"The war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20,000,000
people. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster
as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach the last time I was there.
After I looked at the wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited.
I shrink—I shrink with a horror that I cannot express in words—at this continuous slaughter."
That was a quote by World War II veteran General Douglass McArthur,
recorded during a 1951 US military hearing on "the military situation
in the Far East." We wanted to begin with that so you know what you're getting into.
If you don't want the atrocities committed in the Korean War to stain your soul forever,
turn back now. For everyone else...
In the early days of the Korean War, namely in the summer of 1950, the South Korean government
committed heinous acts against South Koreans whom they deemed communists or communist sympathisers.
One of the largest atrocities to take place during this time was the Bodo League massacre,
something the government tried to keep under wraps for decades after the war.
Before the war, the South Korean government created what was known as the National Bodo
League, a movement with the aim of, in quotation marks, "re-educating" communists or pretty much
anyone else the government didn't like. After the Korean People's Army (or KPA) attacked on
the 25th of June, South Korean President Syngman Rhee answered by ordering his retreating forces
to execute people he'd detained under the National Bodo League movement, without trial.
One massacre which fell under the umbrella of the Bodo League massacre occurred in a place
called Daejeon, also known as Taejon. Here, between the 28th of June and the 16th of July,
the Korean National Police executed between 4,000 and 7,000 suspected communist sympathisers.
US forces just stood by and watched and took photos,
photos which weren't brought to light until 1999, some 50 years after the end of the war.
In the words of American historian Bruce Cumings, "As the [KPA] bore down upon the city of Taejon[,
South Korean] authorities removed political prisoners from local jails, men and boys along
with some women, massacred them, threw them into open pits, and dumped the earth back on them."
All in all, somewhere between 60,000 and
200,000 people were massacred by the South Korean government that summer.
And if you were wondering, things didn't get any better from there.
On the 26th of July 1950—as it was later brought to light in an Associated Press story in 1999—the
US 7th Cavalry Regiment became embroiled in an atrocity in North Korea.
Here, some 600 North Korean refugees trying to flee the war stumbled into a US roadblock near
the village of Nogeun-ri. The soldiers searched the refugees—confiscating knives and anything
else that could be used as a weapon—and then American planes started strafing the refugees
while they were resting, gunning down men, women, and children alike. The survivors fled to
the relative safety of a nearby bridge underpass, only for the 7th Cavalry Regiment to follow them.
According to one Chun Choon-ja, who was just a girl at the time,
"The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies." A
Korean named Park Sun-yong reported similar depravity: "Children were screaming in fear
and adults were praying for their lives, and the whole time [the Americas] never stopped shooting."
Between 160 and 400 North Koreans fell to American bullets in the Nogeun-ri area
between that day and the 29th. Two of Park Sun-yong's children were among the dead.
US Army documents later exhumed by journalists and scholars suggested that American forces in Korea
adopted a policy of firing on approaching refugee groups, at least in part because the refugees
might have been North Korean soldiers in disguise. One of such documents was a July 1950 memo by the
US Air Force operations chief in Korea, one Colonel Turner C. Rogers; it read as follows:
"It is reported that large groups of civilians, either composed of or controlled by North Korean
soldiers, are infiltrating U.S. positions. The army has requested that we strafe
all civilian refugee parties that are noted approaching our positions.
To date, we have complied with the army request in this respect."
The following quote by US soldier Edward L. Daily further evinces the American policy:
"[C]ommand looked at it as getting rid of the problem in the easiest way. That was to shoot
them in a group. [W]e ended up shooting until all the bodies we saw were lifeless. On summer
nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming."
While what truly motivated the soldiers to commit the
Nogeun-ri massacre might remain a topic of debate,
it was an atrocity no less, one which 7th Cavalry Regiment veteran Norman Tinkler summarised well:
"We just annihilated them[.] [I]t was like an Indian raid [from] back in the old days."
But wait—it gets worse.
According to North Korea—and as displayed at North Korea's Sinchon Museum of American
War Atrocities—South Korean and American troops butchered as many as 35,000 North
Korean civilians in Sinchon throughout October and December 1950. This affair is absolutely
steeped in controversy, however, and who actually perpetrated the war crime remains unclear.
According to Chicago Tribune journalist Uli Schmitzer, "If any truth about massacres
in [Sinchon] ever existed, the evidence has long ago been obscured. The town has been turned
into a national shrine by a ruthless propaganda machine that has fueled anti-American passions."
If we believe what North Korea says, what went down in Sinchon over those 52 days was truly
not human. In 1998, the Korean Central News Agency described the Sinchon Massacre as such:
"The Yankees separated the mothers from their children before pouring
gasoline [on] the children and babies who were crying for milk. [They] threw flaming torches to
kill them. [They] drowned over 2,000 innocent people by dropping them from Soktang bridge.
