At celebrations staged all across the country, Kim received direct, personal credit and thanks for the land reform.57 A letter supposedly written by villagers in North Hamgyong Province praised him for liberating the country from the Japanese and then, without even stopping to rest, solving the country’s land problems. “Give us whatever are your orders without hesitation,” the villagers said. “We will never fail to achieve what you order us to do.”
Stories the regime disseminated included one about a visit to a village, at the time of land reform, when Kim peeled hot, boiled potatoes and offered one to an old man. “Old Pak Jang-ban, given the first potato, held it in his hands, sobbing, and bo-wed his white-haired head deeply. Suddenly he buried his head on the Leader’s chest and began to cry loudly.” All his life the old man “had been treated like a slave and used like a horse or bullock. Now he was treated for the first time like a human being—by no other person than General Kim Il-sung, the great, Respected and Beloved Leader!” As Kim departed, he used a brush to write Pak’s name on the gatepost of the best house in the village, making the old man the new owner of the former landlord’s residence. Afterward, Pak “would tell everyone he met: ‘Since the creation of the world, has there ever been anyone like General Kim Il-sung?’”58
This was heady stuff for a leader still in his thirties. Photographs from the period show the slim, boyishly handsome guerrilla hero gradually expanding in waist and jowl as his power and accompanying perquisites expanded. Meanwhile some people watching him closely saw signs that power was affecting the young ruler’s personality.59 Coming to the fore were the hungers for absolute obedience and lavish praise.
Some analysts have seen in those needs the signs of an inferiority complex rooted in Kim’s failure to finish even middle school—so contrary to the Confucian-ingrained Korean worship of formal education as a good in itself and a virtual necessity for a leader. Korean revolutionaries whom Kim had beaten out for the top job were senior to him in years, and not inferior in their own records of dedication to the anti-Japanese struggle. Several were his superiors by far in education and reportedly were not shy about playing up that fact. But while this factor may well have had an intensifying effect, we should recall that a deep craving for deference already had become visible as early as Kim’s days as a guerrilla and Soviet Army officer. And Kim was by no means unique in that regard. Regardless of educational attainments, it would have been difficult to find a genuine democrat among the men in either the North or the South who sought to lead Korea after its liberation. Autocratic personalities were the rule in a country lacking any tradition of liberalism or democracy.60
Although North Korea quickly had put into place the apparatus of the police state,61 Kim’s personal power still was far from absolute. Within the regime, several strong figures remained. But he had to content himself-with that situation only for a time. In a 1946 meeting to merge his Korean Communist Party with another leftist party to create the Workers’ Party, one sycophant rose to remark that Kim Il-sung was “the only leader” for Korea and that any opposition to him amounted to reaction and treason.62 Kim himself said the new party needed unity and iron discipline, which required “a merciless struggle against all with opposing inclinations.”63 By the fall of 1948 he had methodically undercut his rivals, removing them entirely or shunting them aside to secondary posts. For the first time, he had no peers.64
South Korean rightists had seized the nationalist high ground by opposing trusteeship, portraying Kim and his fellow communists as tools of Moscow. His taking office with Soviet backing had tended to confirm the unflattering portrait. That had to have been an unaccustomed and extremely unwelcome role for Kim.
Aspiring to recognition as Korea’s chief patriot, Kim counterattacked. He highlighted the backgrounds of some South Korean leaders who had collaborated with the Japanese before liberation. Collaborating with the Americans this time, they had reduced the South Korean people to a ragged and hungry population of slaves, he charged in a June 1946 speech.65 In another speech in August 1946, he referred to right-wing Southern leaders as pro-Japanese, reactionary country-sellers who put patriots in prison while kisaeng houses increased in number daily66
Often during this period Kim spoke of the need to expand his provisional government into a Korea-wide “democratic people’s republic,” which he defined as a leftist regime, different from the capitalist-parliamentary model seen in the South.67 Once rid of the anti-communist, and to his mind unpatriotic, leaders in the South and their American protectors, Korea must be reunited. Expanding his rule to cover the entire peninsula was to remain Kim’s unchanging goal, second only to consolidating and maintaining power in the North, until the final days of the long life and career of this supremely determined and stubborn man.
Communist and other leftist efforts to take over South Korea from within seemed to make head-way in 1946 but the U.S. occupation authorities soon clamped down, arresting key figures. By 1948, the Southern communists had gone underground, resorting to guerrilla warfare while seeking to subvert the South’s military and police force. The North gave military training to more than two thousand Southerners and sent them south as guerrillas.68 Mean-while the rapidly intensifying Cold War dashed hopes for a negotiated reunification of the Soviet-occupied North and American-occupied South— hopes that probably had been unrealistic from the start, given the attitudes on both sides.69
While negotiators talked merger, both sides prepared to set up de facto separate Korean regimes. Loath to be seen as responsible for the country’s division, Kim vowed never to move first.70 In April of 1948, he played host to several Southern politicians, who had accepted his invitation to a joint conference opposing the proclamation of separate regimes.71
In the end, the South did take formal action first. At Washington’s urging, the United Nations dispatched a commission to look into the possibility of Korea-wide elections. Dismissing the United Nations (and not without cause) as an American tool, the North refused to admit its observers. The UN mission then observed the voting in the South alone.72 Rhee won and his government proclaimed the Republic of Korea on August 15, 1948.
