The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [36]
Aside from the rare defector with operational details, such as the liaison agent who disclosed information about the tunnels under the demilitarized zone, the best source of information about the North Korean military has been aerial photographs and electronic intercepts provided by U.S. reconnaissance satellites. However, in these expensive operations, Korea only intermittently had a high priority. As U.S. forces withdrew from Vietnam in 1972 and detente seemed to be breaking out between Seoul and Pyongyang, the Joint Chiefs of Staff reduced American military intelligence resources devoted to the Korean peninsula by more than 50 percent. Given all this, estimates of North Korea's military buildup-and especially of the motivations behind it-must be treated with caution.
What is clear from a variety of sources is that in the 1970s Pyongyang was very active militarily. In May 1972, Kim Il Sung himself told Harrison Salisbury and John Lee of The New York Times that due to the hostile attitude of the United States, "we frankly tell you, we are always making preparations for war. We do not conceal this matter." In the early 1970s, Beijing renewed its military assistance to North Korea even as China moved toward rapprochement with the United States. Military supplies from the Soviet Union were still at a high level, although beginning a slow decline as Pyongyang found it harder to pay and as U.S.-Soviet detente flourished. In addition to the supplies from its allies, the North by the end of the decade was producing large quantities of its own field artillery pieces, rocket launchers, armored personnel carriers, main battle tanks, and surfaceto-air missiles.
By 1974, according to the U.S. Command's intelligence estimate at that time, the North Korean army had grown to 408,000 troops, the fourth largest among the world's communist armies, and was described as "an efficient, well trained, highly disciplined force which is undergoing continual modernization." Of its twenty-three infantry divisions, fourteen were lined up from east to west close to the DMZ. Moreover, North Korea was developing a formidable air force of Chinese and Soviet bombers and fighters and a small but highly versatile navy.
In mid-1973, concerned by the buildup in the North, the U.S. Army assigned to Korea one of its ablest and most flamboyant combat leaders, Lieutenant General James F. Hollingsworth, who had extensive battle experience in World War II and Vietnam. Given command of the ROK/U.S. I Corps forces charged with defense of Seoul, Hollingsworth was visited at his new command post one night by a worried President Park, who asked, "Are you going to do the same thing here you did in Vietnam?" Hollingsworth's response: "I'm here to fight and die to save your country. That's what I'm going to do."
The existing war plan was an essentially defensive document calling for American and South Korean forces, in case of attack, to pull back in phases to the Han River, which bisects the capital city. But in 1974 Hollingsworth, telling his ROK subordinate commanders, "I'm going to turn you into an offensive army," began moving the bulk of his artillery as far forward as possible, near the southern edge of the DMZ, where it was in position to strike well into North Korean territory. Two brigades of the U.S. Second Division were targeted to seize Kaesong, the most important city in the southern part of North Korea, in case of attack from the North. Hollingsworth's forward defense concept envisioned a massive use of U.S. and ROK firepower, including around-the-clock B-52 strikes, to stop a North Korean advance north of Seoul and deliver a powerful offensive punch to win the war within nine days.
Donald Gregg, CIA station chief in Seoul at the time, recalls Hollingsworth standing on the southern