The Fatherland Liberation War lasted three years, one month, two days and 18 hours, more specifically 1 129 days short of six hours, between June 25, 1950 and July 27, 1953.

When the war broke out, the world community never imagined the Korean people would beat down the US armed even with A-bombs.

At the time it was only five years after the Korean people got free from Japan’s military rule and two years after they founded the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and regular armed forces.

After starting the war on the Korean peninsula, the US imperialists claimed that “breakfast would be had in Haeju, lunch in Pyongyang and dinner in Sinuiju” and the DPRK would “come to a dead end in 72 hours.”

However, the war lasted three years, not three days, ending up in defeat on the part of the US.

The Korean people destroyed the Americans who boasted of being the “strongest” in the world, but until some years before the war, they had been subjected to colonial slavery under the jackboot of the Japanese.

During its rule Japan had forcibly conscripted and abducted among the 20 million Korean population 8.4 million Korean young and middle-aged people, who were taken to battlefields and slave labour sites, and kidnapped and forced as many as 200 000 Korean women ranging from teens to the married into sexual slavery for its imperial army.

Thanks to President Kim Il Sung , the Korean people could escape this yoke of slavery and become the masters of land, factories and the country.

When he delivered a radio address entitled Go All Out for Victory in the War on June 26, 1950, they rose up true to his call and volunteered to join the Korean People’s Army, singing the Song of National Defence , not to be reduced to colonial slaves of the US.

Even the students who had been studying abroad sent their petitions to him and returned home to volunteer to fight on the front.

Referring to the fact that all the people turned out for the sacred war of justice, Wilfred Burchett, an Australian embedded journalist, said in his booklet, This Monstrous War , that in the initial six weeks after the outbreak of the war 1.2 million young local men and women turned out to join the volunteers’ units of the KPA or guerrilla units.

KPA troops on the front unhesitatingly sacrificed their youth and lives for the Party and the leader, their one and only fatherland, and their beloved home villages, parents, wives and children. They covered the muzzles of the enemy’s machine guns with their chests to make a breakthrough for their units’ advance, and crushed the enemy by pressing the trigger of heavy machine guns with their jaws after having their limbs wounded.

People in the rear fought a heroic struggle to lend great assistance to the front despite the enemy’s indiscriminate bombing and bombardment.

The fierce war produced about 620 DPRK Heroes and Labour Heroes, including twice heroes, and over 810 000 awardees of official commendations.

Ordinary working people, once colonial slaves, who had created and enjoyed genuine happiness along with the country’s liberation, displayed mass heroism and matchless bravery to emerge victorious in the war under the leadership of Kim Il Sung and become the first heroic people to beat US imperialism in history.

Kim Ye Ryong