UPDATE: I highly recommend everyone read my prior postings on this subject:

• Responding to the Bridge at No Gun Ri
• The Forensics of No Gun Ri
• Revisiting No Gun Ri
• Transcript of Briefing to Seoul Rotary Club
• The No Gun Ri Document Shell Game

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Original Posting:

The Media and No Gun-ri

Here is an article by Yonhap that chronicles a visit to Korea by a group of California college students who during their trip visited the site of the No Gun-ri Tragedy during the Korean War. Here is the background history provided in the article:

More than fifty years ago, the actions of a group of U.S. soldiers in this small village some 230 kilometers southeast of Seoul led to the deaths of hundreds of refugees, who were being escorted from their homes on the pretext of finding a safer hiding place. The troops later sprayed the refugees with bullets while they waited under the village’s cement bridge, with reports claiming hundreds died including scores more in subsequent air raids. The incident took place about a month after the outbreak of the Korean War when the country was in a state of extreme turmoil.

Yonhap of course is pushing the established mythology of the incident prevalent in not only the Korean media but also the US media. Yonhap provides no context in the report such as the fact that North Korean soldiers were often dressed as civilians and regularly ambushed US soldiers especially during the early phases of the war that this incident took place.

Read T.R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War and other prominent Korean War history books for multiple examples of soldiers being attacked by Korean “civilians.” Plus the situation at the time was extremely desperate. The small contingent of US forces on the peninsula were ill prepared for combat and in full retreat trying to delay the North Korean advance while reinforcements continued to arrive in Pusan. In fact the soldiers from H company 2-7 Cavalry Regiment involved in the shooting were in complete disarray at the point of the shooting. They were on the run in a total state of panic when they found themselves in No Gun-ri.

The time this incident took place was during one of the most critical points of the Korean War. If the US forces failed at this time this whole controversy would be null and void because North Korea would have conquered South Korea. A full context of the situation is appropriate before we just condemn these soldiers as heartless killers of civilians.

These soldiers at the time did kill civilians at No Gun-ri. Everyone seems to be agreement on this as the joint US-ROK report on the No Gun-ri incident concludes. The only difference between the US and Korean views is that the US officials believe that about 50+ civilians were killed while the Korean officials believe it to be upwards of 250 people. To determine the actual truth of what happened is extremely difficult as soldiers and civilians allegedly at the scene of the incident have been proven to be liars. The case of Edward Daily is the best example of this. He was the lead witness that started the entire controversy and he was proven rather easily to be a phony yet he was put on all the networks at the time to bash the US military over the incident:

Edward Daily, first mentioned as a principal source in a Pulitzer-Prize winning Associated Press story about the killings at No Gun Ri during the Korean War, has now told the AP he couldn’t have been there and probably learned details of the alleged incident from GIs who were present. In the original AP story Daily gave a chillingly graphic account of the incident at No Gun Ri – an incident in which he insisted he had participated, machine gunning hundreds of Korean civilians huddled under a railway underpass. The AP story, quoted him as saying: “On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming.” He added: “The command looked at it as getting rid of the problem in the easiest way. That was to shoot them in a group. Today,” Daily concluded, “we all share a guilt feeling, something that remains with everyone.”

Nobody bothered checking this guy’s background. A simple background check through the military archives could of found him to be a phony. Yet he was all over the news bashing the army:

As reported in NewsMax two weeks ago, NBC’s Dateline flew Daily to Korea to visit the No Gun Ri site. Daily told Tom Brokaw about receiving the order to fire on the refugees under the railroad trestle. “Just shoot them all,” Daily quoted the order. Brokaw: “You heard that order?” Daily: “Yes, sir.” Brokaw: “Kill them all?” Daily: “Yes, sir.” In February, the Washington Post Magazine put Daily’s picture on the cover and said he “was in charge of the lone machine-gun post” on one side of the railroad culvert. The Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News all published stories citing Daily’s account of No Gun Ri.

How can a major network like NBC and Tom Brokaw along with major publishers make such a huge mistake as believing Daily and putting him on the air and on the cover of magazines like this? Simple background checks exposed this guy as a liar and Robert Bateman the author of the book No Gun Ri, actually informed Charles Hanley, the head AP reporter of the original AP article on No Gun-ri, about the unreliability of Daily and other veteran witnesses the AP quoted and Hanley even concurred that he had his doubts about them but made no attempts fix the article. Bateman was surprised at first but understood why the AP would not change their article when it won the Pulitzer Prize.

To NBC’s credit at least they later retracted their report on Daily, but the damage had already been done. Who knows how many people saw the original report and have taken it to be the truth about what happened at No Gun-ri, sliming not only the soldiers of the 7th Cav but all Korean War veterans. Why did the US media jump all over this story like this without doing extensive background checking? It is very similar to the CNN Tailwind scandal that the media jumped on and then CNN had to later retract. The story fit what many in the media wanted to believe, the military is evil.

