The Korean War: A History (25 page)

Woman guerrilla captured in 1949.
U.S. National Archives

In early August 1950, Alan Winnington published an article in the London
Daily Worker
hyperbolically titled “U.S. Belsen in Korea,” alleging that ROK police under the supervision of KMAG
advisers had butchered seven thousand people in a village near Taejon, during the period July 2–6. Accompanying KPA troops as a war correspondent, Winnington found twenty eyewitnesses who said that on July 2, truckloads of police arrived and made local people build six pits, each two hundred yards long. Two days later political prisoners were trucked in and executed, both by bullets to the head and decapitation by sword, and then layered on top of one another in the pits “like sardines.” The massacres continued for three days. The witnesses said that two jeeps with American officers observed the killings.
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North Korean sources said four thousand had been killed (changing it some months later to seven thousand), mostly imprisoned guerrillas from Cheju Island and the Taebaek Mountains, and those detained after the Yosu rebellion in 1948. They located the site differently than Winnington, however.
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The American Embassy in London called the Winnington story an “atrocity fabrication” and denied its contents. The official American history of the early stages of the Korean War by Roy Appleman made no mention of any ROK atrocities, and instead claimed that the North Koreans carried out this massacre—perpetrating “one of the greatest mass killings” of the war in Taejon, with between five thousand and seven thousand people slaughtered and placed in mass graves.
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Most Western histories do the same: Max Hastings, as we have seen, paid attention only to Communist atrocities (even though he does not catalog or verify them in any detail) because they gave to the UN cause in Korea “a moral legitimacy that has survived to this day.”

The evidence shows that Winnington was more truthful in 1950, during the heat of war, than Appleman and Hastings were with the benefit of hindsight and classified documentation. U.S. Army intelligence on July 2 rated as “probably true” a report that the Korean National Police in Taejon were “arresting all Communists and executing them on the outskirts of the city.” The CIA stated the next day that “unofficial reports indicated that Southern Korean police are executing Communist suspects in Suwon and Taejon, in an effort
both to eliminate a potential 5th column and to take revenge for reported northern executions in Seoul.” Neither report gave numbers, however.
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British officials in Tokyo who talked to Supreme Command, Allied Powers (SCAP) officers said that “there may be an element of truth in [Winnington’s] report,” but SCAP thought it was a matter to be handled between London and Washington. Alvary Gascoigne, a British representative at MacArthur’s headquarters, said that reliable journalists have “repeatedly” noted “the massacre of prisoners by South Korean troops,” but one “J. Underwood” of the U.S. prisoners of war mission told British sources that he doubted seven thousand prisoners could even have been assembled in Taejon, as not more than two thousand were in the city’s prisons.
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Underwood would have done better to admit that this incident was not simply a merciless slaughter of political prisoners, but the murder of people rounded up during the American occupation for protesting against the conditions that Americans fostered or created. Americans conducted the various rounds of suppression in the period 1945–50 or supported those Koreans who did, and then stood idly by to watch this slaughter in July 1950, photographing it but doing nothing about it.

In his 1981 book a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency operative gave witness to the systematic slaughter of political prisoners near Suwon, just south of Seoul, in the first week of July 1950:

A psychologist in New York by the name of Do-young Lee finally got photos of this particular tragedy declassified, and they are dramatic
evidence of American complicity. The most striking fact, uncovered by the Associated Press, was that in September 1950 the U.S. government at the highest level (in this case the Joint Chiefs of Staff) chose to suppress the photos, never to be revealed until 1999. And then the Pentagon subsidized official histories that blamed every civilian atrocity at this time, including Taejon, on the North Koreans, and got Humphrey Bogart to narrate a 1950 film,
The Crime of Korea
, which had the most extensive public film footage of the Taejon massacre—layered corpses stretching across tootball-field-length trenches: “Taejon: men, women and children murdered cold-bloodedly, deliberately, butchered to spread terror” by “Communist monsters” and “primitive North Koreans.” In time, Bogart went on, “we’ll get a careful tabulation … certified by the UN Commission on Korea—each case will be thoroughly documented.”
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Instead the UN did nothing and decades of stonewalling by two governments followed, right up to the Pentagon’s claim for two years (1997–99) that it found “no information that substantiates the claim” of the Nogun village survivors. The offending 1st Cavalry Division wasn’t even in the area, they said. Yet it took me exactly five minutes to find Clay Blair’s statement in
The Forgotten War
, based on declassified unit records, that “the 1st Cav[alry] would relieve the shattered 24th Division at Yongdong” on July 22. But then the Pentagon had to prevaricate and refuse to compensate the survivors because there were so many similar incidents during the war, and who knows how many claimants for compensation.
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The day after the Taejon massacre story broke, I got a phone call from an American woman in Los Angeles whose father was one of the victims. In 1947 she was a Korean citizen of the American Military Government, one of six children of a factory owner in a town near Taejon. He had prospered during the Japanese period, and at liberation thought it desirable to share some of his wealth. He was arrested for giving money to “Communists” in the raucous summer of 1947 (when hundreds if not thousands of Koreans died at the
hands of the occupation’s National Police) and was still in jail in early July 1950. This woman (a registered nurse) and her four sisters and one brother have never been able to tell anyone outside the family how their father died. For half a century they had agonized over the loss of the patriarch of the family, but privately—even among themselves—no one ever talked about it. She was weeping over the phone for half an hour about her experience. Do-young Lee’s father also perished in a massacre in August 1950, but he had the courage to come forward with his photos; subsequently he tracked down and confronted the Korean Army officer who killed his father.

The Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigations of the Taejon massacre are not complete, but by now have determined that at least four thousand people died at the hands of the ROK authorities, and that later the North Koreans killed yet more (but not thousands), and may have buried them in the same pits. Lee Yoon-young was a prison guard who had the courage to step forward at the age of eighty-five and testify to what he saw decades earlier: “Ten prisoners were carried to a trench at a time and were made to kneel at the edge. Police officers stepped up behind them, pointed their rifles at the back of their heads, and fired.”
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Political massacres began as soon as Seoul looked like it might fall. Official Australian sources pointed to “the stupid order of the Rhee Government to execute about 100 communists in Seoul before it evacuated” the city in June 1950; United Press International (UPI) stated that ninety to a hundred had been executed in this episode, including “the beautiful ‘Mata Hari’” of Korean communism, Kim Su-in.
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Many more were murdered at the same time in the port
city of Inchon. American internal sources reported that Southern authorities imprisoned most known leftists as towns fell to the KPA: “Our information is that these prisoners are considered as enemies of South Korea and disposed of accordingly, before the arrival of North Korean forces.”
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American occupation authorities in Tokyo (or SCAP) said that a “guerrilla riot” occured in Inchon on June 30, resulting in the arrest of three hundred people. The North Koreans later claimed to have found eyewitnesses to the slaughter of a thousand political prisoners and alleged Communists in Inchon, perpetrated in the period June 29 to July 1 (they alleged that this was done on the order of an American in KMAG). The State Department’s Office of Intelligence Research (OIR) noted these North Korean charges, but dismissed the affair as “nothing more than an ROK police action against rebellious elements attempting a prison break and other dissidents aiding them.”
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Things got much worse as North Korean forces entered the stronghold of the left wing in the southwestern Chollas, a week into the war.

As this happened, Gen. Yi Ung-jun declared martial law in the region and authorized capital punishment for subversive and sabotage activities, and for “anyone considered a political criminal by the commander.” Who was he? After pledging his fealty to the emperor in blood, he graduated from the Japanese Military Academy in 1943 and was a colonel when the war ended. He then helped the U.S. occupation develop military forces in the south in November 1945, was the first ROK Army chief of staff in 1948, and was remembered by the wife of an American official as having seen “a great deal of action with the Japanese troops in China”; with his jackboots and riding crop he “retained some of the arrogance of the Jap military.” When the North invaded he was commander of the 2nd Division, responsible for the east side of the Uijongbu corridor. Ordered to attack with his whole division, he refused to attack even with a couple of battalions. Soon the whole division was routed.
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The massacres in Suwon and Taejon came in the midst of American
troops reeling backward by the hour. At Taejon came the clearest and in some ways worst defeat of American troops, at the hands of KPA commanders who have prized that victory ever since. The 24th Infantry Division suffered a “ghastly” defeat at Taejon, “one of the greatest ordeals in Army history.”
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As the backpedaling American forces tumbled southward from Taejon, they soon arrived in Yongdong. North Korean sources said it had been “liberated” by local guerrillas before they arrived, something corroborated by Walter Sullivan. He reported that some three hundred local guerrillas in and around Yongdong harassed the retreating Americans, and that they would take over local peacekeeping duties once the North Koreans passed through. “The American G.I. is now beginning to eye with suspicion any Korean civilian in the cities or countryside,” Sullivan wrote; “‘Watch the guys in white’—the customary peasant dress—is the cry often heard near the front.” The diary of a dead Korean named Choe Song-hwan, either a North Korean soldier or a local guerrilla, noted on July 26 that American bombers had swooped over Yongdong and “turned it into a sea of fire.”
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Meanwhile, to the west, in the same week of July the 6th Division of the KPA swept through the southwestern Cholla provinces, clearing them in forty-eight hours—essentially for three reasons: first, the 6th Division was a crack unit led by Pang Ho-san, who a year earlier had led this same division when it was the 166th Division of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, made up almost entirely of Koreans who fought in the Chinese civil war. They had transferred back to North Korea as the war in China wound down, and in May 1950 North Korean commanders positioned this division just north of Haeju, across the 38th parallel on the Ongjin Peninsula. It was these and other China-blooded troops that underpinned North Korea’s war plan in 1950, a battle that would have happened earlier, perhaps, if those troops had been available in the summer of 1949. Second, the 6th Division cleared the Chollas so
quickly because the forces of order of the Rhee government evacuated so quickly. Third, the North Koreans were met by thousands of local guerrillas who rose up as North Korean forces drew near, seizing villages and towns, the residue of the guerrilla conflict that was strong in the Chollas in 1948 and 1949. These troops then turned and began a daunting march eastward, occupying Chinju by August 1 and thereby directly menacing Pusan.