FEAR, CONFUSION FUELED KOREAN MASSACRE
War: Ill-trained and under attack, U.S. soldiers agonized by followed orders
By Richard T.
Cooper, Judy Pasternak, Times Staff Writers
Los Angeles
Times, October 3, 1999
WASHINGTON – In late July 1950, during the disastrous
early weeks of the Korean War, the runner for H Company, 7th Cavalry
Regiment, was a little fellow with blonde hair named Skaggs. When contact broke down, he was the one who
delivered the orders.
Artillery and
mortar fire were dropping so close that Cpl. Edward Daily thought the North
Koreans had to have a spotter nearby.
Even so, when Skaggs skittered in beside him, Daily questioned the
orders. "Skaggs told me to shoot," Daily
remembered. "I asked, ‘Who in the hell
gave those orders?’" It was half a
century ago, but the hurried exchange remains indelible in Daily’s memory: "The answer came back, ‘Maj. Hitcher.’ "I questioned him, ‘Even the women and
children?’ "The answer came back: ‘You
shoot them all. No survivors.’"
As Daily
crouched on open ground behind his .30-caliber machine gun, he could see a
railroad embankment with a big concrete tunnel-like structure spanning a small
stream about 100 or 150 yards away.
Several hundred Koreans, many of them women and children and all wearing
the white robes and baggy trousers of local peasants, had crowded inside the
tunnel after the shelling had begun and P-51 Mustangs had strafed the
area.
Daily’s machine
gun was mounted on a heavy tripod, with two knobs to adjust its aim. "I moved those little round knobs, one for
elevation and one for traverse. I stayed
right in position. It was a good,
accurate weapon." Others obeyed the
orders too. Within half an hour, he had
stopped shooting. "I did not go down
after the shooting," Daily said.
Details of the
episode, which may have claimed hundreds of lives, emerged last week, first in
an investigative account by Associated Press and then in interviews with former
soldiers. It is now almost certain that
Nogun-ri, the hamlet near the railroad overpass, will join the Vietnamese
village of My Lai and a handful of other names on the list of atrocities
committed against civilians by U.S. forces in combat.
The Pentagon,
after years of stonewalling, has now promised a full-scale investigation. President Clinton has expressed concern. And in South Korea, which announced the
formation of a high-level investigative task force Saturday, the incident is likely
to set off political repercussions and renewed demands for reparations from
survivors and descendants of the victims.
But for most
Americans, more important than legal or political issues is the question of how
it could have happened. How could
American soldiers, ordinary young men who returned home and lived normal lives,
have deliberately poured hundreds of rounds of machine-gun and rifle fire into
the bodies of men, women and children trapped inside a concrete tunnel?
The answer, as
seen by historians who have studied the events of the Korean War closely and by
some of the former soldiers themselves, lies in a tangle of factors great and
small.
National
leaders’ blindness to the gathering danger on the Korean peninsula and the
arrogance of commanders who thought they could make short work of the invaders
were part of it. So was the disastrous
conversion of the greatest fighting force in history into a hollow shell of
ill-equipped, ill-trained and ill-led recruits.
Racism almost certainly played a role: The attitude toward Koreans and
other nonwhites then was less than enlightened.
And, for
individual soldiers, obedience to orders and the almost-unimaginable terror of
unforeseen disaster on the battlefield were paramount. Former machine-gunner Daily, now 68 and
living in Clarksville, Tenn., summed it up.
"The confusion, the chaos. There
were men scared to death. I was scared
too. You didn’t have time to really
think about it. You were trying to
survive yourself. You’re looking at your
brothers. You have to protect them." In the end, Daily said, "when you’re in the
Army, you’re disciplined. You follow
your orders, even though it’s hard to swallow and think about what did
happen."
Maj. Omar
Hitcher, who by Daily’s recollection handed down the order, died in the early
1950s, he said.
Airy Predictions Overly Optimistic
Two days after Communist North Korea invaded South Korea
on June 25, 1950, historians recall that Gen. Douglas MacArthur, supreme
commander of occupied Japan, airily declared he could whip the invaders with
one arm tied behind him. Troops
dispatched to make good on that boast thought they would be back among the
comforts of Japan within a couple of months—90 days, tops. A "police action," President Harry S. Truman
called it.
It was soon
clear that such talk had little relationship to reality. Far from the gang of hoodlums that Truman’s
phrase implied, the North Korean army was then one of the best-equipped,
best-led and most battle-hardened forces in the world. And the troops MacArthur commanded in 1950
bore no resemblance to the forces he had led to victory in World War II. "There was a lot of bravado. And, of course, it didn’t happen that way,"
said William Stueck, a University of Georgia historian and author of "The
Korean War: An International History."
Experts
favorably compared the North Korean army with the Imperial Japanese Army of
World War II. In particular, the
divisions sweeping into the area southwest of Seoul and hurtling down on H
Company at Nogun-ri had fought in the Chinese civil war under Mao
Tse-tung. Some North Korean officers had
even fought with the Russians in World War II, taking part in the liberation of
Berlin. "The North Korean soldiers could
crawl farther on their bellies than the American soldiers could walk," one U.S.
officer said later.
Historians say
North Korea’s master plan for the invasion reflected Maoist doctrine: massive
frontal assaults by main-force army units, combined with a large-scale uprising
in the rear by pro-Communist guerillas and North Korean infiltrators disguised
as peasants.
To stop such a
combination of forces, the United States initially had only the military units
stationed in Japan and nearby Pacific bases.
