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

by Bradley K. Martin

  The armistice signatories fixed a border along a 155-mile-long, two-and-a-half-mile-wide “demilitarized zone.” That left North and South roughly where they had been at the time of the 1950 invasion. (The North did gain the major city of Kaesong. Also the new border was even closer to Seoul than before, an advantage to the North in case hostilities should revive—and thus the cause of decades of anxiety in the South Korean capital.) In this war approximately 3.5 million Koreans had died—2.5 million of them Northerners, representing a quarter of the DPRKs pre-war population. Perhaps a million Chinese had died.63 The UN death toll including battle-related deaths of 33,629 Americans plus 3,194 others—Turks, Greeks, French, British, Canadians, Thais, Colombians and so on—pales beside the Korean and Chinese numbers. But from the point of view of the dead foreign soldiers’ comrades, families and friends, there were far too many losses.

  When I asked retired colonel Ed Logan what he thought the war had accomplished, his reply-was positive if laconic: “Saved South Korea.”64 But as for his view of the 1950–1953 policy of “limited war” against the Chinese and North Koreans, he said bluntly: “We should’ve nuked ’em.”

  Kim Il-sung had won the respect of his foes for the military leadership he displayed in the early days of the war.65 As Joseph C. Goulden revealed in his excellent book on the war, someone in the CIA in Washington had thought enough of Kim’s importance to his country’s war effort to offer a hit man a “grand prize of a considerable amount of money” to try to assassinate the North Korean premier.66 At home, on the other hand, Kim faced a potential political problem that Truman himself could have recognized: blame for an initially successful war gone sour. North Korea lay in ruins, devastated more thoroughly than Japan had been by the time of its 1945 surrender.67

  Kim in his Manchurian guerrilla days never had commanded more than a few hundred men in combat—and those were harassing operations, by no means comparable to the full-scale war of conquest he waged against the South. If, in the anti-Japanese struggle, he had come to be viewed as a legendary hero, now he was stuck with a bloody disaster of a war. Earlier major decisions after 1945, such as land reform, had been dictated by the Russians and had succeeded, but the invasion scheme was Kim’s call—a fact that some of the other top leaders knew, even though the masses did not—and it was a failure. As Stalin told Zhou Enlai at a Black Sea meeting in October 1950, Kim had underestimated the “enemy’s might.”68

  Unlike Truman, Kim was not about to step down voluntarily. If he did not act shrewdly, though, it was conceivable that he could lose the leadership, and its perquisites. Regarding those perquisites, he seems not to have denied himself. Despite his inspirational pronouncement that “when the people eat boiled foxtail millet, we must have it, too,” photos from the ’wartime period show Kim looking very well fed indeed—a striking contrast to his rail-thin subjects.69

  Not the least of Kim’s perks was the adoring gaze of that vast majority of his people who, believing the official version of events, were totally unaware it was Kim who had planned and started the full-scale war that killed and maimed so many of them. Kim evidently could not get enough adoration. An official biography relates a telling incident: Entertaining a group of military heroes during the war, Kim asked them coyly, “There is a song you sing at the front. Please sing that song.” The men obligingly sang the song—-which, as Kim well knew, was “The Song of General Kim Il-sung.”70

  Part of Kim’s approach to dealing with the failures of the war was to pass the buck, while harking back to the supposed golden age of his guerrilla activities. North Korean casualties in the war, he wrote, could have been cut drastically if only “flunkeyist” subordinates had taught the people the lessons of his anti-Japanese struggle, instead of directing their eyes abroad to the achievements of the socialist mother country, the Soviet Union.

