This is a sample of the methods used to reduce North Korea to a police state, just as similar states were being organized in occupied lands of Europe by local Reds doing the bidding of Moscow. In the Soviet zone of Korea all banks, factories and industries of any consequence were nationalized by the so-called People’s Committee.[10] Military training for offensive warfare was given to men armed with captured Japanese weapons. Pressure was put upon these recruits to “volunteer” for combat service with the Chinese Reds waging a civil war against the Nationalists.[11]
[10] Dallin, op. cit., 291.
[11] Oliver, op. cit., 5.
Red Victory in China
Moscow was secretly backing the Communists led by Mao Tse-tung in their efforts to wrest China from the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. Such activities, of course, were in violation of the treaty of friendship and alliance with Nationalist China which Stalin had signed on 14 August 1945. But agreements were never allowed to interfere with Soviet ambitions, and Moscow aimed to create in Asia a bulwark of Communist puppet states extending from the Arctic to the tropics.
Asiatic soil was peculiarly suited to the growth of such institutions. Although Communism derived originally from the theories of a German revolutionist, Karl Marx, it was adapted by Lenin and Stalin to the political climate of Asia. Human lives and liberties have always been held cheaply in the East, and absolutism has been the rule in government. Communism, as it developed in Russia after the revolution of 1917, would probably have been better understood by Genghis Khan than Marx. For it is significant that no Western nation has ever embraced this political faith voluntarily, even though it has attracted a minority of radicals and malcontents in nearly every country.
Asia was ripe for change after World War II. In spite of Japan’s defeat, that nation had made a good deal of progress with its “Asia for the Asiatics” propaganda. The Far East seethed with unrest in 1946, and Communism spread ominously through a China weakened by three decades of invasion, revolution and civil war.
While Nationalists and Communist armies contended for the ancient empire, an undeclared war went on in the background. This was the cold war between the United States and Soviet Russia as they supplied arms and munitions to the opposing forces. Russia also supplied troops and laborers. For it has been estimated that no less than 250,000 North Korean Reds were induced to serve in various capacities with the Chinese Communists in Manchuria.[12] There the soldiers completed their military training in actual combat, with veteran Chinese officers as instructors.
[12] GHQ, FECOM, MilIntelSec, GS, Allied Translator and Interpreter Sec (FECOM, ATIS), Enemy Forces (Interrogation Reports [InterRpt], Sup No. 4), 16.
By 1948 there was no longer much doubt about the outcome in China. In the battles of Tsinan, Changchun and Mukden, the Nationalists lost 33 divisions, totaling more than 320,000 men, in killed, wounded and missing. Losses of equipment included 250,000 rifles and vast quantities of other arms and equipment. During the four and a half months following the fall of Tsinan in September 1948, the Nationalist losses were estimated at a million men and 400,000 rifles. Even planes of United States manufacture were captured by the Reds, who also acquired a cruiser that the British had transferred to the Nationalists.[13]