The Korean War: A History (26 page)

The rapid advance of the 6th Division southward and eastward threatened a full envelopment of the peninsula as early as July 26 (the time of the Nogun-ri incident), when General Walker ordered a military withdrawal from Taegu. On the same day the ROK government announced that any civilian “making enemy-like action” would be shot; all civilians now had to travel by special trains, and people in the battle area would be allowed to leave their homes for only two hours each day. “All those found violating these regulations will be considered enemies and will be executed immediately.” In essence this meant that a free-fire zone now surrounded the front lines. Really, though, they were only following American orders in the Chollas: guerrilla infiltration led to General Dean’s decision “to force every Korean out of the division’s area of responsibility, on the theory that once they were removed, any Korean caught in the area would be an enemy agent.” This order was issued to the Korean Army and to the National Police.
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The next day MacArthur flew over to Korea and demanded that further withdrawals cease, and shortly thereafter the 2nd Infantry Division landed at Pusan and was rushed up to the line at Chinju. The 6th Division had just “beat hell out of us” there, an American officer related; the next day the KPA occupied Masan and American forces retreated to the Naktong River, employing a “scorched earth” policy that led to the burning of many villages harboring guerrillas: “smoke clouds rose over the front from Hwanggan to Kumchon.”
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Soon, however, the war front stabilized at the Pusan perimeter.

Ever since this early and determining point South Korean politics has had a suppressed “third force,” with strong roots in the southwest, but a presence all over the country. If we locate these forces on the “left,” we reduce them to the polarized and caricatured constructions of the Cold War, in which any kind of mayhem committed by the right is insufficient truly to distance them from American support, so long as they remain firmly anti-Communist. For decades these political and social forces resided of necessity in the long memories of participants in the local committees, labor and peasant unions, and rebellions of the late 1940s, harboring many personal and local truths that could not be voiced. For the next fifty years, the acceptable political spectrum in the South consisted of the ruling forces and parties of Rhee, Park, Chun, Roh, and Kim Young Sam, and an opposition deriving from the Korean Democratic Party founded in September 1945, led by figures such as Kim Song-su, Chang Taek-sang, and Chang Myon. The ROK did not have a real transition to the opposition until Kim Dae Jung’s election in 1998, and it did not have a president who was not part of the political divide (and political system) going back to the U.S. occupation until February 2003. (Kim Dae Jung got his political start in the self-governing people’s committees that sprouted near the southwestern port of Mokpo; the right always used that against him to claim that he was a Communist or pro-North, but in fact he made his peace with the existing system in the late 1940s, and was an establishment politician thereafter, however much he was hounded by the militarists.) The late president Roh Moo Hyun was the first of the ROK’s leaders not to have a recognizable lineage back to the 1940s. His lineage was more recent, to the extraordinary turmoil of the 1980s, when he put his career and his life in danger to defend labor leaders and human rights activists; but through marriage he is also connected to a family blacklisted politically for events going back decades—Roh’s father-in-law was a member of the South Korean Workers’ Party, outlawed under the U.S. occupation;
he was arrested for allegedly helping the North Koreans during the war, and died in prison.

Kim Chong-won got the name “Tiger” for his service to the Japanese Army; after 1945 he liked journalists to call him “the Tiger of Mount Paekdu.” He volunteered for the Imperial Army in 1940, served in New Guinea and the Philippines, and rose to sergeant, “a rank which epitomized the brutality of the Japanese Army at its worst,” in Ambassador Muccio’s words. He was with the Korean National Police at the Eastgate Station in 1946, then for eight months in 1947 he was Chang Taek-sang’s personal bodyguard (Chang was head of the Seoul Metropolitan Police). He then entered the army, where he rose quickly through the ranks in the counterinsurgency campaigns; Americans remembered him for his brutality in the suppression (Muccio called it “ruthless and effective”), and for his refusal to take American orders. An American in 1948 termed him “a rather huge, brute of a man”—after witnessing Kim and his men “mercilessly” beat captured Yosu rebellion prisoners, including women and children, “with cot rounds, bamboo sticks, fists.” He worked closely with Kim Paek-il and Chong Il-gwon, and by August 1949 he was a regimental commander.

