비 온 뒤에뒤에 땅이땅이 굳어진다굳어진다

After the rain, the land becomes hardened.

Incheon Arsenal, Outside Seoul, November 6th, 1951

Engineer Sim Su-Hon looked at the pistol on his desk. The black metal device, heavy in its weight and purpose, spread itself over his papers. He reached forward, gripping the weapon - looking up at Park Ji-Young, one of the Russian Koreans who had been the backbone of the Dongpyeong Arsenal complex since it began in 1948. The pistol in front of Sim Su-Hon was a Tokarev, the standard automatic pistol of the Soviet Army up to the current time.

"The jigs for the... barrel," Park was saying, stumbling over her Korean effortfully, "can be just the same as the machine pistol, only shorter. It is the same caliber. You see the simplicity."

Sim nodded, inspecting the weapon. It was not an easy task being Subordinate Minister for Armaments, a position confusingly commanded by the Minister of Industry, Minister of State Control, and the Minister of National Defense at the same time. The war had only made that more difficult - while much effort had gone into the defense of Pyongyang, American bombers had nonetheless done moderate damage to Dongpyeong Arsenal's production floor. Repairs had begun immediately, but the fear that the American strategy of precision bombing might switch to full-scale city-flattening, as they had done in the Second World War, was widespread.

Thus Sim's Subministry had been moved from Dongpyeong to the captured Incheon Arsenal. Known previously as Jinsen Arsenal to the Japanese, it had produced Type 99 rifles for the previous strain of imperialists - the pretender regime had made limited use of it, seeming mostly interested in American weapons rather than any domestic manufacture. Thus by the time Sim Su-Hon had arrived in late October, just as the "October Scourge" of intensified bombing campaigns was coming to a close, he had discovered a partially-damaged, partially-disused plant.

Armaments were one of the industries that got top priority in the war economy, however, so he had set to work directly improving and revamping it. Immediately the thoughts of a bomb landing in Sim Su-Hon's office and blowing him to bits had unnerved him, so his thoughts had strayed - and it was this set of papers that Park Ji-Young's pistol had been set on top of.

He gave the pistol back to her as he motioned for her to inspect the documents - already the formalized plan had been translated into Russian, for the sake of Park's rather poor Korean.

"Distributed Weaponry Manufacture"

"The Poles did this," Park said as she read through the document. "They built their own guns... underground, while the... Fascists controlled their cities."

"What if the Fascists control this city?" Sim Su-Hon replied. Park looked thoughtful, then her smile spread in agreement.

The Type 49 submachine gun, a licensed copy of the PPSh, was an effective and valuable weapon, yet its production had been somewhat haphazard - guns of varying quality came off the lines at first, and all of the documentation had been centered at Dongpyeong. Under the plan of Sim Su-Hon, Operation Gwaeng'i, hundreds of copies of everything needed to be known to manufacture the gun would be produced. The Armaments Subministry had begun communicating with Soviet arms experts as early as September 21st on producing a simple variant that would feed from the 35-round stick magazine (as the Type 49 only fed from the drum). Soviet engineers recommended producing a copy of the somewhat simpler PPS-43, but Sim rejected this idea - all of the machining and tooling for the PPSh was already on the peninsula, and a native Korean variant would allow for local tweaks to the design, as well as give valuable experience to Korean weapons designers.

Thus it was done. Rather than the old type system, which Minister of State Control Kim Won-bong regarded to be poor for morale, Sim Su-Hon would call it the Baekje - the name of one of the Ancient Kingdoms of Korea, the first to lay claim to the Han river that was the crown jewel of the Democratic People's Republic. Soon, auto repair workshops and tin shops around the capital were being geared up for production of the new gun.

To be continued...