Mao broke off the meeting with Kim, whose word he did not trust, and sent his foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, to the Soviet embassy in Beijing to find out what the hell was going on.
“Comrade Mao Zedong would like to have personal explanations from Comrade Filippov [Stalin] on this issue,” the Soviet ambassador N. V. Roshchin wrote in a cable that he immediately dispatched to Moscow. “The Chinese comrades expect a speedy answer.”
Stalin replied the next day. But he did not apologize for cutting Mao out of the information loop. The cable said flatly that because of “the changed international situation,” Stalin now supported Kim’s plans for war. The final decision should be sorted out “by the Chinese and Korean comrades together.” If China disagreed, Stalin said, an invasion would be “postponed pending further discussion. The Korean comrades can tell you the details.”
Stalin had maneuvered Mao into a corner. China needed Soviet support to industrialize, build a more powerful military, and attack Taiwan. But Stalin now made it clear that he would not be happy unless China put off the war Mao wanted in favor of the war Kim wanted.
Mao had little choice but to swallow his fury and play the cards Stalin dealt him. He met two days later with Kim and agreed to support the unification of the Korean Peninsula by force of arms. But Mao warned Kim it could be a difficult and bloody slog, saying that the Americans—or perhaps the Japanese—were likely to join the war and prolong the fight.
Kim dismissed the warning. Victory would be quick and easy, he said. He predicted that the Japanese, should they dare return to Korea, would be crushed. Echoing what he had heard from Stalin, he told Mao that the Americans had slunk out of China without putting up a fight and would do the same in Korea.
Soviet advisers in Pyongyang soon wrote up a detailed war plan. The attack would commence early on Sunday, June 25. As prescribed by Stalin, it would be disguised to look like a defensive maneuver—a justifiable reaction to a South Korean invasion. The first stage would be a relatively small “counterattack” on the Ongjin Peninsula. Then a much larger force would hit the western coast of Korea.
Four days before the planned attack, there was an intelligence leak. Kim sent urgent word to Stalin: the South Koreans had learned of the North’s plan. Kim now wanted a full-scale invasion. As Shtykov explained to Stalin in a cable, “Instead of a local operation at Ongjin Peninsula as a prelude to the general offensive, Kim Il Sung suggests an overall attack on 25 June along the whole front line.”
Stalin cabled back the same day. Go for it, he told Kim, “advance along the whole front line,” but be sure to make it look to the world as though South Korea were starting the war.
IV
When he heard the news, No Kum Sok had just returned to the naval academy after a punishing Sunday morning of infantry training. He had been crawling up a dusty mountain ridge on his belly carrying a rifle and heavy backpack.
A dour political officer dressed in navy blue spoke to No and other cadets as they lined up outside the mess hall for lunch. They were exhausted, sweaty, and caked in dirt.
“A full-scale war started early this morning,” the officer told them. “The South Koreans suddenly invaded north of the thirty-eighth parallel and advanced two to three kilometers. Our People’s Army counterattacked and has advanced twenty to thirty kilometers south of the border. The fighting is continuing.”
The Great Leader was telling the same story that day on Radio Pyongyang.
After rejecting North Korea’s earnest proposals for peaceful unification, Kim told his listeners, the “puppet government of country-selling traitor Syngman Rhee” started the war. Kim said American stooges like Rhee would be hunted down and executed. An important reason for the war, he explained, was that American capitalists were forcing farmers off their land, closing factories, bankrupting businesses, creating mass unemployment, and starving the people.
“This war,” Kim said on the radio, “is a war of righteousness for the cause of unification, independence, freedom, and democracy of the fatherland.”
At the naval academy, a teacher of politics showed cadets “evidence” of the attack: an enlarged photograph of John Foster Dulles (then a foreign policy adviser and later secretary of state under Eisenhower) talking with the American ambassador and a South Korean general as they stood near the thirty-eighth parallel. The teacher did not take questions.
As No heard it, the story about how the war began did not make much sense. He wondered how a massive surprise invasion by the South Korean army, with the muscle of the U.S. military behind it, could have been stopped after advancing just two or three kilometers.
How could the North, as Kim said on the radio, already have “liberated” many towns and cities in the South? How could the South Koreans and the Americans have been thrown back so far and so fast?
But other cadets seemed to believe, and so did the people of North Korea. Just to make sure, North Korean state radio explained again and again that the invasion was instigated by the Americans and executed by their capitalist stooges in Seoul.
No heard this version of how the war started so many times that he came to believe it.
It would be years before he learned who attacked whom. But he never bought the idea that whipping the South Koreans—and the Americans—would be easy.
PART II
WAR
CHAPTER 4
The Great Liberation Struggle
I
For a few days, Kim Il Sung was a military genius.
His forces were all but unstoppable, particularly the ones howling south in Soviet tanks. South Korean soldiers abandoned their positions after discovering that shells from American rocket launchers bounced harmlessly off T-34 tanks. In less than forty-eight hours, the North Korean People’s Army took Seoul, some thirty miles south of the thirty-eighth parallel. Three days into the war, nearly 80 percent of the South’s army was unaccounted for, and nearly all its artillery, trucks, and supplies were lost.
