Conflicts
Taejon/Daejon 1950
From chapter 2, “The War that Was,” in Gavan McCormack, Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, New York, Nation Books 2004 (Japanese edition from Heibonsha 2004, Korean edition from Icarus Media 2006)
The official US Army report at the end of the war gave 7,334 as the figure for civilian victims of North Korean atrocities, a small fraction of those now known to have been executed by Rhee in the first moments of the war alone. [1] Of that number, the deaths of an estimated 5,000 to 7,500 civilians were attributed to a single incident, known as the “Taejon Massacre.” This incident, described as “worthy of being recorded in the annals of history along with the Rape of Nanking, the Warsaw Ghetto, and other similar mass exterminations,” became the centerpiece of the US case for North Korean brutality. A US Army report on the massacre, including graphic photographs, was published around the world in October 1953.[2] The notion of North Korea as fanatical and brutal owes much to the way the violence of the Korean War was communicated to the world a half century ago.
At Taejon, a town about 160 kilometers south of Seoul, a massacre undoubtedly occurred. The first published references to it appeared in the North Korean newspaper Choson Inminbo referring to a massacre of around 7,000 people, including many former pro-North Korean partisans held in Taejon prison, which reportedly took place over about five days in early July, 1950. Up to 80 trucks each day were used to cart prisoners to a village where they were either doused with gasoline and burned to death or dumped in air-defense trenches and killed there.[3] The English communist paper the Daily Worker’s correspondent, Alan Winnington, accompanying the (North) Korean People’s Army on their march southwards, reported having inspected mass graves at a village called “Rangwul” near Taejon, about 160 kilometers south of Seoul. He concluded from inspection of the graves, photographic evidence and discussions with villagers in the vicinity, that approximately 7,000 prisoners from the jails of Taejon and nearby had been summarily executed at that spot and buried in mass graves dug by locally press-ganged peasants.
The two Australian officers who constituted the UNCOK Field Observer team, Major Peach and Wing Commander Rankin, were in the Taejon area just when Winnington concluded a massacre must have taken place, acting as liaison officers between the UN and South Korean forces. On July 9, they were, Peach wrote, on the “road from Taejon to Konju”[4] when they saw trucks loaded with prisoners going south. As Peach recalled in a 1982 interview with this author: “Before my very eyes I saw at least two or three killed, their heads broken like eggs with the butts of rifles.”[5]
Later, in Konju, they were told that prisoners were being shot.[6] A contemporary photograph in the London Picture Post shows a truckload of such prisoners, described as “South Korean suspected traitors,” on the banks of the Kum River “on their way to execution.”[7] Four days later, on 13 July, the northern forces crossed the Kum River, and on 20 July captured Taejon, which was still burning when Winnington reached it. The sequence of events strongly suggests that Winnington, Peach and Rankin were all witnesses to different stages of the same terrible event.
There was one further witness. Philip Deane, the captured correspondent for the London Observer, was told a story while in a prison camp in north Korea of a massacre in Taejon just before the town fell to the communists. His informant was a French priest. Deane wrote:
“[Father Cadars] told me that just before the Americans retreated from the town, South Korean police had brought into a forest clearing near his church 1,700 men, loaded layer upon layer into trucks. These prisoners were ordered out and ordered to dig long trenches. Father Cadars watched. Some American officers, Cadars said were also watching. When a certain amount of digging was complete, South Korean policemen shot half the prisoners in the back of the neck. The other half were then ordered to bury the dead.”[8] After Father Cadars’ protest was dismissed, the remainder were likewise killed. He was told they were “Communist guerrillas who rebelled in the Taejon gaol.”
Unless, by some terrible version of serendipity, there were two massacres in the Taejon vicinity, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the most brutal North Korean atrocity in the South was actually a southern atrocity in a brutal ongoing civil war.
This version of the Taejon massacre was also reported by the military attaché to the US embassy, Lt. Colonel Bob E. Edwards, who sent a report together with photographs on to US intelligence in Washington. The figure of 1,800 massacre victims was given, but South Korean forces were clearly blamed, and the orders to execute the prisoners were described as having come from “the highest authority.”[9] Some time between then and 1953, somebody – presumably in either the American military or government – seems to have made the decision to turn this into a Northern massacre, the characteristic, single atrocity of the entire war. The truth seems inescapable: this worst atrocity of the war was committed by forces acting in the name of the United Nations, and a concerted effort was then made to cover it up by blaming it on the North Korean enemy.
