No Gun Ri massacre

No Gun Ri Massacre
Part of Korean War
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.
Location	Nogeun-ri, South Korea
Coordinates
Date	July 26, 1950 (1950-07-26)– July 29, 1950 (1950-07-29)
Deaths	163 dead or missing (accroding to South Korea), unknown (according to the US)
Victim	South Korean refugees
Perpetrators	US military

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 2nd Battalion, 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment (and a U.S. air attack) at a railroad bridge near the village of No Gun Ri (revised Romanization Nogeun-ri), 100 miles (160 km) southeast of Seoul. Estimates of the dead have ranged from dozens to 500. In 2005, a South Korean government report listed 163 dead or missing and 55 wounded and added that many other victims' names were not reported. 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 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 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 the 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 alleged incidents in 1950–1951 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.

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.

Main article: Korean War

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. 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.

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. On July 23, 1950, an Eighth United States 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

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.

Summary of events, based on survivor accounts, by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Republic of Korea

As North Korean forces seized the central South Korean town of Yongdong on July 25, 1950, 1st Cavalry Division troops began evacuating villages in front of the enemy advance, including hundreds of residents of Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri. As they headed down the main road south, they were joined by other refugees. That first night several were killed, apparently by American soldiers as they strayed from a roadside assembly area. The next day, July 26, the strung-out refugee column approached the No Gun Ri area, 5 miles (8.0 km) from their homes, when they were stopped by U.S. troops, made to move to the parallel railroad tracks, and were searched. Survivors said warplanes soon appeared over the horizon and attacked the civilians. In a 2007 German television documentary Yang Hae-chan described the air attack: "Suddenly bombers flew over and opened fire without warning. They came back again and again firing at us. 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."

Dug-in troops of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, also opened fire on the refugees, some of whom took shelter in a low, narrow culvert beneath the railroad embankment. Further firing forced them into a larger double tunnel beneath a railroad bridge. Seventh Cavalry soldiers continued to fire into both ends of the tunnels for the next three days. Survivor Park Sun-yong said corpses were piled up as shields against the gunfire: "Children were screaming in fear and the adults were praying for their lives, and the whole time they never stopped shooting." Chung Koo-ho said in a 2009 South Korean documentary, "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 BBC. Norman L. Tinkler, an H Company machine gunner, 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." He fired about 1,000 rounds and assumed "there weren't no survivors." Said ex-rifleman Herman Patterson, "It was assumed there were enemy in these people." 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.

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. 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.

This 2008 photo shows a concrete abutment outside the No Gun Ri bridge, where investigators' white paint identifies bullet marks and embedded fragments from U.S. Army gunfire in the 1950 massacre of South Korean refugees.

The U.S. Army's 2001 investigative report, citing 1950 aerial imagery, questioned the higher casualty estimates. (See "Aerial imagery, victims' remains" below.)No Gun Ri Massacre#Aerial imagery, victims' remains 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.

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

It goes beyond comprehension why they attacked and killed them with such cruelty. The U.S. government should take responsibility.

— excerpt from Chung's 1960 petition.

During the U.S.-supported postwar autocracy of President Syngman Rhee, survivors of No Gun Ri did not file any public complaints. Following the April Revolution in 1960, which briefly established democracy in South Korea, former policeman Chung Eun-yong filed the first petition to the South Korean and U.S. governments. His two small children had been killed and his wife badly wounded at No Gun Ri. Over 30 petitions, calling for an investigation, apology and compensation, were filed over the next decades – by Chung and later by a survivors' committee.

In 1994, the U.S. Armed Forces Claims Service in Korea dismissed one No Gun Ri petition by asserting that any killings took place during combat. The survivors' committee retorted that there was no battle at No Gun Ri, and the official U.S. Army history agrees, but U.S. officials refused to reconsider. In 1997, the survivors and victims 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 what it claimed was a combat situation and saying there was no evidence the 1st Cavalry Division was at No Gun Ri, as the survivors' research indicated. The official U.S. Army history makes clear, however, that the division was in the area in late July 1950.

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.

Associated Press Story

Chung, the leader of the survivors group, published a book in 1994 about the events of 1950. However, it received little attention outside South Korea. 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 were at No Gun Ri. 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 all units to stop refugees from crossing their lines. The AP reported in subsequent articles that many more South Korea civilians were killed when refugee columns were strafed by U.S. warplanes in the war's first months and when the U.S. military blew up two Naktong River bridges packed with refugees on Aug. 4, 1950.

