Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

  Historians continue to debate whether some on the communist side took the Acheson speech as a signal that the coast was clear for an invasion. Even taking into account Acheson’s wish to keep Rhee guessing, if deterrence was his goal it would seem strange for so skilled and experienced a diplomat not to make Moscow understand that the United States would not sit still for an invasion of South Korea. If what happened was indeed such a failure of deterrence, it may have been one of the most expensive cases of crossed signals in the history of-warfare.91

  On the other hand, revisionist historians starting with I. F. Stone suggested that elements in the United States and some of their allies in Asia wanted a war, somewhere in the world—as a means of rallying the American people for active opposition to communism—and were happy to maneuver the other side into striking first. That way Americans would feel they were fighting a just war. Acheson, if in tune with such an effort, would have wanted Moscow to misjudge American intent. That theory came with even less hard evidence to back it than the similar and persistent minority view that the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration intentionally maneuvered Japan into attacking first at Pearl Harbor.92

  One report does say the Acheson speech persuaded Kim Il-sung that Washington would not be eager to protect the Rhee government. Whether Kim actually believed it or not, he may well have pressed that interpretation upon Stalin while trying to persuade the Soviet leader to come to his aid.93 Mao Zedong, too, following the Acheson speech, said in a message to Stalin that he doubted the United States would defend South Korea from a North Korean attack.94

  That brings up another important change in the international situation that may have affected Stalin’s thinking. The Soviet leader was in the process of trying to tie newly communist-controlled China firmly to the anti-Western camp—as Goncharov and colleagues John W Lewis and Xue Litai have shown by marshaling important Russian and Chinese documentary evidence and interviews with key surviving figures. “By ‘drawing the line’ in Asia, Stalin was carrying out his ideas on how to prepare for a third world war,” they argue.95 It would help that process along to create a situation pushing Mao to take sides with Kim Il-sung militarily against the American-backed Rhee regime.

  In fact, as a condition for granting his approval of the invasion, Stalin insisted that Kim get Mao’s backing. Kim visited Mao in May of 1950. Mao was inwardly reluctant, since his real priority was an invasion of Taiwan to reunify his own country. It would be impractical to try to invade Taiwan while simultaneously sending troops to help Kim—-which Mao would have expected to do should the Korean invasion lead to American intervention. But with China’s Soviet aid at stake, Mao signed on. Only then did Stalin give his final approval.96

  Stalin showed diplomatic deftness in maneuvering China into taking big risks while the USSR stood in the background, but he was not the only clever one. Kim Il-sung also got what he wanted at the time (not knowing then that the war he wanted would prove to be a disaster far beyond anything he could handle on his own). Kim “was able to use Stalin’s trust for his own aims even as Stalin was using him,” say Goncharov and his coauthors. The North Korean leader “managed to make Moscow see the situation on the peninsula through his own eyes.” He persuaded Stalin that a Southern invasion of the North was imminent and would overthrow the communist regime—but that if Kim invaded first, large numbers of South Korean leftists would greet his troops by rising to overthrow the Southern leaders.97

  Soon after the 1950 Stalin-Kim meetings, Tom Connally chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, improved Kim’s case by saying the United States would “abandon” South Korea. The Soviet Union “can just overrun Korea just like she probably will overrun Formosa,” he said. South Koreans, understandably, were in shock. Rhee accused Connally of issuing the communists “an open invitation” to invade.98

  Although Acheson declined to take issue publicly with Connally’s remarks,99 in the end the secretary of state could assert that his own press club speech had provided a fairly straightforward description of just what American policy makers intended. While not mentioning Korea specifically in the speech, he spoke of areas that he had not enumerated as part of the “perimeter” and said that no one could guarantee those areas against attack. However:

  Should such an attack occur … the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations, which so far has not proved a weak reed to lean on by any people who are determined to protect their independence against outside aggression.

  As late as June 19, 1950, less than a-week before the North Korean invasion, Acheson’s representative, John Foster Dulles, reminded the South Korean National Assembly that the United States already had intervened “with armed might” twice in the twentieth century “in defense of freedom when it was hard pressed by unprovoked military aggression. We were not bound by any treaty to do this.”100

  Presumably Stalin and Kim Il-sung were aware of the warnings implicit in such comments. One explanation as to why they would ignore them comes in Yu Song-chol’s recollection that Kim, in Moscow in the spring of 1950, convinced Stalin that the North Koreans had the elements of military superiority, surprise and speed on their side—to the extent that Washington would be unable to intervene before the North had occupied the entire peninsula.101

  Yu was no mind-reader, and we need not accept his conclusion that Kim’s argument was what really convinced Stalin. The Soviet leader could very well have been lulled more by the efforts he himself had made to ensure that it would be the Chinese, not the Soviets, who would join the fight if the Americans intervened.102

  As for Kim Il-sung’s thinking, if Kim himself really believed the argument Yu quotes him as having delivered, all the old questions about U.S. intentions tied to the Truman press conference, the Acheson speech, the Connally interview and so on, decline in relative importance as factors in the decision to invade. A roughly equivalent or perhaps even more important factor becomes the matter of capability: the North Korean leader’s judgment that Washington might wish to respond but would be too late. It is not yet known precisely how Kim Il-sung might have arrived at such a conclusion. After the June 1949 withdrawal of American troops from Korea, did Kim’s intelligence apparatus fail him regarding the U.S. capability to return in force— because, perhaps, of lack of access and familiarity, the wages of that isolation from the West that Moscow had engineered and the Cold War perpetuated? Or was this, rather, a simple matter of Kim’s ambition and desperation overcoming facts and reason—“adventurism” and “reckless war-making of the worst kind,” as Goncharov, Lewis and Xue phrase it?

