Harden Blaine - The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom

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The man who would become the Great Leader stood on an indoor mountain of chemical fertilizer. Snow-white, stone hard, and two stories high, the mound of ammonium sulfate was eye candy for the masses, a symbol of the good life on offer from Comrade Kim Il Sung. Without fertilizer, people in North Korea go hungry, and some starve. It is true now, and it was true on February 22, 1948, when Kim had men cut the fertilizer flat on top, rig up a sound system, and conscript an audience. Three rings of soldiers, each armed with a Soviet-made submachine gun, protected the man atop the huge pile of fertilizer.

The stage was socialist realism writ large, as straightforward as it was brutal: Support Kim Il Sung and eat. Challenge him, and his men will sort you out, using guns and muscle from the Soviet Union.

Kim was thirty-five years old that day, but he looked younger, with smooth cheeks, short black hair, and a snug-fitting Mao suit. He had been back on the Korean Peninsula for just two and a half years, having spent much of his life fighting the Japanese in Northeast China. He had not yet purged, jailed, exiled, or executed all his political rivals. It would be

But he was getting there. His control of the police and the army was absolute. State-owned newspapers and radio applauded his every move. His paunch was expanding with his power.

As Moscows chosen onehe had caught the eye of advisers close to Premier Joseph StalinKim was rushing to rebuild and revolutionize a society traumatized by four decades of Japanese colonial domination. Following a Soviet script, factories were nationalized and labor unions created. The eight-hour workday became law. A mass literacy campaign taught millions of subsistence farmers and their families to read. New laws limited child labor and guaranteed women equal pay for equal work. from wealthy landlords.

Peasant farmers liked what they saw and grew more food. In cities, the poor and the young also seemed to be buying what Kim was selling. But the wealthy, the landed, and the well educated were frightened. About two million of them fled south, where, in a similarly new nation called South Korea, bullying politicians were preaching capitalism while being advised, armed, and bankrolled by the United States.

The Americans and the Soviets divided the Korean Peninsula in the anxious final days of World War II. On August 11, 1945, two American colonels working after midnight in Washington used a small National Geographic map to draw an arbitrary line across the peninsula. It tracked the thirty-eighth parallel, a border with no connection to Koreas history, politics, or geographic features. The east-west line gave two-thirds of the peninsulas population to South Korea, along with most of the arable land. President Harry S. Truman believed it was a good solution. Surprisingly, so did Stalin, and the deal was done. In theory, over the next five years, the wartime allies would work on their respective sides of the border to reunite Koreas thirty million people. Unification would supposedly occur after they moved beyond the hysteria of war and developed democratic institutions.

But they did not calm down, and democracy was stillborn. The leaders who emerged, Kim in the North and Syngman Rhee in the South, were aggressive, egocentric nationalists. Each wanted to reunite Korea on his own uncompromising terms. Each wanted to rule it all, with weapons, money, and ideological window dressing from his superpower patron.

Because of the mass exodus from the North, there was far more social cohesion and political stability in Kims realm than in Rhees, where striking workers and farmers clashed constantly with American-armed police. An American intelligence report concluded, , especially between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, are beginning to believe in the Communist government.

To build on that belief, Kim traveled to rice farms and teachers colleges, irrigation projects and dance schools. Most often, he visited factories, where he charmed workers, listened to local complaints, and gave on-the-spot guidance as state media took his picture.

That is what he was doing on the fertilizer mountain: sweet-talking, inspiring, and intimidating a crowd of ten thousand cheering supporters, most of them young. His speech was the main event for his visit to Hungnam, an industrial city on North Koreas east coast, where the Japanese had built several modern factories, including Chosen Nitrogenous Fertilizers, the largest fertilizer works in the Far East. Soviet soldiers had liberated the place in the late summer of 1945 as the defeated Japanese scurried away. Kims government nationalized it and repaired machinery the Japanese had tried to destroy. Fertilizer was brought back into productionglorious news in a mountainous nation of subsistence farmers, tired soil, and chronic food shortages.

Our workers are now mass-producing fertilizer essential for the peasants, Kim said as he began his speech. Besides fertilizer, he said, the extremely creative enthusiasm of Korean technicians was increasing pig-iron production and repairing hydroelectric dams. a prosperous, independent, and sovereign state by ourselves.

But a happy society required much more. Kim said a genuine peoples government must destroy the enslavement policies of the American imperialists and their stooges and take control of the entire Korean Peninsula. He was hinting, not very subtly, at a military invasion of the South, which he was already planning.