SEOUL, South Korea, July 5, 2008
AP: U.S. Allowed Korean Massacre In 1950
Declassified Files Show Thousands Of Political Prisoners Were Executed By S. Korea, With U.S. Approval
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This U.S. Army photograph, once classified "top secret,'' is one of a series depicting the summary execution of 1,800 South Korean political prisoners by the South Korean military at Taejon, South Korea, over three days in July 1950. Historians and survivors claim South Korean troops executed many civilians behind frontlines as U.N. forces retreated before the North Korean army in mid-1950, on suspicion that they were communist sympathizers and might collaborate with the advancing enemy. (AP/National Archives/U.S. Army)
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In this undated photo, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich (left), here conferring with a Navy officer early in the Korean War, at first discouraged and then approved a South Korean colonel's conditional plan to shoot political prisoners. (AP/National Archives/U.S. Navy)
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The Emmerich narrative is seen at the National Archives in College Park, Md. on Thursday, June 19, 2008. In this once-classified narrative on the early days of the Korean War, written for U.S. Army historians in 1953, a senior U.S. adviser to the South Korean army reported he had conditionally approved a South Korean plan to kill 3,500 political prisoners. This episode, reported by Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, was not included in the Army's official history. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
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In this photograph taken by the U.S. Army in April 1951, South Korean troops shoot political prisoners near Daegu, South Korea. The South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating such mass political executions during the Korean War, and the U.S. military's connection with them. (AP/National Archives/U.S. Army)
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Interactive
The Korean War
The Korean War erupted on June 25, 1950, and for half a year the rapid thrusts of combat raged up and down the peninsula. The fighting settled into 2 1/2 years of trench warfare before a truce was signed, creating the two Korean nations.
By Associated Press Writers Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang.
The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it "would be permitted" to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.
In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.
Extensive archival research by The Associated Press has found no indication Far East commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur took action to stem the summary mass killing, knowledge of which reached top levels of the Pentagon and State Department in Washington, where it was classified "secret" and filed away.
Now, a half-century later, the South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating what happened in that summer of terror, a political bloodbath largely hidden from history, unlike the communist invaders' executions of southern rightists, which were widely publicized and denounced at the time.
In the now-declassified record at the U.S. National Archives and other repositories, the Korean investigators will find an ambivalent U.S. attitude in 1950 - at times hands-off, at times disapproving.
"The most important thing is that they did not stop the executions," historian Jung Byung-joon, a member of the 2-year-old commission, said of the Americans. "They were at the crime scene, and took pictures and wrote reports."
They took pictures in July 1950 at the slaughter of dozens of men at one huge killing field outside the central city of Daejeon. Between 3,000 and 7,000 South Koreans are believed to have been shot there by their own military and police, and dumped into mass graves, said Kim Dong-choon, the commission member overseeing the investigation of these government killings.
The bones of Koh Chung-ryol's father are there somewhere, and the 57-year-old woman believes South Koreans alone are not to blame.
"Although we can't present concrete evidence, we bereaved families believe the United States has some responsibility for this," she told the AP, as she visited one of the burial sites in the quiet Sannae valley.
Frank Winslow, a military adviser at Daejeon in those desperate days long ago, is one American who feels otherwise.
The Koreans were responsible for their own actions, said the retired Army lieutenant colonel, 81. "The Koreans were sovereign. To me, there was never any question that the Koreans were in charge," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Bellingham, Wash.
The brutal, hurried elimination of tens of thousands of their countrymen, subject of a May 19 AP report, was the climax to a years-long campaign by South Korea's right-wing leaders.
In 1947, two years after Washington and Moscow divided Korea into southern and northern halves, a U.S. military government declared the Korean Labor Party, the southern communists, to be illegal. President Syngman Rhee's southern regime, gaining sovereignty in 1948, suppressed all leftist political activity, put down a guerrilla uprising and held up to 30,000 political prisoners by the time communist North Korea invaded on June 25, 1950.
As war broke out, southern authorities also rounded up members of the 300,000-strong National Guidance Alliance, a "re-education" body to which they had assigned leftist sympathizers, and whose membership quotas also were filled by illiterate peasants lured by promises of jobs and other benefits.
Commission investigators, extrapolating from initial evidence and surveys of family survivors, believe most alliance members were killed in the wave of executions.
On June 29, 1950, as the southern army and its U.S. advisers retreated southward, reports from Seoul said the conquering northerners had emptied the southern capital's prisons, and ex-inmates were reinforcing the new occupation regime.
In a confidential narrative he later wrote for Army historians, Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, a senior U.S. adviser, described what then happened in the southern port city of Busan, formerly known as Pusan.
Emmerich was told by a subordinate that a South Korean regimental commander, determined to keep Busan's political prisoners from joining the enemy, planned "to execute some 3500 suspected peace time Communists, locked up in the local prison," according to the declassified 78-page narrative, first uncovered by the newspaper Busan Ilbo at the U.S. National Archives.
Emmerich wrote that he summoned the Korean, Col. Kim Chong-won, and told him the enemy would not reach Busan in a few days as Kim feared, and that "atrocities could not be condoned."
But the American then indicated conditional acceptance of the plan.
"Colonel Kim promised not to execute the prisoners until the situation became more critical," wrote Emmerich, who died in 1986. "Colonel Kim was told that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of (Busan) he would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot the prisoners with machine guns."
This passage, omitted from the published Army history, is the first documentation unearthed showing advance sanction by the U.S. military for such killings.
"I think his (Emmerich's) word is so significant," said Park Myung-lim, a South Korean historian of the war and adviser to the investigative commission.
