The Continuing Promotion of the False No Gun Ri Narrative

It has been over a decade since Charles Hanley and the other AP writers were proven to have used lies to promote their narrative of 400 Korean civilians massacred under a railway bridge at No Gun Ri during the Korean War.  Despite the debunking of their then Pulitzer Prize winning article Hanley continues to try and convince people that despite their article being false it is still true.  His latest attempt to push this false narrative is in Japan Focus:

In the early weeks after North Korea’s invasion of the south on June 25, 1950, the fear that North Korean infiltrators lurked among southern refugees was fed by a few plausible reports and a torrent of rumors. Research at the U.S. National Archives by the Associated Press team that confirmed the No Gun Ri Massacre, both before and after their September 29, 1999 investigative report, found at least 16 documents in which high-ranking U.S. officers ordered or authorized the shooting of refugees in the war’s early months.

First of all I recommend for those who haven’t to read my prior posting that debunked the original AP article at the below link:

• Responding to the Bridge at No Gun Ri

For those that have read my prior posting you would know that the AP’s document search at the National Archives did not confirm the No Gun Ri massacre at all.  They cannot point to one document that confirms a massacre happened at No Gun Ri.  Also notice how Hanley tries to make it out that their team uncovered the shooting of refugees during the Korean War when in fact the shooting of refugees was nothing new and could be read about in all the major historical publications from the Korean War.  In fact it was published in the major media outlets during the time of the war as well.  Here is an example in the New York Times:

“Fear of infiltrators led to the slaughter of hundreds of South Korean civilians, women as well as men, by some U.S. troops….”[xi]

Front Page of The New York Times
September 30, 1950 referring to events in July of 1950

So basically all they did was rehash old news and sensationalize it to an audience that had grown unfamiliar with the Korean War.  Even one of the AP writers Choe Sang-hun admitted in the book “Korea Witness” that the goal was to create a “Korean My Lai”.  Choe is the person who initially began the AP reporting into No Gun Ri and admitted that before he even interviewed one witness or even went to the scene he wrote a 150-word story pitch to submit to his AP editor. In the story pitch he used the advice of one of his colleagues to “hype” the story by likening No Gun Ri to a “Korean My Lai”.  The AP writers knew that just reporting a story of civilians killed during the Korean War is not something that would grab anyone’s attention. They had to make No Gun Ri bigger than what is was, they had to make it like My Lai because that is what Pulitzer Prizes are made of.

Next in the Japan Focus article Hanley goes on to push another narrative that commanders gave orders to indiscriminately shoot the civilians under the bridge at No Gun Ri:

Such communications, showing a command readiness to kill civilians indiscriminately, pointed to a high likelihood that the No Gun Ri killings, carried out by the 7th Cavalry Regiment, were ordered or authorized by a chain of command. A half-century later, lest that case be made, Army investigators excluded 14 of those documents from their report and misrepresented two others.

Yet they cannot prove that commanders gave an order to indiscriminately shoot civilians at No Gun Ri.  In fact here is what the officer who was at the scene that day in July of 1950 at No Gun Ri had to say about what happened:

However, retired Colonel Robert Carroll, who was a lieutenant on the scene at No Gun Ri tell CNN he is convinced no slaughter of civilians took place. He called the allegation, “selective and imaginative memory on the part of a lot of people.”

Carroll said the orders he received, while ordering troops to fire on anyone trying to cross the front lines, also urged discretion in the case of women and children.

“Use discretion was part of that order,” he said. “We used discretion. We did not fire automatic weapons. There was a few riflemen fired at them when they came around the bend. I stopped that. I personally stopped all the firing.”

“If there was any firing at those (people), it had to be later in the day, after I left. And somebody would have countermanded that order,” he said.

“We were not using our machine guns except when we were under attack because we were short on ammunition,” Carroll said. “We had not been resupplied; we had been moving, retreating, falling back for about a week. So that guy is dreaming.”

