North Korea’s Most Powerful Weapon to Win a War

By Kyle Mizokami,The National Interest

In any future war on the Korean Peninsula, U.S. and South Korean forces would encounter a familiar foe: the Korean People’s Army (KPA) 105th Armored Division. Equipped with North Korea’s most modern tanks and armored vehicles, the 105th Division’s mission is to rapidly exploit any breakthrough in the lines and drive deep into the heart of South Korea. The division traces its lineage to the first Korean War, when its Soviet-made tanks panicked ill-prepared U.S. troops and very nearly achieved total victory.

The end of the Second World War saw Korea, formerly a Japanese colony, partitioned between the victorious Allies. The peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel, with Soviet forces occupying the northern half and the United States and Western allies occupying the southern half. U.S. and Soviet-backed governments sprung up in both northern and southern sectors. The Soviet Union began training and equipping the new Korean People’s Army, a force that quickly grew to include ten infantry divisions and an armored brigade, the 105th. In June 1950, KPA forces flooded south, attacking the lightly armed and equipped Republic of Korea Army.

The 105th Armored Brigade traced its origins to the 15th Tank Training Regiment, a tank unit formed by the Red Army in 1948 and commanded by Senior Colonel Yu Kyong Su, a former lieutenant in the Red Army and brother-in-law to North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s wife. Many soldiers of the 15th Regiment were war veterans who had already served in the Soviet and Chinese armies. This early force rapidly grew from a small cadre of Soviet and North Korean personnel and two T-34 tanks to become the 105th Armored Brigade with 120 T-34 tanks.

The brigade was envisioned from the outset as the spearhead of a KPA drive to reunify the peninsula by force and was equipped with the T-34/85 tank [3]. The last model of the famed T-34 line, the T-34/85 had the larger 85mm ZIS-S-53 anti-aircraft/anti-tank gun, and was the mainstay of the Red Army as it swept into Berlin just five years earlier. The T-34/85 was considerably less armored than its American contemporary, the M26 Pershing, but could penetrate the Pershing anywhere but the heavily armored front glacis at 1,000 yards.

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