Goncharov, Lewis and Xue say (pp. 130 ff.) that Mao, although he approved in principle Kim Il-sung’s plan for forcible reunification, was a reluctant partner at first. He wanted to focus his resources on reconstructing his civil war–ravaged country and, by invading Taiwan, fully uniting it. Stalin, however, insisted that he needed China to back up North Korea so that the USSR could remain in the background—since a more visible Soviet role might bring on World War III prematurely.
96. Ibid., p. 146. The authors say Mao, evidently more worried than when he had messaged Stalin earlier, raised to Kim the possibility of U.S. intervention, “and this time in a way that did not exclude the possibility. Mao asked him whether he would like China to send troops to the Sino-Korean border if the Americans did become involved.” Kim replied that he could win the war within a month, before the United States could intervene, and thus he “rejected the need for sending Chinese troops to the border and appeared confident that the Soviet assistance in hand or in the pipeline was all that would be needed.”
Also see Son Key-young, “Kim Il-sung .Masterminded Korean War,” Korea Times, July 21, 1994, and Yonhap News Agency dispatches from .Moscow published in the Korea Times: “Russian Natl TV Airs Documentary Proving NK Provoked Korean War,” May 24, 1994, and “Stalin, Mao Gave Their Blessings to Kim Il-sung s Korean War Plan,” August 8, 1993.
On Mao’s need for Soviet aid as the decisive factor in his acceptance of Stalin’s request, see George Wehrfritz, “History Lessons, Take Two,” Newsweek International, July 14, 1997, pp. 28–30. The article cites articles by a Chinese revisionist historian, writing under the pen name Qingshi, in the Chinese Communist Party magazine Hundred Year Tide.
97. Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners, pp. 132–133, citing reports from Kim to Stalin, and p. 140, citing interviews to the effect that “Stalin appears to have been taken in.” As the authors note, John Merrill has argued that Kim in tensified guerrilla activities in the South and exaggerated the successes of those operations as part of his campaign to persuade Stalin that the success of a south ward invasion was assured. Merrill, Korea, pp. 187–188.
Goncharov, Lewis and Xue also marvel (p. 146) at “how skillfully Kim had achieved his ends by playing on the complicated relations between Stalin and Mao. We would predict that if any transcripts of conversations turn up, they will reveal a pattern of Kim exaggerating Stalin’s support to Mao, and vice versa. In the process, Kim was restricting his own future options and his ability to hedge against failure.”
98. Interview in U.S. News and World Report, May 5, 1950.
99. Cumings, Origins II, p. 431.
100. Both comments quoted by Cumings (Origins II, pp. 420 and 503), who adds on the latter page that “Koreans viewed Dulles’s speech as, in Chong Il-gwon’s words, evidence of ‘an absolute guarantee’ to defend the ROK”
101. Yu, who was present at the meeting in Moscow, told the Goncharov-Lewis-Xue team in an interview that Kim argued, “(1) it would be a decisive surprise attack and the war would be won in three days; (2) there would be an uprising of 200,000 Party members in South Korea; (3) there were guerrillas in the southern provinces of South Korea; and (4) the United States would not have time to participate” (Uncertain Partners, p. 144). On p. 146, the authors describe Kim as likewise telling Mao during their meeting in May 1950 that North Korea “would achieve victory within a month, and that the United States could not deploy its forces before then.”
102. “Stalin had no incentive to question Kim’s arguments, but he gave the go-ahead on the basis of Soviet interests and on the condition that Mao agree. … Stalin was willing to support Kim only if the possibility of a Soviet-American clash in Korea would be excluded. He determined that the way to do this was to implicate Mao in the decision and thereby make him bear the full burden for ensuring Kim’s survival if the Americans intervened. A Sino-American war, should it erupt in Korea, would have the added benefit of widening the break between Beijing and the West” (Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, p. 214).
103. Kim and Stalin, if they were both mistaken on U.S. capability, were not necessarily mistaken on the same grounds since their interests were different. However, they may well have held some common assumptions. For speculation on the grounds for Stalin’s judgment, see Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners, pp. 151–152: “Stalin would have concluded from press reports and intelligence that, though the Americans might want to aid Taiwan or even South Korea, it would take them many months to amass and get that aid to the western Pacific. The timing was on Kim’s side if he moved quickly and decisively. In the worst case, U.S. intervention would lead to a clash between Beijing and Washington and a denial of Taiwan to the Chinese Communists. The resulting rise in Sino-American hostilities would only increase Mao’s reliance on Stalin.
