The Associated Press version, which won a Pulitzer Prize,In April 2000, the AP's team of No Gun Ri reporters were rewarded for their efforts with a Pulitzer Prize. [1] contained the damning assertion that US military policy permitted firing on unarmed, peaceful civilians who posed no threat to US forces.
Another version written by a professor of history calls this a twisting of the truth, on the grounds that the US military policy was both indistinct and, in any event, unknown to soldiers on the ground at the time of the events at No Gun Ri.
The two key points on which the versions differ are:#Did US troops open fire on Koreans who stationary, i.e., not moving toward US lines and not posing any apparent threat?#Were North Korean troops (disguised as civilians) among the Koreans who were killed?
On the day before the incident, hundreds of Korean civilians were evacuated in the vicinity, southward from Imgae-ri and Joogok-ri, fleeing a North Korean advance. Some state that they were herded from their houses by elements of an American army unit. (An assertion which has been generally substantiated by all sides.) They were stopped by a roadblock near Nogeun-ri near the railroad track which eventually led to a bridge, where American forces were. To compel the refugees to halt their advance from the line, U.S. soldiers fired mortar rounds. The circumstances of the killings, and the precise number of dead, are disputed. Estimates of deaths ranged widely, from 8 to 400.
The damaged Wonsabu Bridge in the vicinity of Nogeun-ri is shown here from a picture taken on August 6, 1950; NIMA officials reported that no pictures suggest evidence of mass graves.
The incident was investigated nearly 50 years later in a well-publicized 1999 Associated Press report, later expanded into the book, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War. The original reporting, before its content was disputed, won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2000.
A July 25, 1950 Air Force memorandum states: "The army has requested we strafe all civilian refugee parties that are noted approaching our positions....To date we have complied with the army request in this respect." An Army inquiry would later find no source order for such a suggestion, though the same implication has been discovered in a memo to the State Dept.
The story was initially reported by the Associated Press in 1999. In an investigation by AP reporters Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza and AP researcher Randy Herschaft, the AP discovered numerous previously classified documents which were now in the open archives, and interviewed many witnesses, including Korean survivors and members of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment.
Documents retrieved in this investigation suggested that there was an official policy in the U.S. Army to target civilians with deadly force. A memo (dated July 25) of the U.S. Fifth Air Force regarding "Policy on Strafing Civilian Targets", written by USAFColonel Turner C. Rogers recalls that, "[t]he army has requested that we strafe all civilian refugee parties that are noted approaching our positions," and that, "to date, we have complied with the army request in this respect." The memo says that bands of civilians have either been infiltrated by or are under the control of North Korean soldiers, but recommends that official policy be discriminate in targeting civilians only when "they are definitely known to contain North Korean soldiers or commit hostile acts." Although a similar naval document was found, an official inquiry later did not find a source request from the army.
The book describes the soldiers as, "green recruits of the U.S. occupation army in Japan thrown unprepared into the frontlines of war, teenagers who viewed unarmed farmers as enemies, led by officers who had never commanded men in battle." The soldiers were wary of civilians as being potential (North) Korean People's Army (NKPA) fighters; there were reports of captured enemy fighters as well as of Russian and Japanese weapons.
No documents were found which suggested that an order was given to the regiment at Nogeun-ri to shoot at civilians. For this the AP relied on the testimony of witnesses. AP reporter Martha Mendoza states:
"Some of the veterans recall hearing orders, and we quoted them as hearing those orders to fire on civilians. We also in our reporting described some veterans who did not hear orders. Where those orders came from, we've tried to track down as best we could, and we're looking forward to the Pentagon getting to the bottom of it."
The AP editor of the story, J. Robert Port said he was demoted after championing the story for more than a year with AP higher-ups. The AP special assignment division, which Port headed, was dissolved. Port resigned in June 1999. In September 1999, seventeen months after the story was first found, the AP published the story. It is the AP's only Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.Port, J. Robert The Story No One Wanted to Hear in
Media controversy
An article in U.S. News & World Report, by military reporter Joseph L. Galloway, questioned the credibility of a key witness in the AP report; using the same Army records as those utilized by the AP, Galloway demonstrated fraudulent claims by Edward Daily.
Robert Bateman, a former member of the 7th Cavalry Regiment and an academic historian at West Point, wrote No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident, which is critical of the AP report and calls into question both evidence presented to the reporters as well as their interpretation of the material.
