The Korean War (58 page)

In the three or four months that followed, they had no chance to wash or take off their clothes: they could only rub their hands with snow. Yet the Scottish socialist in Condron was impressed that on the march, their captors never asked them to carry their heavy equipment, and that as a matter of course the guards and their officers joined the daily queue for sorgum along with the prisoners. Condron admitted that it was only later that he understood the conscious political purpose behind this.

Among their party were two US Marines who had been prisoners of the Japanese, and could communicate with the Chinese. The Marines seemed to respond to the situation with less difficulty than the US Army prisoners. ‘The American soldiers seemed to see the way out of the experience as individuals,’ said Condron. ‘If one stole a bit of food, he would scuffle into a corner and eat it alone. The British and American Marines took it in groups. We stuck together. When the marching was looking rough, we’d say to each other, “Come off it – the f—ing commando school was tougher than this.” ’

Their group’s morale soared when they heard, through their American Japanese-speakers, that ‘all prisoners go home’. To their utter astonishment, they were suddenly marched to a train. It began to head south. For four or five nights they travelled, halting throughout the daylight hours in tunnels. Near Pyongyang, they were shuttled into marshalling yards where they remained for a week. Then a handful of men were picked out, for no evidently logical reason, and taken away. These men were indeed returned to the UN lines, apparently as a propaganda move to convince the West that rumours that all prisoners were being shot were unfounded. The remainder began to receive more food – a little rice, chicken, soup. Some of the Americans were now euphoric, composing cables and letters to their families, ready for dispatch at the moment of their release. Some men spent hours discussing the menu for their first meal on their release. The British imposed a self-denying ordinance on themselves, not to discuss food. Suddenly, the Chinese brought news: ‘You go north – prisoner-of-war camp.’ The shock to those who had convinced themselves that they were going home was appalling. A few weeks later, Condron helped to bury one American, whom he had watched on the train working out the hour-by-hour programme for his first week of freedom.

Now, for the first time, they were interrogated. They were apprehensive at the prospect, and bewildered by the reality. They had spent some time discussing with an American captain how they should respond to military questions. Yet there were none.
Instead, an amiable Chinese officer sat on the floor, offered each man a glass of hot water, and asked: ‘What sort of work does your father do? What sort of work does your mother do?’

‘My mother does not work,’ answered Andrew Condron.

‘Why your mother no work?’

‘She is a housewife.’

‘What is housewife?’

‘She just stays home.’

‘How much your land your family own?’

‘There’s the back garden.’

‘What you grow?’

‘Potatoes, rhubarb.’

‘How many cows have your family got?’

‘We get milk from the dairy.’

‘What is dairy? How many pigs you have? How many cows?’

At last, with a self-satisfied grin, the Chinese concluded, ‘Ah, your family very small land. You are poor peasant.’ The British laughed for weeks about the cockney Marine who was asked about his family’s land, and vividly described his windowbox.

Yet if it is easy to find comedy in the naïveté of all this, among the prisoners a powerful undercurrent of fear was never far distant. Condron’s group were relatively well treated by their Chinese guardians. Many men who fell into the hands of the North Koreans suffered dreadfully. Aircrew and those with special technical knowledge were singled out for far more sophisticated and brutal questioning. In the first months of captivity, many officers were treated with savage cruelty, and subjected to months of solitary confinement. The worst brutalities were suffered by those confined in the hands of the North Koreans in the transit or penal compounds around Pyongyang – ‘Pak’s Palace’, ‘The Caves’, Camp 9 at Kangdong.