“Furthermore, Stalin was well aware that the United States would be most reluctant to go to war with the Soviet Union over Korea. With an army that had been sharply reduced after World War Two, it could not run the risk of Soviet retaliation against Western Europe or Japan. .Moreover, the Soviet leader reportedly minimized the danger of any such escalation because he had bought Kim Il Sung’s argument that a North Korean attack would touch off a revolution in the South, making for a quick and easy consolidation of control.
“Thus, we would argue, it was a mixture of short- and long-term estimates of the U.S. posture in Asia, as of April 1950, that finally led Stalin to become directly involved in Kim’s military designs.”
On p. 214 the authors add, “In our view, the decision to go to war cannot be laid alone to Stalin’s pressure [on Mao], or to Kim’s adventurism, or to a Soviet–North Korean (let alone Sino –North Korean) conspiracy. In fact the decision came in bits and pieces and was never coordinated or even thoroughly scrutinized by the three states. It was reckless war-making of the worst kind. Each of three Communist leaders was operating on premises that were largely concealed and facts that were fabricated or at best half true.”
5. Iron-Willed Brilliant Commander.
1. Hankuk Ilbo, November 9, 1990, in Seiler, Kim Il-song 1941–1948 (see chap. 2, n. 18).
Goncharov, Lewis and Xue say (Uncertain Partners [see chap. 4, n. 1], p. 149) that Kim and Mao at this point were in a race to finish war preparations first and fire the first shot in their reunification campaigns, since China could not fight a war on two fronts as it would have to do if it joined North Korea in fighting the United States while invading Taiwan. If China failed to act first it would have to wait. China did fail to build up its invasion troops opposite Taiwan by the summer of 1950 as planned (p. 152)—and thus had to wait for decades without getting another chance at Taiwan. The authors add (p. 153) that while Mao knew Kim was preparing for war, “there are good reasons to accept the conclusion of Korean and Chinese authors that Mao was not informed about the details of the Korean plans or the timing of the assault. … Keeping Mao out of the picture was Kim’s intention. A striking fact about the two months before the war is that the North Koreans—and the Soviets—took steps to keep the Chinese in the dark about their military preparations.”
Newsweek’s George Wehrfritz (“History Lessons, Take Two” [see chap. 4, n. 96], p. 30), reports that a revised history by a Chinese scholar writing under the pen name Qingshi and using both Chinese and Soviet sources begins “with Stalin playing China against North Korea to serve his own interests. In 1949 Mao asked for 200 Russian warplanes and pilots to support an invasion of Taiwan. … Stalin was supportive but noncommittal. What Mao didn’t know, says Qingshi, was that the Soviets had trained and supplied North Korea’s military in preparation for an attack on South Korea. Indeed, Stalin urged Kim to seek Mao’s approval only because he assumed, correctly, that Mao needed Soviet aid too much to say no. Stalin got his way. The invasion came five weeks after Kim’s Beijing visit. Within hours the Americans vowed to turn back communist aggression in South Korea. To thwart Chinese adventurism, the U.S. Seventh Fleet sailed into the Taiwan Strait to shiel
d Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in Taipei. Mao’s planned invasion of Taiwan was thwarted. He quickly grew dismayed by events in Korea, particularly when Kim’s assault crumbled after U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s landing at Inchon on Sept. 15.”
2. Baik II (see chap. 4, n. 24), pp. 267–268.
3. Harold Joyce Noble, Embassy at War, edited with an introduction by Frank Baldwin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), p. 221.
4. Cumings (Origins II [see chap. 3, n. 43], pp. 582–583) tells of one American military intelligence officer whose warnings of enemy activity led to cancellation of passes for the South Korean Army’s Sixth Division. On that basis he writes, “So much for the North Koreans mounting an unexpected surprise attack against an Army on leave for the weekend. It is highly implausible that this advance information, and the 6th Division alert, would not have been communicated to other elements in the ROKA.” Nevertheless, according to Yu Song-chol, it was for the very reason that many soldiers would be on leave that the Russians and North Koreans planned the invasion for June 25 (Hankuk Ilbo, November 11, 1990).
5. Hankuk Ilbo, November 9, 1990. A former KPA lieutenant colonel, Chu Yong-bok, quoted the chief of the operations directorate, Maj. Gen. Kim Kuang-hyob, as telling assembled officers on June 11, 1950, that the “maneuvers” they ’were about to engage in were so important that weaknesses and mistakes of the sorts that had been tolerated in previous exercises would be the subject of courts-martial this time (Chu Yong-bok, “I Translated Attack Orders Composed in Russian,” in Kim Chullbaum, ed., The Truth About the Korean War: Testimony 40 Years Later [Seoul: Eulyoo Publishing Co., 1991], p. 117). It is not clear whether this policy was an original North Korean touch. Chu notes that the Russian-language “engineer operation orders” that he translated said: “If orders come down to begin an attack, the various engineer units will guarantee the technical preparedness of their divisions or regiments for the attack.” This suggests that formal punishment for failures may have been Soviet Army operating procedure.
