On this day in 1948, Korea’s Jeju Uprising began, which the US & its South Korean junta cracked down on viciously as part of its war on communists. The US/SK unleashed a campaign of terror, massacring 30,000 civilians, using mass torture & torching 70% of the island’s villages. 
Under US military occupation, US/SK forces killed 100,000 ppl in South Korea between 1945-1950, mostly alleged communists. The campaign of US/SK violence accelerated on Jeju Island on April 3, 1948, when the uprising began in opposition to US plan to separate N. & S. Korea.
The US/SK & their right-wing thugs began a campaign to cleanse the island of supposed communist agitators. The police/army declared the forested interior of the inland to be enemy territory & they executed thousands.
The US Army Colonel in Jeju directly commanded the crackdown on Jeju. The US Army supplied weapons to Korean forces/police & provided aircraft to assist w/ the operation.
95 year-old Kim Wan Mae remembers when soldiers entered her village & rounded up 100s and herded them into a field. All day, they executed their captives--shooting about 480 men, women and children in what's now a small garlic patch.
Kim escaped the firing squads by huddling in a schoolyard. Yet, Kim lost both parents, her husband and a brother in the slaughter. "I saw the bodies," she says, squinting back tears. "One baby was still nursing at its dead mother's breast."