If I ever had a chance to meet Mr. Hanley the first question I would ask him is why did it take a US Army major sitting behind a desk at West Point, in a matter of days, to uncover a number of inaccuracies and falsehoods in the original AP article? How can people who’s full time job is professional journalism with a multi-million dollar budget with the backing of the world’s largest news organization miss such obvious discrepancies in the article? Could it be because they were more interested in publishing a story line that was more gripping to readers thus the claims of breaking this story and fighting through this great US governmental cover up run by the low level USFK lawyer in Seoul? Could it be they had Pulitzer Prize in mind when they first began writing the article and thus discounted anything that countered their views on this story if it conflicted with winning the prize? Could it be that the remained blinded to all the information out there disputing their article because they so wanted to believe what they did publish due to their own personal aversion and suspicions of the US military?

This instant aversion to the military comes in part to the natural checks and balance of the media of the government and the military. However, many people currently in the US media are from the Vietnam generation and remain suspicious and unsupportive of the draft time military they once knew. They still equate the military with what they remember from Vietnam not realizing how different the all volunteer military of today is. That is why when the military is portrayed in popular culture cliches and stereotypes from Vietnam are used. Many in the US media never miss an opportunity to criticize the military and No Gun-ri was just another example of this.

The No Gun-ri issue was manipulated to fit many reporters’ personal views about the US military while also making the story more sexy to the general public by giving it the air of a government cover up and playing up the emotional story lines of the families affected by this great cover up. It worked because the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to them for investigative journalism even though much of their great investigation could be found in Chapter 12 of the official US Army history of the Korean War.

The Korean media on the other hand is a whole different beast. The objective for many people in the Korean media is pure and simple anti-Americanism. Feel free to comment if you disagree with me but how else do explain the misinformation about No Gun-ri, every little USFK incident turning into front page news, and the constant misinformation about GI crimes and the SOFA agreement. If you disagree with me about the disinformation about GI crimes and the SOFA Agreement you need to check out the USinKorea site that chronicles this issue in great detail.

A perfect example of this is Korea’s popular citizen news service, Oh My News, which published their own version of what happened at No Gun-ri. It is safe to say that this article of “journalism” or should I say docu-fiction tends to focus more on fantasy then the actual facts.

Take this passage here as the first example:

Once the story broke and grabbed headline attention, the victims began to step forward. The Seoul government was placed between a rock and a hard place. Continuing to muzzle the victims would strengthen the notion that the Seoul government was a mere puppet of Uncle Sam. After all, its main reason for suppressing the story was to please him.

What evidence does the author, a Mr. Young Kim offer that the Korean government was trying to suppress the story because of pressure from the US? He has no evidence. Also how is this considered journalism?

Sounds like propaganda to me, but wait there is more:

The massacre of innocent civilians by American troops was, of course, well-known among the victims and their relatives, but the Seoul government had for years labeled anyone mentioning the massacre “communists,” and brutally prosecuted them. Ironically, it took a fair-minded American journalist to disclose the massacre.

Once again he provides no evidence of his claims and then calls the AP reporters “fair minded” when the principle source of their reporting Edward Daily was uncovered as a liar by US News and World Report and the Stars and Stripes newspaper through simple background checks of Daily’s past these journalists uncovered that Daily wasn’t even a combat arms soldier, did not earn the awards he claimed to have won, and wasn’t even anywhere near No Gun-ri at the time of the incident. Daily wasn’t the only one. Other veterans that made key claims about No Gun-ri were later found to have not even been there.

Some how Kim failed to mention all this in his article. Then the claim that this was covered up for decades is absolutely false. As I have shown in my No Gun-ri series, articles from major US newspapers such as the New York Times documents the killing of civilians by US soldiers during the Korean War along with accounts of civilian killings in well known history books about the Korean War and even in the US Army’s official history of the war. This is not new news, but the story needs the air of a great government cover up to catch the readers attention.

I’m all open to fair criticism about the US, but the Korean media seems to rely more on mythology and stereotypes than facts. What bothers me so much about the No Gun-ri criticism in particular, by the Korean media, is that it is an effort to down play the significance of the US military in the Korean War because some people feel the US did not have noble intentions in defending Korea during the war and Koreans should not feel a debt of gratitude to the US for saving the country. Creating a stereotype of these veterans as war criminals is just another way to slowly degrade the Korean public’s image of America and the GIs who fought and died in Korea over 50 years ago.

What is further troubling is that many of these veterans from the war are passing away and cannot defend themselves as this new revisionist history is being created about them. It is a shame and no one seems to be speaking out against it. That is why I found it so important to educate and debate people about what happened at No Gun-ri and hopefully restore some honor to the Korean War veterans that have been tarnished by this tragedy by both the US and Korean media.

The main person trying to set the record straight about No Gun-ri has been Major Robert Bateman. However, these same journalists who cherish their freedom of speech have attempted to silence him. Mr. Hanley contacted Bateman’s boss at West Point and attempted to intimidate his boss into giving him a bad evaluation report. Then after that didn’t work, he then tried to intimidate the publishing company that decided to publish Bateman’s book into not publishing it. That didn’t work either.

