My life began in the 1910s when Korea had suffered the worst tragic calamities. By the time I was born, Korea was already under the Japanese colonial rule….The Korean people seethed with anger and wept with sorrow over the loss of their nationhood….Korea in those days was a living Hell, unfit for human habitation. The Korean people were, in all aspects, walking stiffs; their spirits were dead.
This massive volume, published just before his death, takes on an almost Homeric rhythm, recounting the heroics of Kim and his followers, the depths of his despair as he shivered without a blanket on the Manchurian battlefield, and the heights of his optimism when encountering the kindness of villagers. His stories are captivating and graphic, highlighting the smells and sounds of battles, the broken bodies, the cruelty against Koreans—eyes pierced by sharpened sticks, fingers and heads cut off by roving bandits or as punishment for revolutionary activities, decapitated heads staked as a warning to others. “It was my misfortune,” he wrote, “to be born in an era of evil events and to grow up seeing the worst of the Japanese savagery. These left indelible marks on my memory and shaped my future activities.” Having experienced repression and witnessed brutality from an early age, Kim raged at the “elite of Korea” who let the nation fall.
While other nations went about in mighty warships and rode shiny trains, our feudal leaders rode filthy scrawny donkeys wearing horse-hair hats and wasted several hundred years in a stale state of stupor and suffocating economic stagnation. They kowtowed to foreign gunboat diplomacy and opened up the gate for foreign invasion and exploitation; Korea became an easy prey for the imperialists.
But rather than confront the Japanese troops who were determined to root out Korean guerrillas—many of whom perished—Kim and his small group of fighters fled to the Soviet Union in 1940, where he studied under Soviet military officers and rose to the rank of captain in the Red Army’s Eighty-eighth Brigade. Although Kim apparently spent World War II in a rear unit far away from the fighting—in contrast to the regime narrative of his fearless and relentless assault against Japanese forces—at the tender age of thirty-three, the chubby-faced, ambitious, brutal, anti-Japanese guerrilla triumphantly returned to North Korea intent on becoming its new leader.
After intense jockeying among other Korean nationalists, Kim was installed as the leader of the northern half of the Korean Peninsula by the Soviet Union in 1945, when it was provisionally divided along the thirty-eighth parallel, with the United States controlling the southern half. The division was arbitrary, cutting across seventy-five streams, twelve rivers, more than a hundred country roads, eight highways, and six rail lines, according to the U.S. Army’s history of the war in Korea. He had been away from Korea for twenty years, but as a native of Pyongyang, the charismatic Kim, with his nationalist and Communist credentials—but not least because of his apparent loyalty to the Soviet Union—fit the bill for Moscow. Kim declared the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on September 9, 1948, after purging potential challengers, organizing a robust surveillance and security apparatus to root out dissent, engaging in systematic violence, and adopting reeducation programs to ensure his domination. He was no mere Soviet puppet, however, and the fact that he was a survivor, a savvy political operator, and an able manipulator of Beijing and Moscow contributed to his ascendance and longevity.
Fresh from the fields of combat, flush with the new powers that he’d wrested from his challengers, and confident about the support of his Soviet backers, Kim sought to reunify the Korean Peninsula. Perhaps his still youthful exuberance contributed to this confidence, or he saw an opportunity to make his bid before the division fully gelled, or he was driven by a messianic zeal that only he could make Korea whole again. It was probably all of these things. Indeed, the international environment seemed to support his conviction that he had freedom of action. Washington’s interests lay in the Western Hemisphere, including reconstructing Europe and limiting the expansion of the Soviet Union; it did not view the security of South Korea as a strategic concern. George Kennan, the architect of the postwar containment policy, argued in 1948 that the United States should “get out of [Korea] as gracefully but promptly as possible.” His conclusion that the peninsula held no strategic interest was later shared by Secretary of State