Posted on 05/18/2008 3:30:22 PM PDT by decimon
DAEJEON, South Korea - Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.
With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.
The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were "the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War," said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.
Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.
That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is "very conservative," said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.
In addition, thousands of South Koreans who allegedly collaborated with the communist occupation were slain by southern forces later in 1950, and the invaders staged their own executions of rightists.
Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims' fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped "secret" and filed away in Washington. Communist accounts were dismissed as lies.
Only since the 1990s, and South Korea's democratization, has the truth begun to seep out.
In 2002, a typhoon's fury uncovered one mass grave. Another was found by a television news team that broke into a sealed mine. Further corroboration comes from a trickle of declassified U.S. military documents, including U.S. Army photographs of a mass killing outside this central South Korean city.
Now Kim's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has added government authority to the work of scattered researchers, family members and journalists trying to peel away the long-running cover-up. The commissioners have the help of a handful of remorseful old men.
"Even now, I feel guilty that I pulled the trigger," said Lee Joon-young, 83, one of the executioners in a secluded valley near Daejeon in early July 1950.
The retired prison guard told the AP he knew that many of those shot and buried en masse were ordinary convicts or illiterate peasants wrongly ensnared in roundups of supposed communist sympathizers. They didn't deserve to die, he said. They "knew nothing about communism."
The 17 investigators of the commission's subcommittee on "mass civilian sacrifice," led by Kim, have been dealing with petitions from more than 7,000 South Koreans, involving some 1,200 alleged incidents — not just mass planned executions, but also 215 cases in which the U.S. military is accused of the indiscriminate killing of South Korean civilians in 1950-51, usually in air attacks.
The commission last year excavated sites at four of an estimated 150 mass graves around the country, recovering remains of more than 400 people. Working deliberately, matching documents to eyewitness and survivor testimony, it has officially confirmed two large-scale executions — at a warehouse in the central South Korean county of Cheongwon, and at Ulsan on the southeast coast.
In January, then-President Roh Moo-hyun, under whose liberal leadership the commission was established, formally apologized for the more than 870 deaths confirmed at Ulsan, calling them "illegal acts the then-state authority committed."
The commission, with no power to compel testimony or prosecute, faces daunting tasks both in verifying events and identifying victims, and in tracing a chain of responsibility. Under Roh's conservative successor, Lee Myung-bak, whose party is seen as democratic heir to the old autocratic right wing, the commission may find less budgetary and political support.
The roots of the summer 1950 bloodbath lie in the U.S.-Soviet division of Japan's former Korea colony in 1945, which precipitated north-south turmoil and eventual war.
In the late 1940s, President Syngman Rhee's U.S.-installed rightist regime crushed leftist political activity in South Korea, including a guerrilla uprising inspired by the communists ruling the north. By 1950, southern jails were packed with up to 30,000 political prisoners.
The southern government, meanwhile, also created the National Guidance League, a "re-education" organization for recanting leftists and others suspected of communist leanings. Historians say officials met membership quotas by pressuring peasants into signing up with promises of rice rations or other benefits. By 1950, more than 300,000 people were on the league's rolls, organizers said.
North Korean invaders seized Seoul, the southern capital, in late June 1950 and freed thousands of prisoners, who rallied to the northern cause. Southern authorities, in full retreat with their U.S. military advisers, ordered National Guidance League members in areas they controlled to report to the police, who detained them. Soon after, commission researchers say, the organized mass executions of people regarded as potential collaborators began — "bad security risks," as a police official described the detainees at the time.
The declassified record of U.S. documents shows an ambivalent American attitude toward the killings. American diplomats that summer urged restraint on southern officials — to no obvious effect — but a State Department cable that fall said overall commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur viewed the executions as a Korean "internal matter," even though he controlled South Korea's military.
Ninety miles south of Seoul, here in the narrow, peaceful valley of Sannae, truckloads of prisoners were brought in from Daejeon Prison and elsewhere day after day in July 1950, as the North Koreans bore down on the city.
