The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  The B-29s started their work on the city’s southwest edge. When bombs emerged from the belly of the planes, the pitch of their engines changed, as if sighing in relief, and the B-29s disappeared in the east. For a few moments, only a menacing whistle pierced the morning’s quiet. Then explosions shook the earth, as smoke, flames, and screams filled the air. In his mountaintop foxhole, No began to tremble. Within two minutes, another wave of B-29s appeared, laying down their bombs a block north of the first row of explosions. So it went, as sixty-three B-29s carried out what the air force called “strategic bombing.”

  Like mowing a lawn, the destruction of Chongjin was a steady, systematic, and unhurried chore that moved block by block southwest to northeast. Again, the bombers did not bring a fighter escort. Again, they did not need one. North Korean aircraft did not interrupt their work, nor were any antiaircraft guns fired. In his foxhole, No could see how the residents of Chongjin responded to the bombing. They did not evacuate before it started, nor did they flee as explosions devoured their neighborhoods. They stayed in their homes and apartments, dying by the thousands.

  After the war, an American bomb damage assessment found that eighteen of the twenty-two largest cities in North Korea had been at least half demolished. It asserted that 65 percent of Chongjin had been obliterated. There is no official death toll from the bombing of Chongjin, but a postwar census found that the city lost about a third of its residents, about a hundred thousand people.

  No had read newspaper stories about the Allied bombings of Berlin and Tokyo during World War II. Now he understood, as he cowered in his foxhole, the terror that people in those cities had experienced. The bombing horrified and revolted No. He was a witness to American savagery. But what he saw did not dim his desire to get out of North Korea. His goal did not change. He still wanted to live in the United States.

  Waves of B-29s moved steadily north toward the mountain where No was trying to hide. He could see them coming and feared he would die in the dirt. But before they reached him, the B-29s veered away to drop their bombs on more populous targets. When the explosions ended and he climbed out of his hole, his hands were still trembling. On the beach that evening, he joined other cadets to listen to a political officer’s speech. The naval academy was moving, the officer said, to a location less likely to be carpet bombed. It was sixty miles away, halfway between Chongjin and the Russian border. There was no rail line or road, not even a cleared path.

  So they walked for two days and one night, bushwhacking through valleys and skirting around mountains. Commanders gave them a fifteen-minute break every two hours. All the cadets were in excellent shape, and no one collapsed from exhaustion.

  When No was in elementary school, he had read stories about Japanese soldiers who somehow learned to sleep while on long marches in China. As he trudged toward the border carrying his heavy Russian rifle, No sometimes slipped into a walking sleep. He dreamed, briefly, of life before the Great Leader, when he was a schoolboy and his father was still alive.

  His long march and short dreams ended when they arrived at the entrance to a dark railway tunnel near the coast. Newly excavated in anticipation of a railroad that had yet to be built, it cut through a mountain ridge high above the East Sea (Sea of Japan). There were no railroad tracks inside, just mud. The exhausted cadets, given no rest after their trek, barricaded each end of the tunnel with sandbags, strung electric lights and phone lines, and set up cots. Later they cut down trees to make bunk beds.

  This would be the new naval academy. They slept in the cold, clammy tunnel and took infantry training out in the highlands. In between, they endured long political meetings that denounced the American aggression that they were told had started the war.

  One evening on the hillside outside the tunnel, a cadet who was cleaning a Russian submachine gun accidentally pulled the trigger, firing three bullets into the stomach of a nearby classmate, killing him, and horrifying the other cadets. They had joined the naval academy to get a free college education and avoid dying on a battlefield. Now they were marching in the hills, apparently preparing to be infantry grunts, and one of their classmates was dead of gut wounds.

  The day after the shooting accident, a political officer in the academy called the cadets together for a pep talk. His remarks, though, added to their collective dread. He told them that the academy trained officers for combat, not office jobs. It expected them to be leaders of men, fearless in battle, and willing to die for a glorious cause.

  A few days after the cadets moved into the tunnel, American warships patrolling along the east coast of North Korea spotted them and began lobbing artillery shells in their direction. Explosions shook the ground around the clock, with shelling heaviest at night. From the tunnel entrance, No could see flashes of light far out in the East Sea. Then, within a minute or two, incoming shells would whistle briefly before smashing into the surrounding mountains.

  III

  Eleven weeks into the war, it was Douglas MacArthur’s turn to be a genius, as forces under his command broke the back of the North Korean army. In doing so, they demonstrated to Stalin and Mao that Kim was an arrogant, inattentive amateur who had no business commanding a modern army. When he humiliated Kim and changed the course of the war, MacArthur was seventy and had been famous for much of his life. Perhaps more than that of any general in American history, his career had married battlefield creativity with theatrical self-promotion.

  “He was a great thundering paradox of a man,” his biographer William Manchester wrote. He had “great personal charm, a will of iron, and a soaring intellect.” But at the same time “no more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore a uniform. Flamboyant, imperious, and apocalyptic, he carried the plumage of a flamingo, could not acknowledge errors, and tried to cover up his mistakes with sly, childish tricks.”

