No Gun Ri Massacre

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The No Gun Ri Massacre occurred on July 26–29, 1950, early in the Korean War, when an undetermined number of South Korean refugees were killed by the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment (and a U.S. air attack) at a railroad bridge near the village of No Gun Ri, 100 miles southeast of Seoul. In 2005, the South Korean government certified the names of 163 dead or missing (mostly women, children and old men) and 55 wounded. It said many other victims' names were not reported. Over the years survivors' estimates of the dead have ranged from 300 to 500, whilst the U.S. Army cites the number of casualties as "unknown".

The massacre allegations were little known outside Korea until the publication of Associated Press (AP) reports in 1999 containing interviews with 7th Cavalry veterans who corroborated Korean survivors' accounts. The AP writers also uncovered warfront orders to fire on refugees, given out of fear of enemy North Korean infiltration. After years of rejecting claims by survivors the Pentagon (WP) conducted an investigation and, in 2001, acknowledged the killings, but referred to the three-day event as "an unfortunate tragedy inherent to war and not a deliberate killing." The U.S. rejected survivors' demands for an apology and compensation.

South Korean investigators disagreed with Pentagon findings, saying they believed 7th Cavalry troops were ordered to fire on the refugees. The survivors’ group called the U.S. report a "whitewash." Additional archival documents later emerged showing U.S. commanders ordering the shooting of refugees during this period, declassified documents found but not disclosed by Pentagon investigators. Among them was a report by the U.S. ambassador in South Korea in July 1950 that the U.S. military had adopted a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups. Despite demands, the U.S. investigation was not reopened.

Prompted by the exposure of No Gun Ri, survivors of similar incidents between 1950 and 1951 filed reports with the Seoul government. In 2008 an investigative commission said more than 200 cases of alleged large-scale civilian killings by the U.S. military had been registered, mostly air attacks.

The twin-underpass railroad bridge at No Gun Ri, South Korea, in 1960. Ten years earlier, the U.S. military killed a large number of South Korean refugees under and around the bridge, early in the Korean War

Killings

Background

Hundreds of thousands of South Koreans fled south in mid-1950 after the North Korean army invaded. Rumors spread among U.S. troops that refugee columns harbored North Korean infiltrators.

The division of Japan's former Korean colony into two zones at the end of World War II led to years of border skirmishing between U.S.-allied South Korea and Soviet-allied North Korea. On June 25, 1950, the North Korean army invaded the south to try to reunify the peninsula, touching off a war that would draw in both the U.S. and Chinese militaries and end in an armistice and stalemate three years later.

The U.S. dispatched occupation troops from Japan to fight alongside the South Korean army, green American troops insufficiently trained, poorly equipped and often led by inexperienced officers. In particular, they lacked training in how to deal with war-displaced civilians..^iv-v In the two weeks after the Americans first arrived on July 5, 1950, the U.S. Army estimated that 380,000 South Korean civilians fled south, passing through U.S. and South Korean lines, as the defending forces reeled in retreat.²⁵¹

With large gaps in their front lines, the Americans were sometimes attacked from behind, and rumors spread that North Korean soldiers disguised in rural Koreans’ white garb were infiltrating south with refugee columns.⁷ On July 23, 1950, an Eighth U.S. Army intelligence report said almost all refugees were searched over one 24-hour period on the main road and none was found carrying arms or uniforms. But three days later Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay, 1st Cavalry Division commander, told rear-echelon reporters he suspected half the white-clad people streaming down the roads were infiltrators.

It was on that day that one of Gay's front-line units, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, dug in near the village of No Gun Ri, was faced with an approaching throng of hundreds of refugees, mostly from the nearby villages of Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri.