And, in the five short years since the end of World War II, the fighting
effectiveness of its once-invincible armies had been systematically degraded in
response to congressional budget cuts.
"Many of these units went into battle under-strength and
under-equipped," said Col. Cole Kingseed, a West Point historian.
In the case of
H Company, most of its equipment dated from World War II. Daily’s unit had to rely on old Rand McNally
maps of South Korea. The company’s old
weapons were no match for North Korean armaments: U.S. bazookas fired antitank
shells that couldn’t penetrate North Korea’s tanks.
Even if they
had been well-equipped and up to strength, the U.S. soldiers were woefully
unprepared. "This was an entirely new
Army," said military historian Allan R. Millett of Ohio State University. Except in the officer ranks, the World War II
veterans had been demobilized, replaced by green recruits, many of them very
new to the Army.
Moreover,
Millet said, "the Army was starved for training funds. They were doing garrison duty in Japan. The kinds of training they could do there
were very circumscribed." "These folks
had spent most of their time in Japan standing on street corners whistling at
girls," a senior U.S. officer later said.
Racial Attitudes May Have Played a Role
The American Army of 1950 was a product of the America of
1950 in other ways as well. Its members
had grown up in a culture far different from the one that exists at the end of
the 20th century, not least in its attitudes about race and
color.
Few, if any,
experts see the incident at Nogun-ri as racial killing. But many believe that the prevailing beliefs
about people of color in general and Koreans in particular played a part in the
decisions that led to the massacre. Only
a few years before, a senior U.S. official had returned from a visit to Korea
and confided in his diary that "Korea is a strange land, filled with
strange-looking people."
"There’s no
question that white American soldiers were still fundamentally segregated, even
though President Truman had ordered the Army desegregated, and they saw people
of color as inferior," said Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago, author
of "The Origins of the Korean War."
At the time of
the war, 12 states included Koreans among those prohibited from marrying
Caucasians. In parts of New York, they
couldn’t buy property. "Fear and hatred
travel side by side," Millett said.
Racial
differences also compounded the unnerving difficulty that U.S. troops had in
distinguishing friend from foe. In the
Pacific fighting of World War II, the enemy had been easily recognizable and
civilians had rarely been combatants. In
Korea, all such distinctions were blurred from the beginning. "Korea was Vietnam before Vietnam," Cumings
tells his students.
A Landscape of Frightened Confusion
The night before H Company got to Nogun-ri, Defense
Department archives show, it had joined the rest of the 7th
Cavalry’s 2nd Battalion in a night retreat.
The unit, which proudly traced its lineage to Gen. George Armstrong
Custer, was to relieve remnants of Task Force Smith, the unprepared collection
of troops rushed to Korea immediately after the invasion. Task Force Smith had been knocked to pieces
by the North Korean onslaught and was fleeing south.
Like everything
else, however, neither the relief efforts nor the repositioning had gone
well. Unaccustomed to night operations,
the unit had lost weapons and men as it struggled against oppressive heat,
rugged terrain and inadequate supplies of water, as well as pursuing North
Korean units. Records show that "the
battalion had apparently fallen into considerable disarray," Ohio State’s
Millett said.
As daylight
broke and H Company struggled to set up defensive positions near the railroad
embankment and the narrow dirt road leading south, its men confronted a
landscape of frightening confusion. "You
couldn’t go nowhere," Daily said. "The
road was jammed with the 24th Division retreating . . . Thousands of
vehicles and thousands of refugees.
There was no room to pass. We
ended up getting fire."
Sgt. James T.
Kerns, who was near Daily for a time, said, "We had been letting everybody come
through until we started getting artillery fire." He particularly remembers the accuracy of the
North Korean mortars. "With two shots,
they were zeroing in on us. We had some
of the best mortar men in the Army, and it took them three shots." Kerns, now 69 and living in Piedmont, SC, saw
two Americans killed by the mortars.
Rumors of
approaching tanks spread through the exhausted ranks. "We had nothing to stop them," Kerns
said. "We had two rocket
launchers." To make matters worse, the
area was strafed by U.S. planes; the fire hit refugees streaming down the
railroad tracks but hit H Company as well.
"I’m sure they were all scared to death," Millett said "and then they
get strafed by friendlies…. Add to that anxiety, ignorance, horror stories of
atrocities committed by the North Koreans and you have troops in a condition
not to exercise very good judgment."
The most
immediate test of judgment involved the several hundred white-robed refugees
jammed under the bridge. U.S. troops had
come to regard everyone in white as a potential enemy, and they had trouble
distinguishing women and larger children from men. In the days leading up to the massacre, Daily
said, "I saw civilians firing. They had
this white garb, this robe and these baggy white pants, and they were slipping
it on over their uniforms."
It may never be
known whether the dead included some North Korean troops or guerillas in civilian
clothing or whether anyone in the underpass fired at H Company, but historians
agree that the threat was real. A few
days after the Nogun-ri episode, a U.S. command post not far away was overrun
and a senior officer killed by guerillas in peasant garb.
And although
the men of H Company knew nothing of local history, Cumings said the area "had
been a hotbed of leftism in the 1940s" and was rife with supporters of the
Communist North. Daily, who was later
held as a prisoner by the North Koreans for a month before escaping, has been
haunted by the memory of what happened at Nogun-ri. But he said of the victims’ descendants:
"I cannot
apologize to those people. I’m
sympathetic with them. They’re very
fortunate to be alive. They are living
in a free democracy and many American soldiers died so they could. It was something very tragic that
happened. Admit the truth. It did happen—a bit of military history that
has been hidden all these years."
###