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North Korea THE KOREAN WAR
In early 1949, North Korea seemed to be on a war footing.
Kim's New Year's speech was bellicose and excoriated South Korea
as a puppet state. The army expanded rapidly, soldiers drilled in
war maneuvers, and bond drives began to amass the necessary funds
to purchase Soviet weaponry. The thirty-eighth parallel was
fortified, and border incidents began breaking out. Neither Seoul
nor P'yongyang recognized the parallel as a permanent legitimate
boundary.
Although many aspects of the Korean War remained murky, it
seemed that the beginning of conventional war in June 1950 was
mainly Kim's decision, and that the key enabling factor was the
existence of as many as 100,000 troops with battle experience in
China. When the Rhee regime, with help from United States
military advisers, severely reduced the guerrilla threat in the
winter of 1949-50, the civil war moved into a conventional phase.
Kim sought Stalin's backing for his assault, but documents from
Soviet and Chinese sources suggested that he got more support
from China.
Beginning on June 25, 1950, North Korean forces fought their
way south through Seoul. South Korean resistance collapsed as the
roads south of Seoul became blocked with refugees, who were
fleeing North Korean columns spearheaded with tanks supplied by
the Soviet Union. Task Force Smith, the first United States
troops to enter the war, made a futile stand at Suwn, a town
some thirty miles south of Seoul. Within a month of the start of
the invasion, North Korean forces had seized all but a small
corner of southeastern Korea anchored by the port city of Pusan.
Repeated North Korean efforts, blunted by heavy United States Air
Force bombing and stubborn resistance by the combined United
States and South Korean forces on the Pusan perimeter, denied Kim
Il Sung forceful reunification of the peninsula. The fortunes of
war reversed abruptly in early September when General MacArthur
boldly landed his forces at Inch'n, the port city for Seoul in
west central Korea. This action severed the lines of
communication and supply between the North Korean army and its
base in the north. The army quickly collapsed, and combined
United States and South Korean forces drove Kim Il Sung's units
northward and into complete defeat.
The United States thrust in the fall of 1950, however,
motivated China to bring its forces--the Chinese People's
Volunteer Army--in on the northern side; these "volunteers" and
the North Korean army pushed United States and South Korean
forces out of North Korea within a month. Although the war lasted
another two years, until the summer of 1953, the outcome of early
1951 was definitive: both a stalemate and a United States
commitment to containment that accepted the de facto reality of
two Koreas.
By the time the armistice was signed in 1953, North Korea had
been devastated by three years of bombing attacks that had left
almost no modern buildings standing. Both Koreas had watched as
their country was ravaged and the expectations of 1945 were
turned into a nightmare. Furthermore, when Kim's regime was
nearly extinguished in the fall of 1950, the Soviet Union did
very little to save it--China picked up the pieces.
Data as of June 1993
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