No Gun Ri, One of Korea's My Lais

"We were ordered to set up machine-gun positions on each end of the bridge to keep any enemy soldiers who had mixed in with the civilians from escaping. I set up my Browning, .30-caliber water-cooled, heavy gun about 100 yards from the west opening of the bridge-tunnel. Another machine gun was set up on the east side. Just before dusk, we received sporadic enemy rifle fire. Then the company runner came by with orders to shoot and kill everyone under the bridge. "Who the hell gave you that order," I shouted to him. He said it came from the executive officer assigned to the Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry. I adjusted the dials on my machine gun to fire over the heads of the Koreans and squeezed the metal trigger. At the sound of gunfire, they all fell to the ground, trying to protect their bodies. I knew there were women and children in there, but I also kept thinking there were enemy soldiers in there, too. When ordered to shoot to kill in the army, you do what you are told and don't disobey"... Ed Daily, 7th Cavalry.

South Korean villagers from the town of No Gun Ri have claimed for years that on July 26, 1950, early in the Korean War, American soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians in their hamlet, located about 100 miles from Seoul. Over the years, both the U.S. and South Korean governments vigorously denied the tale, rejecting all claims for compensation. Accounts of what happened at No Gun Ri, are hazy and conflicting. But taken together, they paint a picture of panic, fear, vague military orders and finally, individual G.I.'s struggling with the dictates of conscience. Regardless how it had begun, "all of a sudden, machine guns started firing into the crowd of people under the bridge," recalls George Preece of Dunnville, Ky., then a sergeant, who manned a machine gun on the railroad tracks at one end of the span. Several former soldiers said the firing continued unabated for 30 minutes. Flint, another GI at the site of the massacre, estimates that half of the troops near him fired on the civilians.

No Gun village is located in a remote and mountainous region where a strong, indigenous left wing emerged just after Japanese imperialism collapsed in Korea in August 1945. A country people's committee (a ubiquitous political form at the time) took power from the Japanese and then watched as U.S. civil affairs teams grabbed the reins of government from it that fall. The teams quickly reemployed Koreans who had served in the hated colonial police, as part of the establishment of the U.S. military government that ruled south of the 38th Parallel for the next three years. After two years of political turmoil, guerrilla war emerged in and around Yongdong county, long before the "Korean War" began. According to a U.S. doctor, Clesson Richards, who ran a Salvation Army hospital in Yongdong from 1947 to 1950, "Guerrilla warfare was around us all the time. We had many commies as patients." The police would "keep an eye on them," he blithely told a reporter, "grill them and when they had all possible information, take them out and stand them before a firing squad. This wall was near the hospital. We could hear the men being shot."

Shortly after U.S. troops joined the battle in 1950, the 24th Infantry division suffered a "ghastly" defeat at Taejon, "one of the greatest ordeals in Army history," according to military historian Clay Blair. As back-pedaling U.S. forces tumbled southward from Taejon, they soon arrived in Yongdong. North Korean sources said it had been "liberated" by local guerrillas, something corroborated by the New York Times' Walter Sullivan, who reported that some 300 guerrillas in and around Yongdong harassed the retreating Americans. "The American G.I. is now beginning to eye with suspicion any Korean civilian in the cities or countryside," Sullivan wrote. On July 26, a Communist soldier wrote in his diary that U.S. bombers had swooped over Yongdong and "turned it into a sea of fire."

The popular and guerrilla element of the Korean War has been lost from the collective memory, as if Vietnam were the only intervention where My Lai occurred. But in 1950 what the people in "white pajamas" provoked in Americans was as accessible as our barbershop reading table. What the Pentagon could not find was reported, for example, by John Osborne in Life. He told readers of the August 21, 1950 issue that U.S. officers had ordered GIs to fire on clusters of civilians; a soldier told him, "It's gone too far when we are shooting children." It was a new kind of war, Osborne wrote, with the "blotting out of villages where the enemy may be hiding; the shelling of refugees who may include North Koreans." The commander of the 24th Infantry Division, General John Church, said that Korea was not like the European battles of World War II: "It's an entirely different kind of warfare, this is really guerrilla warfare... especially a guerrilla war over rugged territory." Official U.S. sources have always denied that any massacres of civilians occurred at any point in the three-year war. Routine denials by officers on the scene in Yongdong were followed by official military histories that blamed the North Koreans for all atrocities and by years of stonewalling by two governments -- right up to the Pentagon's claim for the past two years that it found "no information that substantiates the claim." The offending First Cavalry Division wasn't even in the area, it said. But it took exactly five minutes to find Clay Blair's statement in The Forgotten War, based on declassified unit records, that "the 1st Cav. would relieve the shattered 24th Division at Yongdong" on July 22. As with My Lai, first you deny and then you cover up...   -- Pau --

Compiled from a variety of sources but a big mahalo goes to Bruce Cummings of "The Nation" magazine.