The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 7 | Issue 0 | Article ID 3460 | Mar 16, 2009

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The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950 -1960　　北朝鮮の破壊と再建’、1950-1960年

Charles K. Armstrong

The Destruction and Reconstructionof North Korea, 1950 - 1960

Charles Armstrong

This article is part of an ongoing series at TheAsia-Pacific Journal commemorating thesixtieth anniversary of the start of the US-Korean War.

The American Air War and the Destructionof North Korea

The Korean War, a “limited war” for the US andUN forces, was for Koreans a total war. Thehuman and material resources of North andSouth Korea were used to their utmost. Thephysical destruction and loss of life on bothsides was almost beyond comprehension, butthe North suffered the greater damage, due toAmerican saturation bombing and thescorched-earth policy of the retreating UNforces.1 The US Air Force estimated that NorthKorea’s destruction was proportionatelygreater than that of Japan in the Second WorldWar, where the US had turned 64 major citiesto rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroytwo others. American planes dropped 635,000tons of bombs on Korea -- that is, essentially onNorth Korea --including 32,557 tons of napalm,compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped inthe entire Pacific theatre of World War II.2 Thenumber of Korean dead, injured or missing bywar’s end approached three million, tenpercent of the overall population. The majorityof those killed were in the North, which hadhalf of the population of the South; althoughthe DPRK does not have official figures,possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the

population was killed in the war, a figure closeto or surpassing the proportion of Sovietcitizens killed in World War II.3

The act which inflicted the greatest loss ofcivilian life in the Korean War by far, one whichthe North Koreans have claimed ever since wasAmerica’s greatest war crime, was the aerialbombardment of North Korean populationcenters. American control of the skies overKorea was overwhelming. Soviet MIGs, flownby Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean pilots,were sometimes effective against American airpower. But under Stalin’s orders, the Sovietfighter planes were strictly limited in numberand in the range they were allowed to fly, lestUS-Soviet air battles lead to a larger war.4 Andin any case, Soviet air support did not comeuntil the end of 1950. During the summer andfall, North Korean air defenses were virtuallynon-existent. Lightly armed, local self-defenseunits in occupied South Korea could only watchand suffer as their towns and villages wereobliterated from the air.5 By the end of the war,North Korea claimed that only two modernbuildings remained standing in Pyongyang.

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Pyongyang, 1953

For the Americans, strategic bombing madeperfect sense, giving advantage to Americantechnological prowess against the enemy’snumerical superiority. The American commanddismissed British concerns that massbombardment would turn world opinion againstthem, insisting that air attacks were accurateand civilian casualties limited.6 Russianaccusations of indiscriminate attacks on civiliantargets did not register with the Americans atall. But for the North Koreans, living in fear ofB-29 attacks for nearly three years, includingthe possibility of atomic bombs, the Americanair war left a deep and lasting impression. TheDPRK government never forgot the lesson ofNorth Korea’s vulnerability to American airattack, and for half a century after theArmistice continued to strengthen anti-aircraftdefenses, build underground installations, andeventually develop nuclear weapons to ensurethat North Korea would not find itself in such aposition again. The long-term psychologicaleffect of the war on the whole of North Koreansociety cannot be overestimated. The waragainst the United States, more than any othersingle factor, gave North Koreans a collectivesense of anxiety and fear of outside threats thatwould continue long after the war’s end.

North Korea’s considerable economicachievements since liberation were all butcompletely wiped out by the war. By 1949,after two years of a planned economy, NorthKorea had recovery from the post-liberationchaos, and economic output had reached thelevel of the colonial period.7 Plans for 1950were to increase output again by a third in theNorth, and the DPRK leadership had expectedfurther economic gains following integrationwith the agriculturally more productive Southafter unification. According to DPRK figures,the war destroyed some 8,700 factories, 5,000schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000homes.8 Most of the destruction occurred in

1950 and 1951. To escape the bombing, entirefactories were moved underground, along withschools, hospitals, government offices, andmuch of the population. Agriculture wasdevastated, and famine loomed. Peasants hidunderground during the day and came out tofarm at night. Destruction of livestock,shortages of seed, farm tools, and fertilizer,and loss of manpower reduced agriculturalproduction to the level of bare subsistence atbest. The Nodong Sinmun newspaper referredto 1951 as “the year of unbearable trials,” aphrase revived in the famine years of the1990s.9 Worse was yet to come. By the fall of1952, there were no effective targets left forUS planes to hit. Every significant town, cityand industrial area in North Korea had alreadybeen bombed. In the spring of 1953, the AirForce targeted irrigation dams on the YaluRiver, both to destroy the North Korean ricecrop and to pressure the Chinese, who wouldhave to supply more food aid to the North. Fivereservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acresof farmland, inundating whole towns and layingwaste to the essential food source for millionsof North Koreans.10 Only emergency assistancefrom China, the USSR, and other socialistcountries prevented widespread famine.