When Private Henry O’Kane of the Ulster Rifles was captured on the Imjin in April 1951, like Marine Condron, he and his group
expected to be shot. A mate named Tommy Spears of B Company had seventeen cigarettes left in his pocket, and sat down to smoke the lot in the first half-hour, because he was certain he would never smoke again. O’Kane and his companions were reasonably well treated, given the usual ‘safe-conduct passes’ declaring that they had been ‘liberated’, then ordered to start marching. Their interrogations, like Condron’s, focused upon personal histories rather than military information. O’Kane was told that he would be well treated. He pointed out that nothing had been done for his wounds. He was taken across the courtyard to a primitive aid post where the shrapnel fragments were extracted from his head and leg without benefit of anaesthetic, some black ointment ‘such as we use for horses back home’ was smeared on the wounds, then his original bandages were replaced. Their wounds, their filth, their exhaustion depressed O’Kane’s group deeply. There were no officers among them. Each day an NCO would count out their ration of peanuts – sixteen to a man, the sort of statistic a prisoner remembers for the rest of his life. They were told that they were to be marched to catch a train to a place of safety. This raised their spirits, and for the first night or two they moved in good heart. Then, as night followed night and they realised that there was no train, morale fell again. There was no temptation to straggle from the column, for North Korean soldiers hung around constantly, begging to be given prisoners: ‘We were very glad of Chinese protection.’

They spent some weeks at a village on the delta of the Taedong river, being given daily political lectures, before being set marching again, this time to their permanent home, Chayson, Camp 1, where they arrived in June 1951. Here, they joined some hundreds of Americans. The British were shocked. ‘The atmosphere was pathetic. I have never seen men like it in my life,’ said O’Kane. ‘They were like the walking dead. They could not lift their heads, they seemed unable to speak. The appearance of fresh British troops seemed the end to them – it meant that the whole thing
would go on for ever. I saw thirty men buried in one day, that first week.’
⁹

Jerry Morgan was a twenty-five-year-old technical sergeant in the 24th Infantry, a black regiment, when his company heard the cry ‘Every man for himself!’ on the night of 27 November 1950. Most of them were rapidly rounded up by the Chinese, and marched north. They spent a month in the houses of a village at a place they called ‘Death Valley’, for many Americans died there. Then they were moved some twenty miles to their permanent home on the Yalu: Camp 5, ‘Pyongdong University’. Here, in the hands of the North Koreans, they suffered through the rest of that first, terrible winter.

When Andrew Condron and his group were taken north again in March 1951 to Camp 5, they were appalled by what they found. They joined some seven hundred men at the limits of misery and hunger, among whom prisoners were dying every day. The camp was sited in a valley, on a peninsula overlooked by two hills. It was a place of great natural beauty, had the circumstances been such as to make them appreciate it. Here, confined chiefly by the geography and certainty of the impossibility of escape, with a single strand of wire marking the permissible limits of movement, many men stayed for up to three years. Only when the Chinese assumed control of Camp 5 in the spring of 1951 did conditions improve marginally, and the worst excesses perpetrated by the North Koreans cease.

The more thoughtful prisoners perceived from the outset that their wounded died for lack of medical attention and not, on the whole, as a matter of enemy policy. The communists themselves were entirely bereft of drugs and equipment, even for their own men. But it was also evident that in the first winter of 1950–51, the North Koreans were indifferent as to whether their captives lived, or died of starvation. Men who had been receiving a US
Army daily combat ration of 3,500 calories now found themselves provided with only 1,200 calories of corn and millet. It was a diet devoid of vegetables, almost barren of proteins, minerals, or vitamins. Leadership among the prisoners collapsed. A dreadful struggle for survival took over, the strongest ruthlessly stripping the weak of food. Up to thirty men a day were dying.

By far the most deadly killer, above all in those first months of 1951, was the dreaded ‘give-upitis’, which afflicted thousands of prisoners. In an extraordinary fashion, they lost the will to live, above all the will to eat. Many Americans simply declined to eat the mess of sorgum and rice with which they were provided. They chose instead to starve. The British would say laconically: ‘If you don’t eat, you don’t shit. If you don’t shit, you die.’ Some men were fortunate enough to have friends and comrades who cosseted and cajoled them into eating. PFC Graham Cockfield of the 34th Infantry noticed that it was the younger prisoners who seemed most vulnerable:

