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Kim Il-sung and the Outbreak of War

Matters could have proceeded as a kind of shadowboxing for several, perhaps many, years as the two morbidly suspicious absolute rulers were calibrating each other by ascribing their own motives to their counterpart. Instead Kim Il-sung, the North Korean leader whom Stalin had ridiculed in his first meeting with Mao in December 1949, entered the geopolitical fray with startling results. In their Moscow meeting, Stalin had fended off a military alliance between China and the Soviet Union by mockingly suggesting that the only threat to peace would come from North Korea, if “Kim Il Sung decides to invade China.”¹⁸

That is not what Kim Il-sung decided. Instead, he chose to invade South Korea and, in the process, brought the major countries to the edge of a global war and China and the United States into actual military confrontation.

Before the North Korean invasion of the South, it would have seemed inconceivable that a China barely emerging from civil war would go to war against a nuclear-armed America. That the war broke out is due to the suspicions the two Communist giants had of each other and to Kim Il-sung’s ability, though wholly dependent on his incomparably more powerful allies, to manipulate their mutual suspicions.

Korea had been incorporated into imperial Japan in 1910 and quickly became the jumping-off point for Japanese incursions into China. In 1945, after Japan’s defeat, Korea was occupied in the North by Soviet armies, in the South by American forces. The dividing line between them, the 38th parallel, was arbitrary. It simply reflected the limits their armies had reached at the end of the war.¹⁹

When the occupying powers withdrew in 1949 and the hitherto occupied zones became fully sovereign states, neither felt comfortable within its boundaries. Their rulers, Kim Il-sung in the North and Syngman Rhee in the South, had spent their lives fighting for their national causes. They saw no reason to abandon them now, and both claimed the leadership for all of the country. Military clashes along the dividing line were frequent.

Starting with the withdrawal of American forces from South Korea in June 1949, Kim Il-sung had throughout 1949 and 1950 tried to convince both Stalin and Mao to acquiesce in a full-scale invasion of the South. Both at first rejected the proposal. During Mao’s visit to Moscow, Stalin asked Mao’s opinion of such an invasion, and Mao, though favorable to the objective, judged the risk of American intervention as too high.²⁰ He thought any project to conquer South Korea should be deferred until the completion of the Chinese civil war through the conquest of Taiwan.

It was precisely this Chinese aim that provided one of the incentives for Kim Il-sung’s project. However ambiguous American statements, Kim Il-sung was convinced that the United States was unlikely to accept two Communist military conquests. He was therefore impatient to achieve his objectives in South Korea before Washington had second thoughts should China succeed in occupying Taiwan.

A few months later, in April 1950, Stalin reversed his previous position. During a visit by Kim Il-sung in Moscow, Stalin gave the green light to Kim’s request. Stalin stressed his conviction that the United States would not intervene. A Soviet diplomatic document recounted that

Comrade Stalin confirmed to Kim Il Sung that the international environment has sufficiently changed to permit a more active stance on the unification of Korea. . . . Now that China has signed a treaty of alliance with the USSR, Americans will be even more hesitant to challenge the Communists in Asia. According to information coming from the United States, it is really so. The prevailing mood is not to interfere. Such a mood is reinforced by the fact that the USSR now has the atomic bomb and that our positions are solidified in Pyongyang.²¹

Thereafter there is no record of a direct Chinese-Soviet dialogue on the subject. Kim Il-sung and his envoys became the vehicle through which the two Communist giants communicated with each other on Korea. Both Stalin and Mao were maneuvering for dominant influence in Korea or, at a minimum, to keep the other partner from achieving it. During that process, Mao agreed to transfer up to fifty thousand ethnic Korean troops who served in the People’s Liberation Army units to North Korea with their weapons. Was his motive to encourage Kim Il-sung’s design or to prove his ideological support while limiting a final Chinese military commitment? Whatever Mao’s ultimate intentions, the practical result was to leave Pyongyang in a significantly strengthened military position.

In the American domestic debate about the Korean War, Dean Acheson’s speech on Asia policy in January 1950 came to be widely criticized for placing Korea outside the American “defensive perimeter” in the Pacific, thereby allegedly giving a “green light” to the North Korean invasion. In its account of American commitments in the Pacific, Acheson’s speech was not an innovation. General Douglas MacArthur, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Far East Command, had similarly placed Korea outside the American defense perimeter in a March 1949 interview in Tokyo:

Now the Pacific has become an Anglo-Saxon lake and our line of defense runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia.

It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu Archipelago, which includes its main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain to Alaska.²²

Since then, the United States had withdrawn the majority of its forces from Korea. A Korean aid bill was currently before Congress, where it faced considerable resistance. Acheson was left to repeat MacArthur’s sketch, stating that the “military security of the Pacific area” involved a “defensive perimeter [that] runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus . . . [and] runs from the Ryukyus to the Philippine Islands.”²³

On the specific question of Korea, Acheson presented an ambiguous account reflecting the current state of American indecision. Now that South Korea was “an independent and sovereign country recognized by nearly all the rest of the world,” Acheson reasoned that “our responsibilities are more direct and our opportunities more clear” (though what these responsibilities and opportunities were, Acheson did not explain—specifically whether they included defense against invasion). If an armed attack were to occur in an area of the Pacific not explicitly to the south or east of the American defensive perimeter, Acheson suggested that “[t]he initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations.”²⁴ To the extent deterrence requires clarity about a country’s intention, Acheson’s speech missed the mark.

