History, Through Charles Hanley’s Soda Straw

[Update: See also GI Korea’s post. Neither Hanley nor Syngman Rhee comes out of this one looking good, nor do U.S. officials and officers who had the breathtakingly poor judgment to attend Lee’s killings. Clearly, however, Hanley has told us nothing we didn’t already know.]

Professional atrocity monger Charles Hanley is back again, faithful to his rigid 13-month schedule, to report breaking news from 1948 that contains no relevations for Korea-watchers: Syngman Rhee turns out to have been an evil, bloodthirty SOB (and our SOB) who shot a lot of innocent people. The reality, as it tends to be, is more complex: Rhee shot his innocent victims along with actual Communist guerrillas, who were themselves shooting a lot of other innocent people.

And as is so often true of Hanley’s revelations, none of this is news. I remember learning this by browsing through published books — complete with gruesome pictures — at Kyobo Book Store in Seoul in 1998 or 1999. Hanley, who specializes in milking each wrinkle in an old story as a new revelation, hangs his claim to novelty on the presence of American advisors at some of those massacres, and how some were more forceful than others in complaining about it. That is deeply disturbing, but it’s not new, either. Leftist students were displaying pictures similar to these “declassified” ones on the streets in Myeongdong during the same period.

(Because I have a well-developed sense of irony, it amuses me when Korean leftists denounce anyone for standing idly by while Koreans slaughter each other. That would apply with equal force to Hanley, who seems agnostic about atrocities of far greater magnitude and more contemporary significance than rewriting the inscriptions on half-century old grave markers.)

Really, in a more honest world than the one in which we live, the Pulitzer Committee would adopt this rule: if the substance of your expose is already revealed in a four year-old external link from a Wikipedia page, it’s not so much a great moment in investigative journalism as an exercise in selective and repetitive agitation that wears journalistic drag. Thus does Hanley confer new credibility on a stilted revision of Korean history that has almost completely crowded other perpectives off the Internet. Close your right eye, peer through a soda straw with your left eye, and you have Charles J. Hanley’s view of history.

Also, you would think that some journalistic rigor should have some relationship to one’s journalistic reputation. Hanley’s past reporting has been liberally seeded with half-truths and distortions and based on questionable sources; thus, I must approach his reports with a certain evidentiary trepidation, even especially when I know that it may contain some unquantifiable Truth Content. Case in point: in his latest report, Hanley’s “sources” include North Korean “journalism,” reports from their Stalinist camp-follower stooges, and estimates from the Half-Truth-and-Eternal-Polarization Committees set up and staffed by a certain former human rights lawyer with a strikingly selective interest in human rights. Another is Hanley’s demonstrably false attribution of the Taejon Massacre to the South Koreans:

They took pictures in July 1950 at the slaughter of dozens of men at one huge killing field outside the central city of Daejeon. Between 3,000 and 7,000 South Koreans are believed to have been shot there by their own military and police, and dumped into mass graves, said Kim Dong-choon, the commission member overseeing the investigation of these government killings.

The bones of Koh Chung-ryol’s father are there somewhere, and the 57-year-old woman believes South Koreans alone are not to blame. “Although we can’t present concrete evidence, we bereaved families believe the United States has some responsibility for this,” she told the AP, as she visited one of the burial sites in the quiet Sannae valley. [AP, Charles J. Hanley]

As I say, a demonstrable falsehood, as shown by contemporary accounts:

Information on the atrocity-slaying by North Korean Communists of fifty-eight more United States soldiers came today from liberated Americans and South Koreans here. Troops of the United States Twenty-fourth Infantry Division freed a group in recapturing Taejon. [New York Times]

This goes even beyond current leftist revisionism, which suggests that there were two massacres, one committed by each side (though relative tolls are not offered). Say what you want about that theory, but it doesn’t exactly stand to reason that South Koreans would have shot Americans, especially at a time when the North Koreans held Taejon, and contemporary accounts suggest as the North Koreans were killing Americans, they killed South Koreans, too. That would explain why U.N. forces reported finding 5,000 to 7,000 bodies when they retook Taejon the following October.