In 1992, more than 40 years after the events occurred, in a South Korean monthly journal men who had actually taken part in the massacre confirmed Winnington’s account, tough not the numbers he suggested.[10] The only matter which remained unclear was whether Americans had been directly involved or not.
A much smaller incident, in which according to South Korean records 248 civilians were killed, wounded or missing following an attack when seeking refuge in a railway tunnel at a place called Nogunri in the week following Taejon incident, became the subject of international attention following publication of an Associated Press investigation in September 1999.[11] The US Army then conducted a full investigation, concluding that the deaths were the regrettable result of confusion on the part of poorly trained, raw American soldiers. In January 2001, President Clinton expressed regret, but not an apology, for what had happened.[12] The great massacre at Taejon went unmentioned.
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[1] “Korean Historical Report,” War Crimes Division, Judge Advocate Section, Korean Communications Zone, APO 234, Cumulative to 30 June 1953, Copy in Australian Archives, Victorian division, MP 729/8, Department of the Army, Classified Correspondence Files, 1945-1957, File 66/431/25.
[2] See, for example, Daily Telegraph（Sydney), 30 October 1953.
[3] Park Myung-lim, pp. 324.
[4] Extract from the Peach/Rankin report carried in Dispatch by A.B. Jamison, Head of Australian Mission in Tokyo, to Canberra, 10 August 1950, Australian Archives 3123/5, Part 4.
[5] Peach, interview with author, Sydney, 14 August 1982.
[6] Rankin confirmed this account in a 12 August 1982 interview with the author by referring to his 1950 diary.
[7] Stephen Simmons (journalist) and photographer Haywood Magee, “War in Korea,” Picture Post, vol 48, No. 5, July 1950, p. 17. (The caption describes the incident as a matter “which has been investigated by a United Nations observer.”)
[8] Philip Deane, Captive in Korea, London, 1953, p. 83. (The 1953 US Army report locates the headquarters of the North Korean forces it alleged were responsible for the September massacre in “the Catholic mission” in Taejon.)
[9] Park, p. 324 (quoting from US National Archives).
[10] No Ka-Won, “Taejon hyongmuso sachon sanbaek myong haksal sakon” (The massacre of 4,300 men from the Taejon prison), Mal, February 1992, pp. 122-31.
[11] Park (p. 337) concludes from his analysis of various sources, including the North Korean report in Chosun Inminho of 10 August 1950, that 400 people were killed at Nogunri between 26 and 29 July.
[12] Elizabeth Becker, “Army confirms G.I.’s in Korea killed civilians,” New York Times, 12 January 2001. The full report of the official investigation, “No Gun Ri Review” is available on the web http://www.army.mil/nogunri/. The authors of the original investigative report won a Pulitzer for it and subsequently published it as a book – Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri – A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean war, New York, Henry Holt, Owl Books, 2002). A fine television documentary was also made of it by the BBC: “Timewatch: Kill ‘em all,” 31 January 2002. See also Bruce Cumings, “Occurrence at Nogun ri Bridge: An enquiry into the history and memory of a civil war,” Critical Asian Studies, vol. 33, No. 4, November 2001, pp. 509-526.
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Small town caught in the cross-fire of Korean War
Asia erupts in East-West confrontation
Japan’s defeat in World War II transformed East Asia into a Cold War arena of East-West confrontation. With China’s involvement, the bitter rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union flared during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. This chapter explores the impact of these wars on the people of East Asia.
Two lines drawn on the map of the Korean Peninsula irrevocably changed the fate of the small town of Cheorwon and its citizens. In September 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union established the 38th parallel to demarcate their respective zones of control on the Korean Peninsula. The 38th parallel became the de facto North-South border when Korea was officially split in 1948.
The bloody Korean War, which erupted in June 1950, raged for three years. The cease-fire of July 1953 resulted in the creation of a strip of buffer zone, now known as the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Cheorwon lay north of the 38th parallel, but after the fighting in the Korean War, it became incorporated into South Korea. As such, the town was very much a symbol of Korea’s division. I headed for South Korea to see how the town was faring today.
