So recruiters from X Corps had gone hunting among the neighborhoods of Seoul for a fresh crop of trilingual interpreters. This was not an easy task, for nearly all young South Korean men of military age were off fighting somewhere, or they’d already been wounded or killed in combat. Eventually, though, the recruiters found a promising cadre of interpreters, and now they were preparing to send them north.
One of them was a nineteen-year-old medical student from the West Gate of Seoul: Lee Bae-suk.
* * *
During the fight for Seoul, Lee had lain low for a few more worrisome days as the North Korean resistance finally withered. When the Americans regained control of the West Gate, he emerged from the house in Buk Ahyeon Dong—this time with confidence. Shin-kyeon, his elder aunt, assumed control of the household and essentially adopted the children, while Lee reported to the X Corps headquarters to offer his services. In the interviews, he had to be circumspect. He stated that he had been born and raised in Seoul. Disclosing that he was from the North, he thought, would automatically disqualify him. Worse, the Americans might suspect that he was a Communist and imprison him as an infiltrator or spy.
Lee made a good impression, and the X Corps recruiters hired him. He would be a translator, assigned to work with American military police at strategic guard posts and chokepoints. With the situation rapidly changing in the North, Army planners kept him waiting in Seoul for several weeks, on standby. Finally, in October, they called him in to discuss his first assignment. X Corps would be sending him far to the northeast, up to a place called Hamhung. It was an important industrial city, pivotal to the fight. The recruiters explained that nearly 100,000 U.N. troops would be pouring through Hamhung, nearby Wonsan, and their environs, en route to the Yalu. General Smith’s First Marine Division was already there.
As he heard this, Lee was so overcome with emotion that he could scarcely follow the rest of what the officer had to say. Hamhung was his hometown, the place where he was born and raised. It was where his family lived—if his father and mother and siblings were still alive. Of all the cities in the world, Hamhung was where he most wanted to be. He couldn’t tell the American officer this; he had to keep the secret to himself. It took some effort to maintain a straight face, to mask his joy. He had dreamed of Hamhung often, had missed it terribly—the murmurings of the market, the brackish smells of the river, the line of foothills to the west, the ocean breeze at the city’s back. Perhaps he’d grown to romanticize the past, but the places of his youth were deeply etched in his memory. He’d left as a boy and had become a young man. He’d been away four years. Now he was going home.
* * *
Built along the coastal plain, downslope from the Taebaek Mountains, Hamhung had for centuries been a drowsy provincial capital, its uneventful history punctuated by a few storybook moments of intrigue. In 1400, Yi Sung-ke, founder of what became known as the Yi dynasty, took refuge in Hamhung after he was ousted in a palace coup engineered by his own son. When the upstart emperor sent a succession of diplomats from Seoul to reconcile with his father, Yi Sung-ke had them all slaughtered, one by one. This gave rise to a gallows expression that still lives on in Korea: A “king’s envoy to Hamhung” is someone who embarks on a trip and is never seen again.
While he was living in Seoul, Lee had sometimes wondered if that was what he’d become, in reverse—a sojourner who’d left Hamhung, not to be heard from again. A profound remorse had often tugged at him, a feeling that he was an impostor living a blessed life while his own family toiled and suffered in a homeland he would never revisit. He was convinced that he had abdicated his responsibilities, that he’d forsaken life’s most important bonds.
Near the center of Hamhung, a major bridge spanned the Songchon River. Mansekyo, it was called, the Bridge of Long Life. At the Lunar New Year, people had made a tradition of walking across it—the exercise was said to bring longevity and good luck. Families would stroll back and forth, arm in arm, hand in hand, laughing and singing joyous songs. His own family had crossed the bridge each year—those outings were some of Lee’s happiest memories. He wondered if there was anything to it. Had the Bridge of Long Life offered his family some balm of protection? Or was it only another naïve superstition?