  During World War I, MacArthur wore riding breeches and wrapped himself in a four-foot-long scarf; his men called him “the fighting dude.” His baldness could never be photographed. Insisting on being larger than life, he ordered a photographer from Stars and Stripes to kneel while shooting his picture. He presented himself to the world, author William Styron wrote, as a great man who was “almost totally free of self-doubt” and was blessed with “a serene confidence untouched by that daily incertitude which afflicts most humans.”

  MacArthur’s insatiable appetite for flattery was not unlike that of Kim Il Sung. Like Kim, he surrounded himself with mediocre, obsequious men who “catered to his peacockery.” As Clare Boothe Luce put it, “MacArthur’s temperament was flawed by an egotism that demanded obedience not only to his orders, but to his ideas and his person as well. He plainly relished idolatry.”

  A favorite of conservative Republicans, MacArthur harbored presidential aspirations and had a knack for annoying his commanders in chief. Yet he was so creative as a military strategist that Democratic presidents put up with him—that is, until Truman fired him in 1951, with the Korean War still raging.

  For all his failings, MacArthur had an almost miraculous gift for winning huge battles without spilling American blood. He was “remarkably economical of human life.” As commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific during World War II, MacArthur had saved countless American servicemen by perfecting an island-hopping strategy of hitting the Japanese where they were weak, cutting off their supply lines, and minimizing suicidal charges on dug-in machine guns. He believed in surprising his enemy with an attack that seemed impossible. The less likely it was to succeed, he believed, the less the enemy would be prepared to defend against it, and fewer American boys would have to die.

  Guided by this audacious principle, MacArthur planned an amphibious marine landing at Inchon, a port about thirty miles west of Seoul. Everything about Inchon was risky—too risky, in the opinion of officials in Washington. Tides were among the highest in the world. There were no beaches for landing craft, just mudflats that could mire marines in gluey muck if
the landing did not time the tides exactly right. In addition, mining the harbor would be an easy and obvious task for North Korea. It would be the first priority of a competent commander.

  MacArthur bet that Kim was incompetent. He also wagered that superb planning and perfect execution would overcome all other obstacles. If he was right, the landing would allow Americans quick access to Seoul while severing the North’s supply lines and stranding Kim’s best troops at the southern end of the Korean Peninsula, where they could be picked apart by fighter-bombers.

  “I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny. We must act now or we will die,” MacArthur said in a briefing on the proposed landing on August 23. “Inchon will succeed. And it will save a hundred thousand lives.”

  The invasion was supposed to be a military secret. It could succeed only if the North Koreans failed to anticipate and prepare for it. Yet weeks before it happened, Chinese intelligence saw it coming. They watched a huge American buildup of troops and warships, then guessed that an amphibious invasion was taking shape. They guessed, too, that MacArthur, based on the surprise tactics he had often used in the Pacific against Japan, would probably land at Inchon. In two meetings with a North Korean official who had come to Beijing to brief the Chinese leadership on the progress of the war, Mao specifically warned of an American attack at Inchon and advised the North to retreat and deploy troops to prevent a catastrophe. Soviet advisers made similar warnings. Eleven days before the attack, China’s ambassador in Pyongyang met with Kim to discuss what exactly he was doing to protect his overextended army from an Inchon-like attack.

  Kim was reluctant to share military information with Beijing. His government had not bothered telling China about the timing of its invasion of the South. Chinese officials learned about it by reading news accounts. Similarly, after fighting began, Kim did not seek China’s advice, and when it was offered, he almost always ignored it.

  “We estimate that presently, a U.S. counterattack is not possible,” Kim told the Chinese ambassador. “They do not possess sufficient troop support, and therefore a landing in our rear ports would be difficult.”

  Five days before the Inchon invasion, with Beijing in a near panic over what they feared MacArthur was soon to spring on the North Koreans, the Chinese ambassador again met with Kim. Again, he implored the Great Leader to consider a strategic withdrawal and protect the North from an Inchon-style attack.

  “I have never considered retreat,” Kim replied.

  Back in Manchuria in the 1930s, Kim had been a resourceful and cunning guerrilla leader, as skilled in retreating from the Japanese as he was in attacking them. But his command skills were dated and limited. He had led two hundred partisans armed with rifles and knives, not tens of thousands of troops with tanks, artillery, and supply lines that extended for hundreds of miles. Compounding his incompetence was fear on the part of his advisers. Like the officers who surrounded MacArthur, they were afraid of the great man’s displeasure. No one close to Kim dared warn that the North’s army could soon be lost. When the Chinese and the Soviets did warn him, he would not listen.

  On the morning of September 15, 1950, the weather proved perfect for the landing at Inchon, and so did MacArthur’s plan. Thirteen thousand marines stormed the piers and seawalls, overwhelming a scant two thousand North Korean soldiers based in the area. On the first day, only twenty marines were killed. After three days, seventy thousand American troops had come ashore. Within ten days, marines were in Seoul. Down in the far south of the peninsula, where Americans had broken out of the Pusan perimeter, the North Korean army collapsed and was fleeing north. Kim’s army was decimated, losing as many as fifty thousand soldiers (out of the estimated ninety-eight thousand it had sent into South Korea). Nearly all of his Soviet-supplied tanks and mobile armor were destroyed or abandoned. All the while, American bombers pounded North Korean cities. In late September, Shtykov reported to Stalin that Kim was confused, lost, hopeless, and desperate.

