North Korea was a product of two tragic events in Korean history: the division of the country by the USA and the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, and the Korean War. The first quickly led to the creation of two separate regimes in the peninsula, each seeing itself as the legitimate heir of the country’s struggle for independence and national renewal; the second made the division permanent. Under the Soviet occupation from 1945 to 1948 the foundations of the North Korean regime were established and its leaders under Russian tutelage carried out a sweeping revolution. But like all good Korean nationalists the division was unacceptable to them. Furthermore, from the perspective of the North Korean leadership the revolution could not be completed until all of Korea was liberated. Thus, two years after the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was proclaimed in 1948, the leaders of the new socialist state attempted to carry out reunification by military means. But the USA’s intervention led to the disastrous failure of North Korea’s effort at unification and to China’s entry into the conflict to ensure the new state’s survival. After the armistice in 1953, the northern regime focused on rebuilding and remolding its society without losing sight of its long-term goal of creating a strong, progressive united Korean state.
Division
The division of Korea was a totally unexpected development for Koreans of all orientations. One could imagine the conflicting strains of the nationalist movement in Korea creating some sort of domestic power struggle or even civil conflict; but the division of the country into two halves was solely the result of the intervention of the USA and the Soviet Union. The organizationally fragmented, geographically scattered and ideologically divided nationalist movements, whether communist or non-communist, had little initial influence on events.
What actually happened at the end of the war was largely unanticipated by anyone. On August 8, 1945, just two days after the USA dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The Soviets immediately began an offensive along Japan’s northern frontier in Sakhalin, Manchuria, and along the extreme northeast corner of Korea that borders Siberia. The next day reports arrived in Washington of Soviet landings on the Korean peninsula. With the surrender of Japan imminent, Americans quickly began seeing Korea much as Tokyo had, as a strategic bridgehead into Japan. While Soviet forces were already entering the northeast of Korea, the closest American forces were six hundred miles away in Okinawa and would not be able to reach Korea for several weeks. It was therefore urgent that the USA work out an agreement to prevent the entire peninsula from falling into Soviet hands. On the night of August 10–11 the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee assigned Colonel Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel the task of drawing up a line for the occupation of Korea by Soviet and American forces that would keep Moscow from occupying the entire country.1 Rusk and Bonesteel chose the 38th parallel since it split the country into roughly equal halves but kept Seoul in the southern half. In reality, the southern half was more populous; the area north of the 38th parallel contained only 9.3 million people out of Korea’s total population of 28 million, and of this, 8 million people were rural-dwelling while only 1.3 million lived in urban areas.2 With President Truman’s approval the proposal was sent to Moscow, and Stalin sent back his agreement the next day. It is not clear why he did so when his forces could have easily marched all the way to Pusan; Stalin may have hoped that by agreeing to a joint military occupation the door would be left open for a Soviet role in the occupation of Japan and perhaps Europe as well. Recent research suggests he also wanted to avoid a potential conflict with the USA in Korea.3 No Koreans were consulted or even knew of these decisions until days after their implementation had begun.
The 38th parallel was not based on any historical or geographical boundaries; it cut across the two provinces of Kyŏnggi and Kangwŏn, and split counties and valleys. It simply divided the country into roughly two equally sized zones. As George M. McCune, chief of the Korean section in the Office of Far Eastern Affairs in the US State Department wrote, it was “an arbitrary line, chosen by staff officers for military purposes without political or other considerations.”4 It became a central axiom of North Koreans – indeed of all Koreans – that the division of their country was unnatural and unacceptable.
Korea in 1945
When the Japanese emperor announced Japan’s surrender over the radio on August 15, 1945 most Koreans were taken by surprise. So carefully censored was the news in colonial Korea that the extent of Imperial Japan’s reverses was not fully understood, at least not by most Koreans. So when, on Sunday, August 15, they were instructed to listen to an important radio announcement by the emperor the majority were stunned. Then, almost immediately, they broke out into both celebration and an orgy of destruction of the symbols of Japanese authority, such as the Shinto shrines which were set ablaze across the country. Unaware of Allied plans for a trusteeship they began to make immediate preparations for the creation of a new government. In Seoul and in other communities people of all political persuasions met to plan for independence in what appear to have been spontaneous gatherings. In retrospect it is hard to look back without a sense of sadness at the contrast between this brief moment of shared joy, with its promise of the rebirth of the Korean state as a new modern, autonomous nation, and the reality of occupation, division and war that was to come. Meanwhile, as Koreans celebrated their coming liberation, Washington and Moscow began to deploy forces for an occupation that neither had prepared for.
Soviet Occupation
North Korea, as a country and as a regime, had its birth in the Soviet occupation. On August 11 the Soviet Union’s 25th Army crossed the border to enter northeast Korea. Two weeks later, on August 26, Soviet forces entered Pyongyang; soon after all of North Korea was under Soviet occupation. They were considerably ahead of US forces who did not begin to land in the South until September 8, 1945. The Soviet forces in Korea were commanded by General Chistiakov. But he was concerned with the military aspects of the occupation; the task of administration was left to Major-General Andrei Alekseevich Romanenko and Colonel-General Terentii Shtykov. Shtykov, the Political Commissar during the three-year occupation, was a party functionary not a military man. He appeared to be the most important figure among the Soviets in shaping the occupation from 1945 to 1948, and continued to serve as the first Soviet ambassador to the new state after 1948. According to Lankov, Shtykov “was the real supreme ruler of North Korea” during the three-year Soviet occupation.5
While the US government believed that Moscow had a clear blueprint for the takeover of their zone, most historians who have examined the Soviets’ actions and the evidence from the Russian archives that has been made accessible to them find little support for this idea.6 Historian Andrei Lankov, who carried out an extensive study of the Soviet documents from this time and interviewed some of the Russian participants in the Soviet occupations, has argued that Moscow saw North Korea as a military problem to be handled by its generals. In fact, it is surprising just how unprepared the Soviets were. Not only did they lack Korean experts to help with the military occupation, but they lacked interpreters.7 In this way they resembled the American forces under General Hodge who had only Japanese-speaking interpreters. As with the Americans the Soviet military came to fight the Japanese not govern Koreans. As was also the case with the Americans, the Soviets entered without any contacts within Korea, and with little knowledge of the internal affairs of the country. In both cases the military appeared to be almost desperately searching for local Koreans they could work with. For the Soviets, this lack of expertise was in part due to the purge of Korean ethnic military and intelligence offices during the period 1936–1938. It was also due to the isolation of the domestic communists in Korea who, under intensive and effective Japanese repression, were unable to establish regular contact with Moscow. Other Korean communists were based in remote regions of China working for the Chinese Communist Party and had virtually no communication with the Soviet Union.
Despite many cases of looting and rape during the initial arrival of Red Army forces, the Soviets soon showed more skill at establishing order and working with local Koreans than did the Americans. In both the North and South, Korean people’s committees began to fill the vacuum, maintaining internal order, avoiding clashes between Koreans and the Japanese, and securing food stocks. The main Korean organization to coordinate order and to prepare for the independence that most Koreans expected to happen soon was the Committee for Preparation of Korean Independence (Chosŏn kŏn’guk chunbi wiwonhoe) based in Seoul and with 143 branches throughout the country.8 The Americans were suspicious of this organization and refused to recognize or work with it. They feared it was dominated by leftists and perhaps communists with links to Moscow. In reality, left-leaning nationalists played important roles in the organization, but there is little evidence that communists dominated either the central committee in Seoul or more than a very small number of the provincial branches. Local people’s committees were grassroots organizations that sprang up with little planning as prominent citizens responded to the sudden collapse of Japanese rule. By November 20, 1945 people’s committees had been formed in all seven provinces north of the 38th parallel, in 9 cities, 70 counties and 20 townships.9 In contrast to the Americans, the Soviets utilized the committees that had sprung up across the country and turned them into instruments of support for their occupation. Upon entering Pyongyang the Soviets replaced the Japanese local governing authority with the South P’yŏngan Provisional People’s Political Committee.10 Again this was in contrast to the Americans’ actions, as they initially kept the Japanese authorities in office.
The Soviets did not create a full-blown military occupation but worked through various Korean-led organizations. On October 3, the Soviets set up the Civil Administration to function alongside the various people’s committees. The next month they created the Five Provinces Administrative Bureau (Odo haengjŏngguk) with ten departments to carry out much of the administration, each headed by a Korean but with a Soviet advisor to assist. Although to a considerable extent they directed the events in North Korea, the Soviets preferred to give the appearance that Koreans were initiating change. And to some extent this was the case since when the Soviets found Korean communists that they were comfortable working with they let them implement policies.
Finding Suitable Partners
The Soviets needed to find reliable Korean partners. As in Eastern Europe their method was to form broad coalitions between communist and non-communist nationalists while gradually giving greater control over to the communists and removing uncooperative elements. The Soviets, however, had to deal with the fact that most of the non-communist nationalists had cooperated with the Japanese and therefore had tarnished nationalist credentials. An even greater problem was that the local communist movement was structurally weak, centered in the US-occupied South and few of its members were known to Moscow. Unlike the case of Eastern Europe there were no appreciable numbers of communist exiles in the Soviet Union.
