Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  A major test, Kim related, was a three-month battle with Japanese punitive forces that started in November 1933. He said five thousand enemy troops attacked an area defended by only two companies of guerrillas. The guerrillas used surprise attacks, sniping, ambush, night warfare and feints, luring the enemy into a defense zone of their own choosing. One successful tactic was burying a bomb in the bonfire just before abandoning a guerrilla campsite. Enemy troops moving into the abandoned position warmed themselves at the fire—for the last time. Ho Chi Minh would have approved. The enemy forces, however, accepted their losses and mounted a siege, determined to outlast the poorly provisioned communists. Kim said he took half the guerrillas and sneaked through the line of siege, then attacked and harassed the enemy from the rear. Finally, the Japanese lifted the siege and withdrew.

  Kim’s explanation of why outside historians knew nothing of this battle was that it was overshadowed by European news as Hitler took office in Germany while Moscow and Washington established diplomatic relations.42 Other battles did not escape notice, however. From Wangqing and other bases, Kim subsequently conducted many more small-scale military operations, usually in Manchuria but occasionally across the border in Korea. His record in guerrilla-warfare proved him a-worthy bearer of the illustrious Kim Il-sung name. Press reports in the mid- to late 1930s are sprinkled with references to the exploits of the Kim Il-sung unit.43 A report to the Comintern in December 1935 described him as “trusted and respected” within the anti-Japanese movement.44

  Most significant in building his reputation both with the Japanese foe and among fellow Koreans was a battle on June 4, 1937. The twenty-five-year-old Kim and about two hundred of his men crossed into Korea and attacked the border village of Pochonbo at night, killing some Japanese policemen. They then made off with supplies and money seized from local landlords. When a Japanese punitive expedition followed them back across to Manchuria, Kim had his men conceal themselves among the rocks on a mountain. “He told us never to fire until the enemies were close at hand,” Choi Jin-sok recalled. To conserve his unit’s scarce ammunition, Kim had his men push rocks down upon the attacking Japanese. “Rocks rolled down with a thundering noise,” according to Choi. As the Japanese fled, the Koreans captured enough weapons for each guerrilla to be armed with an up-to-date rifle.45

  Most of the men serving under Kim were Korean, and later he wished to be remembered as commander of a body he referred to as the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army. Outside historians, however, know the “KPRA” as the Second Army Corps of a Chinese communist-led force that was called at first the Northeast People’s Revolutionary Army. From 1936, it was known as the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. (The Chinese referred to Manchuria as Northeast China.) A 1936 declaration of the NEAJUA explained that “every Chinese with passion and brains knows that there is no way for survival other than fighting the Japanese.” It added a welcome to “all the oppressed peoples, the Koreans, Mongolians, Taiwanese and their organizations,” to join the army.46.

  Kim led at the company and battalion levels and handled political commissar duties for the party. His Chinese education helped him advance quickly as he gained experience—and as his Chinese and Korean seniors were killed, captured or lured into cooperation with the enemy. While still in his mid-twenties he commanded a division. From around 1938, he commanded the entire Second Directional Army Corps within the NEAJUAs First Route Army. The units he actually led in battle were much smaller than such inflated titles might suggest, never much exceeding three hundred soldiers at a time. Nonetheless, by the late 1930s Kim Il-sung’s exploits were widely known. Among Koreans he had become one of the recognized heroes of the anti-Japanese struggle.

  “He fought the Japanese expeditionary forces at great odds,” as biographer Dae-Sook Suh of the University of Hawaii wrote. “He suffered many defeats but he also scored some impressive victories and made a name for himself—indeed, he became the most wanted guerrilla leader in Manchuria. He persisted in the hopeless fight without much support, but he endured and did not surrender or submit to the Japanese.47

  The Japanese called Kim and his men “bandits,” and some other partisan units in fact were known to have degenerated into simple banditry. Sometimes, as in the case of Pochonbo, Kim’s unit raided towns and other outposts of civilization to confiscate supplies. According to Kim’s own account he operated strictly according to political principles, taking from the rich to help the poor. “Contribute guns if you have guns, money if you have money,” he demanded.

