The Greatest Traitor (18 page)

What Blake failed to acknowledge was that in the course of the
enforced march, the POWs would be driven on without mercy almost to the end, and none that fell were spared; whereas in the midst of the brutality afflicted on the civilians, there were at least occasional acts of leniency.

On Wednesday, 1 November, the day of Lieutenant Thornton’s murder, all the captives, GIs and civilians alike, fought to survive while camped out in a field and open to the elements. By morning, ten POWs had perished, having either frozen to death or simply given up on life. Eight more were so ill and weak they were in no fit state to march. The Tiger ordered everyone on their way, and remained behind briefly to talk to the headman of the village. Commissioner Lord, by his side as ever to translate if necessary, heard him say: ‘Bury the eighteen, and don’t leave any mounds.’

As well as being cruel, The Tiger was also deceptive. He knew the US Army might well capture this territory one day, and he wanted no evidence left of his war crimes. The other ploy used to cover his tracks after the execution of Lieutenant Thornton was to order all the soldiers’ dog tags to be handed over to the guards. This, he knew, would make identification of bodies all the more difficult.

‘Don’t worry,’ he had told the prisoners earlier that morning. ‘The wounded and the ill will be carried by oxcarts. Those who are unable to travel will be taken to People’s Hospitals.’ It became all too clear, before long, that ‘People’s Hospitals’ was a euphemism for execution, and the promise of transport proved illusory. Everybody had to walk, with The Tiger insistent on an even faster pace. At the front, any GIs who were lagging were beaten with rifle butts, while at the back, the elderly nuns were suffering terribly.

Mother Beatrix had served the poor of Korea for fifty years. Now the 76-year-old Frenchwoman, provincial superior for the St Paul of Chartres congregation, was falling badly behind as the march progressed. Her constant companion, Mother Eugenie, had almost worn herself out trying to support her, but continued to stay by her side and urge her forward. The old nun struggled on for a mile or so, but
then sank down by the roadside. Guards surrounded the two women and tried to harry them along. They pushed Mother Eugenie to one side, and then prodded Mother Beatrix in an attempt to make her get up and walk. Mother Eugenie begged the guards to show mercy, to help her friend, but they tore her arms away from Mother Beatrix and angrily told her to move on and rejoin the column.

‘Go, my Sister, go,’ were the last words a weeping Mother Eugenie heard from Mother Beatrix as she reluctantly set out to catch the group. A few minutes later a shot rang out. Execution was the price paid for exhaustion.

That night The Tiger instructed Commissioner Lord, while holding a pistol to his head, to sign Mother Beatrix’s death certificate with the verdict ‘from heart failure’. It was not the first time, and it would not be the last, when Lord was made to falsify such a document.

As the prisoners crossed the Kosan Mountain pass the next day in a biting blizzard, more and more GIs dropped out of the line. An ever increasing number of shots sounded as the guards despatched the worst of the ‘feeble, tottering skeletons’ to the ‘People’s Hospitals’. Many desperate soldiers simply sat by the side of the road and looked to their own comrades to put them out of their misery. ‘Will someone please hit me on the head with a rock?’ Larry Zellers heard one American soldier say, not for the last time.

Blake himself at this stage was suffering from dysentery, while his companions, Vyvyan Holt and Norman Owen, were in even worse shape, starting to develop the symptoms of pneumonia. In the midst of his own illness and distress, Blake looked upon the executions of the GIs with a certain detachment. Years later, he had adapted a brutal rationale for the killings: ‘As far as the shooting of the stragglers was concerned, it seemed pretty merciless, but if they’d been left behind they would have died of hunger and cold in any case. So, in a way, shooting them might have been considered an act of mercy.’

Once they had reached the top of the mountain, The Tiger, apparently satisfied that a major objective had been achieved, began to relax
the pressure, at least on the civilian detainees. Commissioner Lord and Monsignor Thomas Quinlan argued successfully for transportation for the very weak and, later that day, a bus and a truck arrived, on which the children, women, old men and five very sick POWs were driven away.