They also drowned more than 1,000 women in Sowon reservoir. Upwards of 1,200 people detained in an
ice warehouse were bitten to death by military dogs. The enemies disembowled a pregnant woman
to hold up […] [the] 9 month-old embryo on the end of a bayonet [while] laughing aloud."
Propaganda or not, the report went on in that manner.
The aforementioned historian Bruce Cumings expressed his opinion on the massacre in his book
War and Television, published in 1992:
"If any Americans were present they were probably [Korean Military Advisory Group] personnel,
who witnessed many South Korean atrocities against civilians; the Koreans I spoke with were adamant
that Americans had carried out the massacres, but it is also true that Koreans do not like
to admit that Koreans could do such things, unless they are following American orders."
Things back in South Korea were looking pretty grim at the time of the Sinchon Massacre, too.
From December 1950 to April 1951, the South Korean government drafted some 406,000
citizens into what was called the National Defense Corps, organising them into 49 units
for training purposes. With the Chinese People's Volunteer Army (or PVA) advancing,
the South Korean government ordered the National Defense Corps to withdraw south.
This quickly turned into a death march, as their commander, the not-so-wonderful Kim Yun-geun,
had embezzled all the funds he was supposed to spend on food and supplies for these 400,000 men.
Marching 480 kilometres or 300 miles over a three-week period, as many as 300,000
National Defense Corps personnel either starved to death, succumbed to disease, or deserted—that
was if they hadn't already perished in the so-called training camps.
In April, the National Assembly began investigating the case and disbanding
the National Defense Corps. Commander Yun-geun and his fellow embezzlers had stolen around
five billion won and donated tens of millions of won to the president. In August, Yun-geun and his
four accomplices were executed by firing squad. But the damage had been done, the lives wasted.
As some reports suggest, joint US-United Nations POW camps
weren't exactly paradise for captured North Koreans.
According to KPA soldier Kim Sung Tae, "[O]ur life was nothing but misery and torture from the first
days of our capture. We were beaten, starved, tortured. We were treated worse than beasts."
In May 1952, in a UN camp known as Geoje POW camp, word spread that the Chinese prisoners
detained there would ultimately not be repatriated to China,
so they revolted, taking the camp commandant, American Brigadier General Francis Dodd,
hostage. To quell the revolt, the British and Canadian guards employed tear gas,
flamethrowers, and Patton tanks. According to Canadian soldier Tom McKay, American General
Haydon "Bull" Boatner told the guards to bayonet the prisoners, and shoot to kill.
"If you see somebody escaping and you’re going to shoot," said Bull,
"then make goddamned sure you kill him because the hospital's full right now."
In this one revolt, 40 prisoners were killed, and the UN guards decapitated four POWs
and hung their heads from trees as a warning. Brigadier General Dodd was ultimately released.
As brought to light in the trial of the American Private Isaac Davis, sexual abuse was present in
at least some of the American POW camps, as well. Davis, specifically, had prisoners perform oral
sex on him, and he sodomized them. To some guards, the POWs were, quote, "playthings and slaves."
Of course, those were just a few of the atrocities perpetrated by
South Koreans and Americans (as well as some non-American UN troops) during the war, and we
haven't even touched on North Korean atrocities, of which there were plenty—so let's do that.
One of the KPA's earliest atrocities occurred in the South Korean capital,
Seoul, on the 28th of June 1950. Here, in the wake of the First Battle of Seoul, KPA troops
massacred between 700 and 900, doctors, nurses, and inpatient civilians at Seoul
National University, as well as 100 wounded South Korean soldiers who were being treated there.
The KPA either shot their victims or buried them alive.
And things didn't get any brighter from that point forward.
A number of North Korean war crimes were unveiled
in December 1953 before the United States Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities;
this hearing was compiled in a three-part document titled, simply, Korean War Atrocities.
In part two, American Captain Linton Buttrey, an administrative officer with a medical corps,
described what happened when KPA troops attacked a
makeshift medical camp he had established with a non-combatant Christian chaplain
and between 15 and 20 wounded men near Kumchon, South Korea in July 1950:
"[W]e looked across the hills and saw a wave of enemy coming.[The chaplain] was administering
spiritual rites to the patients. [The KPA] just flooded us and shot the patients on the litters."
The KPA also shot Buttrey, wounding him, as well as the chaplain,
who died. This was despite the fact that both Buttery and the chaplain wore Red Cross brassards.
The captain was the only survivor of this massacre, and he only survived by playing dead.
That same month, US Corporal Charles Kinard was captured by a patrol of KPA soldiers
who saw fit to torture him for seemingly no reason other than their own sick pleasure.
Kinard described the affair as such:
"First they put rocks in my shoes and they would chase me around until I would fall.
