How much you guys know about the Korean War of 1950 ?
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Hey, guys. I wondered what's your opinions and level of knowledge of the Korean War.
In fact, before, I admit I did not know much about it.. except that it was the North and South korea pitching against each other, with the UN involved.. and later with China. It was a stalemate in the end. It was the forgotten war to the US.
But in another forum this topic came up in strong discussions, and then I did some researched on the matter, and balancing both side of the accounts and links from the reformers.
(side issues) I googled and Yahooed some, and discovered the Yahoo only/tends to list sites, which are US-sided, censored or watered down. Whereas, google immediately gives results of massacres and eyewitness accounts, historical war facts, war plans and news journals... I keyed the same search parameter in both search engines.. Yahoo has lost my personal respect ... I will use Yahoo less ... no wonder it's a forgotten war.
The reason this war interest me was that, after spending a two whole days going thru articles, day to day war journals and witness accounts (both from US servicemen, south koreans and Chinese.. I took particular attention mostly from US side.. since anything from china side is considered bias... but I do not dismiss them).
At the end of the day, I had a heavy heart that bothered me that I could not sleep well. After, mentally balancing and delibrating both sides, I came to realised that the Korean War, if put aside the polictical aspect, was infact a genocide war !
Yes, both side committed atrocities, but the UN side was unequalled in crimes against humanity. Gen MacArthur had given orders that" any man built structures are military targets" and all NK cities and villages are scotch earth tactics. Nth/south koreans civilians are fair targets and are killed for the moght be future communist. Planes strafing civilians refugees, bridges full of refugees are blown, POWs and nurses are executed ,civilians (women and chidrens) are gunned down for three days hiding under a bridge and bomb shelters are fire bombed and entire village are marked as communist are executed and pows nurses hung naked and tortured in police stations. All this with women and chlidren screamings. The US government calling them savages and gooks in government correspondence, while negotaiting peace talks that lasted two years, while shifting goal post regularly. The NK/Chines POW were extremely badly treated where they were shot for minor reasons. The UN POWs in chinas sides don't even hav fences.
No wonder, it's a war US wants to forget... in fact, from what a gather, the Nk/Chinese were in most times Retaliating to Reciprocate to those same direct actions, but in no terms it's equal in comparison to what UN had done.
Take this as my personal ranting .... I tried to have expressed my view as unbias as possible... but I could not. I may have seemed comsumed with hatred, I am not , it's just that it dawns me that other human beings disregarding other races as none human is sad. -
please show us some photographs or links...
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N. Korean are bastards
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Do it yourself... use google... not too hard to find... but photos are hard to find.. despite it is well known that SK executes suspected communist at will.Originally posted by SingaporeMacross:please show us some photographs or links...
But there is a photo of half-naked NK nurses waiting to be executed by GI's.. use google image to search. -
The Allies have never been very clean. But hey history is written by the victorsOriginally posted by MobyDog:Do it yourself... use google... not too hard to find... but photos are hard to find.. despite it is well known that SK executes suspected communist at will.
But there is a photo of half-naked NK nurses waiting to be executed by GI's.. use google image to search. -
Not to mention, in those days medias are owned by the west.Originally posted by |-|05|:The Allies have never been very clean. But hey history is written by the victors -
Studied it in social studies, but not in detailed because it is just to show us how conflict can happen between nations of different ideologies. It all started with Japan again. It is after WWII, and I think these two countries were separated. After the war, UN suggested bringing back the two countries to be one country again, but North Korea prefers communism and South Korea prefers democracy and this did not lead to wars. Only when US and China steps in, then the war started.
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Originally posted by ndmmxiaomayi:
No, Russia was then one. China was only involved when the UN had advanced near the Yalu river. China has in fact informed the UN of it's intention if the UN reached a certain distance from the chinese border. Because they knew Gen MacArthur had every intention of invading china.
Studied it in social studies, but not in detailed because it is just to show us how conflict can happen between nations of different ideologies. It all started with Japan again. It is after WWII, and I think these two countries were separated. After the war, UN suggested bringing back the two countries to be one country again, but North Korea prefers communism and South Korea prefers democracy and this did not lead to wars. [b]Only when US and China steps in, then the war started. [/b]
As I say do some research...
But be alert of details... Because while doing searches.. I came across photos and description of NK/PLA atrocities, only to find them false, a blantant white wash.
For example .. this photo and its series widely distributed in the US sites ... Taejon, 9/50 South Korean Civilians murdered by retreating PLA , A few of the tens of thousands slaughtered by North Korea
However, the date and corresponding AP reports differentlyAll sides in the war were guilty of atrocities. KPA forces executed several hundreds of American prisoners of war, albeit usually in the traditional battlefield 'humane' manner: one bullet behind the ear. Treatment of ROK prisoners of war was said to be considerably worse, but there is little evidence of this. There were a number of brutal atrocities against civilians, especially as the occupation of the South ended.
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/cumings1.html
The United Nations archive contains well-documented accounts, verified by witnesses and relatives, of several mass murders of Southerners by the Northern occupants, including a particularly ghastly one at Chonju. For what it is worth, captured North Korean documents continued to show that high-level officials warned against executing people. Several orders to stop any further executions were picked up on the battle-field; handwritten minutes of a party meeting, apparently at a high level, said, 'Do not execute the reactionaries for [their] wanton vengeance. Let legal authorities carry out the purge plan.'
It has been alleged that the North Koreans perpetrated one of the greatest mass killings of the war in Taejon, where between 5,000 and 7,000 people were slaughtered and placed in mass graves. Some Americans were included; in one incident six survivors, including two Americans, were found alive, feigning death under the light soil thrown on top of them. Mass burial graves were reputedly also found at many points in South Cholla, and Appleman writes that the North Koreans 'ran amok' in Wonju on 2 October, killing between 1,000 and 2,000 civilians.