  A secret now, the answer may emerge if and when the doors to the North Korean archives swing open someday103

  FIVE

  Iron-Willed Brilliant Commander

  In May of 1950, while preparing its army for the invasion, Pyongyang publicly called on the South to join in peaceful unification, urging that a unified national assembly be established by the time of the August anniversary of liberation from Japan. It was a totally cynical proposal. Kim Il-sung harbored no expectation that the wary Southerners would accept the North’s terms. As planned, the propaganda offensive helped disguise the North’s intentions.

  That same month the Soviet Union started sending new military advisors to North Korea: “individuals with extensive combat experience,” as Yu Song-chol described them. The new Soviet advisors drew up a draft of a “preemptive strike invasion plan.” The assignment to translate and refine the plan went to Yu and three other ethnically Korean officers who, like him, had grown up speaking Russian in the Soviet Union. After preparing troop movements disguised as training exercises, the plan called for mounting an invasion all along the 38th parallel. Blocking any Southern advance, the Korean People’s Army would move on to take the Southern capital of Seoul in four days.

  Moscow also set in motion shipments of the needed military equipment. Once everythin
g had been shipped and the North Korean forces readied to launch their invasion, the North had twice as much manpower and artillery as the South and at least a six-to-one advantage in aircraft and tanks, according to Soviet estimates.

  In the plan, the invasion was referred to as a “counteroffensive.” Trying to avoid being branded the aggressor, Pyongyang for decades to come would maintain consistently—for both external and internal consumption—that the South had invaded first and the North had merely responded.

  Yu Song-chol said he passed the invasion plan up to Kim Il-sung. Kim then signed off on the plan, writing “Concur.”1 On June 25 at 4 A.M., the North Korean forces opened fire. The official propaganda over the years that followed repeated ceaselessly the outright lie that Kim “never for a moment relaxed his struggle to prevent war and achieve national unification peacefully” while South Korea and the United States answered him by launching “a cursed, criminal, aggressive war, for which they had long been preparing.”2

  In Seoul, it was not as if an attack were totally unexpected. “We knew better than almost anywhere in the world that the Communists planned to invade,” said Harold Noble, an American diplomat based in Seoul. “But it had been coming since 1946.” The passage of time had lulled both Koreans and Americans in the city. Like people living on the edge of a volcano, “we knew it would explode some day, but as day after day, month after month, and year after year passed and it did not blow up, we could hardly believe that tomorrow would be any different.”3 Thus, when the shooting started on that Sunday morning of June 25, the Southern forces had their guard down just as the invasion planners had hoped. Many soldiers were away on weekend passes,4 and others were sleeping when the all-out Northern artillery and tank attack hit them.

  Receiving situation reports in a natural cave near Pyongyang that they had turned into their command post, Maj. Gen. Yu Song-chol and other North Korean military brass were astonished at how easily the Southern forces collapsed. The Korean People’s Army’s 150 Soviet-made T-34 tanks frightened Southern soldiers, who fell back in helpless confusion as seven Northern divisions surged down to Seoul.

  Yu recalled just a couple of lapses at that stage in the otherwise highly successful invasion plan. One tank unit was delayed traversing mountain terrain more rugged than the planners had counted on. (The planners after all were not locals but hailed, one and all, from the Soviet Union.) The KPA First Division’s communications system broke down and a weapons storage facility blew up, like-wise causing delays. A furious Kim Il-sung ordered the First replaced by the Fourth Division and decreed death by firing squad for the First Division commander, Maj. Gen. Choe Gwang, an old comrade from Manchuria guerrilla days. The army’s frontline commander persuaded Kim to rescind the order.5 (After at least one more run-in-with Kim, in 1968,6 Choe nearly four decades later, in 1988, was named chief of the general staff of the KPA. In 1995, with the death of Marshal O Jin-u, the defense minister, Vice-Marshal Choe became the top-ranking North Korean military man.)

  ***

  When the North Koreans marched into Seoul in triumph just three days after the initial attack, Rhee’s Southern forces retreated south-ward. The Northerners hoped the war was all but won. In Korea, all roads led to Seoul. Pyongyang expected that losing the city that had been the capital for more than five centuries would put pressure on the Rhee regime to throw in the towel.

