That day, the Korean People’s Army proclaimed its establishment as regular armed forces.
Building a regular army in a liberated Korea was an indispensable prerequisite for the building of an independent and sovereign state and a matter of urgency since the US occupied half of the country and was hell-bent on reducing the whole of Korea to its colony.
But at the time it was an uphill task. The country lacked commanding officers and there was no industry to manufacture modern military equipment.
Against all odds, Kim Il Sung pressed on with the task.
He put forward a policy of founding the revolutionary army with the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army trained and groomed in the flames of the anti-Japanese armed struggle as the backbone, and buckled down first to training military and political cadres.
He established the Pyongyang Institute and the Central Security Officers School to train military commanding personnel with the institute as the parent body. He went on to set up centres for training commanding officers of the navy and air force.
The Korean Aviation Association was formed in December 1945 and the Maritime Security Corps in June 1946, which laid the foundations for building the air and naval forces.
He also ensured that a local base was set up to manufacture various weapons and other military equipment as he provided energetic guidance to laying the solid material foundation for the upcoming regular army.
Finally, a military parade was held to declare the birth of the revolutionary regular army in Pyongyang on February 8 1948.
This marked an end to the distress-torn history of the Korean nation that was ruined as it was weak in military strength, and provided a military guarantee for the building of a new country.
It was a brilliant result of Kim Il Sung’s line of self-reliant defence to have built a regular army with modern services and arms, plus an independent munitions industry, in a little over two years after liberation—under the difficult conditions in which everything was devastated by the Japanese imperialists.
The invincible might of the KPA was fully demonstrated in the Korean war the US started two years later. In the grim three-year war the KPA defeated the US imperialist aggressors who had been boasting of being the “strongest” in the world by overpowering their incomparably great numerical, military and technological upper hand with its political, ideological, strategic and tactical edge.
For decades on the KPA has foiled the imperialist allies’ incessant attempts at invasion and challenges to safeguard national dignity and sovereignty and performed feats as vanguard in socialist construction.
The KPA, now at its height, is playing the role of a reliable pathfinder and unyielding fulcrum of the Songun-based revolution and fully discharging its mission as the army of the revolution and people in the defence of socialism and the building of a thriving nation.