Kim Koo & Kim Kun

For 25,000,000 Koreans a new era had begun. Russian marines patrolled Seoul, Korea's capital. Elsewhere in the Land of Morning Calm, Red Army paratroopers and truck-borne infantry had taken over airfields, harbors, railway junctions. Moscow reported that the Red flag waved in Korean towns, that Korean crowds were wildly cheering their liberators, that self-government committees were operating, and that a purge of collaborationists had begun.

After 40 years, Japan had lost the rugged peninsula (as big as Great Britain) from which she had launched her Co-Prosperity Sphere. Soviet Russia had be come a power in the empire outpost which Tsarist Russia coveted.

The Patriots. The Cairo Declaration, to which the U.S., Britain, China and Russia have subscribed, pledges a "free and independent . . . Korea . . . in due course." Koreans fear that "due course" means a period of international tutelage. They appeal to their history as proof of their right to administer their own affairs.

Koreans trace their national history back 4,000 years. They say they were the first people to have a national flag (1,000 B.C.), an encyclopedia (circa 1405), a solar observatory, a printing press (1403), and an ironclad navy (1592), which, under redoubtable Admiral Yi Sun Sin, inflicted the only defeat on the Japanese fleet before 1942.

The Americans came to Korea (then known as the Hermit Kingdom) in 1882, signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce, built the country's first trolley line, rail way and waterworks. The Japanese, after defeating Russia in 1904-05, made Korea their colony and highroad to Manchuria. They gave it modern transport, developed its mines, exploited its farms, opened Shinto shrines.

Arrogant Japanizers tarred the Koreans' traditional white clothes, jailed them for "thought crime," poisoned their sovereign Yi Hyeung, deposed his dynasty. In 1919, in a remarkable display of mass passive patriotism, Koreans declared their independence. The Japanese retaliated with executions and the flogging of 11,000 demonstrators.

The Exiles. Many Koreans went into exile. Some 300,000 found refuge in Siberia; more than 100,000 fled to China and a few thousand to Hawaii.

In 1919 the exiles organized a Pro visional Government at Shanghai. For two decades they had factional troubles. In 1942 they united again, under the Presidency of earnest, greying Kim Koo, who had taken refuge in Chungking, and won financial support and de facto recognition from Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. The new coalition of exiles did not include the 300,000 Koreans in Siberia. They remained aloof and inaccessible. At least 30,000 of them were said to be organized in a Red Army unit. They were apparently under the leadership of two veteran Korean leftists, Park Hoon and Kim Kun.

The Worriers. In Chungking last week the Korean Provisional Government chafed anxiously, hoped hard for Chinese and U.S. air transport homeward. While waiting, Foreign Minister T. Josowang paid public tribute to Korean troops with the Red Army and with the Chinese Communists, who last month suddenly sponsored a Korean Independence League (TIME, Aug. 20). "We welcome any al lies," he said, "marching in ... for the purpose of liberating . . . the fatherland."

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