LETTER TO THE EDITOR
BY THOMAS C. STURTEVANT
To the Editor:
According to your Oct. 27 story, Secretary of Defense
William Cohen plans to send "an Army investigative team to South Korea to begin
the field inquiry into allegations of a Korean War massacre of civilians by
U.S. soldiers."
While in South
Korea, the team should look into another massacre of civilians by the U.S. a
week before the Nogun village incident.
Bruce Cummings, an authority on Korea and the war, wrote in the Oct. 25
Nation that: "…according to 10 witnesses who spoke to a North Korean army
detachment that arrived there on July 20, U.S. troops herded some 2,000
civilians into the mountains near Yongdong and then slaughtered them,
apparently mostly from the air, although the account also said several women
were raped before being shot…"
With time on
its hands, the team could also venture into North Korea to investigate a crime
of more horrendous proportions.
According to
the May 15 Nation: "On May 13, 1953, in
Korea the U.S. Air Force attacked and destroyed the Toksan dam near
Pyongyang. The aim was to wreck the
system irrigating three-quarters of North Korea’s rice farms. Adjacent dams were bombed on succeeding days,
while the armistice talks went on…"
In their book,
"Korea: The Unknown War," Jon Halliday and Bruce Cummings quote from the main
U.S. Air Force study of these bombings:
"These strikes, largely passed over by the press, military observers,
and news commentators … constituted one of the most significant air operations
of the Korean War …" [and] ‘that attacks in May would be most effective
psychologically when the arduous labor of rice transplanting had been completed
but before the roots became firmly embedded.
"Flood waters
bursting through the destroyed Toksan dam ‘scooped clear 27 miles of valley
below,’ drowned the civilians in the shelter … and sent floods into
Pyongyang. The USAF study tranquilly
stressed, "To the Communists the smashing of the dams meant primarily the
destruction of their chief sustenance—rice.
The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning that the loss of
this staple food commodity has for the Asian—starvation and slow death."
For ordering
the opening of the dikes in Holland in the final months of World War II, which
flooded 500,000 acres of land, the German High Commissioner in Holland,
Seyss-Inquart, was sentenced to death along with 23 other Nazis at Nuremberg.
And while
Cohen’s investigative team is in Asia, it may want to drift south and check out
the U.S. bombing of dikes in South Vietnam, U.S. complicity in the deaths of
200,000 East Timorese or Cohen’s cozy connections with Kopassus, the Indonesian
army’s special forces legendary for their cruelty.
Awareness of
atrocities committed by combatants on both sides led me to join a national
organization called Veterans for Peace, founded in Maine in 1984 by a former
Marine, whose brother was killed in Vietnam, and several other Maine
veterans. It now includes members and
chapters in most states and several nations.
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