bbc.co.uk BBC - History World Wars: Kill 'em All': The American Military in Korea 12-15 minutes The Forgotten War The Korean War was a bloody conflict. It left Korea, North and South, with several million dead and the UN forces involved in the fighting with over 100,000 casualties. But despite fighting as intense and as violent as any other conflict since World War Two, Korea has always been history's 'Forgotten War'. ...US commanders repeatedly, and without ambiguity, ordered forces under their control to target and kill Korean refugees caught on the battlefield. While atrocities conducted both by North and South Korean forces have already been documented, recently a much darker side to the US involvement in the Korean War has begun to emerge. It casts a shadow over the conduct of US forces during the conflict, particularly of officers and generals in command. Declassified military documents recently found in the US National Archives show clearly how US commanders repeatedly, and without ambiguity, ordered forces under their control to target and kill Korean refugees caught on the battlefield. More disturbing still have been the published testimonies of Korean survivors who recall such killings, and the frank accounts of those American veterans brave enough to admit involvement. A Korean captured by a US soldier Korean captured by US soldier © The Korean War began on 25 June 1950 when communist North Korea invaded the South with six army divisions. These North Korean forces, backed by impressive Soviet equipment including tanks, made quick gains into the territory. The United States decided to intervene in the defence of the South and, taking advantage of the Soviet absence from the UN Security Council, proceeded to press for UN resolutions condemning the invasion. Days later a resolution was passed calling upon member countries to give assistance to South Korea to repulse the attack. General Douglas MacArthur, then in charge of US forces in the Pacific and of the occupation of Japan, was appointed commander of the joint forces. Undertrained and underprepared Things began to go wrong almost immediately for the American troops. Those who were rushed to the front line straight from occupation duty in Tokyo in July 1950 were undertrained and underprepared. They were also badly led and quickly defeated by superior North Korean forces. US commanders were outmanoeuvred by North Korean units using guerrilla methods to target US lines from the rear. Text reads: QT (Kean) directed we notify Chief of Police that all civilians moving around in combat zone will be considered as unfriendly and shot. Action taken: PM notified to have chief of police report here to be informed. Detail from US military records © But there was another problem. The surprise attack from the North had generated a very real refugee crisis. Just weeks after the conflict had begun, up to two million refugees were streaming across the battlefield; they clogged the roads and the UN lines. Under pressure and fearing North Korean infiltration, the US leadership panicked. Soon command saw all civilians as the enemy regardless. On 26 July the US 8th Army, the highest level of command in Korea, issued orders to stop all Korean civilians. 'No, repeat, no refugees will be permitted to cross battle lines at any time. Movement of all Koreans in group will cease immediately.' On the very same day the first major disaster involving civilians struck. ...up to 400 South Korean civilians gathered by the bridge were killed by US forces from the 7th Cavalry Regiment. The stone bridge near the village of No Gun Ri spans a small stream. It is similar to a great many others that cross the landscape of South Korea, except that the walls of this bridge were, until very recently, pockmarked by hundreds of bullet holes. On the very day that the US 8th Army delivered its stop refugee order in July 1950, up to 400 South Korean civilians gathered by the bridge were killed by US forces from the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Some were shot above the bridge, on the railroad tracks. Others were strafed by US planes. More were killed under the arches in an ordeal that local survivors say lasted for three days. Deadly orders Yang Hae Chan, a Korean survivor of the massacre at No Gun Ri Yang Hae Chan, a survivor of the massacre at No Gun Ri © 'The floor under the bridge was a mixture of gravel and sand. People clawed with their bare hands to make holes to hide in,' recalls survivor Yang Hae Chan. 'Other people piled up the dead like a barricade, and hid behind the bodies as a shield against the bullets.' Corroborating the Korean survivors' testimony are the accounts of 35 veterans of the 7th Cavalry Regiment who recall events at No Gun Ri. Perspectives differ, but the detailed memories of veterans recalling events burnt into their souls by their first days in combat are as painful as they are shocking. 'There was a lieutenant screaming like a madman, fire on everything, kill 'em all,' recalls 7th Cavalry veteran Joe Jackman. 