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

by Bradley K. Martin

  As Goncharov, Lewis and Xue observe (Uncertain Partners, p. 214), experience before the invasion had already found the guerrilla struggle in the South lacking, and had given Kim ample reason not to pin too many hopes on a popular uprising. “Kim Il Sung had decided on the need for an invasion by conventional forces because his guerrilla tactics, approved by Stalin in .March 1949, had miscarried. Kim presented his case for the invasion on the grounds that these tactics would somehow succeed in the wake of a full-scale attack, but he never fully apprised Stalin of the reasons behind the earlier failures.”

  Also see p. 155, where the authors suggest that Kim himself prevented any uprising by maintaining such secrecy before the invasion that Pak could not organize the Southern communists. A cynic (or, as Cumings puts it on p. 601 of Origins II, someone not “prey to what might be called the fallacy of insufficient cynicism,” which he believes afflicts Americans), if aware of Kim’s power struggle with Pak, might harbor a suspicion that this was deliberate, because a successful uprising might give Pak too much of a boost in stature and entitle him to share power. Such a calculation would have been more or less along the lines of Stalin’s own supposed reasoning in denying Kim and the other partisans a role in the military liberation of Korea in 1945. In any event, Goncharov and his coauthors quote Yu as saying in an interview that Kim had counted on Pak to take care of the uprising, “but he failed.”

  14. Choi Yearn-hong, in a Washington-datelined column of reminiscences entitled “The Korean War,” Korea Herald, June 21, 1994.

  15. Those lyrics comprise the second verse plus the chorus. The first verse (according to Tak Jin, Kim Gang Il, and Pak Hong Je, Great Leader Kim Jong Il, vol. 1 [Tokyo: Sorinsha, 1985], p. 114) goes:

  Bright traces of blood on the crags of Changbaek.

  Still gleam, Still the Amnok carries along .signs of blood in its stream.

  Still do those hallowed traces shine resplendently

  Over Korea ever flourishing and free.

  16. From the transcript of “Testimony from the North,” a telecast on South Korea’s MBC-TV program Current Debate, June 22, 1990. The transcript is excerpted in Kim, Truth About the Korean War, pp. 92–93.

  17. Glenn D. Paige, The Korean Decision: June 24–30, 1950 (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1968), pp. 117–118.

  18. Cumings describes Acheson s mindset: “If in 1950 the problem was the Korean civil war, Acheson would judge it a war about Europe, or the world, that happened to occur in Korea” (Cumings, Origins II, p. 44).

  In disagreeing with the Pentagon’s view, Acheson argued that American prestige “would greatly suffer if we should withdraw.” Cumings observes, “The distinction was between what we might call Korea’s military-strategic significance and its political-strategic significance. Regardless of whether Korea was a good place to fight or not, the United States was there and committed, and thus had to emerge as a good doctor or cause a perceived weakening of its stand elsewhere. Such logic could survive every military argument that Korea was not important strategically … because the premise was psychological and political, not material or martial” (Origins II, p. 48).

  19. See Gardner’s introduction to The Korean War, which he edited. Gardner observes (p. 6), “The State Department’s initial soundings of .Moscow’s intentions brought responses which satisfied the experts that Korea was in fact not the prelude to a general Soviet offensive. But no one in the U.S. government corrected or amended the President’s assertion that the Russians had passed beyond subversion to armed invasion and war.”

  20. For a discussion of this point, quoting Isaac Deutscher and Daniel Yergin, see van Ree, Socialism in One Zone (see chap. 4, n. 1), pp. 8 ff

  As an example of the conventional Western view at the time, consider a New York Herald Tribune correspondent’s comment: “If we cede the Asian mainland to the Communists without a fight, we will greatly strengthen our enemy. We will give the Chinese military dictatorship time to build an even stronger and better army. We will give them the opportunity to liberate’ the rich prizes of Indo-China and Thailand. But we will not be giving them only man power and raw materials. We will be giving them something of great strategic importance. If we pull out of Asia we say to the Soviet world, Your eastern flank is now comparatively secure. Go ahead and concentrate on Europe.’ If we do the Soviet world this favor, Europe will eventually go under” (.Marguerite Higgins, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent [New York: Doubleday 1951], p. 215).