Events of 25–29 July 1950

In this excerpt from a 1950 letter to Dean Rusk, John J. Muccio, U.S. ambassador to South Korea, informs the assistant secretary of state that the U.S. Army has decided to fire on South Korean refugees approaching U.S. lines despite warning shots. The letter, dated July 26, the day the Army's 7th Cavalry Regiment began shooting refugees at No Gun Ri, was deliberately omitted from the Army's 2001 investigative report on No Gun Ri. Full text.[3][4]

The South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2007 summarized events at No Gun Ri, based on survivors' accounts:

"On July 25th, 1950, Korean villagers were forced by U.S. soldiers to evacuate their homes and move south. The next day, July 26, the villagers continued south along the road. When the villagers reached the vicinity of No Gun Ri, the soldiers stopped them at a roadblock and ordered the group onto the railroad tracks, where the soldiers searched them and their personal belongings. Although the soldiers found no prohibited items (such as weapons or other military contraband), the soldiers ordered an air attack upon the villagers via radio communications with U.S. aircraft. Shortly afterwards, planes flew over and dropped bombs and fired machine guns, killing approximately one hundred villagers on the railroad tracks. Those villagers who survived sought protection in a small culvert underneath the railroad tracks. The U.S. soldiers drove the villagers out of the culvert and into double tunnels nearby. The U.S. soldiers then fired into both ends of the tunnels over a period of four days (July 26–29, 1950), resulting in approximately 300 additional deaths."

A half-century after the events, Korean survivors described to international journalists the scenes that unfolded at No Gun Ri. "Suddenly bombers flew over and opened fire without warning. They came back again and again firing at us," survivor Yang Hae-chan told German television. "Chaos broke out among the refugees. We ran around wildly trying to get away. But in that first attack very many people were hit and killed." Park Sun-yong told of the scene in the tunnels beneath the railroad bridge, where the living piled up corpses to shield themselves: "Children were screaming in fear and the adults were praying for their lives, and the whole time they never stopped shooting." Said survivor Chung Koo-ho, "Even now if I close my eyes I can see the people who were dying, as they cried out someone's name."

Veterans of the 7th Cavalry remembered similar scenes. "I shot, too. Shot at people. I don't know if they were soldiers or what. Kids, there was kids out there, it didn't matter what it was, 8 to 80, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot 'em all," Joseph Jackman, a G Company rifleman, told the British Broadcasting Corp. Norman L. Tinkler, an H Company machine gunner, told the Wichita (Kansas) Eagle newspaper he remembered white-clad people coming down the railroad tracks toward the bridge, including "a lot of women and children. ... I was the one who pulled the trigger." Thomas H. Hacha, dug in nearby with the sister 1st Battalion, witnessed the slaughter: "I could see the tracers (bullets) spinning around inside the tunnel ... and they were dying down there. I could hear the people screaming."

On July 29, 1950, three days after the killings began, the 7th Cavalry Regiment was withdrawn from those positions as the U.S. retreat continued.²⁰³

Casualties

Chun Wook, a journalist with the North Korean 3rd Division troops who advanced to No Gun Ri, reported finding the area covered with layers of bodies. He said about 400 people had been killed. Over the years, the survivors' own estimates of dead ranged from 300 to 500, with perhaps 150 wounded. In Pentagon interviews in 2000, 7th Cavalry veterans' estimates of No Gun Ri dead ranged from dozens to 300.¹⁰⁷ Homer Garza, a retired command sergeant major who as a corporal led a patrol through one No Gun Ri tunnel, said he saw 200 to 300 bodies piled up there, and most may have been dead.

In 2005, the South Korean government's Committee for the Review and Restoration of Honor for the No Gun Ri Victims, after a yearlong process of verifying claims through family registers, medical reports and other documents and testimony, certified the names of 150 No Gun Ri dead, 13 missing and 55 wounded, including some who later died of their wounds. It said reports were not filed on many other victims because of the passage of time and other factors. Of the certified victims, 41 percent were children under 15, and 70 percent were women, children or men over age 61.^{247–249,328,278}}}

Aftermath

Information about the refugee killing reached the U.S. command in Korea and the Pentagon by late August 1950, in the form of a captured and translated North Korean military document that described the discovery. Evidence of high-level knowledge also appeared a month later in a New York Times article from Korea, which reported, without further detail, that an unnamed high-ranking U.S. officer told the reporter that a U.S. Army regiment had shot "many civilians" that July. No evidence has emerged, however, that the U.S. military investigated the incident at the time.

