COHEN: PROBE MASSACRE CLAIM
By John Donnelly, The
WASHINGTON – After first brushing aside a report of a U.S. Army massacre of civilians in he Korean War, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen on Thursday called for a probe into whether American troops machine-gunned thousands of people over three days in 1950.
The probe,
sparked by a lengthy Associated Press investigation that cited allegations of
survivors and U.S. veterans, will include a review of the record and interviews
with U.S. soldiers about the shootings near a hamlet called Nogun-ri.
Asked about the
story in
Cohen said the
government would look again at the issue if there were any substantive new
information. Hours later,
The AP story
included interviews with a dozen Army veterans and relatives of victims as well
as declassified Army documents that showed US commanders, fearing North Korea’s
forces had infiltrated civilian populations, ordered troops in late July 1950
to shoot South Korean refugees. A South
Korea survivors group estimates that 300 people were herded under a railroad
bridge and shot dead about 100 miles southeast of Seoul.
In a letter to
Caldera,
Caldera said
the probe will probably take a year or more.
He said the
"Although it
would not excuse the alleged acts, history records that the early weeks of the
Korean conflict were very chaotic," Caldera said. "U.S. soldiers, although they fought with
great courage under very harsh conditions, were ill-trained and ill-equipped to
fight because of the large reduction in resources available to the military for
training and equipment following World War II."
Maurice
Isserman, a history professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, said other
reports of U.S. troops killing Korean civilians surfaced during the war, "but
it was so easily dismissed as Communist-inspired stories. So I’m not surprised that this other account
of a massacre should take so long to emerge."
Isserman
doubted there would be much public outcry over the report because it’s "so far
in the past and the Korean War has just disappeared
for most Americans. But he wondered
about the veterans who talked about their memories of the killings. "These guys carried their experiences around
for 50 years and no one wanted to hear it," he said.
One of the
veterans, George Preece, 74, of
Preece also
expressed misgivings about the Army probe.
"Too much time has passed," he said.
"People have forgotten. Most of
the people involved were my friends, and many are dead by now. What happened back then couldn’t be
helped. It just couldn’t be
helped."
##