Around noon on July 26, 1950, several hundred South Korean villagers sat on a railroad embankment near the hamlet of No Gun Ri. American soldiers had ordered them there, searched their belongings, and promised safe passage south. Then the soldiers left.
Planes suddenly strafed the crowd of men, women, and children. The survivors scrambled for cover beneath a concrete railroad bridge as soldiers opened fire from nearby positions. What followed became one of the deadliest acts committed by U.S. troops against civilians in the 20th century.
For the next three days, soldiers of the 7th Cavalry Regiment poured rifle and machine gun fire into the twin tunnels. Entire families huddled behind walls of corpses. Mothers shielded their children with their bodies. The survivors drank blood-mixed water from a stream running through the underpass.
“Children were screaming in fear and adults were praying for their lives, and the whole time they never stopped shooting,” said Park Sun-yong, who lost her 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter in the carnage.
Disaster on the Korean Peninsula
The massacre occurred only a month into the Korean War. North Korean forces had invaded the South on June 25, 1950, catching American troops completely unprepared. Task Force Smith, the first U.S. unit to engage the enemy, was overrun on July 5. The 24th Infantry Division lost its commander, Major General William Dean, as a prisoner of war at Taejon on July 20.
The 7th Cavalry Regiment landed at Pohang-dong on July 18 as part of the 1st Cavalry Division. This was Custer’s old regiment, the Garryowens, infamous for the disaster at Little Bighorn 74 years earlier. The troops had been enjoying occupation duty in Japan. Half the regiment’s sergeants had recently transferred to other units. Many soldiers were teenagers with no combat experience.
The retreating Americans they encountered made a terrifying impression on the new arrivals as they moved to the front.
Fears of North Korean infiltration spread rapidly. Intelligence reports indicated enemy soldiers were disguising themselves as refugees to slip behind American lines. An estimated 380,000 South Korean civilians were fleeing south in those chaotic first weeks, streaming through non-established front lines.
American commanders responded with drastic measures. On July 24, a communication logged at the 8th Cavalry Regiment headquarters stated that refugees were not to cross the front line. Those trying to cross were to be fired upon. The order added a caveat to “use discretion in case of women and children.”
Major General William Kean of the 25th Infantry Division likewise ordered that “all civilians seen in this area are to be considered as enemy and action taken accordingly.”
Major General Hobart Gay, commanding the 1st Cavalry Division, told reporters he believed most civilians moving toward American lines were North Korean guerrillas. He would later describe refugees as “fair game.” On August 4, after the No Gun Ri killings, Gay ordered the Waegwan bridge over the Naktong River blown while hundreds of fleeing Koreans were still crossing.
The Road to No Gun Ri
The villagers who died at the railroad bridge came primarily from Chu Gok Ri and surrounding hamlets in Yongdong County, roughly 100 miles southeast of Seoul. On July 23, American soldiers and a Korean policeman arrived and ordered them to evacuate. The area would soon become a battlefield.
Most residents fled to Im Ke Ri, a mountain village about two kilometers away. They believed they would be safe there.
On the evening of July 25, American soldiers appeared at Im Ke Ri. They ordered the villagers to gather their belongings and promised to escort them to safety near Pusan. Between 500 and 600 people set out on foot, leading ox carts loaded with possessions, some with children strapped to their backs.
The column spent one night at Ha Ga Ri. The next morning, they continued toward No Gun Ri.
When the refugees reached the railroad crossing around midday on July 26, American soldiers stopped them. The troops ordered everyone onto the tracks and searched their belongings. They found no weapons or proof that any of them were guerillas.
Then, without warning, the soldiers departed. Several aircraft appeared moments later and strafed the civilians.
Three Days of Killing
The air attack killed dozens immediately. Some survivors estimated that roughly 100 people died on the railroad embankment before anyone could reach shelter.
“Chaos broke out among the refugees. We ran around wildly trying to get away,” recalled Yang Hae-chan, who was 10 years old at the time.
The survivors fled into a small culvert beneath the tracks.
Suddenly, American ground fire drove them from there into a larger double tunnel under a concrete railroad bridge. Each underpass measured approximately 80 feet long, 22 feet wide, and 40 feet high.
The 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment had dug into positions on a ridge overlooking No Gun Ri. The unit was in poor shape. On the night of July 25, the troops had panicked and scattered during a disorganized retreat from their forward positions near Yongdong. More than 100 men went missing before the battalion was reorganized the next morning.
