Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (9 page)

Kim’s band joined communist guerrillas whose mission was to defend some one thousand of the Wangqing people, who had evaded the 1932 punitive campaign. They fled deeper into the mountains, to heavily forested Xiaowangqing. Feeding the refugees was the immediate problem. The small patches of arable land in the area could not grow enough for them. Guerrilla attacks on the enemy yielded only small amounts of supplies. The inhabitants ate gruel made of beans ground with a millstone. When even that was unavailable the revolutionaries had to forage for roots and herbs. In their desperation they made cakes of pine bark that had been boiled in caustic soda water and pounded.
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His time in the guerrilla zones was a major formative influence on Kim. In later life he was to recall incessantly those days and the lessons he had learned then. Several lessons arose from his dissatisfaction with the leaders of the guerrilla bases. Like the nationalist buffoons he had so despised in his student days, those communists postured instead of confronting problems directly. “The cadres busied themselves with nothing in particular, simply creating a lot of fuss and shouting ‘Revolution! Revolution!’ They seldom fought outside the guerrilla zone, but spent day after day mouthing empty slogans about establishing a proletarian dictatorship.”

When the guerrillas returned from victorious battles, “the people shouted hurrah, and-waved flags.” However, there were few major battles. Kim recalled
arguing that too few soldiers and arms were available to defend such a large area and to undertake, at the same time, offensive operations. But “weak-kneed officials” rejected his argument. Those officials designated all the people living outside the area as reactionaries, needlessly minimizing the pool of people from whom converts and recruits could be drawn. For any would-be soldiers who met the residential requirements, they set unrealistic standards of class background and ideological development.
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Kim told of one young man whose father owned a little over three hectares
(7.4
acres) of poor land on a hillside. Three hectares was the cutoff point. No member of a farming household owning more land could qualify as a “poor peasant.” Thus the young man flunked the guerrilla district’s strict class-background test for military recruits. Turned down several times, the young man finally arranged to sell the land—without his parents’ knowledge. He used the proceeds to buy a box of Browning pistols and presented the weapons to the district’s defense force. Now that he qualified as a poor peasant, he was accepted. “He was glad that he had become a guerrilla, but his family was at a loss, left without any means of livelihood,” Kim wrote.
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Kim and others of like mind moved to establish a buffer area surrounding the guerrilla zone. The communists would not fully control the buffer area as they did the heavily protected guerrilla zone. But they could draw from it material support and reserve forces. The buffer area “would be governed by the enemy during daylight, but would come under our control at night.” Although opponents attacked his group as “rightist deviationists,” Kim’s side turned out to be correct, as he recounted the story. By the mid-1930s the guerrilla zone itself proved too big a target. The communists had to disband it. However, the underground revolutionary organizations they had established in enemy-ruled buffer areas continued to function.
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Military weakness was not the worst of the problems afflicting the guerrilla districts when Kim arrived at Wangqing in 1933. Radical social changes, dictated from Moscow via the Chinese Communist Party, had disillusioned the people. Many had left in disgust.
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“Everything was communalized, from land and provisions to the farming tools and implements such as sickles, hoes and pitchforks that had belonged to individual peasants.” Life, labor and distribution were all communal. Kim had little problem with the measures themselves; more than a decade later, as leader of North Korea, he adopted many of them himself. Rather, he disagreed-with the timing: “This policy amounted to sending kindergarten children to university without giving them primary and secondary education.”

The revolutionaries’ term for the governing body of a Manchurian guerrilla zone was “soviet,” meaning an elected communist government. Local people, however, had no idea what the foreign term meant, as applied to
their districts, and the communists had not taken the trouble to educate them. In various districts, as Kim eventually learned, the people had mistaken the term for
soksaepo,
the Korean word for an automatic gun, or
soebochi,
a tin pail. One villager advised people to look closely at the soviet and see whether it was large or small. “Some other villagers were said to have gone out with baskets to gather wild vegetables, because they had nothing special to offer the soviet, an important guest.” Even propagandists for the soviet had no clear idea of what it was. To cover their confusion they tossed around additional loan-words such as
kommuna.

