When U.S. Bombed Korean War Peace Talks
Israel upended Gaza truce talks via assassination of Hamas' top negotiator. Nearly 73 years earlier, during the Korean War, the US bombed the North Korean & Chinese armistice reps' compound at Kaesong
The on-again, off-again nature of the cease-fire talks between Hamas and Israel, and various intermediary parties, including the United States, appear interminable. There could not have been any worse showing of bad faith by the Israeli government than the assassination in Tehran of Hamas’s chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, all while bombing and prosecuting mass murder and targeted killings in Gaza.
It’s difficult to believe that any kind of truce process could proceed after such crimes, not to mention the assassination a day before Haniyeh of a top Hezbollah commander. On one hand, the world awaits Iran’s response to Israel’s attack on their territory, while on the other hand, Israel’s patron in Washington, D.C. continues to promote a gravely wounded peace process, one which the U.S. has done everything possible to subvert.
One historical parallel to the Gaza peace talks scandal seems worth recalling. I’m talking about the little remembered, and almost never fully reported, series of attacks by the U.S. on the North Korean and Chinese compound at Kaesong, where Communist negotiators (and some members of the press as well), stayed during the first months of truce negotiations during the Korean War. (Some months later the talks were moved to Panmunjom.)
“… there could be no doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that the attack was a deliberate attempt to murder the Korean-Chinese delegates, carried out by a skillful pilot who had carefully studied the area and knew the precise location of the delegation residence in relation to geographic features.” — Wilfred Burchett
The Kaesong attacks included bombings, strafing by machine guns, the murder of a Chinese military police officer, and the killing of a 12-year-old child, all by U.S. and/or Republic of Korea (ROK) military personnel. Of course, these attacks were denied by U.S. officials, until, in two cases (related below), United Nations Command (UNC) had to admit it was responsible for a couple of the attacks. Some representative headlines from the period (pictured below) provide a flavor of the controversy. Note that in each case the story was page one newspaper material.
Don’t be too surprised if you haven’t heard of this scandal before. It’s barely mentioned in most Korean War histories. And when it is mentioned, the Western historians almost always take the side of the American military that the charges were trumped up (except for those occurrences to which the U.S. admitted). Rarely is this history mentioned anymore in the Western press. India’s Hindustan Times very briefly recalled some of the scandal three years ago.
The U.S. attacks on the peace process in the Korean War also must be understood in the context of other atrocities committed by the U.S. and the ROK armies, and their allies during this period. From massive use of napalm, to orders to shoot civilians, to the use of biological weapons, by summer 1951 the totality of allied atrocities had already been assessed as reaching the level of a genocide by a visiting group of Western legal experts.
On July 24, 2023, the U.S. Department of Defense released an article commemorating the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean War armistice at Panmunjom, Korea. The article by David Vergun, “Long Diplomatic Wrangling Finally Led to Korean Armistice 70 Years Ago,” never even alluded to the scandal around the U.S. attacks. Vergun wrote that the imbroglio over the repatriation policy surrounding prisoners of war led to the breaking off of the first round of peace talks on August 23, 1951.
But that wasn’t the case at all. The POW issue did not become a major sore point until the negotiations shifted to Panmunjom later that year. Initially, the controversy was over where the truce line, or “line of demarcation,” would be drawn. But even that wasn’t the reason for what was an initial, if temporary, halt to the negotiations. Something had happened the day before, on August 22.
Prelude to Peace Talks
A 1972 U.S. Army history by James F. Schnabel, described the situation on the eve of the armistice negotiations. The U.S.-led UNC “ground forces in Korea exceeded 550,000, the bulk of which comprised 17 divisions (7 American and 10 ROK), 4 brigades, 1 separate regiment, and 9 separate battalions.” Chinese and North Korean “forces totaled about 459,000 divided among 13 Chinese armies and 7 North Korean corps. The significant point of difference was in available reserves. Whereas the United Nations Command had no appreciable source of reinforcement anywhere, its opponents had close at hand some 743,000 Chinese troops in Manchuria.” Neither side had been able to achieve a decisive victory.
Schnabel also noted the high casualty rate, at least as the Americans tallied it:
By 10 July 1951, estimates of total enemy casualties had risen above 1,200,000, divided almost evenly between the Chinese and North Koreans. The costs to United Nations Command forces also had been dear. By the end of June 1951 American combat losses stood at about 78,800, of whom approximately 21,300 were killed in action or subsequently died as a result of their combat participation. Losses among other United Nations contingents were in proportion to the Americans'; and ROK Army casualties numbered 212,554, including 21,625 dead. The ROK civilian population had paid a still higher price, suffering some 469,000 casualties, of whom at least 170,000 had been killed.