  The guerrillas could be brutal. In a letter, one Second Army unit warned landlord families that they would begin receiving first the ears and then the heads of their hostage relatives if they failed to deliver 150 sets of underwear as previously demanded.48 Press reports of the time, influenced by the Japanese authorities, paint an unflattering picture of Kim’s activities.49

  But in portraying himself as a Robin Hood, Kim got in the last word— almost by default. Describing in his memoirs an expedition to North Manchuria in 1934, he wrote that he had no “comrades-in-arms now alive” who could recall it.50 That passage was written before ex–machine gunner Choi Jin-sok resurfaced to be interviewed for a South Korean magazine, after living in Russia for five decades. Choi backed Kim’s version, claiming that when the young commander had to depend on poor villagers to feed and shelter the unit, he paid cash “even if money was short.” However, the single example Choi gave was a time when Kim’s unit billeted itself at Choi’s parents’ home.51

  Few details of Kim’s personal life during his guerrilla period are available, but in his account and those of others he comes across as both a man’s man— brave, loyal in his friendships—and a ladies’ man. Clearly he enjoyed female companionship. “Young communists loved the other sex while they worked for the revolution,” Kim recalled later. “Some people say that communists are devoid of human feelings and know neither life nor love that is worthy of human beings. But such people are totally ignorant of what communists are like. Many of us loved while fighting for the revolution. …”52 Indeed. Among the Pyongyang elite it was whispered later that Kim himself had various female companions during his guerrilla years, including both guerrilla comrades and entertainers, and had children by some of those women.

  Kim was vague about just whom he himself loved in his early years. But he did recall with affection several young female comrades. One, named Han Yong-ae, accompanied him to Harbin for his meeting with the Comintern representative, shared meals with him (but not, he insisted, his hotel room) and helped disguise him as a Chinese to keep the police at bay. In his memoirs he said that as an old man he still gazed at her picture—but he observed primly that “all the services she did me were the result of a pure, unselfish comradeship transcending feelings of love.”53

  Kim claimed to have pulled off, a bit later, a heroic horseback rescue of Hong Hye-song, whom he described as a “pretty woman political worker” who was using traditional herbal medicine to treat scabies victims in the Wangqing guerrilla zone. In one of a number of passages showing the movie scenarists’ touch, Kim related that he was riding a white horse when he heard gunfire and discovered Hong Hye-song caught in an enemy ambush. “I spurred my horse on towards her where, on the brink of being taken prisoner, she was returning the enemy fire, and picked her up instantly. The horse, sensing my intention, shot off like an arrow and galloped for a couple of miles.” Kim failed to make clear what his relationship with Hong was but he wrote that, if she had not been killed in a later battle, she “would now be gratefully sharing with me in my recollections of the white horse.”54

  Choe Kum-suk, Wangqing County party committee member for women’s work, “was as magnanimous as a man and ?warm-hearted; and at the same time, she was a woman of principle, faithful to the revolution. She would have hauled a boat over a sandy beach if I had asked her to do it.” Choe sympathized with Kim for having lost his parents, and treated him as a younger brother. She nursed him through a severe bout
of typhus. “She would visit me before anybody else when I returned from the battlefield, slipping into my hands something she felt I needed. Sometimes she would sew up tears in my clothes and knit wool into underwear for me.” Kim mimicked her “funny” Hamgyong Province accent and teased her about being pretty— although actually, with her cherubic face, “she was not a woman of great beauty. But to me, women such as Choe Kum-suk in the guerrilla zone were much nobler and prettier than the girls and ladies in the big towns.” Choe died in the enemy’s siege of Xaiowangqing in the winter of 1933–1934, Kim related.