'I didn't know if they were soldiers or what. Kids, there was kids out there, it didn't matter what it was, eight to 80, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot 'em all.' Along with the My Lai atrocity 20 years later in Vietnam, the killings discovered at No Gun Ri mark one of the largest single massacres of civilians by American forces in the 20th century. When the news of the killings at No Gun Ri was first broken by a team of investigative journalists from the Associated Press in September 1999, the effects were to be as seismic as the allegations themselves. Darkness revealed America was deeply shocked by the AP report. Previously, the US Army had dismissed the claims of South Korean survivors who, since 1960, had been trying to tell the truth about the killings at No Gun Ri. The Army said that US forces were not even in the area of No Gun Ri at the time of the killings. But not only did new evidence put No Gun Ri firmly within the US 7th Cavalry area of operations at the time, the discovery of US veterans willing to talk about events 50 years later made the massacre undeniable. The Clinton administration quickly directed that the Pentagon, specifically the Army, conduct an investigation into what actually happened at No Gun Ri. ...as late as January 1951, the US 8th Army was detailing all units in Korea that refugees be attacked with all available fire including bombing. Since the original AP report, more documents detailing refugee 'kill' orders have been unearthed at the US national archives. They point to the widespread targeting of refugees by commanders well after No Gun Ri. In August 1950 there were orders detailing that refugees crossing the Naktong River be shot. Later in the same month, General Gay, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division (of which the 7th Cavalry Regiment involved at No Gun Ri was part), actually ordered artillery units to target civilians on the battlefield. And as late as January 1951, the US 8th Army was detailing all units in Korea that refugees be attacked with all available fire including bombing. Text reads: This reiterated previous instructions that you have complete authority in your zone to stop all civilian traffic in any direction. Responsibility to place fire on them to include bombing rests with you. Detail from US military instructions © New allegations have also emerged of the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Korea. In August 1950, 80 civilians are reported to have been killed while seeking sanctuary in a shrine by the village of Kokaan-Ri, near Masan in South Korea. Other survivors recall 400 civilians killed by US naval artillery on the beaches near the port of Pohang in September 1950, and dozens of villages across southern South Korea report the repeated low-level strafing by US planes of 'people in white' during July and August 1950. A total of 61 separate incidents involving the killing of civilians by US forces are now logged with the South Korean authorities. Denial Text reads: The army has requested that we strafe all civilian refugee parties that are noted approaching our positions. Detail from US Air Force memo © The Pentagon inquiry into No Gun Ri was finally released in January 2001. The basis of its conclusions are doubtful. The investigation acknowledged the killing of civilians at No Gun Ri by US forces, but it concluded that the killings that took place there were not deliberate attacks but 'an unfortunate tragedy inherent to war'. ...clear orders had been given by command not to let refugees through the lines. Yet whatever the confusion on the battlefield at the time, clear orders had been given by command not to let refugees through the lines. More importantly, documents showed orders had actually been received by the 8th Cavalry Regiment, sister to the 7th Cavalry involved at No Gun Ri. 'No refugees to cross the line. Fire everyone trying to cross the lines. Use discretion in the case of women and children.' This was an order from the headquarters of the 1st Cavalry Division. More documents were discovered that showed that the Air Force was strafing civilians at the request of the Army. Air Force Colonel Turner Rogers wrote a memo the day before events at No Gun Ri. 'The Army has requested we strafe all civilian refugee parties that are noted approaching our positions,' the memo read. It went on to confirm the instructions had been acted upon. 'To date, we have complied with the army request in this respect.' Veterans speak out Despite this the Pentagon maintains in the report that no orders were issued to shoot refugees at No Gun Ri. This rather narrow frame of reference effectively ignores whatever evidence there might be of other orders given at the time to treat civilians as the enemy. Only orders specifically mentioning No Gun Ri would qualify. Even so this is a surprising conclusion to draw for a number of other reasons. ...a significant number of the veterans interviewed did in fact recall orders to open fire on the civilians at No Gun Ri. Firstly, the oral testimony given by veterans of the 7th Cavalry to the Pentagon during its 14-month investigation may contradict the Pentagon's position. This evidence has never been made fully public, but what has been discovered by those allowed access to the material, is that a significant number of the veterans interviewed did in fact recall orders to open fire on the civilians at No Gun Ri. Secondly, the 7th Cavalry communications log - the log that might have contained evidence of such orders had they been given - has gone missing. The significance of this is highlighted by Charles Hanley, one of the AP journalists who first investigated No Gun Ri. '[The Pentagon] report declares that there were no orders at No Gun Ri - and it declares that flatly - but it doesn't have the document that would prove that one way or the other.' Seeking the truth Korean men at a ceremony A ceremony in Korea commemorating victims of the Korean War © The inconsistencies that surround the Pentagon's investigation have even led those brought in as independent advisors to voice doubts. Pete McCloskey, a decorated Korean War veteran and former Congressman, was brought in to advise on the Pentagon report. He was disappointed with what was finally published. 