The first year of the war had been marked by tremendous upheavals, atrocities and deaths. The Korean People’s Army (KPA) of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) had swept aside both the ROK army and what U.S. troops were present in their sweep down the peninsula in the first months of the war. The September 1950 U.S. landing at Inchon had outflanked the KPA forces and cut off their supplies. The U.S. decided to pursue the KPA past the 38th parallel that separated the DPRK and ROK. The KPA was driven back to the Yalu River in its far north, when in November 1950 the forces of China’s People’s Volunteer army (CPV) entered the fray. By December 1950 and January 1951, the formerly victorious U.S. forces were driven back in pell-mell fashion. By the middle of 1951, the war bogged down in a back and forth around the 38th parallel.
On July 23, 1951 the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations told a radio audience that a settlement of the Korean conflict was possible. Such a cessation of combat would be premised upon a withdrawal by forces of both sides around the 38th parallel. Battered and bleeding, both sides appeared to avidly take up the Soviet suggestion. Moreover, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson said a settlement around the 38th parallel seemed acceptable.
Not everyone was happy, however. ROK dictator Syngman Rhee said a cease-fire would only happen if Korea were reunited under an anti-communist banner. Inside the U.S. military, General James Van Fleet, commander of the U.S. Eighth Army was still fuming over the failure of higher command to approve his plan for a second Inchon-style amphibious landing to surprise and take on what he felt was China’s weakened army.
According to Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, then in Korea covering the war for the French Communist newspaper Ce Soir, the U.S. military saw the armistice as a means to play for time once the use of atomic weapons had been rejected. The military still intended to prosecute the war to victory.
Whether or Burchett felt that way in July 1951, I can’t say, but by the time he wrote his book “This MonstrWar” (authored in 1953, but published prior to the final armistice agreement), Burchett argued that the long armistice negotiations were conducted largely in bad faith by the Americans. His book describes, among other things, the outrageous ways the U.S. military tried to sabotage the negotiations literally from the beginning.
The remainder of this article will draw heavily on Burchett’s eyewitness reporting. While Burchett was often quoted by U.S. journalists in Korea (see here and here), due to censorship restrictions on the latter by U.S. authorities, the material in This Monstrous War (TMW) was not available to contemporary American readers. As the editors of Red Star Publishers explained when they republished the book in 2013:
This is the first time this book is appearing in the United States. According to [historian] Gavan McCormack, “in the United States the entire consignment of the book (500 copies) was seized by US Customs and dumped in the sea on its arrival in that country late in the same year (1953), and as a result no major American library possesses a copy to this day.”
The confiscation of Burchett’s book was not atypical of the time, as in 1950 the U.S. Post Office and Customs Department had initiated a program of mass seizure of supposed Communist literature entering the United States, destroying 100,000s of mailed printed materials a month at the height of the program. This destruction continued until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the program in 1965.
The Talks Begin
The first months of the armistice negotiations were not especially hopeful. The Americans came to regret agreeing to Kaesong as a neutral site. They felt it was too close to areas of Communist control. Then, there was a misunderstanding by Chinese troops, who on July 22, the first official day of the talks, detained for an hour a convoy of UNC delegates headed for the meeting. The Chinese quickly apologized, but American nerves were frazzled.
The Communist delegation stayed in Kaesong, but the UNC delegation, which was mostly Americans, with only one ROK representative, stayed 21 miles away in Munsan. (The ROK delegate had been an officer in Japan’s army in Manchuria during World War II, a fact that grated on DPRK and Chinese officials.) The negotiations were held in what historian William Stueck described was once “the most expensive restaurant” in Kaesong ( The Korean War: An International History, 1995, Princeton University Press, pg. 222.)
Stueck’s account of the first encounter is comical.
Admiral [Charles Turner] Joy met General Nam II, the chief North Korean negotiator. Stiffly the two men and their subordinates exchanged introductions and credentials. Once seated, Joy found himself peering northward — in Oriental cultures, the victor faced south — and directly into the eyes of the much shorter Nam. The Communists had provided the leading enemy spokesman with an abnormally low chair, their own with an exceedingly high one. Joy soon retrieved a chair of normal size, but, as he later recalled, “not before Communist photographers had exposed reels of film.” [Ibid.]
Burchett described the initial meetings and the stances taken by either side.
General Nam Il, Chief of Staff of the Korean People’s Army and senior delegate of the Korean-Chinese delegation at the initial meeting on July 10, presented a three point workmanlike proposed agenda for a quick cease-fire. The three points provided for a ceasefire on land, sea and in the air, a withdrawal by both sides of ten kilometres from the 38th parallel and exchange of prisoners, and the withdrawal of all foreign troops within the shortest possible time.