What actually happened in the Taejon atrocity is not at all clear, however. In early August Alan Winnington published an article in the London Daily Worker entitled 'US Belsen in Korea', alleging that the South Korean police, under the supervision of American advisers, had butchered 7,000 people in the village of Yangwol, near Taejon, during the period 2-6 July. He visited the area and found twenty eyewitnesses who said that on 2 July truckloads of police arrived and made local people dig six pits, each 200 yards long. Two days later political prisoners were trucked in and executed, by bullets to the head and decapitation by the sword, and layered on top of each other in the pits 'like sardines'. The massacres continued for three days. The witnesses said that US officers in two jeeps observed the killings. /91/
North Korean sources said 4,000 had been killed (changing the total some months later to 7,000), comprising mostly imprisoned guerrillas from Cheju Island and the Taebaek-san area and those detained after the Yosu-Sunchon incident. They located the site differently, placing the events at Change village in Sanae township, Taedok county.
The American Embassy in London called the Winnington story an 'atrocity fabrication', however, and denied its contents. British officials in Tokyo said, 'There may be an element of truth in this report.'
There is undeniable evidence of South Korean massacres on a lesser scale. A New York Times reporter found an ROK policeman with forty civilians in his retinue, alleged guerrillas, observing him as he 'crashed the butt of his rifle on the back of one after another'. 'We bang-bang in the woods,' the policeman said happily, meaning that the prisoners would be 'taken into the groves and executed after their backs had been broken.' An Australian witnessed a similar incident in Kongju, where twenty civilian prisoners were kneeling and being beaten by guards 'on [the] least movement'. On inquiry the guards said, 'Guerrillas, bang-bang.' A Manchester Guardian correspondent saw a truckload of sixty prisoners taken to the Kum river on 12 July and executed by ROK authorities. 'Tiger' Kim had fifty North Korean prisoners of war beheaded in August; when the Red Cross made representations to KMAG about it, KMAG officers said they 'would not like to see it get in the hands of correspondents'.
James Cameron of London's Picture Post wrote about what he termed 'South Korean concentration camps' in Pusan in the late summer of 1950:
I had seen Belsen, but this was worse. This terrible mob of men - convicted of nothing, un-tried, South Koreans in South Korea, suspected of being 'unreliable'. There were hundreds of them; they were skeletal, puppets of string, faces translucent grey, manacled to each other with chains, cringing in the classic Oriental attitude of subjection, the squatting foetal position, in piles of garbage ... Around this medievally gruesome market-place were gathered a few knots of American soldiers photographing the scene with casual industry ... I took my indignation to the [UN] Commission, who said very civilly: 'Most disturbing, yes; but remember these are Asian people, with different standards of behaviour... all very difficult.' It was supine and indefensible compromise. I boiled, and I do not boil easily. We recorded the situation meticulously, in words and photographs. Within the year it nearly cost me my job, and my magazine its existence.
Picture Post never published Cameron's story, causing a 'mini-mutiny' on the magazine; shortly thereafter Picture Post 'withered away, as it deserved'. -
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Does anyone know know the US series M.A.S.H. or atleast the movie? It's all about the Korea war seen with the eyes of the doctors from the mobil army surgical hospital and their patients - the wounded solders.
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It's a war where General MacArthur was in his "gone-bonkers" mode.
He requested for 18 atom bombs to be dropped along China's coast.
And he was placing himself in a status where he thinks he's God.
Because years before he was like dealing with Hirohito in a way that never in history has happened.. I think his ego got inflated. -
well, there are plenty of photos here,
American troops buries Korean alive
Execution of N.Koreans or pro-North Koreans
N.Korean beheaded.
Korean women being insulted by Yankees -
American troopsÂ’ successful Inchon landing
Birdview of Inchon prior to landing
Shipborne fighters start bombing of the beach.
destroyers shelled the targets.
Sea Burying
Landing order was giving to the commander of the US Marine 1st Division
Landing...
the moment...
The way to the to the city... -
great Korean pics from this
inspired by thisFor some reason, I've always been fascinated by these pics of carrier decks in winter off Korea. Though I don't know that I've ever seen one in color. It looks colder than any other pics I know of.
--www.murdoconline.net/ -
i know my brothers started their first major battle there.
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ur bros?Originally posted by CenturionMBT:i know my brothers started their first major battle there. -
look at my nick....
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Originally posted by ceecookie:N. Korean are bastards
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One thing I have to say though, people only see what they want to believe ...
the internet is a fantastic tool of course, but you'll only see what you want to see, deep down, ... and you'll filter out the rest ...
they say photographs tells a thousand words ... but how true is that ? ... there's always both sides to a story ...
take, for example, some of the most iconic pictures of the nanking massacre, some of which has been exposed as posed pictures ...
of the most famous picture of the vietnam war ... the one with a south vietnamese colonel executing a captured viet cong officer on the streets ? ... how it has been revealed, years too late, that the viet cong officer was actually a blood thirsty prick responsible for many atrocities and murder ? ...
you can google all of the above to convince yourself of course.
there is no right or wrong in War ... both sides have their own shades of truth ... -
WHy does singapore have DPROK embassy here?
Funny they have diplomatic ties. -
Originally posted by Fatum:
This I do not quite agree.. because many a times we only get to read whats we happened to be found or could be found... and searched along that line.. especially if you are not an avid surfer. Of course, patriotism and nationalism do plays a part. In the internet where there are so many opinions and disinformation that really burrs one's mind... and even to a experienced surfer.
