Hidden history of Korean War: Secrets of a Cave

Korea International War Crimes Tribunal, June 23, 2001, New York
Report on US Crimes in Korea 1945-2001

12. Hidden History of Korean War:
Secrets of a Cave

Korean p.o.w.s

Deirdre Griswold

Workers World
June 15, 2000

Dae Won Valley, South Korea

On a peaceful spring day when the acacia trees are blooming and green leaves and grasses shimmer in the sunshine, it is hard to imagine what this valley was like in the summer of 1950. During those opening months of a ferocious war, there was fighting all over.

Many of the fallen are buried in hillside graves that are carefully tended to this day.

Tourists could drive right through here without having to think about the past. They probably wouldn't know that this valley's name--Dae Won--means suppressed rage and sorrow, and that it describes the feelings of many of the people living here.

Now imagine that the tourists make a wrong turn and somehow wind up on the narrow road that leads to an abandoned cobalt mine outside the village of Kyung San. Far up the hillside is an opening to a dangerous vertical shaft. But they'd be safe because the gaping hole is covered by a rusty old metal grating.

Lower down, they'd find an entrance to a cave. If the tourists are curious, they might duck under the rock overhang at the entrance and peer into the inky blackness. And if they don't mind dirtying their shoes, or have brought along rubber boots and a good flashlight, they could ignore the cold, dripping water and slog through the slippery mud some 100 feet to the back of the cave, where it meets the bottom of the vertical shaft.

And then they might begin to appreciate the horrors of the Korean War.

Not just a military conflict

That war was not just a military conflict between two armies of vastly unequal technology and resources. It was a continuation of the Korean people's struggle for national liberation--which had been going on since Japanese colonial rule.

On the part of the United States capitalist government, which had rounded up a "coalition" of nations to send token numbers of troops so that Washington's war could be called a "United Nations police action," it was a war to consolidate its economic hold over Asia. Many GIs had just paid with their lives for these rich men's ambitions in World War II.

For the Koreans, the war was also a class struggle by the workers and peasants. They had borne the brunt of Japan's brutal colonial oppression, which started in 1910. They had been used as slave laborers and "comfort women" during World War II. When that war ended, the anti-Japanese liberation army led by Marshal Kim Il Sung took power in the north of Korea, with the support of the Soviet Red Army.

This revolutionary force carried out a sweeping social reorganization, taking power and property away from the landlords and merchants who had collaborated with Japanese rule and setting up a democratic people's republic.

But south of the 38th parallel, the U.S. forces that rushed in to fill the vacuum left by Japan's surrender actually re-armed Japanese soldiers who had been disarmed by the people. Their task was to prevent revolution. Their allies were the landlords and merchants who had collaborated with colonialism.

This was a time when capitalist rule had been weakened in Asia by the collapse of the Japanese empire and the rise of communist-led revolutionary movements in China, Vietnam and Korea.

Preparation for a new war

From 1945 to 1950 was a tense time on the Korean peninsula.

The country was divided for the first time in its history. Families were separated as the demilitarized zone became transformed into a bristling rampart between two opposing armies.

High officials of the U.S. government, including the notorious war hawk John Foster Dulles, came personally to the DMZ for photo opportunities to prepare the U.S. population for a new war.

In June of 1950 that war broke out. By the time it ended three years later, 3 million Koreans, thousands of Chinese volunteers and 55,000 U.S. troops had been killed.

When the war started, many people in the south of Korea welcomed the troops from the north as their liberators, despite all the demonizing propaganda they had heard for five years. They saw the war as the completion of the great anti-colonial struggle started in the 1930s against Japan. They gave food and drink to the partisans in the mountains.

Their enemies were the invading forces from the United States, whose pose as "liberators" was now unmasked.

It was in the opening months of that war, from the end of July to some time in August, that the peace was shattered in the farming villages of Dae Won Valley. The area was sympathetic to the north--or at least the U.S. military command thought it was.

Soon the jails of Taegu city were full of members of the political opposition. The U.S.-puppet dictator Syngman Rhee, who 10 years later was overthrown in a nationwide uprising, had set up an organization--Bo Do Yun Maeng, or the National League to Provide Guidance--to seek out those accused of being "subversives" and hand them over to the police.

Today, an Investigations Committee and a Committee of Victims' Families are finding out what happened to the people who disappeared in that period. Since Jan. 26 of this year, they have operated a center in Taegu to receive information.

Just to make such inquiries is dangerous. The head of an earlier investigations committee, Lee Bong Yon, served eight years in jail for his efforts. Attempts to get the south Korean government to release secret documents have been futile.

Yoo Yoon Ham, president of the Committee of Victims' Families, says that for many years "we were accused of being communist sympathizers, so we couldn't speak out." But now people are coming forward with what they know.

Trail leads to the mine

The trail leads to the old cobalt mine near Kyung San.

Chae Sim Ho of the Investigations Committee says some 3,000 to 3,500 people were massacred there. Some were political prisoners who had been held in Taegu Prison under a preventive-detention law dating back to Japanese occupation.

But this was 1950, and the United States was now occupying south Korea. It was the Pentagon, under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, that had taken for itself overall operational command of all military actions and was therefore responsible for the deeds of the south Korean army.

A few survivors managed to tell the story of the mine. And it has been known in the villages ever since.

The prisoners were taken by soldiers of the south Korean army to the top of the vertical shaft, eight of them tied together, and shot. Their bodies then fell down the mine shaft.

"It was a convenient place to kill," Chae told a solidarity delegation May 17 as they looked down the old shaft. The group was visiting Korea at the invitation of the National Alliance for Democracy and Reunification of Korea. "They didn't have to dig. And when, after days of killings, they began to run low on bullets, they would shoot just one or two. Since the prisoners were tied together, they would all fall down the shaft.

"Lee Won Chik was a well-known labor leader at that time. They couldn't find him so they killed his wife. Lee was later arrested and served 11 years. After he got out of jail, he was killed in a suspicious car accident. His son is alive now and remembers all this."

The delegates went to the cave below the mine shaft. An altar was placed at the entrance. Burning incense, food and drink were set out to soothe the spirits of the massacre victims. Before entering the cave, each visitor knelt and performed a ceremony of respect for the dead.

Then they pulled on high rubber boots. "Watch your heads," the guides warned. Stooping double and sliding through clay and mud, they made their way to the back of the mine.

Their flashlights lit up a great pile of rocks. And something else.

Human bones lay on and under the rocks. An old skull stared into space.

No one could speak for a long time. In this country where graves are tended so carefully, it was especially shocking to think of all the years these remains had lain in their mass grave. Intimidation had prevented the survivors from trying to find and bury the bodies of their loved ones.

Several young Koreans from the United States wept quietly as the group filed out of the mine.

The Kyung San cobalt mine is just one site. There are 10 more in Kyung Sang Province alone, according to the newly formed investigating committees that are uncovering massacres by U.S. and south Korean troops during the war.

This grim history is now fueling a resurgence of struggle for acknowledgment of these massacres and other crimes, compensation for the survivors and victims' families, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea.

Reprinted from the June 15, 2000 issue of Workers World newspaper.

Copyleft Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim
copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact:
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org.

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS