Same bridge as below. In a recent article, I wrote, "During the Korean War, the US Army believed North Korean soldiers were among refugees trying to cross a bridge there, so it blew up this bridge, killing hundreds of people." Notice how plaque makes no mention of anyone killed.
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10 comments:
In a recent article, I wrote, ...
So you did -- however you just said it, i.e. you omit any source(s) -- other articles published on unz.com do include bibliographic references.
Perhaps civilians did die, I don't know, as re the Korean War I've read very little; if so, then one can ask why it was not mentioned in the text -- civilians do die during wartime, and it can be no one's fault; it can be there is no clear reason to hold anyone accountable, e.g. a military commander -- but you offer no proof one way or the other.
Hill 303 massacre
The Hill 303 massacre ... was a war crime that took place in the Korean War on August 17, 1950 on a hill above Waegwan, South Korea. Forty-one captured U.S. Army prisoners of war were machine-gunned by members of the Korean People's Army during one of the smaller engagements of the Battle of Pusan Perimeter.
"Notice how plaque makes no mention of anyone killed."
An application of selective silence, one of the most powerful instruments of propaganda.
Hi Rudy,
They've certainly tried to flush all these incidents down the memory hole, but here's one article from 1999:
KOREAN WAR: More deaths revealed
Sun | Nation & World
By Sang-Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley and Martha Mendoza, The Associated Press — Oct 14th, 1999
Reports: Hundreds of refugees died at U.S. hands
EDITOR'S NOTE - The Associated Press recently reported on the killings of up to 400 South Korean refugees at the hamlet of No Gun Ri during the 1950-53 Korean War. That story briefly mentioned other incidents in which witnesses said refugees died at U.S. hands. Here is a follow-up report on those episodes.
On a single deadly day in August 1950, six weeks into the Korean War, a U.S. general and other Army officers ordered the destruction of two strategic bridges as South Korean refugees streamed across, killing hundreds of civilians, according to ex-GIs, Korean witnesses and U.S. military documents.
An old soldier recalled the critical moment at one bridge.
"I said, 'There are people!' And they said, 'You have to blow it! There's no other way!' " ex-Army engineer Joseph M. Ipock of Jackson, N.J., told The Associated Press.
Ex-GIs told the AP of the bridge blowings and two other incidents, machine-gun and mortar attacks on refugees, during interviews about what happened at No Gun Ri, South Korea, in late July 1950. In that case, as reported Sept. 29, veterans corroborated Korean accounts of hundreds of refugees killed at U.S. hands.
One bridge blowing, with its refugee deaths, was recorded briefly in an official Army chronicle, but not until 10 years after the event.
The trail of dead civilians, many of them women and children, has been a hidden underside to a well-known chapter in U.S. military history, the southward retreat from advancing North Korean forces of three Army divisions into a defensible perimeter across South Korea's Naktong River in July-August 1950.
The withdrawal was often confused. The U.S. Army itself told South Korean civilians, citizens of an allied nation, to head south. But the AP found in researching declassified Army documents that U.S. commanders also issued standing orders to shoot civilians along the warfront to guard against North Korean soldiers disguised in the white clothes of Korean peasants. Military lawyers call those orders illegal.
Just days into his first combat command, the 1st Cavalry Division's Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay told reporters he was sure most of the white-clad columns pressing toward American lines were North Korean guerrillas.
"We must find a means to hold these refugees in place," the division commander said.
[more below]
Days later, on Aug. 3, 1950, Gay waited on the east bank of the Naktong River as his division retreated across the bridge at Waegwan, the last crossing open to North Korean units reported massing more than 15 miles to the west.
His troops had failed in repeated efforts to turn back the flood of refugees, even firing warning shots over their heads.
"Finally, it was nearly dark," Gay later wrote to an Army historian. "There was nothing else to be done."
Then he gave a fateful command.
"Gen. Gay stood up in the front of his jeep and shouted out, 'Blow the son of a bitch!'," veteran Edward L. Daily recalled.