One thing I have to say though, people only see what they want to believe ...
the internet is a fantastic tool of course, but you'll only see what you want to see, deep down, ... and you'll filter out the rest ...they say photographs tells a thousand words ... but how true is that ? ... there's always both sides to a story ...
True, but while the US enemies atrocities are well documented, the US sides thens to control whats in their Main media outlets... very often the truth are only exposed when Conscience ridden veterens or reporters risking their jobs.take, for example, some of the most iconic pictures of the nanking massacre, some of which has been exposed as posed pictures ...
Yes, some pictures are posed because some private pics of the Jap soldiers, others are from a different war... but very often by the same persecutors.of the most famous picture of the vietnam war ... the one with a south vietnamese colonel executing a captured viet cong officer on the streets ? ... how it has been revealed, years too late, that the viet cong officer was actually a blood thirsty prick responsible for many atrocities and murder ? ...
Don't quite understand, but that colonel was indentified, is an officer of the ARVN, who later escape to the US.
You can read so of the Vietnam vet confession on this site...
http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/index.php?topic=CompletWSI
The 1st Cavalry Division is a good read...you can google all of the above to convince yourself of course.
That's true of course, but there is right and wrong in wars.. when one speaks of freedom ad liberation .. and is touted to be the goods guys.
there is no right or wrong in War ... both sides have their own shades of truth ... -
Back to the Korean War..... while I agree that both sides commits war crimes.. I would like to focus on the war crimes of the UN.
Pulitzer Price - Winner
By SANG-HUN CHOE
CHARLES J. HANLEY
and MARTHA MENDOZA
Associated Press Writers
It was a story no one wanted to hear: Early in the Korean War, villagers said, American soldiers machine-gunned hundreds of helpless civilians, under a railroad bridge in the South Korean countryside.
When the families spoke out, seeking redress, they met only rejection and denial, from the U.S. military and their own government in Seoul. Now a dozen ex-GIs have spoken, too, and support their story with haunting memories from a "forgotten" war.
These American veterans of the Korean War say that in late July 1950, in the conflict's first desperate weeks, U.S. troops -- young, green and scared -- killed a large number of South Korean refugees, many of them women and children, trapped beneath a bridge at a place called No Gun Ri.
In interviews with The Associated Press, ex-GIs speak of 100, 200 or simply hundreds dead. The Koreans, whose claim for compensation was rejected last year, say 300 were shot to death at the bridge and 100 died in a preceding air attack.
American soldiers, in their third day at the warfront, feared North Korean infiltrators among the fleeing South Korean peasants, veterans said. "It was assumed there were enemy in these people," ex-rifleman Herman Patterson of Greer, S.C., told The AP.
American commanders had ordered units retreating through South Korea to shoot civilians as a defense against disguised enemy soldiers, according to once-classified documents found by the AP in months of researching U.S. military archives and interviewing veterans across the United States.
Six veterans of the 1st Cavalry Division said they fired on the refugee throng at the South Korean hamlet of No Gun Ri, and six others said they witnessed the mass killing. More said they knew or heard about it.
"We just annihilated them," said ex-machine gunner Norman Tinkler of Glasco, Kan.
After five decades, none gave a complete, detailed account. But ex-GIs agreed on such elements as time and place, and on the preponderance of women, children and old men among the victims. They also disagreed: Some said they were fired on from beneath the bridge, but others said they don't remember hostile fire. One said they later found a few disguised North Korean soldiers among the dead. But others disputed this.
Some soldiers refused to shoot what one described as "civilians just trying to hide."
The 30 Korean claimants -- survivors and victims' relatives -- said it was an unprovoked, three-day carnage. "The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies," said Chun Choon-ja, a 12-year-old girl at the time.
Armed with new evidence that U.S. GIs had confirmed much of their account, the Korean claimants called for a U.S. investigation into the killings.
"We hope the U.S. government will meet our demands and console the wandering souls of those who died an unfair death," the claimants said in a statement.
In the end, the Koreans have said in a series of petitions, some 300 refugees lay dead under the bridge's twin arches. About 100 others were killed in a preceding attack by U.S. Air Force planes, they say.
That would make No Gun Ri one of only two known cases of large-scale killings of noncombatants by U.S. ground troops in this century's major wars, military law experts note. The other was Vietnam's My Lai massacre, in 1968, in which more than 500 Vietnamese may have died.
From the start of the 1950-53 conflict, North Korean atrocities were widely reported. But the story of No Gun Ri has remained undisclosed for a half-century, despite sketchy news reports in 1950 implying U.S. troops may have fired on refugees.
No Gun Ri's dead were not alone. Veterans told the AP of two smaller but similar refugee killings in July and August 1950. They also told of refusing orders to fire on civilians in other cases.
Hundreds more South Koreans were killed on Aug. 3, 1950, when retreating U.S. commanders blew up two bridges as refugees streamed across, according to ex-GIs, Korean eyewitnesses and declassifed documents.
The Americans wanted to deny the crossings to the enemy, reported massing more than 15 miles away. But the general overseeing one bridge-blowing, the 1st Cavalry Division commander, had sought to stop the refugee flow as well. He told a correspondent he was sure most refugees were North Korean guerrillas.
For decades in U.S.-allied South Korea, the No Gun Ri claimants were discouraged from speaking out. After they filed for compensation in 1997, their claim was rejected by the South Korean government on a technicality.
The U.S. military has said repeatedly it found no basis for the allegations. On Wednesday, just after the AP report was released, Pentagon spokesman P.J. Crowley said, "We just have no information in historical files to lend any clarity to what might have happened in July 1950.
AP research also found no official Army account of the events.
Defense Secretary William Cohen said on Thursday that the claims could be examined if there were new evidence.