Almost the first words of the senior American delegate, the elderly, waxen-faced Admiral Joy, were to the effect that there would be no let-up in hostilities until all the terms of an armistice were agreed on and an approved armistice commission set up and ready to function. [pgs. 122-124, TMW]
Some of the positions the U.S. took weren’t acceptable to the Communist side. Burchett again:
At the first meeting also, Joy proposed that the exchange of prisoners of war should be the first item discussed. The significance of this extraordinary demand that a settlement of P.O.W. exchange should take precedence over discussions of the actual cease-fire, only became apparent many months later when the Americans used their ace card of detaining Korean-Chinese prisoners of war to postpone a settlement indefinitely and eventually break off the talks on this issue. Joy obviously counted on blocking the armistice on the first item.
The POW repatriation issue eventually would come to swamp the entire armistice issue, as the Americans would maintain, against the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, that prisoners should not be immediately repatriated at the conclusion of hostilities, but would have to be individually questioned as to whether they wished to return to China or the DPRK, or remain in “freedom” under Syngnam Rhee’s dictatorship. This controversy deserves a fuller airing, but I’m going to pass over it at this point, as it is not germane to the early period of the negotiations I’m discussing here.
The first sticking point in the negotiations was the U.S. refusal to place the withdrawal of foreign troops on the agenda. General Nam Il called for a recess in the talks until July 25 over the impasse.
While the talks were temporarily suspended, Burchett and another Communist journalist, Alan Winnington (with whom Burchett would later collaborate) arrived in Kaesong along with some Chinese journalists, to cover the talks. Burchett’s eyewitness description is harrowing:
On the entire road from Antung to Kaesong, there was no hospital, school, church or any public building which had not been destroyed by the U.S. Air Force or U.N. demolition teams during their withdrawal…. we had arrived at Kaesong. At first glance the city seemed completely destroyed. The centre was a shambles with a few apathetic-looking citizens sitting forlornly at improvised stalls and remnants of western-style schools, churches and hospitals poking out of the ruins of the more lightly built Korean structures. [pp. 129-130, TMW]
Burchett was present when the negotiations resumed on July 25. “The delegates entered the conference room by separate entrances and sat opposite each other at a long, green, dais-covered table with the U.N. and Korean flags facing in the centre of the table. Groups of staff officers sat at small tables to the rear of the chief delegates.” he wrote (pg. 131, TMW).
Burchett commented that right from the beginning "American correspondents… were less informed about what was happening, even at that stage, than ourselves” (Ibid.)
The U.S. returned to its stance that the question of the withdrawal of foreign troops be put off until after an armistice. Finally a compromise agenda was worked out.
The terms of the compromise were as follows. First, a military demarcation line between both sides would be established. The presence of a demilitarized zone would be the “basic condition for a cessation of hostilities in Korea.” “Concrete arrangements” for the organization of such a cease-fire and armistice, including the composition of “a supervising organization,” would be made. This would be followed by “arrangements relating to prisoners of war,” and finally “recommendations to the governments concerned on both sides” (pp. 131-32, TMW). The last point was vague enough to possibly concern the withdrawal of foreign troops, and satisfied the North Korean and Chinese representatives.
The talks bogged down again over the initial agenda point: setting the location of the demarcation or truce line. As the participants began the discussions on this, the U.S. again bombed Pyongyang, as if they were trying to make a point. Burchett thought the “savage” bombing had been made “apparently with the idea that General Kim Il-sung would immediately panic at the sound of bombs falling and order the delegates to capitulate” (pg. 134, TMW).
The U.S. contended the demarcation line should be north of the 38th parallel. Indeed, it should even be north of where UNC troops were currently positioned. The extra territory should be ceded by the Communists, who should withdraw some miles, as recompense for the fact that the U.S. held air and naval dominance over most of North Korea, and would be ceding that if there were an armistice. But the American demands were kept secret at the time. The reports in the U.S. press about the situation at the talks were not factual, while the true U.S. position was presented as if it were Communist propaganda.
One characteristic news report, as published via “press reports” in the August 7 edition of the Birmingham Post-Herald (pg. 1), stated:
Red broadcasters harped on their persistent claim that the Allies were demanding a line somewhere north of the present battle line, while the Communists themselves insisted on the 38th Parallel….
Ridgway’s headquarters issued a statement which said the line demanded by the Allies “is in effect the line now generally held by the UN forces.”
Brigadier General William P. Nuckols, the UNC’s official spokesman on Kaesong conference matters, otherwise indicated, according to the Birmingham press report, “there would be no news immediately about the meeting here,” leaving U.S. reporters to mainly speculate about what was really going on.
