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

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"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.

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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.

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.

This book deserves an enormous amount of attention and a wide readership. Based upon impeccable, tough-minded research, the findings are well presented in a readable style--this is an intellectual page-turner. To the benefit of the American people, Bateman, a widely-respected soldier-scholar, undertook to get at the truth about the widely reported "massacre" of civilians by elements of the U.S. 7th Cavalry during one of the most confused periods of the Korean War. What Bateman discovered was a network of shameless, self-serving lies, told first by a fake veteran then amplified by ambitious journalists who preferred a great story to the more mundane--and complex--truth. Now, I am not a journalist-basher (I'm married to one and I write for various newspapers and magazines myself), and I've been impressed by the quality of most serious journalists who cover defense issues--but the media's failure to castigate the dishonest journalists who won a Pulitizer Prize for their wildly-inaccurate reporting is a blot on the profession. And, in the end, Bateman's version of events may be less sensational, but it is far more humanly compelling. The real story--or stories--have to do with the terrible confusions of war, with the fragmentation of memory, and with the basic challenges of soldiering--as well as with false identities, vanity and disgraceful self-promotion, fifty years later, by men who weren't there, but who decided, from their lofty perch in the press, that they knew better than those who had served. The tale also tells a great deal about the lingering willingness among elements--only elements--of the press to believe instantly the worst accusations against our military coupled with a reluctance to investigate those who level those charges. For the journalists, had they been real pros, the real story would have been "the man who wasn't there," the great impostor who had, for years, fooled even military veterans. But it was easier to hammer the G.I.s who had served our country to the best of their abilities. With this fine book, Bateman has rendered a valuable public service. One hopes it will receive the review and public attention it so richly deserves.

This is an excellent piece of military history in general and Korean War history in particular. Only Appleman's East of Chosin dissects the anatomy of a tragedy in Korea with as much sense of impending, inevitable doom and finality as Bateman's book does. Bateman achieves something few authors and historians do: weave diverse social, political, and military events so that they can hep us understand a major event.

Other authors would be content enough to 'merely' point out that Daily, Flint, and Hesselman weren't even near No Gun Ri at the time the alleged atrocities occurred. Thats the 'what did he know, and when did he know it' school of journalism. But Bateman has a much more powerful message. It begins as follows:

--American soldiers were never made aware that this area of Korea was rife with guerrilla battles between South Korean communist sympathizers and Rhee's army and militias. They never knew many civilians were armed and aligned with the NKPA.

--The American army had no recent experience conducting combat operations in their rear areas. They often left a task to the ROKs, who were notoriously brutal for slaying prisoners. The US army complained they did this so swiftly there wasn't even time to obtain intelligence from the guerrillas!

--While infiltration was probably not a tactic used all that often by the NKPA, nonetheless American outrage against its use was not based on racist views. It was based on the moral conviction that it was not a 'legitimate military ruse.' His contrast of German infiltration at the Battle of the Bulge, with that of the Koreans in the Naktong battles, is powerful and moving. It is part of a larger subsection Fear and Military Reality which is an excellent discourse on the moral conflicts presented by the combatants and noncombatants in a military theater.

--The famous order 'no refugees to cross front line. Fire everyone trying to cross front line' was never widely disseminated. It was a phone call that never reached the men at No Gun Ri.

There is much more. Lack of training at the Battalion level or higher meant the forces were easily dispersed and communications disrupted. The stripping of the units NCOs and Officers (for the 24th infantry division) meant there were not experienced men on site to keep the units coherent and issue their own orders. Commissioned officers would be able to distinguish between legal and illegal orders such as the one above.

All this makes his speculation about what happened at No Gun Ri more credible than Hanleys'. Bateman doubts an 'execution style massacre' occurred. Certainly mortar fire was a mistake, but 'two way fire was exchanged' between the Korean refugees and US Soldiers. Calling in an air fighters to strife the refugees? Impossible, says Batemen: US soldiers FM radios could not talk to fighter AM radio sets. Even if an unintentional strafing occurred, says Bateman, casualties would be nowhere near the hundreds Koreans claimed. Nor could a bombing run have 'bent the railway like still chopsticks.' Aerial photographs after US forces left the area revealed it compeletely intact. And by the way, where are the bodies?

The rest of the book returns to the larger story behind this No Gun Ri incident. It is almost amusing to watch Bateman peel apart Daily's military record. Flint and Hesselman weren't present at No Gun Ri either, though their stories are less colorful. Bateman's chapters on the media, its evolving concept of 'free press' and relationships with the military are helpful in making clear to the reader just how a story like Hanley's can take on a life of its own. Bateman's liner notes state he 'expressly rejects the notion of media bias.' The reader might ask, why? Isn't it clear between the lines the glee Hanley felt in having 'nailed America' with committing an atrocity? Isn't it similarly clear that Haneley is steeped heavily in contemporary journalism's contempt for the west? How else do you explain reporters culling six witnesses from a pool of 130 simply because the former 'supported the thesis put forward' by the Korean claimants? Why didn't the Associated Press scour the same Service records Bateman used to reveal Daily was an imposter?

