The No Gun Ri massacre was a mass killing of South Korean civilian refugees by United States military air and ground forces near the village of Nogeun-ri (노근리) in central South Korea from July 26 to 29, 1950, during the US Army's retreat in the early phase of the Korean War. In 2005, a South Korean government inquest certified the names of 163 dead or missing and 55 wounded, and added that many other victims' names were not reported. The No Gun Ri Peace Foundation estimates 250–300 were killed, mostly women and children.
The incident was little known outside Korea until publication of an Associated Press (AP) story in 1999 in which veterans of the U.S. Army unit involved, the 7th Cavalry Regiment, corroborated survivors' accounts. The AP also uncovered declassified U.S. Army orders to fire on approaching civilians because of reports of North Korean infiltration of refugee groups. In 2001, the U.S. government conducted an investigation and, after previously rejecting survivors' claims, acknowledged the killings, but described the three-day event as "an unfortunate tragedy inherent to war and not a deliberate killing". Then-President Bill Clinton issued a statement of regret, adding the next day that "things happened which were wrong", but survivors' demands for an apology and compensation were rejected.
South Korean investigators disagreed with the U.S. report, saying they believed that 7th Cavalry troops were ordered to fire on the refugees. The survivors' group called the U.S. report a "whitewash" of a war crime. The AP later discovered additional archival documents showing that U.S. commanders ordered troops to "shoot" and "fire on" civilians at the war front during this period; these declassified documents had been found but not disclosed by the Pentagon investigators. Among the undisclosed documents was a letter from the U.S. ambassador in South Korea stating 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 U.S. war crimes from 1950 to 1951 filed reports with the South Korean government. In 2008, an investigative commission said more than 200 cases of alleged large-scale killings by the U.S. military had been registered, mostly air attacks.
Background
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 (the "Republic of Korea") and Soviet-allied North Korea ("Democratic People's Republic of Korea"). On June 25, 1950, the Korean People's Army (KPA, North Korean Army) invaded the south to try to reunify the peninsula, beginning the Korean War.
The invasion caught South Korea and its American ally by surprise, and sent the defending South Korean forces into retreat. The U.S. moved troops from Japan to fight alongside the South Koreans. The first troops landed on July 1, and by July 22, three U.S. Army divisions were in Korea, including the 1st Cavalry Division. These American troops were insufficiently trained, poorly equipped, and often led by inexperienced officers. Of particular relevance was that they lacked training in dealing with war-displaced civilians. The combined U.S. and South Korean forces were initially unable to stop the North Korean advance, and continued to retreat throughout July.
In the two weeks following the first significant U.S. ground troop engagement on July 5, the U.S. Army estimated that 380,000 South Korean civilians fled south, passing through the retreating U.S. and South Korean lines. With gaps in their lines, U.S. forces were attacked from the rear, and reports spread that disguised North Korean soldiers were infiltrating refugee columns. Because of these concerns, orders were issued to fire on Korean civilians in front-line areas, orders discovered decades later in declassified military archives. Among those issuing the orders was 1st Cavalry Division commander Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay, who deemed Koreans left in the war zone to be "enemy agents", according to U.S. war correspondent O.H.P. King and U.S. diplomat Harold Joyce Noble. On the night of July 25, that division's 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, hearing of an enemy breakthrough, fled rearward from its forward positions, to be reorganized the next morning, digging in near the village of Nogeun-ri (also romanized as No Gun Ri), 100 miles southeast of Seoul. Later that day, on July 26, 1950, these troops saw hundreds of refugees approaching, many from the nearby villages of Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri.
Killings
Events of July 25 to 29, 1950
On July 25, as North Korean forces seized the town of Yongdong, 7 miles (11 km) west of No Gun Ri, U.S. troops were evacuating nearby villages, including hundreds of residents of Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri. These villagers were joined by others as they walked down the main road south, and the estimated 600 refugees spent the night by a riverbank near Ha Ga Ri village, 3.5 miles (5.5 km) west of No Gun Ri. Seven refugees were killed by U.S. soldiers when they strayed from the group during the night. In the morning of July 26, the villagers found that the escorting soldiers had left. They continued down the road, were stopped by American troops at a roadblock near No Gun Ri, and were ordered onto the parallel railroad tracks, where U.S. soldiers searched them and their belongings, confiscating knives and other items. The refugees were resting, spread out along the railroad embankment around midday, when military aircraft strafed and bombed them. Recalling the air strike, Yang Hae-chan, a 10-year-old boy in 1950, said the attacking planes returned repeatedly, and "chaos broke out among the refugees. We ran around wildly trying to get away." He and another survivor said that soldiers reappeared and began shooting the wounded on the tracks.