Interestingly enough in the original AP article Hanley made sure that Carroll’s eyewitness testimony of what happened that day was not fully included.  Instead Hanley relied on witness testimony of people who were not even there that day or misquoted or flat out lied about what others had said.  Here is a breakdown of the 12 GI witnesses the AP had in their original article and the status of their testimony once it was scrutinized:

1. Patterson: misquoted
2. Kerns: misquoted
3. Tinkler: suspect testimony
4. Hesselman: not there
5. Carroll: says no massacre occurred
6. Daily: not there
7. Flint: not there
8. Louis: not there
9. Steward: misquote
10. Lippincott: says no massacre occurred
11. Huff: heard civilians killed during the war not at No Gun Ri
12. George Preece: misquoted

Here comes Hanley’s next major talking point, there is a big government conspiracy to hide massacres that occurred during the Korean War:

In addition, the unit document that would have contained orders dealing with the No Gun Ri refugees, the 7th Cavalry journal for July 1950, is missing without explanation from the National Archives. The Army inquiry’s 2001 report concealed this fact, while claiming its investigators had reviewed all relevant documents and that no orders to shoot were issued at No Gun Ri.

Here is how the Army report of 2001 dealt with three important pieces of evidence, among many documents suppressed or distorted.

The document that Hanley is referring to is the Rogers Memo:

One of the key elements of the AP’s version of events is that an air strike was called in on the refugee column just prior to reaching the railway bridge at No Gun Ri. During the Pentagon investigation into the events of No Gun Ri a memorandum written by Colonel Turner Rogers who was a United States Air Force operations officer at the time of the Korean War was disclosed.  In the memorandum Colonel Rogers expresses his concern to his superior officer about the Army requesting to the Air Force to strafe civilians dressed in white who the front line soldiers believed were disguised as North Korean soldiers. Colonel Rogers notes that the US Air Force has so far complied with Army requests to strafe specified refugee columns that were believe to be North Korean infiltrators. However, Colonel Rogers felt that strafing these suspected North Korean infiltrators was not something the Air Force should be doing and suggested that the Army should just shoot suspected North Korean infiltrators themselves. Interestingly enough the now retired Major General Turner Rogers does not remember this memorandum and could not provide any additional details about it to the Pentagon Review team that investigated the No Gun Ri tragedy. Also of note is that the document is not signed by Colonel Rogers, it just has his signature block. It may have drafted by a subordinate officer and for whatever reason was never signed by the Colonel thus why he does not remember it.

However, Hanley like he does in the Japan Focus article likes to claim that since the Rogers Memo was not in the Pentagon Report that the Army was covering it up as part of the wider conspiracy to hide the civilian killings during the Korean War.  The only problem with this theory is that the Pentagon report included a memorandum written by the Navy that documented a strafing of Korean refuges by naval aircraft dispatched from the aircraft carrier the USS Valley Forge:

Several of fifteen to twenty people dressed in white were sighted. The first group was strafed in accordance with information received from the Army that groups of more than eight to ten people were to be considered troops, and were to be attacked. Since the first pass indicated that the people seemed to be civilians, other groups were investigated by non-firing runs.  No Gun Ri Review, (Department of the Army Inspector General, January 2001), Chapter 3 Combat Operations in July 1950, Page 98

Some cover up.  Likely the Rogers memo may not have been included because it was simply overlooked in the mountains of documents the reviewers had to pour through or was discarded due to the fact it was not signed.  Notice how in the Japan Focus article Hanley made sure the document image was cropped so that readers could not see that the document wasn’t signed.  However, all of this is irrelevant because it was widely known that civilians were strafed during the Korean War and the Pentagon included documented evidence that this happened in their report.  What is relevant is that there is no evidence of a strafing ever happening at No Gun Ri which is something Hanley does not want to talk about.  Claimants claimed that the 7th Cavalry soldiers intentionally called in an airstrike on them.  There is only one problem with this, the 7^th Cavalry did not have the necessary radios to even call in an air strike. In fact the only air strike in the No Gun Ri area occurred on July 27^th, which was one day after the refugees say they were strafed. However, this air strike on the 27^th was when the 7^th Cavalry headquarters was strafed. This strafing of the 7^th Cavalry caused their commander to request an Air Force Tactical Air Control Party (TACP) to the regiment who had the necessary radios to talk to the pilots in order to avoid any further strafings of the 7^th Cavalry.  The below air mission chart shows how there were no airstrike around No Gun Ri on July 26, 1950 as claimed:

The Korean claimants also claim they were bombed. During an interview with a Korean reporter No Gun Ri witness Chung Gu-shik said the refugee column was bombed by a fighter jet, approximately 100 people and many animals were blown to pieces, and that the railway was bent like “steel chopsticks”. He goes on to say the bombing lasted for a total of 20 minutes. American and Korean imagery analysts that reviewed aerial footage of No Gun Ri taken one week after the incident found no signs of rails bent like “steel chopsticks”, no bomb craters, no left over refugee items, no dead animals, and most importantly no dead bodies.