  21. Confidential letter from Dulles to South Korean President Syngman Rhee, June 22, 1953, declassified and published in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1952–1954, vol. XV, Korea (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1984), pp. 1238–1240. This was a rationale that Washington officials might have done well to recall and ponder carefully in September of 1950, before sending their troops across the 38th parallel to “liberate” North Korea.

  The swift UN Security Council decision figures in a 2001 argument by Russian scholars that the United States secretly hoped for an invasion and had plans to meet it. Aleksandr Orlov and Viktor Gavrilov (see chap. 4, n. 94) are reported to contend that the resolution must have been drafted beforehand by the U.S. State Department as part of its preparations. However, the remarkable haste was not in the drafting of the resolution. That is the sort of work, after all, that the department’s diplomats and lawyers were trained to do expeditiously. Rather, what was remarkable was that the UN Security Council acted almost immediately. For that, there is a plausible explanation that does not involve a high-level U.S. conspiracy to invite an attack. Korean War correspondent Denis Warner reports that the United Nations at the time of the invasion already had dispatched a pair of Australians to observe, from the southern side, the outbreaks of violence that had been occurring along the 38th parallel. The day before the Northern invasion Maj. Stuart Peach and Squadron Leader Ron Rankin reported to the UN Commission in Seoul, saying they had found the South Korean military defensively oriented, not in condition to wage a major attack on the North. When the invasion occurred, the commission urgently cabled the report to the UN secretary-general in New York. “No report could have been more timely,” Warner observes (International Herald Tribune, June 14, 2000, p. 7). “The UN Security Council did not have to rely on information from the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, the South Korean government or other observers whose impartiality might have been open to question. It had its own report from its own specialists in its own commission in Korea, of which neither the United States nor South Korea was a member.” Warner adds that “if the Peach and Rankin report had not been immediately available, days might have passed before the Security Council could have mustered enough evidence to persuade its members to act. By that time, the Soviet Union [then boycotting the council] would have resumed its seat and used its veto.” Without the Peach and Rankin report, North Korea “probably would have won the war,” taking over the whole of the South before the UN forces could intervene.

  22. Hankuk Ilbo, November 14, 1990.

  Yu cited Choe Yong-gon as one who “was said to have opposed all-out war, pointing to the possibility that the United States would intervene.” He added that because Choe and Kim Il-sung “were not getting along at the time,” Kim Chaek was made frontline commander, a position to which Choe would have been entitled by rank order (Hankuk Ilbo, November 11, 1990).

  23. “Gook” is a racial and ideological slur applied, in recent decades, mainly to Asians. A retired U.S. Navy admiral in a 1970 book used the word fifty-four times, by the count of one reviewer. The admiral defended his language in this way: “Throughout this book I use the word ‘gooks’ in referring to the North Koreans. Some people object to this word. By ‘gook’ I mean precisely an uncivilized Asiatic Communist. I see no reason for anyone who doesn’t fit this definition to object to the way I use it” (Daniel V Gallery, The Pueblo Incident [New York: Doubleday 1970], p. xi., quoted in Frank Baldwin, “Patrolling the Empire: Reflections on the U
SS Pueblo,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, [Summer 1972]: p. 60).

  William Safire has reported (“On Language,” Asahi Evening News, May 14, 1995) that “gook” began as a term to describe a Spanish-speaker, particularly a Filipino, “and was later used in South Korea and Vietnam to denigrate all non-whites.”

  Reading Safire s account soon after I had devoted much of a year in Seoul to studying Korean, I wondered about continuity. Could the term, after a period of disuse, have been re-minted independently after 1945 based on the Korean word variously Romanized as gook, guk, kook or kuk ? The word means “country” or “nationality,” as in Hanguk for South Korea and Miguk for the United States of America. Each of us, regardless of race, creed or color, is from one kuk or another. But I found evidence against my theory in a John D. MacDonald novel published in the middle of the Korean War, The Damned (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Gold .Medal Books, 1952), which applies the term to .Mexicans. Mac-Donald on page 31 describes killer Del Bennicke as follows: “He had an un-grammatical flair for languages, came from New Jersey, and thought of all other races as gooks.”

