Now there was nothing to praise. The Great Leader had gone silent.
III
As Chinese soldiers prepared to surge into North Korea, their commander, Peng Dehuai, sized up Kim Il Sung’s performance as a battlefield commander and concluded that he was a risk-taking fool.
“There are no long-term plans, and adventurism is all one can see!” Peng wrote in an evaluation of the leadership Kim demonstrated during the first months of the war. “Military control has been extremely childish.”
This was not just a Chinese view. “He was the type of adventurer who left his fate to contingency and luck,” wrote one former colleague of Kim’s. “He always ordered reckless attacks and did not compose effective nor timely retreats.”
Peng’s judgment carried enormous weight in Beijing. He was China’s top general, a hero of the Chinese civil war, and a close friend of Mao’s (although they later disagreed and Peng died in a Chinese prison). In a poem, Mao described Peng as “our only general.” Born a peasant and raised in grinding poverty, he was an idealistic Communist and a career soldier who believed an army must understand and adapt to enemy strengths. In winning the civil war against Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, he never risked a head-on assault. Instead, he attacked from the shadows, using stealth and speed. In Korea, he assessed the Americans as lethal in the air and increasingly strong on the ground. If the Chinese were to have a fighting chance against them, Peng believed, Kim’s foolishness had to be neutralized. Peng wanted absolute command of Chinese and North Korean forces. In asserting his military dominion over North Korea, he shouted at Kim and denigrated him in front of other officials.
“You are just hoping for a quick victory and are not making concrete preparations, and this is only going to prolong the war,” Peng told Kim. “You are hoping to end this war based on luck . . . I resolutely oppose this mistake you are making in misunderstanding the enemy.”
Kim resisted Peng for months, even as his shattered army was being protected by Chinese troops. The North Korean leader would not agree to a unified command structure; he wanted the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army to be controlled from his headquarters. He demanded that Chinese soldiers use North Korean currency and pay for their firewood at prevailing market prices. Chinese and North Korean forces soon began obstructing each other’s ability to travel, fight, and deliver supplies. In the first Chinese campaign of the war, when Peng’s Thirty-ninth Volunteer Army moved in October to surround a U.S. Army division near the town of Pochon, North Korean tanks mistakenly attacked the Chinese, allowing the Americans to slip away. As Peng’s frustration with Kim grew, the Chinese general complained to Mao, who complained to Stalin, and Kim was ordered to accept his emasculation. China soon took control of roads, railways, ports, airports, food storage, and recruitment of men to fight and deliver supplies.
As he asserted his command, Peng surprised and overwhelmed the Americans, who in late November had begun a massive push north to flush the Chinese out of North Korea and end the war. MacArthur, underestimating the Chinese infantry just as he had underestimated the North Korean ground troops at the outbreak of the war, said the offensive would “get the boys home by Christmas.” Instead, about 180,000 Chinese troops shattered the U.S. Eighth Army as it tried to move up the west side of the Korean Peninsula.
By December 2, 1950, the home-by-Christmas offensive “had turned into a bloody nightmare.” The Eighth Army abandoned Pyongyang and fell back 120 miles to the thirty-eighth parallel—the longest retreat in American military history.
At the same time, the Chinese sprang another trap on the east side of North Korea near the Chosin Reservoir, a man-made, high-country lake created by the Japanese. No Kum Sok and his parents had often summered at the reservoir to escape the suffocating lowland heat. But in winter the area was murderously cold, particularly in late November 1950, when American troops, many of them ill-dressed for winter, were enveloped by a Siberian front. The temperature dropped to minus thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Weapons would not fire. Blood plasma froze into chunks of ice in medical tents. With twice as many troops on the ground, Chinese generals tried to destroy the U.S. Army X Corps and the First Marine Division. Only brilliant leadership and ferocious fighting by the marines saved the Americans, enabling them to break out of the trap and escape Chosin Reservoir without devastating loss of life. Still, it was a retreat. Under Peng’s leadership, the Chinese had routed the Americans, humiliated MacArthur, and taken back all of North Korea’s territory in less than three months.