  Based on a rosy prognosis from Pak Hon-yong, the invasion plan had anticipated that Southerners would help the invaders by rising massively against their rulers. Having been the leader of South Korea’s communists before fleeing to the North, Pak was eager to restore his power base through an invasion. He had assured Kim—and Stalin—that two hundred thousand hidden communists in the South were “ready to rebel at the first signal from the North.”7

  In Seoul nothing of the sort happened. To be sure, there were happy people among the Seoul populace, wearing red armbands and running about to cheer their liberators. Happiest of all may have been prisoners who shouted, as the North Koreans threw open the prison gates, “Long live the fatherland!” Soon the streets were bedecked with posters depicting Kim Il-sung and Stalin.8 The invasion went over well with pro-communists such as an ice cream peddler who led some neighbors in chanting against the Rhee “clique” and confiscated for use as his family living quarters a mansion belonging to a former mayor.9 But after the initially well-behaved occupiers began rounding up and killing Southern “reactionaries,” even the shouts of support started to die down.10 Yu traveled to Seoul and was surprised to see that “the people on the streets were expressionless to us. When we waved our hands to them, there were few who cheered for us.”11

  The operations plan called for North Korean troops to advance nine to twelve miles a day and take over the whole peninsula in twenty-two to twenty-seven days.12 The Northerners made the huge mistake of halting their advance in Seoul for two days of rest and celebration—giving the South’s forces time to regroup. And with further communications breakdowns, the post-Seoul plans proved unworkable in some aspects. Guerrillas did help the Northern troops in some battles. But the massive uprising Kim had counted on did not occur in the hinterland, any more than it had in Seoul and vicinity13 Still, the eager Northern forces rolled down the peninsula.

  Mean-while, Kim’s propaganda machine swung into action to try to make believers out of the South Koreans. Schoolchildren in North Korean–occupied Seoul learned the catchy “Song of General Kim Il-sung”:14

  Tell, blizzards that rage in the wild Manchurian plains,

  Tell, you nights in forests deep where the silence reigns,

  Who is the partisan whose deeds are unsurpassed?

  Who is the patriot whose fame shall ever last?

  So dear to all our hearts is our General’s glorious name,

  Our own beloved Kim Il-sung of undying fame.15

  On the home front, morale was high. Only a handful of North Koreans knew that their army had invaded the South. Most believed the North had been the target of a Southern and U.S. invasion, an invasion that the North Korean People’s Army had turned back heroically. Pyongyang’s phony unification appeal just before the attack had fooled Kim’s own people.

  In the North, once the “war of national liberation” started, youngsters heeded the volunteer-recruitment slogan: “Let’s all go out and give our lives!” Kang Song-ho, an ethnic Korean from the USSR-who was living in North Korea when the war broke out, appeared on South Korean television many years later and told how he and his friends had become fired up to fight the Southern forces. “At that time, there was a lot of propaganda made about North Korea appealing to South Korea, always offering peaceful unification,” he said. Northern propaganda, as Kang recalled, claimed that “the U.S. had given instructions, and South Korea had already been made into their colony.” Rhee was inciting his men “to go and even eat up the people of North Korea.”16

  Far more serious than the misguided assumption of quick victory was the plan’s second major flaw: the assumption that the United States would stay out. Perhaps that might have turned out to be the case, if not for the Northern forces’ fatal two-day stopover in Seoul. But Kim’s assumption that the United States would not intervene to reverse a fait accompli more likely was mistaken—if he really believed that and was not simply handing Stalin a line to win Soviet support. Because of American policy makers’ assumptions about the meaning of the invasion, response was close to automatic—and there certainly would have been sentiment in the United States in favor of retaking the South even if the North had overrun all of its territory.

  Acheson and other American officials assumed that Stalin had a role in the June 25 invasion—a correct assumption, as has been amply proven with the opening of the archives of the former Soviet Union. But the Americans exaggerated the Soviet role, imagining that the Korean invasion was but the first step in an expansionist Soviet plan. They did not know that it was Kim— not Stalin—-who had taken the initiative, and for his own purely Korean purpose
s. “This act was very obviously inspired by the Soviet Union,” President Harry Truman said in a congressional briefing. Assistant Secretary of State Edward W. Barrett compared the Moscow-Pyongyang relationship to “Walt Disney and Donald Duck.”17

  Complicating matters was the universal tendency to “fight the last war,” a tendency that was reinforced by the currents of domestic United States politics at the time. Strong memories remained of the negative consequences that had flowed from appeasing the expansionist Nazis at Munich. More immediately, Truman’s Democrats and the Department of State had come under fire from Republicans for decisions and actions that allegedly permitted the “loss” of China: Mao Zedong’s 1949 victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists.

  By 1950, conspiracy theorists in a kill-the-messenger frenzy were questioning the loyalty of a host of officials who had doubted Chiang’s viability. Only four and a half months before the North Korean invasion, on February 9, Senator Joseph McCarthy had begun his Red-baiting campaign by announcing in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he held in his hand a list of 205 Communist Party members working in the State Department. For Truman to let the Korean invasion stand—and thus preside over the “loss” of yet another country—-would have made him instant grist for McCarthy’s mill.