When Japan took formal possession of Korea, in 1910, Hamhung was a medieval city steeped in just these sorts of myths and folk traditions. But in the mid-1920s, as the Japanese tightened their grip on the country, modernity began to arrive. A team of Japanese engineers struck upon an ambitious idea: They would build roads into the mountains northwest of Hamhung and harness the might of the Changjin River—Chosin in Japanese—an important tributary that flowed north toward the Yalu. In the highlands, some seventy road miles from Hamhung, the engineers would construct a large dam that would flood the valley floor. The Changjin waters would rise, swallowing the wrinkled country, and the resulting reservoir, with all its scallops and appendages, would extend southward for more than forty miles. It would be a deep lake splayed out in the mountains, practically on the rooftop of Korea.
This scheme alone was considered a nearly impossible feat, but then the engineers envisioned something bolder: They would effectively reverse the course of the river by building a network of pipes near where it entered the lake on its south end. The pipes would snake along, often underground, carrying cold lake water from the mountains to the coast. Thus, a river that had once flowed north would flow south, through man-made conduits. Working with gravity, these tubes of racing water would feed into a series of hydroelectric plants down on the plain that would supply Hamhung and its neighboring port city of Hungnam with enough power to transform the area into a military-industrial center, perhaps the largest in Korea.
Some said it was quixotic. Some said the engineers were tempting fate, manipulating sacrosanct forces of nature. But the immense project worked as planned. The Chosin Reservoir was completed in 1929, the year Lee was born, and, with dizzying speed, Hamhung-Hungnam underwent a metamorphosis, much of it under the direction of the Noguchi Corporation, a Japanese conglomerate founded by a chemical engineering mogul named Jun Noguchi, who was said to be the “entrepreneurial king of the peninsula.” A nitrogen fertilizer plant, the largest in the Far East, was quickly constructed, and the area became one of the world’s largest producers of ammonium sulfate. Then came oil refineries, chemical concerns, textile mills, metal foundries, munitions works. They produced dynamite and mercury oxide powder and high-octane aviation fuel. It was a grinding, stinking, spewing complex of industries designed to fuel Japan’s expansionist aims across Asia.
Thousands of peasants, many of them displaced by the new lake, moved down from the mountains to work in the factories. Schools sprang up, a train station, a city hall, suburbs, all of it stitched together with streetcars and underground sewer systems and electricity and telegraph wire. It was a modern marvel of civil planning and central design—at least that was how the authorities portrayed the region’s transformation. Through Japanese ingenuity and Korean sweat, men had built a lake that built a city.
* * *
This was the boomtown atmosphere in which Lee Bae-suk had grown up. Throughout the 1930s, Hamhung quickly became, in many respects, a Japanese city—organized, industrialized, modernized, militarized. Korea was living under what came to be called “the black umbrella” of absolute Japanese rule. The occupiers humiliated and exploited Hamhung’s citizens, often brutally, but they also sought to assimilate them—that is, to make them Japanese subjects, slowly eradicating all vestiges of Korean consciousness. As a boy in Hamhung, Lee was taught to bow toward the east, in the direction of the emperor. He prayed to Shinto gods, at Shinto shrines, kneeling in the shadow of red torii gates. At school, he and his classmates were required to recite the Pledge of the Imperial Subjects, promising to “serve the Emperor with united hearts.” Lee, like all citizens, had to forsake his Korean name and adopt a Japanese one. He learned the Japanese language and was forbid
den to study Korean in school. The Korean anthem was not to be sung, the Korean flag not to be unfurled, traditional white Korean clothing not to be worn. People were even expected to give up Korean hairstyles, cutting off their braids and topknots.
Everywhere Lee looked, he saw examples of Japanese authority and expertise: Japanese teachers, Japanese civil servants, Japanese soldiers and tax collectors and cops. The mayor was Japanese. So was the provincial governor. Even the city itself was given a Japanese name: Hamhung became Kanko. The Japanese Kempeitai, which many Koreans came to call the “thought police,” tightened its hold on the city, stamping out dissent or expressions of Korean identity. The police organized the citizens into neighborhood associations, each one composed of ten families. These cells, designed to enforce compliance of Japanese laws, had a chilling effect on community relations, effectively turning Korean against Korean, requiring neighbors to spy on one another.
