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For years south Korean survivors and relatives of the murdered victims have demanded redress for a three-day massacre by United States troops at the start of the 1950-53 Korean War. But all their efforts to obtain justice--including a dismissed 1997 claim for compensation--were opposed by Washington and the U.S.-backed south Korean puppet regime.
All this changed, however, on Sept. 29, when the Associated Press published the results of an investigation it made into charges that U.S. service personnel gunned down up to 400 Korean peasants in July 1950. The AP report included testimony from GIs and south Korean villagers who witnessed the carnage.
According to evidence found by AP, U.S. troops fired on the Koreans in July 1950 as they huddled under a railroad bridge at No Gun Ri hamlet, located 100 miles southeast of Seoul, the south Korean capital.
Three hundred were pinned down and machine-gunned under the span. Another 100 were later mowed down in an air attack. Most of the civilians were women, children and the elderly.
U.S. commanders gave orders to shoot
U.S. commanders had ordered troops to shoot civilians, according to declassified documents found in the military archives.
The Pentagon brass justified the order, which violates military code, as a defense against disguised "infiltrators" from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the Communist north.
Since the news broke, both Washington and the south Korean government have been forced to back down. U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen ordered a review of the report. And south Korean President Kim Dae-jung said his government would also investigate and help compensate any victims.
On Oct. 2, Kim called for a joint probe with the U.S. Army into the allegations. Survivors and relatives of the victims followed by issuing a statement demanding representation.
The Pentagon told NBC News that it had conducted an "exhaustive" inquiry into the charges last year. Documents examined, they claimed, included Korean War records and papers from a Korean church organization. As expected, the world's greatest war machine found "no evidence to substantiate" the account.
Although no official Army record of the mass slaughter was found, six veterans of the 1st Cavalry Division told AP they did indeed shoot civilians at No Gun Ri. Another six said they witnessed the killing.
Veteran Eugene Hesselman said the massacre took place after company commander Capt. Melbourne C. Chandler told the machine gunners in his unit, "Let's get rid of them." Chandler, now dead, was reportedly following orders from higher-ups.
"We just annihilated them," recounted ex-machine gunner Norman Tinkler.
"It was a wholesale slaughter," agreed ex-rifleman Herman W. Patterson.
"People pulled dead bodies around them for protection," recalled survivor Chung Koo-ho, now 61. "Mothers wrapped their children with blankets and hugged them with their backs toward the entrances. ... My mother died on the second day of the shooting."
There were some soldiers, however, who refused to fire.
All 30 Koreans involved in the struggle to expose the truth say the bloodbath was totally unprovoked. "The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies," said Chun Choon-ja, who was 12 years old at the time.
Not an aberration but a policy
The No Gun Ri massacre wasn't an isolated act of terror. It wasn't an aberration limited to a single incident. It was, in fact, a manifestation of a planned military strategy, institutionalized in a war of massive violence against the Korean people.
Time Magazine reported on Aug. 21, 1950, for example, that U.S. troops were ordered by a commander to stop a column of refugees "coming right down on B company." Even if it meant killing them. "Fire into them if you have to," ordered the major.
Moreover, during the three-year war U.S. troops, often while retreating, would lock all the Koreans they could round up in a cellar and set them on fire.
Then there was genocidal devastation from the air. So massive and total was the destruction that the Air Force high command complained that the problem with continuing the air war was that they had bombed everything to ash and there was nothing left to strike.
In his book, "To Win a Nuclear War," Professor Michio Kaku describes once-secret military documents that expose how the Joint Chiefs of Staff had decided to drop atomic bombs across Korea if the DPRK didn't agree to a cease-fire--state terrorism to the max.
Soon after the war started, the reactionary south Korean army had crumbled in the face of north Korean troops. Within just three days the north had made tremendous advances across the Korean peninsula.
Their success wasn't due just to military prowess. Koreans in the south, in fact, were sympathetic to the DPRK and welcomed the north Korean Army as a liberating force.
Solidarity with the masses
Because the DPRK had so much solidarity with the masses, all Koreans were considered suspect by the imperialist high command. Moreover, U.S. soldiers couldn't differentiate between civilians and troops out of uniform.
"We didn't know if they were north or south Koreans," said Hesselman. "We were there only a couple of days and we didn't know them from a load of coal."
Korea was divided by the United States at the end of World War II for the first time in its 5,000-year history. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had rushed U.S. troops to southern Korea on the eve of the anti-Communist Cold War as the Japanese empire collapsed.
The north was fighting to free itself from Japanese colonial rule through a national-liberation movement led by Marshal Kim Il Sung. The movement had allied itself with the Soviet Union and the Chinese communists because it recognized the pivotal role of the masses in the freedom struggle. Only they have the will and determination to resist imperialism to the end. The nationalists' bourgeois class ties, on the other hand, had led most of them to collaborate with the Japanese occupation.
Four million Koreans died in the bloody class conflict. The United States lost some 50,000 troops but could not vanquish the Korean people. It was the first time since 1815 that Washington didn't win a war--this war that could have annihilated the DPRK and its socialist system.
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