The American photos, taken by an Army major and kept classified for a half-century, show the macabre sequence of events.
White-clad detainees — bent, submissive, with hands bound — were thrown down prone, jammed side by side, on the edge of a long trench. South Korean military and national policemen then stepped up behind, pointed their rifles at the backs of their heads and fired. The bodies were tipped into the trench.
Trembling policemen — "they hadn't shot anyone before" — were sometimes off-target, leaving men wounded but alive, Lee said. He and others were ordered to check for wounded and finish them off.
Evidence indicates South Korean executioners killed between 3,000 and 7,000 here, said commissioner Kim. A half-dozen trenches, each up to 150 yards long and full of bodies, extended over an area almost a mile long, said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, chairman of a group of bereaved families campaigning for disclosure and compensation for the Daejeon killings. His father, accused but never convicted of militant leftist activity, was one victim.
Another was Yeo Tae-ku's father, whose wife and mother searched for him afterward.
"Bodies were just piled upon each other," said Yeo, 59, remembering his mother's description. "Arms would come off when they turned them over." The desperate women never found him, and the mass graves were quickly covered over, as were others in isolated spots up and down this mountainous peninsula, to be officially "forgotten."
When British communist journalist Alan Winnington entered Daejeon that summer with North Korean troops and visited the site, writing of "waxy dead hands and feet (that) stick through the soil," his reports in the Daily Worker were denounced as "fabrication" by the U.S. Embassy in London. American military accounts focused instead on North Korean reprisal killings that followed in Daejeon.
But CIA and U.S. military intelligence documents circulating even before the Winnington report, classified "secret" and since declassified, told of the executions by the South Koreans. Lt. Col. Bob Edwards, U.S. Embassy military attache in South Korea, wrote in conveying the Daejeon photos to Army intelligence in Washington that he believed nationwide "thousands of political prisoners were executed within (a) few weeks" by the South Koreans.
Another glimpse of the carnage appeared in an unofficial U.S. source, an obscure memoir self-published in 1981 by the late Donald Nichols, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, who told of witnessing "the unforgettable massacre of approximately 1,800 at Suwon," 20 miles south of Seoul.
Such reports lend credibility to a captured North Korean document from Aug. 2, 1950, eventually declassified by Washington, which spoke of mass executions in 12 South Korean cities, including 1,000 killed in Suwon and 4,000 in Daejeon.
That early, incomplete North Korean report couldn't include those executed in territory still held by the southerners. Up to 10,000 were killed in the city of Busan alone, a South Korean lawmaker, Park Chan-hyun, estimated in 1960.
His investigation came during a 12-month democratic interlude between the overthrow of Rhee and a government takeover by Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee's authoritarian military, which quickly arrested many then probing for the hidden story of 1950.
Kim said his projection of at least 100,000 dead is based in part on extrapolating from a survey by non-governmental organizations in one province, Busan's South Gyeongsang, which estimated 25,000 killed there. And initial evidence suggests most of the National Guidance League's 300,000 members were killed, he said.
Commission investigators agree with the late Lt. Col. Edwards' note to Washington in 1950, that "orders for execution undoubtedly came from the top," that is, President Rhee, who died in 1965.
But any documentary proof of that may have been destroyed, just as the facts of the mass killings themselves were buried. In 1953, after the war ended in stalemate, after the deaths of at least 2 million people, half or more of them civilians, a U.S. Army war crimes report attributed all summary executions here in Daejeon to the "murderous barbarism" of North Koreans.
Such myths survived a half-century, in part because those who knew the truth were cowed into silence.
"My mother destroyed all pictures of my father, for fear the family would get an image as leftists," said Koh Chung-ryol, 57, who is convinced her 29-year-old father was innocent of wrongdoing when picked up in a broad police sweep here, to die in Sannae valley.
"My mother tried hard to get rid of anything about her husband," she said. "She suffered unspeakable pain."