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.

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.

In May 2000, challenged by a skeptical U.S. News & World Report magazine article, the AP team did additional archival research and reported that one of nine ex-soldiers quoted in the original No Gun Ri article, Edward L. Daily, turned out not to be an eyewitness, but was passing on second-hand information. A Pentagon spokesman said this would not affect the Army's No Gun Ri investigation, noting Daily 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 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, along with 10 other major national and international journalism awards.

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 U.S. National Archives, several directives to fire on civilians were found.

1999–2001 investigations

Within hours of the AP report, Secretary of Defense William Cohen ordered Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera to initiate an official Department of the 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. The final weeks were marked by Seoul press reports of sharp disputes between the U.S. and Korean teams.

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. At another point, however, it suggested soldiers may have "misunderstood" the Eighth Army's stop-refugees order to mean they could be shot.

President Bill Clinton issued a statement on the same day, declaring that “I deeply regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri in late July, 1950,” but stopping short of an apology acknowledging wrongdoing. 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. Former U.S. congressman Pete McCloskey 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 National Archives.

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, and 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. 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. The survivors' committee called the U.S. Army report a "whitewash" of command responsibility.

Legal framework

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."

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. 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. 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

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" 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, the U.S. report did not acknowledge it said refugees were being strafed at the Army's request. The report did not address the order in the 25th Infantry Division to shoot civilians in the war zone. 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.

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.

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" and to "shoot all refugees coming across river." 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.'"

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 of a meeting which was held with the South Korean government. During this meeting, it was decided to warn refugees not to flee south at the risk of being fired on; and to fire on people advancing on positions, after firing 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.

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 at the National Archives in which the United States Ambassador to 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. Pressed by the South Korean government, the Pentagon eventually acknowledged it deliberately omitted the Muccio letter from its 2001 report.

Aerial imagery, victims' remains

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. 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 2001 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. 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. 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.

No Gun Ri villagers said that in later decades two mass graves holding some victims' remains were disturbed and bones were removed during a reforestation project and by farming activity. In 2007, excavations at several places near the bridge turned up little. The forensics team said it hadn't found more because so much time had passed, and any remains had been exposed to the elements and soil erosion, railway work, cultivation and highly acidic soil.

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. 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.

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 omitted the Ambassador Muccio letter from their final report, along with other incriminating documents and testimony, prompted more calls for action. Two leaders of the National Assembly 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 (12-ha.) 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. 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.

No Gun Ri in culture

In South Korea, the No Gun Ri story inspired works of nonfiction, fiction, theater and other arts. In 2010, a major Korean studio, Myung Films, released a No Gun Ri feature film, A Little Pond, written and directed by Lee Saang-woo and featuring Song Kang-ho, Moon So-ri and other Korean stars who donated their work. Besides commercial release in South Korea, the movie was screened at international film festivals, including in New York and London. In 2006, artist Park Kun-woong and Chung Eun-yong published Nogunri Story volume 1 - Recollecting that summer day a 612-page graphic narrative that told the story through thousands of drawings. The Korean-language work, based on Chung Eun-yong's 1994 book, was also published in translation in Europe. In the United States, No Gun Ri was a theme of four English-language novels, including the National Book Award finalist Lark & Termite of 2009, by Jayne Anne Phillips.

No Gun Ri's repercussions

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 in 1950–1951, mostly 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."

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 U.S. killings of hundreds of South Korean civilians, including refugees crowded into a cave attacked with napalm bombs, and those at a shoreline refugee encampment deliberately shelled by a U.S. warship.

The commission found that the U.S. military repeatedly conducted indiscriminate attacks, failing to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. 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, including noncombatants killed in extensive U.S. Air Force bombing of North Korea, and southern rightists summarily executed by the invading northerners. 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. This did not occur. Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Stanley Roth had been quoted as saying in Seoul at 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. The 1999 investigation was the last conducted by the United States.

See also

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

External links

• 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)
• "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. (December 2010). "No Gun Ri: Official Narrative and Inconvenient Truths." Critical Asian Studies 42 (4). DOI: 10.1080/14672715.2010.515389.
• 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. Biblioscholar (2012). ISBN 1288290934.
• 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.