Koreans fighting the Japanese in Manchuria under the control of the Soviets (Kaspan faction); and the Koreans fighting Japanese colonialism on the Korean peninsula as well as each other for control in Korea after the Korean War.
The birth of the KPA can be established probably in 1936 when the Korean Fatherland Restoration Association (KFRA) was established to create a united front organization of anti-Japanese Koreans operating in Manchuria. On June 4, 1937, Kim Il Sung led a small group of partisans subordinate to the KFRA on a raid against a small border village in Korea and defeated a small Japanese police detachment. This muchcelebrated victory subsequently became the source of the Kaspan faction’s name and the beginning of Kim Il Sung’s legendary military career.
In 1939, the Korean Volunteer Army (KVA) was formed in Yanan, China, to support Mao Zedong and fought with the Chinese Communist forces in World War II and the Chinese Revolution. In April 1946, the KVA was absorbed by various area commands which ultimately evolved into the newly forming Korean Peace Preservation Corps moving into northern Korea. Eventually, even this Corps was diluted by further officer transfers and reorganizations and eventually passed out of existence. However, the legacy and history of the KVA continued to be used probably for security and morale reasons.
In 1942, Kim Il Sung commanded a company of the Soviet Far East Command’s Reconnaissance Bureau’s 88th Special Independent Sniper Brigade and received a significant amount of training and experience in his future development of special purpose forces for the KPA.
The KPA was established formally by Kim Il Sung on February 8, 1948, the day after the Fourth Session of the (NK) People’s Assembly agreed to separate the roles of the military and those of the police. The origin of the KPA certainly is rooted in the anti-Japanese guerrilla armies in general that operated under Soviet and Chinese military control. For 30 years, the KPA commemorated its birth on February 8. Then in 1978, North Korea changed the commemoration date to April 25 to correspond with the date in 1932 that Kim Il Sung allegedly organized his Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Army. By this act, Kim Il Sung was extolling the Korean-ness of the KPA, while dismissing the combined influences of the Soviets and the Chinese Communists upon the establishment of the KPA.
Just after World War II and during the Soviet Union’s occupation of the portion of Korea north of the 38th Parallel, the Soviet 25th Army Headquarters in Pyongyang issued a statement ordering all (North Korean) armed resistance groups in the northern part of the peninsula to disband on October 12, 1945.
Two thousand Koreans were allowed to briefly enter into Korea but were returned to Manchuria. There were several possible reasons as to why these Koreans were not allowed to stay in Korea. The Soviets may have been concerned with sending a trained armed force into a country it would occupy, possibly giving the Soviets trouble regarding insurgency. Many of these Korean soldiers actually had lived in Manchuria and were just returning to their homes. Finally, most of these soldiers actually were raw recruits and, rather than repatriating them, perhaps they were encouraged to return to the Chinese Eighth Route Army so that, after a period of seasoning, they might return to Korea to become a core element in the nation’s future armed forces.
Two thousand Koreans with previous experience in the Soviet army were sent to various locations around the country to organize constabulary forces with permission from Soviet military headquarters, and the force was created on October 21, 1945. The Headquarters activated a separate unit for railway security on August 15, 1945, to supervise existing security forces and to create the national armed forces. After the North Korean military was organized with facilities to educate its new recruits, the Constabulary Discipline Corps was reorganized into the North Korean People’s Army Corps Headquarters.
The State Security Department, a forerunner to MPAF, was established as part of the Interim People’s Committee on February 4, 1948, with the formal creation of the KPA being announced on February 8, seven months before the government of the DPRK was proclaimed on September 9, 1948. In accordance with Kim Il Sung’s stated aspirations to “build a powerful modern military,” the task continued in earnest, as the army’s first tank unit — the 105th Armored Battalion — was established. With the growth of the military to some 60,000 troops, the KPA Headquarters created two additional ground divisions.
In 1949, after the Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) took control of China, the CCF released tens of thousands of combat-hardened ethnic Koreans from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for duty with the KPA.
In 1950, KPA was a well-trained and modern force, carefully constructed along Soviet lines. For over 2 years, hundreds of Soviet advisers had molded the army. The Russians also had generously supplied it with arms. Each KPA division, for example, was equipped with 12 122mm howitzers, 24 76mm guns, and 12 45mm antitank guns. All were recent World War II vintage. The Soviets also provided the KPA with tanks. Each infantry division had organic tanks, and there was also a separate tank division. The 105th Armored Division boasted 120 modern T-34 main battle tanks.
The Korean War provided the KPA with some lessons learned that they have attempted to correct to this day. First, they fully understand the value of the intervention by the United States. History shows that had the United States not intervened, success for the KPA would have been virtually assured.
Critical defects concerning the KPA were identified: (1) the KPA’s infantry-centric organization was unsuited to the Soviet’s armored/mechanized infantry doctrine (attributed by the KPA as the primary cause of its failures); (2) its strategic plan was inadequately developed to destroy its opponent; (3) its cadre was poorly trained in military doctrine and tactics; (4) its reserve forces were sparsely fielded; and (5) its logistical system was insufficient to supply the army’s needs. Further weaknesses included leaders who were inadequately versed in strategy and tactics and operational/tactical inefficacy.
By 1960, ground forces may have totaled fewer than 400,000 persons and probably did not rise much above that figure before 1972.
KPA Modernization and Reorganization. Beginning in the late 1970s, North Korea began a major reorganization and modernization of its ground forces. This was probably a reflection of the lessons learned (sudden attack, quick victory, and role of a guerrilla struggle to supplant conventional capabilities) from observing the Vietnam War and other regional conflicts such as the Arab-Israeli wars.
During the 1980s, doctrine and organization were revamped to increase the lethality, speed, and combat power of the attack. The shifting of the majority of the North Korean ground forces closer to the DMZ offered the potential for a more rapid advance and minimizing the time of detection of intent. The reorganization of Pyongyang’s exploitation forces in the 1980s suggested that initial attacking forces will be reinforced by heavier and more mobile units to exploit any breakthroughs.
The KPA was not uniformly successful in its 1980s efforts to modernize its forces in support of a high-speed offensive strategy; more needs to be done to update the army’s mobility, artillery, and air defense elements. North Korea increased its tank fleet, but incomplete information suggested that it remained based largely on dated Soviet technology with retrofitted indigenous improvements.
KPA artillery systems appeared to have made the most of the limited technological base. The KPA increased the artillery force while maintaining relative quantitative and range superiorities over its potential southern adversary and improving force mobility. The technological level of Pyongyang’s industrial base appeared to ensure that, with the possible exception of narrow areas of special interest, built-in obsolescence will be unavoidable, regardless of how undesirable. Pyongyang appeared to be quantitatively increasing the amount of systems with larger caliber weapons but qualitatively, these weapons did not include modern evolutionary advances such as computerized targeting, radar guided munitions, etc.
Between 1984 and 1992, the army added about 1,000 tanks, over 2,500 APC/infantry fighting vehicles, and about 6,000 artillery tubes or rocket launchers. In 1992