'I think the American government, the Pentagon and most government agencies don't want to see the truth come out if it will embarrass the government. I think the American government, the Pentagon and most government agencies don't want to see the truth come out if it will embarrass the government. 'I think it's almost a rule of political science. The government will always lie about embarrassing matters. And when you are up in the Pentagon a full Colonel and have a chance to make General, and General with the chance to become Chief of Staff, there's as much politics high in the Pentagon as there is in the halls of Congress. And I think that the Army just chose to try and down play the terrible character of Army leadership in 1950.' It is now nearly 50 years since the end of the conflict in Korea. The only major American investigation into the killing of refugees focused exclusively on the activities of the US Army over a small geographic area during one month of a conflict that lasted three years. Contradicting testimony from veterans and Korean survivors, the report concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that orders to kill civilians were given at No Gun Ri. Clearly there are still many unanswered questions over American involvement in Korea, questions that were not answered by the narrow view of the US Army's investigation. Yet this burden now falls not on those responsible for giving the orders, but on the veterans and survivors alike. Find out more Books The Bridge at No Gun Ri by Charles J Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe and Martha Mendoza with researcher Randy Herschaft (Henry Holt and Co, 2001) About the author Jeremy Williams produced Kill 'em All, a Timewatch documentary about the No Gun Ri killings and American military conduct in Korea.

The Korean War Atrocities No One Wants to Talk About For decades they covered up the U.S. massacre of civilians at No Gun Ri and elsewhere. This is why we never learn our lessons. by Jim Bovard via The American Conservative on June 26, 2020 June 25th was the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers fought bravely in that war, and almost 37,000 were killed. But the media is ignoring perhaps the war’s most important lesson: the U.S. government has almost unlimited sway to hide its own war crimes. During the Korean War, Americans were deluged with official pronouncements about how the U.S. military was taking all possible steps to protect innocent civilians. Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the U.S. was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that, “war crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.” In 1999, forty-six years after the cease fire in Korea, the Associated Press exposed a 1950 massacre of Korean refugees at No Gun Ri. U.S. troops drove Koreans out of their village and forced them to remain on a railroad embankment. Beginning on July 25, 1950, the refugees were strafed by U.S. planes and machine guns over the following three days. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were killed. The 1999 AP story was widely denounced by American politicians and some media outlets as a slander on American troops. The Pentagon promised an exhaustive investigation. In January 2001, the Pentagon released a 300-page report purportedly proving that the No Gun Ri killings were merely “an unfortunate tragedy” caused by trigger-happy soldiers frightened by approaching refugees. President Bill Clinton announced his “regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri.” In a January 2001 interview, Clinton was asked why he used “regret” instead of “apology.” He declared, “I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the government had participated in something that was terrible.” Clinton specified that there was no evidence of “wrongdoing high enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the government was responsible.” In 2005, Sahr Conway-Lanz, a Harvard University doctoral student, discovered a letter in the National Archives from the U.S. ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, sent to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the day the No Gun Ri massacre commenced. Muccio summarized a new policy from a meeting between U.S. military and South Korean officials: “If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.” The new policy was radioed to Army units around Korea on the morning the No Gun Ri massacre began. The U.S. military feared that North Korean troops might be hiding amidst the refugees. The Pentagon initially claimed that its investigators never saw Muccio’s letter but it was in the specific research file used for its report. Conway-Lanz’s 2006 book Collateral Damage quoted an official U.S. Navy history of the first six months of the Korean War stating that the policy of strafing civilians was “wholly defensible.” An official Army history noted: “Eventually, it was decided to shoot anyone who moved at ... View on The American Conservative Add to Collection time The Great Fear of 1776 Against the backdrop of the Revolution, American Indians recognized a looming threat to their very existence. 12 View Connections