Communications specialists Larry Levine and James Crume later said they remembered hearing orders to fire on the refugees coming from a higher level, probably from 1st Cavalry Division headquarters.
A mortar round landed among the refugees. Then came what Levine called a “frenzy” of small-arms fire.
Machine gunner Norman Tinkler of H Company said he fired roughly 1,000 rounds into the tunnels. He saw “a lot of women and children” among the white-clad figures on the railroad tracks.
“We just annihilated them,” Tinkler said.
Joseph Jackman of G Company told the BBC that his commander ran down the line shouting orders to fire. “Kids, there was kids out there, it didn’t matter what it was, 8 to 80, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot ’em all,” Jackman said.
“It was assumed there were enemy in these people,” said ex-rifleman Herman Patterson, explaining the mindset. He further added it was a massacre.
Thomas Hacha of the nearby 1st Battalion watched the killing unfold. “I could see the tracers spinning around inside the tunnel,” he recalled. “They were dying down there. I could hear the people screaming.”
Not everyone participated. First Lieutenant Robert Carroll, a 25-year-old reconnaissance officer with H Company, said he stopped some of the sporadic shooting. When a young child running down the tracks was hit, Carroll carried the wounded child back to the tunnel where the battalion surgeon was treating refugees injured by the firing.
Inside the tunnels, those trapped piled corpses as barricades against the gunfire. Some tried to dig into the ground with their hands. Racked by thirst, they drank from a small stream running through the underpass, its water mixed with blood.
“The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies,” said Chun Choon-ja, who was 12 years old at the time.
By the second day, the constant firing had reduced to potshots and occasional barrages whenever someone moved or tried to escape. Park Sun-yong watched her two children die. She was badly wounded but survived by hiding among the bodies.
The 7th Cavalry withdrew in the predawn hours of July 29 as the American retreat continued. That afternoon, North Korean soldiers arrived at the tunnels. They allegedly helped the survivors, roughly two dozen, mostly children, feeding them and sending them back toward their villages.
Buried History
The massacre remained hidden from history for nearly five decades.
Two North Korean journalists who arrived with the advancing troops reported finding approximately 400 bodies in the No Gun Ri area, including 200 in one tunnel. The survivors also estimated the death toll at around 400.
Under the authoritarian government of South Korean President Syngman Rhee, the survivors feared retaliation if they spoke publicly. One survivor, Yang Hae-chan, said Korean police warned him to stay quiet about what happened.
Former policeman Chung Eun-yong devoted his life to uncovering the truth. His wife was Park Sun-yong, the woman who watched their two young children die in the tunnels. Chung filed his first petition to the U.S. and South Korean governments in 1960. Over the following decades, he and a survivors’ committee submitted more than 30 petitions. Almost all were ignored.
Chung quietly gathered evidence at archives in Seoul and Daejeon for three decades. In 1994, after South Korea’s transition to democracy, he published a novel based on the events. Ten publishers had rejected it. The U.S. Army said any killings of civilians happened in the heat of combat.
The breakthrough came in 1999. Associated Press reporters Sang-Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley, and Martha Mendoza contacted Chung and began interviewing survivors and American veterans. They found declassified documents showing orders to shoot civilians at the war front.
On September 29, 1999, the AP published its investigation. A dozen 7th Cavalry veterans corroborated the survivors’ accounts. The story won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.
Though the investigation was not without criticism. One witness quoted in the original story, Edward Daily, was later found to have been not been present during the massacre at all. He admitted to passing on secondhand information.
Interestingly, Carroll was furious and later admitted his role in the story was twisted. He claimed no orders were ever given to fire on the civilians and that no machine guns opened fire. He further asserted he stopped a lone soldier from firing at refugees from hundreds of yards away, who had failed to hit anyone. When he went to the surgeon, he claimed only a dozen refugees were wounded, mostly by shrapnel.
Patterson also noted that his description in the story of it being a massacre was him discussing what happened to their unit in combat. He claimed he was not referring to the refugees at all. Many others quoted in the story stated their roles or words were twisted to fit the narrative.
Army historian, Major Robert L. Bateman, wrote “No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident” to counter many of the claims in the AP story. He notes that it was the result of poor training, leadership and readiness at a time when the military was told to crack down on refugees moving through their lines. In his view, there was no order to fire on civilians.
The Response
Both the United States and South Korea launched investigations following the AP report. The parallel inquiries lasted 15 months.