One old man, the father of a guerrilla commander, told Kim that the last straw for him had come when officials collected the people’s spoons and chopsticks for use in a new, communal dining hall. The old man spat at them. “If you are going to create a hell and call it a
kommuna,”
he told them, “do it yourselves, young men. We are already out of breath and can’t keep up with you any longer.” The old man like-wise was disgusted by mass meetings at which daughters-in-law criticized their husbands’ overbearing parents, who in traditional fashion ruled the extended-family households.

The authorities expropriated large and small landholdings alike, taking the owners’ cattle, horses and provisions. When a female baby was born in a Chinese household, it had been the custom for her family to prepare flower-patterned shoes for her future children and put them away in a chest. In purges of Chinese landowners the revolutionaries took even those shoes.

Although Kim in his memoirs related such affecting anecdotes, it was not sentiment that made him disapprove of the communalization campaign in the guerrilla zones. Rather, the campaign cut off valuable support the guerrilla armies had been receiving from landowners. The landowners were predominantly patriotic Chinese, opposed to the Japanese colonialists. Alienating them revived old antagonisms on the part of Manchuria’s Chinese inhabitants toward Koreans, who made up the vast majority of both Jiandao’s population as a whole and the province’s communists. The result was a split in the anti-Japanese movement.

Kim blamed the problems on higher-ups who, “in ignorance of specific circumstances, aped the ill-digested principles of the classics”—the Marxist-Leninist classics, that is. The people in charge locally had their orders, handed down from Moscow’s Comintern, and they refused to change the policy. Some revolutionaries could see that the directives had failed in practice—but they imagined that the way to correct the situation would be to go to the Soviet Union and study the way the revolution’s mother country carried them out.

The North Korean system that Kim constructed in his later life appears so extreme that it may be difficult to picture him as the scourge of overzealous
communist radicals. Nevertheless he asserted that for six decades following those days in the guerrilla zones of the 1930s he tirelessly combated “leftist” evils and bureaucratic tendencies.

Some of his 1930s experiences seem to have reinforced a personal bent to authoritarianism. Kim devoted a lengthy section of his memoirs to decrying “ultra-democracy”—another “leftist” tendency—in the commands of some anti-Japanese guerrilla forces in Manchuria.
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The leftists “advocated absolute equality for every soldier, irrespective of his rank.” Officers had to do menial work just like the men. Still more damaging was a rule that, even in the heat of combat, everything had to be decided collectively through majority rule. In practice that meant endless series of meetings.

