North Korea

It was very easy to start a war in Korea. It was not so easy to stop it.

The 1932 retreat from Antu eventually took Kim and his anti-Japanese fighters to the Manchurian-Soviet border area. Japanese pressure intensified. Chinese and Korean nationalist elements fled across the border or switched to banditry. Kim said that left him and his seventeen teenaged Korean communists isolated in a bleak, wild territory called Luozigou. All their provisions were exhausted, their clothes in tatters, he said. "In the sky airplanes were flying around, dropping leaflets urging us to surrender, and on the ground hordes of Japanese soldiers mobilized for a 'punitive expedition' were closing in on us from all directions." Choi Jin-sok, who joined the unit about that time, said he enlisted after the Japanese punitive force had killed his two brothers. Choi's formal induction occurred on a snow-covered ginseng field, where the hungry guerrillas were digging up ginseng roots to eat. "I asked Kim Il-sung to accept me in his unit, and he embraced me, holding my shoulders, and told me to do a good job," Choi told a South Korean reporter more than six decades later. The Koreans considered abandoning their weapons and giving up guerrilla warfare. "Not only I but our whole group wavered," Kim admitted. In a rare instance of public self-mockery, he recalled that "when we were moving about in Jilin, writing leaflets and making speeches, we had all been heroes and great men. But here in this place we were all beginners." Fortunately, an old man named Ma appeared and helped save the day. Ma hid the guerrillas in a mountain hut and fed them while they regained their strength and their will, according to Kim's account. He added, though, that what really pushed them through this crisis was his sense of destiny. "If I had thought there would be people to save Korea after we had died, we would have been buried under the snow." Rested, the young warriors marched off in the spring of 1933 to mountainous Wangqing County in Manchuria's Jiandao Province. Communism had been displacing nationalist ideology among local Koreans who worked as slash-and-burn farmers, lumberjacks and raftsmen. Moscow's line, as transmitted through the Chinese Communist Party, was to establish guerrilla zones in Manchuria. Communists had killed or otherwise removed the local representatives of the ruling class and redistributed their land to the peasants. The revolutionary governments, Kim wrote later, were establishing ideal societies. Education and medical care were free. "For the first time in history, everyone enjoyed equality." He waxed rhapsodic when recalling happy peasants who "danced to the beat of the gongs as they drove in the stakes to mark off their plots of the land distributed by the people's revolutionary government." Kim's memories became less rosy as he described Japanese encirclement of the communist enclaves. While communist guerrilla warfare in Manchuria was but a sideshow compared with the struggle of the main Chinese communist forces to the south, led by Mao Zedong, Tokyo nevertheless sensed a significant threat to its plans and sent troops on "punitive operations" against the Manchuria guerrillas. The year before Kim's arrival in the district, such a Japanese operation had "drowned the fields and mountains of Wangqing in a bloodbath," Kim wrote. "The guts of dead people drifted down the rivers." The Japanese "did not hesitate to destroy a whole village in order to kill one communist." Their policy was "killing everyone, burning everything and plundering everything." Survivors of those scorched-earth tactics had to move from their isolated villages to towns where the authorities could control them. (As Kim noted, the Americans later borrowed and refined this approach in Vietnam, where they took village people from Viet Cong areas and concentrated them in "strategic hamlets.") Kim's band joined communist guerrillas whose mission was to defend some one thousand of the Wangqing people, who had evaded the 1932 punitive campaign. They fled deeper into the mountains, to heavily forested Xiaowangqing. Feeding the refugees was the immediate problem. The small patches of arable land in the area could not grow enough for them. Guerrilla attacks on the enemy yielded only small amounts of supplies. The inhabitants ate gruel made of beans ground with a millstone. When even that was unavailable the revolutionaries had to forage for roots and herbs. In their desperation they made cakes of pine bark that had been boiled in caustic soda water and pounded.