As that summer wore on, and the invaders pressed their attack on the southern zone, Busan-area prisoners were shot by the hundreds, Korean and foreign witnesses later said.
Emmerich wrote that soon after his session with Kim, he met with South Korean officials in Daegu, 55 miles (88 kilometers) north of Busan, and persuaded them "at that time" not to execute 4,500 prisoners immediately, as planned. Within weeks, hundreds were being executed in the Daegu area.
The bloody anticommunist purge, begun immediately after the invasion, is believed by the fall of 1950 to have filled some 150 mass graves in secluded spots stretching to the peninsula's southernmost counties. Commissioner Kim said the commission's estimate of 100,000 dead is "very conservative." The commission later this month will resume excavating massacre sites, after having recovered remains of more than 400 people at four sites last year.
The AP has extensively researched U.S. military and diplomatic archives from the Korean War in recent years, at times relying on once-secret documents it obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and declassification reviews. The declassified U.S. record and other sources offer further glimpses of the mass killings.
A North Korean newspaper said 1,000 prisoners were slain in Incheon, just west of Seoul, in late June 1950 - a report partly corroborated by a declassified U.S. Eighth Army document of July 1950 saying "400 Communists" had been killed in Incheon. The North Korean report claimed a U.S. military adviser had given the order.
As the front moved south, in July's first days, Air Force intelligence officer Donald Nichols witnessed and photographed the shooting of an estimated 1,800 prisoners in Suwon, 20 miles south of Seoul, Nichols reported in a little-noted memoir in 1981, a decade before his death.
Around the same time, farther south, the Daejeon killings began.
Winslow recalled he declined an invitation to what a senior officer called the "turkey shoot" outside the city, but other U.S. officers did attend, taking grisly photos of the human slaughter that would be kept classified for a half-century.
© MMVIII The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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The way forward is truth or we are doomed to repeat again and again. The truth of this incident must serve as the impetus to cleanse, seek reconciliation and move on. These are goals the USA often seeks of others, but seldom embraces. America must embrace these goals and seek forgiveness for their actions.
Posted by zgomer
If someone else commits atrocities, they''re "evil" and we have to confront them, because we''re the good guys. When the US does it, it''s okay.
Hypocrite.
But since we give away gadgets and chocolate bars, we''re still the good guys??
My family fought in WW1 - WW2 - Viet Nam and even the Spanish American War...I am so glad none of us fought in Korea.
Posted by Fee1Free4U at 04:18 PM : Jul 05, 2008
I could not have said it better myself!! We just need to declare everyone who has an olive complexion and dark hair the enemy in Iraq and start shooting till not a soul is standing, pretty simple really!
I DONT CARE who is a SHIA and WHO IS A SUNNI, KURD or CHRISTIAN, JUST kill THEM all! IT is the only way TO ensure victory in the war AGAINST TERROR!!
Posted by Fee1Free4U at 04:18 PM : Jul 05, 2008
I could not have said it better myself!! We just need to declare everyone who has an olive complexion and dark hair the enemy in Iraq and start shooting till not a soul is standing, pretty simple really!
I DONT CARE who is a SHIA and WHO IS A SUNNI, KURD or CHRISTIAN, JUST kill THEM all! IT is the only way TO ensure victory in the war AGAINST TERROR!!
Posted by RushLimbaug4 at 04:26 PM : Jul 05, 2008
Chilling posts akin to a Charlie Manson-like philosophy of kill, kill, kill.
Just when you think the human race might rise above our barbaric, animalistic past, we''re reminded yet again of just how savagely inhuman humans can be.
You do not shoot unarmed prisoners. You are responsible for their safety so long as they are under your control.
Posted by washrealtor at 05:38 PM : Jul 05, 2008
It''s true as history shows that war can at times be inevitible as people fight for their freedom and yes, tragic loss of life occurs. But our current war, the war for oil profits invented by George (962 time liar and mass murderer) Bush, doesn''t qualify as either necessary nor inevitible.
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Posted by washrealtor at 05:38 PM : Jul 05, 2008
Is Iraq a police action?
After all we arrested Saddam...
Posted by nsSherlock1
If the fact that it occurred fifty years ago means it''s no longer important, then why do people make such a fuss about Hitler''s antics twenty years earlier??
Posted by didnt_inhale
No, the GC should apply to everyone. But the excuse "well, the enemy does it" is a bull s h i t excuse your seven year old might say when caught doing something wrong. As America, we are strong and powerful and never need to lower ourselves by acting dishonorably. Except for a few rare instances, we have done the right way for 200 years, even when the enemy hasn''t, and we have survived just fine.
Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the [war] with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match...%u201D John F Kennedy, 1961.
"Anyone who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither". Ben Franklin (paraphrased)
"I would rather die with the constitution clinched in my fist, then live with shackles on my feet" Greywolf
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by yog2541
July 7, 2008 10:22 AM PDT
- The US tolerated its South Korean butchers massacred political prisoners? There should be no surprise. "Birds of same feathers **** together"
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Reply to this comment
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See all 34 CommentsIn 1973, the Nixon administration thru the CIA tolerated the Chilean military junta tortured, kidnapped & killed political prisoners.
In the 60s thru 70s different US administrations turned a blind eye when the CIA trained SAVAK(the Shah domestic intelligence) tortured & killed various political oppositions in Iran.
In the 70s, the US Embassy in Saigon in concert with the CIA station chief ran the "Tiger camps" a French built penal colony off the coast of S. Vietnam, a location infamous for torturing college students, Buddist monks & NLF fighters.
LET THE TRUTH BE KNOWN & THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE