The Bridge at No Gun Ri
CHOE, SANG-HUN & HANLEY, CHARLES J. & MENDOZA, MARTHA
Parts of the Associated Press report reprinted here appeared in many American newspapers last fall, but we didn't see the entire report anywhere. It is a powerful document, an unusual piece of...
...Veteran Delos Flint remembers being caught with other soldiers in the strafing and piling into a culvert with refugees...
...SANG-HUN CHOE, CHARLES J. HANLEY, and MARTHA MENDOZA are AP staff writers...
...The command looked at it as getting rid of the problem in the easiest way...
...Bodies fell everywhere, and terrified parents dragged children into a narrow culvert beneath the tracks, the Koreans told the AP...
...A terrible episode was about to unfold in a "forgotten war," a chapter of the 1950-1953 Korean conflict that would remain unwritten until a dozen ex-soldiers, in interviews with the Associated Press, corroborated the allegations of South Koreans who say they survived a mass killing at the U.S...
...The thirty Korean claimants—survivors and victims' relatives—said it was an unprovoked, three-day carnage...
...After they filed for compensation in 1997, their claim was rejected by the South Korean government on a technicality...
...My mother died on the second day of shooting...
...Today, he said, "we all share a guilt feeling, something that remains with everyone...
...We were about 50 in group...
...FROM THE START of the 1950-1953 conflict, North Korean atrocities were widely reported...
...Air Force mission reports from the mid-1950s show that pilots sometimes attacked "people in white," apparently because of suspicions North Korean soldiers were disguised among them...
...Crowly said, "We just have no information in historical files to lend any clarity to what might have happened in July 1950...
...Veterans said Captain Melbourne C. Chandler, after speaking with superior officers by radio, had ordered machine-gunners from his heavyweapons company to set up near the tunnel mouths and open fire...
...Because families then scattered across South Korea, the claimants said, they have the names of only 130 dead, primarily their own relatives...
...Not everyone fired, veterans said...
...Air Force planes, they say...
...In response, the U.S...
...The villagers say they tried to file a compensation claim with a U.S...
...The refugees could have been screened up on the road or checked out under the bridge, Kerns and Hesselman said...
...A lower-level South Korean compensation committee said people were killed at No Gun Ri but it had no proof of U.S...
...He and his comrades eventually slipped out...
...investigation into the killings...
...Recalled machine-gunner Edward L. Daily: "Some may have been trying to crawl deeper for protection...
...The refugees who approached the Second Battalion's lines on July 26 were South Koreans ordered out of two nearby villages by American soldiers, who warned them the North Koreans were coming, Korean claimants told the AP...
...I don't remember shooting coming out," said ex-rifleman Louis Allen of Bristol, Tennessee...
...In the neighboring Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, the commander, Major General William B. Kean, told his troops that since South Koreans were to have been evacuated from the battle zone, "all civilians seen in this area are to be considered as enemy and action taken accordingly...
...No Gun Ri's dead were not alone...
...That would make No Gun Ri one of only two known cases of largescale killings of noncombatants by U.S...
...North Korean troops who moved in found "about 400 bodies of old and young people and children," the North Korean newspaper Cho Sun In Min Bo reported three weeks later...
...But those close to the bridge, from Chandler's H Company, generally put the total at about 200...
...But the story of No Gun Ri has remained undisclosed for a half-century, despite sketchy news reports in 1950 implying that U.S...
...But old soldiers in their seventies and late sixties identified the No Gun Ri bridge from photographs, remembered the approximate dates, and corroborated the core of the Koreans' account: that American troops kept the refugees pinned under the bridge in late July 1950 and killed almost all of them...
...Hundreds more South Koreans were killed on August 3, 1950, when retreating U.S...
...GIs had confirmed much of their account, the Korean claimants called for a U.S...
...The Korean claimants say the killings were not combat-related—the enemy was miles away...
...For decades in the U.S.-allied South Korea, the No Gun Ri claimants were discouraged from speaking out...
...In April 1998, the national panel rejected the case, saying a fiveyear statute of limitations expired long ago...
...As for civil liability, the U.S...
...This is right after we get orders that nobody comes through, civilian, military, nobody," said Carroll, of Lansdowne, Virginia...
...We were there only a couple of days and we didn't know them from a load of coal...
...Some, like ex-sergeant James T. Kerns of Piedmont, South Carolina, said the Americans were answering fire from among the refugees...
...The AP also pored through hundreds of boxes of once-secret documents at the National Archives and other repositories to find pieces of the story...
...They can be reached on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays in our new office at 310 Riverside Drive, Suite 1201, New York, N.Y...
...American units rushed from Japan to stop the North Koreans were poorly equipped and ill-trained...
...The lieutenant then shepherded a boy to safety under a double-arched concrete railroad bridge nearby, where shaken and wounded Koreans were gathered...
