On a Large Scale

The war was only a fortnight old when the bodies of seven U.S. soldiers captured by the North Koreans were found, shot in the head and with their hands tied behind them. After that, U.N. troops had no illusion about the kind of enemy they were fighting, but no one was quite prepared for the grisly picture of systematic Communist atrocity revealed last week in South Korea.

Recapturing Taejon, the 24th Division found the bodies of 40 American soldiers thrown into long trenches in the Taejon prison yard. There was one survivor, Sergeant Carey H. Weiner of Hickman Mills, Mo. Wounded only in the hand, he had feigned death, lain in the trench for two days. Weiner said that before pulling out of Taejon the Communists tied the prisoners together, pushed them into the trenches and shot them as they crouched against the sides. The Communists then shoveled dirt on the bodies. As the Taejon area was searched, the bodies of 5,000 or 6,000 Koreans were found.

In Seoul, the bodies of 35 men, women & children were found on the boulder-strewn side of Songbok hill where they had been shot down by Communist police. Mayor K. B. Lee of Seoul said that the dead had been relatives of members of the national police force who escaped in the early stages of the invasion. 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.