Korean Job Discussion Forums

[rollo]

good info patchy! I was referring to another massacre committed by N.k troops at Taegu. There were a lot of attrocities committed on both sides .

This was a new one to me. Know anything about Jeju-do massacre committed by R.O.K. troops in the 40's? R.O.K's often not much better than the North in treatment of peasants. I consider Rhee not much better than Kim Sung Il. Difference is he stepped down

Taegu was a front where the North had infiltrated behind the U.N. lines with up to two thousands special-op troops almost broke through and overran the Pusan perimeter. Probably this led to indescriminate killings.


But what in the world has poor geography skills in the U.S. got to do with the rise of China.

One more time. Answer this question. Why are you not in the North?Surely you do not want to continue to hide behind those U.S. troops who have such poor knowledge of a map. Talk is cheap. You could be of real value up there. Obviously us poor brainwashed slobs will never appreciate either your genius nor the glory of Kim Jung Il.

Once mentioned Seoul to a graduate student at a Chinese University, she did not know what I was talking about. She also did not know what the capital of Japan was.

[little mixed girl]

geography in the US is something like this:
6th grade, memorize all 50 states and their capitals and label them on a blank map.

that's about it.

we look at other countries, but we don't spend much time looking at where they are...if that makes sense.
so, maybe you see a map of mexico on the news and you know it's mexico because it says "MEXICO", but you don't see it in relation to the US...or you don't care.

i don't think a huge number of people know that the dmz is the most militarized place.

in short, we don't spend much time looking at the location of other countries or caring about them.

[Gopher]

[seoulsucker]

[patchy]

[patchy]

[rollo]

Yeah I can point you to the massacre site ! I used to live there. Go to Taegu. Go to Susong gu go to the mounds which are marked with marble tablets. This is where Kim Il Sung ordered 14,ooo villagers murderd. men , Women babies in the cradle buried in big pits. People still go there and cry because this is where there family ended. Now go away you Nazi troll!

[patchy]

[patchy]

I've looked for that information that "Kim Il Sung murdered 14,000 men, women and children, including babies in their cradles," at Taegu, and I couldn't find it, but I did find THIS:

http://www.isop.ucla.edu/eas/newsfile/KoreaCiv/991015-apkh.htm

Korean Civilians Massacred by U.S. Soldiers during Korean War

October 15, 1999

Vets say other refugees killed by GIs; On the bridge near TAEGU during early Korean War

Choe Sang-hun, Charles J. Hanley and Martha Mendoza Associated Press writers

Text as published by the Korea Herald.

On a single deadly day in August 1950, six weeks into the Korean War, a U.S. general and other Army officers ordered the destruction of two strategic bridges as South Korean refugees streamed across, killing hundreds of civilians, according to ex-GIs, Korean witnesses and U.S. military documents.

An old soldier recalled the critical moment at one bridge.

"I said, 'There are people!' And they said, 'You have to blow it! There's no other way!" ex-Army engineer Joseph M. Ipock of Jackson, N.J., told the Associated Press.

The AP learned of the bridge blowings and two other incidents, machine-gun and mortar attacks on refugees, while investigating what happened at Nogun-ri, South Korea, in late July 1950. In that case, as reported Sept. 29, veterans corroborated Korean accounts of hundreds of refugees killed at U.S. hands.

One bridge blowing, with its refugee deaths, was recorded briefly in an official Army chronicle, but not until 10
years after the event.

The trail of dead civilians, many of them women and children, has been a hidden underside to a well-known chapter in U.S. military history, the southward retreat from advancing North Korean forces of three Army divisions into a defensible perimeter across South Korea's Naktong River in July-August 1950.

The withdrawal was often confused. The U.S. Army itself told South Korean civilians, citizens of an allied nation, to head south. But the AP found in researching declassified Army documents that U.S. commanders also issued standing orders to shoot civilians along the warfront to guard against North Korean soldiers disguised in the white clothes of Korean peasants. Military lawyers call those orders illegal.

Just days into his first combat command, the 1st Cavalry Division's Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay told reporters he was sure most of the white-clad columns pressing toward American lines were North Korean guerrillas.

"We must find a means to hold these refugees in place," the division commander said.

Days later, on Aug. 3, 1950, Gay waited on the east bank of the Naktong River as his division retreated across the bridge at Waegwan, the last crossing open to North Korean units reported massing more than 15 miles (25 km) to the west.

His troops had failed in repeated efforts to turn back the flood of refugees, even firing warning shots over their heads.

"Finally, it was nearly dark," Gay later wrote to an Army historian. "There was nothing else to be done."

