Partisan Warfare before, during and after the Korean War

[Kim Sung]

I'd like to start a discussion on partisan warfare during and after the Korean War in this thread.

[Kim Sung]

I'd like to start discussion with a story of the legendary partisan leader Lee Hyun-Sang (이현상). He became a myth of modern Korean leftist history.



He was born in Kumsan, Choongchung province in 1906. He participated in building of the Korean Communist Party in 1925 and entered the then best college of Korea, Bosung college (I've also graduated from this college). He led a student demonstration and was arrested and imprisonedby the Japanese police.

Released from prison, he made an organization named Kyoungsung Communist Group (경성 콤그룹) with Park Hun-Young and Kim Sam-Ryong who were pioneer communists at the time.

During the Pacific War, he went to Mt. Chiri (지리산) and lived in a secret place. Some sources exaggerate that he led partisan warfare there against the Japanese police. But this is just a rumor. There is no evidence that he did such things.

After the liberation he worked in Seoul as a liason agent for South Korean Communist Party (남로당) and, after the communist activities are banned by the US military government, he left for North Korea.

In 1948, he returned to South Korea and began partisan warfare against South Korean army and police.

- To be continued -

[Peter H]

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/korea.htm

North Korea's effort to win control of the south using guerrilla warfare forced South Korea's military leaders to concentrate on counterinsurgency operations. Fighting between South and North Korea began on 4 May 1949, in a battle probably started by the South. In the fall of 1949, North Korean guerrilla units attempted to gain control of remote areas and small towns in the mountainous areas of eastern and southern South Korea. It was estimated that as many as 5,000 guerrillas trained in North Korea were infiltrated into these areas by the winter of 1949. Two South Korean army divisions and one army brigade were quickly deployed to conduct sweep and destroy missions to eliminate the guerrillas. Counterinsurgency operations were initiated in South Cholla Province in October 1949. In some areas, South Korean villages were evacuated both to protect civilians and to assist counterinsurgency units in locating guerrilla bases. Guerrilla warfare continued until the end of 1949, coupled with skirmishing along the thirty-eighth parallel. By April 1950, less than 500 North Korean guerrillas remained in South Korea. Although the counterinsurgency program succeeded in ending the threat posed by the guerrillas, it had a deleterious effect on the army, necessitating reorganization and retraining for conventional war preparedness.

[Peter H]

Time Magazine,October 5th 1953:

In the wild Chiri ("Different Wisdom") mountains of southwest Korea, Red guerrilla bands still maraud and plunder, sweeping down from their lairs to ransack villages and loot the creaky buses that bounce along the region's rutted roads. There are at least 3,000 guerrillas, and the villagers on whom they prey call them San Sonnim ("Mountain Guests"). Until last week many of them were devoted henchmen of Lee-Hyun Sang, a plump, mustached Marxist.

Lee joined the guerrillas in 1949, a year after most of them had deserted Syngman Rhee's army. He plodded up the mountains, muttered the proper passwords and quietly announced that the North Korean government had sent him to take charge. Lee's tablets of authority were a Russian dictionary, a Russian-language history of the Communist Party, and a Korean history of Bolshevism. His books never left his side; his orders were never questioned.

Under Lee's imaginative command, the San Sonnim wrecked thousands of South Korean trucks and trains. When the Communist army rolled south in 1950, he emerged from the hills and was made Red commissar of South Chungchong province (around Taejon). He ordered mass executions of captured South Koreans.

Later forced back to the hills, Lee became the No. 1 guerrilla in South Korea. Yet he himself never fired a shot. A scholar and ascetic, he studied three hours before breakfast, left his rice bowl to read his books until noon. From lunch until 3 p.m., he listened to reports, and studied. In the evenings he gave orders for the sabotage of U.S. convoys and studied again until precisely 8 p.m., when he lay down to sleep.

The San Sonnim looked on Lee as "a great man." He had few possessions, but those he had he valued highly: a Parker 51 pen, a Ronson lighter, U.S. Army pants and a North Korean cap. He did not drink, he had neither wife nor mistress. In his personal household of 20, sexual intercourse was forbidden; drunkenness, even at the "Russian dances" which Lee occasionally organized, was forgiven three times, then ended with a bullet. "Lee himself hardly spoke at all," said Koh Sang Kyun, his aide-de-camp whom the South Koreans captured early last year. "He didn't run around."

In the nine weeks since the Korean truce was signed, the San Sonnim has continued to loot and pillage. Recently, a South Korean patrol flushed a band of them from hiding and killed half a dozen. Five of the corpses were barefoot but one, better clad than the rest, wore a pair of torn tennis shoes. Last week he was identified. Seven well-aimed bullets had put an end to the studies of Lee Hyun Sang.

[Kim Sung]

Color Footage of Execution of Leftist Activists before the Korean War (graphic)

I suppose that this execution took place in April 1950.