VETERANS TELL OF OTHER REFUGEE KILLINGS
By Sang-Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley & Martha Mendoza
Associated Press
Writers
Sun Journal,
EDITOR’S NOTE – The Associated Press recently reported
on the killings of up to 400 South Korean refugees at the hamlet of Nogun-ri during the 1950-53 Korean War. That story briefly mentioned other incidents
in which witnesses said refugees died at
On a single deadly day in August 1950, six weeks into the
Korean War, a
An old soldier
recalled the critical moment at one bridge.
"I said, "There are people!" And they said, "You have to blow it! There’s no other way!" ex-Army engineer
Joseph M. Ipock of
Ex-GIs told the
AP of the bridge blowings and two other incidents, machine-gun and mortar
attacks on refugees, during interviews about what happened at Nogun-ri, South Korea, in late July 1950. In that case, as reported Sept. 29, veterans
corroborated Korean accounts of hundreds of refugees killed at
One bridge
blowing, with its refugee deaths, was recorded briefly in an official Army
chronicle, but not until 10 years after the event. The trail of dead civilians, many of them
women and children, has been a hidden underside to a well-known chapter in U.S.
military history, the southward retreat from advancing North Korean forces of
three Army divisions into a defensible perimeter across South Korea’s Naktong
River in July-August 1950.
The withdrawal
was often confused. The
Just days into
his first combat command, the 1st Cavalry Division’s Maj. Gen.
Hobart R. Gay told reporters he was sure most of the white-clad columns
pressing toward American lines were North Korean guerrillas. "We must find a means to hold these refugees
in place," the division commander said.
Days later, on
Aug. 3, 1950, Gay waited on the east bank of the
"Finally, it
was nearly dark," Gay later wrote to an Army historian. "There was nothing else to be done." Then he gave a fateful command. "Gen. Gay stood up in the front of his jeep
and shouted out, ‘Blow the son of a bitch!’", veteran Edward L. Daily
recalled.
The preset
charges exploded, rapid fire, shattering the supports, dropping one of the
bridge’s hulking spans into the muddy waters of the Naktong. "They went right down,"remembered ex-lieutenant
Daily, of Clarksville, Tenn. "It was
like a slow-motion movie. All those
refugees went right down into the river."
"It was a tough
decision," Gay wrote to the historian, "because up in the air with the bridge
went hundreds of refugees."
The division’s 1950 war diary did not report
the refugees’ deaths. But the later
narrative by Gay, who died in 1983, led to a brief mention in an official war
history published in 1960.
What happened
earlier that August day, however, 25 miles down river at the village of
Tuksong-dong, has never been reported.
Ex-sergeant
Carroll F. Kinsman remembers the streams of white-clad humanity shuffling
across the 650-foot-long Tuksong-dong bridge – women clutching children, old
men, overloaded ox carts. "We stayed up
all that night and searched them," Kinsman, a veteran of the 14th
Combat Engineers Battalion, said in an AP interview. They found no infiltrators, he said.
Retreating
Americans had not yet sighted North Korean units near the river around
Tuksong-dong on Aug. 3, the declassified record shows. But American officers knew the enemy would
arrive eventually. Pressed by a
timetable, they proved unable to keep the refugees back from the bridge, rigged
for instant demolition.
Soldiers fired
over the heads of those crowding across, and tried to warn them the bridge
would be blown up, said the veterans, men in their 60s or 70s. "They tried to stop the refugees from coming
across and they wouldn’t stop. They were
abutment to abutment," ex-engineer Leon L. Denis of Huntsville, Ala., recalled
in an AP interview before his death Aug. 31.
The men of
Company A, 14th Engineers, had taken two days to set 7,000 pounds of
explosives on the steel-girder bridge.
When the detonation order came at 7:01 a.m., "it lifted up and turned it
sideways and it was full of refugees end to end," said Kinsman, of Gautier,
Miss.
"These people
were on the bridge, and you saw the spans of steel flying and you knew they
were killed," said ex-GI Rudolph Giannelli of Port Saint Lucie, Fla., driver
for Col. Richard W. Stephens, the 21st Infantry Regiment commander
who was the last officer across the bridge.
In separate AP
interviews, Kinsman, Denis and Giannelli said hundreds of civilians were
killed. Ipock said he could see only 30
or 40 refugees from his vantage point.
"There was people on that bridge when it went up," Ipock said. "And during war that’s the story. They’re up there and they pull the plunger
and that’s it."
Kim Bok-jong,
73, a Korean who said he was 200 yards from the bridge, out of view around a
hill, remembered that "people rushed back toward us and said many people died
when the Americans blew up the bridge."
By the Associated
Press
October 14, 1999,
page A7, Sun Journal, Lewiston, ME
North Korean atrocities made headlines and outraged much of the world during the 1950-53 Korean War. Some of the first reports, in July 1950, told of captured U.S. soldiers bound and summarily executed by North Korean troops near the battle lines in southeast Korea.
In September
1950, U.S. Army units retaking Taejon, South Korea, reported finding the bodies
of hundreds of Korean civilians, slaughtered in large groups and hurriedly
buried before the North Koreans retreated.
A U.S. Army war crimes report later estimated the Taejon dead at 5,000
to 7,500, including businessmen, police and other government employees, and 42
American prisoners of war. Many had been
severely beaten and mutilated, it said.
The North
Koreans, for their part, alleged that earlier the southern government had
murdered thousands of communist sympathizers around Taejon before the initial
South Korean retreat from the city in July 1950. Official U.S. sources and Western journalists
reported such South Korean atrocities during the war. In one case, two South Korean army officers
were sentenced to life in prison in 1951 for leading an army massacre of 187
people in a South Korean village deemed supportive of communist guerillas.
The U.S. Army,
in November 1951, cited U.N. figures saying 25,575 South Korean civilians were
killed during the communist occupation of South Korea. But the South Korean government later put
that toll at 129,000.
As for
prisoners of war, the Pentagon eventually calculated that almost 8,000 U.S.
military personnel were killed or otherwise died while in the hands of the
North Koreans or their Chinese allies.
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