The North was ready. In February of that year, with support from the Soviet Union and the help of his old guerrilla colleagues, Kim had officially formed the Korean People’s Army. Long before that—almost immediately after liberation—he had begun under Soviet auspices the actual development of a Northern fighting force. He had done that despite criticism from “factional elements”—a category that seems to have included any communists who did not agree 100 percent with Kim—that there was no need for an army “when North and South are not yet unified.” The way Kim’s propagandists saw it, in forming the People’s Army “the Korean people grew from a bullied and despised people … into a strong and dignified people whom no one could slight.”73
On September 10, 1948, less than a month after the formal proclamation of the Republic of Korea in Seoul, the Northerners established the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with Kim Il-sung as premier. The DPRK’s legislative body, the Supreme People’s Assembly, included seats filled by “representatives” of South Korea—showing the intent eventually to consolidate the South into the DPRK
Political means having failed to reunify the country, Kim built his army into “the strongest of the world’s revolutionary forces,” in the words of Yu Song-chol, who served as commander of the army’s operations bureau in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Thanks to Soviet help and domestic economic advancement, it was a far more formidably armed force than South Korea’s military. Kim developed the Korean People’s Army on a base of commanders who were experienced, as he was, in the anti-Japanese struggle. Those leaders envied the Chinese Communists their 1949 victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. They lusted to reunify Korea through a similar victory over the South’s Rhee.74
In Seoul, Rhee was issuing his own threats against the North, despite Washington’s determination to restrain him from mountin
g an invasion. “We shall respond to the cries of our brothers in distress,” he proclaimed on March 1, 1950, “even though some of our friends across the sea tell us that we must not cherish thoughts of attacking the foreign puppet who stifles the liberties of our people in the north.”75 Rhee was as eager as Kim to unify the country by force if necessary. Indeed, it would have been hard to find any Korean who doubted that the divided country would reunite, eventually, under one system or the other. It was natural enough that both Kim and Rhee saw a zero-sum game in which one system and set of leaders would win totally while the other would lose just as totally.76
A big difference, however, was that Kim prepared his invasion with the encouragement and help of Moscow, in whose view extending communist rule to the South came to be seen as a worth-while policy goal77—-while Rhee, hobbled and stymied as he was by his Washington protectors, blustered. Rhee’s threats amounted to little more than bravado, in view of the South’s comparatively poor state of military preparedness. The Americans had denied the South Koreans heavy weaponry aircraft and even a large supply of ammunition, precisely in order to discourage them from mounting a north-ward invasion.78 Nevertheless, armed border clashes broke out sporadically79
Kim Il-sung long since had begun pitching to Stalin his own proposal to invade South Korea. In Moscow in March of 1949, Kim raised the prospect of Korean reunification through a military campaign. Kim told Stalin that North Koreans wanted to “touch the South with the point of a bayonet,” Nikita Khrushchev recalled. “After the first impulse from North Korea, there would be an internal explosion and the people’s power would be established.”80 Stalin rejected the proposal then, Soviet documents show. Attacking the South was “not necessary” the Soviet leader said. The only circumstances in which the North Korean army should cross the 38th parallel would be to counter a South Korean attack.
In August and September of that year, Kim sent word to Stalin that the South Koreans were about to attack the North. Once more he asked the Soviet leader to approve a south-ward attack. It would be done only if the South attacked first, as a roughly equivalent counterattack, Kim promised. However, he assured the Soviet leader that the North Koreans could take the whole peninsula “if the international situation permits”—perhaps a reference to the question of whether the United States would intervene or not.
The Soviet leadership on September 24 withheld approval for the time being, saying the North Korean military was not strong enough yet and insufficient ground-work had been done to enlist Southerners in the overthrow of their government. Besides further buildup of the North Korean forces, the Soviet politburo called for maximum effort for “the development of the partisan movement, the creation of liberated regions and the preparation of a general armed uprising in South Korea in order to overthrow the reactionary regime.”
