The Korea of Mr. Wu
By A. D. C. PETERSON THE K.N.A.L.U. (Korean National Army Liaison Unit) was one of the queerest of the many queer detachments that took part in the Burma War. Its effect on our ultimate victory may have been little greater than Errol Flynn's, but at least, it gave its friends a certain insight into Korean character—whether North or South I am not quite sure.
The founder member of the K.N.A.L.U. was usually known as Mr. Wu ; and since he may easily be somewhere where he could get into trouble for Western affiliations, that name will do as well as any other. Mr. Wu came over from China at a time when our shortage of colloquial Japanese speakers was almost complete. He was, as he said more than once, a medical doctor, and it came as a nasty shock to him to find that he was expected to go up to the front line and speak to Japanese troops through a public address loudspeaker. It was at the beginning of the first Arakan campaign, and G.H.Q. confidently expected that at any moment the Japanese would be shut up in Akyab, when Mr. Wu would come in very useful calling on them to surrender. Mr. Wu seemed more than a little doubtful as to what their reactions to this sort of appeal were likely to be, and also a little nervous of the possibilities of a British defeat, or even surrender, which would involve him, personally, in very nasty penalties ; I was not surprised when, four days after the unit set out, I got a message that Mr. Wu had had a bad dream at Cox's Bazaar.
This was the first time that I was called on to deal with a Korean crisis. It proved to have been a very ill-omened dream indeed and it was only with great difficulty that he was coaxed down the next stage of the journey, where a few ill-chosen words from an Intelligence Officer about the extreme foolhardiness of propaganda units were enough to set him right back. It was then that for the first time be showed 'himself in his true colours ; after a lot of exhortations to Korean patriotism and hatred for the Japanese, he turned to me with a face as white as it would go and asked : " Is it really necessary for me to go to the front ?" I explained that there was no one else. " Then I will go," he said. " But you must remember that. since I am a medical doctor you must not expect me to have courage in dangers. I have a friend called Wong, who is a major in our Revolutionary Army. Next time it will be better that he should come."
The first Arakan campaign gave Mr. Wu little opportunity to call on anyone to surrender, and when it was over Major Wong took over. Under his command the unit took part in every campaign of the Burma War, and provided not only front-line propagandists who called on the Japanese to surrender by word of mouth or wrote out heart-rending little leaflets which were fired at them in mortar bombs, but also invaluable translators of captured documents. Once they got used to it they proved remarkably courageous and some of the speakers would even dispense with their loudspeakers from time to time and creep to within a few yards of the Japanese to talk direct to them. One never knew for certain how effective they were ; one Japanese hearer appears to have been driven out of his mind by Major Wong's descriptions of the luxuries of prison life and reported to his superiors that the British had established a dance hall for the use of prisoners and that he himself had actually seen the girls going in and out ; another is supposed to have been so touched on reading one of Lieutenant Kim's leaflets that he instantly' committed suicide. Mr. Wu had gone back to China and I spent most of time on other affairs, turning aside occasionally to design the Koreans a national shoulder flash or to deal with one or two other of the many strange problems that arose in the rear echelon of a unit which owed its allegiance to a Korean National Revo- lutionary General. This sort of thing was necessary because one of the points on which they felt most deeply was that they were Allied Troops, fighting for the independence of their own country, and therefore just as free as, for instance, the " Free French." It was this esprit de Corps which gave rise to the Second Korean Crisis. Several sections of the K.N.A.L.U., attached to different Indian divisions, were at the time same besieged in Imphal, when the news reached me in Ceylon that there had been an incident " from which, in the immortal words of Belloc, a mutiny resulted : would I (a) come up and settle the mutiny and (b) bring some non-mutinous Koreans. Fortunately a Force x 36 aircraft was going into Imphal very lightly loaded on some mysterious errand of its own, and I was able to get on to it not only myself but also two loyalist Koreans and a barrel of rum.
It transpired when we arrived that the mutiny had been caused by one of the Korean lieutenants having been pushed off a truck by a British other rank, who mistook him—not for a Japanese, as often happened—but simply for an oriental other rank. It was an unpleasant business, and I had a good deal of sympathy for the lieutenant. Major Wong was loyal and deeply grieved at the strike—which he called a mutiny—but at the moment he could do nothing. Lieutenant Kim and the rest were going to co-operate no further with the' Westerners, but .return to China and fight the Japanese on their own : they had not come all this way across the Himalayas for the honour of Korea to be insulted.
Unfortunately for the original pacification scheme the barrel of rum had leaked in the aircraft and neither it nor the loyalist Koreans were quite the trump cards that they once might have been. Major Wong had absorbed a good deal of the values for which we were fighting, however, and still seemed to think that democratic procedure might win in the end. There seemed little else to do but let him try it. All through that day a series of democratic conferences were held in the Koreans' bunker, and at the end of the third, somewhere about midnight, Major Wong, almost dropping with exhaustion, announced that he had triumphed. The mutiny—or strike—was over, and all the lieutenants would return to battle tomorrow ; they were sin- cerely sorry for endangering the Allied Cause. " How on earth did you do it, Major Wong ?" we asked. " It was very demo- cratic," replied the Major. " I drew my revolver— " Here he produced a vast weapon that looked as if it belonged to the western section of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer property room. " I drew my revolver and laid it on the table. Then I bared my breast and said : If you trust me, if you believe that I am doing the best for our Korean fatherland, then obey my orders. If not, shoot."
After that lesson in democracy the Unit never looked back, and at the end of the war they returned home via China. Which side of the 38th Parallel Mr. Wu and Major Wong and all the lieut- enants settled down I don't know, but I feel pretty sure that they are in the war up to the neck. on one side or the other.
So many of the Koreans whom Europeans met between the wars were brutalised toughs from the Japanese Securety Police that the reactions of these young nationalists had a scarcity value and interest. The outstanding characteristics about them, I should say, were their adaptability and their nationalism. They got on well on the whole with the queer mixture of British, Indians and Nagas who went to make up a propaganda unit, and they really did seem to have acquired an interest in the " demo- cratic way of life "—but all with a view to how they were going to run Korea after the war. The idea that it should be run by Westerners or by Russians, whether under trusteeship or anyhow else, was not one which would have appealed to them for a moment. And any sort of control by China would have been quite as unpopular. Of course, the vast majority of Koreans are uneducated peasants who know nothing whatever of what the war is about ; but if the minority of young and active leaders are anything like the K.N.A.L.U., it must be a very great advantage to the North Koreans that, whether they are catspaws, dupes or even emigres, they are at least Koreans. And the contempt for human life with which both Northerners and Southerners fight is no sur- prise. But they would adapt themselves to fight, I believe, equally bravely for any Korean cause, and I should not like to guess on which side the K.N.A.L.U., for all their experience of democratic procedure, are now operating.
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