On Tuesday evening, with journey’s end in sight, The Tiger sat down with Commissioner Lord, Major John Dunn, senior officer with the POWs, and Dr Ernst Kisch to complete the cover-up of his crimes. Along with the absence of burial mounds, the removal of dog tags and the falsification of Mother Beatrix’s death certificate, he now asked the three men to draw up a list of all those who had died or been killed. After the name of each person, in a column marked ‘Cause of Death’, he told Dr Kisch he should enter the explanation as ‘enteritis’. The doctor was then forced to sign the false document. For Kisch, there was nothing new in this obligatory collusion. The Austrian had been forced to make similar declarations by the Nazis, in the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. Enteritis, a relatively mild form of inflammation of the intestines, is rarely fatal to anyone except weak babies.

Finally, on Wednesday, 8 November, the column arrived in the town of Chunggangjin. They had been walking for nine days, travelled more than a hundred miles, and lost a hundred men and women along the way, lives sacrificed to the maniacal Tiger and his compliant henchmen.

After a week’s respite in another deserted schoolhouse, the captives were ordered to march once more. Chunggangjin had been peppered by F-51 Mustang fighter aircraft firing machine guns and rockets, and The Tiger wanted his charges out of harm’s way. This time their journey was much shorter – five miles to the deserted village of Hanjang-Ni.

If the journey from Manpo to Chunggangjin had been the Death March, the prisoners’ accommodation at Hanjang-Ni would prove to be a Death Camp. The Carmelite nun Mother Mechtilde was the first to die there on 18 November, followed by Bishop Patrick Byrne on
25 November, Father Charles Hunt on 26 November, Mother Thérèse and Monsieur Alfred Matti on 30 November, Father Frank Canavan on 6 December, Sergei Leonoff (an old White Russian in his seventies) on 9 December, Bill Evans on 12 December, Father Joseph Cadars on 18 December and Father Joseph Bulteau on 6 January.

‘It was difficult to bury the dead because the ground was frozen and we had no tools,’ Blake recalled. ‘All we could do was cover the bodies with snow and stones.’

The prisoners were granted a degree of self-sufficiency and, within strict limits, allowed to cook their own food, draw their own water and keep the fires going. Tiger and his men refused to allow the fires in daylight hours, fearful that the smoke drifting from the chimneys would alert American aircraft.

The food ration continued to be miserly, consisting of 600 grams of millet per person per day – ‘bird seed’ was what the captives called it, as it ranked lowest in the scale of grains – plus a vegetable portion of one desultory frozen head of cabbage for about thirty-five people. More often than not they made soup from bean paste, water and cabbage. During the entire winter they received a tiny piece of meat just three or four times, and fish twice. By now, Blake had recovered from the dysentery contracted on the Death March, which was just as well, as he needed as much strength as he could muster to nurse his colleagues, Holt and Owen, who were close to death. The two Britons had by now succumbed to pneumonia as well as dysentery, with their temperatures rising to 106.7°F.

The Tiger suddenly grew worried at the potential consequences of their deaths and sent the camp’s in-house ‘doctor’, a Korean medical student, on a five-mile trek to bring back penicillin and sulphapyridine tablets. He was nearly too late to administer the medicine. ‘The medical student came in and they [Holt and Owen] were completely delirious,’ remembered Deane. ‘Owen was certain there were ambulances outside ready to take him home, and he fought me time and again to get out of the room. At other times both the sick imagined
there were stacks of chicken sandwiches in the room. They accused me of stealing their share.’

Vyvyan Holt believed he was going to die: ‘If it were not for George Blake and Philip Deane, I would not have survived even the last leg of the Death March. They nursed me and Consul Owen and gave us their rations, although they were themselves sick and hungry.’

The British and French contingent, together with Deane, was crammed in a room no more than nine by nine foot. Deane was impressed by Blake’s stoicism and resolve, none more so than on Tuesday, 5 December, when the two of them were on water-carrying duty.

This was a perilous business. It involved two hours’ carrying after breakfast and another one after lunch, and the biting wind felt as if it had penetrated to the very marrow of the bones. The men had to bring the water from a well two hundred yards away, in a twenty-five gallon drum carried between two of them, slung on a pole. The mouth of the well would slowly ice up until a bucket could hardly fit through its opening; the well rope would be frozen solid and invariably stuck to their hands. On that day Blake and Deane were asked to fetch four drums of water rather than the usual three and they promptly refused, saying they were just too exhausted. As Dean recalled: ‘The guard ordered George Blake and me to kneel down in the snow. He accused us of not carrying the amount of water laid down in regulations. We replied that this was not so. The guard said he would teach us not to lie, and he beat us with the butt of his rifle, kicked us and slapped us. George Blake, who got the worst of it, smiled throughout the ordeal, his left eyebrow cocked ironically at the guard, his Elizabethan beard aggressively thrust forward.’