As a diversion of sorts, the U.S. instead made a strong protest when on August 4, “[d]uring the luncheon recess at Kaesong, Admiral Joy saw about 80 Chinese troops carrying weapons heavier than permitted in the conference site area. Their weapons it is true were carried on their shoulders and they presented no hostile attitude,” Burchett wrote, “but it was a technical violation of the neutrality agreement” [pg. 135, TMW].
Supreme Allied Commander General Matthew Ridgway charged the Communists with a “flagrant violation” of Kaesong’s demilitarization by armed Chinese troops “that marched in formation past the house set aside for the United Nations truce delegation” (Current History, Vol. 21, No. 122, October, 1951, pg. 243) He demanded assurances from his DPRK and Chinese compeers that this show of force, as he saw it, would not recur. The talks were again suspended until August 10. When they resumed, the same dispute over the demarcation line boiled over.
Admiral Joy was insistent concerning the forward projection of the cease-fire line. Burchett described a dramatic confrontation on August 12:
Eventually, as it was impossible to get the Americans to put their line on to a map, on August 12 General Nam Il walked into the conference room with a map on which he had plotted the current battleline and the American proposed demarcation line. He laid it down in front of Joy and asked bluntly, “Is this what you mean or not?” Joy said it was substantially correct and went again into the arguments of compensation for air and naval superiority. Nam Il reminded him coldly that the days were gone for ever when imperialist powers could sail in with a few gunboats and get whole kingdoms in Asia by such methods.
I think it is clear from subsequent events that Ridgway from the moment the idea of a settlement on the 38th parallel was rejected, had instructions to wreck the talks. He believed this could be done by presenting demands which he knew could never be accepted. They were demands which he knew could never be accepted. They were demands such as a victor power could impose on a defeated power, but could not form even the basis for discussion when each side had powerful, intact armies in the field. Ridgway thought the Koreans and Chinese would break off the talks while he could keep the real reason for the breakdown hidden from public knowledge. [pg. 136, TMW]
Meanwhile, on the battlefield, the U.S. resumed military pressures when, after August 18, “UN forces commenced limited offensives on the central and eastern fronts” (Stueck, pg. 231). Back in Kaesong, on August 19, a serious incident occurred.
As Stueck described it, “the leader of a Chinese military police unit patrolling the neutral zone [Platoon Commander Yao Ching-Hsiang] died in an ambush by what the Communists claimed were UNC troops. The UNC countered that none of its personnel bore responsibility for the attack but that South Korean partisans may have been the culprits" (Stueck, pg. 130).
So the situation was already extremely tense when on the night of August 22, the Communist quarters at Kaesong were attacked by air. This could not have been the act of “partisans.”
August 22 Bombing of Kaesong
Burchett’s eyewitness account of the initial attack is as follows:
At 10.15 that night I was the only one of the 15 journalists accredited to the North Korean Chinese delegation to be in bed. A plane with a more than usually menacing sound seemed to be circling over our roof and I crawled out from under the mosquito net just as someone yelled “Put out the lights!” I had just reached the verandah when there was a rippling series of white flashes and the ear splitting sound of bombs exploding nearby. “Bang goes neutrality and the talks” flashed through my mind as a Chinese bodyguard guided me into a ditch where we crouched as the plane made another circle and went into a dive again. When it seemed perilously close it opened up with its machine guns.
The plane pulled out of its dive, made one more leisurely circle, and by this time we all recognised it as a B.26 by its unhurried droning as it flew towards the South. Our first enquiries established that the bombs had fallen between the press house and the delegation headquarters, a few pieces of bomb fragments actually falling on Nam Il’s Jeep – but that nobody had been injured. Within 15 minutes of the attack an attempt was made to contact the American liaison officers by radio-telephone to demand an immediate investigation. Contact was finally established at 11 p.m. At first the senior liaison officer refused to come, stating that it was too late at night. Upon the insistence of [KPA liaison officer] Colonel Chang Chung-san however, {UNC liaison and staff officer, U.S. Air Force Colonel Andrew] Kinney agreed to come and investigate. [pg. 139-140, TMW]
Kinney was a hostile and unbelieving investigator. Together with the DPRK and Chinese personnel, accompanied by Burchett and I believe some other Communist press, the Americans went to investigate. Burchett’s account is vivid:
Less than 100 yards from a house which had been placed at the disposal of [Admiral] Joy and his assistants during their daily sojourns to Kaesong, was a patch of burned grass, splashes of napalm on the road, a water-filled crater about two yards from the road with blobs of oil floating on the water, and in the middle of the road a napalm container with the metal crumpled into folds from its impact with the ground….
