The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  On his first day, No saw several Russian officers. They were living in the rail tunnel, eating at the officers’ mess, and advising the North Korean navy. One of them strutted around outside the tunnel with a dog. The Americans also put in an appearance that day. They flew over the tunnel in B-29s, dropping bombs, chasing the Russians and the North Koreans into the tunnel for shelter.

  That night, No’s jubilance about the future was confirmed by the vice-commander of the naval academy. He told the new ensigns they would become pilots. He did not say when or where, but ordered them to pack up immediately. They marched again that night and stopped at a small depot, where a two-car train took them north. It stopped at dawn inside a railroad tunnel to avoid American air attack. No took a delicious swim that day in a nearby river and ate a leisurely lunch in a small village. At dusk, they resumed their journey, rolling farther north. At midnight, they stopped to change trains in a station on the south side of the Tumen River, which marks the border between North Korea and China.

  “The crossing will be made in complete silence,” an officer announced after they boarded a Chinese train pulled by a black steam locomotive. “Take off your uniforms and all signs of rank. Put on these clothes.”

  No was given padded black cotton pants and a jacket. At first he thought they were work clothes. But as the train chugged across the river, he realized he was wearing the uniform of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

  CHAPTER 5

  Kicked in the Teeth

  I

  Thanks to Kim Il Sung’s stubborn refusal to listen to his tactical betters, he had lost, in less than four months, most of his army and much of its weaponry. He was helpless to stop American aircraft from devastating his cities and slaughtering his retreating troops. As one of his commanders later wrote, the bombing “tormented” the Korean army: Soldiers “could neither fight nor move during daylight . . . As soon as the aircraft sound was heard, one could see the serious neurotic state in which the soldiers were terrified out of their wits.”

  Kim’s war spun completely out of control in the first two weeks of October. South Korean and American troops advanced north across the thirty-eighth parallel and began taking control of his country. He fled the capital and hid near the Chinese border. Fearing attack from the air, he and nearly everyone in his government lived in bunkers, caves, and tunnels during the day, traveling only at night. The future of Kim Il Sung and the continued existence of North Korea were now in the hands of Stalin and Mao.

  Stalin had applauded the idea of Communist expansion on the Korean Peninsula and was enthusiastic about forcing the Americans to spend treasure and spill blood to try to stop it. But he did not want a ground confrontation with the United States. After Inchon, when it seemed likely that North Korea would be lost, Stalin bluntly told Khrushchev that Moscow would never use troops to stop the Americans unless they invaded the Soviet Union itself. The Great Leader and his country were expendable. If he had to, Stalin said, he could tolerate Americans on the border with China and the Soviet Union.

  “So what? Let the United States of America be our neighbors in the Far East,” he said. “They will come there, but we shall not fight them now. We are not ready to fight.”

  Like Stalin, Mao lost little sleep worrying about the survival of Kim Il Sung, viewing him as an irritating incompetent. Kim himself was to blame for this. Before the war started in June, at his first meeting with Mao, when he broke the news that Stalin had given him a thumbs-up to invade South Korea, Kim acted uppity. That impression deepened in the early months of the war as Kim failed to keep Beijing informed about the fighting, turned down Chinese aid offers, and ignored advice from Mao that might have prevented the disaster at Inchon.

  But unlike Stalin, Mao could not stomach the idea of Americans prancing around on his country’s eastern border. He worried that they might cross into Manchuria or perhaps arm the Nationalists in Taiwan for an invasion. “If the American imperialists are victorious,” he told his Politburo in early August, “they will become dizzy with success, and then be in a position to threaten us. We have to help Korea; we have to assist them.”

  Soon after Kim’s catastrophic defeat at Inchon, China began making substantial preparations to do exactly that. On October 8, Mao issued an order that created a Chinese volunteer force, named a famous general as its commander, and began assembling troops near the North Korean border. In a telegram to Kim, Mao said, “We have decided to send volunteers to Korea to help you fight against the aggressors.” The plan was for Chinese soldiers to begin moving into Korean territory around October 15.

