The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Page 11

  When he was eleven, his father sent him back to Korea, so he could have a better sense of his own country and language, even if it was never to be spoken publicly. There he lived for a time with his maternal grandparents, before returning to Manchuria, where he attended a military academy founded by Korean nationalists. Later, he would claim that he was too radical for the school and left after only six months. In any case, he soon moved on to Jilin, a town with a large number of Korean émigrés—and a great many Japanese agents as well. These were fertile times for revolutionaries. He and his friends would argue, Kim later said, about which should come first, the revolution to end the economic cruelty, or the revolution to end the Japanese occupation. They also discussed whether the revolution could come first in Korea, or whether the Koreans would have to wait until Japan itself was taken over by Communist forces. Like so many Koreans of his generation, he became more radical as time passed and the hardships inflicted by the Japanese seemed more permanent. His father died in these years and his mother began to work as a seamstress. Kim himself attended a Chinese middle school, where he encountered Shang Yue, a Communist teacher and party member who took an interest in him, opening his own library to the young man. (Shang was soon fired because of his radical views and eventually became one of the leading historians of Communist China.)

  Kim moved steadily to the left, becoming a junior founding member of a Communist youth group. In the fall of 1929, at the age of seventeen, he was arrested by the local Manchurian authorities and imprisoned. He was quite lucky, notes biographer Bradley Martin, that he was not turned over to the Japanese. Six months later, he was released, and the next year he joined the Communist Party—the Chinese Communist Party. Somewhere in that period, it was believed, he took the nom de guerre Kim Il Sung. His critics claimed he stole the name from another noted Korean patriot famed for fighting as a guerrilla, and so enjoyed a ready-made reputation as something of a Korean Robin Hood. Because of this alleged switch in identities, some detractors were convinced that Kim’s entire service as a guerrilla fighting in Manchuria was a lie. That was not the case: as in all other things, once he came to power, he exaggerated his role as a guerrilla leader, but he had been a serious opponent of the Japanese starting around 1931, and during those years he had lived a difficult, dangerous life as a guerrilla leader, just barely staying ahead of Japanese troops who were intent on hunting him down.

  That meant that by the time he was twenty, he had taken up arms against the Japanese, and by the spring of 1932 he had his own guerrilla band. Kim and others like him were part of what was known as the Kapsan Group, named after Manchuria’s Kapsan Mountains, where he and other Korean Communists had relocated after fleeing their country. The Japanese, their hunger for domination in East Asia growing with each success, were extending their colonial mandate into Manchuria—giving it the new name, as it was Japanized, of Manchukuo. Kim’s was one of many groups fighting the Japanese, some of them Korean and some of them Chinese. The guerrilla struggle against the Japanese went on for much of a decade, a war with few victories for the guerrillas. The Japanese had many more troops, far better weapons, and—so it seemed to the beleaguered Koreans—unlimited supplies of ammunition. They also had the ability to offer the local peasants a painful choice: handsome rewards for information on the guerrillas, who were sometimes their friends and countrymen, or, if they failed to cooperate, death.

  From roughly 1934 to 1940, the Japanese brought ever larger forces into the area and used increasingly brutal methods of persuasion on the local population. They finally ground the guerrillas down and drove them into the eastern part of the Soviet Union. During this period, Kim’s band joined what was called the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, commanded by a Chinese general, Yang Jingyu. The job of the guerrillas was not so much to gain victories as to harass the Japanese, and make each of their moves into China a little more difficult. Kim’s men were almost all Korean, but in any real sense he was at first operating under the auspices of the Chinese Communists.

  Of the importance of his leadership in that period there was no doubt. His title became grander—battalion and finally division commander—though it is believed that he never led more than three hundred men into battle. But Kim was gaining notoriety. On the Communist side there was growing respect for him as a durable, dependable, and valuable guerrilla leader; from the Japanese perspective, he was one of the most wanted Korean guerrilla leaders of the era; by 1935, the Japanese had put a price on his head, and yet he continued to elude them. He was regarded as tough, pragmatic, and from the viewpoint of his superiors, first the Chinese and later the Russians, ideologically trustworthy. The importance of the last quality could not be underestimated, given the fact that though there were powerful ideological bonds between him and his superiors, there were serious national differences, and thus inevitable suspicions.