In the North the most prominent Korean was the Christian leader Cho Man-sik, the head of the Pyongyang People’s Committee. The 63-year-old Cho had compromised his nationalist credentials when he called upon students during World War II to volunteer and fight for Japan.11 Nonetheless, he remained the best-known nationalist in the North and his prestige made him useful to the Soviets who made him head of the Five Provinces Administrative Bureau in November. Cho and other conservatives formed the Democratic Party (Minjudang) in November. They were a collection of landlords, prominent professionals and members of North Korea’s significant Christian community. Although comprising less than 5 percent of the population, Christians tended to be better educated, better represented in the small middle class and active in disproportionate numbers in the nationalist movements. They were strongest in the urban areas, especially in Pyongyang. It is useful to recall that Kim Il Sung came from a Protestant Christian family in the area. Christians were more open to Western ideas, more active in progressive movements and often saw themselves as agents for modernization and national renewal. They were, therefore, influential beyond their modest numbers. The province where Pyongyang is located, P’yŏng’an, was also a center for Ch’ŏndogyo (Heavenly Way) an indigenous religious group that had its roots in the Tonghak movement in the late nineteenth century. Their concern with land reform was especially attractive to the communists who shared this part of their agenda. With Soviet approval the Ch’ŏndogyo organized a political party in early 1946 with the old name Ch’ŏng’udang. Christians and Ch’ŏndogyo members were the most organized non-communist groups in North Korea and the main coalition partners with the communists in the early days of the occupation.
North Korea’s Communists
It is fair to say the Kim Il Sung was selected and promoted by the Soviets to be the communist leader in the North. But the process by which this happened was not carefully planned and was somewhat difficult to untangle. When surviving domestic communists did emerge from hiding or from jail they were centered in Seoul. This presented an awkward situation. The leader of the Communist Party of Korea in August 1945 was Pak Hŏn-yŏng. But Pak, like most of the other domestic communists, was largely unfamiliar to the Soviets and, of course, was operating out of the American occupation zone. On August 17, in the first days of liberation, the Communist Party in Seoul sent Hyŏn Chun-hyŏk to Pyongyang to help organize the party there. Hyŏn, a native of the city, was the de facto leader in the North but in reality he had limited authority over other local communists in the industrial and port cities of Ch’ŏngju, Sinŭiju, Haeju, Hŭngnam, Hamhŭng and Wŏnsan. Most of these were industrial towns in the northeast where communist labor movements had been fairly strong.12 Hyŏn Chun-hyŏk does not seem to have impressed the Soviets. The domestic communists with a few exceptions had worked in isolation, had few contacts with the Soviet Union or communists elsewhere and were not trusted by Moscow. And they were little known among their countrymen. Needing Korean speakers the Soviets conducted a search for Soviet-Koreans. Some survivors of the 1930s purges were found and they began to arrive to assist with the occupation. However, they were Soviet citizens with only distant or indeed no connections with Korea so organizing a reliable and effective local communist group that could serve as loyal allies of the Soviets was not an easy task.
This was the situation that awaited Manchurian veterans of the 88th Brigade when they entered the country. They arrived in Korea on September 19 landing by boat in the port of Wŏnsan. Captain Kim Il Sung became the leader of this small band of about 60 former Manchurian guerillas, or partisans as they are often called. It is not clear how or why he became the leader of this group. There were several other captains and one major, and some of the other ex-guerillas were older and had as much if not more guerilla experience. At 33 he was younger than two-thirds of the group, although most were around his age.13 Perhaps the Soviets for some reason were impressed with him and arranged this. Or he may have been selected by his peers out of their respect for his record as a fighter. These former partisans, many able to speak Russian and already familiar with working with the Red Army, were extremely useful in assisting with the occupation. The Soviet military, they were dispersed to various parts of the country. Some were strategically placed in security organs. For example, O Chin-u, who later became the highest ranking military person in the regime, was made police chief of Pyongyang. Since the Soviets made Pyongyang their occupation headquarters they sent Kim Il Sung there, assigning him to the commandant as deputy chief garrison officer.14
Thus, almost from the moment of his return to Korea, the first time since he was 12, Kim Il Sung rose to a key position in the occupation. This rise was aided by the vacuum in the communist leadership in the North which came about shortly after Kim Il Sung was assigned to Pyongyang: Hyŏn Chun-hyŏk, the highest ranking domestic Korean, returning with Cho Man-sik from a meeting with the Soviet occupation authorities, was assassinated on September 28. Two weeks later Kim Il Sung made his public debut when he was selected to address the crowd at a publicly organized rally to welcome the Soviet forces. This was a major public event, and the selection of Kim as the key speaker immediately placed him at the forefront of the communist leaders. This large ceremony organized by the Soviets took place on October 14, 1945; 300,000 people attended. Kim Il Sung, dressed in a Western-style suit and wearing Soviet medals, led it. Many who attended were surprised at his youth, aged only 33. Kim Il Sung later described this as the biggest day in his life. Why did the Soviets single out Kim Il Sung? There are many explanations, including the story that he had a secret meeting with Stalin before leaving the Soviet Union. This story is unlikely. More likely was that he was the best known of the communists largely owing to the publicity given to the Poch’ŏnbo raid in 1937. He appeared disciplined, worked well with Soviet officers and happened to be in the right place at the right time. And, of course, there was the shortage of other suitable candidates. The decision to promote Kim Il Sung was probably not a carefully planned one by the Soviets. According to Lankov, a study of the Soviet documents suggests that the “process of choosing a future leader was chaotic and spontaneous.”15
Kim Il Sung’s public appearance coincided with the organization of a North Korean communist party. On September 20, 1945 Stalin ordered that the Soviets should “support all of northern Korea’s anti-Japanese democratic parties and organizations in order to establish to establish a proletariat democratic power.”16 From October 5 to 8, 1945, a conference of Korean Communist Party leaders of the five provinces met. Apparently, this meeting established the foundation for what would become the ruling party of North Korea. On October 12, 1945 the Soviet occupation authorities issued a proclamation allowing Koreans to organize political parties provided they were anti-Japanese and democratic.17 The following day local communists created a North Korea Branch Bureau of the Korean Communist Party (Chosŏn kongsandang Puk Chosŏn punguk), officially announced on October 20, 1945.18 This was technically a branch of the Seoul-based party and it recognized Pak Hŏn-yŏng in Seoul as head of the Korean Communist Party. It was organized, however, at the initiative of the Soviets, not by the main party in Seoul. Following two name changes it is still the ruling party of North Korea to this day. Oddly enough, in 1958 the North Koreans, rewriting history, changed the date of the founding of the party to October 10, which has since become an important day of commemoration. Why this was done is not clear but then North Korea has constantly changed important dates in its history, sometimes for obscure reasons. Kim Il Sung was not its chairman. Rather the post went to Kim Yong-bŏm, a rather minor cadre. It is not known why or how he was selected other than the fact he was the husband of Pak Chŏng-ae, an active Korean communist who had spent much time in the Soviet Union. Kim Il Sung only took over the chairmanship on December 17 or 18 after Kim Yong-bŏm died of a stomach tumor.19 At that time the northern branch party was growing but still very small, with only 4,530 members.20
Just as Kim Il Sung began to emerge as the leader among the North Korean communists another group of communists began to trickle into the country. During the fall of 1945 members of the Yanan faction began returning to Korea. In January 1946 they formed their own Sinmindang (New Democratic Party) with Kim Tu-bong as its chair. It had no sharp ideological differences with the Branch Bureau. In June 1946 the Branch Bureau detached itself from the Seoul-based main Korean Communist Party. Renamed the Workers’ Party of North Korea, it merged with the Sinmindang. The Workers’ Party of North Korea held its first party congress on August 28–30, 1946. Kim Tu-bong was named chair and Kim Il Sung one of two vice chairs. Despite Kim Tu-bong’s position as chair, it appeared that the real leader of the party was Kim Il Sung. Since many of the Yanan communists were a generation older, better educated and had longer records as communists and independence fighters their acceptance of Kim Il Sung’s leadership must have been difficult but they had little real choice as the Soviets were supporting him. Most of the members of the Central Committee were also older than him, with Kim Tu-bong, aged 56, being the oldest member.21 Moscow instructed leftists in South Korea to form a similar coalition in November 1946 known as the South Korean Workers’ Party. Three years later, after most of the communists in the South had fled to the North or were forced underground, the two parties merged or rather the southern party was absorbed to form the Korean Workers’ Party (Chosŏn Rodong-dang) (KWP) which has remained the name of North Korea’s ruling party. Kim Il Sung was its chair.