  The Great Leader, by then in dire need of rescue, was giddy with happiness.

  “Well done!” he said. “Excellent!”

  Mao, however, did not tell Kim that China had a key precondition before it would fight the Americans: air cover.

  The Chinese military did not have a modern air force. Aware of this weakness, Stalin had told Mao back in July that “we will do our best to provide air cover” for Chinese soldiers if the Americans crossed the thirty-eighth parallel.

  Mao wanted more than words. Fearing that his soldiers would be slaughtered, as the North Koreans had been, by American air supremacy, Mao wanted an ironclad commitment from Stalin. He expected the Soviet air force to work with the Chinese infantry and push the Americans south.

  On October 9, 1950, just a day after delighting Kim Il Sung with news that the Chinese infantry was coming to the rescue, Mao secretly sent two senior officials, Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao, to talk to Stalin. Their orders were to tell him that China would not rescue North Korea without a commitment of air support. The Chinese argued with the Boss for two days at his villa on the Black Sea.

  “We asked, ‘Can you help with your air force?’” Zhou said later. “[Stalin] vacillated, saying that if China had difficulty, then it was better not to send troops, that if North Korea was lost, we would still be socialist, and China would still exist . . . We just wanted the Soviet Union to send some of their air force, and then we could go in, but without the air force, we would be in trouble. Stalin said he could not send [his] air force.”

  Exasperated by Stalin’s games, Mao pulled the plug. In an October 12 telegram, he told the Soviet leader that China had changed its mind. It would not bail out North Korea. At the same time, though, Mao kept Chinese troops near the Korean border and continued their training.

  Mao’s telegram weighed heavily on Stalin because a week earlier the Soviet Politburo had decided to abandon North Korea rather than risk a ground confrontation with the Americans. In Moscow the morning after he heard from Mao, Stalin received still more discouraging news about North Korea. The chief of the Soviet navy told him that MacArthur was uncoiling yet another amphibious assault, this time off the east coast of North Korea. A massive naval flotilla, including three aircraft carriers, a battleship, three heavy cruisers, twelve destroyers, two squadrons of minesweepers, and hundreds of assault landing crafts, had been spotted in the East Sea. It was headed for the harbor of Wonsan, which Stalin feared would complicate an already disastrous situation and give the Americans control over all of North Korea.

  That afternoon, Stalin decided to cut his losses. He composed an extraordinary telegram. Without ceremony and without delay, Stalin wrote, Kim and his army must flee the Korean Peninsula, head for the Manchurian boondocks, and await further instructions.

  “The Chinese have again refused to send troops,” Stalin wrote. “Because of this, you must evacuate Korea and retreat in the northern direction in the shortest possible period.”

  Kim was stunned. He said it was “very hard” to give up, according to a telegram sent to Stalin by Shtykov, who had delivered the crushing news to Kim late at night in his makeshift headquarters in the town of Kosangjin near the Chinese border.

  Yet the Great Leader began preparations to skulk away as instructed. On the same night that Stalin ordered him to retreat
, Kim asked Shtykov for advice on leaving the country and requested that the Soviets give him an evacuation plan. He called a trusted member of his Front Military Council, Major General Choe Kyong Dok, to his headquarters and told him to leave at once for Manchuria and scout out bases. Over the next few hours, Kim reportedly told his closest associates, partisans who had fought with him in Manchuria, that they would again have to become guerrilla fighters.

  Then, shockingly, Mao changed his mind again.

  Just hours after Stalin sent the cable that terminated the existence of North Korea, he received a cable from Mao that said China had decided to fight, with or without Soviet air cover. Within a week, 260,000 Chinese troops began crossing the Yalu River into North Korea.

  Mao simply could not accept American domination of the entire Korean Peninsula. MacArthur’s demands for the North’s unconditional surrender, together with his threats against China, had exacerbated Mao’s insecurity. He and the entire Chinese leadership, fearing that the Americans might soon march into China, decided it was best to go to war on Korean soil.

