The Cold War (23 page)

But not entirely new. The ur-event in this recurring drama took place at the end of World War II, when Stalin demanded and received from the Allies the forceful repatriation of thousands of Soviet soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Germans—some to fight alongside them. The sense of horror turned to personal revulsion and guilt after the worst fears of the officers who handed them over were confirmed and many Russians were exiled, imprisoned, or executed, sometimes all three. For years afterward, Soviet commanders reminded their men that this would be their eventual fate if they surrendered. This memory seemed to dominate American minds, from President Harry Truman on down, when prisoners began falling into the hands of American troops fighting in Korea under the United Nations flag. More than 130,000 were in Allied prison camps by January 1951, six months before the Communists asked for negotiations. To support Allied insistence on voluntary repatriation, teams began screening the captives. To the amazement of the U.N. command and the embarrassment of the Communists, the ratio of those polled who refused repatriation ran at about four to one before the process was suspended under a combination of invective at the Panmunjom truce talks and obstruction by the Communist leadership inside the prison camps.

If the wise policies of World War II had been followed, the prisoners would have been transferred out of Korea to the United States, or at least to Okinawa. That was what General Douglas MacArthur recommended to Washington, but he never got a reply. The principal arguments against it were cost, political sensitivity in Japan about the status of Okinawa, and the unspoken fact that a stateside transfer of prisoners would constitute an admission that the conflict was more than a temporary “police action.” As the numbers became unmanageable and even threatening behind the wavering front lines, the prisoners were
shifted south to holding camps near Pusan, where the South Korean civilians who had been impressed into North Korean service units were separated from the Korean and Chinese soldiers.

I have always felt that retaliation was the real reason the Communists did not treat our own prisoners better. The captured Asian troops, many of whom had fought with more discipline and determination than their American opponents, were regarded by most ordinary soldiers with whom I served in Korea, and by altogether too many officers, as subhuman “gooks,” which is what they were usually called. They were therefore deemed unworthy of the civilized treatment accorded less than a decade earlier to white European prisoners. They were crowded into improvised prison space at four times the level prescribed in U.S. federal penitentiaries, and given little to do except dig drainage ditches and organize parties for the removal of their own excrement. They were beaten by military police, although this occasional brutality nowhere approached the murderous barbarity the North Koreans practiced on Allied captives in the north. In fact, that brutality was matched in the Allied POW camps only by the North Korean prisoners' enforcement of their own internal discipline, which was essential to their high command's strategy of holding out against the principle of voluntary repatriation.

The now-obscure episode that crystallized the incompatibility of the Communists' subtle political tactics with the classical American military strategy of victory by overwhelming firepower took place on the small fishing island of Koje off the southern coast of Korea. Koje-do (the Korean suffix signifies an island) is about half again as large as Martha's Vineyard. Two rock-strewn valleys on its northern coast were hastily converted into a tented outdoor Alcatraz for seventy thousand Chinese and North Korean captives in January 1951.

“The first blunder was the camp design,” wrote Edward Hymoff, an International News Service correspondent, after a visit. “Instead of small compounds, easily policed, it was decided for ease and economy to make them fewer and bigger. The result was a sprawling series of mammoth, 100-acre compounds enclosed by double fences of barbed wire with a single sally-port gate system and guard towers at the corners. With this incredibly bad planning, all pretense of prisoner control was foredoomed.”

The compounds were originally designed to hold from 700 to 1,200 men each, but about 5,000 were soon jammed into each one. Space between them was later filled to confine more prisoners, saving on the number of guards but
making their task more dangerous because thousands of prisoners could be mobilized quickly for protests, strikes, and riots by orders shouted across the barbed wire from one enclosure to another. The guards, green recruits led by officer misfits sent down from the front with no knowledge of Chinese or Korean, often left their posts to trade souvenirs, cigarettes, or sex with the camp-follower town of eight thousand that had sprung up around the perimeter. Several were murdered. At night the small guard force feared it could easily be overwhelmed, and so it largely retreated to barracks, in effect leaving the camp under control of the prisoners. Their Communist commanders imposed brutal discipline on recalcitrants, who would be found in the morning stomped to death, with rib fragments causing fatal internal bleeding; choked by cotton forced down their throats; or hanging from the barbed-wire fences. One nonlethal method of discipline was to tie a prisoner to a tent pole by his testicles and then dump his head in water.

In this idleness and overcrowding, rebellion would have festered even without an ideological spur. Each compound developed its own arsenal, which was described by Colonel William R. Robinette, one of the Koje commandants:

As so often happens, local commanders on the ground were either unwilling or unable to understand the grand political strategy of both sides. Brigadier General Paul Yount, the commander in Pusan, was grandiosely engaged in constructing a courthouse that was to be the port city's largest building; it was intended to be the site of military trials to punish the camp's prisoner leadership as war criminals, just as if the Koreans were Nazis and this was to be their Nuremberg.

Various people sent to Koje-do to investigate late in 1951 found what amounted to a scandal. One of them was John E. Murray, then a major and secretary to the general staff of the Pusan Logistical Command, who reported
that the administration of the camp was slapstick and slipshod. He tried to alert Eighth Army Headquarters in Seoul of the explosive situation, but there he ran up against General James Van Fleet's chief of staff, who was partly deaf and never quite seemed to understand what they faced. As the ranking army commander in Korea, Van Fleet himself counseled patience lest any sharp reaction provoke a riot that might sabotage the truce talks, which he believed would soon end the war.

