How Dangerous is North Korea?

It might not be immediately obvious from her neat wool jacket, black frock and smart perm, but 55-year-old Kim Su-yeong is, she insists, "very good with weapons" – trained in throwing grenades and firing machine guns.

Tania Branigan
newspaper report

Her expertise is the legacy of the regular military training that she underwent in her youth in North Korea. "When I was there I believed that the US and South Korea were every day, all the time, trying to eat us up," said Kim, who now lives in the South Korean capital, Seoul. "When I came out, I couldn't believe that everything was so peaceful.

"Then I realised everything was a lie and felt terrible … Once you are here, everything is different, by 180 degrees. When I look at the news, I think war will not happen."

The furore over Pyongyang's angry rhetoric and possible missile launch, and its nuclear programme may have raised tensions internationally, but like the vast majority in Seoul, Kim said she did not believe there was any risk of a military conflict.

But the idea of an impending clash is nothing new to the North, a society structured around the belief that it is still at war. Technically, that is true. No peace treaty was signed when the Korean war ended in 1953, only an armistice. More pertinently, say analysts, the rhetoric of being under siege is used to explain and justify its straitened circumstances.

"This kind of regime can only exist under the conditions of isolation and crisis," said Leonid Petrov, an expert on the North at Australian National University in Canberra.

The struggle against the enemy is imbued in people from the earliest age. Tatiana Gabroussenko, an expert on propaganda at Korea University, said a recent North Korean magazine showed under-fives at a kindergarten using wooden clubs to whack dummies of South Korean leaders.

Even maths books for primary schools include – among examples based on train timetables and children's games – calculations of the number of "American imperialist bastards" killed by the Korean people's army.

Gabroussenko said the longstanding militarism of North Korea was typical of a "national Stalinist" society and also reflected Kim Il-sung's background as a guerrilla leader rather than an intellectual.

But after the fall of the Soviet Union, propaganda shifted from presenting the North as "a people's paradise" to showing it as "a paradise under siege", she said, stressing the message: "We have to make a fortress of our country to protect ourself from these attacks."

Because the North's ideology is also heavily ethnocentric, "it is easy to believe the whole world is against you, because the whole world is different from you," Gabroussenko added.

Other analysts suggest that the shift was exacerbated by the plummeting of trade as the Soviet Union collapsed, accelerating the disintegration of an economy that had once been one of the most advanced in continental East Asia.

For Kim – who did not want to give her real name to protect relatives still in the North – the rationale of leaders is simple: "When you are preparing for war, you will never complain about where you are."

The North still holds regular military training for civilian militias, though these days they are more likely to involve drilling, marching with backpacks or practising evacuations, and air raid and blackout drills for the population as a whole.

Hazel Smith, an expert on North Korea at Cranfield University, recalled seeing people training with wooden guns, presumably to save on precious resources. Conscription was also introduced as the prestige and security of becoming a soldier declined, reflecting increasing disaffection with authority and the government's inability to feed its own troops.

North Korean men are supposed to spend 10 years in the army, though soldiers are often used primarily as labour; last week, one visitor to Pyongyang saw them planting flowers around a monument. "I think the big change was from 1997, with the institutionalisation of the military-first policy," Smith added.

"With the military being in control, the tendency is to adopt military solutions to political problems as the first thing you do."

The problem for the regime, she noted, is that "North Koreans think the military leadership has failed to achieve anything good for North Korea … In Kim Il-sung's day, people felt life was getting better. These days, I don't think they believe in anything."

That view is echoed by Kim, who recalls how she used to hope that the war would start quickly, assuming the North would win.

"We had certainty that when the Americans attacked the war would finish very quickly and no one would suffer any more and then we'd be able to stop tightening our belts. Now, when I look at it from outside, they do the same – but fewer people believe it," said Kim.

It is not uncommon for North Koreans working in China to say they wish that war would come, but often they seem to expect neither victory nor defeat – they just want to get it over with, say those who work with them.

Those living away from the border areas, where information from the outside world spreads more easily, may have more faith in the government, Kim acknowledged.

But even so, external military threats seem less important these days, she said: "Their fears are much more focused on what they will eat."

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Giving You Colonel Durnford of Isandlwana 1879

Colonel Anthony William Durnford's final moments.



Colonel Anthony William Durnford was born in Ireland in 1830. He was a brave man who would earn his celebrity in the final moments of his life, fighting bravely, as a valiant soldier, in a battle that was one of the biggest disasters in British military history.

As a 12 year old boy he left Ireland to grow up with his uncle in Dusseldorf Germany, but as a young man he came to England and enlisted in the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, London. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1848.

He was stationed overseas in Ceylon, but tried to get transferred away during the start of the war in Crimea against imperial Russia. He wanted to see action. He was not accepted for this and was disappointed to miss the campaign. While in Ceylon he also got married. 

