U.S. Wavered over South Korean Executions

The American Colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. However, the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart that it would be permitted to machine-gun 3500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces. This may sound harsh, but this is war. Other American officers observed that in the early days of the Korean War, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, happened in a few weeks in mid-1950. This was photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally. They found through extensive research that Gen. Douglas MacArthur took no action to stop the mass killing. The knowledge of this reached top levels of the Pentagon and State Department in Washington, where it was classified as secret and filed away.