Why Did the President Turn the Train Around? — Korea, June 1950

Four in the morning, the twenty-fifth of June, 1950. The North Korean army crossed the 38th parallel.

And in three days, the capital, Seoul, fell.

This is what happened in those four days.

On the afternoon of the 26th, Uijeongbu was broken through.

At dawn on the 27th, the president left Seoul.

At two in the morning on the 28th, the Han River bridge was cut.

We mostly remember Rhee in those days like this.

He lied that Seoul was safe.

He left first, leaving the citizens behind.

He cut the Han River bridge and abandoned 1.5 million people.

Three scenes. And all three are tied to one man's name.

But look for that name in the records —

and at each of those places, a different name comes up.

Today we follow those names.

"Seoul is safe. Do not panic."

It is said that such a broadcast went out on the radio in June 1950.

The citizens believed it and stayed; the president was already gone from Seoul. That is how the story set.

But there is something odd about this story.

Where it began —

who first wrote it down that way, and when — is hard to find.

If that broadcast really happened, it should be recorded somewhere.

As it happens, there was an outfit listening to Korean radio in full at the time.

The Foreign Broadcast Information Service of the United States. FBIS.

It transcribed what it monitored day by day and reported to Washington, and those transcripts survive.

Look in that record —

Rhee's broadcast is there.

But it was not made in Seoul. It was made on the night of the 27th, from Daejeon, where he had taken refuge.

Rhee broadcast, June 27. American aid is on the way, and he has contacted MacArthur and Truman.

The first Rhee broadcast in this record is that Daejeon broadcast of the 27th.

So whatever came out of the radio in Seoul —

even if the words "Seoul is safe" were in it,

it was not Rhee's voice.

And the phrase itself is confirmed nowhere in the transcripts.

Then where did the words that kept citizens in Seoul come from?

The record points somewhere else.

That announcement came from Army Headquarters.

Research by the ROK Institute for Military History records it as a false announcement.

It cites this announcement as the reason citizens stayed in Seoul without even preparing to flee.

That sentence is not in the president's broadcast.

The words that held the citizens were spoken by the army.

The one sentence stuck to Rhee's mouth for seventy years — was not his.

The second thing stuck to his name is this.

"He ran away first."

That he left Seoul at dawn on the 27th is a fact.

The question is what came next. We have called it flight.

Before making that judgment, you have to see what kind of country this was.

Twenty-two months since the government was founded. Behind North Korea in military and economic strength.

Until the day before the war, the whole army was on leave.

The United States was no different.

In January 1950, five months before the war, Secretary of State Acheson announced a Pacific defense perimeter — and left Korea outside it.

Inside America there were voices for giving up the peninsula and making Japan the bridgehead.

The president of a twenty-two-month-old country was standing in that place.

The memoir written by his wife, Francesca, records the dawn of the war's second day.

We give her account of that scene as she wrote it.

The circumstances of this call are confirmed in American diplomatic documents as well.

Dawn on the 27th. The cabinet ministers rushed into the residence.

Your Excellency, you must leave Seoul.

The memoir gives his answer this way —

After the ministers pressed him, he boarded a train that dawn.

But after going as far as Daegu, he turned the train around.

It was in order to go back to Seoul.

But the northbound train stopped at Daejeon.

The broadcast we saw in chapter one — it came out of Daejeon that night.

He held out against leaving, was pushed out, and on the way down he turned back.

Can you call this man someone who ran away first?

Let us add: in wartime, a command moving out of the capital is basic military practice.

And Seoul was never terrain that could be held in the first place.

In the Imjin War and in the Manchu invasion, Seoul was abandoned.

Three months later, when Seoul was retaken, two North Korean divisions defended it — and could not hold a week.

In 1940 the French government left Paris,

and in 1941 the Soviet Union moved the functions of government east from Moscow.

And four months later, when UN forces drove north after the Inchon landing,

Kim Il-sung abandoned Pyongyang too. The North Korean government fell back to Kanggye.

The same act. And only one side is called flight.

What remains is not the leaving.

It is the words left behind in Seoul while he left.

The place those words came from was not him.

The third scene, and the heaviest.

The demolition of the Han River bridge.

This too is said to have been ordered by Rhee.

The bridge was blown at half past two on the morning of the 28th.

Look for where the order came from —

and each record names someone different.

Korean official histories point to Chae Byung-duk, the Army Chief of Staff.

But the official U.S. Army history writes it differently.

Chae himself denied that he had given the order.

The man who carried it out was Colonel Choi Chang-sik, chief of engineers. On this both records agree.

The American advisory group had asked that the bridge be blown later.

Troops and equipment still had to be pulled south.

That request was not honored.

At the moment of the blast there was no warning on the bridge.

The confirmed dead include 77 policemen of the Jongno police station.

The exact scale is still disputed.

And the main body of the Korean army north of the river lost its way out.

Colonel Choi, who carried out the order, was shot in September of that year.

The man who gave the order was never written down as one person,

but the man who received it died.

Thirteen years later a military court accepted his retrial.

And he was found not guilty.

The ground the decision rested on was this —

Following an order is not a crime — a justifiable act under the criminal code.

The received account remembers this scene as Rhee's.

But open the records, and the names in that place contradict one another.

One thing is certain. That hand was not Rhee's.

He lied, he left first, he cut the bridge.

The received account tied those three scenes into one man's story.

Open the records, and at each of those places there was a different name.

The sentence "Seoul is safe" is not in the transcripts, and the words that held the citizens came from Army Headquarters.

There is a record of him refusing to leave — and he did the same thing four months later in Pyongyang.

The order for the bridge points to a different man in every record, yet only the man who carried it out was shot.

The tragedy of that day is real. The severed bridge, the 1.5 million left north of the river.

Only the name attached to that tragedy does not match the record.

Source criticism is not about building heroes.

It is about holding the received account against the record, and marking honestly where they disagree.

There is no "what if" in history.

But we can remember a little more accurately.