Posted on 05/18/2008 3:30:22 PM PDT by decimon
as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head
When your village is being invaded, when you suddenly have to abandon your town, what are you supposed to do with your prisoners? Questions like this have to be understood in the context of warfare and fighting for very survival against unprovoked aggression.
This article is being passed around a generation that doesn't even know the "official" pro-U.S. pro-South Korea story - they're just going to hear "U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants"
It was a WAR, which we nearly lost. These people were being detained for a reason. I am sure there were innocents among them, but there were also people who were Communists. These were likely fifth columnists. I have no problem with these executions. If they had not happened, perhaps the Communists would have taken the whole peninsula. The problem of Communists in South Korea has continued to this day — that’s why they have a National Security law. There was no time for “due process” — only time for action. By the way, the Holocaust parallels are really stupid. This was not genocide. It is the North Koreans who have committed and are committing genocide, against their own people.
A few years back, I recall watching an epic film on the Korean War produced in the South Korea. It centered on two brothers and their extended family and relations, and it made no bones about both sides being guilty of summary executions for just the reasons you mentioned.
I’m with you! Communism is responsible for the deaths of 100 million, give or take a million. The Chinese alone allowed millions to die during The Great Leap Forward in the late Fifties.
Next time we take control of a prison like Abu Ghraib, I’m for turning it over to the South Koreans. Based on history, they generally don’t put up with crap.
Liberal NGOs inflate sketchy memories and extrapolate upward to insure more funding comes their way.
No doubt bad things happened as always does in war, but AP doesn't even try to balance the story with how many millions of ROK civilians were slaughtered by DNK and ChiComms, nor how many U.S. and allied troops where killed defending Korea against the invading Communists. Nor how many millions of free (and Communist) world citizens were spared from the ravages of nuclear war, by the East and West battling it out in proxy wars in Korea and other countries where the Communists tried to take over, instead of firing nukes at each other directly.
Certainly sad for these people's families, but their loss saved millions more.
Is that the one with the South Korean soldier being captured to become a brainwashed hero of the North?
It's a feral planet out there, ya emotional-warfare pushing crybaby.
It's been that way since the beginning, and the Communists had no business forcing their ideology onto South Korea. What you fail to realize is that none of this would have happened had the Communists left South Korea alone.
But no, they couldn't leave them alone. The subsequent Communist invasion yielded death and destruction.
Do you think your tantrum is going to change that?
“Now you know why the current generation of ROK civilins see America as their number one enemy and not the North.”
The current high school and early college kids see the US as a threat because that is what the leftists in control of the Universities have taught them. Kinda like our own schools.
B4Ranch: This crap didn't happen. I lived through this time and the events and this just didn't take place. It is not history, it is revised history. The only slaughters that took place in Korea during the Korean war were carried out by the North. It is easy to see that you are a liberal, a left wing loony who will try to sow dissent and doubt where ever you go.
I love they way you guys work in pairs, the other poster on here agreeing with you about "not hiding the truth" is evidently your partner. This is crap pure and simple. You want history? Look up the historical facts, they are free to look up and available to anyone. They were written down before the left wing idiots who run news agencies today came into power so they are extremely accurate and truthful, unlike the sh** article posted on this thread.
The only reason for a story like this is to hurt America.
... possibly. I remember that one of the brothers did become a Hero of the North, but he defected because he was upset when his wife (or sister, or someone) was executed by a South Korean petty tyrant (who was also some type of relative from a happy time earlier in the story). The film was a real pot-boiler!
I was there 52-53 and not involved in the civilian sector, and where I was, more interested in keeping my head down. But I do know the ROK military didn't fool around. If they found a suspected spy, a mamasan in the hills directing artillery fire or a ROK soldier showing a reluctance to move forward, they were summarily shot - no trial, no Guantanamo. But, the ROK army was good - with them on your flank there was no need to worry.
I was there 52-53 and not involved in the civilian sector, and where I was, more interested in keeping my head down. But I do know the ROK military didn't fool around. If they found a suspected spy, a mamasan in the hills directing artillery fire or a ROK soldier showing a reluctance to move forward, they were summarily shot - no trial, no Guantanamo. But, the ROK army was good - with them on your flank there was no need to worry.
I was there 52-53 and not involved in the civilian sector, and where I was, more interested in keeping my head down. But I do know the ROK military didn't fool around. If they found a suspected spy, a mamasan in the hills directing artillery fire or a ROK soldier showing a reluctance to move forward, they were summarily shot - no trial, no Guantanamo. But, the ROK army was good - with them on your flank there was no need to worry.
Often, that behavior from Americans was simply a response to an even more vicious and unethical opposition, such as the Japanese who feigned surrender to ambush Americans or who tortured prisoners or the as a reaction to what they took a look around the concentration camps that they liberated. Sometimes, it was simply individual soldiers going off the deep end or lacking in the experience and judgement to do the right thing. And there are always a certain number of nuts who make it into the military, especially when there is a widespread draft.
