War crimes in the Korean War

It excavated some mass graves from the Bodo League massacres and confirmed the general outlines of those political executions.

[10][11][12] The commission also received petitions alleging more than 200 large-scale killings of South Korean civilians by the U.S. military during the war, mostly air attacks.

It recommended South Korea seek reparations from the United States, but in 2010, a reorganized commission under a new, conservative government concluded that most U.S. mass killings resulted from "military necessity", while in a small number of cases, they concluded, the U.S. military had acted with "low levels of unlawfulness", but the commission recommended against seeking reparations.

[20] The United States reported that North Korea mistreated prisoners of war: soldiers were beaten, tortured, starved, put to forced labor, marched to death, and summarily executed.

Although the Chinese rarely executed prisoners of war like their North Korean counterparts, mass starvation and diseases swept through the Chinese-run POW camps during the winter of 1950–51.

Especially in early 1951, thousands of prisoners lost the will to live and "declined to eat the mess of sorghum and rice they were provided".

[22] The unpreparedness of U.S. POWs to resist heavy communist indoctrination during the Korean War led to the Code of the United States Fighting Force which governs how U.S. military personnel in combat should act when they must "evade capture, resist while a prisoner or escape from the enemy".

[31] They report they were not told about the POW exchange procedures and were assigned to work in mines in the remote northeastern regions near the Chinese and Russian border.

[32] In December 1950, the South Korean National Defense Corps was founded; the soldiers were 406,000 drafted citizens.

In the winter of 1951, 50,000 to 90,000 South Korean National Defense Corps soldiers starved to death while marching southward under the PVA offensive when their commanding officers embezzled funds earmarked for their food.

[35] U.S. airpower conducted 7,000 close support and interdiction airstrikes that month, which helped slow the North Korean rate of advance to 3 km (2 mi) per day.

[41] North Korean factories, schools, hospitals, and government offices were forced to move underground, and air defenses were "non-existent".

[42] General Matthew Ridgway said that except for air power, "the war would have been over in 60 days with all Korea in Communist hands".

FEAF flew the majority at 710,886 (69.3% of sorties), with the U.S. Navy performing 16.1%, the U.S. Marine Corps 10.3%, and 4.3% by other allied air forces.

These claims have been disputed; Conrad Crane asserts that while the U.S. worked towards developing chemical and biological weapons, the U.S. military "possessed neither the ability, nor the will", to use them in combat.