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Letter on Korean War Massacre Reveals Plan to Shoot Refugees
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."
  A long line of refugees fled Yongdong, South Korea, on July 26, 1950. The same day, eight miles down the road at No Gun Ri, hundreds of refugees came under fire from U.S. troops, according to witnesses. A letter has come to light indicating the killings were part of U.S. policy. (Associated Press Photos) |
Former Washington Post diplomatic correspondent 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 was 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 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 in a 1998 interview that 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? . . . 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 that investigators learned of other, unspecified civilian killings, but said these would not be investigated.
AP research uncovered at least 19 declassified U.S. military documents showing commanders ordered or authorized such killings in 1950-51.
In a statement issued Monday in Seoul, a No Gun Ri survivors group called that episode "a clear war crime," demanded an apology and compensation from the U.S. government, and said Congress and the United Nations should conduct investigations. The survivors also said they would file a lawsuit against the Pentagon for alleged manipulation of the earlier probe.
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.