Because it seems significant, I should mention that, according to the only American survivor of the massacre, the North Koreans used American M-1 rifles.

At least give the old thug Rhee his due: Hanley and his sources would have us believe that South Korea’s civil war of the late 1940’s as a unilateral massacre of agrarian reformers, which is utter rot.

Yet there are leaks in the Memory Hole. Thanks to the Time archive, we can see that South Korea’s Communist guerrillas were a deadly threat to the government and civilians alike. In November of 1948, for example, the Communists seized the towns of Sunchon and Yosu. In Yosu, they captured and executed 100 police, and then went to work in earnest:

Then the rebels, joined by part of the citizenry, paraded through the city under North Korea’s Communist banner, singing “Ten thousand years to the North Korean People’s Republic!” [….] When darkness came, Communist execution squads went from house to house, shooting “rightists” in their beds or marching them to collection points where they were mowed down. In 2-3-days, 500 civilians were slaughtered. [Time, Carl Mydans, Nov. 8, 1948]

Two U.S. Army officer observers narrowly escaped the same fate when one of the Communist leaders turned out to be a drinking buddy of theirs in his double life as a ROK Army infiltrator. And the ROK Army? According to Mydans, the best that could be said of it is that (on this occasion) it killed fewer people than the Communists. That wasn’t all that made the two sides hard to distinguish: both wore U.S. uniforms and carried U.S. weapons. And both sides armed rival groups of civilian thugs.

The Sunchon Massacre was just one of too many other examples from Time and the New York Times to list here, though here are just a few of them from before the North Korean invasion:

* Oct. 1946: “In four riotous days last week 59 Korean policemen were killed at Taegu in the U.S. zone; 60 were wounded and another 100 reported ‘missing.’ Unsigned handbills in Seoul read: ‘Down with American Imperialism,’ and ‘Why only one hop [handful] of rotten foreign corn? Corn is for horses in the United States. If death is inevitable, let us have a bowl of rice before it comes.'” How little things change.

* Oct. 1946: “Korean National Police headquarters reported today that seven civilians were killed at Masan and nine at Chingyang yesterday in attacks on police stations.”

* July 1947: “In an exclusive interview lasting more than an hour today Col. Gen. Terentyi F. Shtikov, chief Soviet delegate to the Joint United States Soviet Commission, vigorously denied reports that 400 Koreans were massacred and thousands wounded in demonstrations in North Korea on June 30.”

* Feb. 1948: “Rail and telegraph lines were cut. One twelve-car train was wrecked, and 50 locomotives were put out of action by saboteurs. In scattered clashes with South Korean police, 47 were killed, 150 arrested.”

* May 1948: Headline: “SOUTH KOREA VOTES AS COMMUNISTS TRY TO SABOTAGE POLL; Foes of U.N.-Directed Election Spread Violence — 2 Killed Attacking Seoul Booth BROADCAST HITS AT HODGE 6,000,000 Expected to Ballot in Spite of Intimidation, Murder, Kidnapping”

* Nov. 1948: South Korea’s first sort-of free election resulted in “only” 35 deaths from Communist-inspired violence.

* Jan. 1949: A North Korean raid on Kaesong, then a part of South Korea, killed 30 people. At which point, the guerrillas’ sponsors in the North invaded, which is where things reached their ugliest stage.

* Apr. 1949: To the extent you can trust any confession given to the South Korean police at that time, four Communists confessed to killing the wife of Horace Underwood.

* Oct. 1950: “The mutilated bodies of more than 500 South Korean soldiers who were prisoners of the Communists were found here on the East Coast today …”

* Oct. 1950: The village of Gurim, S. Cheolla, descends into promiscuous factional bloodletting. Retreating Communist forces lock 28 “rightists” in a barn and burn them to death. Vengeful South Korean police kill 90 villagers in reprisal.

* Oct. 1950: “Little groups of people today crawled over the sandy, boulder strewn sides of Songbok Hill on the eastern edge of this city to gaze at the mutilated, grotesquely sprawled bodies of thirty-five men, women and children slain in one of the most brutal atrocities the Communists committed during the occupation of Seoul.” The 35 were family members of South Korean police.

