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Thursday, September 30, 1999
Korean War vets tell 50-year-old secret of civilian slaughter
By Sang Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley and Martha Mendoza
Associated Press
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.
American veterans of the Korean War say that in late July 1950, in the conflict's first desperate weeks, U.S. troops killed a large number of South Korean refugees, many of them women and children, trapped beneath a bridge at a hamlet called No Gun Ri.
In interviews with The Associated Press, ex-GIs speak of 100 or 200 or "hundreds" dead. The Koreans, whose claim for compensation was rejected last year, say 300 were killed at the bridge and 100 in a preceding air attack.
Enemy feared disguised
American soldiers, in their third day at the front, feared North Korean infiltrators among the fleeing South Korean peasants, veterans told the AP.
The ex-GIs described other refugee killings as well in the war's first weeks, when U.S. commanders ordered their troops to shoot civilians, citizens of an allied nation, as a defense against disguised enemy soldiers, according to once-classified documents found by the AP in U.S. military archives.
Six veterans of the 1st Cavalry Division said they fired on the civilians at No Gun Ri, and six others said they witnessed the mass killing.
"We just annihilated them," said ex-machine gunner Norman Tinkler of Glasco, Kan.
After five decades, none gave a complete, detailed account. But the ex-GIs agreed on such elements as time and place, and on the preponderance of women, children and old men among the victims.
50-year-old secret
From the start of the 1950-53 conflict, North Korean atrocities were widely reported: the killing of civilians and summary executions of prisoners. But the story of No Gun Ri has remained undisclosed for a half-century.
The U.S. military has said repeatedly it found no basis for the allegations.
The AP's research also found no official Army account of the events.
The troops dug in at No Gun Ri, 100 miles southeast of Seoul, South Korea's capital, were members of the 7th Cavalry, a regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division. The refugees who encountered them had been rousted by U.S. soldiers from nearby villages as the invading army of communist North Korea approached, the Korean claimants said.
'Wholesale slaughter'
It was the fifth week of the Korean War. Word was circulating among U.S. troops that northern soldiers disguised in white peasant garb might try to penetrate American lines via refugee groups.
"It was assumed there were enemy in these people," ex-rifleman Herman W. Patterson of Greer, S.C., said of the civilian throng.
As they neared No Gun Ri, the hundreds of refugees were ordered off the dirt road by American soldiers and onto parallel railroad tracks, the Koreans said.
What then happened under the concrete bridge cannot be reconstructed in full detail. Although some ex-GIs poured out chilling memories, others offered only fragments, or abruptly ended their interviews. Over the three days, soldiers were dug in over hundreds of yards of hilly terrain, and no one - Korean or American - saw everything.
But the veterans corroborated the core of the Koreans' account: that American troops kept the large group of refugees pinned under the No Gun Ri railroad bridge and killed almost all of them.
"It was just wholesale slaughter," said Patterson.
U.S planes strafe refugees
Both the 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 their children into a narrow culvert beneath the tracks, the Koreans said.
Some ex-GIs believe the strafing was a mistake, that the pilots were supposed to strike enemy artillery miles up the road. But declassified U.S. Air Force reports from mid-1950, found by the AP, show that pilots also sometimes deliberately attacked "people in white," apparently suspecting disguised North Korean soldiers were among them.
Retired Col. Robert M. Carroll, then a first lieutenant, remembers 7th Cavalry riflemen opening fire on the refugees from nearby positions.
"This is right after we get orders that nobody comes through, civilian, military, nobody," said Carroll, of Lansdowne, Va.
Two days earlier, 1st Cavalry Division headquarters had issued an order: "No refugees to cross the front line. Fire everyone trying to cross lines. Use discretion in case of women and children." A neighboring U.S. Army division, in its order, said civilians "are to be considered enemy."
Experts in the law of war told the AP that such orders, to shoot civilians, are plainly illegal.
Temporary cease fire
Carroll said he got the rifle companies to cease fire. "I wasn't convinced this was enemy," he said.
"There weren't any North Koreans in there the first day. . . . It was mainly women and kids and old men," recalled Carroll.
The Americans directed the refugees into the 80-foot-long bridge underpasses and after dark opened fire on them from nearby machine-gun positions, the Koreans said.
The Korean claimants said those near the tunnel entrances died first.
"People pulled dead bodies around them for protection," said survivor 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."
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