The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (78 page)

The death tolls of specific mass dyings are also uncertain:

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The estimates of the number of political enemies killed during the first purges after taking power are scattered, but most fall between 1 and 3 million.
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Most of the excess deaths under Mao were caused by hunger during the Great Leap Forward. Jasper Becker cites several studies that put the total number of famine deaths anywhere from 19 to 46 million, but he singles out Judith Banister’s 30 million as “the most reliable estimate we have.”
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The number killed during the Cultural Revolution is a pure guess, with at least one secondhand estimate I’ve seen reaching 20 million.
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Most commentators, however, suggest between half a million to a couple of million deaths.
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Just adding the number of deaths from these three episodes gives a plausible death toll ranging from 20.5 million to 51 million, most likely something in the neighborhood of 33 million.

These first purges, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution represent the three peaks in the death rate under Mao, but how many died in the unexceptional day-to-day tyranny of his rule? Guesses for the number of deaths in labor camps have ranged from 15 million (Harry Wu)
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to 20 million (Jean-Louise Margolin)
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to 27 million (Jung Chang and John Halliday),
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but these are largely based on presumed camp populations and presumed annual death rates extrapolated from small anecdotal samples. That’s too many guesses in a row to instill confidence. Realistically, the annual death rate of everyday repression probably did not exceed the annual death rate of the really, really bad years during the first purges (1 to 2 million in four years?) and the Cultural Revolution (also 1 to 2 million in four years?). That means we should expect considerably fewer than a half-million people to have been killed in each slow year, giving us, at most, 9 million additional deaths not associated with the 1.5 to 5 million killed during the major movements listed above.

In short, the best guess would be 30 million deaths from the famine, plus maybe 3 to 4 million executed, massacred, driven to suicide, or dying in prison during the big movements, and perhaps twice that to cover the lesser purges and camp deaths—a total of around 40 million.

KOREAN WAR

Death toll:
3 million soldiers and civilians
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Rank:
30

Type:
ideological civil war

Broad dividing line:
Communists vs. capitalists

Time frame:
1950–53

Location:
Korea

Major state participant:
United States

Major quasi-state participants:
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North), People’s Republic of China, Republic of Korea (South), and United Nations

Minor state participants:
Australia, Belgium, Canada, Columbia, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Netherlands, Philippines, the Soviet Union, Thailand, Turkey, and the United Kingdom lost soldiers in the war.

Who usually gets the most blame:
North Korea. (Lately there’s been an effort to spread some of the blame to South Korea, but since the entire world in the form of the UN supported that side, it’s a little late to be changing our minds.)

Another damn:
superpower ground war in Asia

Split

World War II ended with the Soviet army in Manchuria, poised to take over the entire Japanese colony of Korea, but the Americans insisted on joint occupation instead, so the victors partitioned the peninsula along the 38th parallel into Soviet and American zones. In each one, the sponsoring powers installed compliant puppets to create a nation in their image.

The Soviets had kept Kim Il-sung tucked away in Siberia for just such an occasion. Kim had led Korean partisans against the Japanese occupiers from 1932 until 1941, when he fled to Russia. He returned to Korea with the Soviet occupation forces as a major in the Red Army.

For the southern half, the Americans brought in Syngman Rhee, a Christian Korean with a PhD from Princeton. Every post-colonial founding father needs a prison sentence on his record to foster his credibility, and luckily Rhee had been jailed in 1897 for leading demonstrations against the Japanese. After his life sentence was revoked during a general amnesty in 1904, he went to school in America but was eventually exiled from Korea forever in 1912. During a 1919 uprising against Japan, he had been proclaimed president of the Korean government-in-exile, but the uprising failed, so he never got to exercise his authority.

Cheju

Elections in the southern Republic of Korea (ROK) were scheduled for May 1948. They were expected to be less than fair and to confirm Rhee as president. As rightists fled from Communist north to capitalist south, tilting the vote further in favor of Rhee, leftists took to the streets to protest the dismemberment of Korea. Because of unrest, the island of Cheju, a stronghold of the South Korean Labor Party, was not going to be included in the May elections, further weakening the left wing in the south. Tempers boiled. Police fired on protesters in Cheju. On April 3, rebels retaliated with a raid on the local police station, killing 50 officers. The island descended deeper into chaos.

Rhee sent troops, police, paramilitaries, and thugs to Cheju to restore order by any means. They hauled away dissidents in the dead of night, burned villages, raped girls, and left unburied bodies on the beaches. By the time it was all over, maybe 60,000 people—a fifth of the island’s residents—had been killed.
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The rest were hiding in caves, nursing wounds, mourning relatives, and having nightmares.

The superpowers were only marginally involved in Cheju. For the most part, the Americans had left the response to the South Korean government. As native governments fell into place, the Soviets withdrew their occupation forces in late 1948, and the Americans pulled out early the next year.

In North Korea, Kim Il-sung had hoped that the Cheju uprising would spread and drive Rhee from power. When that didn’t happen, the Communists had to do it the hard way.

Attack

The two Koreas had been trading border raids since 1948, but both their sponsoring powers tried to keep these from escalating to civil war. In fact, the Americans had deliberately avoided giving too many heavy weapons to the ROK in order to prevent Rhee from invading the North. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted the ultimate conflict for the future of civilization to be fought here. Their eyes were on Europe instead.