"I am not aware of any evidence that would support or substantiate those claims. But to the degree that any substantive information is forthcoming, we certainly would look at it," he told a press conference in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Speaking at press conference in Washington later Thursday, Army Secretary Louis Caldera promised a "complete and thorough review," of the allegations.
The South Korean government said it will investigate whether the survivors' claims are true or not.
"With keen attention, we'll try to verify the truth of all related things concerning the case," Foreign Ministry spokesman Chang Chul-kyun said. "Any further action will be decided after those efforts are finished."
Some elements of the No Gun Ri episode are unclear: What chain of officers gave open-fire orders? Did GIs see gunfire from the refugees or their own ricochets? How many soldiers refused to fire? How high in the ranks did knowledge of the events extend?
The Korean conflict, which ended in stalemate, began on June 25, 1950, when the communist North invaded and sent the South Korean army and a small U.S. force reeling southward toward the peninsula's tip.
American units rushed from Japan to stop the North Koreans were poorly equipped and ill-trained. The 1st Cavalry went in with little understanding of Korea. Half its sergeants had been transferred to other divisions. Teen-aged riflemen and young officers with no combat experience were thrust overnight into a hellish war, told to expect guerrilla fighting and be wary of the tens of thousands of South Korean civilians pouring south with retreating Americans.
The untested 7th Cavalry Regiment, part of the 1st Cavalry Division, reached the front July 24. Within a day many of its 2nd Battalion infantrymen were scattering in panic, tossing away weapons, at word of an enemy breakthrough nearby.
Records show that on the third day, July 26, the battalion's 660 men were regrouped and dug in at No Gun Ri, a hamlet 100 miles southeast of Seoul, South Korea's capital. Word was circulating that northern soldiers disguised in white peasant garb might try to penetrate U.S. lines via refugee groups.
The refugees who approached the 2nd Battalion's lines on July 26 were South Koreans ordered out of two nearby villages by American soldiers, who warned them the North Koreans were coming, Korean claimants told the AP.
Declassified records show that 1st Cavalry Division soldiers did move through that village area the previous three days.
As the refugees neared No Gun Ri, leading ox carts, some with children on their backs, American soldiers ordered them off the southbound dirt road and onto a parallel railroad track, the South Koreans said. Ex-sergeant George Preece remembered the way was being cleared for U.S. Army vehicles.
What then happened under the concrete bridge cannot be reconstructed in full detail five decades later. Some ex-GIs poured out chilling memories of the scene, but others offered only fragments, or abruptly ended their interviews. Over the three days, no one saw everything: Koreans were cowering under fire, and Americans were dug into positions over hundreds of yards of hilly terrain.
But old soldiers in their late 60s or 70s identified the No Gun Ri bridge from photographs, remembered the approximate dates, and corroborated the core of the Koreans' account: that American troops kept the refugees pinned under the bridge in late July 1950, and killed almost all of them.
"It was just wholesale slaughter," Patterson said.
Both Koreans and several ex-GIs said the killing began when American planes suddenly swooped in and strafed an area where the white-clad refugees were resting.
Bodies fell everywhere, and terrified parents dragged children into a narrow culvert beneath the tracks, the Koreans told the AP.
Declassified U.S. Air Force mission reports from mid-1950 show that pilots sometimes attacked "people in white," apparently because of suspicions North Korean soldiers were disguised among them. The report for one mission of four F-80 jets, for example, said the airborne controller "said to fire on people in white clothes. Were about 50 in group."
Forward controllers in light planes directed pilots to such unplanned targets in midflight. The Korean claimants say a light plane circled their area immediately before the strafing.
But ex-GIs said the strafing may have been a mistake. A company commander had called for an airstrike, but against enemy artillery miles up the road, they said.
Veteran Delos Flint remembers being caught with other soldiers in the strafing and piling into a culvert with refugees. Then "somebody, maybe our guys, was shooting in at us," he said. He and his comrades eventually slipped out.
Retired Col. Robert M. Carroll, then a 25-year-old first lieutenant, remembers battalion riflemen opening fire on the refugees from their foxholes.
"This is right after we get orders that nobody comes through, civilian, military, nobody," said Carroll, of Lansdowne, Va.
That morning, the U.S. 8th Army had radioed orders throughout the Korean front that began, "No repeat no refugees will be permitted to cross battle lines at any time," according to declassified documents located at the National Archives in Washington.
Two days earlier, 1st Cavalry Division headquarters issued a more explicit order: "No refugees to cross the front line. Fire everyone trying to cross lines. Use discretion in case of women and children."
In the neighboring 25th Infantry Division, the commander, Maj. Gen. William B. Kean, told his troops that since South Koreans were to have been evacuated from the battle zone, "all civilians seen in this area are to be considered as enemy and action taken accordingly." His staff relayed this as "considered as unfriendly and shot."
Military experts in the law of war told the AP they had never heard of such blanket "kill" orders in the U.S. military.
"An order to fire on civilians is patently an illegal order," said retired Col. Scott Silliman of Duke University, an Air Force lawyer for 25 years.
Carroll said he "wasn't convinced this was enemy," and he got the rifle companies to cease firing on the refugees. The lieutenant then shepherded a boy to safety under a double-arched concrete railroad bridge nearby, where shaken and wounded Koreans were gathered. He said he saw no threat.
"There weren't any North Koreans in there the first day, I'll tell you that. It was mainly women and kids and old men," recalled Carroll, who said he then left the area and knows nothing about what followed.
The Americans directed the refugees into the bridge underpasses -- each 80 feet long, 23 feet wide, 30 feet high -- and after dark opened fire on them from nearby machine-gun positions, the Koreans said.
