Army Interrogators Assist in Operation RAT KILLER (DEC 1951)

Photo By Lori Stewart | North Korean guerrilla fighters captured during Operation RAT KILLER  

UNITED STATES

12.01.2023

Story by Lori Stewart 

U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence

by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian

ARMY INTERROGATORS ASSIST IN OPERATION RAT KILLER
In early December 1951, Republic of Korea (ROK) forces organized under General Paik Sun-yup launched Operation RAT KILLER in the area around the Chiri Mountains in southwestern Korea. The operation rounded up thousands of enemy fighters left behind when North Korean forces were pushed back across the 38th parallel. A team of U.S. Army interrogators assisted the ROK forces in better understanding the operations of the guerrilla forces.

In late 1950, United Nations forces estimated at least 8,000 guerrillas and bandits took refuge in South Korea after having been cut off and isolated following the Inchon landings earlier in September. Most of these enemy fighters concentrated in the Chiri Mountains, using the rugged terrain to their advantage. By November 1951, with fighting essentially stalled as armistice talks took place, guerrilla attacks surged against communications and rail lines, particularly the main rail line between Pusan and Seoul.

The lull in the fighting allowed General James Van Fleet, commander of the Eighth U.S. Army, to detach the Capital and ROK 8th divisions to deal with the guerrilla problem. The ROK forces were placed under the command of General Paik, whose Task Force Paik was augmented with Korean National Police units and a Korean Military Advisory Group support team. The latter team, led by Lt. Col. William Dodds, consisted of sixty U.S. Army experts in liaison, communications, air-ground operations, reconnaissance, and psychological warfare.

Paik managed to keep his pending operation—known alternately as Operation RAT KILLER or RAT TRAP—secret until it launched on 2 December 1951. With significant air support from the ROK Air Force, Paik’s thirty thousand men encircled Mount Chiri and the surrounding peaks that hid the communist guerrillas. As TF Paik pushed up the rugged snow-covered slopes, they flushed out guerrillas who were then captured by police units stationed along escape routes. Once Mount Chiri had been cleared, TF Paik moved north for similar operations around Chonju. Then, on 15 January 1952, in the final phase, TF Paik returned to Mount Chiri for a repeat of the first phase. Operation RAT KILLER officially ended on 15 March when local forces took over the effort.

TF Paik’s extremely successful operation netted thousands of guerrilla fighters, with reported numbers ranging from twelve to nineteen thousand killed or captured. Those captured underwent an initial interrogation in the field and were then sent to a prison camp in Kwangju. There, an American interrogation team assisted ROK and National Police interrogators. This team was led by Lt. Gordon Avison, Jr., a Korean-born son of a Presbyterian missionary who had grown up on the peninsula. He had previously served with the Counter Intelligence Corps during the post-World War II occupation of Korea. His team included Lt. Delbert Longway; Lt. Kazuo Kariya, a 1945 graduate of the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS); Lt. George Taketa, another MISLS graduate who had served with the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service in Manila during the final year of World War II; and Lt. Roy T. Uehata. The latter three members were second-generation Japanese Americans sent to Korea to help allay the U.S. Army’s critical shortage of Korean linguists. Because Korea had been a Japanese colony until 1945, many of the guerrilla prisoners were able to communicate with these Nisei interrogators in Japanese.

Interrogations revealed information about the guerrillas’ organization, locations, intentions, and recruitment tactics. They were organized as a Southern Corps with the main force using the Chiri Mountains. Each South Korean province had a communist cell, the leaders of which had been trained at a Pyongyang espionage school. While many of the fighters were North Korean People’s Army soldiers left behind to sabotage United Nations efforts in the south, others were members of the southern arm of the communist Chosun Workers’ Party. Still others had been fomenting rebellion in the region since the end of World War II.

While Operation RAT KILLER significantly disrupted guerrilla operations in South Korea, such activities continued for years after the armistice was implemented.

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• Date Taken: 12.01.2023
• Date Posted: 12.01.2023 15:08
• Story ID: 458915
• Location: US