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S. Korea Faults U.S. In '51 Strike

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The Associated Press

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 4, 2008

YEONGCHUN, South Korea - The war refugees, frigid, laden with baggage, trudged down a mountain road on a winter's day in 1951, toward the safety of U.S. Army lines. But they were turned back at gunpoint, sent home to a fiery doom.

Within days, hundreds of the displaced villagers, crowding into a narrow cave, came under napalm attack from waves of U.S. Air Force planes. More than 300 died, mostly women and children, most trapped in the smoke and flames, some strafed when they fled, survivors say.

"People moaned and screamed and shouted in the darkness," recalled Cho Byung-woo, who escaped the inferno as a boy. "It was hell. How could they not tell civilians from North Korean troops?"

"They wouldn't have died like that if they had allowed the refugees to pass through their lines," he added.

After a two-year investigation, the story of Gokgyegul, the "Cave of the Crying Stream," was confirmed on May 20 by the South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was one of the first inquiries completed among dozens of such cases of alleged mass killing of South Korean civilians by U.S. forces in 1950-51.

"The U.S. military hardly took into consideration a risk that its massive bombing and incineration operations could take heavy tolls on civilians," the commission concluded, calling the attack indiscriminate and saying the United States had failed, with the roadblock, to meet its responsibility to safeguard refugees.

It urged the South Korean government to seek victims' compensation from Washington. The U.S. Embassy in Seoul says it has not yet been approached on the compensation issue.

The Gokgyegul attack occurred in January 1951, as retreating U.S. and South Korean forces struggled to stop the North Koreans, massively reinforced by Chinese troops, from penetrating deeper into South Korea.

Declassified U.S. military records show that the Americans, on guard against possible enemy disguised as refugees, were blocking South Korean civilians fleeing the fighting. Air Force pilots were told to view "people in white" - the color most civilians wore - as potential enemies.

Ordered south by local officials, the villagers one early January day left their secluded hamlet, among snowy, humpbacked hills 120 miles southeast of Seoul, but were stopped just 3 miles away at Hyangsan by U.S. 7th Infantry Division troops.

In the following days, fearing bombings, the Yeongchun villagers left their homes again and moved into the nearby 85-yard-long cave, named for the "crying" sound of its intermittent stream. Outside, they tethered cows and stacked household goods.

"People thought they'd be safe inside," said Cho Tae-won, 85, who made it out of the village but lost his 2-year-old son in the bombing. But on Jan. 20, at 9:50 a.m., two or three Air Force F-51 Mustangs struck, the U.S. record shows.

"They dropped oil drums" - gasoline-gel napalm bombs - "and then the fire incinerated everything and spread into the cave," Cho Byung-woo, 66, Cho Tae-won's brother, told Associated Press reporters visiting the site, today a quiet place of chirping birds and fluttering Confucian prayer flags.

His father saved the 9-year-old Cho Byung-woo, but from a ditch outside, the boy witnessed more carnage as U.S. jets strafed fleeing villagers with .50-caliber machine guns. He saw a bullet slit open a young friend's belly.

"His bowels spilled out. His mother fell down and cried over his body in the shower of bullets."

The Chos also lost their father, and a teenage sister and brother in the attack, they said.

Survivors say there were no North Koreans near the cave and surveillance pilots who flew overhead for days should have known that. U.S. pilots claimed in after-mission reports to have killed "troops" and "pack animals." But six days later a U.S. ground patrol reported finding 75 refugee bodies instead.

The truth commission concluded "well over 200" civilians were killed.

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