Innocent Victims and Their Terror

In bone-chilling temperatures and howling winds, with the imminent threat of enemy gunfire aimed at his ship from the beach and return fire from the USS Missouri, four destroyers, two heavy cruisers, and four rocket ships sailing over him back toward the shore, destiny was summoning a thirty-seven-year-old Merchant Marine captain from Philadelphia.

Captain Leonard LaRue stood on the deck of his five-year-old, ten-thousand-ton freighter, the SS Meredith Victory, in the harbor at Hungnam, North Korea, 135 miles into enemy territory, in the sixth month of the Korean War, Christmastime 1950. "I trained my binoculars on the shore and saw a pitiable scene," he later wrote. "Korean refugees thronged the docks. With them was everything they could wheel, carry, or drag. Beside them, like frightened chicks, were their children."

He was looking at nearly one hundred thousand terrified North Korean refugees — old men, women of every age, and children, the innocent victims of every war — who were desperately fleeing the Chinese Communists, who had threatened to behead any North Korean civilians, even though they were supposedly on the same side. The Chinese angrily charged that the civilians had been aiding the Americans and their allies.

Hundreds, even thousands, of family tragedies were unfolding on those docks. Kim Jung Hee, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three young children — two daughters and a son — carried her youngest child, Won Suk, a little girl about two years old, on her back. At the same time she clutched the hand of her son, five-year-old Doo Hyuk, with one hand and held her husband's hand with the other as he carried their oldest child, their ten-year-old daughter, Koon Ja.

They lived in the North Korean city of Wonsan, sixty miles south of Hungnam. They owned a jewelry store where they sold diamonds and other gems. As the war grew worse, and with their fear of the Communist regime in the north, they made the fateful decision to leave Wonsan and escape to South Korea, where they hoped to find safety and freedom for themselves and their children.

They were so desperate that they were willing to walk, even in the subzero temperatures and with snow on the ground. Kim Jung Hee's nephew, Major Peter Kemp, is now a major in the United States Army. He relayed questions from me to his aunt, who is now seventy-nine years old and lives in Seoul. Together we were able to piece together her story.

They left her husband's parents behind in Wonsan. Her husband's brothers and sisters had already been drafted into the North Korean Army. Kim Jung Hee's own family lived much farther away, near the border of Siberia, so she was forced to leave them behind, too. Their decision to leave their families was made easier, she said, because everyone believed that those who were evacuating would be able to return to their homes in only a few months. The rumor going around was that the United Nations forces were retreating, but that their retreat was only temporary — everyone would soon be able to come back home. Neither Kim Jung Hee nor her husband, Lee Man Sik, ever saw their parents or other family members again.

The walk "seemed like forever," Kim Jung Hee recalled. It was "very cloudy," she said, and "extremely cold." She estimated that their journey took at least two days, maybe several more. As they walked, they passed the bodies of those who were not able to survive even the first leg of their desperate journey to safety and freedom. There were "a lot" of people on the road, also traveling by foot to Hungnam, lending credibility to statements by veterans of Hungnam that the North Korean people "were voting with their feet," expressing their displeasure over the ironfisted rule of the Communist Party in their country.

On the way to Hungnam they were strafed and bombed by war planes. Kim Jung Hee was unable to tell whether they were American or Russian planes. They had to dive for cover on the side of the road several times. The parents almost became separated from their children during the air attacks when all of them ran for protection from the planes as they swooped down on the wide-open refugees.

After they reached Hungnam, they found that the scene at the city's dock was "chaotic," with pushing and shoving and soldiers trying to separate the refugees from military personnel so the refugees wouldn't board the ships intended to transport the troops. After the military boarding was complete, the soldiers still on the beach (the men of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division) helped the refugees to board other ships to sail out of the harbor at Hungnam and head for the southern tip of Korea and another port city, Pusan.

As the vast crowd surged back and forth, with refugees extending all the way to the horizon and more flooding in by the minute, Kim Jung Hee's husband told her he was going to look for food for the family. Lee Man Sik took their daughter Koon Ja with him. He told his wife, "Stand here. We'll be right back." After he left, the throng grew more desperate due to both the sheer numbers and the growing fear among the refugees that the American ships might leave at any minute. The refugees were urging those in front of them to hurry, to board the ship — not knowing what kind it was, where it was headed, or what their fate might be if they boarded it. All they knew was that it was a ship, and a ship — any kind — was their only hope for survival.

Kim Jung Hee felt the surge of the crowd around her and heard people telling her to keep moving ahead. She wanted to wait right there, as her husband had told her. She was afraid that any step in any direction would mean they would not find each other. But even her neighbors from Wonsan around her were growing anxious. As the eagerness of everyone on the dock increased, the force of the crowd pushed the young mother and her two children toward a ship, an American "LST" (the Navy's initials for landing ships that carry tanks). Some in the mass of humanity were telling her, "Come on. Let's go. This may be the last ship out."

Those who saw the scene at Hungnam in 1950 say that it was like that other famous scene of desperate human beings, the people of South Vietnam who overran the United States embassy in Saigon and reached for the helicopters from the roof as American personnel completed their pullout at the end of the war in 1975.

At Hungnam, the crowd literally pushed Kim Jung Hee on board the LST with her two children. As she looked around anxiously but futilely for her husband and their third child, she never imagined in her worst fears that she would spend the rest of her life looking for them. Today, as she enters her eighties, she still looks.

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