AP: U.S. Allowed Korean Massacre In 1950

Declassified Files Show Thousands Of Political Prisoners Were Executed By S. Korea, With U.S. Approval

(AP)  The Associated Press has previously reported on the hidden history of mass executions by South Korea early in the Korean War. The following report looks in-depth at the U.S. connection.
By Associated Press Writers Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang.

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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.

[yog2541]

The US tolerated its South Korean butchers massacred political prisoners? There should be no surprise. "Birds of same feathers **** together"
In 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

[whiskyrocker]

War is Hel%

[wardoglrs]

%u201CWe are opposed...by a ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

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

[thgdriver]

Who''s surprised? The Democrats were sitting in the white house and put their stamp of approval on all that took place from 1942 to 1953.

[tootall10142]

IT IS A DAMMED CRYING SHAME THAT THIS WOULD HAPPEN WITHOUT HAVING ALL OF THEM ROUNDED UP FIRST.HALF ASSED GOVERMENT OPERATIONS TOO BAD WE DIDNT HAVE TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND OF THE COMMUNIST MIDGETS LINED UP.WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY DID TO OUR PILOTS AND P.O.W.S ? IS IT TOO LATE TOO START THIS AGAIN? A FEW POISONED FISH HEADS OUGHT TO DO THE TRICK.

[russedav]

If it weren''t so sick it would be hilarious, seeing CBS/AP perverts pretending to wring their hands in contrived angst about this deaths they love to exploit in their "hate Bush" "hate America first" campaign while caring nothing aobut the forty million babies whose butchering these mindless evil fascists have promoted with the lie of "pro choice/reproductive freedom" (unlike infantile egotist pro-aborts, responsible adults rather know that once the choice is made to bed, further choice is forfeit) which only replaces the brutality of the *** owner racist Democrats loved with the brutality of the *** killer abortionist still racist Democrats now love, Planned Parenthood founder Sanger and her successorst deliberately planning their black genocide CBS/AP love (www.blackgenocide.org) and get rich from. As sick as it gets.

[extremophil]

So now the U.S "allowed" a massacre, just like we "allow" starvation in Africa and we "allow" global warming and the endangerment of animals and everything else in this otherwise perfect world. Everything is our fault.....boo hoo hoo. We should hate ourselves.

[hermitdave]

Gosh Stevie just what did the TALLY-BAND do to harm this country. Surely you don''t believe Osama and his gang of cave guys planned 9/11.

[l8c6]

The very bottom line is, Koreans slaughtered Koreans, not by the orders of anyone else. This is not to say the U.S. doesn''t and hasn''t mettled in the affairs of other nations in destructive ways. Troubling recently is the United States now more open acceptance of torture as a means to an end considering the trials that the U.S. has conducted in the past in disfavor of nations who have tortured, one most notable the German Nazi regime after WWII.

[reptilian96]

WAR CRIMES ONLY BRING MORE CRIMES. WE CAN''T BLAME PEOPLE FOR IT OR ANYONE FOR THAT MATTER. ONLY THE SURVIVOR KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM OR HER. OPRESSION, SUPPRESSION WILL NOT WORK, IT WILL ONLY ADD MORE FUEL TO THE FIRE. FOR EXAMPLE: IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY, PLO AND ALL. WHAT MAKE ME SICK IS UNNECESSARY WAR. WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO DIPLOMACY? I HAVE SUGGESTION HOW TO WIN WAR WITHOUT CIVILIANS DEATHS. "WIN THE PEOPLE AND YOU WIN THE WAR" ITS AS SIMPLE AS THAT. IF YOU CAN KILL PEOPLE, YOU CAN FIND WAYS TO WIN PEOPLE TOO.

[rafterman1]

===OOOps sorry. I keep forgetting the the Geneva convention and the rules of decency are only supposed to apply the the USSA. Great smear job AP I am sure the sheeple will eat it up. =)===
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.

[pugster]

Maybe those South Koreans are not totally protesting about US beef after all.

[heuristic1]

What can anyone say? Just another nail in the coffin of the good %u2018ol US of A. This country is f ucked.

[misands]

More proof that despite all of the bragging about what a great, compassionate, Christian nation we are, in the end we are just as barbaric and ruthless as any other rogue nation.

[cdfoxtrot]

Nothing new here. Move along. That was part of the mindset of the early 1950''''s...''''Better Dead Than Red''''.

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??

[stevie571]

The innocent people of Afghanistan? Oh, you mean the Taliban. War is hell.

[hermitdave]

This should come as no surprise. We are no better than any other group of humans. When good people allow themselves to be controlled by bad people, bad stuff happens. Just think what they will write someday about what we did to the poor Afghan people, or the innocent people of Iraq.

[flajoe1]

Police actions AKA Vietnam are a joke and a waste of life.
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Posted by washrealtor at 05:38 PM : Jul 05, 2008

Is Iraq a police action?

After all we arrested Saddam...

[komoncents]

In WW2 bombs and cannon were indiscriminate and lethal but they made the enemy surrender. If Allies had said we know the enemy is in France but we can''''t go there because they are a sovereign nation (RE Pakistan) then we would still be fighting Germany or would have capitulated ourselves. War is terrible, but if you are going to do it make it no holds barred. Police actions AKA Vietnam are a joke and a waste of life.

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.

[nssherlock1]

Nothing new here. Move along. That was part of the mindset of the early 1950''s...''Better Dead Than Red''.