No specific reference to this aspect of Acheson’s speech has so far emerged in any Chinese or Soviet documents. Recently available diplomatic documents do suggest, however, that Stalin based his reversal in part on access to NSC-48/2, which his spy network, probably through the British turncoat Donald Maclean, had uncovered. This report also specifically placed Korea outside the U.S. defense perimeter. Since it was highly classified, the document would have seemed particularly credible to Soviet analysts.²⁵

Another element in Stalin’s reversal may have been his disenchantment with Mao stemming from the negotiations leading to the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship described earlier. Mao had made it abundantly clear that Russian special privileges in China would not last long. Russian control of the warm-water port of Dalian was bound to be temporary. Stalin may well have concluded that a unified Communist Korea might prove more accommodating to Soviet naval needs.

Ever devious and complex, Stalin urged Kim to speak about this subject with Mao, noting that he had “a good understanding of Oriental matters.”²⁶ In reality, Stalin was shifting as much responsibility as he could to Chinese shoulders. He told Kim not to “expect great assistance and support from the Soviet Union,” explaining that Moscow was concerned and preoccupied with “the situation in the West.”²⁷ And he warned Kim: “If you should get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger. You have to ask Mao for all the help.”²⁸ It was authentically Stalin: haughty, long-range, manipulative, cautious, and crass, producing a geopolitical benefit for the Soviet Union while shifting the risks of the effort to China.

Stalin, who had encouraged the outbreak of the Second World War by freeing Hitler’s rear through the Nazi-Soviet pact, applied his practiced skill in hedging his bets. If the United States did intervene, the threat to China would increase as would China’s dependence on the Soviet Union. If China responded to the American challenge, it would require massive Soviet assistance, achieving the same result. If China stayed out, Moscow’s influence in a disillusioned North Korea would grow.

Kim next flew to Beijing for a secret visit with Mao on May 13–16, 1950. In a meeting on the night of his arrival, Kim recounted to Mao Stalin’s approval of the invasion plan and asked Mao to confirm his support.

To limit his risks even further, Stalin, shortly before the attack he had encouraged, added reinsurance by withdrawing all Soviet advisors from North Korean units. When that hamstrung the performance of the North Korean army, he returned Soviet advisors, albeit under the cover of their being correspondents from TASS, the Soviet press agency.

How a minor ally of both Communist giants unleashed a war of major global consequences was summed up by Mao’s translator Shi Zhe to the historian Chen Jian, who paraphrased the content of the key conversation between Mao and Kim Il-sung:

[Kim] told Mao that Stalin had approved his plans to attack the South. Mao solicited Kim’s opinions of possible American response if North Korea attacked the South, stressing that as the Syngman Rhee regime had been propped up by the United States and that as Korea was close to Japan the possibility of an American intervention could not be totally excluded. Kim, however, seemed confident that the United States would not commit its troops, or at least, it would have no time to dispatch them, because the North Koreans would be able to finish fighting in two to three weeks. Mao did ask Kim if North Korea needed China’s military support, and offered to deploy three Chinese armies along the Chinese-Korean border. Kim responded “arrogantly” (in Mao’s own words, according to Shi Zhe) that with the North Koreans’ own forces and the cooperation of Communist guerillas in the South, they could solve the problem by themselves, and China’s military involvement was therefore unnecessary.²⁹

Kim’s presentation apparently shook Mao sufficiently that he ended the meeting early and ordered Zhou Enlai to cable Moscow requesting an “urgent answer” and “personal clarification” from Stalin.³⁰ The next day the reply arrived from Moscow, with Stalin again shifting the onus back to Mao. The cable explained that

[i]n his talks with the Korean comrades, [Stalin] and his friends . . . agreed with the Koreans regarding the plan to move toward reunification. In this regard a qualification was made, that the issue should be decided finally by the Chinese and Korean comrades together, and in case of disagreement by the Chinese comrades the decision on the issue should be postponed pending further discussion.³¹

This, of course, placed the blame for vetoing the project entirely on Mao. Further disassociating himself from the outcome (and providing Kim with an additional opportunity for exaggeration and misrepresentation), Stalin preempted a return telegram from Beijing by explaining that “[t]he Korean comrades can tell you the details of the conversation.”³²

No records of Mao and Kim’s subsequent conversation have yet been made available. Kim returned to Pyongyang on May 16 with Mao’s blessing for an invasion of South Korea—or at least that is how he described it to Moscow. Mao may well have also calculated that acquiescence in the conquest of South Korea might establish a premise for Soviet military assistance for a subsequent Chinese attack on Taiwan. If so, it was a grievous miscalculation. Because even had the United States stood aloof from the conquest of South Korea, American public opinion would not have allowed the Truman administration to ignore another Communist military move in the Taiwan Strait.

Ten years later, Moscow and Beijing still could not agree on which side had actually given Kim the final green light to launch his invasion. Meeting in Bucharest in June 1960, Khrushchev, who was by then Soviet General Secretary, insisted to Chinese Politburo member Peng Zhen that “if Mao Zedong had not agreed, Stalin would not have done what he did.” Peng retorted that this was “totally wrong” and that “Mao Zedong was against the war. . . . [I]t was Stalin who agreed.”³³

The two Communist giants thus slid into a war without addressing the global implications should Kim Il-sung’s and Stalin’s optimistic forecasts prove to be erroneous. Once the United States entered the war, they would be forced to consider them.

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Kim Il-sung and the Outbreak of War

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