Even educated South Koreans remained ignorant of their country's past. As a young researcher in the late 1980s, Yonsei University's Park Myung-lim, today a leading Korean War historian, was deeply shaken as he sought out confidential accounts of those days from ordinary Koreans.
"I cried," he said. "I felt, 'Oh, my goodness. Oh, Jesus. This was my country? It was true?'"
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission can recommend but not award compensation for lost and ruined lives, nor can it bring surviving perpetrators to justice. "Our investigative power is so meager," commission President Ahn Byung-ook told the AP.
His immediate concern is resources. "The current government isn't friendly toward us, and so we're concerned that the budget may be cut next year," he said.
South Korean conservatives complain the "truth" campaign will only reopen old wounds from a time when, even at the village level, leftists and rightists carried out bloody reprisals against each other.
The life of the commission — with a staff of 240 and annual budget of $19 million — is guaranteed by law until at least 2010, when it will issue a final, comprehensive report.
Later this spring and summer its teams will resume digging at mass grave sites. Thus far, it has verified 16 incidents of 1950-51 — not just large-scale detainee killings, but also such events as a South Korean battalion's cold-blooded killing of 187 men, women and children at Kochang village, supposed sympathizers with leftist guerrillas.
By exposing the truth of such episodes, "we hope to heal the trauma and pain of the bereaved families," the commission says. It also wants to educate people, "not just in Korea, but throughout the international community," to the reality of that long-ago conflict, to "prevent such a tragic war from reoccurring in the future."
___
Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.
as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head
When your village is being invaded, when you suddenly have to abandon your town, what are you supposed to do with your prisoners? Questions like this have to be understood in the context of warfare and fighting for very survival against unprovoked aggression.
This article is being passed around a generation that doesn't even know the "official" pro-U.S. pro-South Korea story - they're just going to hear "U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants"
It was a WAR, which we nearly lost. These people were being detained for a reason. I am sure there were innocents among them, but there were also people who were Communists. These were likely fifth columnists. I have no problem with these executions. If they had not happened, perhaps the Communists would have taken the whole peninsula. The problem of Communists in South Korea has continued to this day — that’s why they have a National Security law. There was no time for “due process” — only time for action. By the way, the Holocaust parallels are really stupid. This was not genocide. It is the North Koreans who have committed and are committing genocide, against their own people.
A few years back, I recall watching an epic film on the Korean War produced in the South Korea. It centered on two brothers and their extended family and relations, and it made no bones about both sides being guilty of summary executions for just the reasons you mentioned.
I’m with you! Communism is responsible for the deaths of 100 million, give or take a million. The Chinese alone allowed millions to die during The Great Leap Forward in the late Fifties.
Next time we take control of a prison like Abu Ghraib, I’m for turning it over to the South Koreans. Based on history, they generally don’t put up with crap.
Liberal NGOs inflate sketchy memories and extrapolate upward to insure more funding comes their way.
No doubt bad things happened as always does in war, but AP doesn't even try to balance the story with how many millions of ROK civilians were slaughtered by DNK and ChiComms, nor how many U.S. and allied troops where killed defending Korea against the invading Communists. Nor how many millions of free (and Communist) world citizens were spared from the ravages of nuclear war, by the East and West battling it out in proxy wars in Korea and other countries where the Communists tried to take over, instead of firing nukes at each other directly.
Certainly sad for these people's families, but their loss saved millions more.
Is that the one with the South Korean soldier being captured to become a brainwashed hero of the North?
It's a feral planet out there, ya emotional-warfare pushing crybaby.
It's been that way since the beginning, and the Communists had no business forcing their ideology onto South Korea. What you fail to realize is that none of this would have happened had the Communists left South Korea alone.
But no, they couldn't leave them alone. The subsequent Communist invasion yielded death and destruction.
Do you think your tantrum is going to change that?
“Now you know why the current generation of ROK civilins see America as their number one enemy and not the North.”