We continued to the side of a valley about 200 yards from the delegation headquarters. Here there were a number of small craters. Alongside the first, half-buried in the sandy soil, was a small fin, corresponding to those from 100-pound anti-personnel or fragmentation bombs. Kinney refused to go near it and refused to touch it when it was handed him….
Ten paces away from the first crater, another bomb had struck a piece of sheer rock and flaked it off to a depth of about two inches, with a badly twisted bomb fin lying near a small blast crater. Pieces of half-inch cube shrapnel could be felt in the sand around the crater and had left score marks in the rock. Kinney refused to inspect it [pgs. 140-1, TMW]
Colonel Chang Chung-san, Liaison Officer, Korean Peoples Army, demanded that the U.S. further investigate the attack. Kinney reportedly seethed:
“You wh-a-a-a-t ?’’ shouted Kinney, with contemptuous overtones of racial arrogance in his voice, “Who gave you any rights? You have no right to demand anything.” There were still three craters to investigate but Kinney refused to go further. Actually it was discovered in daylight that at least 13 bombs, all of the same anti-personnel type, had fallen within a very small area in this valley, but only six of them had been located in the dark that night. [pgs. 141-142, TMW]
As for Burchett, he concluded from the bombing, “After carrying out the daylight investigation, there could be no doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that the attack was a deliberate attempt to murder the Korean-Chinese delegates, carried out by a skilful pilot who had carefully studied the area and knew the precise location of the delegation residence in relation to geographic features. He failed in his task by a split-second error in navigation.”
Meanwhile, an August 23 Associated Press report on the Kaesong attack made headlines back in the U.S. Reporter Robert B. Tuchman wrote:
Communists abruptly broke off Korean war cease-fire talks today — “from now on.” But Red China’s radio indicated the breakdown was only temporary.
The excuse for the Red action was a reported air attack on Kaesong, site of armistice negotiations.
The UN command called it “a frameup staged from first to last.”
The Aftermath
The day after the attack, Kim Il Sung, KPA Supreme Commander, and Peng Teh-Huai, Commander of the Chinese People’s Volunteers wrote to General Ridgway. They reminded him of the murder of the Chinese platoon commander at Kaesong only days before, and addressed the issue of breaking off the talks. The following is from U.S. State Department records, and the spellings and abbreviations are from the original 1951 translation:
Before the blood of our brave fighter, Platoon Commander Yao Ching-Hsiang sacrificed under the unlawful murder by your armed personnel could dry, aircraft of your side further unlawfully intruded into the air above the conference site area in the Kaesong neutral zone at 2220 hrs, Aug 22, to carry out bombing and strafing with the residence of our delegation as tgt [target]. Although filled with the utmost indignation, our delegation still notified your side at 2235 hrs, Aug 22, to send over your personnel to conduct an investigation, in order to make known the facts of this incident to the whole world and to deprive your side of all pretexts to attribute the incident to accidental causes. The Liaison Officers sent by your side saw with their own eyes the craters and shrapnel left by the bombs dropped by your acft [aircraft] and the evidences that the bombs were dropped only a few hours ago, and could not but keep silent. As a matter of fact, even if there had been no joint investigation with the participation of your Liaison Officers, the testimonies and evidences in our possession were already sufficient to prove the undeniable provocative act on the part of your side.
The reason why you dared continue to undertake wantonly such provocative actions is that you have erroneously taken our patience in winning peace as a sign of weakness. You believe that we would, in no case, be willing to see the negotiations broken off on account of such matters, and therefore you did not hesitate to shoot at Pan Mun Jom in the first instance, to murder our mil police, and finally even to attempt to murder our delegation. We must tell you that you are mistaken in believing so. It is true that it has been our consistent attitude to be extremely patient and tolerant for the sake of armistice and peace. But there is a limit to our patience….
With regard to the provocative incident of bombing the Kaesong neutral zone by your armed forces at 2220 hrs, Aug 22, with the intention of murdering our delegation, we hereby raise a strong protest before all the just people of the world, and await a satisfactory reply from your side.
The next day Ridgway sent a secret message to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the Kaesong incident and its fallout. It’s interesting to see how Ridgway spun the situation to his superiors:
The “bombing incident” was a complete and premeditated fabrication. (The “fabrication” is attested to by the investigation made by Colonels Kinney and Murray)….
The Communists have announced that negotiations are suspended pending a satisfactory reply to the allegation…. [parentheses in original]
Ridgway then posited different possible motivations as to why China and the DPRK may have made such a (supposedly) outrageously false allegation.
The Communists desire an “excuse” to bring an end to the negotiations, with the object of seeking to fix the blame for the cessation upon the United Nations….
[Or] The Communists desire a suspension based on manufactured incidents in order to strengthen their propaganda position and regain the initiative in the conduct of negotiations.
