opinion

During the anti-Japanese armed struggle, President Kim Il Sung inflicted heavy defeats on the Japanese imperialist aggressors who boasted of their numerical and technical superiority with the protean and adroit arts and tactics of guerrilla warfare.

They included the tactics of making the enemies fight among themselves, attacking them at lightning speed before vanishing like the wind, pretending to go away but staying nearby to attack them in succession, alluring and ambushing them, harassing them in their rear, attacking them in the west after making sounds in the east, marching a long distance in a rush, leaving only one line of footprints to make enemies be quite at a loss and promoting simultaneous operations by small and large units. They smashed all sorts of tactics of the Japanese imperialists including “combing tactic”, “tick tactic”, “single vantage deployment tactic”, “step-by-step occupation tactic” and the “tactic of tenacious long-distance pursuit”.

On a march during the large-unit circling operations, the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army unit under the command of Commander Kim Il Sung being pursued by a “punitive force” of the enemy encountered another “punitive force” in the front. At that juncture, Kim Il Sung ordered guerrillas to make a single-log bridge on tree stumps standing here and there to escape sideways. The enemies, unaware of that, fought each other all night through. They realized they had fought among themselves and suffered a wholesale death only after it became light on the following morning and cried out that “The tactics of guerrillas are a mystery which even the devil wonders at”.

In addition, the guerrillas tunnelled through the snow to disappear, and made a Japanese “punitive force” pass through an ambush they prepared by leaving footprints the day before to deal  a crushing blow to the aggressors. The then commander of the Japanese "punitive force" confessed that he had not yet the least idea of such facts that the clear footprints the guerrillas left on the snow disappeared suddenly and that they failed to find any footprints of guerrillas on a hill on the other side of the river though it was obvious that they had gone across the river. He added that they were elusive tactics which could not be found in the Japanese army’s books on strategy or science of war.

The main force of the KPRA under command of Kim Il Sung boldly marched along the “Kapsan-Musan guard road”, which the Japanese imperialists boasted of as an impenetrable defence cordon, in broad daylight and achieved a victory in the Battle of Pochonbo to shake the Japanese imperialists’ colonial rule over Korea to its very foundations. Such facts caused a great sensation throughout the world.

Kim Il Sung’s mysterious guerrilla tactics beat the Japanese brass hats styling themselves “king of punitive operation” and “god of guerrilla tactics” and it was on every Korean’s lips that General Kim Il Sung employed the “art of shortening distance” and “art of rising into the sky and dipping into the ground”.

“Kim Il Sung’s army operated in several detachments, each claiming itself to be Kim Il Sung’s army. Its tactics were to give the impression that this army was everywhere,” confessed Nozoe, the then commander of the Japanese punitive forces. Nagashima, special agent of the imperial Japanese army command, recalled that the tactics employed by Kim Il Sung’s army were very curious.

Although the Japanese imperialists armed to the teeth and hell-bent on the invasion of the continent regarded the KPRA as “a drop in the ocean”, they were hit hard by its mysterious tactics and were finally defeated.