Political Cleansing
Wikimedia CommonsTerrified civilian members of the Bodo League await execution over a ditch in Daejeon, South Korea. June 1950.
As brutal as the air war against the North was, much of the devastation could conceivably be excused as the collateral damage of ordinary war operations. This could not be said, however, for the mass shootings of civilians who were suspected of having communist sympathies.
Starting in the summer of 1950, just weeks before the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korean “self-defense forces” rounded up and shot tens of thousands of people.
The first major shooting took place in Daejeon, South Korea. Here, South Korean military and civil police rounded up between 100,000 and 300,000 members of the Bodo League — a national re-education organization aimed at purging the South of communists — and shot them and their families.
This massacre seems to have been motivated by expediency, as reeducating hundreds of thousands of people was taking a really long time and war was looming. Therefore, the authorities evidently felt the need to eliminate a potential Fifth Column before it could aid the enemy.
League members were taken from their forced-labor details and led to open trenches in the Daejeon area. From there, their hands were bound and they were shot while kneeling at the edge of the ditches. The bodies were covered with earth, and the surviving members of the league were told they would get similar treatment if they ever talked about what they saw.
In recent years, many of the execution sites have been excavated, and the remains of men, women, and children have been recovered from the mass graves.
Wikimedia CommonsPolitical prisoners huddle together before their execution in Daejong, South Korea. The unidentified man in the foreground may be an American military observer. Date unspecified.
The National Self-Defense Forces didn’t limit themselves to shooting South Koreans of suspect loyalties, either.
Once Allied forces occupied the North, these “civilian” units swept over the conquered territory and began a political cleansing of Korean Workers’ Party members and sympathizers, along with anybody suspected of being less than enthusiastic about all the new “freedom” that North Korea was getting thanks to the invading UN forces.
At Sinchon, in southwestern North Korea, South Korean forces shot another huge number of people. How many exactly is not known, and it probably never will be known because of subsequent communist propaganda, which unnecessarily inflated every number until it bore little connection to reality.
The North claims that 35,000 people were shot at Sinchon between October and December 1950. If true, this number represents 25 percent of Sinchon’s entire population at the time.
North Korean sources also claim that the United States led and perpetrated the massacre, though this remains very much in dispute.
North Korean accounts tell of American soldiers chopping off civilians’ heads with samurai swords. This last detail is telling, as postwar North Korean propaganda has always drawn a straight line between the American presence in Korea and the Japanese occupation in the decades beforehand. Thus, if accounts of Americans with samurai swords are fictional, they are likely an attempt by North Korea to evoke the imagery of the hated Japanese when teaching children the approved history of the “Imperialist Aggressor” War.
But, samurai swords or no samurai swords, however the executions were done, and whatever the final body count, many were clearly murdered at Sinchon and the mass shootings didn’t stop until UN forces were driven out of the North.