The Great Leader played virtually no role in these victories.
While stewing in his irrelevance, Kim devised a pie-in-the-sky plan to revive his army in eastern China. His plan depended on help from Stalin, whom he appealed to via Shtykov, the supportive Soviet ambassador.
“Our North Korean friends will withdraw to Manchuria with the personnel for organizing nine divisions,” Shtykov wrote to Stalin. “Once again, our comrades are requesting that ninety Soviet advisors . . . help them organize the nine divisions and establish education and training institutions. The North Koreans state that if they do not have this help, it will take them a year before they can prepare for combat on their own.”
Stalin refused.
When Kim heard the news, he was silent for a moment and then asked, “How can matters come to this?”
For Kim, matters soon deteriorated further. At the end of 1950, Stalin fired Shtykov, who for five years had been Kim’s most sympathetic Soviet supporter and his only direct line to the Boss. The longtime ambassador, it seems, sabotaged his own career by being too close to Kim and his battlefield blunders.
The man who replaced Shtykov was not a confidant of Stalin’s, and Kim’s complaints no longer reached the Soviet leader directly. North Korea soon became just another distant Soviet satellite. Its importuning to Moscow was filtered through Beijing. To appeal to the Soviets for money, matériel, and advisers, Kim had to win sympathy from Peng, who thought the North Korean leader was an ass, and from Mao, who agreed with Peng. In his memoirs, Khrushchev wrote that the Soviet ambassador in Pyongyang sent “very tragic reports concerning Kim Il Sung’s state of mind.”
In the fall of 1950, Kim was a thirty-eight-year-old widower, still mourning the deaths of his wife, who died the previous year, and of his second son, who drowned in a pond in 1947. He was head of a nearly nonexistent state, living on the run and hunkering down in bunkers with his son and daughter to escape American bombing.
Being kicked when he was down, however, was not an unfamiliar experience for Kim. As a guerrilla commander in Manchuria, he had endured crushing military defeats at the hands of the Japanese and survived murderous backstabbing from the Chinese. He had been weaned, as the historian Adrian Buzo put it, “in a predatory, political subculture of force which encouraged in him an outlook that accepted callousness and criminality as a daily reality.”
Kim began to emerge from his wartime funk and assert his predatory instincts at the end of 1950, shortly after Chinese forces retook Pyongyang in December and secured control of all of North Korea. Change in the war’s momentum gave him a chance to convene a party plenum on December 21 in the bomb-shattered city of Kanggye. There he “attacked almost everybody.” He blamed his failings as a commander on the incompetence, cowardice, and lack of discipline of underlings. At considerable length, he damned his own military, his own propaganda machine, his own internal security apparatus, and all the wannabe Communist guerrillas in the South who he had predicted would help him during the war but who had done nothing. Then he censored his own speech, leaving many North Koreans (including No Kum Sok at Yanji airfield) with only a vague idea of what the Great Leader was up to.
China had grabbed control of the war, but unlike the Soviet Union it did not meddle in the internal affairs of the North Korean government.
Paradoxically, Kim benefited from his own incompetence. The Chinese did the dirty work of gr
ound fighting, freeing him from day-to-day management of the war and giving him an opportunity to begin eliminating his political rivals. His incompetence also weakened his ties to Soviet advisers who had guided his behavior. Cut loose from them, his Manchurian-bred callousness could assert itself.
At the party plenum in December, Kim showed glimpses of the dictator he would become. When it came time to praise Stalin, he was less the lickspittle and more the enforcer. Gone were his references to the great Soviet Union and the Glorious Leader of Worldwide Revolution. Instead, he demanded that the party act “as one man upon the orders of the Chief.”
As General Peng saw it, Kim was too childish and too impatient to run a military campaign against a formidable enemy like the United States. But politics were different. Kim could win at home because he alone made up the rules. His official biographer explained the new world according to Kim: “Only when the entire Party membership and working people had established the unitary ideological system, firmly arming themselves with the ideas of the Leader, being boundlessly faithful to his teachings, defending with their lives Comrade Kim Il Sung, the respected and beloved Leader, without vacillation in any storm and stress, at any time and at any place, and unconditionally accepting and carrying out the teachings of the Leader and the decision of the Party, would they be able to win the war.”
In the last weeks of 1950, Kim moved back to Pyongyang, which Americans continued to bomb and burn. The U.S. Air Force estimated it destroyed 75 percent of the capital, while the North Korean government said every modern building in the city was destroyed, save two. The Great Leader, stripped of command over his own war, often had to live underground.
IV
In the early spring of 1951, No Kum Sok’s war took a turn toward luxury.
He ate imported caviar and wiped his lips with freshly laundered cloth napkins. He slept, for the first time in his life, on a bed with a spring mattress. Every third night, he watched a new movie from Moscow. In a dining hall packed with chatty pilots, many of whom were tall, blond, and pale Russians, he feasted on borscht and vodka, piroshki and fish pie, black bread and gobs of butter. Much of the food was flown in from the Soviet Union and prepared by chefs who had been recruited from international hotels in China. The waiters, also imports from first-class hotels, wore clean white linen and glided around the dining hall, busing as many as five plates in one hand. When No asked for seconds, they smiled and fetched. The best thing, by far, about learning to fly was the food.
No began eating it after qualifying for jet training, as did nearly all of the North Korean naval cadets who had been sent to Manchuria. The excellent food was served at a Soviet-run airfield near Anshan, China, a steelmaking city about 150 miles northwest of the North Korean border, where the mountains of eastern Manchuria give way to a dusty plain. Almost as soon as No arrived there by train on March 7, 1951, he felt more comfortable than he had in years. The Russian flight instructors he dined with were in their late twenties. They were welcoming, intelligent, and urbane—far more amiable companions than his stressed-out North Korean peers. Part of it was language. To enhance his performance as a No. 1 Communist, No had been working for years to learn conversational Russian. After high school, he took three years of college-level Russian at the chemical college in Hungnam and at the naval academy.
At Anshan, where most Korean pilots could not communicate without help from translators, No talked directly with Russian instructors and aircraft mechanics, few of whom could speak Korean or Chinese. As a result, he learned more about flying a jet and he learned it faster than other cadet pilots.
Although they had been in Manchuria for nearly half a year, many of the cadet pilots remained traumatized by the punitive ordeal of their training in the North, particularly in the naval academy’s caves and tunnels. They feared demotion, even death, if they crashed a plane, failed to pass ideological muster, or said the wrong word.
The few cadet pilots who did not qualify for jet training—and were then relegated to older, propeller-driven aircraft—were not necessarily inferior pilots. More often, they were poor actors. Unlike No, they failed to flaunt their dedication to the Great Leader. At ideology-improvement meetings, which were an endless, mind-numbing component of flight training, they neglected to flatter political officers. One of these unfortunate cadet pilots, Lee Yong Chol, who had been No’s classmate in high school in Hungnam and at the naval academy, was upset when he learned he would not be allowed to fly a jet. Someone overheard him saying that if he had to fight the Americans in a Russian propeller plane, he would just as soon defect to South Korea. For his pique, he was executed, supposedly in secret, although word of his death spread among the cadet pilots, with sobering effect.
By comparison, the Russian pilots, as No watched them in the dining hall and on the flight line, behaved like free men, like the Americans he imagined meeting one day. They were self-confident, opinionated, and funny. Drinking vodka, they could become loud and playful but rarely violent or cruel. They were nothing like the Russians he had encountered five years earlier in Kanggye: beefy, unwashed dregs who raped North Korean housewives and puked in the streets.
No’s instructor at Anshan, Captain Alexei Nikichenko, was a patient man and a sophisticated Muscovite: slender, gentle, and articulate. He showed No photographs of his wife and two young sons and often said that he missed his family.
