The Korean War: A History (9 page)

This political milieu of bleak choices between the extremes of right and left inhabited most of Europe and East Asia during the Great Depression, and it is in this milieu that the North Korean leadership came of age and established itself. Korean resisters faced militarists capable of anything, and quickly concluded that violent struggle was their only viable option. Nearly eighty years later that state still stands, likewise against all odds, still arrayed against Japanese militarism (and against American power). But these distant origins in a barely known struggle in an obscure corner of the Pacific War (“even in that country”) hold a key to why American leaders have consistently underestimated their opponents who hold power in Pyongyang.

Over time the Japanese built a textbook case of how to fight an insurgency by any means necessary, and the Koreans founded the nucleus of a “guerrilla state” that would come to power amid the ashes of Japan’s defeat at the hands of American power. Japanese
counterinsurgency was premised on using climate, terrain, and unflinchingly brutal methods to separate guerrilla bodies from their peasant constituents, and harsh interrogation and thought control to poison and destroy their minds. Winter drastically shifted the advantage to suppression forces: it made guerrillas stationary and the counterinsurgents mobile, as former Japanese army officers put it; the guerrillas holed up in winter shelters that well-fortified and protected troops sought out and burned. Rebuilding them was next to impossible “because everything is frozen.” Frigid weather denied guerrillas the protection of thick foliage and undetected movement, military encirclement and blockade isolated base areas and prevented resupply of food and weaponry. Large armies established the blockades between the mountains and the low-lying fields and villages; small search-and-destroy units then entered the mountains to ferret out guerrillas, often by tracking their footprints in the snow.
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Japanese imperial forces were willing to go to any lengths to break the relationship between guerrillas and the sea of people in which they swam: slaughtering suspected peasant collaborators (millions of Chinese died in “kill-all, burn-all, loot-all” campaigns, as they were called), relocating large populations into concentrated or protected villages, and either executing or “converting” captured guerrillas. Japanese counterinsurgency experts told Americans that because of the close relations between guerrillas and peasants, “semi bandits [sic] must be abolished.”
¹⁴
Who were “semi bandits”? Peasants who supported guerrillas by refusing to give information on guerrillas or pay taxes; in other words, almost anybody in a peasant village. The Japanese established “white cells” of supportive collaborators to counter guerrilla “red cells.” Once guerrillas were captured, they were either routinely shot or put through intensive “thought reform” methods to turn them around (the Japanese term is
tenko);
they would then become leaders or members of anti-Communist groups, or of so-called Concordia associations promoting Japanese-Korean unity.
¹⁵
When Japan’s bacteriological
warfare criminals in Unit 731 in Harbin needed more “logs”
(maruta)
on which to do live experiments, they would call the local prison and say, “Send us more Communists.”

Careful scholarship in recent years, made possible by the availability of new Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Soviet documentation and by the hard labors and open minds of a younger generation of historians, has now made clear that Koreans formed the vast majority of resisters to the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, native home for the rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). By the early 1930s half a million Koreans lived in the prefecture of Kando (Jian-dao in Chinese) alone, long a Korean immigrant community just across the border in China, and since 1949 an autonomous Korean region in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Most Koreans had moved to Kando in hopes of escaping Japanese oppression, although some previous emigrants had also gotten wealthy developing the fertile soils of Manchuria, yielding tales that farming families could double or triple their income by relocating there. By and large, though, these Koreans were very poor and thoroughly recalcitrant in their hatred of the colonizers, and remained so in 1945 when U.S. intelligence estimated that 95 percent of the nearly two million Koreans in Manchuria were anti-Japanese, and only 5 percent were sympathizers and collaborators. Japanese officials saw their Korean colony as a model for Manchuria, and encouraged Korean allies to think that if they helped colonize Manchukuo, Korea itself might get closer to independence.

A certain degree of collaboration, of course, was unavoidable given the carrot-and-stick combination of considerable economic development and ruthlessness that characterized Japan’s rule, especially in the last decade of this colony when Japan’s expansion across Asia caused a shortage of experts and professionals throughout the empire. Ambitious Koreans found new careers opening to them just at the most oppressive point in this colony’s history, as Koreans were commanded not to speak Korean and to change their names, and millions of Koreans were used as mobile human fodder
by the Japanese. Koreans came to constitute about half of the hated National Police, and young Korean officers joined the aggressive Japanese army in Manchuria. Pro-Japanese aristocrats were rewarded with special titles, and some of Korea’s greatest early nationalists and intellectuals, such as Yi Kwang-su, came out in public support of Japan’s empire. If collaboration was inevitable, its considerable scale was not. Nor was it ever fully and frankly debated in South Korea or punished, leaving the problem to fester until 2004, when the government finally launched an official investigation of collaboration—along with estimates that upward of 90 percent of the pre-1990 South Korea elite had ties to collaborationist families or individuals.

Japanese forces launched their first major antiguerrilla campaign in April 1932 in Kando, killing anyone said to be a “Communist” or aiding Communists; many victims were innocent peasants. North Korean sources say that 25,000 died, perhaps an exaggeration, but it surely was an unholy slaughter. This experience became the most famous North Korean opera,
Sea of Blood (Pibada),
¹⁶
and it happened amid a drastic fall in peasant livelihoods, brought on by the depression and the collapse of the world economy. Take a look at your dollar bill: you’ll see George Washington. Looking at the North Korean equivalent, one will notice on the right side the heroine of
Sea of Blood
. You will also see her etched into a massive tile mural across from the Pyongyang Hotel and in many other iconic places in North Korea.