thenation.com Can the United States Own Up to Its War Crimes During the Korean War? By Tim ShorrockTwitter March 30, 2015 11-14 minutes Can the United States Own Up to Its War Crimes During the Korean War? Can the United States Own Up to Its War Crimes During the Korean War? An American journalist uncovers some ugly truths about the “forgotten war.” March 30, 2015 When I was living in San Francisco in 1981, I met and became friends with Chun Sun-Tae, a Korean immigrant who had come to the United States as a college student in the 1960s and ran a small luggage shop in Oakland. James, as he was known, had grown up in the 1940s in the city of Kaesong in what was then the northern frontier of South Korea. One warm day in June, 1950, he went camping with a group of friends at a nearby lake. The next morning, they woke to the sounds of artillery and gunfire: Kaesong had just been overrun by the Korean People’s Army and was now under control of the communist North. Over the next three years, Kaesong would change hands several more times, and eventually became the site for the truce talks that led to the 1953 armistice that ended the fighting. It’s now located—as the photo above illustrates—just a few miles north of the current border in North Korea. As a result of its unfortunate location, Kaesong was attacked several times during the war by US bombers and jet aircraft, who completely controlled Korean skies and dropped huge quantities of napalm and bombs on the country. Once, James told me, an American bomb ripped through a large structure in Kaesong where townspeople had sought shelter; hundreds of people were burned to death. He described the experience of an American bombing in Memory of Forgotten War, a 2013 film by Ramsey Liem, a professor emeritus at Boston College. “I still hear the sound… and then big clouds. Right after that… orange fire… blood here, shrapnel passing through my cheek.” His father sent Chun south to Seoul, where his family thought he would be safe. When the lines dividing North and South were drawn after the 1953 armistice, Kaesong remained in the North—the only major city to change hands from South to North. James never saw his father again. But years later, during the 1980s, he became one of the first Korean-Americans to visit North Korea, and was finally reunited with the surviving members of his family. Yet Korea remains divided, and tensions between North Korea and the United States are now higher than they’ve ever been. As the conflict has deepened in recent years, the nation north of the DMZ has become a source of hatred, disdain and fear. To most Americans, North Korea is an abomination, a “slave state,” ruthlessly run by a hereditary dictator, Kim Jong Un and a handful of sycophantic generals with funny hats and grim faces. Few journalists ever get past these stereotypes to report on the country’s past, or look into the reasons for its hostility to the United States. Ask most reporters in Washington, and the words they’ll use for the North are “crazy” and “irrational.” And as we saw with the sophomoric film The Interview (and its reminders at this year’s Academy Awards), Hollywood sees North Korea and its leader as an endless source of amusement and parody. But last week, for the first time in my memory, a mainstream US media outlet ran an article that not only challenged this narrow view, but cut through the haze to present the reasons for North Korea’s quite valid fear and distrust of America. “The US war crime North Korea won’t forget” was published on March 24 as a commentary in The Washington Post by Blaine Harden, a former Post reporter and the author of two books on North Korea. His first, Escape from Camp 14, told the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, one of the first people to escape from one of North Korea’s notorious prison camps (Shin, who lives in Seoul, has since changed parts of his story). Harden is now on tour for his second book, The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, which is about North Korea’s first dictator, Kim Il Sung, and a North Korean defector who flew a MIG fighter jet south during the height of the war. Harden, in other words, is someone with no illusions about the North. That makes his Post article even more compelling, and I hope it’s read far and wide, especially in Washington. After explaining how the North’s leaders use the Korean War as a propaganda tool against the United States, Harden argues that there is truth behind some of the regime’s claims. The hate is not all manufactured. It is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets. The story dates to the early 1950s, when the US Air Force, in response to the North Korean invasion that started the Korean War, bombed and napalmed cities, towns and villages across the North. It was mostly easy pickings for the Air Force, whose B-29s faced little or no opposition on many missions. The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—20 percent of the population,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, US bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops. Although the ferocity of the bombing was criticized as racist and unjustified elsewhere in the world, it was never a big story back home. US press coverage of the air war focused, instead, on “MiG alley,” a narrow patch of North Korea near the Chinese border. There, in the world’s first jet-powered aerial war, American fighter pilots competed against