...CHANGES With this issue, Brian Morton steps down as executive editor of Dissent, a position he held (with different titles) for seventeen years...
...In late July 1950, the American veterans said, their army battalion killed a large number of South Korean refugees beneath a railroad bridge at a hamlet called No Gun Ri...
...American commanders had ordered units in retreat in the Korean War's first desperate weeks to shoot civilians as a defense against disguised enemy soldiers, according to once-classified documents found by the AP in months of researching U.S...
...But ex-GIs said the strafing may have been a mistake...
...Ex-GIs speak of a hundred, two hundred, or simply hundreds dead...
...How many soldiers refused to fire...
...In the end, the Koreans have said in a series of DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 39 THE BRIDGE AT NO GUN RI petitions, some three hundred refugees lay dead under the bridge's twin arches...
...None of the other veterans, when asked, remembered seeing North Koreans...
...Armed Forces Claims Service said there was "no evidence . . . to show that the U.S...
...Retired Colonel Robert M. Carroll, then a twenty-five-year-old first lieutenant, remembers battalion riflemen opening fire on the refugees from their foxholes...
...The veterans also disagreed: some said they were fired upon from beneath the bridge, but others said they don't remember hostile fire...
...How high in the ranks did knowledge of the events extend...
...You can't kill people just for being there," he told the AP...
...They also told of refusing orders to fire on civilians in other cases...
...military...
...government will meet our demands and console the wandering souls of those who died an unfair death," the claimants said in a statement...
...The First 40 n DISSENT / Spring 2000 Cavalry Division went in with little understanding of Korea...
...The U.S...
...EDS...
...Did GIs see gunfire from the refugees or their own ricochets...
...Let's get rid of all of them'," said Eugene Hesselman of Fort Mitchell, Kentucky...
...But others who were there said No Gun Ri didn't have to happen...
...FROM FRESHLY dug foxholes, the GIs looked out over their gunsights...
...That's possible, said Preece...
...Brian played a decisive role in shaping the editorial style and policies of the magazine...
...The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies," said Chun Choon-ja, a twelve-year-old girl at the time...
...Army is now investigating the allegations made by the soldiers quoted here (after long resistance to similar allegations by Korean civilians...
...We didn't know if they were North or South Koreans...
...His staff relayed this as "considered as unfriendly and shot...
...military archives and interviewing veterans across the Unites States...
...An order to fire on civilians is patently an illegal order," said retired Colonel Scott Silliman of Duke University, an Air Force lawyer for twenty-five years...
...And it's the individual that has to make the decision...
...But he "heard" about refugee killings and told his men it was wrong, Huff said at his Abbeville, South Carolina, home...
...Kira has worked as an editor in New York and is a graduate student in philosophy at the New School...
...The young American soldiers, new at the warfront, were wary...
...What then happened under the concrete bridge—which stands today, deeply scarred by bullets—cannot be reconstructed in full detail five decades later...
...Chandler and other key officers are now dead, but the AP was able to locate the colonel who commanded the battalion, Herbert B. Heyer, eighty-eight...
...Orders had come down: No one crosses the line...
...Chandler said, 'The hell with all those people...
...commanders blew up two bridges as refugees streamed across, according to ex-GIs, Korean eyewitnesses, and declassified documents...
...Army vehicles...
...ground troops in this century's major wars, military experts note...
...involvement...
...On July 28, the Seventh Cavalry was told to prepare to pull back again early the next morning...
...The Korean War record shows army courtsmartial only for individual murders of Koreans, nothing on a large scale...
...Kerns also said weapons were recovered...
...Two days earlier, First Cavalry Division headquarters issued a more explicit order: "No refugees to cross the front line...
...Some ex-GIs today estimate 100 or fewer were killed...
...It was assumed there were enemy in these people," veteran Herman Patterson remembers...
...We were scared to death," said Preece, a career soldier who later fought in Vietnam...
...Some ex-GIs poured out chilling memories of the scene, but others offered only fragments, or abruptly ended their interviews...
...Half its sergeants had been transferred to other divisions...
...Kerns, a machine gunner, said he fired over the refugees' heads...
...The report for one mission of four F-80 jets, for example, said the airborne controller "said to fire on people in white clothes...
...There's things that goes on that we can't comprehend, but it has to be done...
...One said they later found a few disguised North Korean soldiers among the dead...
...Heyer, of Sandy Springs, Georgia, denied knowing anything about the shootings and said, "I know I didn't give such an order...
...War is not just," said Norman Tinkler...
...Records show that on the third day, July 26, the battalion's 660 men were regrouped and dug in at No Gun Ri, a hundred miles southeast of Seoul, South Korea's capital...
...Sounds of slaughter haunt Park Hee-sook's memory, too...