Kim's headquarters was in a different part of the country from the home of his mother, who was ill with an undiagnosed ailment that he later came to believe was stomach cancer. Kim said his mother rejected his attempts to help her around the house and urged him instead to stick to his revolutionary work. He took her at her word, and seldom visited her as her illness progressed. When he did visit, he carried grain for her and his younger brothers. Arriving for one long-delayed visit, Kim felt uneasy to see no smoke rising from the chimney. Entering the house "feeling such fear and tension that the blood in my heart seemed to freeze," Kim found his mother's bed empty and his brothers sobbing. Kim related an affecting anecdote. As his bedridden mother's death approached, it had been difficult to keep her hair clean. A neighbor woman who was caring for her had cut Kang Pan-sok's hair to stop her scalp from itching. Hearing about that after his arrival was "tearing me apart inside," Kim recalled. "I had nothing to say, even if I was to blame for being an undutiful son." Kim confessed to confusion about his duty as a son (a confession that contrasted with the self-assurance reflected in most of his reminiscences). Confucian notions of filial piety clearly retained a tenacious hold on his mind. On the other hand, "it was much in vogue among the young people who were my revolutionary companions to think that a man who had stepped out on the road to struggle should naturally forget my his family," he wrote. "It was my view of filial piety in those days that earnest devotion to the revolution represented the supreme love for one's family." Nonetheless, "I had no clear, established view of how a revolutionary devoted to the revolution should love his family." Kim found in Korean history some justification for the course he took. After Japan imposed on Korea a treaty of "protection" in 1905, a militant patriotic band calling itself the Righteous Volunteer Force tried to abrogate the treaty. The Righteous Volunteers were closing in on the capital when the commander, Li Rin-yong, received word that his father had died. Li turned over command to another man and went home, as Kim related the story. Combined with other reverses, Li's departure demoralized the men and led to the collapse of the army. Kim said that while he was studying in Jilin, some of his fellow students spoke up to defend Li. "In those days, he who was devoted only to his parents was considered a dutiful son," Kim explained. But he said he argued that Li should have fought first, fulfilling his duty to the nation, before going to pay homage at his father's grave. Kim's family members had suffered considerably for the cause of independence, and their suffering was far from over. Kim left his younger brothers behind to be looked after by neighbors or to fend for themselves. Then he joined the other Chinese and Korean troops in a retreat from Antu, where the Japanese were stepping up their countermeasures. The sixteen-year-old middle brother, Chol-ju, wanted to join the guerrillas and fight, but Kim told him to wait a few years. It was the last time they met. Chol-u later did take up combat, as part of another Chinese-led unit, and was killed in battle three years later, Kim said. After Chol-ju's death, Kim said, his youngest brother, Kim Yong-ju, wandered from place to place, eking out a living babysitting and running errands, eventually getting a job in a brewery. On a visit to Korea, Kim Il-sung wrote, Yong-ju "turned up in Mangyongdae wearing a black suit and white shoes. His appearance was so dashing that our grandfather even wondered if his youngest grandson had got a high public post and made his fortune." That, however, was to come much later, when President Kim Il-sung promoted his kid brother to top-level positions in the North Korean leadership. Kim's hot-tempered uncle Hyong-gwon, the same young uncle who had smashed the gruel bowl with his head, had continued as an adult to vent his spleen - but learned to channel his anger against the Japanese. Kim Hyong-gwon and three accomplices shot and killed a Japanese policeman during a 1930 foray into Korea from Manchuria. Kim Il-sung related his surprise at learning that an erstwhile family friend, after hiding the men in his yard, had betrayed their hiding place to the authorities. It turned out that the informer had been serving as a secret agent of the Japanese. This was a lesson for Kim. "Even now I say that it is good to believe in people but that it is mistaken to harbor illusions about them," he wrote. Hyong-gwon, "stubborn as a mule," died in prison in 1936 at the age of thirty-one, Kim said. The Mangyongdae house, home to two such notorious outlaws as Kim Il-sung and his uncle, attracted considerable attention from the authorities, he recalled. Police sat in the shade of some ash trees in front of his grandparents' home, watching the house and harassing the family. To deprive them of their shade, the older of his father's brothers "went out with an axe and cut down one of the ash trees," Kim wrote. Alone among all the households in the village, he claimed, his family held out against adopting Japanese names as the colonial authorities demanded in the 1930's, although police beat his elder uncle for his refusal to do so. "The misfortune and distress of our family is the epitome of the misfortune and distress that befell our people after they lost their country," Kim wrote in his memoirs. "Under the inhuman rule of Japanese imperialism millions of Koreans lost their lives - dying of starvation, of the cold, from burning or from flogging."