At first the Soviet occupation was through a broad coalition of Korean nationalists, at least in theory. The Soviets then orchestrated the political domination by the communists in steps. When Cho Man-sik and his conservative colleagues organized the Democratic Party in November the Soviets pressured them to include some communist members. Ch’oe Yong-gŏn was made deputy chair of the party. Ch’oe had once worked with Cho Man-sik but later joined the guerillas in Manchuria and became a comrade of Kim Il Sung. Later he served as North Korea’s head of state. Kim Ch’aek, another partisan, headed the Democratic Party’s secretariat. When in early 1946 Cho opposed the Soviet–US plan for a trusteeship he was removed as party chair and placed under house arrest. Ch’oe Yong-gŏn was made the new Democratic Party chair. On July 22, 1946, also under the apparent direction of the Soviets, all legal parties formed the United Democratic National Front (Puk Chosŏn minjujuŭi t’ongil chŏnsŏn) under the leadership of the communists.22 By this time most of the landlords, who formed an important base for the Democratic Party, had left for the South. Thus, the chief moderate nationalist party became a mere puppet organization of the communists.
The American and Soviet occupation zones were meant to be temporary arrangements under the trusteeship that had been discussed and agreed upon during the war. When the allied powers met at the Moscow Conference on December 27, 1945, to discuss the postwar settlement they agreed to carry out the four- to five-year four-power trusteeship of the USA, the Soviet Union, China and Britain. This was a considerable reduction from the earlier 20–30 years agreed at Yalta but it was still too long for most Koreans, who wanted immediate independence. Koreans, in general, were still unaware of the trusteeship agreement and reaction to the public announcement by the powers was universal outrage. Massive demonstrations took place in the South. In the North the Soviets demanded all parties were to support the trusteeship; Cho Man-sik’s removal and house arrest when he refused to do so made this policy clear. At the conference Washington and Moscow created an American–Soviet Joint Commission which met in March 1946 to work out the terms of the trusteeship. Preliminary talks between the two powers were held prior to the commission in Seoul. The Americans wanted guarantees that there would be no interruption to the electricity supply to the South, most of which came from the Soviet zone. They also wanted freedom of movement across the 38th parallel where the Soviets had begun to establish roadblocks.
Birth of the North Korean State
While evidence suggests that Moscow initially had no clear plan when they occupied the area north of the 38th parallel, the outlines of the North Korean state emerged very quickly. In February 1946 the Soviets organized a North Korean Provisional People’s Committee (NKPPC) with Kim Il Sung as chairman and Kim Tu-bong as vice-chairman. One could argue that with this, the North Korean communist regime began, just six months after liberation. The NKPPC acted quickly to carry out sweeping reforms; the most important being the land reform (see the section “A North Korean Revolution” below). Many other sweeping measures were carried out by the Provisional Committee. It established a new educational system, opened a new university and carried out adult literacy campaigns. Labor laws established the eight-hour day, and other laws established the legal equality of women, made divorce easier and ended the legal basis of the old patriarchal family system. The impact of these actions was profound and transformed North Korean society. Furthermore, in August of 1946 all major industries were nationalized.
Meanwhile, step by step, a new North Korean state was being consolidated. In November 1946 the Soviets carried out carefully managed elections to regional, provincial and city people’s committees. In February 1947 the delegates from these people’s committees met in the First Congress of the People’s Committees.23 They, in turn, created the North Korean People’s Committee. Once again Kim Il Sung was named chair and the former partisan Kim Ch’aek vice chair. The deletion of the word “provisional” in this new governing organ is significant, for North Korea in 1947 was already becoming in reality a separate state. Gradually, a North Korean military was formed. This was done under the careful supervision of the Soviets. First, in 1946, the Soviets established a police force as well as railway defense units. A key figure in developing the security forces was Pang Hak-se, a former Soviet police officer who was sent to the Korea along with other Soviet-Koreans to assist the occupation.24 Another important figure was the Manchurian partisan Kim Ch’aek who headed the Pyongyang Institute founded in November 1945 to train military officers and political cadres. A Central Security Officers’ Training School was established and its first class graduated in the fall of 1947.25 In February 1948 the Korean People’s Army (KPA) was officially organized, although in fact, the Soviets had begun forming the army in 1947. The Soviets played a big role in the training of KPA forces, attaching at least three Soviet advisors to each regiment.26 In 1948 the KPA had 40,000 troops; the following year it had 60,000.
Contrast with the South
These orderly but revolutionary developments in North Korea contrasted with the South. There the Americans were far slower in working out a plan for a viable state, as they floundered while looking for partners to work with. Their occupation was also more violent and chaotic. The People’s Republic of Korea, which was created prior to the arrival of the Americans, was ignored and all power was transferred to the United States Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK). The Americans created a Korean Advisory Council which was dominated by conservative landowners, and later that year an Interim Legislative Assembly, but unlike the Soviets in the North, the Americans ruled directly as a military occupation and were far less effective in creating the façade of local authority. And in contrast to the North there was no land reform. Rather the emerging institutions of the South Korean state were often dominated by the members of the landowning class. In general, the South underwent a turbulent occupation. Meanwhile, a kaleidoscope of political groups emerged and quarreled. Political assassinations were frequent; and labor, teacher and student strikes and demonstrations, many directed at the American support for trusteeship, were common.
In the fall of 1946 there was a bloody uprising in the southeastern part of the country that American forces and the Korean police put down at the cost of several thousand lives. The Americans blamed the communists for much of the disorder, banned the party and forced much of the leadership to flee to the North. Restlessness continued and a peasant insurrection on the island of Cheju in 1948 saw thousands more killed. Nonetheless, by late 1947 the Americans had created a South Korean national police force, and a political leadership of largely conservative anti-communists led by the American-educated nationalist hero Syngman Rhee emerged. Yet there was a serious problem for this emerging South Korean state. Except for Rhee, most of the leadership in the South lacked the untarnished nationalist credentials of the emerging communist regime in the north. Most of those that served in the government, officered the constabulary and directed the police had served and prospered under Japanese rule. For example, paralleling developments in the North, the Americans created a National Constabulary, eventually a military academy and then a formal military. However, the Americans relied on Koreans who had served in the Japanese colonial police force for their constabulary and on those who had attended a Japanese military academy for the officer corps of the army. The North Korean military and police were drawn from those who had no such compromising backgrounds. All this reinforced the beliefs of the emerging North Korean leadership that they were the true bearers of Korean nationalism and would eventually establish control over the conflicted and collaborationist-dominated South.
Independence
After the failure of the second meeting of the American–Soviet Joint Committee in the summer of 1947 the Americans who had become eager to disengage from Korea turned the issue of the country’s future to the United Nations (UN). The international body set up the UN Temporary Committee on Korea (UNTCOK) to supervise the move toward independence. Elections, according to the UN plan, were to be held throughout Korea for a unified National Assembly no later than March 1948. Power would be transferred to this new political body, Korea would become a fully sovereign state and the Soviet and American forces would withdraw. This plan ignored the reality that two political systems were already taking shape on the peninsula. Furthermore, the USA had turned the process over to the UN without securing the Soviet Union’s support. Without this support or Moscow’s recognition of UNTCOK’s authority there was no way the organization could sponsor elections in the North. The UN therefore decided, on February 26, to hold elections in “accessible” areas, in other words in the South. Many southern Koreans also opposed this process since they feared it would create a separate government in the South, a prospect they found appalling. Their objections were ignored and when UNTCOK carried out elections on May 10 for a 200-member National Assembly, many South Koreans boycotted it. The newly elected National Assembly adopted a constitution on July 17 and three days later elected Syngman Rhee as president. On August 15, 1948, the Republic of Korea (Taehan Min’guk) was proclaimed. On December 12, the UN General Assembly accepted the UNTCOK report that the elections were “a valid expression of the free will of the electorate” of that part of the country where they could be monitored; and it declared that the Republic of Korea (ROK) was the only “lawful” government and “the only such government in Korea.”
By early 1947 the Soviets had established the basic skeleton of what was in effect a separate state in the North. When it was clear that the USA, through its working majority of sympathetic and allied states in the UN, was set to establish an independent Korean state on its terms, the Soviet Union began the final process of preparing North Korea for independence. In late 1947 the People’s Assembly formed a commission to begin drafting a constitution headed by Kim Tu-bong. A draft roughly modeled on the 1936 Soviet constitution was sent to Moscow. At an April 24, 1948 meeting with Stalin, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov and other high-ranking officials approved the draft constitution after it had been amended. Interestingly, the document, closely patterned on that of the 1936 Soviet constitution, was first written in Russian and then translated into Korean.27 The Soviets were careful to avoid seeing this as creating a separate Korean state but instead as the true legitimate state representing all the Korean people. Seoul, for example, was still recognized in the constitution as the capital; a Korea without Seoul was like a France without Paris. And the new government was to be created by a peninsula-wide election process. To carry out the elections in the South, secret and illegal (from a UN or South Korean perspective) elections were held in each region to select representatives who met in Haeju just north of the 38th parallel. On September 2, 572 deputies, 360 for the South and 212 from the North, met and on September 8 unanimously approved the constitution.28 The next day, September 9, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) (Chosŏn Minjujuŭi Inmin konghwaguk) was proclaimed. To distinguish itself it adopted a new flag in July, the ingonggi (or People’s Republic flag) to replace the old national flag of Korea that the ROK was using, the t’aegukki whose yin–yang and trigram symbols were denounced as “feudalistic” and “imported from China.”29 A new national anthem was also adopted.