In any case, the talks were not completely broken off, but only days later another provocation occurred.
The September 1 Bombing of Kaesong
On September 1, 1951, Kim Il Sung and Peng Teh-Huai shot off another letter of protest to Ridgway. They alleged that in the early morning hours of September 1, a military aircraft had “again illegally intruded into the air space over our Kaesong neutral zone and carried out bombing.”
Kim and Peng said two bombs had been dropped “only 500–600 meters from the residence” of senior communist delegate, General Nam Il. “This is another serious provocative action of your mil acft, fol [military aircraft, following] the bombing of our delegation’s residence on the night of 22 Aug. We hereby lodge a serious protest against you,” the North Korean and Chinese leadership wrote. (Again, the abbreviations and spellings are in the original.)
Kim and Peng said that in the period between the August 22 bombing and the latest attack, the United Nations planes had flown “25 sorties” “into the air space over the Kaesong neutral zone.” There was also the matter of two additional killings of Communist military police attached to the delegation. Kim and Peng accused the U.S. of illegally sending South Korean troops into the neutral zone, where they murdered the two MPs.
Once again, Wilfred Burchett provided eyewitness details of the September 1 incident:
The first two bombs had dropped within 500 yards of General Nam Il’s new headquarters. From midnight until daylight, we spent most of the night in the shelter, with single planes overhead constantly. Radio-telephone contact was made with the Americans at 5.45 a.m. They were urged to send officers for an investigation. The Americans promised to reply by 6.30, but sent an impudent message at that time that Colonel Kinney was not available. After three more radio contacts and much pressing, Kinney agreed to meet Korean-Chinese liaison officers at Panmunjom at 9 a.m. The actual investigation started two hours later. This time it was a daylight investigation and as it had been repeatedly broadcast over Peking radio that there was never any Korean-Chinese objection to journalists being present at investigations, Kinney was forced to bring a group of U.S. pressmen along with him. His arrogant attitude this time was slightly tempered with an attempt to appear reasonable in front of the press. But his slippery methods remained the same. (pg. 149)…
There were two huge craters in the middle of growing crops. Green leaves had been stripped off bean and millet stalks and pulverised within a radius of fifty yards of the craters. A film of dust covered crops within a radius of 100 yards. Pieces of jagged bomb splinters intended for the bodies of delegation members lay scattered around. Kinney picked one of these up and in an attempt at bluster, showed it to the pressmen and said, “See that rust on it?” and turning to Colonel Chang, said, “You mean to tell me that with this rust on the metal, this explosion took place last night.” Chang invited him to look at the film of dust over the crops and the pulverised green leaves and reminded him that earlier in the evening it had rained heavily. Kinney then had to admit that an explosion had taken place recently. His next line of argument was that this was not a bomb dropped from an aircraft but a “metal container filled with explosive and buried in the ground.” [pg. 149, TMW]
Despite the September 1 attack, the wrangling over the negotiations continued, and the talks were not definitively broken off. The U.S. presented a new demand: that the truce meetings be moved from Kaesong. The DPRK and Chinese reps rejected the move, though later, in fact, the talks would be moved to Panmunjom. In the meantime, unbelievably, the U.S. attacks on Kaesong continued. But this time, the claims about Communist lies would be turned on their head.
The September 10 Attack
After the September 1 bombing, the Communist delegation moved their residence headquarters in Kaesong, fearful of another attack. It wouldn’t be long before such an attack took place. Burchett described the situation on the evening of September 10:
At 1.35 a.m. on September 10, an American plane made an attack against this [new] residence, spattering half a dozen houses with machine-gun bullets, a little over a hundred yards from the new headquarters. Our small press corps had also shifted again, this time into a house a few hundred yards from those attacked. We heard the plane circle and dive, the clatter of the machine guns and heard it pull out of its dive, circle again and head away to the South. [pg. 161, TMW]
Once again the Communist delegation demanded an investigation. Kim and Peng sent “the strongest note handed to Ridgway up till that time.” They warned the general that the limit to U.S. provocations had been reached. He was warned that unless their demands for an investigation were taken seriously this time, the Americans and their allies would “definitely bear the full responsibility for all consequences resulting from the procrastination and obstruction of the negotiations and of breaking up the negotiations.” Burchett felt a warning had been given “that went clear over Ridgway’s head to Washington” (pg. 162, TMW).
At first, the UN Command did not even reply to Kim and Peng’s protest. Burchett, writing about this incident a few years later, felt the entire armistice negotiations, if not the course of the war itself, hung by a thread on the evening of September 11. [Note because of the time changes around the International Date Line, when it was, say, September 11 in Korea, it was September 10 in the U.S. and Europe.]
