Events on June 25 will mark the 75th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, but the truth is that the US was a willing partner in mass murder across the peninsula.
South Korean troops executed thousands of people in July 1950 near Daejeon, South Korea. US officers witnessed and photographed what became known as the Daejeon massacre.
(US Army)
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the official start of the Korean War, known as “the Forgotten War” in the United States, yet most commemorative events will only enforce our forgetting through a distorted narrative. It goes something like this:
On June 25, 1950, the Korean War began when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. It was a brazen act of communist aggression, an unprovoked surprise attack against an independent democratic nation, that prompted President Harry Truman to call an emergency meeting with the UN to authorize sending US forces to Korea. Although the war ended in a stalemate on July 27, 1953, the US-led UN forces, alongside South Korean forces, were successful in containing communism and safeguarding freedom in both South Korea and the United States.
The truth is, however, that South Korea—the nation that the United States and United Nations had established in 1948 after a three-year American occupation—was not democratic; it was a brutal police state that would only become democratic after four decades of popular struggle. Its first president, Syngman Rhee, had also planned to cross the 38th parallel in an armed invasion during the months leading up to June 25. Rhee’s aspirations were by no means a secret. They were publicized in South Korean newspapers, and Rhee pleaded for the United States to fund his war effort. But in the US news media, censorship was the order of the day. The New York Times, for example, voluntarily suppressed information that South Korea had been planning to attack the north.
In South Korea, too, North Korea’s transgression on June 25 is central to its narrative of the war. It is so central, in fact, that most South Koreans call the war “yuk-i-o,” or “six-two-five,” instead of “the Korean War,” thus reinforcing June 25 as its defining moment, echoing Truman’s claim that it was a defensive and righteous war. According to Kim Dong-Choon, a sociologist and a member of the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea (TRCK) from 2005 to 2009, the phrase yuk-i-o “is intended to repeatedly remind South Koreans of who was responsible for starting the war and which forces and ideological groups made them suffer such a national tragedy.… No other country in the world that has ever waged war commemorates the day it began.”
North Korea’s name for the war is “the Fatherland Liberation,” a name that sounds more obviously propagandistic but points to the fact that neither Korea regarded the other as an independent country but rather as part of itself that needed to be freed and reunified. To say that the war started on June 25 erases everything that led up to it—namely, the civil war that had already claimed at least 100,000 lives.
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For decades now, scholars, activists, and civil groups have worked to show that the war in Korea started much earlier. By some accounts, it started in the 1930s guerrilla movement against the Japanese, from which North Korea’s first president, Kim Il Sung, rose to prominence. Others argue that it started with the United States’ division of Korea in 1945 into Soviet and US occupation zones, which disrupted decolonization efforts and sowed discontent among Koreans who wanted independence and unification. The United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) then implemented unpopular and catastrophic policies that led to uprisings throughout the south during the fall of 1946. The USAMGIK suppressed the rebellion by deploying police, paramilitary, and right-wing organizations, who killed hundreds of people and arrested thousands more. The uprisings planted the seeds of the Jiri Mountain guerrilla movement that would fight the South Korean government two years later.
Another common retelling of the war’s history begins in the spring and summer of 1948, when Korea was still under occupation, and the United Nations, under US leadership, set up elections to establish the south as a separate regime. People across all social strata opposed the idea of permanent division, and Kim Ku, the right-leaning nationalist whose name appeared on the ballot against far-right Syngman Rhee, boycotted the vote and warned that establishing two Koreas would lead to war. Rhee would go on to claim “a landslide victory” in what was essentially an uncontested election, and Rhee’s right-hand man would order Kim’s assassination.
Nowhere had the opposition to separate elections been as fierce as in the southern island province of Jeju, where most residents refused to vote in the election, and thereby threatened the legitimacy of the newly declared Republic of Korea. The boycott, in conjunction with a year of protests, general strikes, and a small armed insurgency, branded Jeju as a “red island” in the eyes of the rightists whom the United States wanted to bring to power. The USAMGIK ordered “an all-out offensive” against some 500 guerrillas on Mt. Halla that culminated in the deaths of 30,000 people, 10 percent of Jeju’s population. As many as 80,000 additional Jeju Islanders escaped to Japan. Residents remember the fall of 1948 as the “era of madness.”