Then he gave a fateful command.

"Gen. Gay stood up in the front of his jeep and shouted out, 'Blow the son of a bitch!,'" veteran Edward L. Daily recalled.

The preset charges exploded, rapid fire, shattering the supports, dropping one of the bridge's hulking spans into the muddy waters of the Naktong.

"They went right down," remembered ex-lieutenant Daily, of Clarksville, Tennessee. "It was like a slow-motion movie. All those refugees went right down into the river."

"It was a tough decision," Gay wrote to the historian, "because up in the air with the bridge went hundreds of refugees."

The division's 1950 war diary did not report the refugees' deaths. But the later narrative by Gay, who died in 1983, led to a brief mention in an official war history published in 1960.

What happened earlier that August day, however, 25 miles (40 km) downriver at the village of Tuksong-dong, has never been reported.

Ex-sergeant Carroll F. Kinsman remembers the streams of white-clad humanity shuffling across the 650-foot- (195-meter) long Tuksong-dong bridge - women clutching children, old men, overloaded ox carts.

"We stayed up all that night and searched them," Kinsman, a veteran of the 14th Combat Engineers Battalion, said in an AP interview. They found no infiltrators, he said.

Retreating Americans had not yet sighted North Korean units near the river around Tuksong-dong on Aug. 3, the declassified record shows. But American officers knew the enemy would arrive eventually. Pressed by a timetable, they proved unable to keep the refugees back from the bridge, rigged for instant demolition.

Soldiers fired over the heads of those crowding across, and tried to warn them the bridge would be blown up, said the veterans, men in their 60s or 70s.

"They tried to stop the refugees from coming across and they wouldn't stop. They were abutment to abutment," ex-engineer Leon L. Denis of Huntsville, Alabama, recalled in an AP interview before his death Aug. 31.

The men of Company A, 14th Engineers, had taken two days to set 7,000 pounds (more than 3000 kg) of explosives on the steel-girder bridge. When the detonation order came at 7:01 a.m., "it lifted up and turned it sideways and it was full of refugees end to end," said Kinsman, of Gautier, Mississippi.

"These people were on the bridge, and you saw the spans of steel flying and you knew they were killed," said ex-GI Rudolph Giannelli of Port Saint Lucie, Fla., driver for Col. Richard W. Stephens, the 21st Infantry Regiment commander who was the last officer across the bridge.

In separate AP interviews, Kinsman, Denis and Giannelli said hundreds of civilians were killed. Ipock said he could see only 30 or 40 refugees from his vantage point.

"There was people on that bridge when it went up," Ipock said. "And during war that's the story. They're up there and they pull the plunger and that's it."

Kim Bok-jong, 73, a Korean who said he was 200 yards (180 meters) from the bridge, out of view around a hill, remembered that "people rushed back toward us and said many people died when the Americans blew up the bridge."

The dying did not end there, he said. Panicked refugee families stranded on the far shore after the bridge was destroyed tried to swim the river, Korea's largest.

"Many - I mean many - people drowned," Kim told the AP. "... Women with kids were exhausted before reaching the southern bank and disappeared under water. Sometimes kids were abandoned in the middle of the river."

The veterans said they don't know who gave the detonation order at Tuksong-dong. The operation was noted in the 14th Engineers report with a simple "Results, excellent."

From the bridges, the U.S. Army units moved into defensive positions along the Naktong, in what came to be known as the Pusan Perimeter. They had arrived at the river after weeks of retreat through South Korea - and after countless, sometimes bloody encounters with refugees.

Four 1st Cavalry Division veterans told the AP that on Aug. 2, the day before the bridge blowings, they were among several dozen soldiers retreating toward the Naktong and being trailed by perhaps 80 white-clad Koreans.

In mid-afternoon, five North Korean soldiers - disguised in white - appeared in front of the Americans, they said. Veteran Edward L. Daily said the North Koreans opened fire and were quickly killed. Another ex-GI, Eugene Hesselman, remembered it differently, saying the intruders surrendered and were led away.

Because it was believed they came from among the refugees, said Hesselman, of Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, "we got orders to eliminate them (the refugees). And we mowed them all down. The Army wouldn't take chances."

Scattering too late, every man, woman and child was killed, Daily said. He and veteran Robert G. Russell said they found about 10 disguised North Korean soldiers among the dead. Hesselman said he doesn't recall that infiltrators were found ......

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But since this talks about US soldiers killing Korean civilians, with no mention of Kim Il Sung, I would still like to know where that information about Kim Il Sung is. So where is it, rollo?

[little mixed girl]