The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom. By Blaine Harden. Viking; 290 pages; $27.95. Pan Macmillan; £16.99.

THE vain feats of Kim Il Sung, the Korean guerrilla leader who fought the Japanese occupiers from Manchuria, were irresistible to the destitute North Koreans who, by the 1940s, had suffered nearly four decades of brutal colonisation. They did not know the truth: that Kim lost his war, fled east and later slinked home in a Soviet uniform, kowtowing to Stalin until his death. Nor did they see that Kim’s monstrous regime, which would last another 41 years until he died in 1994, was built on fiction.

In 1945 No Kum Sok was one of those who thought that young Kim, the Soviet poodle, was a sham. In the boy’s hometown, Russian soldiers ransacked and raped, and his family fell on hard times. Mr No longed to escape to America. Posing as a false communist, spying and snitching to prove his fervour, he became the youngest pilot in the North Korean air force. In 1950 the Soviet-backed North invaded the South, prompting a UN-backed American-led force to step in. The Chinese, in turn, supported the North. Just after the conflict ended, Mr No flew a Soviet MiG-15 jet over the border and defected to the South.

Both men’s lives in the nascent North Korean state are deftly woven together by Blaine Harden, an American journalist, who has made good use of Mr No’s memoirs, as well as newly declassified air-force intelligence reports, presidential papers and Chinese and Soviet archives. The history of the war unfolds at the top, as Stalin, Mao and Kim (mostly “stewing in his irrelevance”) jockey, bicker and bootlick for influence. It is played out at the bottom through Mr No, who hears of the war at his naval academy in Chongjin, in the north-east, and goes to China to train as a pilot.

North Korea was deeply vulnerable from the skies. Three weeks into the war, almost all of its combat planes had been strafed; America described its early air-force campaign as “leisurely”. Its bombers destroyed more than four-fifths of the North’s infrastructure. The destruction of Chongjin, which Mr No witnessed, was a “steady, systematic and unhurried chore”. Within two months the B-29 bombers said they were running out of targets.