Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (19 page)

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Air power was the key to the evolving strategy in Korea. Two months after losing Seoul for the second time, the UN forces regained the capital. But the seesawing battles continued, with the two sides arrayed against each other in the vicinity of the former border. Carrying out a scorched-earth policy of aerial and naval bombardment in North Korea, the UN forces sought to deprive the Chinese and North Korean troops of logistical support from the rear and, ultimately, of the will to fight. Killing millions of people, in what Bruce Cumings once predicted “would be recognized eventually as an “American holocaust,”
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the bombings helped prevent reconquest of the South but fell short of defeating the communists.

As Chinese and North Korean soldiers stubbornly defended their positions, building a net-work of military tunnels along the front, North Korean civilians like-wise dug into mountainsides to construct underground factories that could withstand bombing raids. Children, according to official accounts, kept going to school during the war “while their pencil cases rattled” from the bombing. If those official sources can be credited, the Northerners simply became more determined—and, alas, more verbose: “Hero Kang Ho-yung was seriously wounded in both arms and both legs in the Kamak Hill Battle, so he rolled into the midst of the enemy with a hand grenade in his mouth and wiped them out, shouting: ‘My arms and legs were broken. But on the contrary my retaliatory spirit against you scoundrels became a thousand times stronger. I will show the unbending fighting will of a member of the Workers’ Party of Korea and unflinching will firmly pledged to the Party and the Leader!’”
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The truth, of course, is that war takes its toll on the morale of even the most motivated people. According to defector testimony, North Koreans had become so war-weary that many had come to hope simply for an end to the fighting, regardless of-which side might win.
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As the fighting and killing continued, MacArthur sought to resolve the bloody impasse by carrying the war to China. He wanted to unleash Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan-based Nationalist troops for a rematch with the Chinese communists, supporting them this time with American bombing—including the atomic bomb. American generals had been considering and making preparations for the possible use of nuclear weapons since the early weeks of the war, and Truman had publicly discussed the possibility in a press conference on November 30, 1950.
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Truman, however, favored an essentially defensive posture, fearing that MacArthur’s aggressive scheme would attract Soviet intervention (just as the Chinese, unbeknownst to him, had calculated). In the ensuing third world war, with American forces stretched too thin, Europe or Japan or both might fall to the communist forces. When MacArthur, against orders, persisted in
maneuvering publicly and privately to get his way Truman fired him for insubordination. The war would be limited to a conventional “police action.”

Limited “war was an unpopular concept among Americans. Right-wing forces opposed it because they-wanted not mere “containment” of communist regimes at their current borders—the usual policy of Cold War–era governments in Washington—but an active “rollback” that would take on such regimes and remove them. Regime change was a minority position, however.

More important in shifting American opinion was the bloodshed that continued in Korea following MacArthur’s march to the Yalu. The violence came to seem gratuitous, giving rise to cynicism in the field that later would be portrayed graphically in the movie and long-running television series
M*A*S*H.
At home, as well, more and more Americans asked a simple but compelling question: Why get our men killed capturing and relinquishing real estate by the square inch in that far-off land—especially if the United States could wipe out the enemy with a few well-placed nuclear weapons?

Ceasefire talks began in mid-1951, with American officers and one South Korean representing the UN side while the North Koreans and Chinese fielded a joint delegation. Growing American sentiment in favor of using stronger measures to halt the fighting may have been one factor influencing the other side to agree to negotiate.
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Nevertheless, the North Koreans were ready to try to portray Washington’s eagerness to talk as evidence that Pyongyang had triumphed: The United States was “frantic,” “completely bewildered.”
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The talks snagged on the treatment of prisoners of war. UN negotiators insisted that each POW be permitted to decide whether to return to his country or not. Humanitarian considerations aside, Washington’s propaganda goal was to show up communism by encouraging many of the North Koreans and Chinese to reject a return to communist rule. The communist side would have none of that, and insisted on the return of all prisoners according to the terms of the Geneva Convention.

