No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident [Hardcover]

Robert Bateman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2002

Compelled by the known fallacies in the Pulitzer Prizewinning Associated Press story of the alleged slaughter of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri, Major Bateman, an academic historian and professional soldier, presents an alternate explanation of the events through the perspective of the soldiers and their commanders, the 1948-50 South Korean civil war, and the broader state of U.S. military policy and force readiness. In a solid historical analysis of the incident he debunks the AP allusion to a widespread massacre of civilians by U.S. forces at No Gun Ri and shows how veterans who allegedly witnessed this event and influenced others were not even present. Told concisely with extensive documentation from previously overlooked sources.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Major Robert Bateman served with the 7th Cavalry Regiment, was associate professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and is currently an Army fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He resides in northern Virginia.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Stackpole Books; 1St Edition edition (April 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811717631
• ISBN-13: 978-0811717632
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,193,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required reading for journalists, April 15, 2002

By 

Robert Skole (Boston, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident (Hardcover)

"No Gun Ri - A Military History of the Korean War Incident" should be required reading for every journalism school student - as well as for every young working reporter and for every American who values honest media coverage.

This book, by historian and soldier Robert L. Bateman, thoroughly debunks the highly-publicized Associated Press story, published in Sept. 1999, that claimed US troops "massacred" up to 400 civilians in the early days of the Korean War. In April 2000, the AP story won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Although serious questions were raised shortly after about the accuracy of the story, AP has insisted its research, sources and facts were accurate and that a massacre was definitely committed at No Gun Ri on July 26, 1950, by troops of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment.

Robert Bateman's book, based on meticulous, painstaking research and analyses, details events leading to the action at No Gun Ri and what happened there. He gives solid, overwhelming evidence that the AP story was highly exaggerated, if not completely untrue. He tells how the AP initiated and based its investigations primarily on fabrications of Edward Daily, a self-created "war hero." Daily recently plead guilty in Federal Court of being a fraud and swindler of veterans benefits. Robert Bateman describes the AP story and Daily's role in Part Two of the book, entitled "The Story of the Story."

One minor fault of the book is that the original AP story should have been placed at the very beginning, so as to provide readers with an early reference, an opening gun, so to speak. Instead, the AP story is in the final chapter, which is aptly entitled "Making (Up) History." An appendix has the executive summary of the US Government's investigation into the "massacre" allegations. The extensive investigation, ordered by President Clinton, clearly shows the tremendous publicity the AP story received.

As an old reporter, from the old school -sadly, a fast-vanishing old school that insists on honest, true, accurate, unbiased reporting - I cannot imagine how AP can avoid returning the Pulitzer, just as the Washington Post did some years ago when its prize-winning reporter was revealed to have written fiction instead of fact. The AP's prize-winning "reporters," well, they will have to live with themselves. And the naive Pulitzer Committee will have to live with egg on its face.

And then there's Tom Brokaw, who obviously did not learn much about honor when writing "The Greatest Generation." He has not acknowledged that he was totally conned, no less apologized to his millions of NBC Dateline viewers, for featuring "war hero" Edward Daily at No Gun Ri lying how he machine-gunned civilians. We are still waiting for Brokaw's mea culpa and NBC Dateline's retraction.

The fact that the AP team did not warn Brokaw and other reporters, and kept secret their suspicions, if not definite knowledge, that their famous "hero" was a fraud who was never at No Gun Ri, is enough reason to completely reject their story.

Robert Bateman's book is well footnoted and referenced. He provides an excellent description of the months before the war, the communist guerilla action in Korea, the poorly trained Cavalry troops going into battle, and the days and hours of the No Gun Ri incident. After reading Robert Bateman's detailed, paragraph-by-paragraph debunking of the AP report, you'll surely take a new, critical, healthily skeptical approach to today's journalism.

