During the anti-Japanese armed struggle, Commander Kim Il Sung of the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army only won the battles against the Japanese imperialist aggressors by dint of his outstanding military strategy, guerrilla tactics and superb war methods.

In February Juche 26 (1937), he led the main-force unit of the KPRA to the Xiagangqu area in Changbai County of China.

The aim of the movement of the unit was to decisively crush the enemy’s “winter punitive operations” by dispersing their forces and throwing them into confusion.

On arrival at a village near Yaofangzi, Kim Il Sung ordered it to billet there and dispatched a scouting party to Taoquanli.

Taoquanli was over 12km away from Yaofangzi.

According to the report of the scouting party, a vicious Jingan army unit of the Japanese imperialists would drop in at Taoquanli that evening. And it noted that for the enemies to reach Taoquanli, they would have to pass through a long lane among birches, very tall reeds and entanglements of purple eulalias.

The Commander proposed luring them into the underbrush forests and beating them section by section and assigned commanding officers detailed combat tasks.

By his order, the officers positioned their men in ambush both at the entrance to and end of a valley and dispatched a decoy party.

When the enemy’s marching column appeared, the decoy party hiding themselves near the wide road leading to Taoquanli opened surprise fire all at once at the head of the column and then quickly ran away to the thorny plateau where other men were lying in ambush. The duped enemies chased them rashly. To them, the underbrush was a barrier as good as a barbed-wire entanglement as they were unaccustomed to mountain life. Therefore, the enemy ranks were naturally broken into different sections. At that moment, the KPRA men in ambush fired at the enemies here and there. Hundreds of enemy troops were consequently smashed by Kim Il Sung ’s chopping tactics.

When dusk began to fall, the enemies fled to Taoquanli village, leaving a large number of their casualties behind in the battlefield.

Kim Il Sung received the news from the underground organization in Taoquanli that the enemy seemed to return to their base that night.

So he sent the underground organization an instruction to delay the preparations for the enemy’s supper as much as possible.

As a result, the enemies were compelled to leave the village in the middle of the night.

By that time, the KPRA unit laid an ambush on both sides of the road in front of Taoquanli, before completely annihilating the Jingan army unit.

The Japanese imperialist aggressors, bragging that they would completely destroy the anti-Japanese guerrilla army, applied all sorts of war methods and tactics which had been applied to actual battles, including the “hair-comb tactics” and “encirclement and mop-up operations,” by mobilizing their huge “punitive” forces. But they used to be overpowered by the might of the KPRA, only to suffer telling blows.

The brilliant victory in the anti-Japanese armed struggle which brought about Korea’s liberation on August 15 1945 was the fruition of the mysterious strategy and adroit command of General Kim Il Sung .