Kim tried again on January 19, 1950, arguing that partisan fighting would not suffice. He pleaded to be permitted to emulate the Chinese Communists, who had just won their civil war on the mainland. Rhee was not giving him the excuse he needed for a counterattack, Kim complained. He wanted permission to unleash his own army offensively. Kim asserted that his own nationalist credentials were at stake: “Lately I do not sleep at night, thinking about how to resolve the question of the unification of the whole country. If the matter of the liberation of the people of the southern portion of Korea and the unification of the country is drawn out, then I can lose the trust of the people of Korea.” Stalin, noting that such an effort “needs large preparation” and insisting that it “be organized so that there would not be too great a risk,” replied on January 30 that he would be willing to receive Kim to discuss the matter.81
Kim did go to Moscow in late March, staying into April.82 Khrushchev recorded in his diary an account of a dinner he attended that Stalin hosted at his dacha for Kim. There, the North Korean leader held forth on the theme that Korean unification was essential because of the natural economic fit of North and South. Despite the North’s advantage in mineral resources, four-fifths of its territory consisted of mountains and highlands and its farmland was mainly dry fields. The South possessed most of the wet-paddy rice-growing land and the better climate for farming, not to mention bountiful fisheries. Putting the North and the South together again, Kim asserted, was the recipe for building a strong country.83
During that visit, Stalin—taking account of the “changed international situation”—approved the invasion in principle. A message from Stalin to Mao Zedong, confirming this policy, does not mention which changes in the international situation had affected Stalin’s thinking.84 One obvious candidate is a new policy Washington had developed.
Coming out of World War II, the United States downsized its military rapidly—too rapidly, as many would think later. Upwards of twelve million Americans were in uniform in the various armed services on the day of Japan’s surrender. Their families quickly demanded that Washington “bring the boys home.” Heeding those cries, and seeking budget cuts, Congress pushed for enormous reductions that produced a standing military only a small fraction of the size of the ’wartime force. As the cuts proceeded, military planners scratched their heads to figure where they most needed to station the few remaining troops. Since their main concern was another global war, this time against the Soviet Union and other communist countries, Europe was high on the list. But the approximately forty thousand American troops in Korea offered more potential for embarrassment than for strategic advantage in a third world war, as they might be easily overrun or be forced to abandon the country in ignominy.
In 1948, the Soviet Union—confident that the North Korean People’s Army had been well trained—announced that it would withdraw all its troops that year. Despite warnings that the United States was planning for the wrong war, and must leave some of its troops to deter a North Korean invasion,85 all U.S. combat troops like-wise were out of Korea by the end of June 1949. “We seemed to want no part of the country, and yet we had planted the flag,” as David Halberstam has written. “The American century was about to begin, but clearly no one wanted to pay for it.”86
U.S. officials the following January enunciated a policy of declining (both publicly and privately) to guarantee the American defense of either South Korea or Taiwan. In a news conference on January 5, 1950, Harry S. Truman said there would be, “at this time,” no American defense of Taiwan. The remark had considerable impact—and not only on the Chinese nationalists and their communist foes. Russian scholar Sergei N. Goncharov saw in the Russian archives an intelligence report on a secret meeting of the South Korean cabinet the day after the Truman press conference. The report quoted worried South Korean officials expressing the opinion that the United States, as in the case of Taiwan and China, would stay out of the fight if North Korea invaded South Korea. Goncharov believes that this Soviet intelligence report was “the triggering information” that persuaded Stalin to unleash Kim Il-sung.87
The question is whether Pyongyang and Moscow failed to read all of Washington’s signals. Understanding the professional soldiers’ reluctance to get bogged down in Korea, did they miss some other, ultimately stronger currents in Washington thinking—such as the view promoted by the State Department as early as 1947 that Soviet domination of Korea would amount to “an extremely serious political and military threat” to U.S. interests in Japan and elsewhere in the region? Indeed, considerable evidence indicates that Washington really did not intend to let South Korea fall into hostile hands, and was in fact prepared to lead an international coalition to prevent such an outcome in case of an invasion.88
The policy of “containment”—blocking the advance of communism beyond existing borders—had been gaining ground. In his ambitious two-volume work on the origins of the Korean War, Bruce Cumings shows that the logic for applying containment to Korea followed from a pair of premises. First, Washington wanted to maintain the prestige of its commitments. The United States had, after all, encouraged the formation of a noncommunist government
in South Korea; abandoning that government would signal allies elsewhere not to put their trust in America. Second, Washington in response to the onset of the Cold War had decided to stop punishing Japan’s wartime leaders and encourage them to rebuild their country’s economy as the engine of growth for noncommunist economies in Asia. Historians now call that the “reverse course.” A total revival of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was, of course, out of the question. But American planners believed that Japan, to take on its assigned role, did need at least an industrial hinterland and military buffer just across the straits in southern Korea.
Containment was the State Department’s policy for Korea, and remained the policy even after the removal of U.S. troops.89 Moreover, in June 1949, as the troops were leaving, the Pentagon in a top-secret study reluctantly agreed that the response to a full-scale North Korean invasion of the South might include returning—with a military task force under the aegis of the United Nations—if “all else fails.”90
However, in a speech on January 12, 1950, at the Washington National Press Club, Secretary of State Dean Acheson described the American “defense perimeter” in the Asia-Pacific region as running from the Aleutian Islands to Japan, Okinawa and the Philippines. Generations of commentators have wondered since then: Why did he not mention Korea? The best answer now available is that Acheson wanted to keep secret the American commitment to Korea’s defense, to avoid revealing Washington’s cards not only to Moscow but also to South Korean President Rhee. He feared that Rhee, if he knew, would take advantage of that guarantee of protection to charge off into the very military struggle with the Northern communists that Washington wanted to avoid.
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Page 10