# # #

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Authoritative Analysis and Historical Reconstruction, September 16, 2002

By 

A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident (Hardcover)

No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident is a excellent work of sound scholarship and public service. In 1999, a team of Associated Press (AP) reported won a Pulitzer Prize for a news story that was not news, and was not entirely true. Robert L. Bateman, though, offers much more than an analysis of the AP story, "The Bridge at No Gun Ri". No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident, which destroys the reputation of both the AP and its misguided historical theorizing, has elements of historiography, military history, and personal narrative.

If one only reads the concluding chapter of Bateman's book, the flaws so disturbingly apparent in the AP's story are blown wide open. But Bateman also uncovered the fraudulent nature behind the four witnesses` story, which formed the core of the AP story. He also documents his efforts to obtain documents through the Freedom of Information Act, and his correspondence with the AP reporters. Not only were the AP reporters creating a news story that was actually an historical interpretation, they scorned Bateman`s, a trained historian, collaboration. Bateman's account of the AP story's "hero", Edward Daily is chilling.

Bateman delivers a neat, detailed reconstruction of the events of July 25-29, 1950, when the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment killed in self-defense, not as part of a pre-meditated massacre, approximately at most thirty-five Korean civilians, at least two of whom, according to Bateman, were most likely armed South Korean Communist guerrillas. To support his contention, Bateman takes the readers through the history of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, military doctrine, the history of journalism, and Korean history. As a former officer of the unit and an associate professor at West Point, Bateman's intimate knowledge of American military procedures lends authority to his reconstruction. The book also contains transcripts of the AP story and the executive summary of the United States No Gun Ri Review, several maps, photographs, 33 pages of notes, and a bibliography, including interviewees.

This strength, however, is also the book's greatest weakness. Considering the political divisiveness of the issue, such a partisan identification is a handicap. Also, Bateman admits he does not know Korean, and so did not interview the Korean witnesses, who were suing for compensation, the AP interviewed. Working with translated transcripts of their testimonies, he undermines even the minutest pieces of information in them. Bateman discredits the AP's massacre theory succinctly. No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident is one of the most clear-headed works of analysis and history about Korea, and I hope its evident clarity and quality will dispel misconceptions and animosity.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutal Analysis, September 28, 2002

By 

"timdavin" (Las Vegas, NV United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident (Hardcover)

No Gun Ri, A Military History of the Korean War Incident slams home the vital difference between history and journalism. While one prefers the variations inherent in the spoken word, the other requires evidence in support of oral assertions. Bateman takes the entire Associated Press, up to and including their now-president Boccardi, to task for the utter failure to check their sources.

Journalism, good journalism anyway, rests upon the idea of "accuracy, accuracy, accuracy" according to Bateman. Bateman makes it clear that something bad happened at No Gun Ri, something avoidable and something about which the United States should not be proud. But, significantly, it wasn't what the AP wrote about, it bears no resemblence to their version of events. Bateman goes to great lengths to point out that he's in favor of free and open journalism, that he admires the ideas and ideals of journalism. What annoyed him (and apparently led to this book) is sloppy and casual tabloid-like journalism passing itself off as "in depth" or "definitive." It is this sin which he pressed against the AP and their three reporters. In the reporting of their version of the events at No Gun Ri the Associated Press team led by Charles Hanley demonstrated that they were not interested in confirming the identities or presence of their "witnesses" before they published their story to a global audience...something that one would rather expect when writing a story about the one of the largest accusations of deliberate mass murder. In this I have to agree with Bateman. Journalism is a good thing. Some journalists (and in this case the AP as an institution) were downright sloppy. It's a sad statement about the state of the Pulitzer that the historical misdirection the AP passed off as "news" won the Pulitzer. ...

One wonders why the AP has not returned their ill-gotten gains (they won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize before the...nature of their sources was revealed by Bateman) nor apologized for the shoddy work they did in thier story and the "advocacy journalism" they foisted off as history in their follow up book.

With more than 30 pages of footnotes, allowing any reader to fully reconstruct his research in-depth, Bateman sets the standard for historians working in military history as well as any journalists that confuse the process which results in accurate and reliable (read: reproducible and proveable) history with on-the-spot "gotcha" journalism.