ABSTRACT
John Osborne, Time and Life senior correspondent in the Pacific, called the warfare in Korea “the ugly story of an ugly war.” But the real story of the ugly war had not been fully disclosed when he was reporting on the Korean War. Recently released reports of mass killings by US troops are only a small part of the war’s ugly story. The executions of “suspect civilians” by the ROK government in the wake of its hurried retreat might be considered the darkest chapter of the Korean War. Most Westerners think of North Korea’s maltreatment of US POWs when the subject of Korean War atrocities is raised. But it is little known that South Korea executed many more civilians. The massacres apparently perpetrated by Rhee Syngman’s government show what the so-called forgotten war was really about.