This was an outcome that few if any really wanted – the creation of two separate states. It is unlikely that the majority of leaders in either the North or the South saw this as more than a temporary measure until national unification could be achieved.
A North Korean Revolution
The changes that took place in North Korea from 1945 to 1950 can only be labeled as “revolutionary.” Sweeping reforms were carried out in what Kim Il Sung referred to as the “people’s democratic revolution,” adopting the label given to similar reforms being carried out in other Soviet-occupied countries.30 In just a few years the Korean communists and the Soviets, often with the assistance of ordinary men and women, created a new society. The Soviets provided the broad outlines of the revolution and worked closely with their Korean counterparts, but it would be wrong to see it as completely imposed from above. Although there is some disagreement among scholars over the extent to which this revolution was orchestrated by the Soviets, as Charles Armstrong and Suzy Kim have persuasively argued in their studies of captured documents it was carried out enthusiastically by the Korean communists. Nor were the farmers, workers and intellectuals passive participants but rather many eagerly embraced the new reforms and helped shape it.
No reform measure had a more immediate impact on society than the land reform. Three out of four Koreans were peasants. They were mostly poor and burdened by rents. In 1945, 75 percent of all land was worked by tenants; and half of all Korean farmers owned no land at all. Another one-third of farmers rented part of the land they farmed since their own personal holdings were insufficient to support a family. Tenants commonly paid rents up to half of the crop and sometimes up to 60 percent. There was a powerful demand for land reform and for limitations on rents in kind. The first major action by the new communist-dominated NKPPC was a comprehensive measure issued on March 5, 1946, for redistributing land. All farmland owned by Japanese, by national traitors and by landlords who owned more than five chŏngbo (a chŏngbo was approximately two and a half acres) was confiscated and redistributed.31 As Kim Seongbo (Kim Sŏng-bo) points out, this was “one of the most rapid and radical land reforms in world history.”32 The land reform was carried out with great speed, and largely completed in time for spring planting. Few actions by the communists could have done more to establish their support among the majority. And it served as a rebuke to the American zone where the landlords were still entrenched. There was some resistance to the reforms but they were generally rolled out smoothly.33
Yet, as popular as the measure was, it did not bring that much relief to farmers. Peasants got their land but their burden was still heavy. Taxes were set at 25 percent of the crop. While this was in theory considerably lighter than previous rents of up to half the crop, it was in reality not necessarily all that much lighter. The 25 percent tax was often based on overly optimistic projections so that the real figure was greater. In addition, special requisitions meant that the actual tax was often much higher than even these figures. Farmers also had to supply their best grain, and surpluses were to be sold to state-run markets that bought the produce at low prices.34 And the land reform did little to solve North Korea’s problem of limited cultivatable land. The problem of food shortages would bedevil the country in the following decades.
Land reform was not just an economic measure but part of the radical restructuring of society. The old landholding yangban class vanished as their properties were confiscated, and most fled to the South. In contrast to traditional hierarchical society, with its many levels of deference in speech and honorifics, all workers were encouraged to address each other as comrade (tongmu) no matter what their position or age.35 Nearly everyone was enrolled in a state-sponsored organization. A North Korean Democratic Women’s League (Pukchosŏn minju yŏsŏng tongmaeng) was created in early 1946 and had over 1 million members by the end of the year.36 Young people in their early teens to late twenties were organized into the North Korean Democratic Youth League (Puk Chosŏn minju ch’ŏngnyŏn tongmaeng). There was a North Korean Federation of Trade Unions and all workers were incorporated into it. These were not only means of mobilizing and controlling the population, but means to promote a new sense of identity. The emerging North Korean state rapidly expanded school enrollment and conducted mass literacy campaigns facilitated by the decision to switch from a mixed script of Chinese characters to the exclusive use of the Korean alphabet han’gŭl. It created a new educational system with Kim Il Sung University established in October 1946 at its apex.
One of the biggest breaks with the past was the insistence on gender equality. Women were to have equal pay, benefits and treatment in the workplace. In January 1947 the North Korean People’s Committee passed the Law to Eradicate Remnants of Feudal Practices, which outlawed dowry exchange, child marriage and polygamy and legally guaranteed free choice in marriage.37 When leftists in Seoul organized a nationwide women’s movement in August 1946, the North Koreans objected to the use of the term puin for women, a word that also meant wife and had the connotation of subservience to men. Although this was the common term among Koreans the new regime preferred the term yŏsŏng (female) without such connotations.38
Yet for all the emphasis on equality a new hierarchy replaced the old. Those at the bottom of society – poor peasants and workers – were now, at least in theory, at the top of society. Those branded landowners, rich peasants, capitalists and former officials in the colonial regime were placed at the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy. Inherited status, which had always existed in Korean society, still mattered and priority in education and jobs was given on the basis of ch’ulsin (or origins – in essence, one’s family background). But now it was those who had humble backgrounds that were favored.
Under the emerging North Korean regime artists and writers served the revolution. Although the Korean cultural center had been Seoul, a number of left-wing intellectuals and artists arrived in the North, both to flee the right-wing political order that was forming in the South and to eagerly help build a new socialist society. Some initially played prominent roles in North Korea, including the writer Yi Ki-yŏng, historians Paek Nam-un and Pak Si-hyŏn, and the dancer Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi.39 Kim Wŏn-ju, a female writer and intellectual, arrived from Japan to become editor of the party newspaper Rodong sinmun.40 The composer Kim Wŏn-gyun wrote the national anthem of the DPRK and the “Song of General Kim Il Sung.”41 But free-thinking intellectuals, even those sympathetic to the regime, did not fare well in the DPRK, and most fell out of favor in the 1950s and 1960s.
Most North Koreans lived in the countryside where life was improving. Rural electrification campaigns doubled the amount of farm households that had electricity from one in six in 1945 to one in three in 1948.42 Tiled roofs replaced thatched ones. This much-desired improvement in rural housing was not achieved in South Korea until the early 1970s. While the standard of living was low, and life difficult for most, it was no worse off than in the South and for the majority it was getting better. Landless tenant farmers received land, workers got an eight-hour day as well as accident and health insurance, and women gained equal pay. The expansion of schooling provided greater opportunity for ordinary people to get an education for their children, and literacy campaigns enabled many unschooled adults to read. North Korea was experiencing a true social revolution. The revolution was creating a more equitable society where the poor were probably better off materially, and where marginal groups – women, laborers and peasants – enjoyed an improvement in their social status that was almost inconceivable before 1945.
North Korea followed the Soviet economic model with its highly centralized planning, its emphasis on industrialization and its early nationalization of much of industry. Nationalization was aided by the fact that most industry had been owned by the Japanese, and much of the rest by “national traitors.” Economic planning began in early 1947 with a National Economic Rehabilitation Plan intended to promote rapid industrialization. A second one-year economic plan was implemented for 1948 and a two-year plan launched for 1949–1950. In general, North Korea’s economic recovery from the initial chaos and destruction in 1945 proceeded rather rapidly. Abundant supplies of hydroelectric power contributed to the rapid increase in electrification. Economic development was carried out with assistance from the Soviet Union. This was not overly generous and some of the aid provided was paid in mineral wealth including uranium. Moscow sought to integrate North Korea’s economy into the Soviet Union’s, although not a lot of progress was made in this period toward that end. Its chief interest was in the land’s rich mineral resources.
By the late 1940s many of the features of North Korean society were already appearing, such as the use of mass mobilization campaigns to achieve economic targets. Perhaps the most salient aspect of North Korean society is the all-pervasive glorification of the leader. This too appeared early. Once the Soviets had settled on Kim Il Sung they began to fashion his cult of personality in Stalinist fashion. During 1946, his portrait appeared alongside Stalin’s in almost every public place. Songs about him were sung, and in October 1946 the new national university was named after him. He held the position as the head of the government, but even at the founding of the North Korean Workers’ Party, he was praised as “the leader of all the Korean people,” the “hero of the nation” and the “great leader” despite officially being only one of two vice chairmen along with Chu Nyŏng-ha.43 The adulation of the leader started almost with the inception of the new state. An early biography described him as a great general “winning every battle.”44
There was nothing unusual about this. Throughout the Soviet bloc the “little Stalins” carried out their own cults of personality alongside that of Stalin himself – a development encouraged by Moscow. However, there were some distinctive characteristics of the cult that emerged in the late 1940s. Some of the language and symbolism appeared to reflect the influence of the intense emperor worship of the colonial period. For example, as early as 1946 the writer Han Sŏr-ya referred to Kim Il Sung as “our sun” (uri ŭi t’aeyang), consciously or unconsciously using the same sun metaphor that had been associated with the Japanese emperor.45 Another distinctive North Korean feature was the legend of the Manchurian guerillas. This legend would grow to wildly exaggerated proportions in later years but even as early as 1946 the “Song of General Kim Il Sung,” composed by Kim Wŏn-gyun and played at public occasions, spoke of “the snowy winds of Manchuria / the long, long nights of the forest / who is the timeless partisan, the peerless patriot / the beneficent liberator of the working masses / Great Sun of democratic new Korea?”46 No other feature of the North Korean leadership cult so differed from Stalinism as the glorification of Kim Il Sung’s family. Most of this developed later but even before the start of the Korean War, Kim’s “revolutionary family heritage” (hyŏngmyŏngjŏk kagye) appeared in a textbook.47
The consolidation of the regime was not accompanied by violent class warfare. Partly this was due to the fact that most of the landlord and business class fled to the South after 1945. But even if the creation of North Korean society was not characterized by the levels of violence that had accompanied the creation of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, there was still opposition. As early as November 1945 protests in the city of Sinuiju were violently repressed. Student-led protests took place in Hamhŭng in March 1946 calling for the Soviet troops to leave.48 On March 1, 1946, the date commemorating the great national uprising against the Japanese in 1919, public protests directed at the occupation and its communist allies took place. Most anti-communist protests were carried out by Christians and often led by church groups. They were quickly suppressed and participants arrested. Many Christians and other dissenters fled to the South.49 Thousands of opponents were sent to Siberia, a practice that continued until North Korea established its own system of political prison camps.