Bristling with new Soviet weaponry, North Korean soldiers were not only better equipped than their counterparts in the South but better trained, more disciplined, and more ideologically committed. Nearly half of them were battle-hardened veterans who had fought, some for as long as a decade, on the Communist side in China’s civil war. With Mao’s approval, they had returned home to become the fist of the North Korean military. Most of them came from peasant families, and they despised Koreans in the South who had been Japanese collaborators. They viewed Americans as imperialist enablers of elites who ruled in Seoul.
The Americans badly underestimated their enemy, with a condescension bred of ignorance and racism. “I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back,” General Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces in the Far East, said the day the war began. The next day, he said that if he sent just one cavalry division into Korea, “Why heavens you’d see those fellows scuddle up to the Manchurian border so quick, you would see no more of them.” American soldiers believed officers who told them that North Korean troops would run and hide at the sight of a white man.
On the battlefield, as MacArthur himself soon acknowledged, the North Koreans were efficient, skillful, and tough. Combining Japanese infiltration skills with Russian tank tactics, they overwhelmed South Korean forces and alarmed the United States, along with much of the world. Two days after the invasion began, the United Nations Security Council authorized the use of force to stop North Korea. The Soviet Union’s representative was absent from the vote and could not use his veto. On the fifth day after the invasion, President Harry Truman approved the use of ground forces. He told the American people it was a “police action.”
Whatever its name, the United States was rushing into war. As Truman privately told his secretary of state, “We’ve got to stop the sons of bitches no matter what.” Kim’s preinvasion prediction of American passivity was wrong, as was his promise to Stalin and Mao tha
t tens of thousands of South Korean Communists would rise up and help the North Korean army vanquish the imperialists.
Nothing of the sort happened. Stalin, too, had badly misread American foreign policy. He had no idea what the United States would fight for in Asia.
But for a couple of weeks, their misjudgments did not matter. North Korean troops crushed the first wave of American troops to arrive in Korea. Sixteen thousand soldiers and officers of the army’s Twenty-fourth Infantry Division rushed into the war from cushy and undemanding duty in Japan, where they were physically unfit, poorly trained, and badly equipped. Few had combat experience. After two weeks in Korea, about half of them were dead, wounded, or missing, including the division commander, General William F. Dean, who got lost in his jeep and became a prisoner of war. It was one of the most disastrous and humiliating showings in the history of the U.S. Army.
Korea, a place that had existed on the fuzzy, ill-informed edges of the American public’s awareness of global trouble spots, became the center of the first major fight against Communism. And the United States was losing badly.
Stalin fretted when the Americans rushed into the war, sending an anxious cable to Shtykov, asking if the North Korean leadership was scared “or do they hold firm?” But by late August, the Boss had calmed down. Kim’s army controlled the entire Korean Peninsula, save for an American toehold at Pusan, a city at its southeastern tip. As important to the Kremlin, Truman had refrained from publicly blaming the war on the secret machinations of the Soviet Union. To Stalin’s enormous relief, the Americans, even though they were convinced that the Soviet Union had armed and enabled North Korea, did not use the Korean conflict as a pretext for a third world war. Stalin sent a cable in late August to Pyongyang, saluting “the great liberation struggle of the Korean people, which comrade Kim Il Sung is conducting with brilliant success. [I have] no doubt that in the nearest future the interventionists will be driven out of Korea with ignominy.”
Stalin’s pleasure was short-lived. Indeed, weeks before he sent his congratulatory cable, the North’s army had begun to fall apart.
It was undone, in large measure, by Kim’s impatience and incompetence as a war planner. In his rush to invade on June 25, he chose not to wait for most of the heavy armor that Stalin had given him. Eighty-nine T-34 tanks arrived by ship in July and August. Had he waited for them, the T-34s would have more than doubled the number of tanks in his invasion force and substantially increased his chances of winning a lightning victory. Kim could have raced into South Korea in the first days of the war with three armored divisions instead of one. Other Soviet military supplies, had Kim waited for them, would have outfitted another division’s worth of infantry soldiers for the invasion. As important, Soviet equipment, food, and fuel would have substantially strengthened his combat supply lines.
As it turned out, many of North Korea’s tanks and other mechanized units broke down within days on the rough terrain. Supply lines quickly collapsed. After the initial rout, several South Korean army units stood their ground, fighting with unexpected pluck and gumming up the North’s effort to control the peninsula before massive numbers of American and international troops and their equipment could arrive. As they pushed south, many North Korean frontline commanders proved incompetent, turning certain victory into stalemate.
Desperate for better battlefield leadership, Kim begged Stalin to send Soviet military advisers to the front, saying that without them “the invasion would fail.” Just two weeks into the war, Shtykov told Stalin “he had never seen Kim Il Sung so dejected and hopeless.” In the weeks and months to come, Shtykov would have many opportunities to watch Kim come unglued. Delay and indecision in the North’s offensive gave the Americans time to reinforce the Pusan line, which protected their precarious hold on the end of the peninsula—and allowed them time to plan a counterattack.