During the late 1930s, the industrial complex of greater Hamhung became an arsenal and a forge for Japan’s deepening war against China. Enormous quantities of explosives were manufactured there. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, operations at Hamhung expanded exponentially. Among other secret projects, Japanese physicists made early attempts to build an atomic weapon. Using uranium reportedly mined from the mountains around the Chosin Reservoir, they constructed a crude cyclotron, produced heavy water, and even began to develop a primitive atomic device.
Lee and his classmates, though of course unaware of such covert doings, were inescapably pulled into the war effort. Throughout high school, they underwent compulsory military training, including sword and bayonet practice, in the expectation that they would soon fight against the Americans in defense of the Land of the Rising Sun. When he was fourteen, they put him to work in a refinery that made aviation fuel destined for use in the engines of Zeros. As the war progressed, the Japanese became more fiendish. Young Korean men were pressed into labor gangs and shipped to Japan to toil in mines, shipyards, and factories. Thousands of young Korean women were mobilized into something called the Volunteer Service Corps, ostensibly to work as nurses on the front. In reality, these women had been abducted to service Japanese soldiers in mobile brothels—“comfort women,” these sex slaves were called. Rumors also floated that some Koreans were being used as guinea pigs in a sadistic medical experimentation program, based in Manchuria, known as Unit 731.
By August of 1945, Lee, then sixteen, knew that he would soon be conscripted to fight for the cause of a deeply evil regime. But after the Americans dropped atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered. Lee was spared just in time. On August 22, the Soviet Army marched into Hamhung and liberated the city. Overnight, the once proud Japanese occupiers became refugees—chased from their homes, rounded up, and stripped of their assets. They became beggars, maids, ragpickers. Many were sent to Russian prison camps and never seen again.
At first Lee, like so many of his countrymen, was joyful that, thanks to world events, Korea had finally thrown off the yoke of her oppressor. But then a new reality began to settle in: The Soviets proved as ruthless as the Japanese, and the prospect of a free and independent Korea, that fervent hope that had animated generations of patriots, faded. Rampant were the stories of corruption, of executions without trial, of drunken Russian soldiers looting shops, ransacking homes, and raping Hamhung women. Traumatized girls and women began disguising themselves as boys and men in hopes of eluding sexual assault. The Russians would do anything for a drink, it seemed—they would down antifreeze until they vomited or break into people’s homes in search of sul, a spirit distilled from rice. The Soviets systematically dismantled the factories of Hamhung and Hungnam, loading the most valuable equipment onto trains and hauling it off to Vladivostok. Such were the prerogatives of war, the spoils of a theater the Russians had entered only at the last opportune moment—spoils that they now expected to enjoy to the fullest.
Lee and his classmates went back to school. Only this time, instead of learning Japanese, they learned Russian. Stalin’s face was everywhere, Cyrillic letters, banners colored blood red. Schools and buildings bearing Korean or Japanese names were instead given numbers. It became a crime to even speak the Japanese language, and baseball, a game that American missionaries and Japanese colonists had brought to Korea, was condemned as a decadent bourgeois sport. Talk of revolution hung in the air. Important Communists came from Pyongyang to deliver impenetrable, jargon-filled harangues, often in Russian, on the principles of Marxism and Leninism. Then followed the parades, the rallies, the self-criticism sessions. A new decree made it a crime for more than five people to meet without permission from the authorities. For Lee, the turning point came when he and a classmate attended a Communist assembly held in the public square, near the city hall and the train station. Posters of Kim Il Sung grinned at the crowds. On stage was a wall of implacable faces, a phalanx of new leaders in sharp military uniforms, smiling, waving. Everything had been decided—all posts filled.
Lee’s friend, who was much more politically shrewd, couldn’t contain his wrath. “Korea is not Russia!” he screamed. “Korea is Korea! One land, one language, one people!” He had yelled this message of dissent too loudly, for several military policemen had noticed him and were now coming for both him and Lee, pistols raised. The two boys looked at each other, wide-eyed, and took off through the crowd, running for safety.