As South Korean forces from the mainland were being deployed to Jeju, army regiments in the cities of Yeosu and Suncheon “refused to massacre our Korean compatriots” and demanded an end to fratricide. The defecting soldiers fled to Jiri Mountain to join the guerrilla movement against what they viewed as an immoral and illegitimate government. This is the point at which a full-fledged guerrilla war broke out south of the 38th parallel in a mission to take back the country and rebuild a unified Korea. According to John Merrill’s 1989 book Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War, June 25 was the final act of the guerrilla war before it turned into a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
June 25 did mark a new chapter of the war that unleashed the military might of superpowers and was far more ruthless in its targeting of civilians. The US-led UN bombing of the north intended to harm civilians, as it was a tool of psychological warfare to demoralize the population, 20 percent of which was killed. UN forces dropped more than 400,000 bombs on Pyongyang alone—nearly as many bombs as there were people—and transformed it into “a city of cave-dwellers,” in the words of historian Callum MacDonald. North Korea remains one of the most heavily bombed countries in history, a legacy that continues to threaten the lives of people—usually children—who find unexploded ordnance. The UN’s bombing of the enemy-occupied south, while not designed to hurt civilians, was indiscriminate. By 2009, the TRCK had investigated 215 claims of the US military targeting noncombatants, usually by bombing residential areas or groups of refugees.
South Korean forces were also responsible for the mass killing of its citizens. Starting on June 25, the kind of wholesale slaughter that had been carried out in Jeju would be applied across all of South Korea. This, too, had been in the making since 1948.
Rhee’s singular purpose had been to build a strong anti-communist state, which is precisely why the United States backed him to lead South Korea. He began his presidency by jailing critics and closing left-wing newspapers, actions that were facilitated by the implementation of the National Security Law in December 1948. Rhee used the law to criminalize dissent as “anti-state” or “pro-communist,” as did most of his successors.
In April 1949, Rhee created the Bodo League (also translated as National Guidance Alliance or Press Union), a nationwide organization to “re-educate” South Koreans on the left. A successful conversion to anti-communism would enable them to “become people of the nation.” While some voluntarily joined the league, the membership drive was largely coercive and acted as a police informant network in which new recruits were forced to name others on the left. The registry included people from a wide range of political backgrounds: former members of South Korea’s communist party, politically engaged youth, peasants who had been involved in local committees or labor unions, and farmers with little knowledge of politics who had signed up in exchange for free fertilizer.
The Bodo League continued to recruit members up until June 25, 1950, at which point, it had registered 330,000 citizens. As soon as North Korea crossed the 38th parallel, Rhee ordered all their arrests. The police took them into “preventive detention,” accused them of “ideological crimes,” then judged them through what Koreans call a “finger trial” that would deliver death sentences to people still deemed red.
Three days later, the North Korean army took control of Seoul and massacred 1,000 wounded South Korean soldiers and civilians at a hospital, while the South Korean police and Counter Intelligence Corps, with the tacit approval of the United States, began a months-long extermination campaign of the Bodo League. In some instances, the police skipped the detention and went straight to the execution. They abducted people from their homes or neighborhoods, tied their hands with wire, threw them into a truck with dozens of other thought criminals, and drove them to the killing fields. The valleys in mountainous Korea can hold hundreds or thousands of bodies, and so most of them were dumped there. Others were sealed inside caves or thrown into the ocean, for reasons that are still unclear, but possibly because the victims were prominent figures whose remains needed to be hidden.
The 332-page TRCK investigation report of the Bodo League massacres, the single largest case that the commission investigated, estimates a death toll between 100,000 and 300,000. According to a former commissioner there is no way to know the exact number, because the police systematically destroyed all Bodo League records.
Families of the disappeared were often unaware that their loved ones had been killed and only began to suspect the truth once living family members were denied job opportunities or passports—telltale signs that the police considered them “guilty by association.” Others knew of their family’s persecution for having protested the government. This was the case for Noh Chi Su, whose father, a high school teacher, had been arrested in 1947 for posting flyers demanding the purge of Japanese collaborators from the USAMGIK. Because of his political activity, Rhee officials identified him as a leftist and then in 1950 killed him. Noh said about the massacres, “Dozens of people were sentenced to death each night, without lawyers present, without family present, in secret.… My father was executed without anyone ever telling us when, where, or how.”
