REFUGEES: The Greatest Tragedy

By the roadside, a mile from Seoul, lay the frozen body of a barefooted little boy, face down in a tangled knot of abandoned telephone wire. Past his stiff, straight body moved a torrent of refugees, carrying whatever possessions they could balance on their heads or strap to their tired backs. Few glanced at the dead child; the sight was too common.

“They Just Don’t Care.” All week long before Seoul fell, the refugees poured day & night through the city, out across the Han River ice and south along frozen roads, railroad tracks and byways toward Pusan. Hoping that the retreating U.N. forces would still stop somewhere and give them protection from the Communists, more than 1,000,000 of Seoul’s 1,200,000 people took to the road. Altogether, nearly 2,000,000 were moving across the countryside.

A few lucky ones escaped in army vehicles, battered civilian autos, wheezing motorcycles, oxcarts; thousands packed themselves into southbound railroad gondola cars. But most of them walked, their feet bound with rags, their bodies swathed in bed quilts, blankets, silks. Retreating U.N. troops stopped frequently to rescue crying babies strapped to the backs of mothers who had fallen dead.

At Yongdung rail junction, outside Seoul, 20,000 refugees squatted in an area about 100 yards wide and half a mile long, waiting for a chance to clamber aboard freight trains. They strapped themselves to the sides of flatcars, clung to perilous footholds by slender strands of rope. On one engine, a woman wedged herself atop a steam valve to keep warm, not realizing that when the train started moving she would inevitably freeze and topple off.

Said an American captain: “You can’t keep them off the tracks. Sometimes as many as four or five are killed in a single night. Most of them just get confused. But I guess some of them get so tired and hopeless that they just don’t care enough any more to get out of the way.”

Lessons Learned. The refugees fled in fear of being caught between the opposing armies, in fear of Red reprisals (many had been openly anti-Communist during the brief weeks of U.N. victory), above all in fear of their ancient enemies, the Chinese, for whom they had revived their old epithet oranke (savages). Many who had stayed when the Reds invaded South

Korea last June, this time picked up their bundles and ran. They had learned the bitter lessons of Communist liberation.

The U.N. army’s Civil Assistance Command and Korean officials, doing their desperate best to provide clothing and shelter, tried to persuade the refugees to go to southwest Korea, where it would be easier to feed them. But the refugees, remembering that last time the Communists quickly overran the southwest, insisted on going to Pusan, where the U.N. army was likeliest to hold.

Sad Responsibility. Pusan was already choked with 225,000 refugees (normal pop. 400,000), and had to be kept free for the movement of military supplies. At week’s end, the U.N. army announced that once again Communist agents had been found among the refugees, ordered more thorough screening (which would be an added burden for U.N. forces).

Last week 40 trucks bought with ECA money and loaded with blankets and clothing drove ashore at Pusan, the first to arrive of 214 trucks which ECA bought originally to rehabilitate the South Korean economy. More supplies were on the way. But at best, all that the refugees could look forward to was huddling in warehouses or other improvised shelters, waiting for rice handouts, sometimes literally burning up the buildings to keep warm.

The U.S. had a sad responsibility toward Korea’s refugees, for it had held out to them, at least implicitly, the promise of protection from the Reds. Yet the U.S., itself in a desperate military plight in Korea, could scarcely do more to help the refugees. No one knew what was to become of them if & when the U.N. line once more shrank to the narrow Pusan perimeter—or the U.N. forces were forced out of Korea altogether. Said Eighth Army Commander Matthew B. Ridgway, of the refugees’ plight: “Perhaps the greatest tragedy to which Asia has ever been subjected in the course of its long history . . . Everything else is dwarfed by the pathos of this tragedy, and our American people haven’t the faintest concept of it. In the words of Shakespeare, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ “