“Leaflet drops will be made north of U.S. lines” to ward off the movement of those fleeing south from the fighting, Muccio wrote Rusk on the day of a mass killing by U.S. forces at No Gun Ri, south Korea. “If refugees do appear north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.”

For 50 years U.S. officials had rejected claims that the shooting down of Korean refugees had ever occurred. Then a 1999 Associated Press report, based on interviews with U.S. veterans of the 1950-53 Korean War, exposed the massacre of hundreds at No Gun Ri.

Residents of the village fleeing the war zone were ordered by U.S. Army officers to walk on railroad tracks, and then were attacked by warplanes. Survivors scrambled for cover under a railroad bridge. Then for three nights and four days, July 26-29, U.S. troops fired into the tunnel where the peasants were trying to hide from the air bombardment. A U.S. investigation into No Gun Ri found no “written orders” to kill civilians. President William Clinton in January 2001 dismissed the brutal killings as an “incident…a painful reminder of the tragedies of war.” Washington refused to either apologize to the survivors or offer financial compensation.

Since 1999 south Koreans have issued complaints with the government in Seoul about 60 more U.S. killings of refugees during the war, AP reported May 30. The news agency said its research “uncovered at least 19 declassified U.S. military documents showing commanders ordered or authorized such killings in 1950-51.”

During the war U.S. forces also conducted saturation bombing, especially of northern cities, factories, and mines. They dropped more than 400,000 bombs on the city of Pyongyang alone, and used 717 million pounds of napalm on the population.

Muccio sent Rusk his confidential letter in 1950 because he wanted to prepare the State Department for “the possibility of repercussions in the United States” should the facts about the firing on refugees come to light. More than half a century after the letter and the massacre, Chung Koo Do, a leader of the No Gun Ri survivors group, said that continued U.S. Army denial of the planned shooting of refugees is a “deception of No Gun Ri victims and of U.S. citizens who value human rights.”
 
 
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