Can you spot the 400 dead bodies? Korean and American imagery analysts could not either. 

Back to the Air Force and Naval memorandums, it is important to realize they were both dated July 25, 1950. The Naval and Air Force officers that coordinated air operations during the early days of the Korean War worked together in the same Joint Operations Center (JOC). Obviously the requests from the Army to strafe civilians that were alleged to be North Korean infiltrators had sparked much debate with the JOC between the Air Force and Navy on July 25^th based on the memos.  These concerns most likely got back to the 8th Army headquarters where more pressure was mounted to come up with a suitable policy for the massive refugee crisis. Eighth Army responded with the July 26^th refugee control order to all its subordinate units that was also importantly approved of by the South Korean government.   The Eighth Army policy either directly or indirectly took the advice of Colonel Rogers to have the US Army decide whether to shoot suspected North Korean infiltrators and not the Air Force.  However, unlike Hanley’s claims of orders to indiscriminately shoot civilians, the refugee policy created a system where the Korean police would consolidate care for and move the refugees through friendly lines at set times every day and forbid any movement of civilians at night. Leaflets were dropped to spread this information to include the Korean police going in and evacuating villages.

Nowhere in this order was there ever any orders to indiscriminately kill refugees as the AP writers would lead you to believe. The order was to not permit civilians to cross battle lines who were not following the established procedures.  Hanley goes on to discuss another document he regular brings up as proof of orders to shoot refugees:

Major General William B. Kean, commander of the 25th Infantry Division, which held the front line to the right of the 1st Cavalry Division, the division responsible for No Gun Ri, issued an order to all his units dated July 27, 1950, saying civilians were to have been evacuated from the war zone and therefore “all civilians seen in this area are to be considered as enemy and action taken accordingly.”

Again, the Army investigators of 2001 had to grapple with this explosive document, since it had been reported in the original AP story on No Gun Ri. And so they simply chose to write of this order, “There is nothing to suggest any summary measures were considered against refugees.”  They suggested that when Kean said civilians should be treated as enemy, he meant front-line combat troops should “arrest” this supposed enemy, not shoot him—an implausible scenario in the midst of a shooting war.

Once again it is important to read the whole document and understand the context of when it was published:

By reading the whole the whole document you gain the context of why the order by General Kean was given in the first place. Actions against refugees was only going to be taken after the Korean National Police had cleared the area and reported back to General Kean that the area had been evacuated. Only after that were people found in the area declared hostile. The order does not say shoot refugees, but leaves the action that needs to be taken to stop the infiltration of refugees to the commanders on the ground. General Kean’s order was completely in line with the refugee policy issued by Eighth Army the day prior that was approved by both the Korean and American governments.

The next document that Hanley writes about in his Japan Focus article is the Muccio Letter:

Perhaps the most important document excluded from the U.S. Army’s 300-page No Gun Ri Review was a U.S. Embassy communication with Washington that sat unnoticed for decades at the National Archives. In 2005, American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz reported his discovery of this document, a letter from the U.S. ambassador to South Korea in 1950, John J. Muccio, to Dean Rusk, then-assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, dated July 26, 1950, the day the killings began at No Gun Ri.¹¹ In it, Muccio reported to Rusk on a meeting that took place the previous evening among American and South Korean officials, military and civilian, to formulate a plan for handling refugees.

He wrote that the South Korean refugee problem “has developed aspects of a serious and even critical military nature.” Disguised North Korean soldiers had been infiltrating American lines via refugee columns, he said, and “naturally, the Army is determined to end this threat.” At the meeting, he wrote, “the following decisions were made: 1. Leaflet drops will be made north of U.S. lines warning the people not to proceed south, that they risk being fired upon if they do so. If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.” The ambassador said he was writing Rusk “in view of the possibility of repercussions in the United States” from such deadly U.S. tactics.

The letter stands as a clear statement of a theater-wide U.S. policy to open fire on approaching refugees. It also shows this policy was known to upper ranks of the U.S. government in Washington.

Here is the full text of the Muccio Letter:

PERSONAL-CONFIDENTIAL

The Foreign Service of the United States of America

American Embassy

July 26, 1950

Dear Dean: The refugee problem has developed aspects of a serious and even critical military nature, aside from the welfare aspects. Necessarily, decisions are being made by the military in regard to it, and in view of the possibility of repercussions in the United States from the effectuation of these decisions, I have thought it desirable to inform you of them.