I had lost quite a bit of blood and when I would come to,
Kinard’s captors also tortured him by pushing a can opener into the open wound in his back,
and then twisting it.
Another atrocity mentioned at the hearing—and
one of the most infamous from the Korean War—was the Hill 303 massacre of August 1950.
Here, during the Battle of Taegu, elements of a US battalion were surrounded by KPA troops while
they were trying to cross the Naktong River near Hill 303 in South Korea. Outnumbered,
the battalion surrendered, and the KPA took as many as 46 men captive (the estimates vary).
Taking the Americans to a nearby orchard, they removed their shoes and some of their clothes,
tied their wrists behind their backs with the shoestrings, and told them they would
be transferred to a POW camp. When any of the POWs resisted, the soldiers beat them to death.
The following day, however, UN air forces attacked the hill, paving the way for a contingent of US
soldiers. Unable to hold the prisoners and fend off the advancing Americans, the KPA troops had
the prisoners kneel in a gulley, where they mowed them down with submachine guns. Four men survived
by hiding under the corpses of their brothers in arms. One of the survivors was Corporal Roy
Manring, who described what it was like in that blood-soaked gulley before he got shot:
"They come by and they started kicking and you could hear the fellows hollering, grunting,
groaning, and praying, and when they kicked me they kicked my leg and I made a grunting sound
and that's when I caught it in the gut."
In August of that same year, another massacre went down in the Masan area of South Korea.
Surrounded by a regiment of the KPA near the village of Pongam-ni,
around 100 troops from two US field artillery battalions were killed in battle,
leaving just 75 men alive. The KPA rounded these survivors up, ushering 50 of them into a house
and then mowing them down, and executing the remaining 20 with shots to the head.
This was known as the Bloody Gulch massacre, and in the wake of this atrocity and Hill 303,
General MacArthur issued the following warning to North Korea's military leaders:
"I shall hold you and your commanders criminally
accountable under the rules and precedents of war."
Of course, MacArthur's warning did nothing to stop the atrocities.
In October 1950, some 180 American POWs were placed on a train to be transported
deep into North Korea. On the five-day journey, they were exposed to the cold and weren't given
any food or medical attention. Many died on the way. To avoid air raids,
the train halted in Sunchon Tunnel on the 30th of October, and it was during this stopover that
KPA troops marched some of the POWs to a nearby ravine, where they cut 68 of them down with SMGs.
American private John Martin described it like this:
"We went around the corner, into this ditch. [The soldiers] said,
'Get down; the planes. Get down; the planes.
Like Manring, Martin survived by hiding among the bodies of his brothers in arms.
Of the 180 Americans who had boarded that train, only 21 survived.
December 1950 saw another infamous atrocity.
Much to their horror, the men of a South Korean patrol happened upon the corpses of
five US American airmen tortured to death by enemy troops after their truck convoy was ambushed in
North Korea. The KPA soldiers had tortured the airmen by sharpening bamboo sticks and slowly
pressing them again and again into their flesh. At the US Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities
hearing, American Lieutenant Colonel James Rogers, who had served in the Medical Section
of the 1st US Army Corps in Korea, described what he saw when he examined the dead airmen:
"[T]hey suffered multiple superficial and deep spear wounds over the body, the face,
the chest, and the abdomen. By the nature of the wounds I am of the opinion that the instrument
of torture had been previously heated. [A]fter torturing them with the superficial wounds they
bayoneted them with the same instruments and these fellows were allowed to bleed to death."
Though, even if captured US soldiers survived long enough to enter enemy POW camps,
that didn't mean they were out of the woods.
American Lieutenant Colonel Abbott was a POW for 33 months during the war. He later described
the conditions of a Chinese-run camp where they experimented on inmates by cutting them open and
putting, in quotation marks, "monkey glands"—which were actually chicken livers—inside them:
"In this hospital men were dying again daily. [They] were sleeping on the floor, and they were
covered with maggots, they were suffering from dysentery, pellagra, beri-beri, and so on[.]
[T]he Chinese had introduced an operation that they claimed was a cure-all for all diseases[.]
[T]hey referred to it as a tissue operation[,] in which they made an incision under the arm
and injected into this incision a chicken liver. It was then re-sewed and allowed to heal."
The horrors go on and on, far further and deeper than we have time or stomach for today.
As evinced in the sources we referred to in this video, it seems that both
the North and the South Koreans, along with their Chinese and American allies,
were neck-deep in war crimes and atrocities. There were no good guys, and MacArthur was right
to vomit and shrink whenever he envisioned the slaughter that was the war in Korea.
But did you know that the Korean War was so brutal?
Do you have anything to add to the atrocities we covered? Can you think of any more?
Sinchon was one of the most controversial atrocities we covered today;
what do you think happened there? And lastly, which nation do you think perpetrated the worse
atrocities of the war? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.