On January 11, 2001, the U.S. Defense Department and the South Korean Defense Ministry issued reports on their parallel investigations of the events at No Gun Ri in July 1950. After years of rejection of the villagers’ allegations, the inquiry led by the U.S. Army inspector general affirmed that the U.S. military killed and wounded an “unknown number” of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri with small-arms, artillery and mortar fire and aerial strafing. President Bill Clinton issued a statement expressing deep regret and said a memorial would be built and a scholarship fund established to honor all Korean civilians killed in the 1950–1953 war. The U.S. government did not make a formal apology or offer compensation to the No Gun Ri survivors, as asked for in their petition.
The reports’ release was preceded by weeks of friction between the American and South Korean investigators.
The South Koreans’ report said their investigators believed U.S. pilots had been instructed to attack South Korean refugees to guard against North Korean infiltrators, and it was possible that U.S. ground troops received orders to fire on the No Gun Ri refugees.
The Pentagon report, on the other hand, maintained without citing definitive evidence that U.S. pilots were not told to attack the No Gun Ri civilians and that no Army officers issued orders to shoot them, implying that enlisted men took it upon themselves to fire. It called the killings at No Gun Ri, carried out over three days, “an unfortunate tragedy inherent to war and not a deliberate killing.” It found no wrongdoing and assigned no blame.
In taking that position, however, the Army’s 300-page report omitted vital information and misrepresented some important documents. Major examples:
• Despite the Korean investigators’ request, the American investigators did not share with their Korean counterparts the mission reports of the U.S. Air Force’s 35th Fighter-Bomber Squadron; nor did they discuss the documents’ contents in the U.S. report. The 35th Squadron documents showed that apparent civilian groups were targeted during this period; noted pilots’ concerns that they were killing refugees; and reported three air attacks in the No Gun Ri area on July 26–27, 1950.
• The Pentagon did not include in its report any reference to what the Korean-language report said were interviews with five ex-pilots who told U.S. investigators they had been ordered to attack apparent refugee groups in mid-1950 in South Korea.
• It omitted the key passage from the “Rogers memo” of July 25, 1950, in which the Fifth Air Force’s operations chief wrote that “to date, we have complied” with an Army request to strafe refugees approaching U.S. lines. These essential words, a colonel’s statement that deliberate strafings were taking place, were not included in the Pentagon’s presentation of the memo.
• It did not disclose that the all-important 7th Cavalry Regiment communications log for July 1950 was missing from the National Archives. That is the single document most likely to have recorded orders for ground troops to shoot the No Gun Ri refugees.
• It did not report, as the Korean investigators did, that seventeen of the former 7th Cavalrymen interviewed by the Pentagon said they believed there were orders at No Gun Ri to shoot the refugees.
• It did not report the existence of at least fourteen U.S. Army documents showing that high-ranking officers ordered or authorized the shooting of refugees during the Korean War’s first months. It acknowledged the existence of only two such directives, previously made public by the Associated Press: the one in the 1st Cavalry Division to “fire everyone,” including refugees, trying to cross U.S. lines, and General Kean’s order in the 25th Infantry Division to treat civilians as enemy. In the case of the 1st Cavalry Division communication, it asserted that this was an officer’s “misinterpretation” of policy. But subsequent orders in that division, undisclosed in the Pentagon report, said just as plainly that refugees should be shot. As for Kean’s order, the report said the general meant civilians should be “arrested.” But one communication the Pentagon did not report was from a Kean aide, a colonel, who instructed troops that the order meant civilians should be “shot.”
• While discussing at length the perceived threat of North Korean infiltration among South Korean refugees, the Pentagon did not report the fact that no hard evidence emerged of infiltration among the group at No Gun Ri.
There were other examples, and former U.S. Representative Paul N. “Pete” McCloskey Jr. of California, one of eight members of an advisory panel that oversaw the U.S. inquiry, concluded afterward that the Pentagon report was a “clear failure to report the truth.” He was the only adviser to write and distribute a detailed analysis, although another, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, wrote afterward in the Washington Post that “the blame (at No Gun Ri) ultimately fell on some level of leadership.”
On January 12, 2001, the day after the Pentagon report’s release, President Clinton commented further when asked whether his statement of regret amounted to an apology: “I don’t think there is any difference in the two words. They both mean that we are profoundly sorry for what happened, and that things happened which were wrong. I think the word which was agreed on … was thought to be appropriate in a—if you will—a legal and a political sense, because the evidence was not clear that there was responsibility for wrongdoing high enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the government was responsible.”
In South Korea, Chung Koo-do, as spokesman for the No Gun Ri petitioners, said: “Any final report that does not deal with the responsibility of commanders has a serious defect. It can’t be construed as anything other than a Pentagon attempt to whitewash the massacre.” Chung Eun-yong, his father, concluded, “America has no justice or conscience.”
An acknowledgment of responsibility and granting of compensation for No Gun Ri would have set a precedent for dozens of other reported cases of large-scale, indiscriminate killings of South Korean civilians by the U.S. military in 1950–1951, all cases reported after the original AP articles on No Gun Ri were published in 1999. An examination of those cases would shed further light on a long-hidden underside of an American war.
The Pentagon report, in its 300 pages, took note of these many other deaths in a footnote on page 18, in which it said the Army interrogators learned of other civilian killings in the course of their interviews. Those other killings, Pentagon officials indicated, would not be investigated.