  When General Yang was finally captured and killed by the Japanese in 1940, Kim became for a brief time the most wanted guerrilla in the region, with the highest price on his head, 200,000 yen. But with the Japanese forces becoming stronger and stronger, it was also time for retreat. Sometime in this period, probably around 1940, he finally came under Soviet command and tutelage. By 1942, he had been inducted into the Soviet Army and sent to a training camp near the village of Voroshilov in the eastern part of the Soviet Union. He soon became a member of a secret battalion of the Soviet Army, the Eighty-eighth Special Independent Sniper Brigade, its job essentially reconnaissance of those Japanese forces that had moved onto Soviet territory (though the Soviet Union and Japan were not formally in a state of war). He was a captain at the start and later a battalion commander in the brigade. Given how authoritarian their army was, he was in all ways a Soviet soldier and a de facto Soviet citizen. There were about two hundred men in his unit, ethnic Koreans, though some of them had grown up completely under the Russian hand. All of them were very heavily politicized, the process of indoctrination being as important to the Russians as any lessons in military tactics—political truth always preceded military ability. Sometime during World War II, Kim apparently visited Moscow. The Soviets saw his battalion as one not to fight the Japanese head-on, but to be used for various other roles as the war neared its end and their forces moved eastward.

  Kim, like any Korean of his generation, knew that the liberation from the Japanese could not be done without outside help. To him—and he now wore the uniform of a Soviet officer—the Russians were a greatly preferred sponsor to the Chinese, for the Chinese had played a larger, unwanted role in Korea’s history than the Russians, and Moscow was farther away than Beijing. Besides, by 1944, the Russians looked like sure winners, and to be major postwar players, while Mao Zedong’s revolutionary movement was still largely confined to an impoverished region of northwest China. In addition, the Soviet model seemed especially attractive to would-be Communist leaders from the underdeveloped world, because the Russians had actually done it, had completed their revolution, defeated their enemies, and in addition had seemingly managed to modernize an archaic state. So Kim became something brand-new, a modern Korean patriot and, at the same time, a dedicated, doctrinaire Soviet loyalist. Others might sense a major contradiction there between nationalism and Soviet authoritarianism, but he did not. He was a man who did not doubt the great Communist cause or, more accurately, causes—theirs, and his as well. In the beginning the two were the same for him; what was good for the Soviets was good for him—and for his Korea.

  The quick end to the war caught almost everyone by surprise, the Russians as much as the Americans. Korea was instantly and tentatively divided at the thirty-eighth parallel. In came the Red Army—not led by the Eighty-eighth Sniper Brigade, for Russian troops, not Koreans, were to get the credit for the liberation. The Korean wing of the Red Army would be allowed in only a few weeks later. In the beginning, Kim was the ultimate dependent. He had no other ticket to leadership than the Russians, and that was the way Stalin preferred it in the Communist world, all t
oo aware as he was that men with real political constituencies could become difficult and begin to think that they actually were men of true independence. Better to take someone who fit your needs, announce that he was a hero, create a mythic if partially inauthentic history for him, and then install him in power.

  That was what they did with Kim Il Sung. He did not need to be charismatic, and he most assuredly was not. The party did not need charismatic figures in its satellite states. Yugoslavia’s Communist ruler, Josip Broz Tito, and Mao Zedong, both of whom Stalin was always dubious about because of their considerable achievements, would eventually prove how dangerous it was to back men of exceptional accomplishment who were powerful national figures. There were no ideological problems with Kim: they had been molding him for years, he had passed all kinds of secret tests, and he was a true believer. What the Russians said about the West, about capitalism, and about Korea dovetailed with what Kim knew from personal experience. Years later, long after Stalin’s death, after schism upon schism had torn at the Communist world, Kim remained the last great Stalinist in power: rigid, doctrinaire, inflexible, a man who believed all the old truths even as so many of them had turned out to be false. They were not lies, at least not in Korea, because he could, with the hand and the power of the dictator, make them truths. In the end he managed to create one of the most tightly controlled, durable, and draconian societies—one of the most truly Stalinist societies—in the world. If Joseph Stalin had been born in Korea and had come to power there in the same era, he would have ruled almost exactly like Kim Il Sung and survived just as Kim did, till death did him part.