The current high school and early college kids see the US as a threat because that is what the leftists in control of the Universities have taught them. Kinda like our own schools.
B4Ranch: This crap didn't happen. I lived through this time and the events and this just didn't take place. It is not history, it is revised history. The only slaughters that took place in Korea during the Korean war were carried out by the North. It is easy to see that you are a liberal, a left wing loony who will try to sow dissent and doubt where ever you go.
I love they way you guys work in pairs, the other poster on here agreeing with you about "not hiding the truth" is evidently your partner. This is crap pure and simple. You want history? Look up the historical facts, they are free to look up and available to anyone. They were written down before the left wing idiots who run news agencies today came into power so they are extremely accurate and truthful, unlike the sh** article posted on this thread.
The only reason for a story like this is to hurt America.
... possibly. I remember that one of the brothers did become a Hero of the North, but he defected because he was upset when his wife (or sister, or someone) was executed by a South Korean petty tyrant (who was also some type of relative from a happy time earlier in the story). The film was a real pot-boiler!
I was there 52-53 and not involved in the civilian sector, and where I was, more interested in keeping my head down. But I do know the ROK military didn't fool around. If they found a suspected spy, a mamasan in the hills directing artillery fire or a ROK soldier showing a reluctance to move forward, they were summarily shot - no trial, no Guantanamo. But, the ROK army was good - with them on your flank there was no need to worry.
I was there 52-53 and not involved in the civilian sector, and where I was, more interested in keeping my head down. But I do know the ROK military didn't fool around. If they found a suspected spy, a mamasan in the hills directing artillery fire or a ROK soldier showing a reluctance to move forward, they were summarily shot - no trial, no Guantanamo. But, the ROK army was good - with them on your flank there was no need to worry.
I was there 52-53 and not involved in the civilian sector, and where I was, more interested in keeping my head down. But I do know the ROK military didn't fool around. If they found a suspected spy, a mamasan in the hills directing artillery fire or a ROK soldier showing a reluctance to move forward, they were summarily shot - no trial, no Guantanamo. But, the ROK army was good - with them on your flank there was no need to worry.
Often, that behavior from Americans was simply a response to an even more vicious and unethical opposition, such as the Japanese who feigned surrender to ambush Americans or who tortured prisoners or the as a reaction to what they took a look around the concentration camps that they liberated. Sometimes, it was simply individual soldiers going off the deep end or lacking in the experience and judgement to do the right thing. And there are always a certain number of nuts who make it into the military, especially when there is a widespread draft.
I point this out not to impugn the veterans of those wars, who were still generally paragons of virtue for their day and still worthy of admiration. I point this out to highlight just how admirable our current military is that the best the press can come up with to impugn American soldiers and Marines is Abu Ghraib and using a Koran for target practice. Compared to any military in the history of the planet, including our own, the American military today performs like angels.
Now...let's all go vote vote for B Obama or H Clinton. Those two think it's still viable.
FMCDH(BITS)
He’s not the only one to have forgotten, if he ever knew, the unspeakable savagery of the Pacific war. The dramatic postwar Japanese success at hustling and merchandising and tourism has (happily, in many ways) effaced for most people the vicious assault context in which the Hiroshima horror should be viewed. It is easy to forget, or not to know, what Japan was like before it was first destroyed, and then humiliated, tamed, and constitutionalized by the West. “Implacable, treacherous, barbaric”—those were Admiral Halsey’s characterizations of the enemy, and at the time few facing the Japanese would deny that they fit to a T. One remembers the captured American airmen—the lucky ones who escaped decapitation—locked for years in packing crates. One remembers the gleeful use of bayonets on civilians, on nurses and the wounded, in Hong Kong and Singapore. Anyone who actually fought in the Pacific recalls the Japanese routinely firing on medics, killing the wounded (torturing them first, if possible), and cutting off the penises of the dead to stick in the corpses’ mouths. The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war.