The Leadership of the New North Korean State
The new North Korean state was theoretically a coalition government but in fact the North Korean Workers’ Party was the unchallenged ruling institution. It differed from most other communist parties in that a majority of its members were peasants rather than workers. Therefore, few had any training or much knowledge of Marxism-Leninism. Under Soviet advice, six-month ideological training sessions were conducted for a select elite at the Central Party School, and an even smaller number were sent to the Soviet Union for further ideological training.50
At the Second Party Congress in March 1948 Kim Il Sung assumed the role as party chair. Kim Il Sung, although the preeminent leader of North Korea and already the subject of a personality cult, was still first among equals. His fellow partisans held key posts but were far from dominating the party. Nor did Kim’s partisans dominate the administration. Only three partisans held cabinet positions: Kim Il Sung as premier, Kim Ch’aek as minister of industry and Ch’oe Yong-gŏn as minister of defense. The partisans, while holding only a minority of the top positions in the party and the government, were over-represented in the security organs and the military. Many key positions where held by the Yanan and Soviet-Koreans but domestic communists from the South held the most cabinet posts. Subject to relentless persecution by the US occupation authorities and their South Korean allies most of the communists in the South had fled to the North by 1948. Most prominent was Pak Hŏn-yŏng, the leader of the South Korean Workers’ Party. Pak was vice premier and also the foreign minister and was considered the number two ranking figure in the regime. In contrast to the importance of South Korean communists, few local communists from the North held important posts. Despite, their local roots and knowledge they had the least support from the Soviets and were the early losers in the competition for power. Almost all were eliminated from even minor leadership positions. As a result, the leadership of North Korea came entirely from people who had largely lived their adult lives in Manchuria, China, South Korea or the Soviet Union; and in most cases they had never lived in what became the DPRK at all until after liberation.
The North Koreans were still very much dependent upon the Soviet Union for economic and military assistance and advice. Soviet troops withdrew in 1948 but many advisors stayed behind, including General Shtykov who now served as ambassador. Moscow’s continued tutelage is evidenced in a document given to Pyongyang on foreign policy in October 7, 1948. Issued by the Politburo and signed by Stalin it instructed the North Koreans to establish diplomatic relations with other people’s democracies with the exceptions of Mongolia and Albania.51 The proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 provided another neighboring ally that would eventually prove useful as a counterweight to the Soviet Union but until 1950 the leadership of North Korea remained under Moscow’s wing.
An Unstable Division and Kim Il Sung’s Plans for Reunification
North Korean leadership saw reunification as their main task. From their point of view the liberation of the South, with its government beholden to the USA, was a continuation of the nationalist anti-imperialist struggle. Furthermore, the liberation of the South from its domination by the old “feudal” landlord class and their comprador bourgeois allies in power was also a continuation of the socialist revolution. There was no question about the need for reunification. Even the constitution of 1948 stated that Seoul was the capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; Pyongyang was simply a temporary seat of government. Kim Il Sung, in his first public statement as premier of the DPRK on September 10, 1948, declared that unification of the fatherland was to be a top priority in his government’s eight-point agenda. Pyongyang’s drive to reunify the country, reflected not just the ambitions of its leaders but the aspirations of most Koreans, North and South, who regarded both the division of the country as unacceptable and the unification as inevitable.
The option, if not a definite plan, for armed intervention to liberate South Korea was part of the regime’s thinking from 1948.52 To that end the DPRK built up its military. Moscow assisted in this effort by providing training and equipment. Officers in the KPA began training in Soviet Union. Pyongyang, also benefited from the influx of Koreans who fought with the People’s Liberation Army during the civil war in China. At North Korea’s request about 35,000 experienced fighters returned to join the KPA from the summer of 1949 to the end of the year. About 14,000 returned in early 1950.53 After 2–4 months’ retraining they were then integrated into the KPA.54 They provided combat-experienced soldiers and established links and goodwill between the People’s Liberation Army of China and the KPA. Having so many experienced soldiers was a great advantage for the North.
A key part of the regime’s strategy for the invasion and liberation of the South was to promote internal uprisings. Pak Hŏn-yŏng and other southern communists were optimistic about the prospects for widespread uprisings that would assist any invasion. There were grounds for this optimism. In many ways the Rhee regime seemed rather shaky. Peasants were disappointed with the failure to enact land reform. Political strikes by workers and students were common. The politics of the country was contentious and divisive. In May 1948 protests against holding separate elections led to a full-scale insurrection on the island province of Cheju. On October 13, 1948, just one month after the USA transferred command of the ROK forces to the Korean officers, troops who had been sent to the southern city of Yŏsu on their way to put down the Cheju rebellion mutinied, taking over the town and setting up people’s courts. When more loyal forces regained control and quashed the rebellion many of the rebels fled into nearby mountains and joined local partisans in guerilla resistance.
Pak and his fellow communists from the South had already been involved in peasant and worker revolts against the US occupation, especially in late 1946, and were fully aware of just how deep the discontent was. They sent more than 3,000 guerillas to the South, including 600 cadres trained at the Kangdong Institute, to promote pro-communist uprisings. They included two important experienced communists, Kim Sam-yŏng and Yi Chu-ha. Many of these cadres were sent to fight in the Odae Mountain region of South Korea and another group to the T’aebaek Mountain area.55 However, the ROK conducted successful counterinsurgency campaigns against the guerillas in 1948–1949 and 1949–1950, including the setting up of strategic hamlets and the carrying out of frightful reprisals against rebel supporters. And, in March 1950, prospects for a successful guerilla campaign were dimmed when both Kim Sam-yŏng and Yi Chu-ha were captured.56 But the North Koreans appear to have believed resistance to the ROK would be rekindled by a northern invasion. Meanwhile, the situation along the border was tense with frequent military clashes, some initiated by South Korean forces.
Besides the perceived weakness of the ROK, the somewhat ambiguous American position in South Korea was also encouraging. The USA supported the state and wanted to prevent communism from spreading closer to Japan, which all in Washington agreed was vital to US interests; however, the American political leaders in the Truman administration and in Congress did not want to invest too much in a land that remained of peripheral concern. The USA began withdrawing its forces in September 1948, with the last troops leaving the following year. It allocated funding for the establishment of a 65,000-man ROK army and left behind a 500-member Korean Military Advisory Group to help train the new South Korean army. The USA also provided generous economic aid to Seoul. But this generosity soon waned; the US Congress considerably reduced economic aid for 1950 and limited funding for the South Korean army. Americans were particularly wary of President Rhee’s strident nationalism and were concerned over reports of ROK raids along the northern border, as they wanted to avoid the risk of conflict on the peninsula. They provided only small arms for the ROK forces and no significant aircraft. Even in small arms, the ROK army had a mere 15-day supply in June 1950.57 The USA was unclear about the extent of its commitment; the most famous example of this was Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s January 12, 1950 press conference in which he excluded South Korea from the USA’s defensive perimeter. Not only did all this point to the South’s vulnerability, but the winds of change seemed favorable to Pyongyang. The People’s Liberation Army had defeated the US-backed Guomindang in China in 1949, and a triumphant Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on October 1. By the spring of 1950 the Guomindang held only the island of Taiwan. Its erstwhile ally, the USA, appeared resigned to the imminent fall of that last non-communist stronghold.
Politically unstable, with a restive population, a weak military, a foreign patron that seemed less than fully committed to its defense, and thousands of sympathizers ready to rise up in support of the KPA (or so Pyongyang may have believed), South Korea seemed ripe for a quick conquest. By June 1950 the KPA had 150,000 men under arms compared to less than 100,000 in the ROK. It had more experienced troops than South Korea’s military; and it was better equipped, including tanks and planes which the ROK lacked. For Pyongyang an invasion seemed likely to result in a swift victory and the completion of the struggle for national liberation and reunification.