But the precariousness of the talks was not just the perception of Wilfred Burchett. A September 11 article in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, published in conjunction with France’s Le Monde, heralded the “Virtual Collapse of the Cease-fire Talks.” The papers’ anonymous “special correspondent” wrote, “both soldiers and diplomats in Tokio [sic] note that the situation is once more explosive on the Korean front, and they are in general agreement in thinking that hostilities may begin on a big scale at any moment.”
Burchett described the tension on the day after the September 10 strafing of Kaesong, as aircraft flew over the compound “all day in larger numbers than usual. As soon as darkness fell, B.26’s were constantly circling” (pg. 163). He and other journalists hunkering down in the besieged DPRK and Chinese headquarters worried the circling planes were the prelude to “an all-out assault against Kaesong.”
But then, surprisingly, the next day, the UN Command blinked.
Reuters reported, dateline Tokyo:
“Vice-Admiral Charles Joy, chief allied truce delegate, admitted that an American warplane accidentally strafed the Kaesong neutral zone yesterday.
Admiral Joy said to-day that disciplinary action was being taken against the pilot of the American plane, who said he made a strafing attack on some lights, believing he was outside the neutral zone…. He said Allied radar had picked up an aircraft in the area of the strafing…. Further investigation had shown it to be American.”
Burchett commented in This Monstrous War, “ The fact that Ridgway admitted the violation and promised a serious attitude towards such matters in the future seemed to clear the way for a resumption of the talks” (pg. 163).
Indeed, it did, after a fashion, but not before a lot of positioning, and a lot of blood was shed. It was decided that smaller groups of liaisons would meet to pound out a workable agenda. Meanwhile, the military on both sides were making furious, if still marginal gains.
In the air war, “Red MIGs” were doing well against the U.S. Air Force Sabre jet fighters. A 1983 Air Force history of the air war in Korea commented, “Alarmed by the developments…. [Far East Air Forces Commander] General Weyland frankly warned [Air Force Chief of Staff] General Vandenberg that the Communist air force was rapidly getting out of control. The Red MIGs were hampering United Nations air-to-ground atttacks as far southward as Pyongyang…. ‘If the present trend continues,’ Weyland warned, ‘there is a definite possibility that the enemy will be able to establish bases in Korea and threaten our supremacy over the front lines” (The United States Air Force In Korea 1950-1953, pg. 404).
Meanwhile, the Commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, General Van Fleet, led a new ground offensive above the 38th parallel that was successful in gaining a few miles of territory, but at the cost of high casualities. Burchett thought General Van Fleet, commander of the Eighth Army “had persuaded Ridgway and Washington, or Ridgway himself had persuaded Washington, that if the talks could be held off for another month or two, he could secure a military victory.” But neither side gained a decisive edge. Both sides had reason to resume negotiations.
Ridgway still wanted the talks moved from Kaesong. He suggested Songhyon-ni, which was unacceptable to the Communists. On October 7, the latter suggested Panmunjom, eight road miles southeast of Kaesong, and 13 miles northwest of the allied truce camp at Munsan. The UN forces accepted. On October 11, the liaisons met for the first time at a tent at Panmunjom. Astoundingly, within 1-1/2 hours after the first meeting ended, there would be yet another attack on the Kaesong neutral zone!
More Attacks on Kaesong and Panmunjom
Once more, I’m going to turn the narrative over to Wilfred Burchett, who was eyewitness yet again to a U.S. air attack on the Communists’ negotiating headquarters at Kaesong.
On the afternoon of the 12th, while taking a customary walk near the western outskirts of Kaesong, I had to take shelter from a strafing attack by three straight-winged jet planes, which finished their dives not too far above my head and then roared off to the East, where I could see them diving and hear the hammering of their machine guns. It was broad daylight on a clear autumn afternoon. This time, they had strafed Panmunjom for the first time and actually strafed within the thousand yard security zone agreed the previous day. Could anyone possibly think this was a coincidence? It was the fourth air attack. The first three were against the constantly shifting delegation headquarters. The fourth was against the new conference site within 24 hours of its being selected. There could be no excuse on the grounds that the security area had only been agreed the previous day, because Panmunjom was included in the original Kaesong neutral area agreement which was still in force. It was another demonstration by the U.S. Air Force – at least – that no matter how small or where the neutral area was they could still hit it. [Pg. 166, TMW]
During one of the air attacks, a 12-year-old boy was killed, while his two-year-old brother was wounded. The boy’s body had been “riddled with bullets, a fishing rod clutched in his hand” (Wilfred Burchett, Korea Again, International Publishers, 1968, pg. 51).