I would argue that the same is true of this incident in Korea, which is amazing to contemplate given what's still going on to innocent Koreans in the North.
Later in the article, Fussell writes:
It would be not just stupid but would betray a lamentable want of human experience to expect soldiers to be very sensitive humanitarians. The Glenn Grays of this world need to have their attention directed to the testimony of those who know, like, say, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, who said, “Moderation in war is imbecility,” or Sir Arthur Harris, director of the admittedly wicked aerial-bombing campaign designed, as Churchill put it, to “de-house” the German civilian population, who observed that “War is immoral,” or our own General W. T. Sherman: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Lord Louis Mountbatten, trying to say something sensible about the dropping of the A-bomb, came up only with “War is crazy.” Or rather, it requires choices among crazinesses. “It would seem even more crazy,” he went on, “if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese.” One of the unpleasant facts for anyone in the ground armies during the war was that you had to become pro tern a subordinate of the very uncivilian George S. Patton and respond somehow to his unremitting insistence that you embrace his view of things. But in one of his effusions he was right, and his observation tends to suggest the experimental dubiousness of the concept of “just wars.” “War is not a contest with gloves,” he perceived. “It is resorted to only when laws, which are rules, have failed.” Soldiers being like that, only the barest decencies should be expected of them. They did not start the war, except in the terrible sense hinted at in Frederic Manning’s observation based on his front-line experience in the Great War: “War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.” Knowing that unflattering truth by experience, soldiers have every motive for wanting a war stopped, by any means.
Throughout history (written and unwritten) people have fought. In most cases the fighting was not limited to soldiers. War is hell and needs to be avoided. We have more ‘war’ going on now then ever before thanks to the UN.
The left worships Stalin and other misunderstood leaders. All of these killed millions regardless of the situation or actual crime.
Tearing America down sure won’t help anyone but that is what these folks are intent on.
While atrocities are, regrettably, a part of warfare, there is some reason to view this report with a bit of suspicion.
The AP correspondent who co-authored this account, Charles Hanley, was part of a wire service “team” that won a Pulitzer in 1999 for their “expose” of a U.S. massacre of South Korean civilians at No Gun Ri in the summer of 1950.
The circumstances of both events were somewhat similar; the North Koreans were rolling south; the ROK Army had, essentially collapsed, and U.S. forces arriving on scene were trying desperately to establish defensive lines after the debacle of Task Force Smith. There were many reports of NK guerillas blending in with the hordes of refugees, heading south.
Hanley’s initial report created quite a stir, but an Army Ranger-turned-history professor at West Point was less than convinced. While Major Robert Bateman conceded that some ROK civilians had been killed at No Gun Ri, he disputed the accuracy of key portions of the AP story, provided by a solider who was supposedly there, Edward Daily. Bateman later proved that Daily was not at No Gun Ri, and his version of events was patently false.
Bateman also demonstrated that the U.S. policy to “shoot” refugees was not widely disseminated and indistinct, at best. While the AP later corrected their version to omit Daily’s account, they accused Bateman of a “tiresome” campaign to undermine their reporting. They also later produced a document which claimed the policy on shooting refugees was disseminated within the U.S. command structure and even broadcast over radio nets.
However, the document does not indicate to what degree the policy was disseminated, what radio nets carried the message and which units actually acknowledged receiving the directive and complying with it. In other words, the policy document discovered by the AP—after Bateman’s critique appeared—is not a complete vindication for the wire service.
It’s also worth noting that Hanley did everything he could to discredit Major Bateman, lobbying his publisher to cancel the Army officer’s book contract, and even complaining to historians who offered Bateman’s work a positive review.
For the problems with Hanley’s original No Gun Ri account—and his attitude toward those who would criticize his work—Hanley’s latest expose deserves similar scrutiny. Almost 60 years after the fact, memories get fuzzy and you can only wonder if there’s a Korean Edward Daily among those cited by the AP.
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