All of the material presented in Bateman's book is designed to do two thing First, explain why an event like No Gun Ri would be inevitable in the course of a war such as that fought in Korea. Second, explain why it was unlikely that such an event, if it occurred, would be an intentional act by US soldiers. Compare that with Hanley's forays into US foreign policy, US 'arrogance' and meddling in Korean 'internal' affairs, fond wishes by Korean farmers that the NKPA would arrive any second to liberate them from Rhee henchmen, ad nauseum. What has that got to do with the agony suffered in the vicinity of that trestle? In the books 'Afterward' the statistical and survey methods necessary to obtain unbiased reportage on an issue of this magnitude are made clear. The reader begins to see the sophistication and patience, the thoroughness and contemplation necessary to assemble an interpretation of 'facts' fifty years after an event occurs. Pay particular attention to Bateman's focus on the comments of Colonel Nist, and the dignified process by which he interviewed veterans of this War. The former shows how sharp he is as a detective; the latter shows how trained he is as a researcher. I think you will be tempted to reach the same conclusion Bateman and the US government did:

"neither documentary evidence nor US citizens statements reviewed by the US Review Team support a hypothesis of deliberate killing of Korean civilians."

Truly fantastic! WHAT A PIECE OF work this book is. Mr. Bateman has written a superb book that chronicles what combat soldiers, like himself, have endured throughout the centuries. Not only must they dodge bullets on the battlefield, but they must also dodge critiques from those who have never been under fire as well. Mr. Bateman has taken a small step up a large hill to correct this injustice. What really impressed me about this book was his use of language. Mr. Bateman yields his words like a machete to cut down all those who have surrounded him in an attempt to take the moral high ground. The members of the 7th Calvary owe Mr. Bateman a debt of honor that I hope they will pay him in full. This book reminded me of James R. McDonough's book, "Platoon Leader". I still have a first edition copy of that masterpiece and I will place Mr. Bateman's book right beside it.

There was always something fishy about the story the Associated Press published in September 1999 about a massacre at No Gun Ri, South Korea, in July 1950.
Anyone who has studied military history knows you cannot understand a small unit infantry action without a detailed terrain map, and there was no map.
Maj. Robert Bateman, who taught history at West Point, saw additional problems that wouldn't have been obvious to civilians. The AP account "did not jibe . . . with the things I knew as an infantry officer."
Before becoming a teacher, Bateman had been a company commander in the same unit -- 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment -- whose earlier incarnation was accused of slaughtering perhaps 400 refugees over (accounts varied) a few minutes to four days.
He knew and considered a friend the man the AP relied on most for confirming the claims of alleged Korean survivors, Ed Daily.
While other journalists began investigating Daily's bona fides, Bateman approached the mystery from a military historian's perspective: Could he reconstruct the events of the last days of July 1950, when American and South Korean armies and masses of civilians were retreating, sometimes in panic, from a North Korean attack?
It turned out to be easier to determine what could not have happened than what really did happen, but in "No Gun Ri: A Military History" Bateman presents a well-documented, coherent story.
Simultaneously, the South Korean and American governments opened their own investigations.
Eventually all these investigators proved several things. The one that got the most public attention was that Daily and all the other veterans who endorsed the South Korean allegations were frauds.
But there were other discoveries that put the AP story in even worse light. Not all the AP's inaccurate statements were just mistakes.
Bateman proves that what the AP called a "division order" to kill refugees was not a division order, could not possibly have been known to the 7th Cavalry and wouldn't have been a legal order if it had been. As Bateman says, majors don't give orders to colonels.
It was already obvious, but the AP reporters were incompetent and Bateman demonstrates this in a dozen ways.
It was not only that the AP reporters and editors did not understand how to read military reports. They made mistakes that no city editor in the sorriest tank town weekly in the country would have accepted, notably by alleging 400 murders without supplying, even tentatively, a name or a home village for even one victim.
But when it comes to atrocity stories, the usual rules often are not applied. The Pulitzer Prize committee, which has often been hoaxed, awarded the AP its prize.
Later, the committee said its duty did not include verifying the authenticity of the report, but that does not explain why it ignored holes in the AP report that wouldn't have been overlooked in a story about a one-alarm fire.
In the second half of his book, Bateman explores "the story of the story," and then things turn out to be much worse than they appeared, which was bad enough.
Quoting the AP reporters, he shows contradictions in how they claimed to have done their work. Worse, he proves that "AP used these accounts (by fake witnesses) despite its knowledge of the problems with witness credibility."
What is still very much in question is how many, if any, civilians were killed at No Gun Ri.
There is no grave to show there was even one death. Aerial photographs taken a few days after the supposed massacre show no evidence of any deaths.
Bateman thinks that perhaps six to 35 Koreans were killed by Americans, first in a mistaken mortar attack, then by rifle and machinegun fire from the 2nd Battalion after two South Korean Communist guerrillas who were among the refugees opened fire on the Americans.
Obviously, these figures are just a guess. Americans who really were at No Gun Ri that day claim to have killed two North Korean regulars (which Bateman says were South Korean irregulars) and recovered their weapons, which were duly registered later by the regimental supply officer.
Almost certainly some helpless villagers were killed, too. But between Bateman the historian and the honest reporters who followed up the AP, there can be no doubt now that the story of a massacre was a hoax.