Petitions

Under the U.S.-supported postwar dictatorship of President Syngman Rhee, the No Gun Ri survivors kept their silence. Then, during a brief democratic interlude in 1960, Chung Eun-yong, a former policeman whose two small children were killed and whose wife was badly wounded at No Gun Ri, filed the first of what would eventually be 30 petitions over decades presented by him, and later by a survivors' committee, to the South Korean and U.S. governments for an investigation, an apology and compensation. "It goes beyond comprehension why they attacked and killed them with such cruelty. The U.S. government should take responsibility," Chung wrote in 1960.^129,126

The No Gun Ri survivors, who in 1950 included youths who would later become a county legislator, a high school vice principal and the president of the local Rotary Club, received no substantive responses until 1994, when the U.S. Armed Forces Claims Service in Korea dismissed a petition by asserting that any killings took place during combat. The survivors' committee retorted that there was no battle at No Gun Ri, but U.S. officials refused to reconsider. In 1997, the survivors filed a claim with a South Korean compensation committee under the binational Status of Forces Agreement. This time, the U.S. claims service responded by again citing a supposed combat situation and saying there was no evidence the 1st Cavalry Division was at No Gun Ri, as the survivors' research indicated.^132,133 The official U.S. Army history makes clear, however, that the division was in the area in late July 1950.¹⁷⁹

On April 28, 1998, the Seoul government committee made a final ruling against the No Gun Ri survivors, citing the long-ago expiration of a five-year statute of limitations.¹³⁵

Associated Press Story

Chung, the leader of the survivors group, had published a book in 1994 about the events of 1950. However, it received little attention outside South Korea.¹²⁸ In April 1998 The Associated Press reported on the rejection of the survivors’ 1997 claim; its reporters had already begun months of investigative work searching for 1st Cavalry Division veterans who had been at No Gun Ri.^{269–284} On Sept. 29, 1999, after a year of AP internal struggle over releasing the article, the AP published its investigative report on the incident, based on the accounts of 24 No Gun Ri survivors corroborated by 7th Cavalry Regiment veterans. The journalists’ research into declassified archives uncovered recorded instructions in warfront units at the time to shoot South Korean refugees. A liaison officer of the sister 8th Cavalry Regiment had relayed word to his unit from 1st Cavalry Division headquarters to fire on refugees trying to cross U.S. front lines. Top commanders of the 25th Infantry Division ordered their troops to treat civilians in the war zone as enemy and shoot them. On the day the No Gun Ri killings began, the Eighth Army ordered[6] all units to stop refugees from crossing their lines.

In October 1999, after release of the Associated Press report confirming the No Gun Ri refugee killings, Chung Eun-yong, leader of the survivors committee, reads a petition in Seoul, South Korea, calling for a ``truthful and speedy’’ investigation.

The AP also published articles reporting on the death of hundreds of refugees when the U.S. military blew up two Naktong River bridges five days after the No Gun Ri killings and the deaths of many more when refugee columns were strafed by U.S. warplanes in 1950–51.

Other media organizations, notably British Broadcasting Corp., German ARD Television and South Korea's Munwha Broadcasting Corp., later broadened and deepened the reporting. In June 2000, CBS News reported the existence of a U.S. Air Force memo from July 1950, once classified "Secret," in which the operations chief in Korea said the Air Force was strafing refugee columns at the Army's request. A Navy document later emerged in which pilots said the Army had told them to attack any groups of more than eight people in South Korea.⁶⁰⁴

Seven months after the No Gun Ri story had been published, Wikipedia:U.S. News & World Report magazine published an article by military reporter Wikipedia:Joseph L. Galloway questioning, on the basis of an incomplete personnel record, whether one of the quoted 7th Cavalry veterans, Edward J. Daily, had been at No Gun Ri during the incident. After further archival research, the original journalists presented Daily with additional records that led him to concede he could not have been there, and he was passing on second-hand, not first-hand, information. Daily was the seventh of nine ex-soldiers quoted in the original story. Pentagon spokesman Maj. Tom Collins said the Daily affair would not affect the Army's No Gun Ri investigation, noting he was "just one guy of many we've been talking to."