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In October 1960, Noh’s uncle helped found the nation’s first Bereaved Families Association, but it was short-lived. Its members were arrested on the grounds that their work was anti-state. Families of the victims remained silent until the late 2000s, when regional associations sprouted up across the country. In 2020, after seven years of legal wrangling, 70 years after the massacres, Noh finally got a court declaration that his father had been innocent. Today, Noh carries on the work that his uncle started—he’s the chairman of the Changwon Bereaved Families Association in Gyeongnam province, and a nagging question drives him: “How could something like this happen in a democratic nation governed by the rule of law?”
Unlike other Korean War massacres that were partly motivated by uncertainty about whether enemy soldiers might be hiding among civilians, the Bodo League massacres cannot be called “collateral damage” or chalked up to “the fog of war.” They were highly coordinated, carried out simultaneously across several provinces of South Korea, and the groundwork for them had been laid in April 1949. While the registry began as a list of people to be re-educated, it turned into a slate of people to be killed during a national emergency, a reminder that surveillance of political groups can quickly escalate into something much darker. Some prospective recruits anticipated the consequences of joining the Bodo League and, therefore, had refused to cooperate. “I knew that they would kill me if I joined,” one woman said to a TRCK investigator.
A citizen journalist who participates in the exhumation of massacre sites explained to me that there has been debate about what to call the victims. Many South Koreans, she said, believed that the Bodo League “were communists, so no need to remember them, no need to excavate and honor them with a proper burial.” But the tide of public opinion began to change after the TRCK launched its truth-finding work in 2005. Educational literature and memorial plaques now often refer to the victims as “the sacrificed.” Yet this word is not right either. As historian Su-kyoung Hwang has written, “the idea of noble sacrifice…doesn’t apply to everyone: civilians didn’t voluntarily ‘give all’ for their country’s freedom.” Bodo League members were not soldiers or guerrillas fighting for a nation or cause. They were ordinary people who had signed up for nothing more than government indoctrination.
To think of these mass killings as sacrifices for the greater good or justifiable actions during a state of emergency are symptoms of what theologian Kelly Denton-Borhaug calls “the moral distortion of the world that is created by war.” When we say “sacrifice,” maybe what we really mean is “slaughter.”
The moral distortion of the Korean War was aided by the United Nations’ 1948 Genocide Convention when it deleted the word “political” from its original definition. In 1946, the UN General Assembly had broadly defined the crime of genocide as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups,” and specifically as “when racial, religious, political or other groups have been destroyed entirely or in part.” During the 1948 Convention, however, the Soviet Union and other member states argued that ideology was a justifiable reason to kill people during war. In “eleventh-hour drafting changes,” as a mass slaughter of the left was already underway in Korea, the United States supported removing protections for political groups from the Convention.
When we say “war,” maybe what we really mean is “genocide.”
On June 25, which words will we use to describe the Korean War? What stories will we tell about it? If we are to remember June 25 as the day that North Korea invaded the south, then we must also remember it as the day that South Korea began to systematically execute its own citizens.
Officials will no doubt speak at commemorative events of how the United States came to the aid of South Korea and forged an alliance for the noble goal of freedom. They will pay tribute to the soldiers who sacrificed their lives, and they will say that their sacrifices were not in vain. The rise of South Korea from one of the poorest nations on earth to one of the wealthiest will be proof, because the war was the backbone upon which South Korea was built.
There will also be events hosted by civil associations that will be commemorating a very different version of history. In Daejeon, Gyeongsan, and Cheongwon, where the TRCK first exhumed mass graves of the Bodo League in 2007, and throughout my family’s home province of Gyeongnam, which claims more Bodo League victims than any other, it will be an occasion to mourn our ancestors whom the state disappeared and to recognize the genocide upon which South Korea was built.
This year on June 25, which histories are we going to remember? Whose lives are we going to grieve?
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