Survivors first sought shelter in a small culvert beneath the tracks, but soldiers and U.S. ground fire drove them from there into a double tunnel beneath a concrete railroad bridge. Inside the bridge underpasses, each 80 feet (24 m) long, 22 feet (6.5 m) wide and 40 feet (12 m) high, they came under heavy machine gun and rifle fire from 7th Cavalry troops from both sides of the bridge. "The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies," said Chun Choon-ja, a 12-year-old girl at the time. "Children were screaming in fear and adults were praying for their lives, and the whole time they never stopped shooting," said survivor Park Sun-yong, whose 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter were killed, while she was badly wounded.
Two communications specialists, Larry Levine and James Crume, said they remembered orders to fire on the refugees coming to the 2nd Battalion command post from a higher level, probably from 1st Cavalry Division. They recalled the ground fire beginning with a mortar round landing among the refugee families, followed by what Levine called a "frenzy" of small-arms fire. Some battalion veterans recalled front-line company officers ordering them to open fire. "It was assumed there were enemy in these people," said ex-rifleman Herman Patterson. "They were dying down there. I could hear the people screaming," recalled Thomas H. Hacha of the sister 1st Battalion, observing nearby. Others said some soldiers held their fire.
Trapped refugees began piling up bodies as barricades and tried to dig into the ground to hide. Some managed to escape that first night, while U.S. troops turned searchlights on the tunnels and continued firing, said Chung Koo-ho, whose mother died shielding him and his sister. By the second day, the gunfire was reduced to potshots and occasional fusillades when a trapped refugee moved or tried to escape. Some also recall planes returning that second day to fire rockets or drop bombs. Racked with thirst, survivors resorted to drinking blood-filled water from a small stream running under the bridge.
During the killings, the 2nd Battalion came under sporadic artillery and mortar fire from the North Koreans, who advanced cautiously from Yongdong. Declassified Army intelligence reports showed that the enemy front line was two miles or more from No Gun Ri late on July 28, the third day of the massacre. That night, the 7th Cavalry messaged division headquarters, "No important contact has been reported by our 2nd Battalion." The refugee killings were not reported in surviving unit documents.
In the predawn hours of July 29, the 7th Cavalry Regiment withdrew from No Gun Ri. That afternoon, North Korean soldiers arrived outside the tunnels and helped those still alive, about two dozen, mostly children, feeding them and sending them back toward their villages.
Casualties
In the earliest published accounts of the killings, in August and September 1950, two North Korean journalists with the advancing northern troops reported finding an estimated 400 bodies in the No Gun Ri area, including 200 seen in one tunnel. The survivors generally put the death toll at 400, including 100 in the initial air attack, with scores more wounded. In Pentagon interviews in 2000, 7th Cavalry veterans' estimates of No Gun Ri dead ranged from dozens to 300. One who had a close look, career soldier Homer Garza, who led a patrol through one No Gun Ri tunnel, said that he saw 200 to 300 bodies piled up there.
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.
The South Korean government-funded No Gun Ri Peace Foundation, which operates a memorial park and museum at the site, estimated in 2011 that 250–300 were killed.
Aftermath
Information about the refugee killings 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, which reported the discovery of the massacre. A South Korean agent for the U.S. counterintelligence command confirmed that account with local villagers weeks later, when U.S. troops moved back through the area, the ex-agent told U.S. investigators in 2000. Evidence of high-level knowledge also appeared in late September 1950 in a New York Times article from Korea, which reported, without further detail, that an unnamed high-ranking U.S. officer told the reporter of the "panicky" shooting of "many civilians" by a U.S. Army regiment that July. No evidence has emerged, however, that the U.S. military investigated the incident at the time.
Petitions
During the U.S.-supported postwar autocracy of President Syngman Rhee, survivors of No Gun Ri were too fearful of official retaliation to file public complaints. Survivor Yang Hae-chan said he was warned by South Korean police to stop telling others about the massacre. 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, Park Sun-yong, 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. Almost all were ignored, as was a petition to the U.S. and South Korean governments by the local Yongdong County Assembly.
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.
In 1994, Seoul newspapers reported on a book Chung published about the events of 1950, raising awareness of the allegations inside South Korea. In that same year, 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, 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 what it claimed was a combat situation, and by asserting that there was no evidence the 1st Cavalry Division was in the No Gun Ri area, as the survivors' research indicated (and as the 1961 official U.S. Army history of the war confirms).
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. In June 1998, South Korea's National Council of Churches, on behalf of the No Gun Ri survivors, sought help from the U.S. National Council of Churches, which quietly asked the Pentagon to investigate. In March 1999, the Army told the U.S. council that it had looked into the No Gun Ri allegations, and "found no information to substantiate the claim" in the operational records of the 1st Cavalry Division and other frontline units.