The following happened when Comrade Kim Il Sung was organizing the anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle.

One day in December 1931 he convened a meeting of party and young communist league cadres in Mingyuegou, Yanji County, China. Around that time, the Japanese imperialists, after provoking the Manchurian incident in September 1931, were intensifying reactionary offensive against the Korean people in an all-round way for the “security in their rear.” Enraged by the former’s barbaric armed suppression, the latter responded it with violence. The prevailing situation urgently demanded that the Korean revolutionaries oppose counter-revolutionary armed force with revolutionary armed force.

At the meeting Kim Il Sung said that the time had come when all should turn out in the sacred struggle for the country’s liberation with arms in hand and ardently called for fully mobilizing to the armed struggle all the patriotic forces opposed to Japanese imperialism irrespective of wealth, social status, political affiliation and religion. Then he put forward the line of organizing and waging armed struggle mainly in the form of guerrilla warfare.

The participants in the meeting discussed the problem of what form the armed struggle should take. Kim Il Sung thought a lot over this choice which would be decisive of the Korean revolution.

He closely analysed the concrete environment and objective conditions of the revolution. On the basis of his analysis and inquiry, he made a conclusion that under the conditions of his country where regular warfare was impossible, guerrilla warfare should be the main form of the struggle, irrespective of what had been happening until then.

But some participants were still doubtful: Will it be possible to defeat the Japanese army by waging such a form of the armed struggle? Will it be possible to beat, with an irregular armed force such as a guerrilla army, an enemy several millions strong equipped with modern, highly efficient weapons such as tanks, artillery and war-planes when we will have to fight without any backing from the state or the support of a regular army, and in a foreign territory at that?

Kim Il Sung said to them:

“ We are the sons of ruined people who have been deprived of all their state power, territory and resources.... However, we have not hesitated to challenge the Japanese imperialists. What is it we are relying on in doing so? We have decided to start an anti-Japanese war by relying on the people. The people are the state, the people are the home front and the people are the regular army. When the war starts, the people will become soldiers and rise up. Therefore, the guerrilla warfare which we shall wage can be called a people’s war. ”

At the meeting he advanced the slogan “ Oppose armed force with armed force, and resist counter-revolutionary violence with revolutionary violence! ” and formally proclaimed an anti-Japanese war to annihilate the Japanese imperialists.

With the meeting which marked the start of the anti-Japanese armed struggle as a momentum, the anti-Japanese national liberation movement of Korea developed to the stage of the armed struggle. The Korean people defeated the Japanese imperialists under the leadership of Kim Il Sung and, finally, achieved the historic cause of national liberation on August 15, 1945.

Ham Kwang Hyok