  North Korea inevitably became a hagiographer’s paradise and Kim Il Sung its one modern legend. There would be no flattery too shameless to be used in describing his wartime heroics, no obstacle that he had not overcome almost single-handedly, no Japanese battalion he had not destroyed all by himself, no other guerrilla fighter whose deeds were worthy of recounting, no sun that had ever risen over his country without his own personal assistance. In North Korea there was a revolution, but it had been imposed on the people. The power that had deeded the country over to the Communists was not, as in China (and soon in Indochina), the power of revolutionary ideas executed brilliantly and harshly against a colonial or neocolonial order during a prolonged and exhausting struggle that had demanded the support of the population. It was, instead, the raw power of the Red Army, and the decisions were all made back in Moscow, where Kim fitted his sponsor’s needs. He was young; he was brave; he had been well indoctrinated. He had no other sponsors; in blunt terms, he owed them big-time. In his favor was his lack of a political past—there was nothing to undo, and no power base of his own. He could in a sense be created from scratch, made into anything the Soviets wanted him to be. What he became in the end was something almost unique in the world, reflecting the cruelty of a Korean childhood, the colonialism of the Japanese, and the isolation and paranoia that afflicted many of his generation in Korea: a serious if embittered Korean patriot, but a patriot who was also a truly xenophobic, narrow-gauge Korean nationalist, and who by the time of his death was cut off from almost all other world leaders, including those in the Communist world.

  Those who might have seemed more likely candidates to lead North Korea, at least to outsiders unfamiliar with how Stalin operated, were in many cases automatically eliminated for their very independence. Some Koreans who had fought alongside Mao’s troops for too long a time, no matter how remarkable their wartime activities, were considered tainted by their very closeness to the Chinese. Others were perceived as having ideas and dreams too different from those of the men in the Kremlin. Hyon Chun Hyok, a prominent member of the Korean Communist Party, was soon judged to be too independent and was mysteriously assassinated in late September 1945. He was seated in a truck, beside Cho Man Sik, also a popular figure, when the assassin fired. Clearly one Korean politician was being removed from play and another was being put on warning. It was at virtually the same time as Hyon’s assassination that Kim Il Sung was first sighted in Pyongyang, wearing the uniform of a Red Army major.

  KIM MIGHT BE their man, but he was quite an unfinished politician, and he cut a disappointing figure to those Koreans who hungered for someone with more obvious credentials to lead them, and did not want any foreign power, no matter how welcome initially for replacing the Japanese, to bestow a leader on them. The Russians apparently chose to unveil Kim Il Sung first at a small dinner party held at a Pyongyang restaurant in early October 1945. Kim was, one Russian general told the assemblage, a great Korean patriot who had fought valiantly against the Japanese. Among others attending was the far better known Cho Man Sik, a nonviolent nationalist, known as the Gandhi of Korea. Aware of just how vulnerable he was, Cho was moving as deftly as he could in a political situation that, once again, the Koreans themselves did not control. He appeared at the dinner as a show of accommodation to the Russians. Part of his job was to welcome Kim. Though he was a figure with a far larger constituency, Cho arrived—in Russian eyes—with too much baggage from the past and was not ideologically trustworthy to the newest occupiers of Korea. Bourgeois nationalist was the category the Russians put him into, and it was not an enviable pigeonhole. A bourgeois nationalist was someone who did not understand that all the important decisions were going to be made in Moscow. Perhaps if he had played it right and been genuinely subservient, Cho might have had some brief value to them as a figurehead at the top, carefully isolated from the real levers of power. But as an independent politician, Cho had no chance. General Terenti Shtykov, Stalin’s man on location, the Tsar of Korea as he was then known in Pyongyang, thought Cho too anti-Soviet and anti-Stalin, and reported as much to Moscow.