The big question is, why is the world’s largest news organization so scared of Bateman that they are willing to go to these extremes to silence him? Could it be because Bateman’s criticisms clearly show that the AP’s Pulitzer Prize was undeserved? The AP makes money on their creditbility, any hint that they are not creditible is going to be jumped on with everything the AP has no matter if they are right or wrong. However, all their attempts to silence Bateman hasn’t worked because Bateman has been relying on facts to present his case. The AP can’t dispute the facts thus they try smear campaigns such as claiming anyone disputing the article is a No Gun-ri denier which isn’t the case. Nobody disputes whether their was a tragic loss of life at No Gun-ri. What is in dispute is the numbers of casualties and motivations behind what happened.

Another curious issue is that the AP relies on witness testimony to back their claims, that they refuse to release to the public. Bateman has been requesting for years for the AP to release the names and the complete transcripts of the witness testimony, but the AP has refused. Could it be that they fear if the testimony is released Bateman and others could find more holes in their testimony like they did with the GI witnesses? Until these questions are answered the AP’s Pulitzer Prize is always going to be viewed as the Barry Bonds homerun record of journalism; with a great, big asterick.

Sadly I believe the mythology of the Korean War preached by people from the AP and Oh My News’ Mr. Kim is what many Americans and Koreans now believe. That is the continuing tragedy of this incident. The advocacy journalism these reporters are using to push their anti-military or in the case of Mr. Kim, anti-USFK agendas is truly disturbing. I call this advocacy journalism because that is what Amazon.com has said the AP’s book is. These reporters are actively working to smear the honor of aged veterans who sacrificed their youth to save Korea from communism. If you don’t believe me that Mr. Kim is behind a anti-USFK propaganda campaign than I highly recommend that you read through his dubious Kimsoft site that I have debunked on a number of occasions.

Shouldn’t journalists have some kind of responsibility to verify facts before reporting a story? How can journalists be allowed to accuse people of war crimes when their claims couldn’t even stand up during a quick review by a US Army major sitting behind a desk at West Point, much less in a court of law? It is bad enough the Korean War is considered the Forgotten War in America, but now it is becoming the Revised War in an effort to smear the veterans and in turn Americans themselves.

Prior Posting: The Aftermath of No Gun-riÂ

The Aftermath of No Gun-ri

It should be clear by now for most fair minded people that the incident at No Gun-ri was not a planned execution of Korean civilians. It was what I call the “Perfect Storm” of a multitude of circumstances that ultimately led to killing of the South Korean civilians. First of all there was scared soldiers that had been retreating all night from what they percieved to have been enemy tanks. No one knew that the actual North Korean frontline was actually 15 miles down the road due to the chaos of that night plus the fact the regiment had been operating autonumously due to the piece meal deployment that left them without a division headquarters to relay intelligence information to them.

Secondly the unit had many poorly trained soldiers, who had never done any training above a company level much less training with handling refugees and uncoventional warfare due to the nature of their occupation duties and funding of the division.

Thirdly the 7th Cav was missing adequate leadership due to the few experienced NCO’s they did have being removed from the unit and given to the 24ID. Also the soldiers at the bridge were not in their typical unit structure due to being a hodgepodge of soldiers pulled from the road to form the defensive line which caused a situation where there was a lot of Indians and not enough Chiefs to relay orders. So an order is put out to shoot above the heads of the civilians and others down the line without the benefit of training and leader supervision also begin to fire.

The final factor that contributed to this was the fact that the refugees were there to begin with. 28 refugees from the village claim they were removed from the village of Imgae-ri by US soldiers. This claim is possibly true but unlikely as there was US units within three miles of the village at that time.

Here is a quote from the US Army Report I found noteworthy:

While the U.S. Review Team cannot rule out the possibility that the movement of the villagers occurred as described by the Korean witnesses, there was no sound military reason for soldiers to travel approximately three miles off their designated movement route to the village of Im Gae Ri during a hasty withdrawal for the purpose of encouraging an additional 400 refugees onto the already crowded roads and aggravating further the congested conditions. It is also unlikely that the soldiers would have performed this evacuation given the widespread knowledge and fear of North Korean infiltrators believed to be present in refugee concentrations.

Though it is unlikely because of the many valid reasons stated above in the report, but let’s assume the village was evacuated by US soldiers, they would be wrong to do so. The village should of been evacuated by the Korean National Police who would of then escorted the villagers out of the area. Maybe the soldiers didn’t get the message from higher on how to handle evacuating villages and refugees? They were in a chaotic, unorganized retreat and many of the radios had been lost and what leaders were left with radio contact had little ability to pass out orders with everyone spread out everywhere. The bottom line is that there is no conclusive proof to show that US soldiers evacuated the village, only witness testimony which researchers and critics are not allowed to see because the AP won’t release the witness details or transcripts. However, whatever happened at Imgae-ri that caused the villagers to leave was the final part of the perfect storm that put the villagers under the bridge that day in the line of sights of the hodgepodge of 7th Cav soldiers.

