Historic Day in Building Juche-type Revolutionary Armed Forces

Pyongyang, February 8 (KCNA) -- February 8 is a historic day when the birth of the Korean People's Army (KPA) was declared.

After the country's liberation from Japan's colonial rule, President Kim Il Sung set it as a prerequisite for building an independent and sovereign state to found a regular armed forces, and put forward the line of building a revolutionary regular army embracing sons and daughters of the working people with the anti-Japanese revolutionary fighters as its backbone.

Under his guidance, the Pyongyang Institute was established in February Juche 35 (1946) to produce military and political officers and the Central Security Officers Training School in July that year to train commanding officers and technical personnel of all branches of arms and services.

An aviation class was formed at the Pyongyang Institute in March 1946 and the Marine Security Officers Training School founded to train military cadres for air and naval forces in a far-sighted way.

And the Security Officers Training Center was organized to train core members of the regular army and, on this basis, it had been pushed forward to expand different units of arms and services.

Early in October 1945, the President visited Phyongchon-ri in Pyongyang and unrolled the grand plan for founding the Juche-oriented national defence industry. Thanks to his leadership, the munitions factory, the first of its kind in the country, came into being in June 1947 to produce weapons and military hardware by its own efforts.

Under these circumstances, a military parade was held on February 8, 1948 to proclaim the birth of the KPA, the people's army carrying forward the tradition of the anti-Japanese revolutionary armed struggle and having different services and arms fully supported by the independent munitions industry.

Since its founding, the KPA has reliably defended the Workers' Party of Korea and the revolution with arms, frustrating the U.S. imperialists' ceaseless moves to provoke a war, and fully discharged its mission and duty as the creator of the people's happiness.

It defeated the U.S. imperialists, which boasted of being "the strongest" in the world, in the Fatherland Liberation War (1950-1953) and captured the U.S. armed spy ship Pueblo to exact a written apology from the U.S.

Now, the KPA is further demonstrating its might as a powerful revolutionary elite army fully ready to react to any form of war under the guidance of respected Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un who is ushering in the greatest heyday of building the revolutionary armed forces. -0-