Two days later, the Americans took responsibility for the attacks. A September 15, 1951 Reuters article quoted General Ridgway in saying the attacks had been made “in violation of instructions, and he promised ‘prompt and appropriate disciplinary action.’”
A second message from Ridgway expressed “sympathy and heartfelt grief to the bereaved Korean family for their tragic loss.” For his part, Burchett noted that the episode did not end there:
Less than 12 hours after [Ridgway’s] assurance of standing instructions to avoid overflight of Kaesong, Kaesong neutrality had been violated several times by U.S. planes, including a B.29, a B.26 and a flight of jet fighters during the daytime, and four B.26’s at night.
In the conference tent, [Colonel] Kinney was doing his best to force Colonel Chang to agree to abolish the neutrality of Kaesong so that the Korean-Chinese delegation could “legally” be strafed and bombed at any time. Kinney’s main argument was that this was the only effective way to avoid incidents.
Ridgway’s admission that UNC planes were responsible for the death of the Korean boy must have been a bridge too far for the bigwigs back in Washington. While military attacks on the battlefield continued, often quite savagely, the negotiations continued. Formal talks resumed in Panmunjom on October 25, 1951. Burchett noted years later, in his book, Korea Again, as the main proceeding got underway, “General Nam II and Admiral Joy faced each over the conference table for the first time since August 15” (pg. 51).
The war would drag on for another year and nine months. The major sticking point, as mentioned above, came to center on the POW repatriation issue, but that controversy is too complicated to enter into here. I will take it up at another time.
In any case, the main narrative of this article is about how the U.S. government entered into cease-fire negotiations with the “enemy,” and then proceeded to attack the “enemy” negotiators and threaten their lives. The parallels with Israel’s attack on Hamas negotiators, especially the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh on July 31, 2024, are obvious. They also raise an interesting question.
Haniyeh was not the first Hamas negotiator to be assassinated by Israel. Back in November 2012, breaking an “informal ceasefire,” Israel killed Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari in an air strike. According to “Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, who helped mediate talks between Israel and Hamas in the deal to release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit… Jabari was assassinated just hours after he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the ceasefire.”
The question is this: why does Hamas even bother trying to negotiate with a bad faith actor like Israel? Additionally, one could ask as well, why did DPRK and PRC negotiators bother negotiating with the Americans during the Korean War, especially after multiple attempts to disrupt the very negotiations they had agreed to by trying to kill the other sides diplomats?
One could ask the same, I suppose, of the Israelis and the Americans. Why did they bother with negotiations at all? The reasons were both political and military, I believe. The issue is not one raised much by Western commentators, because they generally seek to minimize U.S. and/or Israeli perfidy. The Communist negotiators must have known what they were doing, because they succeeded in fighting the U.S. and its allies to a standstill, and U.S. efforts to destroy both the DPRK and, possibly, the PRC, failed.
It is said that Hamas cannot be defeated, but the U.S. and Israel and their allies are pressing a genocide on the Palestinian people that is intense and horrifically one-sided. North Korea had powerful allies in both China and the Soviet Union. Hamas and the Palestinians do not have such powerful allies, though they have the sympathy of millions, if not billions of people.
The lessons in this article are not aimed at the Palestinians, who must decide their own tactics and strategy. The lessons are intended for the Americans and Westerners more generally. The truth of what their own government does is hidden from them. The assault on historical truth is not incidental either. It is profound and pernicious. Only time will tell if attempts to rebalance the historical discourse with the objective of forwarding the truth about U.S. crimes will make a difference or not.
Appendix: Text of the Armistice Agreement, signed July 27, 1953.
[Added on August 27, 2024 — A reader has notified me that a print edition of Wilfred Burchett’s This Monstrous War was published by New Outlook Publishers in 2020. Censorship of Burchett’s work has been intense. The book doesn’t even appear on search results for Amazon, Abebooks, Better World Books, Barnes & Noble, or apparently most online book sites, but it can be purchased from New Outlook Publishers directly, or at Lulu.com.]
Errata: A photo that was wrongly attributed as one of Wilfred Burchett has been deleted and replaced with a new photo of Mr. Burchett walking with fellow correspondent, John Ulm.
Jeffrey Kaye has brought into the sunshine one more ignominious truth revealing the the US' genocidal war against Korea . This article, appalling as it is for Americans to read, is but one episode of a total war of colonial subjugation waged against the Korean people from 1945-1953 which includes other chapters of mass murder, mass rape, mass incarceration, massive pollution of the land and water by exploded munitions, chemicals, and bacteriological warfare. Thank you, Jeff, for your tireless research and dedication to the truth. You are a true American patriot.
Nothing new under the sun. Thank you for bringing this to light in these turbulent times.