Kim Il Sung, who organized his first guerrilla unit in that same spring of 1932, was the Manchurian candidate—master of the measures taken. But he did not make a name for himself until a battle at Dongning in September 1933, when Chinese leaders mounted an unusually large attack on this city, aided by two Korean guerrilla companies led by Kim. His units rescued a Chinese commander (Shih Chung-hung) in this battle, and from then on Kim was a confidant of top Chinese leaders—which saved Kim when he himself was arrested by Chinese comrades on suspicion of being a traitor. Commander Shih declared that “a great figure like Kim Il Sung” could not be “a Japanese running dog,” and said he would take his guerrillas and leave the Communist Party if it convicted Kim.
¹⁷

Kim Il Sung with his wife and son, Kim Jong Il, circa 1947.
U.S. National Archives

Kim took a leading role in trying to forge Sino-Korean cooperation in the Manchurian guerrilla struggle, helped along by his fluency in Chinese. After the establishment of Manchukuo around 80 percent of anti-Japanese guerrillas and upward of 90 percent of the members of the “Chinese Communist Party” were Korean. By February 1936 a formidable Sino-Korean army had emerged, with Kim commanding the 3rd Division and several Chinese regimental commanders under him. Koreans were still the largest ethnic force in the late 1930s, constituting 80 percent of two regiments, 50 percent of another, and so on. By this time Kim was “the leader of Korean communists in eastern Manchuria with a great reputation and a high position,” in the estimation of Han Hong-koo. “Kim Il Sung fought all during 1938 and 1939,” Dae-sook Suh wrote, “mostly in southern and southeastern Manchuria. There were numerous [published] accounts of his activities, such as the Liudaogou raid of April 26, 1938, and his raid into Korea once again in May 1939.”
¹⁸

North Korean Defense Minister Choe Yong-gon, circa 1948.
U.S. National Archives

He was not alone, though, working with other Korean guerrilla leaders with their own detachments, such as Choe Yong-gon (minister of defense when the Korean War began), Kim Chaek, and Choe Hyon. Kim’s reputation was also plumped up by the Japanese, whose newspapers featured the conflict between him and the Korean quislings whom the Japanese employed to track him down and kill him, such as Col. Kim Sok-won (then known as Kaneyama Shakugen); he reported to Gen. Nozoe Shotoku, commander of the “Special Kim Detachment” of the Imperial Army. Colonel Kim’s
greatest success came in February 1940, when he killed Yang Jingyu, a famous Chinese guerrilla and close comrade of Kim Il Sung. In April, Nozoe’s forces captured Kim Hye-sun, thought to be Kim’s first wife; the Japanese tried in vain to use her to lure Kim out of hiding, and then murdered her.
¹⁹
Maeda Takashi headed another Japanese Special Police unit, with many Koreans in it, that tracked Kim’s guerrillas for months in early 1940. Maeda’s forces finally caught up with Kim when his guerrillas attacked them on March 13, 1940. After both sides suffered casualties, Kim’s group released POWs so they could move faster; Maeda pursued him for nearly two weeks, stumbling into a trap on March 25. Kim threw 250 guerrillas at 150 soldiers in Maeda’s unit, defeating them and killing Maeda, fifty-eight Japanese, and seventeen others attached to the force, and taking thirteen prisoners and large quantities of weapons and ammunition.

In September 1939, the month when Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II, the Japanese mobilized a “massive punitive expedition” consisting of six battalions of the Kwantung Army and 20,000 men of the Manchurian Army and police force in a six-month guerrilla-suppression campaign, the main target being those led by Kim Il Sung and Choe Hyon. In September 1940 an even larger force embarked on a counterinsurgency campaign against Chinese and Korean guerrillas:

In other words, massive counterinsurgency punctuated the last two years of this conflict, which lasted until the eve of the German onslaught against the Soviet Union. Kim Il Sung’s unit had grown to 340 fighters by July 1940, when it again became the target of General
Nozoe’s expeditionary force, but soon many of his comrades were killed and Kim was forced into “small-unit” operations thereafter.
²¹
Thousands of guerrillas were wiped out, and could be added to the estimates of about 200,000 guerrillas, Communists, secret society members, and bandits slaughtered by the Japanese going back to the Manchurian Incident in 1931.

The disunity of the Korean diaspora—ordinary farmers seeking their livelihood, merchants trying to start a business, lesser and greater collaborators with the Japanese, a resistance made up of Communists, nationalists, bandits, and criminals—left Kim Il Sung with a conviction: unity above all else, and by whatever means necessary (taking Brecht literally). From then onward the North Korean leadership promoted a totalized politics: no dissent, no political alternatives, our way or the highway. Almost as soon as they came into power they put key guerrilla leaders in charge of almost everything (Choe Yong-gon, for example, was installed as head of the main Christian democratic party in the North). However lamentable outsiders may find this, it has been a core element of North Korean politics since the 1930s. The dilemma of political means and ends, for them, is defined by being at war with either Japan or the United States ever since. “Nothing is more important than learning to think crudely,” Brecht once said. “Crude thinking is the thinking of great men.” So was the milieu of crisis in which he wrote, and Koreans fought: crude, illiberal, murderous.