Aerial bombardment of Hwachon Dam.

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Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

North Korean Reconstruction as a“Fraternal Socialist Project”

When the fighting stopped in the summer of1953, the entire Korean peninsula lay in utterruin. South of the DMZ, the United States andits allies led an ambitious, and well-funded,effort to rehabilitate South Korea under theauspices of the United Nations KoreaReconstruction Agency (UNKRA).11 NorthKorea, even more devastated than the Southand suffering as well from a labor shortagecaused by the population hemorrhage of thewar, had far fewer resources with which torebuild itself. Yet through a combination oftremendous work and sacrifice on the part ofthe North Korean people, generous economicand technical assistance from the “fraternal”socialist countries, and the advantage of a pre-war industrial infrastructure more developedthan that of South Korea, the DPRK soonachieved economic growth rates that farsurpassed South Korea’s into the 1970s. In thelate 1950s North Korea’s growth rate of totalindustrial output (averaging 39% between 1953and 1960) was probably the highest in theworld.12

North Korea had been virtually destroyed as anindustrial society, and the first priority of theDPRK leadership was to re-build industry.Within days of the armistice, Kim Il Sung sent areport to the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang,detailing the extent of war damage and theneed for Soviet assistance to rehabilitate NorthKorea’s industrial economy. “Fraternal” aid tothe DPRK began during the Korean War. Ofcourse the great bulk of direct militaryassistance came from the USSR and China, butthe East European “People’s Democracies” alsocontributed to the war effort with logisticalsupport, technical aid, medical supplies and thelike. Among the most poignant forms ofassistance was the taking in of thousands ofKorean war orphans. Romania alone reportedly

sheltered some 1,500 of these children, whowere returned to the DPRK with the completionof North Korea’s 1957 – 1961 Five-Year Plan.The first group of 205 Korean children weresent to the GDR in January 1953. These andhundreds of others were also returned to NorthKorea several years later.

Kim Il Sung led a delegation to Moscow inSeptember 1953, primarily to settle the termsof Soviet assistance. The Soviet governmentagreed to cancel or postpone repayment for allof North Korea’s outstanding debts, andreiterated its promise to give the DPRK onebillion rubles in outright aid, both monetaryand in the form of industrial equipment andconsumer goods. Soviet technicians were sentto North Korea to help with the rehabilitationeffort. The bulk of factory reconstruction inpost-war North Korea was supervised by Sovietexperts. Pyongyang also received promises ofaid from East European countries and theMongolian People’s Republic, the latterpromising to send North Korea some 86,500head of livestock. The third-largest contributorof external assistance after the Soviet Unionand China was East Germany, which played amajor role in the rebuilding of Hamhŭng, NorthKorea’s second-largest city and an importantindustrial center,.

Kim visited Beijing in November and receivedsimilarly generous pledges from the PRC,reflecting in part the Chinese government’sinterest in competing with the USSR forinfluence in North Korea. China cancelledNorth Korea’s debts from the Korean War, andoffered the DPRK 800 million yuan in aid forthe period 1954 – 1957, of which 300 millionwould come in the first year. North Korea andChina also signed an agreement on economicand cultural cooperation similar to the onesigned between the DPRK and USSR in March1949. China helped North Korea in factoryreconstruction, although not on the scale thatthe USSR did, and became a major source forNorth Korean consumer goods, including

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textiles, cotton, and foodstuffs. Chinesetechnical experts went to North Korea, andKoreans traveled to China for technicaltraining. But perhaps the most importantcontribution that China made to North Korea’sreconstruction, in addition to monetary aid anddebt cancellation, was the manpower suppliedby Chinese People’s Volunteer (CPV) troopswho remained in North Korea until 1958. Thesetroops, who numbered in the thousands, helpedrepair roads and rail lines damaged by war andrebuild schools, bridges, tunnels and irrigationdams. In labor-short North Korea, the physicalassistance of Chinese People’s Volunteers wasinvaluable for the rehabilitation of the war-damaged infrastructure.