  24. Baik II, p. 299.

  25. Hankuk Ilbo, November 14 and 16, 1990. Yu says the frontline command moved south from Seoul to a mountain temple for the Taejon offensive, with Chief of Staff Kang Kon in charge until Kang was killed when his jeep hit a mine. Kang’s temporary replacement, Yu, had to report Kang’s death to Kim Il-sung, sending the message off to “higher headquarters.” From Yu’s account, then, it seems Kim would not have been with Kang and Yu in the frontline command headquarters at the time of the Taejon offensive.

  If, as Yu implies, Kim as commander in chief stayed away from actual combat situations, that seems a wise enough move for the country’s leader—even if Kim’s propagandists preferred to picture him recklessly throwing himself into the thick of the fighting. Baik Bong claims that Kim personally led the three most successful battles—the capture of Seoul, the capture of Taejon and the defense of Height 1211, or Heartbreak Ridge. He “visited wretched villages, falling down and burning under the enemy’s bombs and fire bombs, comforting the peasants and encouraging them to join the struggle to rout the enemy; called at the smoking front at night when enemy aircraft showered bullets like hail, with star shells. It appeared that he took no care of his own personal safety, so there was no inducement for adjutants to take things easy” (Baik II, pp. 293–294, 613).

  Dae-Sook Suh cites a Russian’s epic wartime poem recording that Kim was wounded in a battle near Hamhung (Kim Il Sung, p. 155). There is, however, no mention of such a wound in Baik Bong’s biography, and it is hard to imagine Kim passing up a chance to enhance his image with a genuine battlefield wound.

  26. Yu Song-chol’s testimony in Hankuk Ilbo, November 11, 1990.

  27. As an official U.S. history put it, “this North Korean method of attack had characterized most earlier actions and it seldom varied in later ones” (Roy E. Apple-man, South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961]). (Lacy C. Barnett, in a manuscript chapter, “19th Infantry at the Kum River,” quotes this passage. I am grateful to Colonel Logan for passing along his copy of the Barnett chapter, which I have found useful.)

  Cumings writes (Origins II, p. 687) that “Americans first felt the combination of frontal assault and guerrilla warfare in the battle for Taejon. Local peasants, including women and children, would come running along the hillsides near the battle lines, as if they were refugees.” On signal they would reach into their packs, pull out weapons and attack the Americans. “The retreat from Taejon ran into well organized roadblocks and ambushes, often placed by local citizens. From this point onward, American forces began burning villages suspected of harboring partisans.”

  28. It is not the purpose of this book to break new ground on the military conduct of the Korean War, which itself has been the subject of a great many books including several very good ones. But evoking the sheer ferocity of that war is important to the story as it will develop in later chapters. My uncle saw about as much fighting as anyone there at the time. His role figures in some military histories of the war, but they seldom quote him at any length on what he saw. Perhaps the reader will indulge me as I relate a few episodes as seen through Ed Logan’s eyes.

  29. Hankuk Ilbo, November 14, 1990.

  30. Goulden, Korea: The Untold Story of the War (see chap. 4, n. 10), p. 183.

  31. Cumings observes (Origins II, p. 691) that the average GI “came from an American society where people of color were subjugated and segregated, and where the highest law officer in the land, Attorney General McGrath, had called communists ‘rodents.’ It thus did not take long for soldiers to believe that Koreans were subhuman, and act accordingly.”

  32. Baik II, p. 289.

  33. See Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners, pp. 163, 171–172.

  34. Baik II, pp. 311–313.

  35. Hankuk Ilbo, November 14, 1990. Yu adds, “On 28 September Seoul fell, and the new defense lines became meaningless. Each individual was engrossed in fleeing … , with the KPA command structure in total collapse. Contact between the Front Line Command and the Auxiliary Command Posts was cut off. .Mass confusion set in to the point where we did not even know the whereabouts of commanders. Kim Il-song had no choice but to have us establish a defense line north of the 38th parallel. … We desperately tried to halt the northern-advancing … forces who had broken through the 38th parallel. However, there was nothing we could do with our strength alone. Just as the South Korean regime was rescued at the last minute from a burial at sea by the United States, it was the Chinese forces’ entry into the war which saved Kim Il-Song’s regime at the last moment.”