  Stalin welcomed China’s final flip-flop. He wrote a letter to Kim, saying that he “was glad that the final and favorable decision for Korea has been made at last.”

  Kim, meanwhile, had become a passive observer of his mouse-like insignificance.

  Upon the whims of Stalin and Mao, he and his country had ceased to exist. A day later, upon the whims of Stalin and Mao, he and his country were permitted to exist again. The Great Leader’s status as a player in the power struggles of the Soviet Union and China was painfully clear: North Korea and its people were expendable. So was he.

  Kim’s humiliation—and the bitterness it engendered—would permanently stain North Korea’s relations with the Soviet Union and China. In the long run, Kim would get revenge. He would play the Communist powers off each other while milking them for development aid, industrial expertise, and military hardware. But in the short run, as China took command of the war he had so eagerly started, Kim’s degradation was just beginning.

  II

  Inside China, No Kum Sok traveled north by train and then by truck to Yanji airfield, which had a wide dirt runway and a handful of low brick barracks. Thirty Soviet-built, propeller-driven training aircraft were parked out in the weather, which soon turned bitingly cold. The flight instructors at Yanji were North Koreans whose planes and home air bases had been destroyed by American air attacks in the first weeks of the war.

  The airfield was in Jilin Province, a region that in the 1950s was still commonly referred to as Manchuria. It had been part of the guerrilla-war turf of the young Kim Il Sung in his fight against Japanese colonial police, and most of the population was still ethnic Korean. In the city of Yanji, No felt as though he had never left Korea. Newspapers were printed in Korean script. Courses at the city university were taught in Korean. No heard Korean music on local radio, ate Korean food in local restaurants, and attended a Korean drama in a local theater. It was only when performers in the play referred to “our country” and meant China that No was jolted into remembering he was in a foreign country.

  Being inside China was the necessary condition that allowed him to learn how to fly. If the planes, pilots, and students at Yanji airfield had been back in North Korea, they would have been obliterated by American bombs.

  Location defined safety in the Korean War, which was fought under a curious set of unwritten superpower rules. They were intended to confine all shooting, bombing, and killing to the Korean Peninsula and prevent violence from spreading into a broader war. Leaders in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing who could have expanded the war chose not to do so. Truman ordered American pilots not to go after ground targets in Manchuria or the Soviet Far East. His restraint was sorely tested when the Chinese troops poured into Korea. His generals drew up plans to drop nuclear bombs on Manchuria, and U.S. combat pilots slipped over the border to hunt airborne enemy aircraft. Still, ground targets in Manchuria remained safely out-of-bounds throughout the war.

  As a result, No found that his new quarters were tranquil—and surprisingly comfortable. Instead of shivering in a cave or a tunnel, he slept on a new straw mattress in a well-heated barrack. There was plenty of meat in his soup. Because the mission at Yanji was to teach young men how to fly as quickly as possible—and not to torment them with discipline and physical hardship—the students were allowed a reasonable amount of sleep. They awoke at six in the morning and were encouraged to be in bed by nine or ten at night.

  No had never flown in an airplane, never been near one. He had never even driven a car. To his relief, other naval cadets were just as green. They began their careers as combat pilots with four weeks of classroom basics, learning the principles of flight, how an internal combustion engine worked, and the names of an airplane’s parts—rudders, flaps, ailerons. By early winter, as snow blanketed Manchuria, they had left the classroom and climbed aboard the World War II–era propeller planes that Moscow had shipped east by train. Instructors taught them how to fly Yak-18s, a light, fabric-covered two-seater with a three-hundred-horsepower engine and a passing resemblance to the Japanese Zero, the fighter No would have flown had his father not nipped his adolescent urge to be a kamikaze pilot in the bud.