The period of post-war reconstruction in NorthKorea was the first and only time the SovietUnion, China, and the Soviet-aligned countriesof Eastern Europe and Mongolia cooperated ona large-scale economic project of this nature. Itwas the historical high point of “internationalsocialist solidarity,” one that would never berepeated after the USSR and China fell out inthe early 1960s. Considering that the SovietUnion was still rebuilding from the devastationof World War II, that China had only recentlyconcluded its civil war, and that East Germany(the third-largest aid source) was rebuildingfrom war as well, the scale of aid to NorthKorea is remarkable. Contemporary Sovietsources give a breakdown in foreign assistanceto the DPRK between 1953 and 1960 asdividing roughly into thirds, no doubt a divisionof labor suggested by Moscow. Exactly one-third (33.3%) of reconstruction aid came fromthe USSR, 29.4% from China, and 37.3% fromother countries. The monetary figures do nottake into account aid in labor, which wasparticularly important on the Chinese side.

Source: SSSR i Koreia (Moscow: USSRAcademy of Sciences, 1988), p. 256

North Korea was dependent on fraternalassistance for more than 80% of its industrialreconstruction needs between 1954 and 1956,the period of the Three-Year Plan.

North Korea could not possibly have rebuilt itseconomy as quickly as it did without thismassive inflow of aid into nearly every sector ofproduction and consumption. But the DPRKdid not remain aid-dependent for long. Partlythis was out of necessity, as socialist-bloc aidwas intended from the beginning to be phasedout as reconstruction was completed. Yet it isremarkable how quickly North Korea’s aiddependency dropped – North Korea’sdeclaration of “self-reliance” by the end of the1950s was not without substance. In 1954,33.4% of North Korea’s state revenue camefrom foreign aid; in 1960, the proportion wasdown to a paltry 2.6%. By contrast, well overhalf of South Korea’s government revenuecame from foreign assistance in 1956. By theearly 1960’s, well before South Korea’sindustrial take-off, the North had impressivelyre-industrialized. This difference cannot beexplained by foreign aid alone, which was fargreater in absolute terms in South Korea thanin the North. The regime’s ability to mobilizethe North Korean population was alsoindispensable for the success of this project. AsKim Il Sung had said, economic reconstruction

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would require all the work and resources theNorth Korean people could muster.

Rebuilding Pyongyang. From ChrisMarker, Coreennes (Paris: Seuil, 1959).

Urban Reconstruction in Pyongyang andHamhŭng

In the reconstruction of Pyongyang, as in theNorth Korean economy more generally,fraternal assistance was massive, diverse, andcrucial. At the time, this help was warmly andextensively acknowledged in the DPRK media.After the 1960s, when self-reliance becameboth the dominant slogan and the lens throughwhich all previous North Korean experienceswere filtered, the role of foreigners in post-warreconstruction was rarely if ever mentioned. Broadly speaking, China contributed mainlymanpower and light consumer goods, theSoviets and East Germans supplied technicalassistance and supervision, and the other EastEuropean countries gave equipment andtechnical assistance for specific industries. KimIl Sung publicly thanked the Chinese People’sVolunteers, who had fought “shoulder-to-shoulder” with the Korean People’s Army, fortheir cont inued role in the post -warreconstruction effort. CPV soldiers helpedrebuild bridges, elementary schools, factories

and apartments. In February 1955, forinstance, the 47th Brigade of the CPV rebuilt thePyongyang Electric Train Factory. A group ofmore than 770 Chinese construction expertsstayed in Pyongyang from November 1954 tothe end of 1956 to help oversee reconstruction.Albania donated asphalt for paving roads,Czechoslovakia gave buses, Hungary built aprecision tool factory, East Germany gavetelephones and switchboards for the city’scommunication services and modernized theNational Film Production Center. Poland builtthe West Pyongyang Railway Factory, Bulgariabuilt a factory for wooden tools, Romania builtup Pyongyang Central Hospital, and the USSR,Czechoslovakia, China and East Germany eachcontributed engines and freight and passengercars to develop the North Korean railroadindustry. During the period of the Three-Yearplan, many East European leaders visitedPyongyang, where they were warmly thankedfor their countries’ contributions to post-warreconstruction, including Otto Grotewohl of theGDR, Enver Hoxha of Albania, and Gheorghiu-Dej of Romania.