  The first on the communist side to bring up the possible benefits of a “strategic retreat” may have been not Kim but Mao Zedong, who told Yu Song-chol in August or early September, before Inchon, that the South Korean and American enemy, pushed into a corner in Pusan, naturally would “unite tightly like clenched fists. … On such an occasion, it is not so bad for you to retreat to some extent and untie the enemy. Then they will dissolve their union as they stretch bended fingers. … By doing this, you can dissipate their strength by cutting off their fingers one by one” (Lim Un, Founding of a Dynasty [see chap. 2, n. 59], pp. 187–188).

  36. The Americans’ fear of North Korean soldiers disguised as civilians apparently led to one incident grave enough to have been compared to Vietnam’s notorious My Lai massacre. A team of Associated Press reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting with a 1999 account of the shooting by the Seventh Cavalry’s Second Battalion of scores, perhaps hundreds, of South Korean refugees under a bridge at No Gun Ri between July 26 and July 29, 1950. The same reporters investigated further and revealed in a book that they had found nineteen examples of orders by American commanders to fire on civilian refugees in 1950 and 1951. See Charles Hanley Sang-hun Choe and Martha Mendoza, with Randy Herschaft, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2001). The Pentagon declined to comment when asked whether the orders showed there had been a pattern of decisions at high levels to fire on civilians, according to Richard Pyle, “Book Details More US Killings of Civilians During Korean War” (Associated Press dispatch from New York, Bangkok Post, Dec. 1, 2001).

  37. “Since we were the lead unit we did not stop in Taejon proper but continued our attack through the town to [the] north and west,” Logan told me. “I did not pursue who did it, how many [victims], whether civilian, military, etc.—more important things to do at the time.”

  Military historian Clay Blair gives the following account of the atrocity: “North Korean security police had murdered an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 South Korean civilians and 40 American GIs and 17 ROK soldiers. The bodies ’were found wired together in shallow trenches. Six men—two American GIs, one ROK soldier, and three civilians—had survived the massacre by feigning death. They ’were buried alive in shallow
graves, still wired to the dead” (The Forgotten War: America in Korea 1950–1953 [New York: Times Books, 1987], p. 312).

  It cannot be ruled out that this massacre might have been preceded by a South Korean police massacre of some 1,700 imprisoned North Korean guerrillas just before the North Koreans captured Taejon. Deane (I Was a Captive [see chap. 4, n. 49], p. 91) describes what he considers reliable reports of such an earlier massacre. Halliday and Cumings (Korea [see chap. 4, n. 60], pp. 90–92) offer their own version of the evidence for such a massacre between July 2 and 6, 1950, with the victims numbering 4,000 to 7,000.

  Logan, who first arrived at Taejon with the Nineteenth’s commander, Col. Guy Stanley Meloy Jr. around July 6 and stayed in the area until around July 17, told me he had never heard of these allegations before I called them to his attention in a letter of January 15, 1995. While in the Taejon area he neither heard nor saw anything that would back them up, he said, noting that in all likelihood such a huge massacre “would not go unnoticed in a fluid operation underway.”

  “But who knows?” he added, acknowledging that the limits of an infantryman’s knowledge are “about the range of rifle and machine-gun fire. … Ground plodders do little investigation—accept what we just passed and move on to the next objective. Those behind might know more, but we just keep up the pressure.”

  38. See Clay Blair, The Forgotten War, pp. 325–327; Halberstam, The Fifties (see chap. 4, n. 86), p. 84; and Goulden, Korea, p. 249.

  39. Goulden, Korea, p. 248.

  40. Dwight .Martin, Time article, cited in Goulden, Korea, p. 251.