I think Mr. Bateman only tells his side of the story; he almost totally ignores the other side. Mr. Bateman presents himself as a historian, but I think it's unacceptable for a historian to present such highly prejudiced material to the public. I have several reasons for saying this and I'll just make a few points here:

1. If he had paid a slightest attention, he wouldn't have been confused with the Korean names. He thought, for example, Chung Eun Yong's family name was Yong, despite the fact that Chung Eun Yong spelled his name as Eunyong Chung in his 1997 letter to President Clinton, and there were many Chung's in the list of No Gun Ri victims. Had he asked just one Korean American nearby, he would have been corrected. It appears that Mr. Bateman didn't give much thought on victims. In my view, he was only interested in presenting his prejudiced views for whatever reasons.

2. He says, without speaking to any Koreans or visiting the actual location, that the South Koreans' memories refer to other incidents and were conflated with the No Gun Ri incident when a South Korean author gathered them together into a 1994 novel. It's amazing that he could positively say this while he had very little understanding of Koreans. In my opinion, each person would have told his or her own story thousands of times from 1950 to 1994; it would have been pretty obvious to everyone if one suddenly changes his story in 1994.

3. He says without doubt that there were guerillas among the refuges. But I know the fact that by the start of the Korean War the guerillas were largely controlled. I think there still were some remnants, but generally deep in the Chiri Mountains, much farther south. No Gun Ri is on the nation's most important artery of rail lines (which was the only practical means of public transportation that time), where the South Korean government would have made sure to be free of guerillas. I lived near a secondary rail line (with only a single track) and much more mountainous and much closer to the Chiri Mountains, but there were no guerillas there that time. In fact many of village people (including my father) had been absent from home for a few years after the October 1946 riots nationwide, but they had all come home sometime before the war. Even if there were a few guerillas, it was highly unlikely that they possessed Soviet-made machine guns and foolish enough to shoot from the tunnel to GIs scattered throughout in the fox-holes. It doesn't make any sense.
4. I reviewed the arial photos of August 6, 1950 many times, and have widely different view of what might have happened there than what was described (very midly) in this book.

I have lived in America for more than 30 years and I understand that it's best to protect our government position and understand why Mr. Bateman, as a soldier and army historian, wants to protect the U.S. government position. However, publishing a historical book with incomplete research doesn't seem appropriate.

No Gun Ri was a tragic incident for the victims and their families, but under the circumstances, I understand why American GIs acted that way and even if the higher authorities had ordered to shoot innocent civilians, I can sort of understand why. Koreans themselves did worse things to their own people. And the Korean War was tragic for all Koreans as well as for all American GIs who fought in the war, their families, and the American people who had to foot the bill. I appreciate President Truman for sending the troops. But the indiscriminate bombings were very wrong. Perhaps the Korean War was inevitable, but it was the super-powers' fault to divide the innocent Korea into two (instead of dividing Japan like they did Germany).

In light of the Iraq War, we must think all the consequences, not just our own solders' lives, before ever going to a war. No matter how you cut it, a war is a messy business for all involved, especially for the innocent and helpless civilians.

The so-called _Skeptical Inquirer_magazine (Sept-Oct 2002 issue) has a review of this title, which shreds the story about the phony massacre at No Gun Ri during the Korean war. As those of us still hot under the collar know, the parties behind this phony story won the Pulitzer for it and wouldn't give it back when they (and their "source") were exposed. No wonder more and more people turn to the Internet or to Fox News Network to find out what is going on.

Recommended reading:

-:- Tank by Patrick Wright (0670030708)

A U.S. military perspective of the proceedings at No Gun Ri during the Korean War is a welcome one, and offers an interesting contrast to the human rights tone of "The Bridge at No Gun Ri." However, Bateman is extremely one-sided in his research, fitting facts around his argument rather than the other way around. His objective is to not to supply an accurate historic acount of what happened at No Gun Ri; instead, it is to argue blindly for his version of the story. As a Korean American, I was offended that Bateman took so little care in his research that he identified Chung Eun Yong's (Eunyong Chung) last name as Yong; I question whether someone with a legitimate background in East Asian Studies would make such an egregious error. Overall, the premise of the book is a good one, but Bateman's narrow vision turns this book into a radical diatribe rather than an objective academic work.