In the face of the Chinese advance in lateNovember and December 1950, the US Army XC o r p s w i t h d r e w t o w a r d t h eHamhŭng/Hŭngnam area to be evacuated bysea. Hamhŭng had already been bombed by theUS Air Force, but the X Corps had beenordered to “deny the Communist troopssupplies and transportation facilities” beforethey left the area. For several days, beginningDecember 11, the 185th Engineering Battalionof X Corps hauled some four tons of dynamiteto the industrial outskirts of Hŭngnam andbegan to destroy what remained of thefactories. On December 15, the railroad bridgeleading south from Hamhŭng was blown up. Allthe highway bridges in the vicinity weresimilarly demolished. Three days later, theFirst Platoon burned all the buildings anddestroyed all aviation supplies at Hamhŭng’sYongp’o airport, about five miles south ofHŭngnam, with gasoline, tracer bullets and

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grenades; for good measure, a navalbombardment hit the airport later thatafternoon. Meanwhile, some 100,000 NorthKorean refugees were transported fromHŭngnam to South Korea by US navy LST’s inthe so-called “Christmas Evacuation” ofDecember 19 – 24. Out of the rubble of adestroyed and depopulated Hamhŭng, theNorth Koreans and East Germans built a newindustrial city.

Korean and German workers in theHamhung reconstruction project, late1950s. From Paek Sŭng-jong, Tongdok

top’yonsu Ressel ŭi Puk Hanch’uok (Seoul: Hyohyŏng ch’ulp’ansa,

2000)

It is not clear exactly when, and by whom, thedecision was made for East German aid tofocus on the city of Hamhŭng. It appears thatGDR Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl personallypromised Kim Il Sung help in rebuilding a citywhen the two men met at the GenevaConference in 1954. Later that year, in lateJune or early July, a North Korean leader(presumably Kim Il Sung) wrote to Grotewohl:

The government and the wholeKorean people are endlesslytouched and thankful for thepromise given by you, dear

comrade Prime Minister, to ourd e l e g a t i o n a t t h e G e n e v aConference, to rebuild one of thedestroyed towns by the efforts oft h e G e r m a n D e m o c r a t i cRepublic…The government of ourRepublic has decided as the objectof reconstruction and recovery byyour government the city ofHamhŭng, one of the provincialcenters of our Republic.13

Perhaps Grotewohl, presiding over a war-damaged country himself, was moved by asense of common bond with the Koreans;perhaps he was pressured by the Soviets togive East German aid to a major industrialreconstruction project, but not in the capital,which would be a showcase of Soviet aid. Inany case, Grotewohl himself headed a “GermanWork Team” (Deutsche Arbeitsgruppe, DAG) todirect the project. Hundreds of East Germanengineers, technicians, craftsmen and theirfamilies were sent to Hamhŭng, some residingfor several years, and gained the collective,ironically German-sounding nickname“Hamhunger.” In the fall of 1954 a GDRdelegation visited Hamhŭng to lay thegroundwork for the reconstruction project, andthe fo l lowing year the East Germangovernment announced its plan to help in thereconstruction of Hamhŭng for the period 1955– 1964.

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East German engineers and their familiesin Hamhung, celebrating the 10th

anniversary of the founding of the DPRK,1958. From Paek, Tongdok top’yonsu

Ressel ŭi Puk Han ch’uok.

In just over five years, North Koreans with EastGerman assistance rebuilt Hamhung as amodern industrial city, and for decades the citywould be the main industrial hub of NorthKorea outside the capital Pyongyang. In 1960 –long before the term would be applied to SouthKorea – the East German press called NorthKorea “an economic miracle in the FarEast.”14 In June 1956, Kim Il Sung visited theGDR and personally thanked the East Germansfor their help.15 But from the beginning of thereconstruction process, the DPRK leadershiphad seen foreign assistance as a limitedprocess that would gradually give way to NorthKorean self-reliance.16 In December 1955 Kimmade his subsequently famous speech about“Juche” or self –reliance, Originally referringto ideological independence, especially withregard to the Soviet Union, over the course ofthe next two decades Juche would be extendedto all aspects of North Korean behavior, frompolitics to economics to military defense.

The DPRK and GDR governments declared theHamhŭng project completed in1962, two years

ahead of schedule. The German specialists andtheir families went home. At the same time, thethousands of Korean orphans taken in byGerman, Romanian, and other East Europeanfamilies, were sent back to Korea. Some NorthKorean students remained in Eastern Europeand the USSR, but the era of close “fraternalcooperation” had come to an end. North Koreahad been rebuilt, and from this point onwardwould chart its own distinct course of politicaland economic development, connected butnever subordinated to the broader socialistcommunity of nations.

Charles Armstrong is professor of history andDirector of the Center for Korean Research atColumbia University. He is the author of TheNorth Korean Revolution, 1945 – 1950(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0801489148/?tag=theas ipac jo0b -20 ) and The Koreas(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415948533/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), and editor of KoreanSociety: Civil Society, Democracy and the Stateand Korea at the Center: Dynamics ofRegionalism in Northeast Asia .