I point this out not to impugn the veterans of those wars, who were still generally paragons of virtue for their day and still worthy of admiration. I point this out to highlight just how admirable our current military is that the best the press can come up with to impugn American soldiers and Marines is Abu Ghraib and using a Koran for target practice. Compared to any military in the history of the planet, including our own, the American military today performs like angels.
Now...let's all go vote vote for B Obama or H Clinton. Those two think it's still viable.
FMCDH(BITS)
He’s not the only one to have forgotten, if he ever knew, the unspeakable savagery of the Pacific war. The dramatic postwar Japanese success at hustling and merchandising and tourism has (happily, in many ways) effaced for most people the vicious assault context in which the Hiroshima horror should be viewed. It is easy to forget, or not to know, what Japan was like before it was first destroyed, and then humiliated, tamed, and constitutionalized by the West. “Implacable, treacherous, barbaric”—those were Admiral Halsey’s characterizations of the enemy, and at the time few facing the Japanese would deny that they fit to a T. One remembers the captured American airmen—the lucky ones who escaped decapitation—locked for years in packing crates. One remembers the gleeful use of bayonets on civilians, on nurses and the wounded, in Hong Kong and Singapore. Anyone who actually fought in the Pacific recalls the Japanese routinely firing on medics, killing the wounded (torturing them first, if possible), and cutting off the penises of the dead to stick in the corpses’ mouths. The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war.
I would argue that the same is true of this incident in Korea, which is amazing to contemplate given what's still going on to innocent Koreans in the North.
Later in the article, Fussell writes:
It would be not just stupid but would betray a lamentable want of human experience to expect soldiers to be very sensitive humanitarians. The Glenn Grays of this world need to have their attention directed to the testimony of those who know, like, say, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, who said, “Moderation in war is imbecility,” or Sir Arthur Harris, director of the admittedly wicked aerial-bombing campaign designed, as Churchill put it, to “de-house” the German civilian population, who observed that “War is immoral,” or our own General W. T. Sherman: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Lord Louis Mountbatten, trying to say something sensible about the dropping of the A-bomb, came up only with “War is crazy.” Or rather, it requires choices among crazinesses. “It would seem even more crazy,” he went on, “if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese.” One of the unpleasant facts for anyone in the ground armies during the war was that you had to become pro tern a subordinate of the very uncivilian George S. Patton and respond somehow to his unremitting insistence that you embrace his view of things. But in one of his effusions he was right, and his observation tends to suggest the experimental dubiousness of the concept of “just wars.” “War is not a contest with gloves,” he perceived. “It is resorted to only when laws, which are rules, have failed.” Soldiers being like that, only the barest decencies should be expected of them. They did not start the war, except in the terrible sense hinted at in Frederic Manning’s observation based on his front-line experience in the Great War: “War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.” Knowing that unflattering truth by experience, soldiers have every motive for wanting a war stopped, by any means.
Throughout history (written and unwritten) people have fought. In most cases the fighting was not limited to soldiers. War is hell and needs to be avoided. We have more ‘war’ going on now then ever before thanks to the UN.
The left worships Stalin and other misunderstood leaders. All of these killed millions regardless of the situation or actual crime.
Tearing America down sure won’t help anyone but that is what these folks are intent on.
While atrocities are, regrettably, a part of warfare, there is some reason to view this report with a bit of suspicion.
The AP correspondent who co-authored this account, Charles Hanley, was part of a wire service “team” that won a Pulitzer in 1999 for their “expose” of a U.S. massacre of South Korean civilians at No Gun Ri in the summer of 1950.
The circumstances of both events were somewhat similar; the North Koreans were rolling south; the ROK Army had, essentially collapsed, and U.S. forces arriving on scene were trying desperately to establish defensive lines after the debacle of Task Force Smith. There were many reports of NK guerillas blending in with the hordes of refugees, heading south.
Hanley’s initial report created quite a stir, but an Army Ranger-turned-history professor at West Point was less than convinced. While Major Robert Bateman conceded that some ROK civilians had been killed at No Gun Ri, he disputed the accuracy of key portions of the AP story, provided by a solider who was supposedly there, Edward Daily. Bateman later proved that Daily was not at No Gun Ri, and his version of events was patently false.
Bateman also demonstrated that the U.S. policy to “shoot” refugees was not widely disseminated and indistinct, at best. While the AP later corrected their version to omit Daily’s account, they accused Bateman of a “tiresome” campaign to undermine their reporting. They also later produced a document which claimed the policy on shooting refugees was disseminated within the U.S. command structure and even broadcast over radio nets.
However, the document does not indicate to what degree the policy was disseminated, what radio nets carried the message and which units actually acknowledged receiving the directive and complying with it. In other words, the policy document discovered by the AP—after Bateman’s critique appeared—is not a complete vindication for the wire service.
It’s also worth noting that Hanley did everything he could to discredit Major Bateman, lobbying his publisher to cancel the Army officer’s book contract, and even complaining to historians who offered Bateman’s work a positive review.
For the problems with Hanley’s original No Gun Ri account—and his attitude toward those who would criticize his work—Hanley’s latest expose deserves similar scrutiny. Almost 60 years after the fact, memories get fuzzy and you can only wonder if there’s a Korean Edward Daily among those cited by the AP.
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