From 1948 the DPRK prepared for war while Kim Il Sung and Pak Hŏn-yŏng sought Soviet permission and support for an invasion. On March 1949 Kim Il Sung met with Stalin to ask for assistance for the two-year economic plan. He also requested Stalin’s approval and support for a military invasion of the South. Kim Il Sung is reported to have told him:
Comrade Stalin, we believe the situation makes it necessary and possible to liberate the whole country through military means. The reactionary forces of the South will never agree on a peaceful unification and will perpetuate the division of the country until they feel themselves strong enough to attack the North.
Furthermore, he went on, “Our people are very anxious to be together again to cast off the yoke of the reactionary regime and their American masters.”58 With some US troops still in the South and the civil war in China unresolved Stalin was unwilling to support an invasion. However, Stalin then seems to have changed his mind. On January 30, 1950, he telegrammed Ambassador Shtykov to tell Kim Il Sung “that I am ready to help in this matter.” He explained that he understood Kim Il Sung’s impatience but “he must understand that such a large matter … such as he wants to undertake needs large preparation” and “the matter must be organized so that there would not be too great a risk.”59 The next day Shtykov reported that Kim Il Sung received the news that Stalin would support his invasion plans “with great satisfaction.”60 At Stalin’s invitation Kim Il Sung and Pak Hŏn-yŏng went to Moscow in April and met with him and other leaders. Kim Il Sung told Stalin: “The attack will be swift and the war will be won in three days: the guerilla movement in the South has grown stronger and a major uprising is expected.”61 It is not clear why the Soviet Union decided to back the plan. Typically, the Soviets focused on Europe and took a more cautious stand in Asia. Mao’s victory in China and the end of the civil war there, and the USA’s abandoning of its Guomindang allies, may have been a factor. Perhaps Secretary of State Acheson’s comments of January 12 persuaded Stalin that the USA was unlikely to intervene. Perhaps, the Soviets became persuaded by Kim and Pak’s arguments that the war would be a swift and easy victory.
In May, Kim and Pak went to Beijing to gain Mao’s support. Initially Mao had not been in favor of the plan and warned of possible Japanese and American intervention, but he reluctantly agreed to back the North Koreans after Moscow assured him of its likely success. However, he made clear that Chinese forces would not assist if the Americans intervened unless they crossed the 38th parallel.62 A team of Soviet advisors drew up plans and the Soviet Union began supplying more tanks, artillery and other weapons. In late spring Soviet advisors completed their “Preemptive Strike Operational Plan.” By the end of May the Soviet ambassador reported that the KPA infantry was nearly ready for combat and that Kim Il Sung wanted to carry out the “attack” in late June before the rainy season began in July.63
Reunification Failed
On June 25 the DPRK launched predawn artillery barrages along the Ongjin Peninsula, the scene of frequent clashes. Within hours it had become a full-scale offensive along the border. The next day, on June 26, in a broadcast to his people, Kim Il Sung announced that the ROK forces had attacked but that the KPA had successfully counterattacked.64 North Korea’s plan was to quickly capture Seoul, to strike a crippling blow to the ROK army and then to advance further south as the South Korean state collapsed. ROK forces defended Seoul for two days and then, as Pyongyang had anticipated, they began to crumble. On the third day of fighting Seoul fell to the KPA amid horrendous scenes of thousands of panicked, fleeing civilians. Symbolic of the chaos and horror was the Han River Bridge incident. The South Korean military prematurely blew up the only bridge over the river that separated the capital from the country to the south, killing hundreds of civilians as they tried to escape the city.
Initially everything went as Kim and Pak had planned but very soon that changed. Pyongyang, as hoped, caught the USA and the ROK completely by surprise. However, after some initial confusion over whether or not this was a full-scale invasion was cleared up President Truman acted swiftly. On June 27, as Seoul was falling to the KPA, he ordered General MacArthur in Japan to use available US air and naval forces to support the South Korean army. Partly because he was uncertain of support from a Republican-dominated Congress and partly to give an international legitimacy as well as gain allied support Truman went directly to the UN and called for a resolution to give the USA authority to intervene. At the time the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN in protest of its refusal to allow the new communist regime in Beijing to take China’s seat, which was still held by the nationalist government now headquartered on Taiwan. With Moscow absent the Security Council swiftly passed a resolution that demanded the withdrawal of DPRK forces and called for UN members to assist the ROK. On July 7, the UN Security Council established a unified military command under the USA. The UN forces that North Korea now faced were at least nominally an international force with 16 nations contributing troops. By the spring of 1951, this international force included British, Canadian, Turkish and Filipino personnel. It was, however, largely an American operation with the USA supplying most of the troops, paying the costs and in command.
Even with the US intervention Kim Il Sung’s forces were still in a strong position. Since it would take weeks to mobilize forces from the USA, Washington relied on the 100,000 troops it had in occupied Japan who began arriving on June 30. But these soldiers were mainly involved in administrative and clerical duties and had little combat readiness. The US armed forces had been downsizing since the end of World War II, from 12 million men and women in uniform in 1945 to 1.6 million in June 1950. There were fewer than 600,000 in the army and many of these were based in Europe. When the first American troops saw action at Osan south of Seoul on July 5, they were forced into retreat along with their accompanying ROK forces.
North Korean forces continued their offensive. The KPA captured Taejŏn over one hundred miles south of Seoul in early July, and then advanced toward Pusan in the southeast corner of the country where the South Korean government had fled. It was now imperative to complete the conquest before American troops could be fully ready. However, two things were going wrong for Pyongyang. Although, the ROK forces were overwhelmed by the KPA and Seoul fell in days, the retreating South Korean troops did not collapse as fast as the North Koreans had expected but often put up stubborn resistance. And there was no popular uprising in support of the liberators from the north. Although there was some communist guerilla activity in the southeastern mountains this was merely the work of the remnants of the partisan forces that had largely been wiped out in the 1949–1950 campaign. By June 1950, most leftists in the South had been killed, imprisoned or had fled to the North. For the most part, the South Korean population fled or acquiesced to the North Koreans, but with some minor exceptions they did not rise up in arms against their own government. So Kim’s expectation that the war would be over in a matter of days was wrong. Yet his forces continued to advance southward. By early August, they had reduced the ROK-controlled territory to a small area in the southeast corner of the country around Pusan, the so-called Pusan perimeter. Nearly 90 percent of the country was in the hands of the communist forces. But by that time enough US forces had arrived to halt the KPA’s offensive and the war temporarily stalemated.
By early August, the Chinese were already becoming concerned, and Mao had decided to send Chinese volunteers to assist Pyongyang if US forces were to reverse the tide of war and advance toward his border. And soon the war did turn against the DPRK when UN forces commander General Douglas MacArthur came up with a daring plan to launch a surprise landing at Inchon (Inch’ŏn), entirely outflanking and trapping the KPA. Ignoring the objections of many military officials in Washington who feared it was too risky, MacArthur brought 75,000 marines and 260 ships to Inchon, negotiating the treacherous tides and sandbars to land. Despite Soviet and Chinese warnings that the Americans might land on the west coast Kim Il Sung focused on the Pusan perimeter. As a result he was caught unprepared. His forces were quickly overwhelmed as UN and ROK forces fought their way back into Seoul. By the end of September most of the KPA was in near total disarray, although some troops managed to retreat intact up the east coast. North Korean forces had been defeated with the loss of an estimated 50,000 killed, captured or missing. The attempt by Kim Il Sung and the rest of the KWP to unify the country under their leadership had failed disastrously.65
A panicky Kim Il Sung wrote to Stalin about the situation. Addressing him as “the liberator of the Korean people and the leader of the working peoples of the entire world,” he explained the situation. “The adversary suffering one defeat after another, was cornered into a tiny piece of land at the southern-most tip of South Korea and we had a great chance of winning a victory,” but the USA, in order to “restore its prestige and to implement by any means its long-held plans of conquering Korea and transforming its militarily strategic bridgehead,” launched the attack on Inchon. The military situation, he reported, had now become “extremely grave.” Street fighting is going on in Seoul, units in the south are cut off without communication with each other. Korea was in danger of becoming “a colony and a military springboard of the U.S. imperialists.” Only direct assistance from the Soviet Union or “international volunteer units in China and other countries of people’s democracy,” he implored, would be able to prevent that from happening.66 If the USA had been willing to accept the prewar status quo hostilities might have ended soon. But Kim was correct about the plans to invade the North. Both MacArthur and Syngman Rhee were determined to “rollback” the North Koreans. The UN resolution had only authorized that the North Korean invasion be repelled. Some in the USA and some allies, especially Britain, were wary about widening the war fearing Chinese or even Soviet intervention. But MacArthur wanted the complete destruction of the DPRK and the South Korean leaders wanted reunification, which now seemed so close.
China, which maintained no diplomatic relations with the America, sent a warning in early October through India’s ambassador in Beijing that it would not tolerate a US presence on its border, but Washington ignored this. On September 30, ROK forces crossed the 38th parallel in pursuit of the KPA troops. Perhaps overconfident after the success of Inchon, Washington now gave MacArthur permission to destroy all KPA forces and, on October 7, the UN passed a vaguely worded resolution that approved the use of UN troops to cross the 38th parallel to establish a unified government. On October 9, UN forces moved north of the parallel. On October 10, the provincial capital of Wŏnsan fell to ROK forces as Kim Il Sung in a radio broadcast urged the KPA to “fight to the last drop of blood.”67 Throughout October, UN and ROK forces which were under UN authority, swept across North Korea capturing Pyongyang and other major cities while Kim Il Sung and the other DPRK leaders fled to the mountainous strongholds near the Manchurian border. On October 20, a triumphant President Rhee visited Pyongyang. Within a few weeks about 90 percent of North Korea was occupied by UN and ROK forces.
The UN/ROK occupation of the North was just as brief as the KPA occupation of the South had been. Just as Korea appeared to become reunified under the leadership the South, China came to the North Koreans’ rescue and saved the regime, however, not before Stalin indicated a willingness to abandon the regime in October.68 The fact that at this crucial moment Moscow was ready to abandon him, could not but have had a profound impact on Kim Il Sung who would seek to no longer be reliant on his former patron.
By late November the DPRK had been reduced to a few mountainous regions in the North, mostly near the Chinese border. Then, on November 27, the Chinese forces calling themselves the Chinese People’s Volunteers and led by veteran commander Peng Dehuai counterattacked. From this point on the Chinese effectively took over control of military operations from the North Korea leadership. Overextended and overconfident UN troops were forced into a full retreat. Chinese forces advanced as swiftly as the UN and ROK forces had done weeks earlier. They retook Pyongyang on December 6 and within two weeks had forced the withdrawal of UN and ROK troops out of most of North Korea. Making the same error as the USA had done, the Chinese then advanced southward, crossing the 38th parallel and retaking Seoul on January 4 and continuing to the 37th parallel. But by late January their offensive was losing momentum. UN forces regrouped and stopped the Chinese. Beijing conducted a new offensive in February which was repelled with enormous Chinese losses. Despite the use of massive assaults, the so-called “human wave” tactic designed to compensate for China’s inferior firepower, the UN forces were able to retake Seoul on March 15. It was the fourth time the city changed hands in nine months.
The conflict was now carried out mainly between China and the USA, with the DPRK and ROK leadership on the sidelines. With the two sides now arrayed roughly around the 38th parallel, the Truman administration was willing to negotiate a truce. By Spring, Mao too was ready to accept a stalemate with the peninsula divided approximately where it had been before the outbreak of the conflict. With Stalin’s approval Mao signaled his willingness to begin armistice talks. On July 10, 1951 formal negotiations began as representatives of the Chinese People’s Volunteers, the KPA and the UN command met. They came to an understanding that the boundary between the two would be roughly similar to but not exactly the same as the 38th parallel, instead extending a little below it to the west and above it to the east and separated by a demilitarized zone (DMZ). They also agreed to the creation of a Military Armistice Commission. Then progress slowed down. The conflict continued for two years after negotiations began.
Wartime Occupations
North Korea attempted to bring its revolution to the areas of the South that came under its control. Kim II Sung in his June 26 radio speech announced that South Korea was being liberated from Japanese and US imperialism, and called for the reinstatement of the people’s committees that had sprung up in the days after liberation, calling them the “real organs of the people.”69 During the two to three months that KPA forces occupied Seoul and other major cities they attempted to carry out the same revolutionary changes as in the North. They set up people’s committees as the local governing bodies. DPRK officials confiscated the property of the ROK government, its officials and “monopoly capitalists,” and drew up plans to redistribute land in the countryside, completing the partial land reform that had begun under the US occupation. They released political prisoners from the jails, many of whom sought the opportunity to take revenge on the police and others who had persecuted them.
To what must have been a great disappointment to the North Korean leaders few South Koreans showed much enthusiasm for their liberators. Instead of embracing the communists, hundreds of thousands fled. Pusan, which became the wartime capital of the ROK, and other southern cites swelled with refugees. Some moderates joined the committees and the new North Korean liberators enjoyed some enthusiastic support from students and labor activists, but overall most South Koreans were wary of the new regime at best. The brief occupation served instead to create hostility toward the northern regime when it impressed thousands of young men into the KPA and carried out executions and confiscations. The worst atrocities were committed by the North Koreans during their hasty retreat. Many “traitors” were executed and others were taken with them as the North Korean forces retreated. It was a brief and, ultimately, bloody occupation.70
The occupation of the North was just as violent. Although nominally under the command of General MacArthur, ROK forces and intelligence officials often acted without much supervision. They carried out bloody reprisals. Any member of the Korean Workers’ Party was subject to arrest or abuse. Since this was a mass party that included a sizeable proportion of the entire North Korean population, these punishments were unrealistic. North Korea, in a 26-volume official history of the conflict published in 1981, claimed 15,000 people were murdered in Pyongyang and tens of thousands elsewhere by the occupation forces. While exaggerated, ROK military and civilian officials did in fact execute thousands of civilians.71 Farmers were required to return land to their former landlords. And when the ROK forces retreated they too took tens of thousands of North Koreans with them, most of whom were young men who had been forcibly conscripted. As with most civil wars, this was a vicious, unpleasant conflict. The brutality on both sides probably did little to win over support but rather left a legacy of fear and bitterness on both sides of the 38th parallel. Nonetheless, for all their heavy-handed methods few ordinary North Koreans put up much resistance to their southern “liberators” and their UN allies, and many seemed to have willingly cooperated with them. Their failure to actively resist was alarming to Kim Il Sung and his government. His response to this after the war was to make every effort to indoctrinate his people in the goals of the revolution and instill in them unquestioned loyalty to the regime.
Bringing the War to an End
Chinese intervention saved the North Korean regime but it also resulted in its loss of control over the war. Once the Chinese intervened actively in the fighting in November 1950 they assumed operational command. Mao, who blamed Kim for his failure to prepare for the defense of Inchon, confined him and the KPA to a subordinate role in the fighting for the rest of the war. In essence, the two main opponents in the war became the USA and China. From the summer of 1951 to the summer of 1953 the two powers were at a stalemate, with conventional fighting largely confined to a narrow strip of land. Kim Il Sung spent most of the war in a bunker in Chagang province near the Manchurian border.72 On July 16, 1952, his weariness and concerns over the continual American bombing were expressed in a letter to Stalin requesting air defense. He wrote: “the enemy almost without suffering any kind of losses constantly inflicts on us huge losses in manpower and material values.” And about the bombing campaign he reported that: “In only one 24 hour period of barbaric bombing, of only one city of Pyongyang (on July 11 and the night of July 12) more than 6,000 peaceful inhabitants were killed or wounded.”73
Eventually all parties became weary of war. Shortly after his November 1952 election, Eisenhower, who had promised to end the conflict, visited Korea and made it his intention to bring the conflict to a close soon. The Soviet Union, however, may not have minded its continuation. The Soviets were careful not to become directly involved in the conflict. They supplied equipment to the North Koreans and Chinese, and flew some reconnaissance aircraft, but did not commit troops. This was in good part because Stalin was not eager to get into a conflict and did not want to take forces away from Europe which was the area of confrontation with the West that mattered most to the Soviet Union. The war from the Soviet point of view tied the US forces down in the east, lifted pressure from Europe, drained American resources but cost the Soviets little since it was fought by the Chinese and North Koreans. Mao may have found the cost of the conflict bearable as there were many troops no longer needed for the civil war, there was no shortage of cannon fodder and the war was a useful rallying support for his new regime. Furthermore, having fought the Americans to a stalemate added to his prestige. Yet as the war dragged on indications were that Mao was willing to bring it to an end. Stalin’s death in March removed an obstacle to peace as his successors showed little interest in continuing the conflict. In the spring of 1953, the USA carried out the most extensive bombing of the war, raining horrific destruction upon the civilian population of North Korea as well as on the Chinese People’s Volunteers and KPA forces. North Korea needed a respite from the constant American bombing; its hope of reunifying Korea was clearly dashed, at least for the near future. So in the spring of 1953 all parties were ready to bring the war to an end.
Talks were delayed over the issue of repatriation of prisoners since many of the Chinese and North Koreans held by the UN did not want to go home, but Beijing and Pyongyang insisted that all be returned. South Korea’s President Rhee, still hoping for a victory that would reunite the country on his terms, did not want to end the conflict and tried to sabotage the talks by releasing many of the prisoners. When an agreement for a ceasefire was arrived at, he refused to sign it. The North Koreans, on the other hand, had little incentive to prolong the war, whose continuation only brought about more destruction from US bombing raids. Whatever his sentiments, Kim Il Sung probably had only a modest input in the negotiations. The UN, North Korea and China signed an armistice on July 27, 1953. Kim Il Sung’s attempt to reunify the Korean peninsula had failed. But the DPRK survived and the war was not over.