Veterans said Capt. Melbourne C. Chandler, after speaking with superior officers by radio, had ordered machine-gunners from his heavy-weapons company to set up near the tunnel mouths and open fire.
"Chandler said, 'The hell with all those people. Let's get rid of all of them'," said Eugene Hesselman of Fort Mitchell, Ky. " ... We didn't know if they were North or South Koreans. ... We were there only a couple of days and we didn't know them from a load of coal."
Ex-GIs believe the order was cleared at battalion headquarters, a half-mile to the rear, or at a higher level. Chandler and other key officers are now dead, but the AP was able to locate the colonel who commanded the battalion, Herbert B. Heyer, 88.
Heyer, of Sandy Springs, Ga., denied knowing anything about the shootings and said, "I know I didn't give such an order." Veterans said the colonel apparently was leaving battalion operations to subordinates at the time.
The bursts of gunfire killed those near the tunnel entrances first, the Korean claimants said.
"People pulled dead bodies around them for protection," said Chung Koo-ho, 61. "Mothers wrapped their children with blankets and hugged them with their backs toward the entrances. ... My mother died on the second day of shooting."
Recalled machine-gunner Edward L. Daily: "Some may have been trying to crawl deeper for protection. When you see something like that and you're frightened, you start to claw."
During three nights under fire, some trapped refugees managed to slip away, but others were shot as they tried to escape or crawled out to find clean water to drink, the Koreans said.
Veterans disagreed on whether gunfire came from the underpasses.
Some, like ex-sergeant James T. Kerns of Piedmont, S.C., said the Americans were answering fire from among the refugees. Hesselman said, "Every now and then you'd hear a shot, like a rifle shot." But others recalled only heavy barrages of American firepower, not hostile fire. "I don't remember shooting coming out," said ex-rifleman Louis Allen of Bristol, Tenn.
The Koreans said the Americans may have been seeing their own comrades' fire, ricocheting through from the tunnels' opposite ends. That's possible, said Preece.
"It could actually have happened, that they were seeing our own fire. ... We were scared to death," said Preece, a career soldier who later fought in Vietnam.
On July 28, the 7th Cavalry was told to prepare to pull back again early the next morning. The final barrage still echoes in the memories of old soldiers.
"On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming," said Daily, of Clarksville, Tenn., who went on to earn a battlefield commission in Korea.
Sounds of slaughter haunt Park Hee-sook's memory, too.
"I can still hear the moans of women dying in a pool of blood," said Park, then a girl of 16. "Children cried and clung to their dead mothers."
Not everyone fired, veterans said.
"Some of us did and some of us didn't," said Flint, of Clio, Mich., the soldier who had been briefly caught in the culvert with the refugees. "... I wouldn't fire at anybody in the tunnel like that. It was civilians just trying to hide."
Kerns, a machine gunner, said he fired over the refugees' heads. "I would not fire into a bunch of women."
Once the fury subsided, Kerns said, he, Preece and another GI found at least seven dead North Korean soldiers in the underpasses, wearing uniforms under peasant white.
But Preece, of Dunville, Ky., said he doesn't remember making such a search or even hearing that North Koreans were found. None of the other veterans, when asked, remembered seeing North Koreans.
Kerns also said weapons were recovered. Hesselman said someone later displayed a submachine gun. Preece recalled only "hearsay" about weapons.
All 24 South Korean survivors interviewed individually by the AP said they remembered no North Koreans or gunfire directed at the Americans.
Secret U.S. military intelligence reports from those days, since declassified, place the North Korean front line four miles from No Gun Ri on July 26, when the refugees entered the underpasses.
Early on July 29, the 7th Cavalry pulled back. North Korean troops who moved in found "about 400 bodies of old and young people and children," the North Korean newspaper Cho Sun In Min Bo reported three weeks later.
Some ex-GIs today estimate 100 or fewer were killed. But those close to the bridge, from Chandler's H Company, generally put the total at about 200. "A lot" also were killed in the strafing, they say.
The North Koreans buried some dead in unknown locations and surviving relatives buried others, the villagers said. Because families then scattered across South Korea, the claimants said, they have the names of only 120 dead, primarily their own relatives.
The war, in all, claimed an estimated 1 million South Korean civilian casualties -- killed, wounded or missing. Almost 37,000 Americans died.
At 1st Cavalry headquarters, division commander Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay was told South Korean refugees were killed by North Korean troops in a crossfire at No Gun Ri, the division information officer recalled. "I think that's what he believed," said Harold D. Steward, an ex-colonel from San Diego.
Relevant unit documents say nothing about a crossfire, about North Korean soldiers killed under a bridge, or anything else about No Gun Ri.
One battalion lieutenant located by the AP said he was in the area but knew nothing about the killing of civilians. "I have honestly never, ever heard of this from either my soldiers or superiors or my friends,'' said John C. Lippincott of Stone Mountain, Ga. He said he could have missed it because "we were extremely spread out.''
The villagers say they tried to file a compensation claim with a U.S. claims office in Seoul in 1960, but were told they missed a deadline. Later, they say, Korean police warned one man, survivor Yang Hae-chan, to keep quiet about the 1950 events. But as authoritarian South Korea liberalized in the 1990s, they revived their case and sent petitions to Washington. None was acknowledged, they say.
In August 1997, a claim signed by 30 petitioners was filed with South Korea's Government Compensation Committee. Having researched histories, they pointed a finger at the 1st Cavalry.
In response, the U.S. Armed Forces Claims Service said there was "no evidence ... to show that the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division was in the area." A lower-level South Korean compensation committee said people were killed at No Gun Ri but it had no proof of U.S. involvement. In April 1998, the national panel rejected the case, saying a five-year statute of limitations expired long ago.
