The great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung devoted his heart and soul to founding and strengthening the revolutionary armed forces after Korea’s liberation on August 15, 1945.

The year after the country’s liberation he set about founding regular revolutionary armed forces before anything else. He set up the Pyongyang Institute, and he established the Central Security Officers School, a facility for training military cadres, in 1946.

In those days those steeped in flunkeyism and dogmatism insisted that the period of the school system should be three or four years, following the example of other countries.

But Kim Il Sung referred to the need to adequately set the school system to suit the specific conditions of the country in which the military cadres needed in building a regular army should be trained as soon as possible and to educate the students so that they can possess the practical qualifications and aspects as befit the commanding officers of the regular army, adding that this requires the period of education should be at least one year.

He paid close attention to strengthening and developing the aviation corps.

He readily accepted the presidency of the Aviation Association of Korea and visited the runaway construction site for the training of the students of the air corps class of the Pyongyang Institute and dug a spadeful of earth. As a growing number of the students flew alone, he was delighted to record the number in his pocket book. The air corps he pictured was indeed the genuine air corps of the new Korea whose pilots reliably defend the country’s airspace.

One day he came to know that they were a pilot short to form the air echelons for a military parade to be held to mark the fourth anniversary of the country’s liberation, and that a foreign pilot was to fill the vacancy.

Until then, everyone took the shortage as a matter of inevitability. But Kim Il Sung could not agree at all as he firmly believed that the country’s sovereignty is defended by strong self-defensive capability.

Asking whether there was no pilot trained at the Pyongyang Institute, he said sternly: It is quite ridiculous to include a foreign pilot in the parading formation instead of an eligible local man simply because the latter has not yet graduated from the school and he is not yet an officer. The children of the workers and peasants have now been qualified to drive planes through hard training, so this is fairly unjustifiable.

His instructions remind the young generations of how the solid foundations of the invincible Korean People’s Army were built.

Thanks to his painstaking efforts to found the army and build it up without depending on others and with strong determination, the DPRK has emerged as a dignified people’s country with firm military guarantee since its birth on September 9, 1948 and the KPA has grown up into an impregnable fortress defending the country.

Jang Chang Nam