each other to shoot down five or more Soviet-made fighters and become “aces.” War reporters rarely mentioned civilian casualties from US carpet-bombing. It is perhaps the most forgotten part of a forgotten war. He ends with a plea for reconciliation. Since World War II, the United States has engaged in an almost unbroken chain of major and minor wars in distant and poorly understood countries. Yet for a meddlesome superpower that claims the democratic high ground, it can sometimes be shockingly incurious and self-absorbed. In the case of the bombing of North Korea, its people never really became conscious of a major war crime committed in their name. Paying attention in a democracy is a moral obligation. It is also a way to avoid repeating immoral mistakes. And if North Korea ever does change, if the Kim family were overthrown or were to voluntarily loosen its chokehold on information, a US apology for the bombing could help dispel 65 years of hate. As someone who’s spent years trying to explain the animosity between North Korea and the United States to skeptical Americans, including with many articles in The Nation, these words were a revelation to me. They also caught the attention of people I know with significant experience in both North and South Korea. “This is hugely significant,” says Christine Ahn, a Korean-American activist who is the prime mover behind a plan by Gloria Steinem and other prominent women to walk across the North-South border next month in a plea for peace on the peninsula. “In the Post, he actually writes that the US committed war crimes in Korea.” Harden, she noted, has been a major voice exposing the evils of North Korea. “While we can’t deny the existence of labor and prison camps,” said Ahn, “he’s putting North Korea in historical context. That’s what we as activists have been trying to do all along.” “We are walking to invite all concerned to imagine a new chapter in Korean history, marked by dialogue, understanding, and—ultimately—forgiveness,” Ahn told a news conference at the United Nations on March 10. As The New York Times reported: The goal of the women was to punctuate their desire for a permanent peace treaty to replace the 1953 armistice that halted, but technically did not end, the Korean War, a conflict that claimed an estimated four million lives, mostly Koreans, and separated millions of families. The organizers, a broad array of international peace activists, also see their plan as a catalyst for other steps that could revive the North-South reconciliation process, which has essentially been paralyzed by hostility, suspicion and occasional eruptions of violence. Mike Bassett, a former US Army officer who served in South Korea for most of the last decade as a tank commander and platoon sergeant, also linked Harden’s article to the need for reconciliation. “I was blown away” by the story, he told me. “This has been a subject I never expected anyone to talk about—and definitely not something as powerful as saying ‘we did commit war crimes there.’” He compared the US attitude towards Korea, summarized in the oft-repeated phrase “the forgotten war,” to Japan’s refusal to recognize its terrible misdeeds during World War II. “The US will never admit what it did in Korea.” Bassett’s knowledge runs deep. He was raised in Illinois by his grandfather, a Korean War veteran who was stationed with a US artillery battalion in the notorious “Iron Triangle.” In the months after US forces crossed the 38th parallel in a disastrous attempt to occupy the North up to the Yalu River, it was a hotly contested area where United States, North Korean and Chinese forces often clashed, frequently in hand-to-hand combat. From his grandfather, Bassett learned first-hand about the human destruction caused by US bombing and shelling. “He said his battalion decimated tons of civilians; he knew,” he said. During his last deployment in 2008, Bassett was stationed in the most northern part of the DMZ with a reconnaissance-intelligence unit that often encountered North Korean soldiers just across the border. Until then, he had hated North Koreans with all his might. But the experience at the border began to change his perceptions. “When I started pulling guard shifts on the DMZ, I’d be looking at them, and they were just like me—wet from the rain, cold, hungry. We made eye contact sometimes. I think we began to feel what each other was going through. I remembered what my grandfather had said—“we should have fought to the Yalu” and left Korea united. “That experience made me want to change from shooting artillery at the North to learning how to resolve tensions. I want the regime to end, but it has to be in a humane way. Those guys [on the border] suffer just like I did.’ After leaving the military, Bassett studied at Yonsei University in South Korea and at American University in Washington, DC. He says he spent much of 2013 in North Korea, working as a consultant for South Korea’s Ministry of Unification on a plan to organize a North-South Korean orchestra that would perform at the Peace Park on the DMZ. But the plan was scuttled after tensions escalated over North Korea’s objection to US-South Korean military exercises that Kim’s regime believes are practice runs for an invasion. Facing up to the truths of the war is central to the peace process, said Bassett. “The Korean War is still the most advanced propaganda war in human history.” I’ll have more on the 2015 Women’s Walk for Peace in Korea in a future posting.