President Kim Il Sung delivers speech at the crowd in Pochonbo
Flames over Pochonbo
June 4 this year marks the 76th anniversary of the victorious battle in Pochonbo.
In the latter half of the 1930’s, the Japanese imperialists pressed ahead with preparations for a war of aggression on mainland China while intensifying the colonial rule over Korea to turn it into a living hell.
The Korean people were firmly convinced that Kim Il Sung would liberate the country, holding him in high esteem as the sun of nation and leader of national resurrection.
With a deep insight into the prevailing situation, Kim Il Sung decided to advance with large forces into the homeland.
The main unit of the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army (KPRA) led by him crossed the River Amnok bordering Korea on the night of June 3, Juche 26 (1937).
The battle assumed the unique features of a street battle, breaking the conventional concept that the guerilla warfare is mountain warfare.
The Korean guerillas commanded by Kim Il Sungbroke through the border guard line, which the Japanese were calling an “iron wall,” and advanced to their homeland. After making full preparations for the street battle, Kim Il Sung fixed the command post less than 100 meters away from the enemy’s police station.
At 10 p.m., he pulled the trigger and the signal started a barrage of fire destined to destroy the enemy’s establishments.
Addressing the enthusiastically cheering residents, Kim Il Sung called upon them to turn out in the vigorous struggle for national liberation.
“Brothers and sisters, look at the flames over there. Those raging flames show that the enemy is doomed. Those flames show the whole world that our nation is not dead but alive, and that if we fight against the Japanese imperialist plunderers we can win. Those flames will shine like a ray of hope in the hearts of our people suffering from maltreatment and hunger, and will spread throughout our three-thousand-ri land like a torch of struggle,” the President said to the crowd.
Upset by the battle, the enemies amassed forces in pursuit of the unit, only to suffer bitter defeats in battles in Mt. Kouyushui and Jiansan Hill.
The flames that flared up in Pochonbo of the colonized Korea, which had been eclipsed on the map of the world, drew the world attention instantly.
Dong-A Ilbo, ChosunIlbo and other Korean newspapers, the Domei News, Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, Osaka Ashahi Shimbun and other Japanese media, Manchuria News, Taiwan Daily and other Chinese newspapers, Tass, Pravda newspaper and Pacific magazine of the former Soviet Union, and even Orienta Kuriero, a magazine in Esperanto, gave liberal space to this battle.
Tremendous was the significance of the Battle of Pochonbo, which demonstrated to the whole world that Koreans were not dead but alive, and if they were fighting against the Japanese imperialists to win back the independence of their country.
The Japanese imperialists whimpered, “We feel as if we had been struck hard on the back of the head,” and “We feel the shame of watching the haystack we had been carefully building for a thousand days go up in flames in an instant.”
With the victorious battle in Pochonbo as an occasion, the anti-Japanese armed struggle, which was staged in the areas around Manchuria, rapidly expanded into the whole of Korea and all the Korean people turned out as one in the anti-Japanese resistance.
