Opinion letters

Author: Various Authors

Civilian Deaths in Korea
Aren't News

By Stanley Weintraub. Mr. Weintraub is an Eighth Army
veteran of the Korean War and author of "MacArthur's
War" (Free Press, 2000).

This year's Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting went
to the Associated Press for a September 1999 story
about a purported mass killing of civilians by American
troops during the Korean War. What set the AP dispatch
apart from wartime reports of massacres in Korea was
the charge by a supposed participant that his
commanding officer had ordered the killings. Trouble is,
the investigative reporters didn't seem to investigate
whether their principal source was credible.

Now it turns out he is not. The key player in the AP
atrocity story, Ed Daily, was nowhere near the alleged
site of No Gun Ri. Mr. Daily told a tissue of untruths so
blatant as to call the entire Pulitzer-winning story into
question. As Joseph Galloway of U.S. News and World
Report has sleuthed out, Mr. Daily manufactured nearly
everything from other soldiers' memories.

Damage Control

In a damage-control effort, the AP's executive editor,
Jonathan Wolman, declared: "While we remain confident
of the central findings of our coverage, AP is dismayed
that Ed Daily cannot authenticate his account of the
events at No Gun Ri." In flabby exculpation for AP's
prime source, Mr. Wolman added that "Mr. Daily is
obviously haunted by his service in the Korean War even
as he struggles to understand and explain the version of
events he provided to AP."

But it would appear that what was really haunting the voluble mechanic with a rear area service unit was the fear of being found out. The officer alleged to have given the orders is conveniently dead. The other eyewitness vets, their memories jogged by Mr. Daily, have no supporting evidence. The only fact beyond doubt is
the spelling of Mr. Daily's name, which AP got right.

It's true that horrible things happened in Korea in the summer of 1950. The Eighth Army's situation was precarious. Its mission was to hold some territory from which it could, when augmented, counterattack. Otherwise it faced a Dunkirk back to
Japan. Units were ordered not to allow refugees to impede military action. Civilians, however frightened and panicked, were to be considered unfriendly if they failed to turn back.

The command dilemma emerged not only at the village of No Gun Ri, but everywhere along the receding battle lines. Already strafed by American planes, desperate
refugees fleeing the North Koreans sought shelter in drainage ditches and tunnels, and under a railway trestle. They had been warned off, as elsewhere, to clear the
way for American tanks and trucks.

When the civilians kept coming, newly arrived and marginally trained infantrymen, fearing that enemy soldiers had concealed themselves in the traditional white "papa-san" garb of the elderly, fired into the cowering masses. This is the No Gun Ri story, paralleled across the peninsula. As elsewhere, many civilians died.

A semiofficial history, "Battle Report," published in Washington during the war, bluntly owned up to some of the blunders by the green troops. But, covering the Pentagon's flanks, it also blamed the communists. "So we killed civilians, friendly civilians," the report admitted, "and bombed their homes, fired whole villages with their occupants -- women and children and 10 times as many hidden Communist soldiers -- under showers of napalm, and the [carrier] pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do."

As the North Koreans poured down, the authors of "Battle Report" explained, "the wholly defensible, wholly abhorrent, task of warring against civilians" was forced
upon United Nations forces by the "stealthy" stratagem of hiding soldiers and guerrillas among refugees.

In other words, what actually took place at No Gun Ri and other places was the same thing that happens wherever hapless civilians are in war's way. When the South
Korean army first fled Seoul, it blew up the Han River bridge to keep the communists from crossing. It was crowded with people and vehicles in flight. Thousands died.

Thousands more died in the confusion and panic of the early weeks of the war, when ill-equipped U.N. forces did not even have maps. (Two officers in a newly arrived
battalion broke into a schoolhouse and tore a page from a geography book to locate their position.) Australian airmen flying without map grids sprayed bullets and
bombs onto a South Korean munitions train well below enemy lines. Nine cars with their locomotive exploded, taking with them the railway station and uncounted hundreds of civilians in the adjacent village. American pilots fired on a column of 30 South Korean trucks and killed most of the soldiers aboard.

Exploiting the chaos, Syngman Rhee, the dictatorial South Korean president whom Gen. Douglas MacArthur admired for his staunch anticommunism, ordered the
murders of thousands of political opponents. The mass graves of some, including women and children, were discovered only in the late 1990s, although the facts have
been known since 1950. The North Koreans also massacred civilians as they moved south.

Desperation and death were everywhere in the first months of war in Korea. But that war, unlike Vietnam, was not fought on television. When Vietnam War protestors in the U.S. shouted that "the whole world is watching," the world indeed was. Not so in Korea, where the war was reported only in print and magazine photos.