From the first day of fighting, North Korea had an insuperable vulnerability. The country could be devastated from the sky. Its infant air force was desperately short of trained pilots. A North Korean pilot shot down on the second day of the invasion told interrogators that the North had just eighty pilots, only two of whom were any good. When these pilots attacked the South, they flew World War II–era, propeller-driven aircraft that were easily shot down. Three weeks into the war, nearly all of the North’s 132 combat planes had been destroyed. Most were strafed or bombed as they sat on runways.
“The air battle was short and sweet,” said Lieutenant General George E. Stratemeyer, commander of U.S. Far East Air Forces during the first year of the war. “Air supremacy was quickly established . . . I need not dwell on the fact that had the enemy possessed a modern air force the whole picture in Korea—from the viewpoint of land, sea, and air forces—would have been vastly different.”
To the delight of Americans drawing up bombing plans, North Korea revealed itself as a sitting duck of historic proportions: helpless and within easy striking distance of bombers based in Japan and Okinawa. The purpose of the air campaign, according to Major General Emmett O’Donnell, a veteran planner of the bombing of Japan during World War II, was to deliver “a very severe blow . . . and go to work burning five major cities in North Korea to the ground.”
The official history of the air force campaign in Korea uses the word “leisurely” to characterize the first months of bombing. “Our bombing should have been good,” said Colonel James V. Edmundson, a commander of the Twenty-second Bombardment Group. “We didn’t have any opposition and the bombardiers had all the time in the world to make their bomb runs.”
Bombs fell from the B-29 Superfortress, the hulking, long-range, four-engine plane that firebombed Tokyo and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On board these aircraft, air force cameramen safely filmed the destruction. Their images soon appeared in newsreels shown in movie theaters across the United States. From ten thousand feet, the American response to Communist aggression looked efficient, overwhelming, and, with no visible corpses, rather tidy. Within a month, bombs from B-29s had methodically ruined North Korea’s most important industrial cities. Within two months, there was—from the perspective of B-29 bombardiers—a critical shortage of targets.
Airmen aboard B-29s called it a “commuter war,” with daily missions that took them out and back from comfortable quarters in Japan and Okinawa. They usually arrived home in time for dinner. They did not see the human cost of the bombs they dropped, and as the historian Kathryn Weathersby has noted, “Their memories of the war overwhelmingly focus on the performance of their aircraft, and secondarily on the painful loss of fellow airmen” who crashed or were shot down.
Outside the United States, the targeting of cities provoked outrage. In India, Jawaharlal Nehru complained of racist disregard for human life. In the United Nations, the Soviet Union accused the Americans of “barbarous and indiscriminate bombing of peaceful towns and civilians.” There was sympathetic coverage of these charges in the international press, especially in British newspapers. But Americans did not read or hear much about it, and the wholesale killing of North Korean civilians never embarrassed politicians in the United States. It was a nonissue.
Thirty years after the truce that ended the conflict in Korea, the revised edition of the official history of the U.S. Air Force in the war said unambiguously that the “strategic air attacks destroyed none but legitimate military targets in North Korea, and the bombing was so accurate as to do little damage to civilian installations near the industrial plants [that were destroyed].” The official history noted, too, that the air force always dropped leaflets that “gave industrial workers ample warning that the bombers were coming.”
In a congratulatory letter to the commander of the bombing operation, General Stratemeyer wrote, “The Far East Air Force Bomber Command, new as it is in the annals of the United States Air Force, has made history for which you and every member of your command can be justly proud.”
II
No Kum Sok watched history being made in Chongjin.
American bomb planners had singled out the city in July, placing it on a list of major industrial targets to be destroyed. The naval academy and its three hundred cadets had moved there eleven months before the start of the Korean War. Chongjin then had a population of about 300,000 and was the political, industrial, and shipping center for the country’s northernmost province.
When air-raid sirens first sounded in the city in July, thousands of leaflets fell from the sky. Few of them, however, found their way into the city; most were blown away by the wind. Like all residents of Chongjin, No and the other cadets had been given strict orders not to read leaflets dropped from enemy aircraft. They were supposed to turn them over to political officers. Soon after the leaflets were spotted, commanders at the naval academy ordered all cadets and school personnel to flee to the surrounding mountains.
Civilians stayed put.
As No ran for the hills, the first bombs exploded. Air force fighters did not escort the B-29s that dropped them, nor did a single North Korean aircraft rise up to try to defend the city. The American bombers struck their targets with precision, destroying No’s school and most other military targets in Chongjin. That evening the naval academy set up a temporary barracks near the sea about ten miles northeast of the city. The cadets slept on cots in a long, low, unlit cave that had been cut through a mountain.
A few weeks later, on August 19, No was standing on that mountain at six o’clock in the morning, beginning his shift of sentry duty, when he saw a lone B-29 appear in the southern sky and swoop low over Chongjin. It was a reconnaissance plane, No guessed, taking photographs of the city. A half hour later, he saw four more B-29s lumber in from the south. Laying down his rifle, he crawled into a nearby foxhole and for the next five hours watched as the Americans carpet bombed Chongjin.
The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot Page 7