  On his first flight, No sat in the front seat of a Yak-18 with an instructor seated behind. The takeoff was so smooth that No did not realize he was airborne. Gradually, the instructor allowed him to take control while explaining what speed to maintain to avoid stalling. No understood and memorized everything. On his next flight, he repeated the routine precisely. He had a good mind for navigation, an intuitive feel for flying, and preternatural self-confidence. His stomach never got upset, even when he flew upside down. Most important, learning how to fly gave him hope. He had a means to get out of North Korea.

  He soloed in the Yak-18 after thirty hours of training, then moved up to the Yak-11, a heavier, faster, all-metal, prop-driven fighter that was more difficult to master. A day after his first solo in the bigger plane, on a morning when the airfield was covered in fresh snow, he volunteered to be the first to go up. Thirty minutes later, as he returned for landing, the flat winter light, a gusty wind, and the snowy runway confused his vision. Losing track of his altitude, he stalled the plane, bounced it on the runway, became airborne, bounced it again, and finally came to a stop. The base commander, who happened to be watching, gave No a dirty look.

  “That was the lousiest landing I have ever seen,” he said.

  The lousy landing, though, did not damage No’s standing in the Korean People’s Air Force, which paid much more attention to a pilot’s political loyalty than to his flying skill. Political officers closely monitored pilot trainees, trying to identify and weed out those who might take advantage of a solo flight and defect to South Korea.

  Because defection was exactly what he had in mind, No needed a cloak of patriotism to hide his intentions. He created a pro-Communist newspaper for the airfield and made himself its hyper-Communist editor in chief. In the pages of the Battle Gazette, No affirmed his devotion to the Great Leader and flattered senior officers at the airfield.

  No had few close friends among the cadet pilots, even though they had worked, slept, and eaten in close quarters for more than a year. Keeping them at a distance made his Red act easier and less exhausting. All North Korean pilots were required to snitch on each other, reporting regularly on conversation and behavior that could be interpreted as disloyal or suspicious.

  No trusted only one person at Yanji, Kun Soo Sung, who had been a naval cadet and was now a student pilot. Six years older than No, Kun was better educated and more worldly than most of the other North Koreans, having attended a merchant marine school in Korea run by the Japanese during World War II. Like No, Kun was a fake Red. The two young pilots could sense the pretense in each other and intuit a mutual loathing of Kim Il Sung’s government. They told each other their secrets. Kun said he want
ed to move to England when the war ended. He believed that the best way to survive was to put on a show of his love for the Great Leader and the Workers’ Party of Korea, of which he was a member.

  Kun became No’s partner in the production of the Battle Gazette. They worked every night to write and illustrate three or four news items for the paper. Each was handwritten by No, while Kun drew sketches and caricatures. There were no typewriters or mimeograph machines at the airfield. No and Kun pressed down as hard as they could with pens on sheets of paper separated by carbon paper. Then they pasted the original and a few faint copies on cardboard, which they passed around in the flight line rest area, where student pilots, instructors, and some senior officers gathered every day.

  The Battle Gazette used humor to exhort students to perfect their flying skills while minimizing flight hours and maximizing fuel savings. It warned them to avoid mistakes that could damage aircraft and runways. No and Kun also took pains to praise the bravery and self-sacrificing spirit of the North Korean military, particularly those in the infantry, who were fighting the Americans at the front. Everything in the newspaper emphasized the need for young pilots to obey their wise and hardworking superiors.

  Political officers took notice. They praised No by name during ideology meetings. Whenever he could, No stood up at these meetings, denounced American imperialism, and thanked the Great Leader for his courage and wisdom. No’s standing as a patriot also benefited from the long hours of parade-ground marching that he and the other naval cadets had been required to do back in North Korea. The commander in Yanji beamed when they marched smartly around the airfield, singing—in Russian—revolutionary songs. He called them the Special Group.

  A voice No did not hear that Manchurian winter was that of Kim Il Sung. The volume on the Great Leader’s propaganda machine was uncharacteristically low, which disturbed No. To become an air force pilot, No needed to be perceived as a reliable Red. Publicly praising the most recent pronouncements of the Great Leader had always been the easiest way for No to impress his superiors with his sincerity.