Impact of the War on North Korea
North Korea’s revolutionary regime may have survived but its losses in the conflict were appallingly high. Three years of conflict left a terrible toll. No one knows for certain the extent of losses. In fact, estimates vary wildly since there was so much confusion during the war as people fled and neither North Korea nor China has ever released figures. At least 2 million military personnel and civilians perished, and perhaps many more. These included 37,000 Americans and 4,000 UN allies killed and around 200,000 South Korean military casualties. Approximately 400,000 South Korean civilians may have died when all factors including starvation, disease and other causes related to dislocation are factored in. At least 200,000 from the Chinese People’s Volunteers were killed; some estimates place this figure much higher, as many as 500,000. But it was North Korea that suffered the most. Out of a population in 1950 of about 9.6 million, at least 1 million most likely perished. These included around 200,000 North Korean troops and thousands of civilians, many as a result of US bombing campaigns. Altogether at least 10 percent of the population perished. In percentage terms this is far greater than German or Japanese losses in World War II, and possibly greater than Soviet losses in that conflict. In fact, it represents one of the highest rates of wartime death suffered by any country in the twentieth century.74
The sheer scale of destruction in North Korea was horrific. Few factories or public works escaped damage or destruction. A large proportion of the population were left homeless. Cities in the DPRK were totally destroyed, as was most of the infrastructure. Much of the destruction was the result of American bombing. The USA only intensified its air campaign against North Korea as the war dragged on. Civilians suffered especially when, on July 11, 1952, the Americans launched Operation Pressure Pump in which US planes undertook a massive bombing campaign of Pyongyang and 30 other cities.75 Sŏng Hye-rang, a member of the North Korean elite, recalls that up to early 1952 Pyongyang streets were filled with people, and life still seemed vibrant.76 But this attempt at normalcy ended with the mass bombing campaign. In May 1953 the USA carried out a bombing campaign directed at dams to destroy the rice crop.77 The USA dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea. This was 20 percent more than in the entire Pacific theater of World War II and slightly more than the Americans had dropped on Germany. Additionally, the Americans dropped 32,000 tons of napalm on North Koreans.78 All this bombing was on a small country with less than 10 million people. North Korea’s cities, even very small ones were devastated. Official US estimates were that between 50 and 90 percent of 18 of the 22 largest North Korean cities were destroyed, including 75 percent of Pyongyang, and 80 and 85 percent of Hamhŭng and Hŭngnam, the two largest industrial cities. This compares with an estimated 43 percent destruction of Japan’s largest cities in World War II.79 The North Korean regime never let its people forget the death and destruction the Americans inflicted upon them.
Although the war that Kim Il Sung was so eager to carry out was a disastrous failure, it had the effect of strengthening rather than weakening his hold on power. This may seem surprising. Yet when the Chinese took control of the military operations during the war they did not interfere with domestic political affairs. At the same time, as Andrei Lankov has stated, the war “untied the hands” of Kim Il Sung since it weakened the Soviet Union’s influence. Militarily dependent upon China, North Korea achieved a greater measure of political independence from Moscow.80 When the war went against him, Kim was quick to point the finger of blame at his rivals in the leadership. At a party meeting on December 21, 1950, Kim Il Sung carried out a purge of some party leaders.81 Mu Chŏng, the veteran of Yanan, was dismissed in late 1950; he died shortly afterward. The communist leaders from the South were assigned special blame for the failure of the great guerilla uprising that had promised to appear. He also purged Hŏ Ka-i, a leader of the Soviet-Koreans and an expert on party organization. Hŏ had sought a balance between workers and peasants and wanted to restrict membership to a small vanguard based on the Soviet model, while Kim argued for a broad-based party whose membership ought to reflect the fact that 80 percent of all North Koreans were peasants. Finally, Kim Il Sung carried out the purge of those who had collaborated with the UN forces during their occupation of Pyongyang and much of the North.
Rather than unifying the peninsula the war hardened its division. The conflict solidified popular support for the South Korean state if not necessarily its leadership, and a generation of southerners developed a deep hostility toward the Kim Il Sung regime. The brutality of the North Korean occupiers during 1950–1951 alienated ordinary citizens who developed a deep antipathy toward the DPRK. Of course, the South, during its briefer occupation of the North, was also brutal and no doubt reinforced Pyongyang’s propaganda about the nature of the southern regime, although it is hard to measure this. Furthermore, the USA was now fully committed to the defense of the ROK, which in the 1950s and early 1960s was one of the largest recipients of American aid. Seoul possessed and maintained an army of 600,000 troops equipped by the Americans. The USA maintained tens of thousands of troops stationed at a string of military bases in the South and patrolled the border along with ROK forces.
Kim Il Sung proclaimed the war a great victory since it defeated the attempt by the USA and ROK to invade and enslave the people of the North. A later official history declared it a “righteous fatherland liberation struggle” that fought and defeated the “U.S. and its puppets [who] launched an armed attack.”82 The conflict, however, was, in fact, a serious setback for the Kim Il Sung regime and its revolution. It was also a tragedy for Koreans who suffered so much yet failed to achieve the unity they all desired. Instead, the conflict drove the two Koreas bitterly apart and consolidated their separate systems. Fittingly, the Korean War ended in a ceasefire not a peace, for few Koreans regarded the settlement in 1953 as permanent. It was certainly not over for Kim Il Sung. For Kim, a battle had been lost but not the broader struggle. The DPRK would continue to pursue the goals that he and his comrades had decided upon years earlier: to liberate the country from imperialism, from its backward, feudal past, and to create a progressive, prosperous nation state free from foreign control, a nation that encompassed all Koreans.
References
Armstrong, Charles K. The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Lankov, Andrei. From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945–1960. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Lankov, Andrew. The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Footnotes
1
Lee, Chong-sik, “Why Did Stalin Accept the 38th Parallel?,” Journal of Northeast Asian Studies 4, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 67–74.
3
Jungsoo Lee, The Partition of Korea After World War II: A Global History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 40–42.
9
Kim Sŏng-bo [Kim Seongbo], Pukhan ŭi yŏksa Vol.1: Kŏn’guk kwa inminjujuŭi ŭi kyŏnghyŏm [North Korean History Vol. 1: Establishment and Experience of the People’s Democracy]. Seoul: Yŏksa Pip’yŏngsa, 2011, p. 31.
18
Shin Jongdae, “North Korean State-Makin: Process and Characteristics,” in Michael Seth (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History. London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 197–210.
31
Kim Seong-bo [Kim Sŏng-bo], “The Decision-Making Process and Implementation of the North Korean Land Reform,” in Pang Kie-Chung and Michael D. Shin, editors, Landlords, Peasants and Intellectuals in Modern Korea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005, pp. 207–241.
36
Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2013, p. 119.
40
Sŏng,Hye-rang, Tŭngnamu chip: Sŏng Hye-rang Chasŏjŏn [Wisteria House: The Autobiography of Song Hye-rang]. Seoul: Chisiknara, 2000.
50
Hwang Chang-yŏp Na nŭn yŏk-sa ŭi chilli rŭl poatta [I saw the truth of history]. Seoul: Hanul, 1999.
52
This follows the interpretation of the origins of the Korean War now supported by most scholars. For an alternative interpretation see the exhaustively researched Bruce Cumings, Origins of the Korea War, Vols I and 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990.
53
Shen Zhihua and Li Danhui, After Leaning to Once Side: China and Its Allies in the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011, p. 25.
55
Wada Haruki, The Korean War: An International History. Latham, MD: Rowman & Litttlefield, 2014, pp. 39–40.
57
Adrian Buzo, The Guerilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in the DPRK 1945–1994. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999, p. 77.
58
Weathersby, Kathryn, “Korea, 1945–50, To Attack, or Not to Attack?: Stalin, Kim Il Sung, and the Prelude to War,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 5 (Spring 1995): 1–9.
59
Telegram from Stalin to Shtykov, January 30, 1950, North Korean International Documentation Project. Washington, DC: Wilson Center.
66
Kim Il Sung and Pak Heonyeong to Stalin, September 29, 1950, North Korea International Documentation Project.
68
Alexandre Mansourov, “Stalin, Mao, Kim and China’s Decision to Enter the Korean War,” September 16–October 15, 1950.
69
Callum A. MacDonald, Callum, “So Terrible a ‘Liberation’: The U.N. Occupation of North Korea,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 23, no. 2 (1991): 6–7, 17.
71
Kang Chŏng-gu, “Han’guk chŏnchange kwa pukhan sahoechuŭi kŏnsŏl,” [The Korean War and the construction of North Korean Society] in Son Ho-ch’ŏl (eds), Han’guk chŏnchaeng kwa nampukhan sahoe ŭi kuchojŏk pyŏnhwa [The Korean War and Structural Change in North and South Korean Society]. Seoul: Kyŏngnam Taehakkyo kungnipdong munje yŏn’gyso, 1991, pp. 159–201, 170.
73
Kathryn Weathersby, “New Russian Documents on the Korean War,” introduction and translations by Kathryn Weathersby. CWHIP Bulletin, no. 6/7 (Winter 1995/1996): 77.
74
Estimates of North Korean casualties vary considerably and there seems to be no consensus on the numbers.
78
Cumings, p. 159; Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 1950–1953. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000, pp. 168–171.