The AP subsequently reconstructed unit movements from map coordinates in declassified war records. They showed that four 1st Cavalry Division battalions were in the area at the time of the alleged incident.
Months of tracing veterans -- some 130 interviews by telephone and in person -- then pinpointed the companies involved. The AP also pored through hundreds of boxes of once-secret documents at the National Archives and other repositories to find pieces of the story.
The laws and customs of war condemn indiscriminate killing of civilians, even if a few enemy soldiers are among a large number of noncombatants killed, military experts note. The Korean War record shows Army courts-martial only for individual murders of Koreans, nothing on a large scale.
As for civil liability, the U.S. government is largely protected by U.S. law against foreign claims related to "combatant activities." The Korean claimants say the killings were not combat-related -- the enemy was miles away.
"We want the truth, justice and due respect for our human rights," they wrote in a 1997 petition to President Clinton.
One ex-GI objects that ``a bunch of lawyers'' can't run a war.
"War is not just,'' said Norman Tinkler. ``There's things that goes on that we can't comprehend, but it has to be done. And it's the individual that has to make the decision.''
But others who were there said No Gun Ri didn't have to happen. The refugees could have been screened up on the road or checked out under the bridge, Kerns and Hesselman said.
"The command looked at it as getting rid of the problem in the easiest way. That was to shoot them in a group," said Daily. Today, he said, "we all share a guilt feeling, something that remains with everyone."
The late Col. Gilmon A. Huff, who took over the 2nd Battalion from Heyer three days after the pullback from No Gun Ri, was interviewed before his death earlier this year and said he knew nothing of what happened at the bridge.
But he "heard" about refugee killings and told his men it was wrong, Huff said at his Abbeville, S.C., home.
"You can't kill people just for being there," he told the AP.
The bridge at No Gun Ri still stands today. For 49 years its concrete was deeply scarred by bullets -- until railroad workers this month patched over the holes.
AP Investigative Researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this report.
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Korean villagers recall death and terror beneath a bridge
By SANG-HUN CHOE
Associated Press Writer
NO GUN RI, South Korea (AP)-Some tell the story haltingly, others in a rush of words, a few in tears - a tale of terror and death in the early days of the Korean War.
They are old now, some in failing health. But the former Korean refugees still offer vivid descriptions of what happened here in late July 1950, of being strafed by U.S. planes and then fired on by U.S. soldiers.
Chung Koo-shik, then 16, told The Associated Press that "the planes came, raining down bombs and big bullets. The planes shrieked past repeatedly. People ran for the shrubs and trees. A lot of people died.
"Something hot dropped on my back. It was the severed head of a baby."
Lee Yoo-ja, then a 26-year-old housewife, says "dirt and gravel rained down. Oxcarts were burning ... Dead bodies and cows were everywhere, spewing blood."
Yang Hae-sook says she lost an eye in the strafing, and was herded into the No Gun Ri bridge tunnels with other survivors. She was 12.
"We thought it was safe. The tunnel I was in was packed with people. I saw people from my village and thought it was okay. Then the shooting came.
"Bullets ricocheted off the concrete and hit the people like popcorn in a frying pan. Mother wrapped me with a quilt and hugged me.
"It was shooting from both sides. When there was shooting coming from one side, we rushed to the other side. When the bullets came, we could not even raise our heads. We just dug under dead bodies."
Yang says she lost her grandmother, an elder brother and a baby brother, as well as an aunt and her husband and their two daughters, at No Gun Ri.
Park Hee-sook, who was 16, says she lost her father, mother and a sister before a U.S. soldier saved her."It was still the first day of the shooting, and after lying under corpses, I decided to crawl out," she said. "I squirmed through piles of bodies. I was all covered with blood. I stepped out and stood there and shouted the only English word I knew. I said, 'Hello! Hello!'
"I just stood there and cried. "From the hill, a soldier looked at me for a while with binoculars. He beckoned me to come up the hill. Some soldiers came and looked at me without talking. One of them checked to see if I was injured. ... They later sent me to the south on a truck."
Park Sun-yong, then 25, says she was desperate by the second day in the tunnels.
"It was dusk. My 5-year-old son kept crying for food. My 2-year-old daughter had already been killed when her grandmother took her and walked outside in the hope of appealing to the soldiers.
"I crawled out with my son and climbed a hill. A terrible crackle of shooting came down and my son was hit in his thighs. Both his thighs were torn with bullets. It was strange, but my boy kept saying he wanted food and he wanted to go see his dad.
"I saw an American soldier and begged for mercy. I shouted to him that we were not bad people, not communists. But he shot at us again.
"A bullet ripped through my waist and hit my son's chest. I lay there still, my mind blank. Two soldiers came over, a fat one and a tall one. They looked down at us and talked to each other. Later more soldiers came and they wrapped my son in a white bag and buried him. They took me to an ambulance.
"That day, I saw the two faces of America."
EDITOR'S NOTE - Associated Press Writer Reid G. Miller contributed to this report.
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Veterans: Other Incidents of Refugees Killed by GIs During Korea Retreat
EDITOR'S NOTE -- The Associated Press recently reported on the killings of up to 400 South Korean refugees at the hamlet of No Gun Ri during the 1950-53 Korean War. That story briefly mentioned other incidents in which, witnesses said, refugees died at U.S. hands. Here is a follow-up report on those episodes.
By SANG-HUN CHOE
CHARLES J. HANLEY
and MARTHA MENDOZA
Associated Press Writers
On a single deadly day in August 1950, six weeks into the Korean War, a U.S. general and other Army officers ordered the destruction of two strategic bridges as South Korean refugees streamed across, killing hundreds of civilians, according to ex-GIs, Korean eyewitnesses and U.S. military documents.