  “If-we had educated people in our revolutionary traditions,” Kim wrote in his memoirs, “they could have formed small units of five to six people or fifteen to twenty people, each carrying an axe and one or two mal [about half a bushel to a bushel] of rice, and moving from mountain to mountain, firing several shots now and then and posting up leaflets; in this way they could have endured one month or two in mountains.”71 There are some similarities here with the way Korean communist guerrillas in the South, as well as the Chinese “volunteers,” actually did operate during the Korean War. And perhaps his remark is a regretful reference to Mao’s proposal for establishing a second front in the South in October 1950.72 However, Kim’s hindsight analysis seems a bit quaint when held up against the overall military reality of that conflict—a struggle so ferociously close to total war that it can be called “limited” only thanks to its nonuse of nuclear weapons and the fact that ground fighting did not spill over into other countries.

  Mainly, however, Kim dealt with the war’s failure by proclaiming over and over again that North Korea had won a great victory, repelling an invasion by the South and the UN forces. “At the time when we had been able to live a worthy life, built up on our own after the liberation, the U.S. imperialists ignited the war,” he told the people.73

  As an official biographer puts it, “all the attacks of the enemy were turned, as though they dashed their heads against the cliffs. The People’s Army mercilessly hit the oncoming enemy met them and crushed their positions. The People’s Army and the whole Korean people stood like a mountain towering in the sky brandishing their sharpened arms. On top of the mountain stood Comrade Kim Il-sung, the iron-willed brilliant commander who held in his hands the general outcome of the war, looking down upon the panic-stricken U.S. imperialist aggressors with calm and shining eyes.”74

  The North’s propaganda references to “the whole Korean people”—as if the people of North and South under Kim’s leadership had been struggling in partnership against the South Korean rulers—would have rung hollow to many Southerners. Their own military men were bad enough, overbearing and arrogant toward civilians. But the experience with the Northern occupiers seems to have been even worse. Northern troops in the South indulged themselves in drunkenness and looting. Many Southerners saw their young relatives forbibly conscripted into the North Korean People’s Army and their older relatives—civilians with backgrounds in politics or scholarship—spirited off to the North, never to return.75 Others lost friends or relatives in mass executions of people denounced as anti-communist. Some of the executions were particularly grisly beheadings by swordsmen.76 Christians were a key target for arrest and maltreatment. Thousands of people deemed “pro-American” were jailed and deprived of their property, as the North applied what correspondent Marguerite Higgins described as police-state techniques “far more ruthless than those I had seen in Poland.”77

  While they occupied parts of the South the Northerners tried to portray themselves positively as liberators, but with only mixed results. Communist propagandists sought to make the best of the American intervention by attacking the Rhee regime for flunkeyism, in an appeal to South Koreans’ nationalist feelings. Although Moscow used its leverage as supplier of aid and skills to maintain control over much of the Pyongyang regime’s basic decision making, via the Soviet embassy78 the Russians had gone to considerable lengths to disguise that fact. As the invasion approached, Moscow had withdrawn its military advisors in order to keep its major contributions to the Northern war effort hidden from outside view. That left Pyongyang in a position to decry the South’s dependence on U.S. military backing. A talented cartoonist in the hastily established communist propaganda bureau in Seoul drew what one South Korean third grader of the time considered a very effective poster. It showed a craven South Korean President Rhee kneeling down and begging Truman for help.79

  The Northern regime allied itself with elements in the South Korean National Assembly. Some of those had been bested in factional struggles and so might have felt they had little to lose. Others, however, were moderates who had beaten the Rhee forces in an election shortly before the invasion and had
taken control of the assembly. Many such moderates decided to stay on in Seoul after the communists arrived.80

  Having taken over the rice stocks, the occupation authorities tried to win friends by giving special rationing treatment to Southern families whose members joined communist youth orgainizations and labor unions. Offsetting the scheme’s successes was the guaranteed alienation of all those who did not get the special rations—many of-whom, having taken names, would be around after the communists’ departure. In yet another bid for popular support, the occupiers set up supposedly democratic “people’s committees” to govern localities—but they staffed them with mayors and other officials brought from the North, along with Southern communists.