American public support for Truman waned as the talks and the fighting dragged on, and he decided not to seek reelection. Dwight Eisenhower campaigned on a promise to “go to Korea”—-which voters took as a pledge to try to halt the war, even if that required more serious measures. After taking office as president in January 1953, the former general let North Korea’s allies in Beijing and Moscow know he was prepared to end the stalemate by expanding the war. He withdrew orders with which Truman had neutralized Taiwan; Chiang Kai-shek was now “unleashed,” and conceivably might decide to invade the Chinese mainland, opening a second front. Stalin’s death in March of 1953 further complicated matters for North Korea’s backers. In May, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that the United States was prepared to exercise the nuclear option. Nehru duly passed along the threat.

Finally, on July 27, 1953, representatives of the United Nations, China and North Korea, meeting at the neutral village of Panmunjom (“Plank-Gate Tavern”), signed a ceasefire agreement. South Korea did not sign, since Rhee wanted to keep the war going and unify the peninsula. Many military commanders on the UN side privately agreed with him. The generals feared that the ceasefire, while averting further bloodshed in the immediate conflict, postponed an inevitable final reckoning with what they still viewed as the expansionist forces of worldwide communism—a reckoning that would prove even bloodier on account of the delay
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The armistice signatories fixed a border along a 155-mile-long, two-and-a-half-mile-wide “demilitarized zone.” That left North and South roughly where they had been at the time of the 1950 invasion. (The North did gain the major city of Kaesong. Also the new border was even closer to Seoul than before, an advantage to the North in case hostilities should revive—and thus the cause of decades of anxiety in the South Korean capital.) In this war approximately 3.5 million Koreans had died—2.5 million of them Northerners, representing a quarter of the DPRKs pre-war population. Perhaps a million Chinese had died.
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The UN death toll including battle-related deaths of 33,629 Americans plus 3,194 others—Turks, Greeks, French, British, Canadians, Thais, Colombians and so on—pales beside the Korean and Chinese numbers. But from the point of view of the dead foreign soldiers’ comrades, families and friends, there were far too many losses.

When I asked retired colonel Ed Logan what he thought the war had accomplished, his reply-was positive if laconic: “Saved South Korea.”
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But as for his view of the 1950–1953 policy of “limited war” against the Chinese and North Koreans, he said bluntly: “We should’ve nuked ’em.”

Kim Il-sung had won the respect of his foes for the military leadership he displayed in the early days of the war.
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As Joseph C. Goulden revealed in his excellent book on the war, someone in the CIA in Washington had thought enough of Kim’s importance to his country’s war effort to offer a hit man a “grand prize of a considerable amount of money” to try to assassinate the North Korean premier.
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At home, on the other hand, Kim faced a potential political problem that Truman himself could have recognized: blame for an initially successful war gone sour. North Korea lay in ruins, devastated more thoroughly than Japan had been by the time of its 1945 surrender.
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Kim in his Manchurian guerrilla days never had commanded more than a few hundred men in combat—and those were harassing operations, by no means comparable to the full-scale war of conquest he waged against the South. If, in the anti-Japanese struggle, he had come to be viewed as a legendary hero, now he was stuck with a bloody disaster of a war. Earlier major decisions after 1945, such as land reform, had been dictated by the Russians
and had succeeded, but the invasion scheme was Kim’s call—a fact that some of the other top leaders knew, even though the masses did not—and it was a failure. As Stalin told Zhou Enlai at a Black Sea meeting in October 1950, Kim had underestimated the “enemy’s might.”
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Unlike Truman, Kim was not about to step down voluntarily. If he did not act shrewdly, though, it was conceivable that he could lose the leadership, and its perquisites. Regarding those perquisites, he seems not to have denied himself. Despite his inspirational pronouncement that “when the people eat boiled foxtail millet, we must have it, too,” photos from the ’wartime period show Kim looking very well fed indeed—a striking contrast to his rail-thin subjects.
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Not the least of Kim’s perks was the adoring gaze of that vast majority of his people who, believing the official version of events, were totally unaware it was Kim who had planned and started the full-scale war that killed and maimed so many of them. Kim evidently could not get enough adoration. An official biography relates a telling incident: Entertaining a group of military heroes during the war, Kim asked them coyly, “There is a song you sing at the front. Please sing that song.” The men obligingly sang the song—-which, as Kim well knew, was “The Song of General Kim Il-sung.”
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Part of Kim’s approach to dealing with the failures of the war was to pass the buck, while harking back to the supposed golden age of his guerrilla activities. North Korean casualties in the war, he wrote, could have been cut drastically if only “flunkeyist” subordinates had taught the people the lessons of his anti-Japanese struggle, instead of directing their eyes abroad to the achievements of the socialist mother country, the Soviet Union.