After the war began, a KMAG adviser went “berserk with the idea of killing Kim,” according to Muccio. The officer himself, Lt. Col. Rollins Emmerich, was not berserk: he said he would have to shoot Kim “if no one else will get rid of him.” Kim was berserk: he had killed some of his own officers and men for alleged disobedience, avoided the front lines of fighting like the plague, and had beheaded fifty POWs and guerrillas (said to be just “one group” among others that had received this treatment). Kim was temporarily relieved of his command under American pressure. Later on Rhee made him the commander of the martial law regime in Pusan, where he distinguished himself in the squalid terror of the “conscription” campaigns, which consisted of “shanghai-ing the required number of young men off the streets.” Kim told this same officer that he planned to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners held in Pusan prisons. Emmerich told him not to—unless the city was about to fall: “Col. Kim was told that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of [Pusan] he would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot prisoners with machine guns.” Emmerich later persuaded Koreans not to execute 4,500 political prisoners in Taegu, but within weeks most of them were killed. President Rhee soon promoted Kim to deputy provost marshal, and later sent him to assist in running the occupation of Pyongyang in the fall of 1950. Although he was clearly, on this evidence, a war criminal in Korea if not necessarily in the Philippines, Tiger Kim was part of Rhee’s bestiary of close and trusted confidants.
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Seoul Police commander Chang Taek-sang. The unidentified man to his right appears to be “Tiger” Kim. Circa 1946.

Kim Il Sung (center) walks away from a meeting, early in the Korean War.
U.S. National Archives

We instantly return to the mentality that operated during the Cold War when we anticipate the question “But how many people did the Communists kill?” A democratic conception of justice is not dignified by assuring ourselves that even if Syngman Rhee’s forces killed 200,000 political suspects, the Communists killed more. But readers will ask this question, accustomed as they are
to contemporary media images of North Korea as a worst-case example of Communist rule. Often these images correspond to reality: DPRK leaders have on their hands the blood of at least 600,000 of their citizens who perished in the famines of the late 1990s. If unprecedented floods began this tragedy, the inaction or complicity of a regime that has always penetrated even the most remote hamlets indicates either reprehensible dereliction or conscious and inexcusable cruelty and inhumanity. Since the mid-1970s Amnesty International has documented the existence of political prisons and forced labor camps holding somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people. From the early years down to the present, the regime has staged exemplary public executions, particularly of political offenders. When the Communists recovered their territory after the Chinese intervened in the war, even Kim Il Sung had to condemn the scale of political retribution against perceived collaborators with the South. We know very little about this terrible episode, however, because the North Koreans have never evinced the slightest interest in reexamining their past in any open, democratic, or serious investigative manner. One is therefore right to presume that they have everything to hide.

Having said all that, the North and South Korea of today are vastly different than they were sixty years ago. We do not have evidence that the North Koreans ever killed their enemies in such large numbers. The land reform campaigns were much less bloody than those in the Soviet Union, China, or Vietnam; the leadership was content either to let landlords flee to the South, or to move them to non-native counties if they were willing to farm the land. From the start of the war there were reports that the North Koreans executed former ROK officials, KNP officers, leaders of rightist youth groups, and former Korean employees of the United States. The early executions often resulted from released leftist prisoners settling scores, but a DPRK Interior Ministry document stated that the KNP included many colonial police who fled the
North, sons of Northern landlords who had joined the Northwest Youth Corps, sons of landlords and capitalists in the South, and people who were relatively high up in the colonial regime. It thus declared that their crimes “cannot be forgiven.”
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Although the document said nothing about executing such people, one can imagine that this provided the basis for the executions, after a kangaroo “people’s court.”

North Korean battlefield executions of captured American soldiers inflamed American opinion well beyond anything the South Koreans might have been doing. This practice first surfaced in early July, and in the wake of the Inchon landing it got worse: several groups of thirty to forty executed American POWs were found, and one group of eighty-seven was retrieved just as their hands were being tied. Such behavior underpinned MacArthur’s and Willoughby’s frequent demands that North Korean leaders be tried for war crimes. Internal materials, however, show that SCAP had found orders from KPA leaders demanding that such practices stop, and that therefore war crimes trials would not be appropriate.
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According to POWs, these executions appear to have occurred when it became onerous or impossible to take American prisoners to the North, and they were done in the traditional battlefield “humane” manner: one bullet behind the ear. Treatment of ROKA POWs was considerably worse, but there is little evidence on this.

Internal North Korean materials themselves show that many POWs were killed—because KPA officers sought to stop the killings. On July 25, the high command said,

On August 16 a KPA officer said, “Some of us are still slaughtering enemy troops that come to surrender … the responsibility of teaching the soldiers to take POWs and treat them kindly rests on the political section of each unit.”
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American POWs who were liberated after the Inchon landing reported generally good treatment by their captors (given existing conditions), good discipline by KPA troops, and some executions. The UN Commission on the Unification and Reconstruction of Korea (UNCURK) later stated that in spite of many reports of political executions and atrocities against rightists, “few cases came to the notice” of their survey team that visited Kangwon province in early November, interviewing ROK and American officials and speaking to local people. But G-2 intelligence sources found that thousands of political prisoners were moved out of Seoul to the North, including many KNP officers, rightist youth leaders, and others who were thought later to have been eliminated.
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