Early in 1952, Washington prohibited Koje-do commanders from judicial prosecution to enforce discipline: So much for Yount's mini-Nuremberg. But Truman and his advisers were divided on much more than that. The Joint Chiefs of Staff at first hungered for the propaganda victory that would come from public mass defections by the Communist prisoners, but they realized this posed a risk that the Communists might end the talks and hold on to the Allied prisoners as pawns. Army Secretary James M. Lovett argued for a straight exchange to avoid spinning out the talks and threatening the welfare of U.S. prisoners. Secretary of State Dean Acheson also backed a straight exchange under the Geneva Convention, which would get the far smaller number of American GIs back sooner. But it was too late for mere legalism, and Truman himself recognized that. In 1951 he ordered General Matthew Ridgway to demand “some major concessions” preventing the forced repatriation of prisoners. In a lengthy public statement defending the diplomatic behavior of the United Nations, he declared with Trumanesque forthrightness, “We will not buy an armistice by turning over human beings for slaughter or slavery.”

On the ground, the Communists thought of victory more than of honor and had their tactics well coordinated. They viewed the prison camps as a mere extension of the battlefield, which included the worldwide battle for public opinion. Charges of germ warfare were a principal weapon, and U.S. prisoners were threatened and tortured—“brainwashed” was then the popular term—to make statements admitting they had conducted it, mainly from the air. The most notorious confession came from a senior marine pilot, Colonel Frank H. Schwable, who had been put in a hole outdoors and left in his own filth for six months before he cracked.

On Koje-do, most compound commanders were North Korean intelligence officers who had been smuggled through the lines, surrendering as enlisted captives. The overall political commissar was Pak Sang Hyong, a Korean raised in the Soviet Union who had served as a staff officer and interpreter to Russian troops occupying North Korea after World War II. He was a close associate of
Nam Il, the chief truce negotiator at the Panmunjom talks, and the two worked together, passing reports and instructions back and forth through underground channels, the existence of which American officers found hard to believe. Pak had made his way via the POW process to Koje-do disguised as a private soldier; he was equal in rank to Nam Il, but American intelligence never identified him. Another high-ranking North Korean officer was Colonel Lee Hak Koo, who had surrendered in the summer of 1950 in full uniform with red piping and Russian pistol, claiming to have lost his Communist faith. He became the military commander inside the barbed wire on Koje-do. Under the leadership of Pak and Lee, the die-hard compounds of the camp had acquired a terrible potential for embarrassing its hosts.

The prisoners provided ample warning of their commitment. Their ideological activity was shouted out in slogans and posters, including drawings of the Soviet and North Korean dictators, Joseph Stalin and Kim Il Sung. They demonstrated for better conditions, drilled with homemade rifles, and forcibly resisted United Nations screening, to the point of murdering those who wavered. In the compounds they controlled, riots on command slowed down the U.N. process of screening out anti-Communist prisoners from the hard core. When the leader of Compound 62 declared that screening was unnecessary because all 5,600 prisoners demanded to be returned to North Korea, the 3rd Battalion of the American 27th Infantry Regiment was sent to subdue them on February 18, 1952.

As more than a thousand prisoners in Compound 62 ran yelling from their tents brandishing improvised weapons and throwing rocks, the men of the 27th hurled grenades and finally opened fire. Fifty-five inmates were killed outright; twenty-two more died in hospitals. One GI was killed and thirty-eight wounded. When the infantrymen returned to the front line shortly afterward in a supposedly secret transfer, they were greeted by Communist loudspeakers blaring at them, “Welcome, murderers of Koje-do!” It was, to say the least, unnerving; I know, because I was in the 15th Infantry on the flank.

More to the point was the opening the incident created for Nam Il at the truce talks. At Panmunjom he railed at the U.N. negotiators: “The fact now placed before the people of the world is that in spite of your barbarous measures, you violated the will of the captured personnel of our side. Thousands of them would rather die than yield to your forcible retention.” In fact, the Allied command had begun to retreat quietly. In a message on April 29, Ridgway cautioned the Joint Chiefs of Staff that resumption of forced screening would demand
“brutal” repression and asked them to assume that those who refused to be screened had in effect accepted repatriation. The parlous security at the camp was confirmed early in May by a visit from Colonel Robert T. Chaplin, provost marshal of the Far East command. Chaplin's report prompted Ridgway to warn Van Fleet of the need to tighten control. Van Fleet's response was to complain that Chaplin had been sent to inspect over his head without the protocol of first informing Eighth Army Headquarters.

The Koje uprising had resulted in the appointment of Brigadier General Francis T. Dodd as camp commander on February 20, but with conflicting orders. Ridgway told Van Fleet to maintain tight control, while Van Fleet told Dodd to “go easy” on the prisoners and keep them quiet because the armistice was near. This muddle had been a major factor in turning the camp into what Dodd's predecessor, Colonel Maurice J. Fitzgerald, called a “graveyard of com-manders”—a new one almost every month, even before Fitzgerald had taken over the previous September.

In May 1952 the political and military elements collided dramatically in a way that none of the principal actors could have foreseen—not just Dodd and Van Fleet but Ridgway himself. At the precise moment of the climax, he was in the process of handing over his Far East command to another celebrated World War II leader, General Mark W. Clark, and trying to avoid the stain on his glittering reputation before he became commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Europe.

Dodd, an imposing West Pointer with a fine combat record, was anxious to decrease tensions in the camp. He circulated freely, talking to the Communist leaders and fatuously trying to win their cooperation. He went unarmed as a show of goodwill—and to avoid having his weapon seized and used against him. But because the Communists had already gained such mastery over their own compounds that neither guards nor officers had been allowed to enter them for months, Dodd easily fell into their trap. In a prisoners' dry run, Lieutenant Colonel Wilbur Raven, the commanding officer of the camp's military police guards, had actually been seized and held briefly, but this did not alert either officer to a plot. Nam Il himself had set it up, through bamboo-telegraph orders, to strengthen his negotiating hand at Panmunjom.