The instructors at Anshan were by far the best jet fighter pilots in the Soviet Union. Many had flown hundreds of combat missions against Germany during World War II. Before Manchuria, they were stationed in Moscow, where they protected the capital from possible American air attack and marched in air parades in Red Square.
Their commander was Colonel Ivan N. Kozhedub, one of the most famous military men in the Soviet Union. A skilled and fearless pilot with hawk-like blue eyes, he was credited with shooting down a record sixty-two German aircraft during World War II. Three times he had been named a Hero of the Soviet Union, the country’s highest honor.
The fame and status of Kozhedub, along with the superb flying skills of his men, helped explain the luxury treatment at Anshan airfield. The orders that sent them there, which came directly from Stalin, explained the rest. In a coded message on November 20, 1950, Stalin promised Kim Il Sung that he would send Soviet instructors to teach two regiments of North Korean pilots how to fly jet fighters. A month later Kozhedub and his men left Moscow on trains heading to the Far East. When No showed up in March as part of the first class of North Koreans to be taught to fly jets, the Russians had been waiting for them for more than two months.
The elite Russians were supposedly there to teach, not fight, as Stalin wanted to minimize his risk of an all-out confrontation with the United States. But the unchecked ferocity of American airpower—after China entered the war—forced the Boss to rethink. American pilots were blowing up bridge after bridge over the Yalu, disrupting supply lines, and slaughtering Chinese units that were fighting in North Korea without air cover.
MacArthur had revved up the bombing to compensate for his egocentric mistake: he had bathed too long in the adulation generated by his triumph at Inchon while neglecting intelligence reports that Chinese troops were moving into North Korea. When the Chinese started killing GIs and clawing back territory, MacArthur demanded a scorched-earth response. He approved the use of incendiary bombs and ordered the air force “to destroy every means of communication and every installation, factory, city, and village” in North Korea. He instructed bombers to create “a desert” incapable of supporting Communist troops between United Nations lines and the Chinese border.
Prior to the Chinese incursion, the air force had pounded North Korea with conventional explosives. These bombs, as No had witnessed in Chongjin, tore buildings apart, knocked bridges down, and killed tens of thousands of people. But rarely did they start fires that engulfed entire cities. Politicians and generals in Washington had been unwilling during the war??
?s first few months to allow the air force to drop bombs containing incendiary chemical compounds like napalm, a gel that sticks to human flesh and burns for an extended period. During World War II, incendiaries, dropped from B-29s, created firestorms in cities across Japan. On a windy night over Tokyo in March 1945, American bombers dropped nearly 800,000 pounds of napalm in less than an hour, creating an epochal fire that reduced fifteen square miles of the city to ashes and killed about a hundred thousand people. The fire was so intense it burned paint off the bellies of air force bombers and pilots smelled updrafts of “roasting human flesh.”
After Chinese soldiers overran American infantry positions, Washington put aside its qualms about using napalm on North Korean cities. It quietly agreed with air force strategists who claimed that the stuff was “economical, efficient, and expeditious.” The first firebombing in the North occurred on November 4, 1950, when twenty-six B-29s took off in search of Kanggye, the city where No had attended middle school. Bad weather diverted them to a secondary target, Chongjin, where they burned the rubble that was left after the devastating conventional bombing that No had witnessed back in August. Two days later, the Pentagon ordered the air force to use all available means against Yalu bridges on the border with Manchuria. The border city of Sinuiju was attacked by seventy B-29s carrying incendiary bombs. Firestorms burned the city to the ground, killing more than two thousand civilians.
In the three devastating months that followed, as the air force dropped 40 percent of the bombs and two-thirds of the napalm used in the entire Korean War, most major cities and many minor towns in the North were set afire. American fighter-bomber pilots often preferred napalm. As one explained, “When you’ve hit a village and have seen it go up in flames, you know you’ve accomplished something.”