6. He and two other veteran military men ’were purged “amid rumors of a fiery denunciation of these men by Kim Il-song himself. … Behind the spoken charges … there was probably an unspoken one: the failure of the southern liberation campaign’ ” (Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea [see chap. 2, n. 28], pp. 614–615).
7. Suh, Kim Il Sung (see chap. 2, n. 35), p. 121; Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners (see chap. 4, n. 1), pp. 143–144.
8. See Max Hastings, The Korean War (London: Michael Joseph, Ltd., 1987), pp. 79, 105–106.
9. Choe Hun-sik, “Lesson of the Korean War,” Korea Herald, June 24, 1994.
10. Hastings, Korean War, pp. 79, 105–106.
11. Hankuk Ilbo, November 13, 1990.
12. Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners, p. 137, citing a top-secret 1966 Soviet Foreign Ministry report on the Korean War.
This is one point on which Yu’s memory may have failed him, as he insisted that the planners, assuming a quick Southern collapse after the capture of Seoul, had made no further plans. “Any war outside of three days was one that was not in the playbook of the KPA,” he recalled. When it turned out that the Northern forces would have to keep fighting, they lacked operational plans, lacked linkage of artillery and infantry—lacked “even a basic strategy. Each division simply pushed southward on its own” (Hankuk Ilbo, November 14, 1990). Contradicting Yu on this point, Sergei Goncharov said during a conference in Seoul in June of 1995 that he had personally seen the operations plan in the Russian archives, and it did set out plans for the invasion after the taking of Seoul.
13. Yu related (Hankuk Ilbo, November 13, 1990), “It is said that Kim Il-song gave a speech to some military officers in 1963 along the following lines: ‘Pak Hon-yong, the spy employed by the American scoundrels, exaggerated that there were some 200,000 underground party members in South Korea, with 60,000 in Seoul alone. Far from 200,000, by the time we had advanced to the Nakdong River Line, not even one uprising had occurred. If only a few thousand workers had risen in Pusan, then we certainly could have liberated [South Korea] all the way down to Pusan, and the American scoundrels could not have landed.’ ” Yu concludes, “In this manner, our war scenario was flawed from its basic conception.”
Yu’s account of the Kim speech is secondhand at best, since Yu himself went into exile in the Soviet Union in 1959. Note, however, the finding of Scalapino and Lee (Communism in Korea, p. 312) that official hostility in the South from 1945 had long since pushed the communist movement there “to poorly timed extremist measures that progressively estranged it from the people. By the time of the Korean War, it was largely the true believers who remained.”
Cumings has a different view: “Kim Sam-gyu, Robert Simmons, the State Department, and the North Koreans are … wrong in alleging that no southern uprising’ occurred. In the early days of the war there was no need for an uprising, since the southern regime collapsed quickly; no one with any brains ‘rises up’ in the face of army and police violence when armed help is on the way. But when the KPA arrived its efforts ’were greatly aided by activities of the southern people in the Cholla and Kyongsang Provinces. … It may be that Kim Il Sung and his allies found it convenient to let Pak Hon-yong and the southerners dangle out front in promoting an assault that everyone wanted, which would be politically shrewd. But more likely the thesis about Pak’s role became useful only in 1953, when he and the other southerners could be scapegoated for the debacle of the war, which brought a holocaust on North Korea” (Origins II [see chap. 4, n. 1], p. 457).
Cumings cites an impressive array of guerrilla activities in the countryside as evidence for his proposition (see Origins II, pp. 686 ff). However, he points to no uprising of 200,000, or even 20,000 or 10,000, at the North’s signal. Nor does he offer evidence that would challenge the specific Northern complaint about the Pusan workers. It seems implausible that Pusan communists “with brains” would have failed to see (a) that Northern help was not on the way since it had been blocked at the Pusan perimeter; and (b) that their own efforts from inside the perimeter might make the difference between victory and defeat for their cause. Their failure to rise up does indeed call Pak’s boasts into serious question. More basically, piling on after the conquering troops have arrived requires far less courage and determination than rising up in a rebellion ahead of the arrival of the troops, and therefore seems quite a different matter.
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 co
mprise 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).
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