The Marmot’s Hole

lirelou

My %$%#% link won’t open up the article. An anti-Lankov conspiracy by my provider. However, Baduk, the U.S. did not “have to” intervene when the “USSR suddenly rushed into NK”. The temporary division of Korea at the 38th Parallel had been decided before Russia even entered the war against Japan in August 1945, and it was solely for the purpose of disarming the Japanese Army and assisting the Koreans to get a government together, after which it was expected that the Koreans would develop political parties, unify, and move on to independent statehood. Of course, the cold war derailed that, and it turned hot in June 1950. As to why the US wanted the USSR brought into the Pacific War, just review the percentage of casualties that U.S. forces sustained fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa were very recent ememories. At least the Russian 25th Army came in prepared to communicate and deal with Koreans. That cannot be said of the U.S. 24th Corps, one of whose early acts was to release and rearm Japanese troops and policemen to perform security duties on the streets of Seoul. And the few regional linguists they had were Japanese-Americans speaking Hawaiian and California dialect Japanese. The irony is that for a few weeks in July 1945, it looked like Stillwell’s Xth Corps was going to get the job. Stillwell had extensive Asian experience. It would appear that we were about as prepared for a Korean occupation and nation-building mission as we were for an Iraqi one. It must have taken a lot of good will on both sides to make it work.

For all, a search for (kysongsong army map service 1946) should pull up a map of Seoul which shows the Japanese garrison in great detail. I believe it’s from a Texas university site, but the map is a government map “not for sale”.

lirelou

Mr. Chips. Bulgasari’s link to Boose’s article is as good as you can get on the Korean division issue. Great link!

Baduk, Il-sung is, of course, a pseudonym. There were six Kim Il-sungs resisting the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s. Kim Il-sung the “founder” was in fact the commander of an “Army” of Chinese-Korean band of up to 200 guerrillas. This is a respectable accomplishment, despite the fact that was nothing more than an infantry company in strength, but actual strength varied based upon both the combat and political situations. Il-sung’s “Army” was a component of the North-East Anti-Japanese United Army, or AJUA, which had been organized by the CCP on orders from Stalin (as head of the COMINTERN). After 1939 a combination of Soviet machinations (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) and Japanese strategy (win the guerrillas over in lieu of the previous scorched earth approach) undercut the AJUA and caused both heavy losses and defections, among the latter KIS’s deputy. Having failed as a guerrilla, KIS slipped into the Soviet Union in Mar 1941, where he and his band were placed in detention. In Apr 1941 the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact with the Japanese ssimilar to the one they had with the Germans. Then on 22 Jun 41, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. With Stalin’s regime fighting for survival, he desperately needed some means to keep an eye on the Japanese, to ensure he wasn’t going to have to fight a two-front war. Orders were sent out to raise an independent unit to conduct such operations, and the result was the 88th Independent Infantry Brigade, often referred to as the 88th Sniper Bde. Among those recruited into this unit was Kim Il-sung and his handful of former partisans. By 1945 he was a captain commanding a battalion within this brigade which likely specialized in cross-border reconnaissance operations behind Japanese lines. This means he recruited, trained, equiped, and launched reconnaissance teams whose job was to keep an eye on the Japanese. He did this for 4 1/2 years, and once source alleges he himself actually participated in between 2 to 5 trips behind the lines. When the war ended, Il-sung was not important enough to be included in the first wave of Soviet-Koreans. He did not arrive back in Korean until September 1945, when he landed at Wonsan with the Korean remnants of his battalion. He promptly made his way to Pyongyang where he was presented by the Russians to the Koreans as the “great resistance leader, general Kim”, based upon a company level firefight he had had with the Japanese that had entered into Korean folklore.

To make this short, my own reading of Kim Il-sung is that he was not the pre-annointed leader fo the future Korean communist state when the Russians arrived in 1945. Rather, he was one among many contenders. Certainly there were Korean communists and leftists with far greater bona-fides. My reading is that the Russians wanted a Korean soviet state, and they were willing to back whomever it was that the rest of the Korean “progressives” would follow. By 1948, holding the twin reins of internal security and national defence, the strongest candidate was Kim Il-sung. All he had to do was out-maneuver or kill off his rivals, which he managed to do quite well in the following years.

Bottom line: KIS did fight the Japanese. He was NOT the inventor of the “fish in the sea” guerrilla approach, and eventually failed as a guerrilla, but he did have four and a half years of cross-border special operations experience.