...Relevant unit documents say nothing about a crossfire, about North Korean soldiers killed under a bridge, or anything else about No Gun Ri...
...Kira Brunner and Rachel Neumann are the new assistant editors of the magazine...
...The laws and customs of war condemn indiscriminate killing of civilians, even if a few enemy soldiers are among a large number of noncombatants killed, military experts note...
...A company commander had called for an airstrike, but against enemy artillery miles up the road, they said...
...No one saw everything: Koreans were cowering under fire, and Americans were dug into positions over hundreds of yards of hilly terrain...
...Secret U.S...
...Ex-GIs believe the order was cleared at battalion headquarters, a halfmile to the rear, or at a higher level...
...troops may have fired on refugees...
...lines via refugee groups...
...Within a day, many of its Second Battalion infantrymen were scattering in panic, tossing away weapons, at word of an enemy breakthrough nearby...
...fax (212) 316-3145...
...The late Colonel Gilmon A. Huff, who took over the Second Battalion from Heyer three days after the pullback from No Gun Ri, was interviewed before his death earlier this year and said he knew nothing of what happened at the bridge...
...It was mainly women and kids and old men," recalled Carroll, who said he then left the area and knows nothing about what followed...
...David Glenn, who arrived as an intern in 1992, returned as an editorial assistant in 1995, and was associate editor for the last few years, has also left his position here in order to write full time in Milwaukee before moving to northern California later this year...
...Veterans told the AP of two smaller but similar refugee killings in July and August 1950...
...Fire on everyone trying to cross lines...
...The final barrage still echoes in the memories of old soldiers...
...military intelligence reports from those days, since declassified, place the North Korean front line four miles from No Gun Ri on July 26, when the refugees entered the underpasses...
...law against foreign claims related to "combatant activities...
...and he will consult with us regularly on writers and themes...
...Forward controllers on light planes directed pilots to such unplanned targets in mid-flight...
...The AP subsequently reconstructed unit movements from map coordinates in declassified war records...
...Six veterans of the First Cavalry Division said they fired on the refugee throng at No Gun Ri, and six others said they witnessed the mass killing at the South Korean hamlet...
...Veterans disagreed on whether gunfire came from the underpasses...
...In August 1997, a claim signed by thirty petitioners was filed with South Korea's Government Compensation Committee...
...First Cavalry Division was in the area...
...Eds DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 43...
...But excomrades disputed this...
...The Koreans said the Americans may have been seeing their own comrades' fire, ricocheting through from the tunnels' opposite ends...
...A lot" also were killed in the strafing, they say...
...Several said some soldiers refused to shoot what one described as "civilians just trying to hide...
...Preece recalled only "hearsay" about weapons...
...It could actually have happened, that they were seeing their own fire...
...claims office in Seoul in 1960, but were told they missed a deadline...
...Use discretion in case of women and children...
...Months of tracing veterans—some 130 interviews by telephone and in person—then pinpointed the companies involved...
...Both 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...
...Early on July 29, the 7th Cavalry pulled back...
...Declassified records show that First Cavalry Division soldiers did move through that village area the previous three days...
...People pulled dead bodies around them for protection," said Chung Koo-ho, 61...
...Hesselman said, "Every now and then you'd hear a shot, like a rifle shot...
...The North Koreans buried some dead in unknown locations and surviving relatives buried others, the villagers said...
...I think that's what he believed," said Howard D. Steward, an ex-colonel from San Diego...
...But ex-GIs agreed on such elements as time and place, and on the preponderance of women, children, and old men among the victims...
...MILITARY EXPERTS in the law of war told the AP they had never heard of such blanket "kill" orders in the U.S...
...That morning, the U.S...
...Eighth Army had radioed orders throughout the Korean front that began, "No repeat no refugees will be permitted to cross battle lines at any time," according to declassified documents located at the National Archives in Washington...
...Some of us did and some of us didn't," said Flint, of Clio, Michigan, the soldier who had been briefly caught in the culvert with the refugees...
...I wouldn't fire at anybody in the tunnel like that...
...But others recalled only heavy barrages of American firepower, not hostile fire...
...One ex-GI objects that "a bunch of lawyers" can't run a war...
...military has said repeatedly it found no basis for the allegations...
...AP research also found no official army account of the events...
...Then "somebody, maybe our guys, was shooting at us," he said...
...There weren't any North Koreans in there the first day, I'll tell you that...
...ALL TwENTY-FOUR South Korean survivors interviewed individually by the AP said they remembered no North Koreans or gunfire directed at the Americans...
...Children cried and clung to their dead mothers...
...We just annihilated them," said Norman Tinkler of Glasco, Kansas...
...On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming," said Daily, of Clarksville, Tennessee, who went on to earn a battlefield commission in Korea...
...Mothers DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 41 THE BRIDGE AT NO GUN RI wrapped their children with blankets and hugged them with their backs toward the entrances...
