Sunchon Tunnel Massacre - October 30, 1950

Suncheon is also the name of a city in North Korea, something I was reminded of while googling "Sunchon" in order to find older mentions of the South Korean city. The North Korean city has a population of 437,000, and though it is spelled the same in Hangeul, it, along with the rest of the DPRK, uses the McCune-Reischauer spelling of Sunch'ŏn. Anyway, I bring it up because while I was googling I came across a few sites talking about the Sunchon Tunnel Massacre, which I had never heard of before. According to U.S. Senate Report no. 848 on Atrocities of January, 1954:

In October of 1950, at Pyongyang, when the fall of that city appeared imminent, the Communists loaded approximately 180 American war prisoners into open railroad cars for transport northward. These men were survivors of the Seoul-Pyongyang death march and were weak from lack of food, water, and medical care. They rode unprotected in the raw climate for 4 or 5 days, arriving at the Sunchon tunnel on October 30, 1950. Late in the afternoon, the prisoners were taken from the railroad cars in alternate groups of approximately 40 to nearby ravines, ostensibly to receive their first food in several days. There they were ruthlessly shot by North Korean soldiers, using Russian burp guns. One hundred and thirty-eight American soldiers lost their lives in this atrocity; 68 were murdered at the tunnel, 7 died of malnutrition while in the tunnel, and the remainder died of pneumonia, dysentery, and malnutrition while in the tunnel, and the remainder died of pneumonia, dysentery, and malnutrition on the horror trip from Pyongyang.

You can also find the above report here, in .pdf form. According to another report, almost two-thirds of American prisoners of war who died in Korea died of war crimes. I found that report through a link from Wikipedia's Korean War page which, to me, seems a bit biased against the US.

Anyway, it's fairly timely because apparently a book was just released which documents the accounts of eight survivors. It is called They Came Home - Sunchon Tunnel Massacre Survivors.