Thursday, September 30, 1999
Hidden slaughter of Korean War
U.S. soldiers massacred refugees
The 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.
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.
Six veterans of the 1st Cavalry said they fired on civilians at No Gun Ri, and six others said they witnessed the killing.
“We just annihilated them,” said ex-machine gunner Norman Tinkler of Glasco, Kan.
Disputed details
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.
Some said they were fired on from among the refugees beneath the bridge. But others said they don't remember hostile fire. One said they later found a few disguised North Korean soldiers among the dead. But others disputed this.
Some soldiers refused to shoot what one described as “civilians just trying to hide.”
Ex-Sgt. James T. Kerns of Piedmont, S.C., a machine gunner, said he fired over the refugees' heads. “I would not fire into a bunch of women.”
The 30 Korean claimants — survivors and victims' relatives — said what happened July 26-29, 1950, was an unprovoked, three-day carnage. “The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies,” said Chun Choon-ja, a 12-year-old girl at the time.
The reported death toll would make No Gun Ri one of only two known cases of large-scale killings of noncombatants by U.S. ground troops in this century's major wars, military law experts note. The other was Vietnam's My Lai massacre, in 1968, in which more than 500 Vietnamese may have died.
The U.S. military has said it found no basis in the historical record for the allegations.
After the AP report was re leased Wednesday, chief Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said, “If there's compelling new evidence to look at, obviously it would be important to make sure we've left no stone unturned in getting to the bottom of it.”
Some elements of the No Gun Ri episode are unclear: Who gave open-fire orders? Did GIs see gunfire from the refugees or their own ricochets? How many soldiers refused to fire? How high in the ranks did knowledge extend?
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 Cav alry 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.
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 throng.
No one saw everything
As they neared No Gun Ri, leading ox carts, with children on their backs, 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 Mr. Patterson.
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 show that pilots sometimes deliberately attacked “people in white,” suspecting disguised North Korean soldiers were among them.
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 division, in its order, said civilians “are to be considered enemy.”
Experts in the law of war told the AP that orders to shoot civilians are plainly illegal.
The Americans eventually 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.
Veterans said the heavy-weapons company commander, Capt. Melbourne C. Chandler, after speaking with superior officers by radio, had ordered machine-gunners to set up near the tunnel mouths and fire.
Capt. Chandler and other key officers are dead. The colonel who commanded the battalion, Herbert B. Heyer, 88, of Sandy Springs, Ga., told the AP he knew nothing about the shootings and “I know I didn't give such an order.” Veterans said the colonel left operations to subordinates at the time.
The AP reconstructed U.S. troop movements, then spent months tracing veterans — some 130 interviews.
The U.S. government's civil liability may be limited. It is largely protected by U.S. law against foreign lawsuits related to “combatant activities.”
War crimes prosecution appears even less likely. The U.S. military code condemns indiscriminate killing of civilians, legal experts noted, but prosecution so many years later is a practical impossibility.
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