Originaal viide koos piltidega aadressil oli/original link with pictures was
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/koreaUS990929.html
Praegu mingil arusaamatul põhjusel link ei tööta/At the moment link is not functioning.
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.
At Least 100,
or ‘Hundreds,’ Killed
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 warfront, 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,
then 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.
Claims for Retribution Denied
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.”
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.
Some Details Unknown
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 Pentagon, told generally of the AP’s findings, said
it had found no substantiation for the allegations in the
official record. The AP’s research also found no official
Army account of the events.
Some elements of the No Gun Ri episode are unclear:
What chain of officers 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 of the events 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 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.
(continued:)
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, 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.
Corroboration From Both Sides
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.
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.
Ex-GI Delos Flint said he and other soldiers were
caught in the U.S. air attack and piled into the culvert with
the refugees. Then “somebody — maybe our guys — was
shooting in at us,” he recalled. The soldiers managed to
slip out.
Orders to Shoot
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.
Carroll said he got the rifle companies to cease fire. “I
wasn’t convinced this was enemy,” he said.
He then shepherded a boy to safety under a
double-arched concrete railroad bridge nearby, where
shaken and wounded Koreans were gathering. He saw no
threat.
“There weren’t any North Koreans in there the first
day. … It was mainly women and kids and old men,”
recalled Carroll, who said he then left the area and knows
nothing about what followed.
Shot on Them After Dark
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.
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
open fire.
“Chandler said, ‘Let’s get rid of all of them,’” said
Eugene Hesselman of Fort Mitchell, Ky. “We didn’t
know if they were North or South Koreans. … We were
there only a couple of days and we didn’t know them
from a load of coal.”
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 apparently was leaving
operations to subordinates at the time.
(continued:)
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.”
Some ex-soldiers said gunfire was coming out of the
underpasses, but others don’t remember any. None of the
ex-GIs interviewed supported one veteran’s statement
that he and others afterward discovered “at least seven”
dead North Korean soldiers in the underpasses, in
uniform under peasant white.
‘It Was Just Civilians’
Some GIs didn’t fire, veterans said. “It was civilians just
trying to hide,” said Flint, of Clio, Mich.
All 24 South Korean survivors interviewed individually
by the AP said they remembered no North Koreans or
gunfire directed at the Americans. One suggested the
Americans were seeing their own comrades’ gunfire
ricocheting through from the tunnels’ opposite ends.
Relevant U.S. Army documents say nothing about
North Korean soldiers killed under a bridge or anything
else about No Gun Ri.
The precise death toll will never be known. The
survivors believe 300 were killed at the bridge and 100 in
the air attack. Ex-GIs close to the bridge generally put the
dead there at about 200. “A lot” also were killed in the
strafing, they say.
One battalion lieutenant located by the AP said he was
in the area but knew nothing about the killing of civilians.
“I have honestly never, ever heard of this from either my
soldiers or superiors or my friends,” said John C.
Lippincott of Stone Mountain, Ga. He said he could have
missed it because “we were extremely spread out.”
Claim Rejected, Time Expired
In authoritarian, U.S.-allied South Korea, the survivors
were long discouraged from speaking out. In 1997, in a
liberalized political atmosphere, they filed a claim with
South Korea’s Government Compensation Committee.
But the committee rejected it in April 1998, saying a
five-year statute of limitations had expired long ago.
The AP reconstructed U.S. troop movements from
map coordinates in declassified U.S. war records,
narrowed the possibilities among Army units, then spent
months tracing veterans — some 130 interviews by
telephone and in person — to pinpoint the companies
involved.
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,” although the claimants
say the killings were not directly combat-related.
War crimes prosecution appears even less likely. The
U.S. military code condemns indiscriminate killing of
civilians, even if a few enemy soldiers are among a large
number of noncombatants killed, legal experts note. But
prosecution so many years later is a practical impossibility,
they say.
Associated Press Investigative Researcher Randy
Herschaft contributed to this report.
Copyright 1999 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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