  Farmland hastily redistributed to tenant farmers came burdened with onerous quotas for delivery of crops to the government; as a result, Higgins found, the decrees “aroused little enthusiasm.” After the Allies retook Seoul, the American correspondent also found a big change in the views of South Korean journalists she had known in the capital. Just before the war, they had been responsive and somewhat sympathetic to communist propaganda. But now she found that their earlier fervor to see the country unified, even if it should come under communist domination, had been transformed quickly into a panicked determination to flee the communist-occupied zone.81

  For decades afterward, it was an article of faith among commentators in and out of South Korea that the war had left most Southerners implacably anti-communist.82 Evidence advanced for that proposition included enormous refugee flows from north to south, the numbers not even approached by a flow in the opposite direction. Those fleeing the North had included many farmers who “abandoned their own land to become propertyless refugees in South Korea,” Higgins reported. “The pitiful swarms of refugees who fled south in the wake of our retreating army were irrefutable evidence of how much the people feared the Reds.83

  Is it possible, though, that many who moved South were not truly voluntary refugees but people who simply feared being bombed if they should remain in the North? That is the argument of scholars Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings. “There is evidence that people in the North genuinely feared that they might be hit” with atomic weapons, they write—and “anyone who has seen pictures of the North as it was in the winter of 1950–51 and the destruction of Hungnam (or Inchon), with temperatures falling to minus forty degrees centigrade, with food stocks burned, animals slaughtered and entire villages razed to the ground, might reconsider why people moved.”84 Halliday and Cumings also say that no “important” Workers’ Party officials defected to the South.85

  The South had already passed the legislation for a land reform of its own before the invasion. Redistribution, limiting any family to three chongbo or about 7.5 acres, was supposed to take place after the 1950 autumn rice harvest. Once he regained control of the South, Rhee sought to postpone the reform, but he ended up carrying it out. Halliday and Cumings believe that the Northern occupiers’ brief land-reform effort, whatever its shortcomings, had been enough of a success to pressure the Rhee regime into going ahead despite the objections of the landlord class.86

  Still, one key to the intensity of Southern anti-communism in succeeding years no doubt is the fact that Southerners with obvious leanings toward the North had either gone north or died. Like Kim Il-sung in the North, Rhee used the war to purge his half of Korea of ideological diversity. Gregory Henderson, a U.S. diplomat in Seoul in the pre-war period, wrote four decades later that people occupying an ideological middle ground had been much in evidence there as the war approached, and some of them had gone to the North during the war. But “one searches in vain for them in the North they went to. Perhaps they are hidden in northern niches where we cannot yet find them. They-were stamped out also in the South.”87

  The escalation of hatred had, of course, been mutual. After the war, while the Southerners remembered Northern atrocities, there had been far more indiscriminate killing by the other side for North Koreans to remember if the victims of aerial bombings and napalm attacks are taken into account. The regime had little difficulty fanning popular hatred against both South Korea and the United States for deeds both real and imagined: “The U.S. imperialists and their bootlickers trampled underfoot and burnt everything in all quarters. They butchered innocent people en masse. They kicked children and pregnant women into the flames and buried old folks alive.”88

  Even if many of the refugees were simply fleeing the bombing, the additional migration further reduced the numbers of malcontents in the North who might resist Kim’s policies. On top of about 3.5 million North Koreans who had migrated to the South between 1945 and the outbreak of the war, another million or so refugees fled during the Korean War. Many (including such people as those villagers who had thrown a communist official’s family down a mine shaft) joined the retreat of the UN forces from the North in the winter of 1950 after the Chinese joined the conflict.89

  Although the war with which he had sought to reunite Koreans had divided them further instead, nevertheless Kim’s regime remained unrelenting in repeating the lie of a great victory in a war begun by U.S. imperialists. During the brief occupation by UN and South Korean forces, some North Koreans had heard the truth about who had invaded whom. For the most part, though, people remained “willing to believe the regime’s version.90

  Eventually the official version would also leave out references to Chinese help. The supposed grand victory would become a purely North Korean victory. That piece of historical falsification could not be accomplished immediately since the Chinese “volunteer” army stayed on until 1958 to protect North Korea against any renewal of hostilities with the United States. North Koreans retained vivid memories of generous Chinese assistance—even as some of them criticized the Soviet Union and their own Korean Workers’ Party for not having done enough.91

  By the 1960s, however, Kim’s official biographer would have not a single word to say about Chinese help, right up through his description of the “enthusiastic cheers of Korea and the world” on July 28, 1953. That was the day the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly conferred the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the National Flag First Class and the Medal of the Golden Star on Marshal Kim Il-sung, who had “organized and led the Korean people and the People’s Army to a shining victory in the Fatherland Liberation War, with his outstanding strategy and tactics.”92 The account leaves out the small detail that the Hero of the DPRK title was awarded also to Gen. Peng Dehuai, commander of the Chinese force.93

  For public consumption in North Korea, the war was pronounced a success. The North Korean people continued to be told that the South Koreans and Americans had started the war to destroy the North. To have thwarted their evil plan was a glorious victory, affirming the system and the revolutionary tradition of Kim’s republic. “The spirit of the heroic soldiers who held out against the American invaders on Height 1211 [known to the UN troops as Heartbreak Ridge] was derived from the spirit of the guerrilla zones in the 1930s,” Kim wrote in his memoirs. “We still maintain this spirit as we advance along the straight road of our own style of socialism within imperialist encirclement.”94

  Snatching a proclaimed “victory” from the jaws of defeat with the help of the Chinese, much as he had been able to do in 1945 thanks to the Allies, Kim could well imagine that the fates were with him. We may doubt that the Korean War failure seriously dented his confidence in himself, any more than had his ultimate failure in anti-Japanese warfare.

  SIX

  With the Leader Who Unfolded Paradise

  Throughout his career, starting with the skits he produced in Jilin as a student organizer, Kim Il-sung displayed a showman’s sense. Thus it was that when Workers’ Party officials gathered in Pyongyang for a plenary session of the Central Committee on August 5, 1953, they met in a nicely appointed meeting hall equipped to seat a thousand.

  How could that be, just a few days after the armistice had been signed, in a city where the Amer
ican bombing had flattened nearly every building? The story goes that Kim had ordered the building’s foundation and walls constructed even before the armistice—on the theory that walls were more likely than roofs to withstand any further United Nations bombing attacks. The roofless structure had indeed survived. With the armistice, Kim had ordered an all-out effort to roof the building and finish its interior in time for the meeting.

  Kim viewed the post–Korean War period not as a time to relax after the horrors of the war but as a contest, in which the two opposing systems would position themselves for further struggle. The North must build a strong and attractive economy—not just for its own people but to back up a continuing push to bring the South under communist rule. The instant meeting hall was intended as a vivid symbol of his determination. The speech he gave the party officials who assembled there was entitled, “Everything for the Postwar Rehabilitation and Development of the National Economy”1

  In the several years following the armistice North Korea did rebuild its shattered economy, with a lot of help from its friends. The country—especially its capital, Pyongyang—became something of a socialist showcase. Meanwhile Kim consolidated power through continued purges against his rivals at home. His concern to limit the country’s dependence on its larger communist neighbors inspired him to begin developing a self-reliant brand of communist economics.

  Although Kim would not acknowledge the failure of the war, the country was in ruins and someone had to take some sort of responsibility. He moved to defuse the situation by blaming mid-level and low-level bureaucrats for foul-ups.2 That was not enough, though, and he sacrificed some of the leadership.

  Even as the Korean War fighting raged, Kim parceled out blame among high officials. On December 21, 1950, he addressed a meeting of the central committee of his Workers’ Party, attacking named individuals for mistakes. Some of those errors were substantive snafus, but others were “defeatism” and other attitude problems. The offense of one high official who lost all his official posts was to have remarked that it would be hard to fight without more airplanes—a comment whose truth should have been evident in view of the devastation wrought when the Americans unleashed their air power.