* Oct. 1950: “The North Korean Communists’ three months occupation of this capital city was a period of reprisal, confusion and disorganization, according to Koreans who watched closely the Communist conduct of affairs.”

* Oct. 1950:

Other Seoul witnesses described how 2,000 young men, said to be members of an anti-Communist organization, had been lined up along the banks of the Han River and machine-gunned. Little by little the picture was enlarged. At Wonju 1,000 to 2,000 had been killed, including five U.S. officers, at Suchon 280, at Mokpo 500, at Yangpyong 700, at Chongju 2,400, at Yosu 200. Everywhere the pattern was the same: these were not chance killings but deliberate, premeditated executions of political prisoners, relatives of South Korean soldiers and suspected antiCommunists. Said the United Nations Commission on Korea in a report to Secretary General Trygve Lie: “The commission condemns the complete disregard by the North Korean authorities of civilized standards of behavior as well as of the principle of the Geneva Conventions.” At week’s end a conservative estimate of the number of civilians killed by the retreating Reds was 25,000. [Time]

* Oct. 1950: “Korean Communists massacred at least sixty-eight American prisoners of war Friday night near the Sunchon railway tunnel ten miles north of here.”

* Oct. 1950: “North Korean Communist police killed at least 500 political prisoners in the last days of Red rule in Wonsan, some of those who escaped the slaughter said today.”

* Oct. 1950: “HAMHUNG, Korea, Oct. 18 (UP) –New Communist atrocities were uncovered today with the discovery of the bodies of 700 civilians crammed into a well … behind the prison of this North Korean industrial city.”

* Oct. 1950: “Three tattered survivors today said that unestimated scores of United States prisoners of war had “died like flies” on a terrifying 160-mile-death march from Seoul to Pyongyang.”

* Oct. 1950: The Judge Advocate General of the Army estimates that North Korea has killed 20,000 South Korean POW’s to date.

* Jul. 1953: “Old men and women were ruthlessly liquidated. Mother Superior Beatrice of the Order of St. Paul was shot when she could not go on. She was 77. Salvation Army Commissioner Lord, a heroic figure in Deane’s book, wrote her “death certificate” with a pistol at his head: ‘From heart failure.'”

* Oct. 1953: A Senate white paper concludes that Chinese and North Korean forces murdered tens of thousands of U.N. prisoners: “Of the 29,815 victims, there are at least 6,113 Americans.

* Oct. 1953: South Korean forces kill Communist guerrilla leader Lee Hyun-Sang in the Chiri Mountains: “Under Lee’s imaginative command, the San Sonnim wrecked thousands of South Korean trucks and trains. When the Communist army rolled south in 1950, he emerged from the hills and was made Red commissar of South Chungchong province (around Taejon). He ordered mass executions of captured South Koreans.”

(It suddenly occurs to me that by finding these old and forgotten links, I ought to be just as eligible for a Pulitzer as Hanley.)

In retrospect, about all that Syngman Rhee had going for him between 1945 and 1961 was the absence of a lesser evil. He certainly didn’t establish democracy as we know it, although it must have bested the North Korean alternative, judging by the flight of 2 million North Koreans to the South by early 1949, or, for that matter, by this picture. And not for material reasons; in those days, the South was lit by North Korean power plants until Kim Il Sung cut them off.

None of which should be seen as any defense of Syngman Rhee, who could only seem to be a tolerable alternative because of Communist infiltration and invasion. And although we may wish it happened sooner, the historical record reveals that the Americans eventually realized the savagery they were dealing with and took steps to mitigate it. Four days after the Incheon landings, the New York Times reported that the South Korean government was “studying” “steps to forestall [a] possible massacre of Communist helpers:”

The problem of dealing with Koreans charged with collaboration with the North Korean Communists during the occupation of South Korea is being closely studied here at the temporary capital as preparations get under way for the return to Seoul as soon as that city will be liberated. [New York Times]

My objection to Hanley isn’t about him telling sordid tales about “our” repellent allies, or our own willingness to tolerate those things. In context, a truthful and objective exploration of those events can be a warning and a guide to our actions in the future. Hanley gives us no such thing, nor will he until he springs for some lazik on his right eye.