Book claims Aussie war crimes

Atrocities were committed by British and commonwealth soldiers, including Australians, during the Korean War, according to a new book.

 Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950 describes an incident where an Australian soldier told two North Korean prisoners of war to walk away from him and then tried to shoot them with their own submachine gun: known to allied forces as a "burp gun", it jammed.

Lance-Corporal Don Barrett of the Middlesex Regiment describes how a soldier of the Royal Australian Regiment dealt with captured "gooks", as the North Koreans were derogatorily described.

"Out in (the) field was an Aussie and he had two gooks -- he'd taken their burp gun -- and he motioned and they started walking away," Mr Barrett told the book's author, Andrew Salmon.

"It misfired, so he called them back. One came back and fixed it. They walked away, then he mowed them down."

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~ Note: Polyukhovich v Commonwealth ~