The preset charges exploded, shattering the supports and dropping one of the bridge's hulking spans into the muddy waters of the Naktong.
"They went right down," remembered ex-lieutenant Daily, of Clarksville, Tenn. "It was like a slow-motion movie. All those refugees went right down into the river."
"It was a tough decision," Gay wrote to the historian, "because up in the air with the bridge went hundreds of refugees."
The division's 1950 war diary did not report the refugees' deaths. But the later narrative by Gay, who died in 1983, led to a brief mention in an official war history published in 1960.
What happened earlier that August day, however, 25 miles downriver at the village of Tuksong-dong, has never been reported.
Ex-sergeant Carroll F. Kinsman remembers the streams of white-clad humanity shuffling across the 650-foot-long Tuksong-dong bridge - women clutching children, old men, overloaded ox carts.
"We stayed up all that night and searched them," Kinsman, a veteran of the 14th Combat Engineers Battalion, said in an AP interview. They found no infiltrators, he said.
Retreating Americans had not yet sighted North Korean units near the river around Tuksong-dong on Aug. 3, the declassified record shows. But American officers knew the enemy would arrive eventually. Pressed by a timetable, they proved unable to keep the refugees back from the bridge, rigged for instant demolition.
Soldiers fired over the heads of those crowding across, and tried to warn them the bridge would be blown up, said the veterans, men in their 60s or 70s.
"They tried to stop the refugees from coming across, and they wouldn't stop. They were abutment to abutment," ex-engineer Leon L. Denis of Huntsville, Ala., recalled in an AP interview before his death Aug. 31.
The men of Company A, 14th Engineers, had taken two days to set 7,000 pounds of explosives on the steel-girder bridge. When the detonation order came at 7:01 a.m., "it lifted up and turned it sideways and it was full of refugees end to end," said Kinsman, of Gautier, Miss.
"These people were on the bridge, and you saw the spans of steel flying and you knew they were killed," said ex-GI Rudolph Giannelli of Port Saint Lucie, Fla., driver for Col. Richard W. Stephens, the 21st Infantry Regiment commander who was the last officer across the bridge.
In separate AP interviews, Kinsman, Denis and Giannelli said hundreds of civilians were killed. Ipock said he could see only 30 or 40 refugees from his vantage point.
"There was people on that bridge when it went up," Ipock said. "And during war that's the story. They're up there and they pull the plunger and that's it."
Kim Bok-jong, 73, a Korean who said he was 200 yards from the bridge, out of view around a hill, remembered that "people rushed back toward us and said many people died when the Americans blew up the bridge."
The dying did not end there, he said. Panicked refugee families stranded on the far shore after the bridge was destroyed tried to swim the river, Korea's largest.
"Many - I mean many - people drowned," Kim told the AP. "Women with kids were exhausted before reaching the southern bank and disappeared under water. Sometimes, kids were abandoned in the middle of the river."
[more below]
The veterans said they don't know who gave the detonation order at Tuksong-dong. The operation was noted in the 14th Engineers report with a simple "Results, excellent."
From the bridges, the U.S. Army units moved into defensive positions along the Naktong, in what came to be known as the Pusan Perimeter. They had arrived at the river after weeks of retreat through South Korea - and after countless, sometimes bloody encounters with refugees.
Four 1st Cavalry Division veterans told the AP that on Aug. 2, the day before the bridge blowings, they were among several dozen soldiers retreating toward the Naktong and being trailed by perhaps 80 white-clad Koreans.
In midafternoon, five North Korean soldiers - disguised in white - appeared in front of the Americans, they said. Veteran Edward L. Daily said the North Koreans opened fire and were quickly killed. Another ex-GI, Eugene Hesselman, remembered it differently, saying the intruders surrendered and were led away.
Because it was believed they came from among the refugees, said Hesselman, of Fort Mitchell, Ky., "we got orders to eliminate them (the refugees). And we mowed them all down. The Army wouldn't take chances."