  The dinner in early October was hardly a success. The other Korean politicians present were underwhelmed by Kim’s youth and lack of grace. The more crucial introduction—the public one—came in mid-October, at a mass rally in the Northern capital, and the day proved something of a disappointment to a large crowd eager for the introduction of an important Korean nationalist. The people had apparently expected to see and hear a venerable leader, who had served their cause for many years, and who would reflect their own passion for a country now officially free from foreign domination. But it was a Russian show. Kim spoke flatly, in a monotone, in words written by the Russians, and what the crowd heard was a young, rather inarticulate politician with a “plain, duck-like voice.” One witness thought his suit too small and his haircut too much like that of “a Chinese waiter.” But what really bothered many in the crowd was his adulation of Stalin and the Soviet Union. All praise went to the mighty and wondrous Red Army. Here they were, hoping for distinctly Korean words of freedom, and his words were reflecting a new kind of political obedience, Korean words bent to Russian needs, too much of “the monotonous repetitions which had [already] worn the people out.” There are two very different photos, each of which tells its own truth about that occasion. In the first, Kim, looking young and anxious, is flanked by at least three senior Soviet generals; in the second, doctored version, produced later as Kim was re-creating his own mythic story, one of greater personal independence, he is on the same podium, the angle is slightly different, and the three Russian generals have magically disappeared. Cho Man Sik’s days were already numbered. By early 1946 he had disagreed with the Russians on a number of things important to a Korean nationalist, and had thus become in their eyes even more of a reactionary. General Shtykov had sought and gotten Stalin’s permission to purge him. Soon after, he was put under what was ever so gently called protective custody, in a hotel in Pyongyang. No one was allowed to see him. In fact, no one ever saw him again.

  Kim Il Sung finally held power over half a nation, but he was hardly that great or commanding a figure on the world stage, or even for that matter the Communist one. He lacked the far greater legitimacy of Mao Zedong, who had come to power on his own with little Soviet help, or of Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader in Indochina then mounting a mili
tary attack against the French colonialists, the man who became the very embodiment of indigenous Vietnamese nationalism. Instead, for almost a decade after the liberation of Korea, Kim, as Bradley Martin has noted, was “to play for his Russian mentors the role of consummate company man, flattering them and carrying out their instructions as they rewarded him by granting him more and more power and autonomy.” Kim came quickly to understand and to use the instruments of the modern totalitarian state, police power and fear. Like Stalin, he knew how to divide and conquer, and how to remove his enemies, and he knew Stalin’s great truth: that no one, no matter how seemingly loyal, could ever really be considered trustworthy.

  Kim quickly grasped, as Stalin and Mao before him had, the need for a national cult of personality, almost one of worship—and in the future he would rival both men in that department. Already a biography, published in 1948, elevated him above all other Korean guerrilla leaders who fought the Japanese. He was “our nation’s greatest patriotic hero, and the sun of our people’s hopes.” The Japanese imperialists, the biography added, “hated General Kim Il Sung the most among thirty million Koreans.” Less than a year after he had first returned to Korea, a poem, “A Song of General Kim Il Sung,” was published that signaled what was to come: “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 worthy masses/ Great Sun of democratic new Korea?”

  By early 1950, he had systematically taken control of all of the levers of power. The great problem in his mind was that he ruled only half a country. Above all else, he longed to unleash his increasingly powerful, Soviet-trained, Soviet-equipped, well-disciplined army to invade, and to his mind liberate, the South, where hundreds of thousands awaited his strike. He would turn two Koreas into just one. When the North Koreans finally moved on June 25, their early successes seemed to validate his predictions. Because they were doing so well in the beginning, Kim Il Sung and his top officials continued to treat the representatives of Communist China with striking disdain, bordering on contempt. On July 5, Stalin had suggested that the Chinese send nine divisions to the Chinese side of the Yalu River just in case. The Chinese were already thinking the same way; they were not nearly as confident as Kim of what the Americans would do. In fact, a few days earlier Zhou Enlai had assigned one of his most trusted men, Zhai Junwu, to Pyongyang to strengthen China’s ties with the North Koreans. Zhai arrived on July 10 and met immediately with Kim, who told him, “If you need anything else just look for me at any time.” Kim in turn deputized one of his top people to give Zhai daily briefings, and with that the North Koreans cut Zhai out of the loop. The briefings turned out to be virtually useless, about what you could get from the local foreign news services. A request on the part of the Chinese leadership to send a group of senior Chinese officers to study the battlefield was rejected. Kim was sure there would be no need for their help. Things were going that well.