...The Korean claimants say a light plane circled their area immediately before the strafing...
...Declassified U.S...
...we will miss his intelligence and devotion...
...Ex-sergeant George Preece remembered the way was being cleared for U.S...
...The Americans directed the refugees into the bridge underpasses—each 80 feet long, 23 feet wide, 30 feet high—and after dark opened fire on them from nearby machinegun positions, the Koreans said...
...After the AP report was released, Pentagon spokesman P.J...
...Teen-aged riflemen and young officers with no combat experience were thrust overnight into a hellish war, told to expect guerilla fighting and be wary of the tens of thousands of South Korean civilians pouring south with retreating Americans...
...Both have already written for Dissent...
...Hundreds of civilians, many of them women and children, were moving toward their lines, trying to cross to safety...
...Anticipating the discussion certain to follow upon the report, we include with the AP dispatch two comments on the political and moral meaning of the incident at No Gun Ri...
...It is a powerful document, an unusual piece of investigative journalism, and one that has had significant political consequences...
...During three nights under fire, some trapped refugees managed to slip away, but others were shot as they tried to escape or crawled out to find clean water to drink, the Koreans said...
...At First Cavalry headquarters, division commander Major General Hobart R. Gay was told South Korean refugees were killed by North Korean troops in a crossfire at No Gun Ri, the division information officer recalled...
...He said he saw no threat...
...We want the truth, justice and due respect for our human rights," they wrote in a 1997 petition to President Clinton...
...But as authoritarian South Korea liberalized in the 1990s, they revived their case THE BRIDGE AT NO GUN RI and sent petitions to Washington...
...There should be an official report in late spring or early summer of this year...
...I would not fire into a bunch of women...
...But the general overseeing one bridge-blowing, the First Cavalry Division commander, had sought to stop the refugee flow as well...
...I can still hear the moans of women dying in a pool of blood," said Park, then a girl of sixteen...
...That was to shoot them in a group," said Daily...
...Some elements of the No Gun Ri episode are unclear: What chain of officers gave the open-fire orders...
...Armed with new evidence that U.S...
...He will continue to write for Dissent and to work to strengthen our ties to the next generation—his generation—of writers on the left...
...It was just wholeTHE BRIDGE AT NO GUN RI sale slaughter," said Patterson, of Greer, South Carolina...
...The other was Vietnam's My Lai massacre, in 1968, in which more than five hundred Vietnamese may have died...
...As the refugees neared No Gun Ri, leading ox carts, some with children on their backs, American soldiers ordered them off of the southbound dirt road and onto a parallel railroad track, the South Koreans said...
...After five decades, none gave a complete, detailed account...
...Army's hands...
...Veterans said the colonel apparently was leaving battalion operations to subordinates at the time...
...About a hundred others were killed in a preceding attack by the U.S...
...force reeling southward toward the peninsula's tip...
...Later, they say, Korean police warned one man, survivor Yang Hae-chan, to keep quiet about the 1950 events...
...Once the fury subsided, Kerns said, he, Preece, and another GI found at least seven 42 n DISSENT / Spring 2000 dead North Korean soldiers in the underpasses, wearing uniforms under peasant white...
...The bursts of gunfire killed those near the tunnel entrances first, the Korean claimants said...
...Word was circulating that northern soldiers disguised in white peasant garb might try to penetrate U.S...
...None was acknowledged, they say...
...The Americans wanted to deny the crossings to the enemy, reported massing more than fifteen miles away...
...When you see something like that and you're frightened, you start to claw...
...The untested Seventh Cavalry Regiment, part of the First Cavalry Division, reached the front July 24...
...Carroll said he "wasn't convinced this was enemy," and he got the rifle companies to cease firing on the refugees...
...He told a correspondent he was sure most refugees were North Korean guerillas...
...It was civilians just trying to hide...
...Hesselman said someone later displayed a submachine gun...
...10025, phone (212) 316-3120...
...Having researched histories, they pointed a finger at the First Cavalry...
...They showed that four First Cavalry Division battalions were in the area at the time of the alleged incident...
...More said they knew or heard about it...
...The U.S...
...Rachel has an MFA in fiction writing from the New School and also works as a writing teacher and freelance writer and editor...
...The Korean conflict, which ended in stalemate, began on June 25, 1950, when the communist North invaded and sent the South Korean army and a small U.S...
...Together with Mark Levinson, he will continue to run our Books section...
...We hope the U.S...
...The Koreans, whose claim or compensation was rejected last year, say three hundred were shot to death after a hundred had been killed in an air attack...
...government is largely protected by U.S...
...But Preece, of Dunville, Kentucky, said he doesn't remember making such a search or even hearing that North Koreans were found...
Vol. 47 • April 2000 • No. 2
