"I'm For You"

Last week South Korean army forces retook the southern cities of Sunchon and Yosu, seized in a Communist uprising the week before (TIME, Nov. 1). TIME Correspondent Carl Mydans accompanied government assault troops. His report:

The pretty little valley of Sunchon ("Peaceful Heaven") rests neatly at the bottom of the rugged Chiri Mountains, twelve miles north of the port of Yosu. On the morning of Oct. 20, Sunchon's farmers were harvesting their rice, when they heard a siren and the rattle of small arms from the railroad station. They looked up to see 2,000 rebel soldiers and 400 civilians swarming off a train from Yosu.

The rebels approached Sunchon city peacefully; but as soon as they entered the city, police opened fire. Joined by a company of soldiers guarding the city bridge, the rebels fired back. After a short, sharp battle they were in full control. The hundred or so cops who surrendered were lined up against the wall of the police compound and riddled. Then the rebels, joined by part of the citizenry, paraded through the city under North Korea's Communist banner, singing "Ten thousand years to the North Korean People's Republic!"

Star-Spangled Shirt. When darkness came, Communist execution squads went from house to house, shooting "rightists" in their beds or marching them to collection points where they were mowed down. In 2-3-days, 500 civilians were slaughtered.

U.S. Lieuts. Stewart M. Greenbaum and Gordon Mohr, Army observers in Sunchon, narrowly escaped death. The rebel sergeant assigned to kill them was an old friend, who had drunk beer with them in their billet many times. He took the two officers into a field, fired into the ground and then led them to the Presbyterian Mission of Dr. John Curtis Crane, who was barricaded in with his wife and four other missionaries.

From one of the doctor's shirts and a few colored rags the ladies made a 16-star, eleven-stripe U.S. flag and put it up. The rebels began pounding at the compound gate, yelling: "Let's kill the Americans!" Suddenly one shouted: "No, no, not them; they are my friends." It was the lieutenants' friend, the sergeant. The rebels went away.

For the first few hours the loyal troops who retook Sunchon were as savage as the Communists had been. On the big compound of the Sunchon Agricultural and Forestry School we found what was left of the entire population of Sunchon. Women with babies on their backs watched without expression as their husbands and sons were beaten with clubs, rifle butts and steel helmets. They saw 22 of them marched away to the primary school nearby, and heard the volley of rifles which killed them.

"Get the Americans Out." Two days later, entering Yosu, the town where the revolt began, the government troops were much better behaved. The Communists' occupation of Yosu revealed the pattern they would like to impose on all South Korea. After arrest and murder of police and loyal leaders, the rebels took over all communications, banks, schools and food distribution. They established a "People's Committee" as the new government. The "People's Committee" announced: "Our two-point program: 1) to oppose, to the death the killing of our brothers, and 2) to get the Americans out of here."

Though the recapture of Yosu has temporarily stalled the revolt, most of the rebel troops have, melted off into the countryside and mountains with their weapons. Yosu's fall was not the end of a war; it was only the beginning. The general civilian point of view was expressed by one woman we found squatting in a shack on the outskirts of Yosu just after the fight had gone by her door. When we asked her whom she was for she replied: "I'm for you. You are the strongest."

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