Vol. 72/No. 32      August 18, 2008

The latest revelations, based on interviews conducted by the commission with survivors, and confirmed by once classified U.S. documents, detail how U.S. forces bombed, strafed, and napalmed hundreds of civilians and war refugees in three towns in South Korea in 1950 and 1951.

“Of course the U.S. government should pay compensation. It’s the U.S. military’s fault,” survivor Cho Kook-won, 78, told the Associated Press. He lost four family members when the U.S. air force napalmed a cave shelter south of Seoul in 1951.

The massacres in the three towns took place when Washington sought to retake territory it had lost twice—first in June and July 1950, after revolutionary Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel and pushed back the U.S.-led occupation army—and then lost again in early 1951.

On Sept. 10, 1950, according to U.S. military documents, five days before the landing at Inchon that opened the U.S. counteroffensive, 43 U.S. warplanes dropped 93 napalm canisters to “burn out” the eastern slope of Wolmi Island and clear the way for U.S. troops. Wolmi Island overlooks the channel that approaches Inchon harbor.

“When the napalm hit our village, many people were still sleeping in their homes,” Lee Boem-ki, 76, told reporters. “Those who survived the flames ran to the tidal flats. We were trying to show the American pilots that we were civilians. But they strafed us, women and children.”

Despite fierce resistance by anti-imperialist fighters, U.S. and United Nations troops made rapid progress after Inchon. By September 1950 they reconquered Seoul and kept driving north toward the Chinese border. U.S. general Douglas MacArthur thought he had won the war. Instead the Korean revolutionaries together with Chinese troops fought back and by Jan. 4, 1951, retook Seoul.

The U.S. occupiers saw all Korean workers and peasants as potential enemies. The U.S. ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, sent a letter dated July 26, 1950, informing Washington that the U.S. Army had adopted a policy of shooting South Korean refugees who approached U.S. lines.

Anyone dressed in white, a common clothing color in Korea, was viewed as suspect. Investigators with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found an after-mission report where a U.S. Air Force observer wrote in the “enemy” box, “Many people in white in area.”

On Jan. 19, 1951, three waves of U.S. Navy and Air Force planes attacked the village of Sanseong-doing, 100 miles southeast of Seoul. The U.S. 10th Corps had issued an order to destroy South Korean villages within five miles of a mountain held by North Korean troops. Sixty-nine of 115 houses were destroyed and at least 51 killed in the bombing raid.

An unusual joint army-air force review admitted there were no “enemy” casualties during the U.S. attack, even though U.S. pilots reported “excellent results.” Two colonels wrote in the report, “Civilians in villages cannot normally be identified as either North Koreans, South Koreans, or guerrillas.”

The massacre was too much for one U.S. officer, Brig. Gen. David G. Barr, who wrote that “methodical burning out poor farmers when no enemy is present is against the grain of U.S. soldiers.”

The day after the bombing of Sanseong-dong, a cave shelter at Yeongchun, 120 miles southeast of Seoul, came under repeated napalm and strafing attacks from U.S. warplanes. The planes dropped firebombs at the cave’s entrance, where hundreds of South Korean civilians had taken refuge, fearing their village could be next. Villagers say that 360 people were killed at the cave. The truth commission estimates the dead at “well over 200.”

Some 7,000 South Koreans have brought more than 200 similar cases to the attention of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Although the Pentagon has refused to comment on the most recent findings, many Koreans continue to press for the truth to come out. At the entrance to a Wolmi Island park that hosts a bronze statue honoring General McArthur, elderly South Koreans gather daily to draw attention to the massacres.
 
 
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