An old soldier recalled the critical moment at one bridge.
"I said, 'There are people!' And they said, 'You have to blow it! There's no other way!" ex-Army engineer Joseph M. Ipock of Jackson, N.J., told The Associated Press.
The AP learned of the bridge blowings and two other incidents, machine-gun and mortar attacks on refugees, while interviewing ex-GIs about what happened at No Gun Ri, South Korea, in late July 1950. In that case, as reported Sept. 29, veterans corroborated Korean accounts of hundreds of refugees killed at U.S. hands.
One bridge blowing, with its refugee deaths, was also recorded briefly in an official Army chronicle, but not until 10 years after the event.
The trail of dead civilians, many of them women and children, has been a hidden underside to a well-known chapter in U.S. military history, the southward retreat of three Army divisions into a defensible perimeter across South Korea's Naktong River in July-August 1950.
The withdrawal was often confused. The U.S. Army itself told South Korean civilians, citizens of an allied nation, to head south. But the AP found in researching declassified Army documents that U.S. commanders also issued standing orders to shoot civilians along the warfront to guard against North Korean soldiers disguised in the white clothes of Korean peasants. Military lawyers call those orders illegal.
Just days into his first combat command, the 1st Cavalry Division's Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay told reporters he was sure most of the white-clad columns pressing toward American lines were North Korean guerrillas.
"We must find a means to hold these refugees in place," the division commander said.
Days later, on Aug. 3, 1950, Gay waited on the east bank of the Naktong River as his division retreated across the bridge at Waegwan, the last crossing open to North Korean units reported massing more than 15 miles to the west.
His troops had failed in repeated efforts to turn back the flood of refugees, even firing warning shots over their heads.
"Finally, it was nearly dark," Gay later wrote to an Army historian. "There was nothing else to be done."
Then he gave a fateful command.
[Editor's Note: Edward L. Daily says he now recognizes he could not have been at the scene and instead learned of it second-hand from soldiers who were there. Full Story]
"General Gay stood up in the front of his jeep and shouted out, 'Blow the son of a bitch!'," veteran Edward L. Daily recalled.
The pre-set charges exploded, rapid fire, shattering the supports, dropping one of the bridge's hulking spans into the muddy waters of the Naktong.
"They went right down,'' remembered ex-lieutenant Daily, of Clarksville, Tenn. ''It was like a slow-motion movie. All those refugees went right down into the river."
"It was a tough decision," Gay wrote the historian, "because up in the air with the bridge went hundreds of refugees."
The division's 1950 war diary did not report the refugees' deaths. But this later narrative by Gay, who died in 1983, led to a brief mention in an official war history published in 1960.
What happened earlier that August day, however, 25 miles downriver at the village of Tuksong-dong, has never been reported.
Ex-sergeant Carroll F. Kinsman remembers the streams of white-clad humanity shuffling across the 650-foot-long Tuksong-dong bridge -- women clutching children, old men, overloaded ox carts.
"We stayed up all that night and searched them," Kinsman, a veteran of the 14th Combat Engineers Battalion, said in an AP interview. They found no infiltrators, he said.
Retreating Americans had not yet sighted North Korean units near the river around Tuksong-dong on Aug. 3, the declassified record shows. But American officers knew the enemy would arrive eventually. Pressed by a timetable, they proved unable to keep the refugees back from the bridge, rigged for instant demolition.
Soldiers fired over the heads of those crowding across, and tried to warn them the bridge would be blown up, said the veterans, men in their 60s or 70s.
"They tried to stop the refugees from coming across and they wouldn't stop. They were abutment to abutment," ex-engineer Leon L. Denis of Huntsville, Ala., recalled in an AP interview before his death Aug. 31.
The men of Company A, 14th Engineers, had taken two days to set 7,000 pounds of explosives on the steel-girder bridge. When the detonation order came at 7:01 a.m., "it lifted up and turned it sideways and it was full of refugees end to end," said Kinsman, of Gautier, Miss.
''These people were on the bridge, and you saw the spans of steel flying and you knew they were killed,'' said ex-GI Rudolph Giannelli of Port Saint Lucie, Fla., driver for Col. Richard W. Stephens, the 21st Infantry Regiment commander who was the last officer across the bridge.
In separate AP interviews, Kinsman, Denis and Giannelli said hundreds of civilians were killed. Ipock said he could see only 30 or 40 refugees from his vantage point.
''There was people on that bridge when it went up," Ipock said. ''And during war that's the story. They're up there and they pull the plunger and that's it."
Kim Bok-jong, 73, a Korean who said he was 200 yards from the bridge, out of view around a hill, remembered that "people rushed back toward us and said many people died when the Americans blew up the bridge."
The dying did not end there, he said. Panicked refugee families stranded on the far shore tried to swim the river, Korea's largest.
"Many -- I mean many -- people drowned," Kim told the AP. "... Women with kids were exhausted before reaching the southern bank and disappeared under water. Sometimes kids were abandoned in the middle of the river."
The veterans said they don't know who gave the detonation order at Tuksong-dong. The operation was noted in the 14th Engineers report with a simple "Results, excellent."
From the bridges, the U.S. Army units moved into defensive positions along the Naktong, in what came to be known as the Pusan Perimeter. They had arrived at the river after weeks of retreat through South Korea -- and after countless, sometimes bloody encounters with refugees.
Four 1st Cavalry Division veterans told the AP that on Aug. 2, the day before the bridge blowings, they were among several dozen soldiers retreating toward the Naktong and being trailed by perhaps 80 white-clad Koreans.