As mentioned above, Daily falsely corroborated the AP story and provided colorful descriptions of the incident, although he was not mentioned in the AP report until the 56th paragraph. The AP argued Daily was not central to the case and merely was one witness of sixty interviewed. Bateman asserts that not only did the AP reporters refuse to recognize the flaws in his testimony, at Bateman's prodding before its release, but that Daily was more important than the AP suggested. Bateman believes that Daily, as a prominent member of the 7th Cavalry regimental association, had strong influence over other witnesses and that by virtue of his statments he "contaminated" the views and recollections of other veterans. Leaning upon academic research into memory modification, such as the works of psychiatrist Elizabeth Loftus, Bateman related the plasticity of memory and susceptibility of some "memories" to outside suggestions from influential figures such as Daily, who had written two books on the history of the unit. Another AP witness inadvertently demonstrated Bateman's point in a front-page New York Times article. Veteran Eugene Hesselman denied the charge that Daily was not at Nogeun-ri when confronted; "I know that Daily was there. I know that. I know that." Bateman is critical of Hesselman and Pfc. Delos Flint, for their recollections, and suggests they were not present at Nogeun-ri after he found records that they had been medivaced out of the area on July 24th, one day before the events in questions. Most damning, Bateman demonstrated that in all of the published material to date, the AP had not actually quoted anyone who was actually at Nogeun-ri, who heard an order. The closest being those who "believed" that there "must have" been an order. The AP regularly asserted that they had many interviews to this effect, but never published any of them, and refused to release their transcripts to any archive or allow for their examination.
The most contested estimates concerns the body count. A report of the Yeongdong County Office in South Korea, based upon self-reporting by present-day inhabitants, stated the total number of civilian casualties (injured, missing, or killed) to be 248. Some Korean victims have stated numbers in the hundreds. It's not entirely clear what happened to all the bodies in any case. Bateman believes it to be between eight and 35 killed, with two to three times that number wounded, due to mortar rounds and then a short (30-90 seconds) of gunfire from the troops which occurred when the troops panicked and believed they were under fire themselves. Declassified reconnaissance photos revealed no sprawling corpses nor indicated potential graves. Hanley has suggested that they were not in the open because they were stacked by local villagers beneath soil under parts of the bridge. Bateman contends that the soil required for burying hundreds of corpses even at a shallow level would have meant an excavation of soil so large (the remains alone for 300 small humans would be, roughly, 20 tons) that it would be visible in the photos. The AP contends that Korean witnesses testified to stacking bodies, however, but Bateman believes the number of victims are conflated with other incidents in the vicinity during the war, and in the same timeframe. Citing the psychiatric studies, he points out that none of the Koreans may believe they are lying, and he believes many if not most were fired upon by U.S. troops (he cites at least nine incidents that he found, and suspects dozens of other times where U.S. troops fired upon civilians in that period), just not all at the same time, and in the same place, at Nogeun-ri.
As mentioned above, to compel the refugees to halt their advance from the line, U.S. soldiers fired mortar rounds. West Point historian Robert Bateman describes this as "the dumbest possible action that could have been taken." Some Korean witnesses describe being strafed and bombed as they walked along the railway. Pictures taken on August 6 reveal possible recent strafing damage; Hanley, et al., contend the U.S. forces called in strikes. Bateman contends this was impossible because of the incompatibility between army and air force radios (AM vs. FM) and the fact that the same unit could not stop a USAF strafing of their own position the very next day due to the lack of such radios; he argues the witnesses may have confused the mortars for bombs, and that the strafing shown in the photographs could have been from that period, or could have been from a later period days or weeks after the events.
Findings of the U.S. Army Inspector General
The results of the official Army inquiry were released in January 2001.
American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz published an article in the January 2005 issue of Diplomatic History entitled "Beyond No Gun Ri", in which he argues that the position taken by the Pentagon after its 1999-2001 investigation-that the US military did not order the refugees shot-is "untenable". In April 2006 he would give his own account of events in Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II, in which he published a letter by the United States ambassador to South Korea, John J. Muccio, which informed the State Department that US troops had been authorized to shoot at refugees, referring to policy set down on July 25, 1950.
The Associated Press reporters who, in 1999, were the first to reveal the scope of the killings at Nogeun-ri, wrote, in an article May 29, 2006 in The Washington Post that the letter, which had not previously been known, "is the strongest indication yet that such a policy existed for all U.S. forces in Korea, and the first evidence that that policy was known to upper ranks of the U.S. government."
