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The Young-do Guerrillas
The Young-do Unit was a super secret guerrilla unit created in August 1950 by the US CIA at Young-do, a hot-springs resort area of Pusan, known today as the Taejong-dae Public Parks. The Young-do Unit was made of over 1,200 anti-Communist students and youth from the northeastern region of North Korea - the North and South Hamgyong Provinces and the Kangwon Province. The anti-Communist North Koreans were parachuted or boated behind the enemy line. They destroyed numerous enemy military installations and radioed back valuable intelligence data; they organized anti-Communists and rescued key anti-Communist leaders from enemy prison. They created major disturbances in the enemy interior and forced the enemy to divert several divisions from the front to the rear area. Of the 900 or so guerrillas dispatched to North Korea during the Korean War, only about 40 returned and the rest are still unaccounted for. The US CIA disbanded the Unit in December 1952 and made no effort to extract the stranded guerrillas. Over fifty years have gone by since the Young-do Unit was disbanded and the true history of the Unit can be told only now. Why 50 years of silence? There are three major reasons: (1) The Unit was super secret and the members were sworn to keep silent: (2) The guerrillas sent north swore to stay and fight until North Korea was liberated, and disclosing their existence might have jeopardized them: and (3) conditions were not conducive to the public disclosure of the unit until now. This short history of the Young-do Unit contains no new disclosure; it is a compilation of what have been disclosed in various publications. In particular, the book obtained much of its contents from the Republic of Korea Army History of the Korean War (volumes 80 and 84) and the History of Guerrilla Warfare in Korea. The book is a compilation of photos, radio reports of guerrilla missions, and debriefing reports of returned agents preserved by former members of the Unit. This is an English version of the Korean book published in 2001 by the PROCOM Publishers in Seoul, Korea. The book includes over 500 photos, 8 mission maps, unit rosters and numerous mission reports. We are looking for an American publisher of the English version. If you are interested, please send an email to editor@kimsoft.com Thank you. |