The No Gun Ri reporting by AP's Sang-hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley, Martha Mendoza and Randy Herschaft was awarded the 2000 Wikipedia:Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, along with 10 other major national and international journalism awards.²⁷⁸

Investigations

In March 1999, six months before the AP story was published, the U.S. Army said it had looked into the No Gun Ri allegations as a result of a 1998 request from the U.S. National Council of Churches, on behalf of the Korean National Council of Churches. An Army official wrote the U.S. council that researchers reviewed operational records of the 1st Cavalry and 25th Infantry Divisions and "found no information to substantiate the claim." During the earlier 1998 investigation by Associated Press journalists, reviewing the same records at the Wikipedia:National Archives, several directives to fire on civilians were found.^{275–276}

1999–2001 Investigations

Within hours of the AP report, Defense Secretary William Cohen ordered an Army investigation. The Seoul government also ordered an investigation, proposing the two inquiries conduct joint document searches and joint witness interviews. The Americans refused.

In the ensuing 15-month probes, conducted by the U.S. Army inspector general's office and Seoul’s Defense Ministry, interrogators interviewed or obtained statements from some 200 U.S. veterans and 75 Koreans. The Army said its researchers reviewed 1 million pages of U.S. archival documents.^i-ii The final weeks were marked by Seoul press reports of sharp disputes between the U.S. and Korean teams.¹⁶⁸

On Jan. 11 (U.S. time), 2001, the two governments issued their reports. After years of dismissing the allegations, the Army affirmed the essence of the AP report, saying the U.S. military had killed "an unknown number" of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri with "small-arms fire, artillery and mortar fire, and strafing." But it held that no orders were issued to fire on the civilians, and the shootings were the result of hostile fire from among the refugees or firing meant to control them.^x-xi At another point, however, it suggested soldiers may have "misunderstood" the Eighth Army's stop-refugees order to mean they could be shot.¹⁸⁵ President Wikipedia:Bill Clinton issued a statement on the same day, expressing regret for the incident, but stopped short of an apology or acknowledgement of wrongdoing.

"On behalf of the United States of America, I deeply regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri in late July, 1950. The intensive, yearlong investigation into this incident has served as a painful reminder of the tragedies of war and the scars they leave behind on people and on nations. Although we have been unable to determine precisely the events that occurred at No Gun Ri, the U.S. and South Korean governments have concluded in the Statement of Mutual Understanding that an unconfirmed number of innocent Korean refugees were killed or injured there. To those Koreans who lost loved ones at No Gun Ri, I offer my condolences. Many Americans have experienced the anguish of innocent casualties of war. We understand and sympathize with the sense of loss and sorrow that remains even after a half a century has passed. I sincerely hope that the memorial the United States will construct to these and all other innocent Korean civilians killed during the war will bring a measure of solace and closure. The commemorative scholarship fund that we will launch will serve as a living tribute to their memory."

The U.S. offered a $4 million plan for a memorial at No Gun Ri and scholarship fund, but not the individual compensation survivors demanded. The survivors later rejected the plan because the memorial would be dedicated to all the war's South Korean civilian dead rather than just the No Gun Ri victims.

South Korean investigators, whilst acknowledging a lack of documentation of specific No Gun Ri orders, referred to testimony from five former Air Force pilots that, during this period, they were directed to strafe civilians, and from 17 veterans of the 7th Cavalry that they believed there were orders to shoot the No Gun Ri refugees. The Koreans noted that two of the veterans were battalion radiomen and, as such, were in an especially good position to know which orders had been relayed.¹⁷⁶ Former U.S. congressman Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey Jr. of California, the only one of eight outside advisers to the U.S. inquiry to write a detailed analysis afterward, agreed with the Koreans. "I don't think there is any question that they were strafing and under orders," he said of U.S. warplanes, and "I thought the Army report was a whitewash." Korean investigators pointed out gaps in U.S.-supplied documentation, gaps that included the 7th Cavalry's journal, or communications log, for July 1950, the crucial document that would have carried No Gun Ri orders. It was missing from its place at the U.S. National Archives.¹⁴⁶⁰⁷