The enemy has used the refugees to his advantage in many ways: by forcing them south and so clogging the roads as to interfere with military movements; by using them as a channel for infiltration of agents; and most dangerous of all by disguising their own troops as refugees, who after passing through our lines proceed, after dark, to produce hidden weapons, and then attack our units from the rear. Too often such attacks have been devastatingly successful. Such infiltrations had a considerable part in the defeat of the 24th Division at Taejon.

Naturally, the Army is determined to end this threat. Yesterday evening a meeting was arranged, by 8th Army HQ request, at the office of the Home Minister at the temporary Capitol. G-1, G-2, Provost Marshall, CIC, the Embassy, the Home and Social Affairs Ministries, and the Director National Police. The following decisions were made:

1. Leaflet drops will be made north of US lines banning the people not to proceed south, that they risk being fired upon if they do so. If refugees do appear from north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.
2. Leaflet drops and oral warning by police within US combat zone will be made to the effect that no one can move south unless ordered, and then only under police control, that all movement of Korean civilians must end at sunset or those moving will risk being shot when dark comes.
3. Should the local tactical commander consider it essential to evacuate a given sector he will notify the police liaison officers attached to his HQ, who through the area Korean National Police will notify the inhabitants, and start them southward under police control on specified minor roads. No one will be permitted to move unless police notify them, and those further south not notified will be required to stay put.
4. Refugee groups must stop at sunset, and not move again until daylight. Police will establish check points to catch enemy agents; subsequently Social Ministry will be prepared to care for, and direct refugees to camps or other areas.
5. No mass movements unless police controlled will be permitted. Individual movements will be subject to police checks at numerous points.
6. In all cities, towns curfew will be at 9 p.m., with effective enforcement at 10 p.m. Any unauthorized person on streets after 10 p.m. is to be arrested, and carefully examined. The last item is already in effect.

Sincerely,

John J. Muccio

Nowhere in the Muccio Letter are there any concerns about war crimes, Geneva Convention, or anything else that Hanley wants readers to believe. Ambassador Muccio was simply doing his job by notifying the State Department about the Eighth Army refugee policy that had already been disseminated that day across the theater. The newsworthiness of this letter is that it shines a light on why the Eighth Army refugee policy was created in the first place. The letter clearly states that the policy was established in response to the North Korean violations of the laws of war by using soldiers dressed as civilians to infiltrate into the rear areas of the 24^th Infantry Division. Muccio says himself that the North Korean tactics played a “considerable part in the defeat of the 24th Division at Taejon”. This destruction of the 24^th Infantry Division at Taejon is what led to the collapse of the US war effort in the early days of the Korean War. Interestingly enough nowhere in Hanley’s article is the destruction of the 24^th Division mentioned.

What else Muccio provides insight into is that the refugee handling order was not something that was taken lightly. The order was only implemented after a meeting at the Eighth Army headquarters that included officials from the Korean government, US Embassy officials, and the Director of the Korean National Police. All these elements agreed to the refugee control order and was not something that was created by the U.S. military on a whim so they did not have to deal with the refugees. It was in fact a very thoroughly thought out policy that was only issued after close consultation with elements of the Korean government. Despite the fact that the Korean government played a key role in this refugee order, Hanley has long down played this fact.  What Hanley will never down play is his fixation on a massive government conspiracy:

In 2006, under pressure for an explanation from the South Korean government, the Army acknowledged that its investigators of 1999-2001 had seen the Muccio letter, but it claimed they dismissed it as unimportant because it “outlined a proposed policy,” not an approved one – an argument that defied the plain English of the letter, which said the policy of shooting approaching refugees was among “decisions made.^“ In his book Collateral Damage (2006), Conway-Lanz attests to the letter’s crucial importance, writing that “with this additional piece of evidence, the Pentagon report’s interpretation (of No Gun Ri) becomes difficult to sustain” – that is, its conclusion that the refugee killings were “not deliberate” became ever more untenable^.

The Muccio Letter however offers nothing new.  As I already mentioned all it did was summarize the points from the 8th Army refugee control order that had already been published years prior.  If anything the Army would have wanted this letter included in the Pentagon report because it further establishes the rationale behind why the 8th Army issued their refugee control order in the first place; because of the massive infiltration of North Korean soldiers disguised as refugees that led to the destruction of the 24th Division. The letter also makes it quite clear that this policy was methodically thought out in complete consultation with the South Korean government and military which agreed fully to the recommendations.