I think it is quite obvious by the evidence that these 7th Cav soldiers were not just sitting on a hill waiting for the next group of helpless refugees to shoot at because they were under orders to do so by some general who just didn’t want to deal with refugees anymore.

I also think that it is obvious that 400 people did not die on the bridge that day. I say a maximum of 50 people died that day. By looking at the bridge myself I estimate that if the bodies were hidden under the bridge possibly no more than 50 could be stacked and hidden from the aerial pictures. This is still a tremendous amount of civilian casualties that should not be discounted. The only way I can see 400 deaths is from a combined total of deaths of civilians in the area at the time and not just at the bridge. I would buy that 400 civilians died overall in that area between crossfire between the combatants, stafings, and artillery fire. This is highly possible and villagers are just assuming their relatives died at No Gun-ri.

However, why is 400 dead at the bridge brought up over and over again instead of 50 which the facts more heavily favor? 50 is still a horribly large loss of life. It is because 400 deaths are what Pulitzer Prizes are made of and $400 million in compensation money is awarded from, which remember was never mentioned in the AP article.

What is the motivation of the many veterans who lied about their involvement in this tragedy. Maybe some of these people were disgruntled at the military, wanted notariety, or maybe just simply with age do not remember the incident accurately. Money has also been found to be a motivator. However, the lies caught up with one veteran only looking for his payday:

Prosecutors successfully proved to the court that Daily had filed a claim with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on shrapnel injuries he said he received while he was a Korean War veteran. He also claimed POW status. From February 1986 through the end of 2001, Daily received $324,911 in payments wired to his bank, and $87,928 in medical care for service-related disabilities. The war veteran?s fraudulent claims were discovered following a Stars and Stripes investigation of the Associated Press story about Nogun-ri. Investigators with U.S. News also found discrepancies in the testimonies of witnesses named in the Associated Press story. Declassified Army war diaries and other declassified documents showed that Edward Lee Daily was not a member of a 7th Cavalry Regiment line company. Instead, he was a mechanic with the Army?s 27th Ordnance Maintenance Company. Daily?s claim to be a 1st Lieutenant in the Army was also false, according to his own admission in court.

On September 13, 2002, U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger pronounced sentence against Daily. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Daily was sentenced in federal court to 21 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. In addition, Daily must repay the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs $412,839?money which he illegally obtained from the government by wire fraud.

I realize that even with the evidence I have displayed some people will never except the possibility that these soldiers were part of what I term a “Perfect Storm” of circumstances that combined to create this tragedy. Some people will continue to maintain these soldiers are racist war criminals and were under orders to kill all refugees and whatever else the current mythology preaches. Some will claim that these guys are war criminals because if they had been there that day they wouldn’t have fired. That is an extremely bold statement coming from someone sitting at home. Getting shot at in a war brings a new perspective to things you cannot even understand unless you are there. Watching Saving Private Ryan doesn’t mean you understand soldiers and the nature of warfare.

Many will also continue to demand compensation for what happened an No Gun-ri. Isn’t the loss of 54,229 (this number includes combat and accidental deaths) American lives, 103,248 wounded, 8,142 MIAs, 3,746 POWs, over 50 years of national security provided by USFK, as well as over 50 years of economic development made possible by the US-ROK alliance enough compensation to Korea? There is nothing more valuable to a country than their youth, and America gave the lives of over 54,000 of their youths plus the ten of thousands of more wounded to give a country no one even heard of before a chance at a better life free from communism. I just hope that fair minded people will give Korean War veterans a chance to restore the honor they have lost by the unfair reporting and sensationalism of this tragedy.

Prior Posting:  What Happened at No Gun-ri?

Next Posting: The Media and No Gun-ri
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I hope I have been able to better educate people that may not know much about the incident to look more into it and to draw their own conclusions because I am quite confident in what I think happened that tragic day in July, 1950. So what do you think? Feel free to place your comments.

Here are some books and links I highly recommend if you have further interest in this topic.

This Kind of War, T.R. Fehrenbach

No Gun Ri, Robert Bateman

The Bridge at No Gun Ri, AP reporters

South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu, Roy Appleman

Official US Army Report on No Gun Ri

Korean War Educator

This posting is now out of date.  Please read the updated posting here.  Thanks.
Prior Posting: Who Were the Soldiers of the 7th Cavalry?

Next Posting: The Aftermath of No Gun-ri

Who Were the Soldiers of the 7th Cavalry?

The tragedy at No Gun-ri has been a point of much debate since the publishing of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning article from the Associated Press that suggests that the soldiers of the US 7th Cavalry are heartless killers of helpless Korean civilians while acting on the orders of even greater heartless leaders from above. I believe before condemning soldiers especially those who didn’t even volunteer to go to war, but were conscripted as heartless war criminals it is important to understand the context of the situation that these men were put into. The original AP article dismisses these men as “poorly trained and ill equipped”, I hope to show through closer analysis why these men were ill trained and poorly equipped and how this was one of the factors that led to what I call the “perfect storm” of events that ultimately ended with the tragedy at No Gun-ri.