Surviving documents said nothing about infiltrators at No Gun Ri, even though they would have been the 7th Cavalry's first enemy killed-in-action in Korea. Only three of 52 battalion soldiers interviewed said their unit was returning infiltrators' fire. The U.S. 2001 report nonetheless suggested U.S. troops may have been fired on from the tunnels.^120,x The Korean survivors said there were no infiltrators in their group, and both the South Korean investigative report and a study at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in 2003, citing the illogic of trapped infiltrators firing on the surrounding battalion, doubted the otherwise unsupported infiltration scenario.⁹⁷⁸³

Legal framework

The survivors' committee called the U.S. Army report a "whitewash" of command responsibility. Speaking with reporters, Clinton had said, "The evidence was not clear that there was responsibility for wrongdoing high enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the government was responsible." But established international laws of war held governments responsible for their soldiers' acts. "A belligerent party … shall be responsible for all acts committed by persons forming part of its armed forces," says the 1907 Hague Convention on the laws of warfare, which the United States declared it would abide by at the Korean War's outbreak, along with the 1949 Geneva Conventions' articles regarding protection of civilians during wartime.¹¹³ In addition, the Hague Convention and the U.S. Army's own contemporaneous Rules of Land Warfare manual said troops must distinguish noncombatants from belligerents and treat them humanely. "Thus, the United States of America should take responsibility for the No Gun Ri incident," the South Korean government's victims review committee concluded in 2005.¹¹⁹ Writing to the Army inspector general's office after issuance of its 2001 investigative report, American lawyers for the survivors said that whether the 7th Cavalry troops acted under formal orders or not, "the massacre of civilian refugees, mainly the elderly, women and children, was in and of itself a clear violation of international law for which the United States is liable under the doctrine of command responsibility and must pay compensation."

Further evidence emerges

In this excerpt from a July 25, 1950, memo, the U.S. Air Force operations chief in Korea, Col. Turner C. Rogers, reports U.S. warplanes are strafing South Korean refugees at the U.S. Army's request. The Army's 2001 investigative report on the No Gun Ri refugee killings excluded this passage from its description of the memo. Full text.[5]

A joint U.S.-South Korean "statement of mutual understanding" issued with the separate 2001 investigative reports did not include the assertion that no orders to shoot refugees were issued at No Gun Ri. But that remained a central "finding"^xiii of the U.S. report itself, which either did not address or presented incomplete versions of key declassified documents previously reported in the news media. In describing the July 1950 Air Force memo,[7]) the U.S. report did not acknowledge it said refugees were being strafed at the Army's request.⁹⁸ The report did not address the order[8] in the 25th Infantry Division to shoot civilians in the war zone.^xiii In saying no such orders were issued at No Gun Ri, the Army did not disclose that the 7th Cavalry log, which would have held such orders, was missing from the National Archives.

After the Army issued its report, it was learned it also had not disclosed its researchers' discovery of at least 14 additional declassified documents showing high-ranking commanders ordering or authorizing the killing of refugees in the Korean War's early months. They included communications from 1st Cavalry Division commander Gay and a top division officer to consider refugees "fair game"[9] and to "shoot all refugees coming across river."[10] In addition, interview transcripts obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests showed that the Army had not reported repeated testimony from ex-soldiers that, as one put it, "The word I heard was `Kill everybody from 6 to 60.'"^{609–610}

Then, in 2005–2006, in an award-winning article in a scholarly journal and a subsequent book, American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz reported his discovery of a declassified document[11][12] at the National Archives in which the U.S. ambassador in South Korea in 1950, John J. Muccio, notified the State Department on the day the No Gun Ri killings began that the U.S. military, fearing infiltrators, had adopted a policy of shooting South Korean refugee groups that approached U.S. lines despite warning shots. Only under South Korean government pressure did the Pentagon eventually admit it knew about and deliberately omitted the Muccio letter from its 2001 report.

