War: Substantial Citizens

With troops of the 1st Cavalry Division when they entered Pyongyang was TIME Correspondent Dwight Martin. This is his report on conditions in the first Communist capital to be liberated by the forces of the free world:

THE people of Pyongyang cheered, waving South Korean flags, British flags, Chinese Nationalist flags and improvised U.N. flags which had been designed from hearsay. At Seoul, which had been devastated by both the retreating Communists and the U.N. assault, the people had shown a restrained enthusiasm for their liberators. The people of Pyongyang were staging the most spontaneous demonstration seen in any Asiatic city since the World War II liberation of Shanghai from the Japanese.

At one intersection we slowed down to pass a sandbag barricade. The crowds lining the street surged out around us, offered us sesame cookies and handshakes. Farther down the street a South Korean cavalryman put his horse through a victory prance while he waved his rifle aloft, a Communist battle flag impaled on his bayonet.

Four Anterooms. Pyongyang may have a Korean name, but it was a Russian-run city. In every house, shop and office hang pictures of Stalin and Lenin. The biggest hotel in Pyongyang is known simply as “the Russian hotel.” For two full blocks around the Russian embassy in Pyongyang every house is a Russian house. On the city’s main thoroughfare the Russians maintained their own commissary, a steel-shuttered building crammed with excellent wines, vodkas, caviar and cosmetics. In the embassy itself we found expensive radios and photographic equipment, heavy silver ashtrays and a completely cooked meal which the Russians never got to eat.*

Life in Pyongyang had been pleasant for the Korean Communist bosses, too. The offices of Communist Premier Kim II Sung make Syngman Rhee’s modest quarters in Seoul look like a Trappist’s cell. To enter Kim’s personal office you have to walk through four successive anterooms past four portraits of Stalin. Kim’s office is a real-life equivalent of the one used by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. Rich with gaudy rugs and expensive furniture, it is dominated by an enormous mahogany desk which is flanked on the left by a foot-high plaster bust of Kim, on the right by a bust of Stalin.

Across the road from his office was Kim’s private air-raid bunker, 70 to 100 feet underground and connected by a tunnel with the residence of his Russian advisers. In the bunker Kim had complete living quarters, a music room with an organ and a one-chair barber shop.

Five Years. Two days after the first R.O.K. and U.S. troops entered the city, Pyongyang began to settle down again to the business of daily living. In the thoroughly looted City Hall, Colonel Archibald W. Melchior, a civil-affairs officer, struggled to organize a provisional city council out of a hastily assembled group of what he hoped were Pyongyang’s leading citizens. Melchior explained how he had chosen his council: “We were sitting on some logs by a foot bridge when we saw a Korean walking toward us. Since he was well-dressed we collared him and told him to round up some substantial citizens.” The well-dressed Korean turned out to be an innkeeper who promptly rounded up a collection of high-school teachers and minor county officials.

Through an interpreter of indifferent fluency, Colonel Melchior advised the new councilmen to set up municipal police, a rice distribution system and a weapons dump to take care of the thousands of arms abandoned by the retreating Communists. The councilmen clearly had no idea of what they were supposed to do or how to do it. One of the colonel’s aides smiled wanly and said, “It’s the same story all over again. We just don’t have properly trained people. If we had just six Americans who could speak fluent Korean we could make something out of this show. We never have them, but you can bet your life the Russians do.”

I turned to the acting mayor, a teacher named Cheung Deuk Rim, and asked him who had run things in Pyongyang the last five years. “The Russians,” he said simply.

* Although they did not have to do so, all Soviet diplomats fled Pyongyang. They would have been protected by international law since Russia is not technically at war with any of the U.N. nations.