Before the outbreak of the Korean War the soldiers involved in the tragedy at No Gun-ri, soldiers from H Company, 2 Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment which were part of the 1st Cavalry Divison. They were stationed in Japan conducting peacekeeping operations in the aftermath of World War II. Due to budgetary reasons most of the resources for training soldiers at the combined arms level were diverted to Europe because of the looming Soviet threat there. No one ever envisioned a war in Korea. This lack of vision would become one of many factors that led to the tragedy at No Gun-ri.

The soldiers of the 7th Cavalry did not train at anything above the company level and spent much of their time conducting occupation related duties, not to mention hanging out at the local clubs at all hours of the night. Plus the units were all short of personnel especially noncommissioned officers (NCOs) to keep the Army divisions in Europe fully manned against the more immediate Soviet threat there. The 7th Cavalry was full of young, patriotic, soldiers who grew up on John Wayne movies and were eager to serve their country. However the majority of these young soldiers were not old enough to have served during World War II and lacked combat experience.

There were a few NCOs and officers in the unit that did have combat experience. However, when the war in Korea did break out the experienced NCOs from the 7th Cavalry were pulled to fill units from the 24th Infantry Division that were the first division in Japan to deploy to Korea to delay the North Korean advance that included units such as Task Force Smith.

I have always found this statement from T.R. Fehrenbach (pg102) to best describe the state of the US military leading up the Korean War:

..the abiding weakness of free peoples is that their governments cannot or will not make them prepare or sacrifice before they are aroused.

The military had been under funded for years after World War II and the politicians were unwilling to raise the amount of money necessary to ensure the military was properly trained and equipped. Additionally the initial sanatizing of the war by the government as a “Police Action” did not arouse the citizens of the United States enough to be committed to a full scale war. This failure at the governmental level all had a part to play with the tragedy at No Gun-ri.

From Pohang to No Gun-ri

Once it came time for the 1st Cavalry Division to deploy to Korea, it was deployed in piece meal and not as a complete division due to the nature of limited ports in Korea and the division being spread out all over Japan due to occupation duties. So when the 2-7 Cav’s transport from Japan arrived in Korea on July 22, 1950 they were acting semi-autonomous from the division command structure they were used to, plus they were about to undertake operations they had never trained for because they had never done any training above the company level and were about to undertake operations in a major theater war that featured many uncontemporary operating environment problems, such as security in the rear areas and a massive refugee crisis no one had any prior experience or training to deal with. Refugees was almost a totally new concept because the US military had little experience dealing with a mass refugee crisis during World War II. In Korea the US forces were faced with a refugee crisis of epic proportions that no one expected.

To deal with the refugee crisis the soldiers on the ground were literally making up doctrine as they went through trial and error. To make matters worse they were short NCO’s across the regiment that enforce standards. It was so bad that there was some Private First Classes serving as Platoon Sergeants. The officer ranks weren’t much better as the battalion only had one officer with combat experience at the time and that was the commander of G company, 2-7 Cav, CPT Henry West. This lack of inexperience and training would all have a part to play in the tragedy that would occur four days later.

Almost from the moment the 7th Cavalry regiment unloaded their boats and moved out of Pohang to fight the North Koreans the stragglers of soldiers from the 24th Infantry Division who had been defeated by the North Koreans, and who were retreating South told tales of how the North Koreans were dressing up as civilians to enter the rear areas of the American units to the 7th Cav soldiers.

Here is this report from Robert Bateman’s book, No Gun-ri, that chronicles this fear:

… a civilian woman who appeared pregnant and her male companion who were attempting to pass through American lines. At an American checkpoint there were stopped and searched along with other civilians in the group. At that point the searchers discovered that the pregnancy was not real , and that the bulge covered by the woman’s clothing was actually a two way tactical radio. The woman immediately confessed that she was North Korean and was sent to observe and report American positions and to call for artillery fire on them.

Then reports of American GI’s in the rear found with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head began to circulate among the soldiers as well. Long before the 7th Cav had ever reached their defensive positions near Hwanggan there had been plenty of warning about the dangers of letting refugees through the front lines. This was something that was in the back of all the soldiers minds more than the North Korean Army they had yet to face.

The night of 25-26 July, 1950 these inexperienced soldiers would have their first experience with what was then known as the “bug out” syndrome that happened to US soldiers in the early days of the Korean War. At about 0200 that night one of the last elements of the 24ID that was lost and unaccounted for finally found the proper road to retreat south on. This unit included a company of tanks. The road they moved south on went right through the 7th Cav’s defensive lines.

It was dark, their was no night vision devices back then, no communications with anyone in the 24ID, lack of combat experience, and just plain fear that caused the soldier of the 7th Cavalry to open up fire on the American unit. The 24ID unit just simply drove through the hail of gun fire and continued their retreat south not really knowing who was firing on them. Fortunately no one from the unit was killed.

