When I was a child, I believed that everyone had drawn the 38th line on the table, and at that time the children thought that this line was used to curse people, but in fact, this 38th line originated in the way the Korean Peninsula was divided between the United States and the Soviet Union. The name "38th Line" refers to the division according to the 38th degree north latitude, which is the origin of the "38th Dividing Line".
By that time, the defeat of the Axis powers had been decided, and World War II was coming to an end, and the world began to discuss the division of interests in the world, and the participating countries were the three world giants of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. Although China did not send its leaders to participate at that time, Roosevelt joined China among the interested countries at the partition meeting.
Roosevelt proposed at the time that after the independence of North Korea, there should be four countries at the same time, the United States, China, Britain, and the Soviet Union, until the DPRK formed a new government and then transferred power. This proposal was widely recognized by the countries of the world at that time, but the plan could never catch up with the change, and soon the battlefield situation changed, and Japan surrendered in advance, resulting in china and Britain being unable to compete for the right to dominate Korea, leaving only the Soviet Union and the United States.
At that time, the main American forces were all in Japan, but the Soviet army had advanced to the northern part of Korea, and soon it would come to the south of Korea, and it would gain control of the entire Korean Peninsula. Naturally, the United States side does not want to give up, but if it really goes to war with the Soviet Union, their side's combat effectiveness is obviously insufficient, and naturally it is still based on peace talks and diplomacy.
A number of senior U.S. military officers held emergency meetings overnight at the Pentagon to discuss countermeasures on the Korean Peninsula, and they also received orders from their superiors to quickly draw a demarcation line between the United States and the Soviet Union. During the deliberations, one admiral noticed that Japan had consulted with Russia over the partition of Korea, and that they had decided to divide it according to the latitude and longitude of the earth, with 38 degrees north latitude as the dividing line. The U.S. military thought the idea was very good, and they quickly drafted a division in this way, with North Korea to the South and the Soviet Union to the north, and the draft was quickly submitted to Stalin.
The U.S. military was ready for the Soviet Union to turn the other cheek, after all, it was the Soviet Union that occupied most of the Korean Peninsula at that time, and it was acceptable that they would divide it further south. However, what the US military did not expect was that Stalin quickly agreed, but there were two additional conditions, the first was to claim Japan's Kuril Islands, and the second was to divide the Japanese mainland according to 38 degrees north latitude, and the north of Hokkaido belonged to the Soviet Union.
The Kuril Islands were acceptable to the Soviet Union and the US military, but it was absolutely impossible for the Soviet lions to open their mouths to want Japan, they spent too much effort to occupy Japan, and the Japanese mainland was much more important than the Korean Peninsula, so the United States resolutely refused to ask the Soviet Union.
But Stalin did not give up, he knew that the actual controller of Japan at present was Lieutenant General MacArthur of the Us Army, so he sent the Soviet representative in Japan to talk to MacArthur, hoping to use him as a breakthrough. But MacArthur was a fearless lord, did not care at all about the threat of the Soviet mission, and said that once any Soviet army set foot on the land of Hokkaido, Japan, he would arrest and kill all the Soviet representatives in Japan.
Faced with MacArthur's resolute attitude, coupled with the military arrangements of the US military in Japan, the Soviet Union felt that they might not be able to win, and the US army also had atomic bombs, and once the two sides officially went to war, it was likely to cause both sides to lose and let other countries take advantage of the situation. Eventually the Soviet Union abandoned Hokkaido and accepted the Kuril Islands and north of Korea, leaving the rest to the United States.