The other prisoners were summoned to watch this punishment meted out, and warned that they would be treated in similar fashion if they disobeyed orders. Blake and Deane were made to remain, hands behind their back, crouched in the snow, for over an hour.

For Blake, the positive, philosophical side of a fatalistic approach to
life served him well in this period. It enabled him to cope when all the evidence, all reason, might have led him to give up.

What Blake had, many of the GIs lacked, however, and they fell into despair. Still on starvation diets, many now chose to sleep for eighteen hours out of twenty-four; it was a means of preserving energy, but also a way for those who had dysentery to avoid the dreaded fifty-foot walk to a lean-to communal latrine, which afforded precious little shelter from the biting December winds and temperatures of -40 to -60°F. That walk alone was the cause of many deaths. For those in the lowest spirits, starvation seemed an easy way out; they had seen their colleagues float into a coma and never wake up, and it seemed a peaceful way to go. Some simply stopped eating.

The soldiers who struggled on resorted to all kinds of selfish, thoughtless behaviour. There were those who worked in the cookhouse, who stole their comrades’ food. Others, in relatively good health, kept the sick away from the stove. Some left others alone to die because they were unpleasant to be around, being dirty and unable to make it to the latrine. There were even those who stole clothes from their skeletal comrades even as they lay dying. The thin veneer of civilised behaviour was torn away: in The Tiger’s world, they lived on the edge.

While Blake and his fellow prisoners at Hanjang-Ni were preoccupied with an elemental life and death struggle in the winter of 1950–51, during which 200 people died, outside the camp gates the intervention of the Chinese had irrevocably altered the course of the war.

After his tactical triumph at Incheon and subsequent rout of the North Korean forces, General Douglas MacArthur, Commander-in-Chief of the United Nations forces, was transfixed by the prospect of total victory in the shape of a united Korea. At a meeting at Wake Island on 15 October, the General assured President Truman there was little chance of Chinese intervention in Korea. In the unlikely event that Mao decided to send in his troops, MacArthur told the President,
then UN air strikes would render them ineffective long before they reached the battlefield. Yet, on that very weekend, the first men of the massed armies of the Chinese Communist forces – the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) – were stealthily entering Korea over the Yalu bridges at Antung and Manpojin, concealed by rugged terrain, weather and smoke from forest fires.

In the course of the next six weeks, General Peng Dehuai and his army of 300,000 first crushed South Korean opposition and then forced the US-led UN forces into a humiliating retreat, all the way back to the 38th parallel and beyond. Dehuai combined all-out attack with clever tactical retreat to mountain hideouts, and MacArthur and his generals were completely outmanoeuvred. A national humiliation was underway.

December 1950 was the nadir of the US-led United Nations campaign in Korea and things looked desperate, until Lieutenant-General Matthew Ridgway replaced Eighth Army commander Walton Walker, killed in an accident in his jeep on 23 December, and slowly but surely, the tide began to turn. Ridgway, a celebrated airborne commander in the Second World War, quickly set about re-establishing discipline and raising morale. Unlike MacArthur, he bought into the political strategy of holding the line and fighting a limited war. He wanted to take back territory, but not at the expense of large casualties, and was happy to fight a war of attrition.

It started to pay dividends in early February. Ridgway had been forced to abandon Seoul, but as his troops retreated, he stretched the Communist supply lines to their very limit. In the coming month, he led a series of successful, limited attacks by UN forces – the colourfully named Operations Killer, Ripper and Rugged. After they had recaptured Seoul and the front began to coalesce roughly around the old demarcation line, the 38th parallel, expectations were raised that peace negotiations would open soon. Back in the camp at Hanjang-Ni, greater stability in the war led to a corresponding improvement in living conditions for Blake and the other captives.
Food was more plentiful and ill treatment rare; life altogether felt not quite so desperate.