Many soldiers of the 7th Cavalry thought that the retreating company of tanks was in fact a North Korean armored column moving through their lines and opened fire. Experienced NCO’s could of detected the sound of the tanks as American tanks and not North Korean tanks, but remember all the experienced NCO’s from the division got pulled in Japan weeks prior, to serve with the 24ID, leaving the 7th Cavalry with no experienced NCO’s. Remember there was Private First Classes serving as Platoon Sergeants. The now, even more frightful soldiers, were thinking that the North Koreans were in their rear waiting to kill them and many soldiers just simply “bugged out” after the tanks passed and left their fighting positions and retreated. Nobody in the infantry likes to have tanks in front of them much less behind them as well.

CPT Melbourne Chandler the commander of H/2-7CAV was able to consolidate some of his retreating troops and other stragglers of the 7th Cavalry in the predawn darkness to form a defensive line with this hodgepodge of troops. The defensive perimeter was set up on a small hill overlooking a bridge near a place called No Gun-ri.

Next Posting: What Happened at No Gun-ri?

I have been working on transferring over comments from the old GI Korea Tripod site to my current WordPress site this week when I noticed this comment that had been posted on the old site. The comment was from someone claiming to be Charles Hanley, one of the Associated Press reporters who published the highly flawed No Gun-ri article that won the Pulitzer Prize.  Here is what he had to say:

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Since your blog seems to have an interest in No Gun Ri, perhaps you’d like to see something reality-based (and based on actual professional news reporting). Here it is, published several months ago…

BC-No Gun Ri-Letter

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Ambassador’s 1950 letter says U.S. set policy of shooting refugees

Eds: A multimedia interactive is available in the nogunri folder and a document slugged nongunri.pdf will be available in the _documents folder on Monday.

AP Photos of May 25: NY517-519

AP Graphic NO GUN RI BRIDGE

By CHARLES J. HANLEY and MARTHA MENDOZA

Associated Press Writers

More than a half-century after hostilities ended in Korea, a document from the war’s chaotic early days has come to light _ a letter from the U.S. ambassador to Seoul, informing the State Department that American soldiers would shoot refugees approaching their lines.

The letter _ dated the day of the Army’s mass killing of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri in 1950 _ is the strongest indication yet that such a policy existed for all U.S. forces in Korea, and the first evidence that that policy was known to upper ranks of the U.S. government.

“If refugees do appear from north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot,” wrote Ambassador John J. Muccio, in his message to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

The letter reported on decisions made at a high-level meeting in South Korea on July 25, 1950, the night before the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment shot the refugees at No Gun Ri.

Estimates vary on the number of dead at No Gun Ri. American soldiers’ estimates ranged from under 100 to “hundreds” dead; Korean survivors say about 400, mostly women and children, were killed at the village 100 miles southeast of Seoul, the South Korean capital. Hundreds more refugees were killed in later, similar episodes, survivors say.

The No Gun Ri killings were documented in a Pulitzer Prize-winning story by The Associated Press in 1999, which prompted a 16-month Pentagon inquiry.

The Pentagon concluded that the No Gun Ri shootings, which lasted three days, were “an unfortunate tragedy” _ “not a deliberate killing.” It suggested panicky soldiers, acting without orders, opened fire because they feared that an approaching line of families, baggage and farm animals concealed enemy troops.

But Muccio’s letter indicates the actions of the 7th Cavalry were consistent with policy, adopted because of concern that North Koreans would infiltrate via refugee columns. And in subsequent months, U.S. commanders repeatedly ordered refugees shot, documents show.

The Muccio letter, declassified in 1982, is discussed in a new book by American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz, who discovered the document at the U.S. National Archives, where the AP also has obtained a copy.

Conway-Lanz, a former Harvard historian and now an archivist of the National Archives’ Nixon collection, was awarded the Stuart L. Bernath Award of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for the article on which the book is based.

“With this additional piece of evidence, the Pentagon report’s interpretation (of No Gun Ri) becomes difficult to sustain,” Conway-Lanz argues in his book, “Collateral Damage,” published this spring by Routledge.

The Army report’s own list of sources for the 1999-2001 investigation shows its researchers reviewed the microfilm containing the Muccio letter. But the 300-page report did not mention it.

Asked about this, Pentagon spokeswoman Betsy Weiner would say only that the Army inspector general’s report was “an accurate and objective portrayal of the available facts based on 13 months of work.”

Said Louis Caldera, who was Army secretary in 2001 and is now University of New Mexico president, “Millions of pages of files were reviewed and it is certainly possible they may have simply missed it.”

Ex-journalist and Korean War veteran Don Oberdorfer, a historian of Korea who served on a team of outside experts who reviewed the investigation, said he did not recall seeing the Muccio message. “I don’t know why, since the military claimed to have combed all records from any source.”

Muccio noted in his 1950 letter that U.S. commanders feared disguised North Korean soldiers were infiltrating American lines via refugee columns.

As a result, those meeting on the night of July 25, 1950 _ top staff officers of the U.S. 8th Army, Muccio’s representative Harold J. Noble and South Korean officials _ decided on a policy of air-dropping leaflets telling South Korean civilians not to head south toward U.S. defense lines, and of shooting them if they did approach U.S. lines despite warning shots, the ambassador wrote to Rusk.

