South out of the north who carried it out on suspect communist supporters Also the number has been magnified under the son's rule to go with his extreme anti American propaganda so now the truth becomes a myth to fit his massacre museum
I'm saying the results are it most likel happened on a smaller scale and was more likely infighting but the story has been distorted to support thier anti American slant more than people who claim it is all fake
The death of North Korean civilians at Sinchon is significant on a few levels. On the one hand, it calls our attention to the always fractious topic of war crimes in Korea, and the contested nature of the memory of those crimes. On the other hand, the Sinchon massacre has underpinned a great deal of anti-U.S. propaganda in the DPRK and today remains a touchstone of the North’s Korean War narrative highlighting the brutality of the United States.
Bruce Cumings notes that he has not found much in the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland, to verify or deny the North Korean version of events in Sinchon. By contrast, NARA has extensive holdings on the broader topic of war crimes in Korea and about massacres carried out by retreating Korean People’s Army forces in northern cities like Hamhung. (See National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 153, Records of the Judge Advocate General, Box 891 forward.) The U.S. investigated a total of 1848 allegations of North Korean War crimes and these take up about 900 boxes in the National Archives. I have scans of a number of these documents and photographs, and anticipate posting some on this website in the future
Response from Bruce Cumings (5 March 2008):
In response to J.J. Suh’s inquiry, and with thanks to Adam Cathcart’s informative posting, here is an excerpt about Sinch’on from my 1993 book. I also spoke with Hwang Sok-yong, who told me (before Sonnim came out) that the major part of the Sinch’on massacres were carried out by Korean Christians who had fled the Sinch’on area for the South. In my opinion, If any Americans were present they were probably KMAG personnel, who witnessed many South Korean atrocities against civilians; the Koreans I spoke with were adamant that Americans had carried out the massacres, but it is also true that Koreans do not like to admit that other Koreans would do this
Excerpt from Bruce Cumings, War and Television (Verso, 1993; electronic copy, not copyedited):
My research has never uncovered anything about Sinchŏn in the National Archives.
An awful atrocity occurred one day in Sinchŏn, however, because we were later able to compare our visit against newsreel footage taken when the bodies were discovered and that could not have been faked. (Max painstakingly counted and measured the bricks [with calipers, etc.] in the charnelhouse wall to verify the footage.) We could verify nothing, however, about its authorship.
Journalist Eli Schmetzer of the Chicago Tribune would disagree. He also visited Sinchŏn, misspelling it as Chichon, and titled his account “North Korean Museum Stokes Loathing of U.S.” He quoted an unnamed East European: “Chichon stinks. It smells of fraud.”
Schmetzer went on to say that “each year 300,000 North Koreans are brainwashed at Chichon.” All this is part of the “twisted version of history that North Korea has dished up,” warning people that unless they’re loyal to Kim Il Sung, “the bogeyman GIs will come back to rape, torture and burn everyone alive.”
I have this to say to Mr Schmetzer: it happened.
https://adamcathcart.com/sino-north-kore/
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