“If-we had educated people in our revolutionary traditions,” Kim wrote in his memoirs, “they could have formed small units of five to six people or fifteen to twenty people, each carrying an axe and one or two
mal
[about half a bushel to a bushel] of rice, and moving from mountain to mountain, firing several shots now and then and posting up leaflets; in this way they could have endured one month or two in mountains.”
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There are some similarities here with the way Korean communist guerrillas in the South, as well as the Chinese “volunteers,” actually did operate during the Korean War. And perhaps his remark is a regretful reference to Mao’s proposal for establishing a second front in the South in October 1950.
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However, Kim’s hindsight analysis seems a bit quaint when held up against the overall military reality of that conflict—a struggle so ferociously close to total war that it can be called “limited” only thanks to its nonuse of nuclear weapons and the fact that ground fighting did not spill over into other countries.

Mainly, however, Kim dealt with the war’s failure by proclaiming over and over again that North Korea had won a great victory, repelling an invasion by the South and the UN forces. “At the time when we had been able to live a worthy life, built up on our own after the liberation, the U.S. imperialists ignited the war,” he told the people.
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As an official biographer puts it, “all the attacks of the enemy were turned, as though they dashed their heads against the cliffs. The People’s Army mercilessly hit the oncoming enemy met them and crushed their positions. The People’s Army and the whole Korean people stood like a mountain towering in the sky brandishing their sharpened arms. On top of the mountain stood Comrade Kim Il-sung, the iron-willed brilliant commander who held in his hands the general outcome of the war, looking down upon the panic-stricken U.S. imperialist aggressors with calm and shining eyes.”
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The North’s propaganda references to “the whole Korean people”—as if the people of North and South under Kim’s leadership had been struggling in partnership against the South Korean rulers—would have rung hollow to many Southerners. Their own military men were bad enough, overbearing and arrogant toward civilians. But the experience with the Northern occupiers seems to have been even worse. Northern troops in the South indulged themselves in drunkenness and looting. Many Southerners saw their young relatives forbibly conscripted into the North Korean People’s Army and their older relatives—civilians with backgrounds in politics or scholarship—spirited off to the North, never to return.
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Others lost friends or relatives in mass executions of people denounced as anti-communist. Some of the executions were particularly grisly beheadings by swordsmen.
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Christians were a key target for arrest and maltreatment. Thousands of people deemed “pro-American” were jailed and deprived of their property, as the North applied what correspondent Marguerite Higgins described as police-state techniques “far more ruthless than those I had seen in Poland.”
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While they occupied parts of the South the Northerners tried to portray themselves positively as liberators, but with only mixed results. Communist propagandists sought to make the best of the American intervention by attacking the Rhee regime for flunkeyism, in an appeal to South Koreans’ nationalist feelings. Although Moscow used its leverage as supplier of aid and skills to maintain control over much of the Pyongyang regime’s basic decision making, via the Soviet embassy
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the Russians had gone to considerable lengths to disguise that fact. As the invasion approached, Moscow had withdrawn its military advisors in order to keep its major contributions to the Northern war effort hidden from outside view. That left Pyongyang in a position to decry the South’s dependence on U.S. military backing. A talented cartoonist in the hastily established communist propaganda bureau in Seoul drew what one South Korean third grader of the time considered a very effective poster. It showed a craven South Korean President Rhee kneeling down and begging Truman for help.
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