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The Journal of Military History 68.2 (2004) 684-687



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Letters to the Editor


We are always pleased to have letters to the editor because this shows that people are reading our Journal seriously. However, due to space limitations, we ask that you keep your letters under 500 words.

To the Editor:

A review in the April 2003 issue of the book No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident [JMH 67, no. 2] unfortunately conveyed to Journal readers a highly erroneous picture of the 1950 refugee killings by the U.S. Army.

We were the Associated Press reporters who confirmed the mass civilian killing by the 7th Cavalry Regiment through interviews with more than a dozen ex-soldiers, whose accounts meshed with those of two dozen South Korean survivors also interviewed. In addition, our archival research uncovered U.S. military orders during this period to indiscriminately shoot refugees.

We have found in the reviewed book more than 100 significant errors, major distortions and omissions, and baseless assertions. To focus on just three highlighted in the review:

The book's author contends, citing no evidence whatever, that No Gun Ri was a "collage" of different events. This assertion would shock the survivors. Betraying his bias, the author chose not to interview any of the many Korean witnesses, presenting instead his own conjectural scenario.

The reviewer says the author, with "carefully argued recreation," describes GIs firing back at "two guerrillas" among the refugees. The reviewer doesn't realize that a document cited in a footnote as supporting this tale does no such thing. The document, not reproduced or even quoted from in the book, is a unit log containing a terse report of two enemy rifles found at some unidentified location and at some unspecified time in the regimental area. Incredibly, the author decided to ascribe these weapons to imagined "guerrillas" among the targeted refugees.

The reviewer writes that the author "relies heavily on interviews with veterans," when in fact the book cites interviews with only four ex-soldiers, a grossly inadequate number. The AP eventually found 26 ex-GIs who confirmed that a large number of refugees were killed at No Gun Ri. Pentagon investigators in 2000 found at least nine additional U.S. Army witnesses.

The mass refugee killings at No Gun Ri, South Korea, were established four years ago as an irrefutable historical fact, one that then was affirmed by a Pentagon investigative report in 2001, when the president of the United States issued a statement of deep regret.

Interested JMH readers can find a factually based account in our book, The Bridge at No Gun Ri (Henry Holt and Company, 2001), and can find [End Page 684] solid documentary material at the websites http://www.henryholt.com/ nogunri/documents.htm and http://wire.ap.org/APpackages/nogunri/. The declassified U.S. military documents at the first site include 19 communications from 1950-51 in which units are ordered or authorized to indiscriminately kill Korean civilians. The second site includes our full original reporting on No Gun Ri.

Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, Martha Mendoza
Associated Press
New York, New York

Dr. Matray declined to respond.

To the Editor

For some time I have waited for someone to jump in with a letter about the article in the July 2003 issue of the Journal of Military History titled "'Now a Major Motion Picture': War Films and Hollywood's New Patriotism" by Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli. So now, here is my correction to their article.

It seems that the authors have fallen into the common trap of making General Robert L. Scott a member of the Flying Tigers, more correctly known as the American Volunteer Group. In their article they wrote, "God Is My Co-Pilot (1945), a film based on the memoirs of Robert Scott of the famed Flying Tigers." Unfortunately, General Scott was never a member of the American Volunteer Group and he is not listed on the register of the American Volunteer Group's 67 pilots.

When the AVG was disbanded on 4 July...

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