Located in the dead center of the Korean Peninsula, Cheorwon can be called its “navel.” With a vast, fertile plain stretching around it, Cheorwon used to be a major transportation hub. In 1914, when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule, the Kyongwon Railway Line was laid through Cheorwon to connect present-day Seoul and the city of Wonsan on the east coast. Cheorwon also became the starting point of another railway line extending to the scenic mountain resort of Kumgangsan. Banks and shops lined the front of Cheorwon Station, and the town boasted theaters and hospitals. And with its good water and sewage services for its 20,000 residents, Cheorwon prospered as an inland town.
I toured this once-thriving town with Kim Young Kyu, 45, a scholar of local history. About 30 kilometers north of the 38 parallel, I spotted red-crested white cranes and white-naped cranes resting their wings on a wide expanse of farmland with low shrubs and dead grass, dotted with patches of snow. The scene was idyllic, but the nearby presence of South Korean soldiers at a border checkpoint, as well as barbed wire fencing with red notice boards proclaiming “land mine,” reminded me of my proximity to the DMZ. A few kilometers to the north, I could see North Korean mountains.
In what was once the town’s busiest street in front of the train station, there stood the ruins of a building, its walls charred black and scarred with numerous bullet holes. “The town was destroyed in intense street battles and bombings during the Korean War,” Kim told me. “Since this area is off-limits to civilians, the war’s scars have been left as you can see.”
Kim Song Il, 77, was born during the Japanese colonial era and lived in Cheorwon’s busy downtown section in front of the train station until the Korean War broke out. The story he told me of his adult life was typical of the fate suffered by those whose lives were directly affected by the establishment of the 38th parallel and the DMZ. Before Kim could really begin to appreciate the absence of Japanese soldiers from Cheorwon following Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945, Soviet soldiers arrived. Unbeknown to its citizens, Cheorwon had become a tense border town on the north side of the 38th parallel, the “front line” of the incipient Cold War.
The following year, Cheorwon citizens were mobilized for the construction of a city hall to house the North Korean Labor Party, and portraits of Kim Il Sung were hung all over town. The North Korean People’s Army guarded the 38th parallel, blocking traffic to and from South Korea. “We’d been made to learn Japanese (under Japanese occupation), and then we were told to embrace communism,” Kim Song Il said. “We had no choice but to obey.”
In June 1950, Kim recalled, he noticed a daily massing of North Korean troops and tanks at the 38th parallel. Before the month was over, the Korean War had begun. Kim was in high school at the time, and his classmates and older students were conscripted into military service. Kim became a draft-dodger and laid low for a while, but he gave himself up to authorities when he heard his father had been detained.
Serving with a tank unit of the People’s Army, Kim advanced south. But the unit was driven back by the U.S. Army after crossing the Han River in Seoul. Back in Cheorwon after an absence of about 100 days, Kim became a deserter and fled to the mountains. The following year, he found a job as a bartender at a U.S. Air Force base where he had sought asylum.
One day, Kim overheard an Air Force officer–one of his regular customers–boasting of his successful bombing mission in the “Triangle.” The plains of Cheorwon, where fierce battles were being fought every day, were known then as the Iron Triangle. Kim did not want to believe his ears. “The U.S. military, on whom I depended for my livelihood, was bombarding my hometown,” Kim reminisced. “I was struck then by the sobering reality of life’s uncertainty.”
South Korea and North Korea came into being in 1948, supported, respectively, by the United States and the Soviet Union. With both President Syngman Rhee of South Korea and Prime Minister Kim Il Sung of North Korea considering invading each another, their armed forces clashed from time to time across the 38th parallel. Among those who lived through that period, everyone I spoke with in Cheorwon said to the effect, “The atmosphere back then left no doubt that war was inevitable.”
153 farmers executed
What had started out effectively as a civil war evolved into a major international conflict when United Nations forces led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Chinese forces joined the Korean War. The front line moved back and forth, north and south, forcing the local populace to flee every time with nothing but the clothes they wore; or they had to do the bidding of the occupying forces for their own survival.