  Communists in China, including Korean communists, had welcomed women to join the struggle, supposedly on an equal basis.55 Many did join, not only as fighters but in other capacities. Kim’s guerrilla command included female detachments in charge of sewing and cooking. The cooks numbered around thirty women and girls, Choi Jin-sok recalled. The seamstresses made the guerrillas’ uniforms and knapsacks, using cotton cloth soaked in a dye obtained from boiling the bark of oak trees. They were the same yellowish khaki color as the Japanese army uniforms, with red stars on the caps instead of the yellow stars the Japanese wore.56

  With their mixed-gender units, the communists acquired a reputation for promoting free love. Kim told of a Chinese nationalist commander who remarked that he had heard how “communists, men and women alike, all sleep under one quilt.” Kim said he replied that this was a Japanese-concocted lie: “There are many woman soldiers in our guerrilla unit, but such a thing never occurs. If they fall in love, they get married. Our discipline between men and women is very strict.”57

  If that made him sound old-fashioned, Kim revealed a contrasting mentality when he wrote approvingly about a “modern” woman of the previous generation. A friend of Kim’s father, Li Gwan-rin was a beautiful revolutionary, the “flower” of the nationalist fighting force. In times past, Kim wrote, “whenever a foreign enemy invaded the country and murdered and harassed our people, the women would conceal themselves deep in the mountains or in temples so as to avoid violation.” Li Gwan-rin was different, however. Still unmarried in her late twenties, she lived in a man’s world where men constantly pursued her while other Korean women were marrying at half her age. Li Gwan-rin did not fit the Confucian notion that chastity is a woman’s top priority, Kim said. She was “attractive, bold and of firm character. The like of her was rarely found in Korea in those days.” He gave no details of any specific liaisons Li might have enjoyed, but quoted her as lamenting that Kim’s father’s death had left her gloomy58

  A young woman named Kim Jong-suk headed the seamstress detachment of Kim Il-sung’s guerrilla unit.59 Five years his junior, she met him in 1935 when she was seventeen and sometimes worked as a member of his bodyguard detachment60 besides sewing and cooking. Some accounts say that it was in 1940 that she became his wife61 —without benefit of a wedding ceremony62 In 1942, she gave birth to the first of his acknowledged children, Kim Jong-il.

  Various sources say Kim Il-sung already had been married at least once before his marriage to Kim Jong-suk. An earlier marriage is not mentioned in either his memoirs or official North Korean histories, but in those days teenaged Koreans were considered of marriageable age. “A young man over twenty was regarded as an old bachelor,” Kim himself said63 —although he also recalled predicting that he himself might marry late.64

  Japanese police reported capturing, on April 6, 1940, a woman partisan who called herself Kim Hye-suk and who said she was Kim Il-sung’s wife.65 Various sources maintain that the woman gave a false name to confuse the police but that she was indeed Kim Il-sung’s wife (presumably common-law as in the case of Kim Jong-suk) and her real name was Han Song-hui. Han had been chief of the women’s department of Kim’s partisan band. To win her release from custody, she had to agree to sever all contact with the anti-Japanese movement, change her name and remarry.66 A Han Song-hui does make a walk-on appearance in Kim’s memoirs, in connection with events in the Manchurian guerrilla zones in the autumn of 1934, but he provided no details of her role with the partisan band or of her relationship with him.67

  Besides liking women, Kim Il-sung wrote of his “great pleasure”68 in being with children. One entire chapter of his memoirs is devoted to a pair of tap dancers who arrived in the guerrilla zones. There they-worked in a children’s entertainment corps, whose activities seem to have occupied much of Kim’s time when he was not off fighting battles. Kim said he was close to tears when he heard the life story of the older of the girls, Kim Ok-sun. Her father had promised her to a landlord’s son when she was only nine. The young man, more than twenty years old and thus over the hill as a marriage partner, “was apparently a dim-wit or cripple, with no hopes of getting married by fair and just means,” Kim related. The prospective groom’s parents had invited the girl’s peasant father for a drinking bout and there had paid him a substantial sum for his agreement to marry Ok-sun to their son once she reached fifteen. The girl’s father had considered it a good bargain until he had his “class consciousness aroused”—-whereupon he had sent Ok-sun, by then thirteen, to the guerrilla zone. Kim Ok-sun rose after liberation to become chair of the Democratic Women’s Union of Korea. Her husband, partisan Choe Gwang, became chief of the Korean People’s Army general staff.