R e c o m m e n d e d c i t a t i o n : C h a r l e sA r m s t r o n g , T h e D e s t r u c t i o n a n dReconstruction of North Korea, 1950 - 1960,The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 8, Issue 51 No 2,December 20, 2010.

Other articles on the sixtieth anniversary of theoutbreak of the US-Korean War are:

S t e v e n L e e(http://japanfocus.org/-Steven-Lee/3457 ), TheUnited States, the United Nations, and theSecond Occupation of Korea, 1950-1951.

H e o n i k K w o n(http://japanfocus.org/-Heonik-Kwon/3413),Korean War Traumas.

H a n K y u n g - k o o(http://japanfocus.org/-Han-Kyung_Koo/3414),

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Legacies of War: The Korean War – 60 YearsOn.

Additional articles on the US-Korean Warinclude:

M e l G u r t o v(http://japanfocus.org/-Mel-Gurtov/3428), FromKorea to Vietnam: The Origins and Mindset ofPostwar U.S. Interventionism.

K i m D o n g - c h o o n(http://japanfocus.org/-Kim-Dong_choon/3314),The Truth and Reconciliation Commission ofKorea: Uncovering the Hidden Korean War

T e s s a M o r r i s - S u z u k i(http://japanfocus.org/-Tessa-Morris_Suzuki/3193), Remembering the Unfinished Conflict:Museums and the Contested Memory of theKorean War.

Notes

1 Far East Command ordered General Walker to“destroy everything that might be of use to theenemy” as the Eighth Army fled South inDecember 1950. Roy E. Appleman, Disaster inKorea: The Chinese Confront MacArthur(College Station, TX: Texas A & M Pres, 1989),p. 360.

2 Cited in Rosemary Foot, A Substitute forVictory: The Politics of Peacemaking at theKorean Armistice Talks (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1990), pp. 207 – 208.

3 Jon Halliday, “The North Korean Enigma,”New Left Review no. 127 (May – June 1981), p.29.

4 The extent of Soviet air involvement in theKorean War was long a secret of the Cold War,whose details only become known after thecollapse of the USSR. See Xiaoming Zhang, RedWings over the Yalu: China, the Soviet Union,and the Air War in Korea (College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 2002).

5 US National Archives, Record Group 242,shipping advice 2013, item 1/191. Organizationof Armed Home Defense Units (DPRK),September 1950. Reports include graphicdescriptions of an air attack on the city ofYŏch’ŏn on August 26, and the bombing of anelementary school on September 1.

6 Conrad C. Crane, American Airpower Strategyin Korea, 1950 – 1953 (Lawrence: UniversityPress of Kansas, 2000), pp. 42 –43.

7 US National Archives, Record Group 59. U.S.Embassy to State, “Economic Conditions inNorth Korea,” October 11, 1949, p. 8.

8 “The Three Year Plan,” Kyŏngje kŏnsŏl[Economic Construction], September 1956, pp.5 –6.

9 Nodong Sinmun, March 16, 1952, p. 1.

10 Callum MacDonald, Korea: The War BeforeVietnam (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 241 –242.

11 The post-war reconstruction of South Koreawas the world’s largest mult i lateraldevelopment project at the time. See StephenHugh Lee, “The United Nations KoreaReconstruction Agency in War and Peace,” inChae-Jin Lee and Young-ick Lew, eds., Koreaand the Korean War (Seoul: Yonsei UniversityPress, 2002), pp. 357 – 96.

12 John Yoon Tai Kuark, “A Comparative Studyof Economic Development in North and SouthKorea during the Post-Korean War Period,”Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota,1966, p. 32; Joseph S. Chung, The NorthKorean Economy: Structure and Development(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1974), pp.146-47.

13 Cited in Ruediger Frank, Die DDR undNordkorea: Dier Wiederaufbau der StadtHamhung von 1954 – 1962 (Aachen: Shaker,1996), p. 23.

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14 Martin Radmann, “Ein Wirtschafstwunder imFernen Osten,” Neues Deutschland, December27, 1960.

15 GDR Foreign Ministry, Korea section. “Visit

of a Government Delegation of the DPRK in theGDR, June 1956.” MfAA A 6927, Fiche 1.

16 Kim Il Sung, “On Eliminating Dogmatism andFormalism and Establishing Juche inIdeological Work,” Works vol. 9, pp. 395 – 417.

(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0801489148/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20)

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(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415948533/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20)

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