Goyang is a city in suburban Seoul. A deep, dark pit that looks like an old well can be found on a small hill along a trunk highway. In 1995, the remains of 153 people were recovered from the pit. The area around Goyang fell under North Korean control within a few days of the outbreak of the Korean War, but South Korea seized it back in less than three months. Police and right-wing organizations rounded up 153 farmers, accusing them of “cooperating with the North.” All were taken to the pit on the hill and shot dead. Some of the younger men and women were no more than children.
At the insistence of the victims’ surviving families, this mass execution was investigated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an independent organ appointed by the government. The commission concluded last year that the government should make an official apology for the mass execution by the police. The ideological confrontation that formed the backdrop of this “hot war” in the Cold War invited countless tragedies. Massacres were committed by the U.S. military, too. According to various advocacy groups, about 1 million civilians were killed before and during the Korean War.
However, until the early 1990s, the bereaved families were forced to remain silent under generations of South Korean administrations that were led by former military officers. Kim Dong Choon, a SungKongHoe University professor who researched the mass execution as a full-time member of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, pointed out that the massacres represented the war itself for the Korean common folk. “Among the police officers and members of the right-wing groups that participated in the mass execution, many were active supporters of Japanese colonialism,” Kim noted. “Disarming the Japanese military was the U.S. and Soviet purpose for establishing the 38th parallel. The tragedy of the ethnic division and war was a legacy of Japan’s colonialism.”
China enters the war
More than 200,000 foreign soldiers died in the Korean War, fighting for either the North or South. Of these people, Chinese nationals were by far the most numerous. Their toll, including those who went missing in action, was close to 180,000. Why did China send so many of its own to the Korean Peninsula?
A 14-hour ride on a Beijing-Pyongyang night train took me to the Chinese city of Dandong in Liaoning province on the North Korean border. From Dandong Station, it was a five-minute drive to the Yalu River, which forms the China-North Korea border. I got a close look at North Korea on the other side. Trucks rumbled across the China-Korea Friendship Bridge spanning the river. About 70 percent of trade between the two countries is said to move through Dandong. The bridge was built by Japan in 1943, 11 years after the establishment of Manchukuo in northeastern China.
Parallel to this bridge was the Short Bridge, so called because its North Korean end is missing–destroyed in a bombing raid during the Korean War. This bridge, too, was built by Japan in 1911, the year after the Japanese annexation of Korea, in order to connect a railway vertically traversing the Korean Peninsula with another that ran across the Chinese continent.
When South Korean and United Nations forces advanced north across the 38th parallel in October 1950, the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army crossed the Yalu River, and Dandong became a munitions supply base. A command headquarters facility stood atop the hill where the museum stands today, according to Zhao.
Sun Jingkun, an 84-year-old Dandong native I met, is a Korean War veteran. After the departure of the Kwangtung Army upon Japan’s defeat in World War II, Sun, a tenant farmer, became a landowner thanks to the Chinese Communist Party’s agrarian reforms. I asked him how he felt when he crossed the Yalu River on his way to the front. Sun replied: “It was hard to be separated from my wife for a long time, but we all knew at the time that U.S. troops could attack the town any day. I was determined to fight with my life to protect the land that was finally mine.”
He claimed to have killed 21 U.S. soldiers, all in hand-to-hand combat. Of the 120 men from his unit, only five survived. When Sun returned home to his wife, he had fragments of a bomb lodged in his hip, and his shoulder bore a scar from a bullet wound.
Niu Jun, a Peking University professor and an expert on Cold War-era Chinese diplomacy, explained: “In the autumn of 1950, China was getting ready to send troops to Taiwan. But with the Korean War, the U.S. Seventh Fleet blockaded the Taiwan Strait, heightening tensions in the region. And then there was the fact that China had been asked by the Soviet Union to accommodate the North Korean government-in-exile in northwest China should Kim Il Sung lose the war. “In that event, it was clear that China would be directly confronting U.S. forces across the Yalu River.”
The United States was just as eager to avert an all-out war with China. In April 1951, U.S. President Harry S. Truman relieved Gen. Douglas MacArthur from command for insisting on using a nuclear bomb and dispatching Taiwan’s Kuomintang Army to Korea. Cease-fire negotiations began three months later, in July 1951. The Korean War raised China’s influence on North Korea and America’s influence on South Korea. The fact that the fate of the Korean Peninsula is inseparably tied to the interests of these two major powers remains unchanged to this day.
