peninsula, was never taken by North Korean forces. Consequently, it and the area around it—the thinly held defensive line known as the Pusan perimeter—became the de facto seat of the South Korean government. Pusan also housed hundreds of thousands of refugees, who built shelters from the discarded materials of warfare—corrugated metal sheets, flattened tin cans, and US Army C-ration boxes—and did what they could to stay alive. Huddled there, they endured hunger, disease, pestilence, power outages, fires, and water shortages for the duration of the war and long after it ended.

It is difficult to overstate the deprivation, poverty, and destruction wrought by the Korean War. Regarded by the rest of the world as a geographically limited civil war—a UN "police action"—it was a total war for Koreans. At its close in 1953, the peninsula "was a smoldering ruin." North and South Korea each reported roughly US$2 billion in property damage, the equivalent of South Korea's gross national product in 1949. South Korea's capital city, Seoul, which had changed hands four times in less than a year, saw the majority of its office space, homes, and industrial capacity destroyed. North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, was similarly shattered. By the July 1953 armistice, "most of South Korea was a wasteland of burned villages, bombed out towns and cities, roadsides littered with the rusted hulks of trucks and tanks, bridges down, rail lines severed, factories and schools flattened." In this land of farmers and fishermen, half of the livestock and all of the fishing fleet had been wiped out. Measured in terms of "human lives lost," the Korean War was the third "most costly war of the twentieth century." Yet the civilian death toll has never been accurately assessed, partly because the North Korean...