False Claims

Because we knew what happened in dozens of equivalents to No Gun Ri, the AP's story last year was not news -- apart from the questionable eyewitness testimony. False claims, even of dishonor, surface often. Some veterans aspire to be in the headlines, even as antiheroes, so long as their names are spelled right.

A late friend who flew B-29s over Japan in World War II returned for repairs via Iwo Jima, where he wandered to the shoreline. "What a stinking, horrid piece of land that
is!" he wrote in his diary. "Debris all over, Jap and Am. . . . Many unburied Japs in holes & caves & trenches -- skeletons all over. Place stinks to high heaven of rotten
flesh." He was used to seeing war from high heaven -- 21,000 feet up -- and was shocked at the real thing.

Especially from close up, war will always stink. The message of No Gun Ri, whatever its truth, is just that. It is not news. Since the Pulitzer Prize committee won't ask for its award back, the AP should recognize its shoddy work and relinquish the prize itself.

Commentary:
by Richard Tryon

One might expect that after the above revelation, the false story would go away. It has not and it will not! Why? Because the story fits a picture that some want you to think shows that American soldiers fought to kill S. Koreans rather than try to save them.

Unless you have experienced the hell of combat, I believe you should be slow to jump to conclusions about the behavior of those who live through it. Especially at a time like June of 1950 when we Americans jumped into a battle that we had promised the world we would not enter, and did not think could happen.

Our Secretary of State spoke to a U.S. National Press Club months before to tell the world that Korea was outside of the defense sphere of the U.S. in its policy of containment of the Soviet threat. A future American Ambassador to Peru and Brazil, William D. Pawley, sternly warned President Truman that he would have a war on his hands within nine months as the militant N. Korean communists needed to come steal the food of the poor southern half of the nation. Even though the North was thought to be far more important because of its industrial development during the years of Japanese control, it was not able to feed itself then and never has since except by the expedient of starving or killing its own people; or getting it given to them by us.

The only force in the world less prepared to fight in 1950 than the U.S. in Korea was the Soviet Union. Not only was it devasted by WWII that ended in 1945, it had no way to become involved except in a peripheral way by supplying fighter pilots for Mig 15 jets. This they did but refused to admit it for almost fifty years. They took refuge on the N. side of the Yalu River where our leaders said that our planes could not fly for fear of dragging the Russians into the ‘police action’. I almost had the chance to fly an F-86 in that combat. It would have been tough to let the enemy shoot at me and not shoot back because he crossed a river with me in pursuit!

The overwhelming military might of the North quickly raced through S. Korea and the Truman forces sent from Japan were mostly young, ill prepared and under equipped.
They found themselves quickly joining the crumbling forces of S. Korea in a flight to the South for the port city of Pusan.

By the time they had established a battle line around the port in hopes that they could defend it long enough for reinforcements and food to arrive, the commandes knew that they might lose it all. Reports or rumors circulated- it matters little which- that the N.Koreans were prone to disguising themselves as fleeing S. Korean refugees with the hope of penetrating the U.S. lines. This would enable them to turn and attack from the rear. It is not surprising that efforts were made to stop such, even if it meant shooting civilians, that they could not feed, if they did let them through the lines.

Such unfortunate ‘trade-offs’ by military leaders or ordinary soldiers at the front under extreme pressure are bound to happen in war. Why should anyone want to dredge up such unfortunate stories fifty years later? The answers are twofold:

The most obvious from the report above is to make money by collecting fame for a brilliant award winning story! That the story was full of fabrications is evident from the report above. But, did it happen?  Well, maybe not exactly as the vague memories describe it, but it is hard to imagine how it could not have happened. In some form, somewhere along that battle line it was virtually inevitable that a combination of men, leaders, conditions and events would make it happen.

The second reason for the story? To make Americans look bad to other peoples of the world. Why?  Well, the most important reason is that communism is not dead! Its leaders still want to think that their concepts are best and only poor leadership was to blame for the global failures of the system to achieve its glorious goals. To reignite the peoples, it is necessary to foment evidences of class warfare. Here is an excellent example of how it is done.

Under the innocent umbrella of a desire to win an award for exceptional reporting we find the kind of story that communists have always encouraged, searched for and manufactured. We may never know if the author of this example was duped, or if he was driven by terrible memories of his own activity; or if he is just a soldier in the communist cause, trying to influence the people of the world to hate one another over perceived nation wrongs! There is no reason for the friendship between S.Korea and the U.S. to be destroyed by this type of story, but emotional stories of this sort can do damage not only between the friends, but they also can paint an unreal picture of the participants in the eyes of those in other parts of the world. We should read such stories carefully; and we should pray that those in control of publishing would do a better job of determining that the authors have their facts right!