After the cease-fire, a new downtown area in Cheorwon sprang up about 10 km south of the old downtown that had fallen into ruins. A number of residents of the new town are “displaced persons” originally from North Korea. And many South Korean residents have family members living in the North.
In 2004, the 90th anniversary of the completion of the Kyongwon railway line, Cheorwon citizens gathered at the former site of the train station and prayed for a peaceful reunification of Korea as well as for the restoration of the railway tracks severed by the Korean War. A piece of good news recently reached Cheorwon. A project will start in March to partially restore the tracks.
Chong Ho Jo, head of Cheorwon County, voiced his dream: “North and South merge in the town of Cheorwon. When Korea is reunified, there’s a good chance that Cheorwon will become the new capital. We don’t know when that will be, though.”
Fact File: Brief History on the Korean War
On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea and captured Seoul three days later. The United States denounced the move as an act of invasion. In July 1950, the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution, in the absence of the Soviet Union, to dispatch U.N. forces to the Korean Peninsula. Sixteen nations, including the United States, Britain and France, sent combat units to Korea.
North Korean forces advanced as far as the Nakdong-gang River near Pusan, but after the landing of U.N. forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s command at Incheon in September, South Korean forces retook Seoul. They then crossed the 38th parallel in October and occupied Pyongyang. Some of the forces reached the Chinese border.
But the situation reversed that same month when the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army entered the war. North Korean forces re-occupied Seoul in January 1951, but the city fell into the South’s hands again two months later. After that, a tug-of-war continued across the 38th parallel.
Cease-fire negotiations began in July 1951, but they continued to flounder over the treatment of prisoners of war and where to establish the North-South border. With both sides desperate to make the talks go in their favor, bloody skirmishes continued.
Following Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s death in March 1953, negotiations resumed in earnest. Representatives of U.N. forces, North Korean forces and Chinese forces signed a cease-fire agreement in July, but South Korea did not. The cease-fire agreement resulted in the creation of a new buffer zone between the two Koreas. This was the 2-kilometer-wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
Fact File: Participants in the war
The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, and a cease-fire agreement was signed on July 27, 1953. As such, the war is not yet over. South Koreans call this war the “June 25 War” and the “Korean War,” while North Koreans refer to it as the “War of National Liberation.” China, which participated in this war to resist “U.S. aggression,” calls it the “War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea.”
Upon their foundation in 1948, both South Korea and North Korea asserted their respective territorial rights to the entire Korean Peninsula, claiming one another’s territorial occupancy to be “illegitimate.”
Initially, the Korean War was by nature a civil war over the legitimacy of the respective regimes, but it evolved into an international conflict with the participation of Chinese forces and U.S.-led United Nations forces. Soviet Air Force pilots fought alongside the North Koreans. Japan, too, secretly dispatched a minesweeper at U.S. request, and one Japanese citizen died in the mission.
Korea conflict set Japan’s economic recovery in motion
What effect did the Korean War have on Japan? The special demand generated by the war set the nation’s postwar economic recovery in motion. The creation of the National Police Reserve (which would evolve into the Self-Defense Forces), the signing of the San Francisco Treaty and the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, and other developments that took place during the Korean War years were all part of the U.S. strategy to position Japan as a “bulwark” against communism.
Okinawa became the key part of this bulwark. According to a U.S. researcher, nuclear bombs were brought to the Kadena Air Base during the Korean War, and U.S. bombers took off frequently for North Korea to drop mock atomic bombs and other mega-bombs.
Yasuhide Oshiro , 67, who lived in the village of Onna near the Kadena base at the time, saw turbo-prop bombers returning from the north across the East China Sea every evening. In April 1953, while cease-fire negotiations were in progress, U.S. forces ordered the confiscation of land in Okinawa, evicted protesting landowners, and ran bulldozers over their homes and fields to create new military bases.
Teruo Hiyane, professor emeritus at the University of the Ryukyu, pointed out, “Through the Korean War, the United States reconfirmed Okinawa’s importance as a military base.” During the Vietnam War, Okinawa became the most important home base for U.S. bombers assigned to missions in Vietnam.
