News of the slaughter was reported Sept. 29, 1999, by the Associated Press, which interviewed 130 ex-GIs, a dozen of whom commented on the incident. Six veterans said they shot civilians who were trapped under the No Gun Ri railroad bridge in south Korea. Others said they shot over the civilians' heads.

For nearly 50 years Washington and Seoul had tried to cover up the facts about the three-day carnage. Last year the south Korean regime rejected claims for compensation by survivors and relatives of the victims.

Jeon, a 77-year-old retiree whose two children were killed at No Gun Ri, is among at least 30 Koreans who have fought for decades to force the U.S. and south Korean governments to acknowledge the massacre. He was separated from his family as they fled from the imperialist onslaught. His wife, Park Sunyong, was wounded while taking cover under the bridge with her children during the assault.

"My children's lives were taken away so unjustly," said Park Sunyong. "They died such vicious deaths — their bodies were ripped apart right in front of my eyes." She said her daughter and the child's grandmother were killed when they walked outside in hope of appealing to the U.S. invaders.

The demands of the Korean protesters included compensation for the relatives of those who were killed, prosecution of soldiers who participated in the attack, and a special commission established by Seoul to investigate the incident. Many of them assert that violence by the U.S. military occupation force in their country continues today, including murder, theft, and assault.  
 

U.S. military prepares for massacre

The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, as troops from the Democratic People' s Republic of Korea marched past the 38th parallel to drive the U.S. occupation force from the southern part of the peninsula. The Seventh Regiment, which was part of the U.S. First Cavalry Division, had dug in at No Gun Ri. On July 26 south Korean workers and peasants in two nearby villages were forced from their homes by U.S. troops under the pretext that north Korean soldiers were advancing.

After U.S. army officers ordered the peasants to walk on railroad tracks U.S. warplanes swooped in and rained bombs and bullets on the area where the peasants had been resting. As hundreds of people died, the survivors scrambled for cover under a nearby bridge. The Koreans who survived the onslaught said a plane had circled the area just before the assault began.

For three nights, U.S. soldiers in foxholes and other positions fired on the tunnel where the peasants, many of them women and children, were trying to hide. "People pulled dead bodies around them for protection," recalled survivor Chung Koo Ho, who said his mother died on the second day of the attack.

"We ended up shooting into there until all the bodies we saw were lifeless," said former GI Edward Daily.

U.S. officials attempted to explain away the massacre of civilians, claiming concerns that north Korean soldiers were disguised as peasants. But retired Col. Robert Carroll, who was a second lieutenant at the time, said, "There weren't any north Koreans in there the first day… It was mainly women and kids and old men."

"The command looked at it as getting rid of the problem in the easiest way. That was to shoot them in a group," Daily added.

Pentagon officials denied the annihilation of the Korean peasants as recently as one week prior to the Associated Press story. "The U.S. Army Center for Military History has found no information that substantiates the claim that United States Army soldiers perpetrated a massacre of South Korean civilians at No Gun Ri," declared army spokesman Col. Ed Vega September 22. Two days after the AP story broke, however, U.S. secretary of defense William Cohen called for a "full investigation" and review of compensation claims.

The editors of the Washington Post dismissed the slaughter,saying "any flaws shown in the American military's performance must be measured against rescuing South Korea from Communist aggression." The killings don't warrant "a showy guilt trip," they chided.

The AP story printed in the September 29 New York Times claimed the bloodbath at No Gun Ri was one of "only two known cases of killings of civilians by U.S. ground troops," including the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam of more than 500 Vietnamese. But throughout the war U.S. military forces adopted a "free fire zone against anything that moved," wrote Bruce Cumings in The Origins of the Korean War.  
 

The truth about U.S. intervention

The Japanese colonial masters left Korea in 1945 following their defeat in World War II. Their surrender sparked a massive social rebellion throughout Korea. The Korean Peoples Republic was established in Seoul September 6, based on "people's committees" forged in the anticolonial struggle. It called for independence, radical land reforms, and nationalization measures that attracted support of the exploited toilers.

In agreement with the government of Joseph Stalin in Moscow, however, U.S. military forces arrived in Seoul two days later. Washington set up a puppet regime in the southern half of the country, using the apparatus left by Tokyo, which included Korean officers who served in the Japanese military.

The government established by the U.S. occupation army was based on maintaining the domination of landlords in the countryside and capitalist ownership of industry. The resistance of workers and peasants in the south to this continued imperialist domination did not cease. A major rebellion in 1946 included strikes of railway workers and miners, as well as peasant protests.

Moscow accepted Japan's surrender in the north of Korea, and Soviet troops occupied the country north of the 38th parallel. There, landlord domination was broken and land redistributed to tenant farmers and other toilers in the countryside who needed land. The mines and other industrial enterprises were nationalized. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was established in 1948.

The division between the northern and southern parts of the Korean peninsula became institutionalized as two governments based on clashing social systems emerged.

The massive involvement of U.S. military forces on the Korean peninsula came in response to the movement of north Korean troops launched on June 25, 1950, that swept through the south and the mobilization of workers, peasants, and youth who rose up against Korean landlords, usurers, capitalists, and their cops and political agents.

In September 1950, U.S. and other capitalist forces fighting under the banner of the United Nations began a drive to smash the north Korean government and lay the groundwork to bring the entire peninsula under imperialist domination.

Despite the Associated Press's suggestion of the Pentagon's supposed benevolence toward Korean civilians, Washington's saturation bombing of northern cities, factories, and mines was devastating. From November 1950 until the end of the war, the U.S. rulers aimed to create a wasteland in the north.

Napalm was used extensively on civilian centers. Napalm is a mixture of naphthenic and palmitic acids, ignited by phosphorous to make it burn slowly and into the skin. The combustion sometimes lasts up to 15 days inside wounds.

On Aug. 29, 1952, the U.S. Air Force dropped nearly 700 tons of bombs and 10,000 liters of napalm on Pyongyang, the largest city in north Korea. Two years earlier, in addition to napalm, U.S. forces hit the city on December 14-15 with 175 tons of delayed-fuse demolition bombs, which explode at odd moments, such as when people are trying to rescue the injured and dead from napalm fires.

On several occasions the U.S. rulers considered using atomic weapons against the workers and peasants in north Korea and China.

The saturation bombing caused an astronomical number of Korean deaths — 2 million north Korean civilians, 1 million civilians in the south, and 500,000 north Korean soldiers died out of total population of 30 million. Some 5.7 million U.S. troops were involved in the war and 54,000 were killed.

The Korean peninsula remains divided, but Washington's stalemate in Korea was a sharp blow to the "indispensable nation." The U.S. rulers' brutal policies in the region were a foretaste of their war against and eventual defeat by farmers and workers in Vietnam two decades later.  
 
 
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