This was Lee’s initiation, the bud of his political awakening. He’d glimpsed the face of tyranny. Seeing no future here, he grew bitter and impatient. A line had been drawn at the peninsula’s waist, and he yearned to cross over it. When he announced his intentions, his father, to Lee’s surprise, assented. You are the eldest: Go. Perhaps the others will follow.
His father gave him some money and explained the arrangements: Lee was to take a train down to Wonsan, where a guide would lead him and a group of other young refugees south. They would lunch in temples and sleep in the tenebrous woods. They would eat food prepared by friendly co-conspirators. It was an underground railroad, following a network of trails that traced like capillaries over the hills and mountains.
One day in early 1946, at the age of sixteen, Lee embraced his mother and father. He gave his little sister Sun-ja a special hug. To his seven other siblings, he smiled an uncertain smile. Then he headed for the border, and a new life in Seoul.
Now, four years later, he was going home. As soon as X Corps had his papers ready, he would be flying to Hamhung.
11
HEROIC REMEDIES
Washington, D.C.
As the early-morning sun climbed behind the Capitol, President Harry Truman bounded out of Blair House, the executive guest quarters where he was living while the White House underwent renovations, and sauntered down Pennsylvania Avenue. He wore a natty suit and carried a cane. The day had broken unseasonably hot—temperatures were supposed to surpass eighty degrees by noon. Fall had become summer again. The birds appeared to stir with new vigor, and the last thumping insects of the season found they’d been granted a reprieve. Truman, too, seemed unusually sprightly on this day of Indian summer, November 1, 1950, as he bustled along the sidewalk.
The men who guarded the president hated these morning constitutionals. Each day he would veer in a new direction, winding through various precincts of Washington—Foggy Bottom, McPherson Square, the National Mall. He was famous for his brisk gait. The little man from Independence was a speed walker—120 steps a minute was said to be his pace. These strolls were a splendid way, said Truman, to get “your circulation up to where you can think clearly. That old pump has to keep squirting the juice into your brain, you know.”
It had been two weeks since his meeting with MacArthur on Wake Island, and the trip’s success threw off a rosy afterglow that continued to brighten Truman’s mood. The president still had reason to believe that the Korean conflict was nearly over, that the troops, many of them, at least, would be hom
e by year’s end. The fond wish Truman had expressed at Wake—that Mao would officially stay out, that the conflict wouldn’t escalate into a larger war—seemed to be coming true.
The president, having completed his walk, made his way to the West Wing, changed into his swimming trunks, and swam a few laps in the White House pool. He toweled off, did his usual fifty pulls on a squeaky rowing machine in the adjacent gym, and, after showering, dressed once again. At a little after nine o’clock, Truman entered the Oval Office and sat in the swiveling chair at his desk—decorated with a walnut sign that famously said THE BUCK STOPS HERE. Then he dove into his work.
After a staff meeting, Truman focused on a stack of papers that had been brought to his desk. One of the first documents that vied for his attention was a memorandum from General Walter Bedell Smith, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. The memo concerned Korea, and it was a bombshell. It sprang not only from Douglas MacArthur’s insular coterie of officers but also from the best multi-agency field reports, filtered through the best intelligence people in Washington. It was “clearly established,” Smith’s memo declared, that Chinese Communist troops had crossed the Yalu en masse and were flooding into North Korea. The Chinese had pushed as much as one hundred miles south of the river and were already “opposing” U.N. forces.
“Present field estimates,” the CIA memorandum went on, were “between 15,000 and 20,000 Chinese Communist troops.” This was an alarming number, but the CIA was not sure whether the primary objective of these Chinese soldiers was to attack U.N. forces or to defend a handful of hydroelectric plants that, though located in North Korea, generated power for southern Manchuria. Perhaps, wrote Smith, the Chinese sought to create a cordon sanitaire—a no-man’s-land—south of the Yalu to protect these critical power plants.
On Desperate Ground Page 9