In mid-afternoon, five North Korean soldiers -- disguised in white -- appeared in front of the Americans, they said. Veteran Edward L. Daily said the North Koreans opened fire and were quickly killed. Another ex-GI, Eugene Hesselman, remembered it differently, saying the intruders surrendered and were led away.
Because it was believed they came from among the refugees, said Hesselman, of Fort Mitchell, Ky., "we got orders to eliminate them (the refugees). And we mowed them all down. The Army wouldn't take chances."
Scattering too late, every man, woman and child was killed, Daily said. He and veteran Robert G. Russell said they found about 10 disguised North Korean soldiers among the dead. Hesselman said he doesn't recall that infiltrators were found.
"I didn't like to do it," said Russell, of West Fargo, N.D. "It was just pure survival at the time."
About a week earlier, a half-dozen 1st Cavalry Division veterans recounted, mortar fire was directed at possibly a few hundred refugees moving down a railroad track about 100 miles southeast of Seoul.
Americans had been ambushed the night before by North Koreans who mingled with refugees, said ex-GI James McClure. Now, he said, he spotted another white-clad group, including women and children, through his binoculars, and put in a call to a command post.
"The colonel contacted mortar and decided to kill them instead of allowing them through the line," said McClure, of Federal Way, Wash. He could not recall the colonel's name.
When the mortar fire hit, "there were legs, arms and bodies flying everywhere," McClure recounted. Veteran Henry Matthias of Baltimore said he believes about 70 refugees were killed.
Matthias said he and GIs around him didn't fire because "the North Koreans were coming in, but they were a long way away." Other ex-GIs said North Korean uniforms and weapons were found on bodies afterward.
Some officers and other Korean War veterans drew a distinction between killing civilians simply because of suspicions of enemy among them, and destroying a bridge -- a strategic necessity -- with refugees on it.
But others, looking back, said refugees on targeted bridges should have been protected -- for example, by deploying soldiers to hold them back and retrieving the soldiers later by boat.
Three days after blowing the Waegwan bridge, Gay did send boats across the Naktong, to bring over 6,000 stranded refugees from the west bank, the declassified record shows.
The North Koreans did not appear in force on the west bank between Waegwan and Tuksong-dong until Aug. 7, four days after the bridges were blown, the record shows.
From a 50-year vantage point, historians are beginning to look anew at those first desperate weeks of the Korean War.
"Civilians were in the way, their friendliness could not be counted on, they were scary and it was unclear who the enemy was," Marilyn Young, a New York University history professor, said in an interview. "The U.S. Army was taking the population as a whole as the potential enemy."
Killing of noncombatants was then -- as now -- a crime under the international law of war and the U.S. military code, military law experts note.
Although reports of North Korean atrocities were widespread at the time, possible war crimes by American troops were not an issue during the 1950-53 war, a West Point specialist noted.
''This now will change the way we look at the Korean War,'' said Gary D. Solis, a law professor at the U.S. Military Academy.
Last year the South Korean government rejected, on a technicality, a compensation claim filed by survivors of the bloodshed at No Gun Ri in July 1950. But after the AP published its No Gun Ri report, in which U.S. veterans said their unit killed a large number of refugees under a railroad trestle at that South Korean hamlet, the U.S. Army and Seoul government announced investigations.
In addition, since the Sept. 29 AP report, accounts have surfaced in South Korea and the United States of still other civilian killings at U.S. hands in the Korean War.
Those reports have yet to be corroborated. But Defense Secretary William Cohen said last week that after investigating No Gun Ri, "we'll see if there's substance to the other allegations." He did not specify what new allegations the Pentagon may look at.
AP Investigative Researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this report.
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Thousands perished in North Korean outrages during war
By The Associated Press
North Korean atrocities made headlines and outraged much of the world during the 1950-53 Korean War.
Some of the first reports, in July 1950, told of captured U.S. soldiers bound and summarily executed by North Korean troops near the battle lines in southeast Korea.
In September 1950, U.S. Army units retaking Taejon, South Korea, reported finding the bodies of hundreds of Korean civilians, slaughtered in large groups and hurriedly buried before the North Koreans retreated.
A U.S. Army war crimes report later estimated the Taejon dead at 5,000 to 7,500, including businessmen, police and other government employees, and 42 American prisoners of war. Many had been severely beaten and mutilated, it said.
The North Koreans, for their part, alleged that earlier the southern government had murdered thousands of communist sympathizers around Taejon before the initial South Korean retreat from the city in July 1950.
Official U.S. sources and Western journalists reported such South Korean atrocities during the war. In one case, two South Korean army officers were sentenced to life in prison in 1951 for leading an army massacre of 187 people in a South Korean village deemed supportive of communist guerrillas.
The total number killed by war crimes in Korea remains as imprecise today as the figures for total casualties in the war.
United Nations and other sources approximate the war's South Korean civilian casualties - dead, wounded and missing - at about 1 million people, and North Korean civilian casualties at up to twice that, many of them killed or wounded in the heavy U.S. bombing campaign.
The U.S. Army, in November 1951, cited U.N. figures saying 25,575 South Korean civilians were killed during the communist occupation of South Korea. But the South Korean government later put that toll at 129,000.
As for prisoners of war, the Pentagon eventually calculated that almost 8,000 U.S. military personnel were killed or otherwise died while in the hands of the North Koreans or their Chinese allies.
Prisoners were "beaten, wounded, starved and tortured ... and-or forced to march long distances without benefit of adequate food, water, shelter, clothing or medical care," a U.S. Senate investigative subcommittee said in 1954. It condemned North Korean actions as "heinous and barbaric."
Treatment of prisoners was generally conceded to have improved, however, as the war went on.
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