In January 2001, both governments released their findings simultaneously. The U.S. Army acknowledged for the first time that American soldiers had killed “an unknown number” of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri with “small-arms fire, artillery and mortar fire, and strafing.”
However, the Army concluded the killings were “an unfortunate tragedy inherent to war and not a deliberate killing.” Investigators said they found no evidence that orders were given to shoot the civilians.
South Korean investigators reached different conclusions. Their report said 17 veterans of the 7th Cavalry testified they believed there were orders to shoot the refugees. Two were battalion communications specialists in an especially good position to know which orders had been relayed.
The document that would have settled the question was gone. The 7th Cavalry Regiment’s communications journal for July 1950, the record that would have contained any orders at No Gun Ri, was missing from its place at the National Archives. No one could explain why.
The survivors claimed the U.S. report downplayed the role of American commanders and soldiers in the massacre. So did some of the Americans who helped produce it.
Former Congressman Pete McCloskey of California, a Marine veteran of the Korean War and one of eight outside advisers to the Pentagon inquiry, reviewed the evidence and agreed with the Koreans.
“I don’t think there is any question that they were strafing and under orders,” McCloskey said. “I thought the Army report was a whitewash.”
Retired Marine General Bernard Trainor, another adviser, wrote to Defense Secretary William Cohen that he believed American command was responsible for the loss of innocent civilian life.
“At the very least, it failed to control the fire of its subordinate units and personnel,” Trainor wrote. “At worst, it ordered the firing.”
“This is not enough for the massacre of over 60 hours, of 400 innocent people who were hunted like animals,” Chung Eun-yong said.
President Bill Clinton, in the final days of his administration, issued a statement of regret. “Things happened which were wrong,” he said. But the U.S. government rejected survivors’ demands for an apology and compensation. Washington offered instead to build a memorial and establish a scholarship fund. The survivors rejected the proposal.
Subsequent research revealed the Army had buried evidence.
Investigators had not disclosed at least 14 declassified documents showing high-ranking commanders ordering or authorizing the shooting of refugees. These included leaders calling refugees “fair game” and directing troops to “shoot all refugees coming across river.” The AP found these documents in the investigators’ own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None had appeared in the Army’s 300-page public report.
In 2005, historian Sahr Conway-Lanz discovered a letter from U.S. Ambassador John Muccio to the State Department dated July 26, 1950, the day the No Gun Ri killings began. It confirmed a policy had been adopted to shoot refugees approaching U.S. lines after warning shots were fired.
The Army had examined this letter during its investigation. When South Korea asked about it, the Pentagon acknowledged it had seen the document in 2000 but dismissed it. The Army claimed it outlined a “proposed policy,” not an approved one. But the letter itself stated unambiguously that “decisions made” at a high-level meeting included the policy to shoot approaching refugees.
Legacy
South Korea’s National Assembly passed legislation in 2004 establishing a committee to identify the victims. The following year, officials certified the names of 163 dead or missing and 55 wounded, noting that many additional victims were never reported.
The No Gun Ri Peace Foundation estimates between 250 and 300 people were killed, mostly women and children.
A 33-acre peace park opened at the site in 2011, built with $17 million in South Korean government funds. It includes a memorial, museum, and education center. The twin tunnels still bear bullet scars.
Chung Eun-yong died in August 2014 at age 91. His son, Chung Koo-do, now chairs the No Gun Ri International Peace Foundation.
The massacre stands among the deadliest incidents involving American forces and civilians in the nation’s modern military history. The Korean War itself remains the deadliest conflict for civilians as a proportion of total casualties in any American war.
No American soldier was ever punished for what happened at No Gun Ri.
“America has no justice or conscience,” Chung Eun-yong later said.
The truth took half a century to emerge. For those who made it out of those tunnels, the official acknowledgment came decades too late. Even after the investigations, many veterans and organizations continued denying the massacre ever occurred. Others acknowledged it did, though downplayed their role or dismissed the notion that it was officially ordered. Some veterans and survivors continue to assert that it happened, was ordered by American commanders and was covered up.
Nevertheless, the AP story and investigations led to many survivors of other American and government atrocities to come forward with their stories. This led to the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which uncovered other buried war crimes and killings committed by U.S. forces during the Korean War.
Even today, the bullet holes can still be seen in the concrete walls of the tunnel at No Gun Ri. While the exact number of victims is unknown, it remains one of the deadliest and most horrific war crimes committed by American forces in history.