Rusk, Muccio and Noble, who was embassy first secretary, are all dead. It is not known what action, if any, Rusk and others in Washington may have taken as a result of the letter.

Muccio told Rusk, who later served as U.S. secretary of state during the Vietnam War, that he was writing him “in view of the possibility of repercussions in the United States” from such deadly U.S. tactics.

But the No Gun Ri killings _ as well as others in the ensuing months _ remained hidden from history until the AP report of 1999, in which ex-soldiers who were at No Gun Ri corroborated the Korean survivors’ accounts.

Survivors said U.S. soldiers first forced them from nearby villages on July 25, 1950, and then stopped them in front of U.S. lines the next day, when they were attacked without warning by aircraft as hundreds sat atop a railroad embankment. Troops of the 7th Cavalry followed with ground fire as survivors took shelter under a railroad bridge.

The late Army Col. Robert M. Carroll, a lieutenant at No Gun Ri, said he remembered the order radioed across the warfront on the morning of July 26 to stop refugees from crossing battle lines. “What do you do when you’re told nobody comes through?” he said in a 1998 interview. “We had to shoot them to hold them back.”

Other soldier witnesses attested to radioed orders to open fire at No Gun Ri.

Since that episode was confirmed in 1999, South Koreans have lodged complaints with the Seoul government about more than 60 other alleged large-scale killings of refugees by the U.S. military in the 1950-53 war.

The Army report of 2001 acknowledged investigators learned of other, unspecified civilian killings, but said these would not be investigated.

Meanwhile, AP research uncovered at least 19 declassified U.S. military documents showing commanders ordered or authorized such killings in 1950-51.

The Army’s denial that the killings were ordered is a “deception of No Gun Ri victims and of U.S. citizens who value human rights,” Chung Koo-do, spokesman for the victims’ committee, told the AP in South Korea. He called the 2001 finding a “nasty” shifting of blame to rank-and-file soldiers, and called on President Bush to reopen the case.

Even if infiltrators are present, soldiers need to take “due precautions” to protect civilian lives, said Francois Bugnion, director for international law for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, global authority on the laws of war.

After reviewing the 1950 letter, Bugnion said the standard on war crimes is clear.

“In the case of a deliberate attack directed against civilians identified as such, then this would amount to a violation of the law of armed conflict,” he said.

Gary Solis, a West Point expert on war crimes, said the policy described by Muccio clearly “deviates from typical wartime procedures. It’s an obvious violation of the bedrock core principle of the law of armed conflict _ distinction.”

Solis said soldiers always have the right to defend themselves. But “noncombatants are not to be purposely targeted.”

But William Eckhardt, lead Army prosecutor in the My Lai atrocities case in Vietnam, sensed “angst, great angst” in the letter because officials worried about what might happen. “If a mob doesn’t stop when they’re coming at you, you fire over their heads and if they still don’t stop you fire at them. Standard procedure,” he said.

In South Korea, Yi Mahn-yol, head of the National Institute of Korean History and a member of a government panel on No Gun Ri, said the Muccio letter sheds an entirely new light on a case that “so far has been presented as an accidental incident that didn’t involve the command system.”

___=

AP Investigative Researcher Randy Herschaft in New York and AP Writer Jae-soon Chang in Seoul contributed to this report.

________________________________

In response to the AP Article and the AP’s corresponding book, a US Army Major, Robert Bateman was able to find a number of inaccuracies in the AP’s reporting and wrote his own book that clearly shows the inaccuracies in their reporting and uncovered witnesses that were not at No Gun-ri that the AP quoted in their reporting. Based on reading both books and reading endless amounts of articles and material about No Gun-ri I created my own series of posts about what happened.

Judging from Mr. Hanley’s comment he doesn’t seem to like me challenging his findings and appears to think Bateman’s research should be discounted because he is not a professional journalist. He links to his own AP article from May of 2006 as evidence that his views on what happened at No Gun-ri are validated. I had a good debate with Haisan over at the Marmot’s Hole over Handley’s article earlier this year that covered a lot of what I believe about what happened at No Gun-ri, but I’m going to put my thoughts together in a updated series posting for everyone to read over the coming days. I hope this will spark some debate about the actual historical evidence of what happened at No Gun-ri compared to the mythology advocated by many in the media.

For Christmas I bought my wife the Emperor of the Sea DVD series that she had been hinting she wanted. It took me a while to find a copy of the movie because the usual online movie sites I go to were all sold out of this series. I actually had to get somebody I know in Korea to help me out. I bought my wife all 51 episodes of the series for $200. Kind of pricey, but it’s Christmas. Usually I don’t pay too much attention when my wife is watching Korean dramas. I sat through a few episodes of Winter Sonata, which I bought for my wife last Christmas, and that was enough for me.

However, watching the first five episodes of Emperor of the Sea, I have to say it is really quite good. Emperor of the Sea is based on a novel by Choi In-ho. His novel is loosely based on the real life exploits of Jang Bo-go (?~846), a famous figure in Korean history who dominated the seas of East Asia during the Unified Shilla Dynasty (676~935). Jang Bo-go also eliminated pirates in the Wando area, which was a geographically important sea route during the time. He also established sea trade across east Asia from Tang dynasty China to Japan. At least that is what the back cover of the DVD set says.