Kim told of one case in which Japanese surrounded thirteen guerrillas in a house at night. Experienced military men in the house could see that the best hope for escaping was to judge the enemy’s weak point, strike quickly and fight their way through the encircling force. However, the company commander had no right to make a decision, and a veteran guerrilla who knew what should be done was not entitled to any special respect merely on account of his seniority. The soldiers argued on and on about whether to try for a breakthrough or simply to stand and fight. They did not stop arguing and start fighting until the enemy commenced firing. All thirteen guerrillas were shot, most fatally. One wounded guerrilla managed to escape to tell the tale. “Ever since then I have shuddered at the mention of ultra-democracy in military affairs, and never tolerated the slightest tendency towards it in our ranks,” Kim said. An army in which subordinates speak impolitely to their superiors, dispute their orders and instructions or fail to salute them “is no longer an army. It is a rabble.”
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During his time in Manchuria’s Wangqing guerrilla zone, Kim claimed, people started to see him as a potential Korean version of Vietnam’s famed revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. A representative of the Comintern known as Inspector Pan came calling in April of 1933, the month Kim turned twenty-one. Kim asked the visitor why Moscow did not permit Koreans to have their own communist party. The Indochinese, after all, had a party of their own despite their own history of factional abuses. Inspector Pan explained the real reason for the distinction: None other than Ho Chi Minh had been representing the Indochinese communists in the Comintern. The Korean communists, on the other hand, had no such outstanding leader who could compel respect from Moscow. Inspector Pan stayed and talked for some days, according to Kim’s account, and when he finally left, his parting words to his host were: “Please be Korea’s Ho Chi Minh.
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Whatever his disagreements with party policy, it was Kim’s job as a soldier to help defend the Xaiowangqing guerrilla district. He and his fellow communist insurgents in East Manchuria were more than an irritant to Tokyo. They limited Japanese control of that territory and may have impeded further imperial expansion into China proper. Japan assigned a division of its crack Kwantung Army and beefed up the police to rein in the guerrillas. The authorities sent armed Japanese reserve soldiers to establish themselves as colonists. They set up associations “for the maintenance of public peace” all over Manchuria. The associations had instructions to root out insurgents and pacify the populace. Spies for the Japanese infiltrated the commumist-held areas. Undercover agents had authority to execute rebels on the spot.
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A major test, Kim related, was a three-month battle with Japanese punitive forces that started in November 1933. He said five thousand enemy troops attacked an area defended by only two companies of guerrillas. The guerrillas used surprise attacks, sniping, ambush, night warfare and feints, luring the enemy into a defense zone of their own choosing. One successful tactic was burying a bomb in the bonfire just before abandoning a guerrilla campsite. Enemy troops moving into the abandoned position warmed themselves at the fire—for the last time. Ho Chi Minh would have approved. The enemy forces, however, accepted their losses and mounted a siege, determined to outlast the poorly provisioned communists. Kim said he took half the guerrillas and sneaked through the line of siege, then attacked and harassed the enemy from the rear. Finally, the Japanese lifted the siege and withdrew.

Kim’s explanation of why outside historians knew nothing of this battle was that it was overshadowed by European news as Hitler took office in Germany while Moscow and Washington established diplomatic relations.
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Other battles did not escape notice, however. From Wangqing and other bases, Kim subsequently conducted many more small-scale military operations, usually in Manchuria but occasionally across the border in Korea. His record in guerrilla-warfare proved him a-worthy bearer of the illustrious Kim Il-sung name. Press reports in the mid- to late 1930s are sprinkled with references to the exploits of the Kim Il-sung unit.
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A report to the Comintern in December 1935 described him as “trusted and respected” within the anti-Japanese movement.
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Most significant in building his reputation both with the Japanese foe and among fellow Koreans was a battle on June 4, 1937. The twenty-five-year-old Kim and about two hundred of his men crossed into Korea and attacked the border village of Pochonbo at night, killing some Japanese policemen. They then made off with supplies and money seized from local landlords. When a Japanese punitive expedition followed them back across to Manchuria, Kim had his men conceal themselves among the rocks on a mountain. “He told us never to fire until the enemies were close at hand,” Choi Jin-sok recalled. To conserve his unit’s scarce ammunition, Kim had his men push rocks down
upon the attacking Japanese. “Rocks rolled down with a thundering noise,” according to Choi. As the Japanese fled, the Koreans captured enough weapons for each guerrilla to be armed with an up-to-date rifle.
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Most of the men serving under Kim were Korean, and later he wished to be remembered as commander of a body he referred to as the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army. Outside historians, however, know the “KPRA” as the Second Army Corps of a Chinese communist-led force that was called at first the Northeast People’s Revolutionary Army. From 1936, it was known as the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. (The Chinese referred to Manchuria as Northeast China.) A 1936 declaration of the NEAJUA explained that “every Chinese with passion and brains knows that there is no way for survival other than fighting the Japanese.” It added a welcome to “all the oppressed peoples, the Koreans, Mongolians, Taiwanese and their organizations,” to join the army.
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