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Watch a lot of war movies and you often see sides split into good guys and bad guys, but this doesn’t often reflect reality. When you put a weapon in a young man’s hand and send him off to kill an enemy you’ve programmed him to dehumanize, bad things happen, such as the Geochang massacre.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: February 9, 1951--
The U.S. did the lion’s share of the fighting on the “good guy” side of the Korean War. I mean if you don’t count the South Koreans. The Americans were by far the largest foreign force, but their peak deployment was a bit over 300,000 soldiers. The South Koreans had almost double that in the fight. And on February 9, 1951, South Korean soldiers did a terrible thing.
The Korean War began in the summer of 1950. It went poorly for the South at first, then it went well because of a daring amphibious landing at Incheon led by Americans that cut off North Korean invaders. Then the Southern Allies pushed far into the North and that pissed of China and they got involved and pushed them back to the 38th parallel. Then the north pushed south again a bit, then were pushed back north again, then it was two years of stalemate until they finally said fuck it and de facto brought the war to an end, although the war is de jure still going on.
It was a few months prior to the stalemate period that the South Korean Army murdered 719 unarmed citizens, mostly women, children, and elderly. It was in the county of Geochang, about 200 miles south of Seoul, near the southern tip of the peninsula. This was far from the main fighting taking place near the Southern capital of Seoul, which had recently been recaptured by Chinese and North Korean forces. This was a mass murder of their own people. But why? Fuckin’ commies, that’s why. At least, that was the excuse.
And it was an excuse used more than once. Two days before Geochang the same forces, the 11th Division of the South Korean Army, murdered 705 civilians, also mostly women and children, in nearby Sancheong and Hamyang. They said they were “sweeping up red guerrillas.” There was communist insurgency in the region, and the 11th Division employed a strategy that was epitomized later in the Vietnam War in the (apocryphal) quote “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Gotta kill everyone to save them from communist infiltration.
The murders were conducted by taking people to a remote mountain valley then shooting everyone. Then the bodies were burned, and the mountain side bombed to collapse the slope and bury their remains. They knew what they did was beyond shameful and endeavored to cover it up.
A month later a lawmaker from the region reported the massacre to the government. The whistleblower was arrested and executed. A later investigation sentenced two senior officers leading the massacre to life in prison, but the South Korean president granted them clemency.
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