Aerial imagery

The U.S. Army's 2001 report suggested the No Gun Ri death toll was lower than Korean estimates, noting that a Pentagon analyst of aerial imagery had not reported detecting mass graves in 1950 reconnaissance photos of the railroad bridge area.^xiv The casualty numbers must be "grossly inflated," Robert L. Bateman, a 1990s veteran of the 7th Cavalry, argued in a 2002 book about No Gun Ri, published before the Seoul government's review panel began the work that verified a minimum 218 casualties. The South Korean investigative report, drawing on accounts from survivors and nearby residents, said many bodies had been taken away by relatives or buried in soldiers' abandoned foxholes in the days following the killings, and some remained inside one underpass tunnel, under thin layers of dirt, out of sight of airborne cameras and awaiting later burial in mass graves.^197,204 In addition, South Korean military specialists questioned the U.S. reconnaissance photos, pointing out irregularities, including the fact that the No Gun Ri frames had been spliced into the roll of film, raising the possibility they were not, as claimed, from August 6, 1950, eight days after the killings.^{App. C, Tab 2,7} The anonymous U.S. analyst's report said Pentagon intelligence officials had not allowed analysis of the originals, but only of a fourth-generation copy of the aerial photos. The analyst concluded the report with recommendations for a process to guarantee the integrity of copies of historical imagery in the future.^{App. C, Tab 2, 13}

Later developments

Continuing appeals

Though often supported by South Korean politicians and newspaper editorials, the No Gun Ri survivors' repeated demands for a reopened U.S. investigation and compensation went unheeded. Meeting with South Korean officials in 2001, the survivors asked that their government seek action at the International Court of Justice at The Hague and in U.N. human rights forums, but were rebuffed.^267,306 In 2002, a spokesman for South Korea's then-governing party called for a new U.S. inquiry, but the Defense Ministry later warned the National Assembly a reopened probe might damage U.S.-South Korean relations.²⁰²

The Memorial Tower in the No Gun Ri Peace Park, with its three- and two-dimensional depictions of the refugees of 1950, and two arches representing the No Gun Ri tunnel entrances. The 29-acre park, adjacent to the massacre site in Yongdong County in central South Korea, opened in October 2011. It also contains a museum and a peace education center.

The disclosure in 2007 that Pentagon investigators had deliberately omitted the Ambassador Muccio letter from their final report, along with other incriminating documents and testimony, prompted more calls for action. Two leading National Assembly members appealed to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a joint investigation, but no U.S. congressional body ever took up the No Gun Ri issue.

Special act, No Gun Ri park

After the United States refused to offer compensation, and the survivors rejected the plan for a war memorial and scholarship fund, South Korea's National Assembly on February 9, 2004, adopted a Special Act on the Review and Restoration of Honor for the No Gun Ri Victims. It established the committee that examined and certified the identities of dead and wounded, and it provided medical subsidies for surviving wounded. The act also envisioned a memorial park at the No Gun Ri site, which had begun attracting 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a year. The 29-acre No Gun Ri Peace Park, built with $17 million in government funds and featuring a memorial, museum and peace education center, opened in October 2011. ^{219,190,311–312} A publicly financed No Gun Ri International Peace Foundation also sponsored an annual peace conference, a No Gun Ri Peace Prize and a summer peace camp at the park for international university students.¹⁹

No Gun Ri in the culture

In South Korea, the No Gun Ri story inspired works of nonfiction, fiction, theater and other arts. In 2010, a leading Korean production company, Myung Films, released a No Gun Ri feature film, A Little Pond, written and directed by director Lee Sang-woo and featuring Song Kang-ho, Moon So-ri and other leading Korean actors who, in an unprecedented step, donated their work. Besides commercial release in South Korea, "A Little Pond" was screened at international film festivals, including in New York and London. In 2006, artist Park Kun-woong published Massacre at the Bridge of No Gun Ri, a 612-page "graphic novel" that told the story through thousands of drawings. The Korean-language book was also published in translation in Europe. In the United States, No Gun Ri inspired at least four English-language novels, including the National Book Award finalist Lark & Termite of 2009, by Jayne Anne Phillips.

