Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 872	9 June 2006

Korean War Document Confirms:

Massacre at No Gun Ri Was Official U.S. Policy

Early in the Korean War, in July 1950, some 400 Korean civilians—mainly women, children and old men—were machine-gunned to death by U.S. troops at the South Korean hamlet of No Gun Ri. Driven from their villages by American forces and strafed by U.S. warplanes, the desperate peasants had sought shelter beneath a railroad bridge. There they were methodically slaughtered by soldiers of the First Cavalry Division. After the massacre was exposed in a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles by the Associated Press in 1999, a Pentagon investigation concluded that what happened was “not a deliberate killing” but rather “an unfortunate tragedy” carried out by panicky soldiers acting without orders. That transparent lie has now been demolished by a recently revealed document proving that U.S. forces in Korea had a policy—decided at the highest levels of the government and the military—to kill civilians fleeing the fighting.

The document, a letter by the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, John Muccio, to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk, states: “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” (AP, 29 May). Muccio’s letter reported on a meeting of top U.S. military officers and South Korean officials that took place on 25 July 1950—the day before the bloodbath at No Gun Ri. The letter was discovered in the U.S. National Archives by former Harvard historian Sahr Conway-Lanz.

The 1950-53 Korean War, led by U.S. imperialism in the guise of a United Nations “police action,” was an attempt to smash social revolution on the peninsula, and beyond that to “roll back” the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Capitalist rule had been overthrown in the northern half of the Korean peninsula following liberation from 35 years of Japanese colonialism at the end of World War II, as the power of the local capitalists and landowners was broken under the Soviet military presence and the newly installed regime of Kim Il Sung. The Korean peninsula was partitioned between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North and the Republic of Korea in the South, a capitalist police state under American military occupation. Despite the rule of a nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, the overthrow of capitalism in the North was a historic defeat for imperialism and a victory for the working people of Asia and the world.

During the war, North Korean forces were backed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. U.S. imperialism devastated the Korean peninsula, killing more than three million people and obliterating whole cities. Washington considered nuking China and Korea but was deterred by Soviet military might, including its newly developed nuclear arsenal. In the end, the U.S. could only achieve a stalemate at the 38th parallel in what was widely viewed as a defeat for U.S. imperialism in this first battle of the Cold War. The Korean War was ended in a “truce,” and the U.S. has refused to sign a peace treaty affirming North Korea’s right to exist ever since, maintaining a massive military presence in the South.

The 1999 AP series revealed that No Gun Ri was but one of a number of mass killings of civilians carried out by the U.S. imperialists, infused as they were with racist hatred of all Koreans. While interviewing veterans, the AP uncovered the following: a July 1950 mortar attack on several hundred refugees southeast of Seoul; the destruction of two bridges over the Naktong River in August 1950 as hundreds of refugees streamed across; a January 1951 incendiary bomb attack that killed several hundred refugees in a cave near Youngchoon. This was on top of repeated strafing of refugee columns by U.S. warplanes. Since the 1999 AP reports, South Koreans have lodged complaints with the Seoul government regarding more than 60 other large-scale massacres of refugees by the U.S. military during the Korean War.

Following the initial AP revelations, we wrote in “U.S. War in Korea Was Mass Murder” (WV No. 721, 15 October 1999): “The bloodbath at No Gun Ri is the true face of imperialism, exposing as a cynical lie the ‘human rights’ pretensions used by the U.S. and its allies to veil their military depredations from Kosovo to East Timor.” Linking the No Gun Ri killings to the notorious 1968 My Lai massacre, in which over 500 South Vietnamese villagers were raped, tortured and massacred by American troops led by Lieutenant William Calley, we stressed: “Horrific as these particular slaughters were, they were only a drop in the ocean of carnage perpetrated by the U.S. imperialist rulers in their counterrevolutionary wars against the Korean and Vietnamese people.”