Kim Il-sung, however, knew that his best chance was now. A few years of peace would only stabilize and strengthen South Korea. On a visit to Moscow, Kim begged Stalin for permission, but Stalin hesitated; he wanted Mao’s opinion before he agreed to anything. Kim hurried to Beijing and told Mao that Dad said it’s okay with him if it’s okay with you, Mom. (Not his exact words.) Mao approved.
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The attack by 120,000 North Korean troops across the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, took the world by surprise. The South Korean army crumbled and fled in disorder. At first, it was assumed that the Americans would not consider the defense of South Korea to be in their vital interests and would sit this one out, but President Harry Truman surprised everyone by declaring his intention to defend South Korea.

American troops were rushed over from their occupation duties in Japan and thrown into the melee. These first units were quickly chewed up and sent reeling southward. The American commanders counted an action successful if their soldiers delayed the enemy and then retreated without abandoning their heavy weapons and wounded. That was rare enough; actually stopping the North Koreans was beyond their abilities.
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Truman asked the United Nations to authorize international intervention. As luck would have it, this followed almost immediately on the heels of the Chinese Civil War (ended 1949), and the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN over which Chinese government deserved a seat at the table. This meant the Soviets weren’t there to exercise their veto when the UN authorized a police action to stop North Korea’s invasion.

Just ahead of the North Korean onslaught, South Korean soldiers and police hurriedly rounded up and shot as many leftists and dissidents as they could find rather than leave them behind to reinforce and assist the invaders. Perhaps 1,000 were killed in Suwon, 4,000 in Taejon, and as many as 10,000 in Pusan.
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Then the North Koreans arrived and massacred class enemies and community leaders who might become the focus of resistance to Communist rule. The combined result was that any South Korean known to have opinions, education, property, or skills was liable to be shot by one side or the other.

As rumors of massacres spread, up to 2 million refugees fled the advancing battle front. Communist infiltrators sometimes blended into these columns of civilian refugees in order to sneak close enough to enemy troops to spring an ambush, so the Americans soon refused to let refugees cross into their lines. During the chaotic retreat south, American troops would warn off approaching civilians with a spray of machine-gun fire. Sometimes they fired into the air, sometimes into the dirt, sometimes into the crowd. American fighter pilots who couldn’t tell one bunch of Koreans from another indiscriminately strafed every crowd they spotted.

The worst known incident occurred at No Gun Ri when hundreds of refugees were camped under a bridge just beyond American lines for several days, until the order came down to kill them all. The Americans raked the crowd with machine-gun fire until everyone stopped moving. Some 300 men, women, and children were killed that day.

The South Korean army was driven back to a last line of defense around the port of Pusan (now Busan) at the very tip of the peninsula, which held desperately against all of the Communist attacks. The North Koreans had lost heavily in their advance and were not able to push the southerners out of their last stronghold. The Communists quickly conscripted all of the young men in the captured territory—including ROK prisoners of war—but it would take awhile to train them.

Counterattack

When the front finally stabilized around the Pusan Perimeter, American planners turned to the problem of restoring the nation of South Korea. In September 1950, American troops under General Douglas MacArthur landed an amphibious assault force at Inchon, the port of Seoul. This put them behind the North Korean army and within striking distance of their supply line. As UN forces also attacked out of Pusan, the Communists scrambled back in panic, leaving tens of thousands of prisoners. The Americans chased the remnant back across the 38th parallel.

The war could have ended here, four months after it had started, but intelligence reported that 30,000 northern troops had escaped the debacle in the south, and another 30,000 recruits were almost ready for deployment.
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MacArthur wanted to continue across the 38th parallel and destroy the North Korean army once and for all. He assured President Truman that liberating North Korea from the clutches of the Communists would be no problem. With Truman’s cautious permission, MacArthur chased the retreating army beyond the old border, out of the northern capital of Pyongyang, and eventually up to the Yalu River, which separated Korea from China.

Upon retaking Seoul, the South Koreans and Americans found a lot of bodies—prisoners of war, students, police, civil servants, businessmen, teachers—often lined up in ditches with their hands bound behind them with barbed wire. Similar discoveries followed the reoccupation of almost every South Korean community, but we still aren’t certain who bears the most blame. The retreating southerners may have killed as many as 100,000 political prisoners on the left, and the ROK government estimated that the conquering northerners killed 26,000 class enemies (and later re-estimated the number to be 129,000) to clear the way for Communist rule.
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The city of Taejon, for example, suffered dual massacres—the July massacre at the hands of the South Koreans, and the September massacre at the hands of the North Koreans. These two events killed some 5,000 to 7,500 civilians in Taejon, but the United States blamed these killings entirely on the North, and the North blamed them entirely on the South. Regardless of who killed the most civilians, the forty-two American prisoners of war found tied up and shot at Taejon were certainly the work of the North Koreans.

The retreat by the Communists added to the misery of the prisoners they had taken. North Koreans usually killed foreign prisoners unless they could be used for propaganda purposes, and in October 1950, as the fall of Pyongyang loomed, the North Koreans packed their American prisoners onto trains to be moved north. Dozens died of cold and hunger during the five-day ride, and sixty-eight were taken off the train and shot at the Sunchon tunnel in the far north. All in all, three out of every eight Americans taken captive in the war died in Communist hands.
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