Scattering too late, every man, woman and child was killed, Daily said. He and veteran Robert G. Russell said they found about 10 disguised North Korean soldiers among the dead. Hesselman said he doesn't recall that infiltrators were found.
"I didn't like to do it," said Russell, of West Fargo, N.D. "It was just pure survival at the time."
About a week earlier, a half-dozen 1st Cavalry Division veterans recounted, mortar fire was directed at possibly a few hundred refugees moving down a railroad track about 100 miles southeast of Seoul.
Americans had been ambushed the night before by North Koreans who mingled with refugees, said ex-GI James McClure. Now, he said, he spotted another white-clad group, including women and children, through his binoculars, and put in a call to a command post.
"The colonel contacted mortar and decided to kill them instead of allowing them through the line," said McClure, of Federal Way, Wash. He could not recall the colonel's name.
When the mortar fire hit, "there were legs, arms and bodies flying everywhere," McClure recounted. Veteran Henry Matthias of Baltimore said he believes about 70 refugees were killed.
Matthias said he and GIs around him didn't fire because "the North Koreans were coming in, but they were a long way away." Other ex-GIs said North Korean uniforms and weapons were found on bodies afterward.
Some officers and other Korean War veterans drew a distinction between killing civilians simply because of suspicions of enemy among them, and destroying a bridge - a strategic necessity - with refugees on it.
But others, looking back, said refugees on targeted bridges should have been protected - for example, by deploying soldiers to hold them back and retrieving the soldiers later by boat.
Three days after blowing the Waegwan bridge, Gay did send boats across the Naktong, to bring over 6,000 stranded refugees from the west bank, the declassified record shows.
The North Koreans did not appear in force on the west bank between Waegwan and Tuksong-dong until Aug. 7, four days after the bridges were blown, the record shows.
AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this report.
— 12/31/1969
Hi Rudy,
On a different note, I just got this in my mailbox, "A paper published by a member of the Yiddish department at Hebrew University of Jerusalem mentions the name 'Linh Dinh'."
Most academics and writers subscribe to Academia, partly or maybe mostly to read papers about themselves, but even when I was teaching college, I never bothered. Every so often, Academia sends me a message to say that I'm mentioned in some paper, with the idea of arousing my interest (and vanity) enough, so that I'll become a subscriber.
Well, I'm very happy to be in someone's mind in Jerusalem!
Years ago, I was actually paid to visit a class at Yeshiva University in NYC...
Linh
Hi Linh,
Well, those refugees... In order to keep the advancing hordes away, of course we had to kill them. If we hadn't fought them there, we'd have had to fight them here. Same thing with Vietnam, Panama, Grenada,indeed the whole damn world. But, don't worry we'll soon get 'er done, now that (((they))) are completely in control.
Academia:
Yeah, yeah, yeah... :-)
I get shit like that: Rudy, somebody or other is interested in your research sort of thing. The last paper I wrote got published around 1990.
Rudy
Here's a link to the (archived) story as published in the Kitsap Sun (perhaps elsewhere as well):
KOREAN WAR: More deaths revealed
You should add this as a bibliographical note at the end of your article published on unz.com -- there was no reason not to do that in the first place.
(I deleted an earlier version of this comment because it had a minor typo -- I hate typos, no matter how minor.)
Well, those refugees... In order to keep the advancing hordes away, of course we had to kill them.
That's a little dishonest -- reading the article, the military concerns were 1) NK infiltrators might be among the civilians crossing the bridge (the article says some were found, but this is also disputed); 2) the intact bridge could be used by the advancing enemy should the defenders fail to hold them off -- bridges are regularly "blown" in wartime for just this reason: to hinder the enemy's advance.
If a military commander failed to blow a bridge because there were civilians on it, and the bridge was later used by the enemy to cross in force, which caused further military setbacks and many more casualties, he would very likely be court-martialed -- and rightly so.
As you may have heard, "war is hell".
Well, if read without an appreciation of sarcasm, I would have to agree with you.
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