The Military Responses of Overseas Koreans during the Pacific War, 1941-1945

Date and Time

November 20, 2025

04:30PM - 06:00PM EST

Location

(In-Person) Thomas Chan-Soo Kang Room (S050), CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

?

Mark E. Caprio

Professor Emeritus, Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan; Kim Koo Visiting Professor of Korean Studies, Harvard University

Mark E. Caprio is professor emeritus at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910?1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). Additionally, he has co-edited a number of volumes, the most recent being a volume titled Japan as the Occupier and the Occupied (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He has also contributed academic articles on colonial-era issues and Korea’s wartime and immediate postwar history that include colonial-era collaboration, Japan-based Korean repatriation, Korean attitudes toward the trusteeship plan that the Allied powers wished to impose on Korea, and Japan’s role in the Korean War to academic journals, as well as to edited volumes. Presently, he is working on a monograph that considers overseas Korean efforts during the Pacific War years (1941-1945) to gain favor with the Allied forces (the US, UK, Nationalist China, and the Soviet Union).

Chaired by Sun Joo Kim, Harvard-Yenching Professor of Korean History, Harvard University

Abstract:

This presentation will examine efforts by overseas Koreans to receive military support from the United States during the last five years of their country’s subjugation under Japanese rule. After a broad overview of these efforts and a consideration of the reasons behind the U.S’s reluctance to support them, it will focus on a success story: Korean-U.S. (primarily with the Office of Strategic Services or OSS) relations forming toward the very end of the Pacific War (1941-1945). The OSS teamed with several Korean groups (primarily in China), but Japan surrendered before they could be deployed. It will also briefly touch on a postwar event where a small number of Koreans were included in an August 18, 1945 mission to fly to Seoul with a larger contingent of OSS members. While the relations formed by the OSS and Koreans may have played a part in U.S. president Harry S. Truman’s decision to replace the intelligence organization with a new agency, the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA, the wartime training that the Korean members received contributed to the post-liberation formation of the armies in southern Korea and, by extension, the Korean War.

Generously supported by the Kim Koo Foundation

 ?