Hanley concludes his Japan Focus article by highlighting the opening of the No Gun Ri Peace Park:

Although the truth of mid-1950 South Korea and No Gun Ri was whitewashed and distorted at every turn in 2001 in Washington, DC, it has now found a home in the two-story, 20,365-square-foot memorial museum and its surrounding three-year-old No Gun Ri Peace Park, a gently landscaped place of arched bridges and flowered walkways, stretching from the bullet-pocked railroad underpasses of 1950, through a garden of powerfully evocative sculptures bearing such titles as “Ordeal” and “Searching for Hope,” to the bottom of a path leading to a hilltop cemetery and the graves of No Gun Ri victims, marked “1950-7-26.”

I actually have no problem with this park as long as it is depicting an accurate interpretation of history.  I have not had a chance to visit it yet, but I eventually will so I won’t comment on this yet, but I would be interested in feedback from people who have.  However, I do like this parting shot at me and other critics of Hanley’s reporting:

Two years after the Army’s deceitful report, a Pentagon-affiliated publisher issued an Army apologist’s polemic on No Gun Ri, an often-incoherent book packed with disinformation. In the English-language Wikipedia, the “No Gun Ri Massacre” article became a Wikipedic free-for-all between jingoistic denialists and the truth. Finally, ironically around the time the Korean park was opened in 2011, the U.S. Defense Department purged from its website the Army’s investigative report, further pushing No Gun Ri toward official oblivion.

The book he is referring to is then Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bateman’s book “No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident.”  This book greatly destroyed the credibility of the original AP article which caused Hanley to begin a vicious feud with Bateman which continues by regularly taking shots at him like you see in this latest Japan Focus article.  In fact Bateman has accused Hanley of even trying to stop the publication of his book.  It is ironic that a journalist tried so hard to stop free speech.  Then the description “denialists” I find quite humorous because he is evoking the term for people who bring up legitimate questions about global warming.  One of Hanley’s favorite tactics since he cannot debate facts is that he relies on personal attacks to silence critics just like the global warming crowd.  So it is only fitting that in recent years Hanley has also become a big media promoter for global warming.

Much like with global warming, No Gun Ri is something that did happen. However, like global warming what did happen at No Gun Ri has been sensationalized to make it more than what it was.  No Gun Ri was not the “Korean My Lai” the AP journalists were so eager to create. The facts show that US soldiers were on the retreat and wary of North Korean infiltrators.  Witness testimony from people who were there say that warning shots were fired over the top of the refugees in order to prevent them from advancing toward their frontline. This firing over the refugees may have been interpreted by the gunmen within the column as being directed towards them and they fired back which ended up causing US soldiers to fire directly into the refugee column.  The warning shots could have also caused other soldiers on the frontline unaware of what was going on to think they were being fired at.  Other veteran witness statements, Soviet shell casings found underneath the bridge, unit supply records showing Soviet weapons turned into the 7th Cavalry supply personnel, and prior documented instances of civilian clothed guerrilla fighters engaging US troops makes for a strong case that there could have been gun men within the refugee column.

If there were gunmen who were they? Were they disguised North Korean soldiers? Probably not. It is more likely they were South Korean communist guerrillas. Before the Korean War began the Yongdong area of South Korea was a known communist guerrilla hide out. US veteran witnesses say the gun men they found dead underneath the bridge wore no uniforms. Veteran also say that the number of refugees killed underneath the bridge from the brief firing numbered to about 4-9 killed with more wounded. It is impossible to know but some of those wounded could have died later on increasing the death toll. Determining the exact death toll is impossible but it is not the 400 or simply “hundreds” as the AP claims.  This was confirmed when imagery analysts looked at aerial footage a week after the shooting and could find no evidence of bodies being dragged away, stacked under the bridge, or buried in mass graves.  There was also no evidence of an airstrike on July 26th as well.

Despite these facts the sensationalization of the No Gun Ri tragedy continues on as an entire generation of Korean War soldiers continue to be labeled as war criminals by people like Charles Hanley.  The Korean War has long been known as the “Forgotten War” however it has quickly become what I like to call the “Rewritten War” that began with the false narrative perpetuated by the AP’s original No Gun Ri reporting.  There are many tragedies from the Korean War and the continuing sliming of the US military veterans who fought in it is one of them.