He was then sent to Malta for a few years and had three children by his wife. Sadly, the first - a boy, died in infancy. The second - a daughter survived, but the third - another daughter, also died in infancy. This was a traumatic time for Anthony William Durnford and his wife. They separated after this and, for a while, he was stationed in Gibraltar, before returning to England.

He was then sent to South Africa in 1872 and stationed at a place called Pietermartizburg. He was now 42 and may have thought his army career had been uneventful on the action side of things.

In South Africa his first chance came and he took part in his first action when he was caught in a skirmish with  an African tribe called the Hlubis at Bushman's River. He fought bravely and took two stab wounds during the fight. He managed to kill two assailants with his pistol but one of his wounds left his lower left arm paralysed from the elbow down. He had no use of his left hand after this and would ride with his native horsemen (The Natal Native Horse) keeping his redundant hand inside his jacket similar to the way Napoleon sometimes did.

Colonel Durnford was very popular among his fellow horse contingents and was regarded affectionately as a larger then life character - a commanding Irishman with a confident presence. He moulded his Natal Native Horseman in to fine riders and very competent men.

In 1879, Colonel Durnford and his men were used in Lord Chelmsford's invasion of the Zulu's land when Britain declared war upon the Zulu King Cetshwayo. The mission was to be a disaster. A large force of the British army encountered the Zulu warriors at a place called Isandlwana. A huge battle took place between over 23,000 Zulus against 858 British troops and 471 native soldiers. All but 55 of the Britain's troops were wiped out during this battle.

During the desperate struggle, Colonel Durnford and his men rode out and tried to hold the left horn of the flanking Zulu army and put up a very fierce resistance faltering the enemy until his men ran out of cartridges. They then had to remount and return to the main camp where the Redcoat British foot soldiers were being over run by the Zulu forces.

Colonel Durnford and his last remaining men put up a last stand as they ran headlong into the Zulus. They were overcome and killed - falling alongside the other soldiers of the British army. Of the 55 soldiers who did manage to escape across the Buffalo river; a few were NNH soldiers. 

First Successful Submarine Attack

                    H. L. Hunley (Confederate submarine)

When the American Civil War was raging a Confederate inventor came upon the idea of converting a steam boiler into a submerged vessel to stealthily sneak up close to a Union vessel and sink it, using a torpedo fixed to a long pole, which could be ramed into the ship's hull, exploding upon contact and blowing a hole below the waterline.

Although the daring attempt did little to help the lost Confederate cause, and the small victory was short-lived; the repercussions of this event were to be colossal. It was the first-ever successful submarine attack and from this bold act came the birth of the submarine as we know it today - the underwater predator that would become the scourge of ships in future wars.

This Confederate Submarine was named H.L. Hunley after Horace Lawson Hunley - the inventor. The small moment of glory came with a successful underwater attack, against the USS Housatonic. Eight men turned the propeller using a hand crank and got a maximum speed of 4 knots. Air was provided by two four-foot pipes, but the hull contained enough air for approximately half an hour of submerged operations. As you can well imagine, it was a most primitive vessel indeed and the crewmen would have to men of a very special metal.

During trials, the submarine sank twice in Charleston harbour, South Carolina. The first accident cost the lives of two crews. In the second sinking, the submarine was stranded on the bottom of the river bed. Horace Lawson Hunley, the inventor, was asphyxiated along with eight other crew members. When the Submarine was raised again, it was renamed the Hunley in honour of the inventor.

Then came the day of action and a chance to prove the H.L. Hunley's worth. The year was 1864 and armed with a 90-pound charge of powder on a long pole, the Hunley stealthily floated forward beneath the river surface and ramed her torpedo into the hull of the new Federal steam sloop, USS Housatonic, at the entrance to Charleston Harbor. The USS Housatonic sank and the Hunley disappeared. Perhaps she was too close to the Housatonic's hull when the charge, at the end of the pole, exploded. It is believed she limped away beneath the water and sank some way off.

Her wreck was found in 1995 and she was raised in the year 2000, one hundred and thirty-six years later, her eight-man crew were buried with proper ceremony. This strange little vessel changed the face of naval warfare.



Graf Spee - German Commerce Raider
http://thelastdaysofthunderchild.blogspot.com/2010/11/hans-langsdorff-of-admiral-graf-spee.html

Victorian Cyclops class coastal defence vessel
http://thelastdaysofthunderchild.blogspot.com/2011/04/hms-hecate-1871-cyclops-class-coastal.html

Victorian battleship's terrible accident
http://thelastdaysofthunderchild.blogspot.com/2011/04/hms-thunderer-victorian-battleships.html

HMS Devastation - first battle steamship without sails.
http://thelastdaysofthunderchild.blogspot.com/2010/05/hms-devastation-1871-1908-first-steam.html

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