  The younger of the two tap dancers, nine-year-old Kim Kum-sun, rested her head on Kim Il-sung’s lap and cried when she heard that her parents had been killed, he wrote. Later the little girl made such a moving speech that one of his fellow guerrillas “took her to his room, set her on his lap and put earrings and bracelets on her ears and wrists.” Kim said Japanese police captured Kum-sun, tortured her and then hanged her when she refused to give information about the communists. (Making it unnecessary for us to speculate about whether this Joan of Arc story has any connection with Pyongyang’s version of Hollywood, he wrote that “a novel and film depicting Kum-sun have been produced recently”)69 After a boy orderly-who had slept “with his arm around my neck” was killed, Kim dissuaded his comrades from breaking the frozen ground to bury him “because I felt as if he would come to life again and snuggle into my bosom.”70

  By 1935, the Japanese had targeted Kim individually, he said. Writing of one occasion when a Japanese officer and his Chinese troops were on his trail, he recalled that “we had to exchange fire with the pursuing enemy four or five times every day. When we marched, the enemy marched. And when we camped, the enemy camped. They stuck to us like leeches until our tongues were lolling out of our heads from the chase.”71 Japanese pacification teams arrested guerrillas’ relatives to gain information about the insurgents. Then they either used the information to capture the rebels or held their relatives hostage to persuade the rebels to surrender. When guerrillas surrendered or were captured, the authorities forced them to cooperate in hunting down their old comrades.

  Ex-guerrilla Choi Jin-sok recalled that, in response to such psychological warfare, many of his comrades ran away from the unit. “There were some who even attempted to kill Kim Il-sung. A large re-ward was offered for his head. Leaflets were issued in the name of a Japanese commander which announced whoever captured Kim Il-sung alive would be given half the entire Korean territory.” Choi himself-was captured in 1940 and forced to join in the anti–Kim Il-sung efforts. This betrayal brought him a ten-year prison sentence after Kim and the communists took power in 1945. Choi afterward lived in exile in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, in 1993 he said of Kim Il-sung: “I respected him before 1940 and am proud of him even now.”72

  Eventually most other anti-Japanese fighters succumbed to enemy bullets or were captured. Kim credited his own survival to a sense of destiny tinged with nationalism—and with the Confucian filial piety that his regime by the 1990s was seeking to encourage as part of the scheme to have Kim’s son succeed him. “History had not yet given us the right to die,” he said. “If we became a handful of dirt without fulfilling our duty to history and the times, we would be unfilial sons not only to our families but also to the
nation that gave us birth and brought us up.”73

  He also acknowledged that he and his men had some crucial help from others along the way “Old man Ma” at Luozigou had appeared and provided needed help in 1933 when his men were thinking of abandoning their struggle. Like-wise another old man, this one a timber mill employee named Kim, helped him and his men out-wit and escape their Japanese-led pursuers in 1935, he said. “It was strange that whenever my life was in danger benefactors such as old man Kim would appear before me and save me at the critical moment.” While some might call this luck, “others regard it as fate. They do not consider it luck when benefactors appear to help patriots who devote their all to the country and the people.”74

  In his memoirs, Kim boasted: “We could defeat the strong enemy who was armed to the teeth, fighting against him in the severe cold of up to forty degrees below zero in Manchuria for over fifteen years,”75 Fifteen years would mean right up to the 1945 Japanese surrender, for which Kim claimed credit. In fact, though, he did not stay on in Manchuria until 1945. The weight of available evidence suggests he managed to continue fighting there only until the latter part of 1940 or early 1941. By then, the Japanese campaign had succeeded to the point that it was next to impossible for him and what remained of the guerrilla force to continue fighting in company-size units as before. Guerrillas had agreed to scatter and pursue “small-unit” action instead.76 Finally, for Kim, the better part of valor was to flee, taking refuge across the border in the Soviet Union to await more favorable circumstances for the struggle.