  Stalin had explicitly warned Kim in April before the war that if the North Korean army got “kicked in the teeth,” Moscow would “not lift a finger” and he would have to ask Mao for help. But Kim begged for Soviet help anyway. On September 29, 1950, three months and four days after the war began, MacArthur officially restored the South Korean government to power in Seoul, and Kim sent an urgent cable to Stalin.

  “We consider it necessary to report to you about extremely unfavorable conditions for us,” he wrote. “The enemy’s air force, possessing about one thousand planes of various kinds, is not encountering any resistance from our side, and has full control in the air. It conducts bombing at the front and in the rear daily, around the clock.”

  Kim begged Stalin for Soviet MiGs and Soviet help in teaching North Koreans how to fly them. He predicted (accurately) that the Americans and the South Koreans would soon march into North Korea. “At the moment that the enemy troops cross the thirty-eighth parallel,” Kim wrote, “we’ll be in dire need of direct military assistance from the Soviet Union.”

  Stalin refused to send soldiers. He had no taste for a distant ground war against the Americans. Instead, two days after reading Kim’s help-me telegram, he wrote to Mao, explaining that the “situation of the Korean comrades is becoming desperate.” China, he said, must clean up the mess.

  Stalin blamed the North Koreans for military ineptitude and for failing to heed his advice to move troops north in time to repulse the landing at Inchon. “Korean comrades don’t have any troops capable of resistance,” Stalin told Mao. “The road in the direction of the thirty-eighth parallel can be considered open.”

  To save Kim’s government, Stalin told Mao that he should “without delay” dispatch five or six divisions of Chinese “volunteers” (about a hundred thousand soldiers) to stop the Americans. He closed his message by saying, “I don’t intend to inform Korean comrades about this, but I have no doubt they’ll be glad when they learn about it.”

  IV

  In the muddy tunnel turned naval academy, a political officer called all the cadets together. The Americans, he said, had landed at Inchon. He did not elaborate or explain. From that day forward, cadets would be given no more official news about the war. They only heard rumors, nearly all of them frightening.

  The American landing thrilled No Kum Sok. He suspected that Inchon—and the information blackout that followed it—meant the beginning of the end of the Great Leader and of Communism in North Korea. Less happily, he suspected that the crippled army would soon be clamoring for infantrymen to send to the front. More than ever, he needed an excuse not to go.

  It came a week after Inchon. A dozen doctors arrived at the tunnel to give an elaborate physical test to a hundred randomly chosen cadets. No was not among the chosen, but he was curious about what the doctors were doing and hung around to watch. The doctors asked a few teachers at the academy to assist with scoring the tests. One of them was the history professor who had given No an A in Communist Party history. This professor kept score on two “spin tests.” In the first, a cadet sat in a swivel chair and was spun around twenty times. Then he stood and tried to walk straight. In the second test, a cadet held a finger to the ground, ran twenty circles around it, and, again, tried to walk straight. A few of his classmates, having spun, fell down when they tried to walk.

  As he watched his dizzy classmates, No realized that the doctors were looking for pilots. Those selected, he guessed, would have to be trained for at least a year. By then, he hoped, the war would be over. Pilot trainees might never have to fight. They certainly would not be sent to the front as cannon fodder.

  “May I take the test, Professor?” he asked.

  The teacher hesitated and tilted his head to stare for a moment at his star pupil, who seemed to be such a fervent Communist.

  “Yes,” he said, “go ahead and take it.”

  The test did not make No dizzy. He passed it easily and scored wel
l on the rest of the physical exam. Much later, No would learn of the life-or-death importance of the spin test. Most of those who did not take it—or flunked it—were killed in ground combat against the South Koreans and the Americans.

  That evening, on the mountain ridge outside the tunnel, No was asked to line up with the eighty cadets who had passed the test. It was late September, a cloudless, moon-bright night with a cold wind. The North Korean winter would come soon. Echoing up from the sea, the sound of whitecaps breaking against the rocky shore could be heard by No. That night, led by the professor of Soviet Communist Party history, they marched twenty miles by moonlight to another railroad tunnel. At one rest stop on the way, the professor told them that discipline in the naval academy had been stupidly harsh. He said that when they became commanders, they should be more tolerant and humane.

  No was jubilant during the night’s long walk, convinced that he was heading off to flight school, where Kim Il Sung’s government would teach him the skills he needed to fulfill his teenage dreams: he would learn to be a pilot, steal a plane, and fly away.

  The rail tunnel at the end of the march offered a surprising improvement in accommodations. Freshly made beds awaited the cadets. When they awoke in the morning, they had an even bigger surprise—a promotion. An orderly gave No a new uniform with one star on each shoulder. He was now an ensign. Walking out of the tunnel to the officers’ mess for breakfast, he encountered two sergeants who were much older than he was. They unnerved No by saluting him. At breakfast, the waiters were eager and the tablecloths white. In the officers’ mess, the food was plentiful, hot, and tasty.