In the first few episodes I have watched it has focused on Jang Bo-go’s childhood growing up as a slave ship builder on Wando island and his determination to rise above being a lowly slave. He secretly studies martial arts and ends up being falsely accused of aiding pirates that raided Wando island by a yangban’s son who was jealous of Jang’s martial arts skills. He is pardoned from execution because he saved the yangban’s daughter during the pirate attack, but is instead exiled to work as a slave on a horse farm. There he continues to study martial arts and improve his skills. He hopes to escape slavery by competing in a martial arts tournament in Kwangju sponsored by a noblewoman who uses the tournament to hire new soldiers for her own personal security contingent.

The drama is beautifully shot, with well develop characters, and a engaging story line. The fighting scenes are similar to what you see in Hong Kong movies such as, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I know some people are annoyed by that kind of action scenes, but I found the scenes well done in this series so far. If you have ever wanted to watch a Korean drama stay away from the Winter Sonata clones and I recommend watching this one.

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UPDATE: Since writing this posting I have watched all the episodes of the drama and it was excellent. I have also since visited Wando Island and did my own Jang Bogo tour.

You can see pictures of Wando Island here and here.

Pictures of the movie sets on Wando Island can be view here.

Pictures of the real Cheonghaejin Island can be viewed here.

Anyone want to sign up for this contest?:

How many U.S. troops will be killed in Iraq in the next year?

Submit your best estimate here…

I’ll keep track–our memories are long–and we’ll notify the "winner" one year from today.
<…>
Our collective prognostications might just serve as a public declaration that the Commander-in-Chief cannot make Iraq into a crapshoot with our kids.

So submit your estimate here. Put a number to it. On January 10, 2008, how many additional men and women in the U.S. services, do you think, will be dead for this cause?

What is wrong with these people?  This is a perfect example of how detached people are from what is going on in Iraq.  It sickens me when I saw people in the media almost giddy when the Iraq casualty number hit 3,000 right before New Year’s.  Then the constant updates of troop casualties is treated like a basketball score and that is all this war has become; a game to most people.  It is that attitude that causes behavior like what you see above.

HT: Greyhawk

Does anyone out there really think this is going to work:

South Korea is empowering couples to have more children by giving them discounts on electricity bills. 

Next week, the government will cut rates for families that have three or more children, the energy ministry said.

"People worry about paying higher electricity bills as their family gets bigger. So, to free them of those worries and have more babies, we are giving discounts," Jang Seok-gu, an energy ministry official, said.

A typical family of five would see their monthly electricity bill fall by about 40,000 won (22 pounds), according to an elaborate formula worked out by the ministry.

40,000 won is roughly $40 bucks a month families would be saving under this latest proposal.  If you multiply that by twelve that comes out to $480 bucks a year.  After reading this I decided to give my brother in law in Anyang a call.  He has one son in middle school and another one in grade school.  I asked him if the government’s latest great idea has inspired him to crank out another kid.  He told me that if the government really wanted to raise the birth rate they would do something about the outrageous education costs.  He said that between paying for school, hagwons, piano classes, taekwondo lessons, etc. for his kids, he is paying roughly about $1,800 month to ensure they get a quality education.  He cannot afford another kid even if he wanted one and saving $40 bucks a month isn’t going to convince him otherwise. 

So obviously this latest great idea isn’t going to do any good.  If the government really wants to improve the birth rate they need to take on the real problem and that is the education system.  Either the system needs to be reformed or the government needs to provide families who have three kids or more with economic assistance to pay for the education costs.  I guarantee the government will improve the birth rate significantly if they agree to pay in full the education costs for the third baby of any family.  This would cost a lot of money, but I’m willing to bet it would be money better spent than sending over one billion dollars to North Korea next year. 

Instead of spending money to better educate their own citizens and improve the sagging birthrate, the government would rather send over a billion dollars every year to North Korea to feed their soldiers, and bolster both their ballistic missiles and nuclear programs.  With a government like this, who would want to have kids.

Over at the Metropolitician he has an interesting podcast posted of none other than the Marmot.  You can find out what a flight simulator had to do with the making of the Marmot’s Hole.

Here is an interesting letter to the editor of the Korea Times:

I would love to make a comment to your newspaper about a very shocking experience that I had today. I got a phone call from a company that had viewed my mini resume, minus photo, on some Web site.

They had asked me to send my full resume with photo, no problem, I sent it. I then received an email from he director or whoever she was telling me THE COMPANY IS LOOKING FOR ONLY WHITE PEOPLE! What was even more degrading, is when this “person’’ had enough gall, to tell me that Korea is a racist country and always will be so I shouldn’t take it personal, and not to feel bad because, the blacks have it worse here.

She closed her statement by saying, “I don’t know why you came to Korea, but you should go back to America because Korea will not change, so you may continue to feel this kind of prejudice.’’

Hines who?