Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (151 page)

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 comprise 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).

19.
See Gardner’s introduction to
The Korean War,
which he edited. Gardner observes (p. 6), “The State Department’s initial soundings of .Moscow’s intentions brought responses which satisfied the experts that Korea was in fact
not
the prelude to a general Soviet offensive. But no one in the U.S. government corrected or amended the President’s assertion that the Russians had passed beyond subversion to armed invasion and war.”

20.
For a discussion of this point, quoting Isaac Deutscher and Daniel Yergin, see van Ree,
Socialism in One Zone
(see chap. 4, n. 1), pp. 8 ff

As an example of the conventional Western view at the time, consider a New York
Herald Tribune
correspondent’s comment: “If we cede the Asian mainland to the Communists without a fight, we will greatly strengthen our enemy. We will give the Chinese military dictatorship time to build an even stronger and better army. We will give them the opportunity to liberate’ the rich prizes of Indo-China and Thailand. But we will not be giving them only man power and raw materials. We will be giving them something of great strategic importance. If we pull out of Asia we say to the Soviet world, Your eastern flank is now comparatively secure. Go ahead and concentrate on Europe.’ If we do the Soviet world this favor, Europe will eventually go under” (.Marguerite Higgins,
War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent
[New York: Doubleday 1951], p. 215).

21.
Confidential letter from Dulles to South Korean President Syngman Rhee, June 22, 1953, declassified and published in U.S. Department of State,
Foreign Relations of the United States 1952–1954,
vol. XV, Korea (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1984), pp. 1238–1240. This was a rationale that Washington officials might have done well to recall and ponder carefully in September of 1950, before sending their troops across the 38th parallel to “liberate” North Korea.

The swift UN Security Council decision figures in a 2001 argument by Russian scholars that the United States secretly hoped for an invasion and had plans to meet it. Aleksandr Orlov and Viktor Gavrilov (see chap. 4, n. 94) are reported to contend that the resolution must have been drafted beforehand by the U.S. State Department as part of its preparations. However, the remarkable haste was not in the drafting of the resolution. That is the sort of work, after all, that the department’s diplomats and lawyers were trained to do expeditiously. Rather, what was remarkable was that the UN Security Council acted almost immediately. For that, there is a plausible explanation that does not involve a high-level U.S. conspiracy to invite an attack. Korean War correspondent Denis Warner reports that the United Nations at the time of the invasion already had dispatched a pair of Australians to observe, from the southern side, the outbreaks of violence that had been occurring along the 38th parallel. The day before the Northern invasion Maj. Stuart Peach and Squadron Leader Ron Rankin reported to the UN Commission in Seoul, saying they had found the South Korean military defensively oriented, not in condition to wage a major attack on the North. When the invasion occurred, the commission urgently cabled the report to the UN secretary-general in New York. “No report could have been more timely,” Warner observes
(International Herald Tribune,
June 14, 2000, p. 7). “The UN Security Council did not have to rely on information from the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, the South Korean government or other observers whose
impartiality might have been open to question. It had its own report from its own specialists in its own commission in Korea, of which neither the United States nor South Korea was a member.” Warner adds that “if the Peach and Rankin report had not been immediately available, days might have passed before the Security Council could have mustered enough evidence to persuade its members to act. By that time, the Soviet Union [then boycotting the council] would have resumed its seat and used its veto.” Without the Peach and Rankin report, North Korea “probably would have won the war,” taking over the whole of the South before the UN forces could intervene.