Broader picture

The 1999 No Gun Ri articles prompted hundreds of South Koreans to come forward to report other alleged incidents of large-scale civilian killings by the U.S. military between 1950 and 1951, most of them air attacks. In 2005 the National Assembly created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Republic of Korea to investigate these, as well as other human rights violations in southern Korea during the 20th century. The commission’s docket eventually held more than 200 cases of what it described as "civilian massacre committed by U.S. soldiers."^288,294

By 2009 the commission's work of collating declassified U.S. military documents with survivors' accounts confirmed eight representative cases of what it found were wrongful large-scale U.S. killings of hundreds of South Korean civilians, including refugees crowded into a cave attacked with Wikipedia:napalm bombs, and those at a shoreline refugee encampment deliberately shelled by a U.S. warship. ^{118–119121}

The commission found that the U.S. military repeatedly conducted indiscriminate attacks, failing to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants.¹⁰⁶ In its most significant finding, the commission also confirmed that South Korean authorities had summarily executed thousands of suspected leftists in South Korea – possibly 100,000 to 200,000 – at the outbreak of the war, sometimes with U.S. Army officers present and taking photographs.

Of all American wars, the Korean conflict is believed to have been the deadliest for civilians as a proportion of those killed.¹⁰⁹ The Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended the Seoul government negotiate with the United States for reparations for large-scale civilian killings by the U.S. military.⁴⁹ This did not occur. Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Stanley Roth had been quoted as saying in Seoul in the outset of the No Gun Ri investigation in 1999 that the United States would consider investigating any similar Korean War killings that came to light. No other U.S. investigations were ever conducted.

See also

• Wikipedia:History of South Korea
• Wikipedia:History of Korea
• Wikipedia:List of Korea-related topics
• Wikipedia:List of massacres in South Korea

External links

• The No Gun Ri Peace Park
• The No Gun Ri Incident, sponsored by the survivors’ committee
• The U.S. Army No Gun Ri Review Report
• “Shooting Refugees”, an Associated Press multimedia interactive
• “Mass Killings in Korea”, an Associated Press multimedia interactive
• "Kill 'em All", a British Broadcasting Corp. documentary on No Gun Ri
• "The Massacre of No Gun Ri”, a German ARD Television documentary (in German)
• "No Gun Ri Still Lives On: The Truth Behind That Day, a Munwha Broadcasting Corp. documentary (in Korean)
• “What Really Happened at No Gun Ri?”, a Pritzker Military Library discussion, broadcast on C-SPAN, also with a podcast
• Public Broadcasting System, Online Newshour, No Gun Ri, a Media Watch special report
• “Digging into history – AP investigates U.S. actions during the Korean War”, from the Investigative Reporters and Editors Journal
• No Gun Ri in the Korean Wikipedia
• No Gun Ri Archive at the State University of New York at Albany
• Theatrical trailer for the feature film A Little Pond
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Republic of Korea
• South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu, first volume of the official U.S. Army history of the Korean War
• Seventh U.S. Cavalry Association
• "Records and the Understanding of Violent Events: Archival Documentation, Historical Perception, and the No Gun Ri Massacre in the Korean War, doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh

Further reading

• Choi, Suhi (January 2011). "Communicating Trauma: Female Survivors’ Witnessing the No Gun Ri Killings." Qualitative Inquiry 17 (1). ISSN: 1077-8004.

• Cumings, Bruce (1990). The Origins of the Korean War, Volume 2: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02538-X.

• Hanley, Charles J., and Mendoza, Martha (Fall 2000). "The Bridge at No Gun Ri: Investigative Reporting, Hidden History and Pulitzer Prize." The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 5 (4). ISSN: 1081 – 180X.

• Kim, Dong-Choon (2009). The Unending Korean War: A Social History. Larkspur, California: Tamal Vista Publications. ISBN 978-0-917436-09-3.

• Kim, Ki-jin (2006). The Korean War and Massacres. Seoul: Blue History. (In Korean, with 260 pages of English-language archival material.) ISBN 89-91510-16-7.

• Noble, Harold Joyce (1975). Embassy at War. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-95341-1.

• Ryoo, Maj. Moo-Bong, Republic of Korea Army (May 2001). "No Gun Ri Incident: Implications for the U.S. Army." Monograph, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.

• Sinn, Donghee (May 2010). "Room for archives? Use of archival materials in No Gun Ri research." Archival Science 10 (2). DOI: 10.1007/s10502-010-9117-y.

• Young, Marilyn (2002). "An Incident at No Gun Ri." In Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century. New York: The New Press. ISBN 1-56584-654-0.