You’d hear mem sitting all day, planning the meal they were going to have when they got out. Then somebody came around with the millet, and they wouldn’t touch it. We simply did our best to force food down any individual we knew wasn’t eating. Natural physique had nothing to do with who survived and who didn’t. It was all in the mind.
¹⁰

Henry O’Kane was near the margin of survival when he reached Camp 1: his mouth was sore from lack of vitamins; like every other man, he was suffering from dysentery and beri-beri. All around him lay cases of malaria, jaundice, bone fever. O’Kane was placed in a hut with some forty Filipinos and Puerto Ricans: ‘They saved my life. They were peasant characters, rice eaters, who simply understood that kind of life, could make medicine from herbs to keep themselves alive. That is what they did for me.’

But other prisoners refused help, resisted every blandishment. The ‘no hopers’ merely lay down, staring emptily into space, until
one morning, they were dead. ‘It was easier to die than it was to live,’ in the words of Lieutenant Walt Mayo of the 8th Cavalry. ‘We tried to do as much amateur psychology as we could, but the problem was sheer despair.’
¹¹
It was an extraordinary phenomenon. A few men in the communist camps in Korea died as a result of deliberate brutality. Many suffered terrible beatings, punishments involving exposure to cold or heat that amounted to torture. Almost all were terribly weakened by hunger and disease. Yet there was never any equivalent of the systematic, wholesale brutality that the Japanese practised upon their prisoners in World War II.

The atmosphere in the camps, above all in the first months of most bitter starvation, was savage. As men’s boots wore out, they saved the steels from the soles, and sharpened them into shivs, as tools for self-defence. There were endless petty power struggles, most about food. Terrible acts were perpetrated by prisoners upon each other. In one of the most notorious cases, US Army Sergeant James Gallagher was later convicted by court-martial of killing two seriously ill prisoners by throwing them out into the snow. ‘I learned more about the way society operates in that camp than I could have learned in any university,’ said Andrew Condron. With a kind of insanity, some prisoners sold scraps of food to others for money or scrip that was utterly worthless to them. In those first months of 1951, every man was entirely preoccupied with the struggle for survival. Racked with dysentery, a man’s intestine would hang down inches below his anus, to be stuffed back with a surge of agony when the next call to defecate came. It was not uncommon to stagger thirty, forty times a day to the latrine, men finding themselves unable even to cross the compound without dropping their trousers. Prisoners drowned by falling in the latrine pits. Lice and bedbugs thrived. They held competitions to kill them – 123, 124, 125; their thumbs were black with ingrained blood. Condron became obsessed with this. ‘If I live,’ he thought, ‘I shall never get rid of that blood.’ They itched ceaselessly as they sat and talked; exchanged the plots of old films; signalled extracts from
old newspapers to each other in morse or semaphore – anything to pass the dreadful, savagely cold days, until the time came to huddle desperately together for warmth through the icier nights.

For the weakened men, the greatest hardship was the regular wood detail. Their lives depended upon collecting sufficient fuel to keep their fires and cookers alive. Yet with each trip, they were compelled to forage further afield into the mountains. The supply began to falter. Crossly, the Chinese summoned a meeting, and harangued the prisoners upon their negative attitude to labour, pointing out that it was not for the captors’ benefit, but that of the captives. Then, as spring came, there was a surge of volunteers for the wood detail. The Chinese were delighted to discover that ‘your attitude towards labour has improved’. Yet it was not wood that called the men, but the discovery of marijuana. First identified by some of the Mexican prisoners, it grew wild on the hills. Through the next two years it became, for some men, the only means of making captivity endurable. It caused some excesses which puzzled the Chinese – sudden exuberant sing-songs from groups of black prisoners; one morning a helplessly stoned figure racing around the compound screaming: ‘The Indians are coming! The Indians are coming!’ But the Chinese were told that he was shell-shocked. Curiously enough, in two years they never appeared to grasp the truth.

In the spring of 1951, officers and men were held in the same camp areas. Each morning, they were herded together in their hundreds for political lectures, huddled shivering for four hours at a stretch: two hours in Chinese, two hours of translation, and any man found sitting back on his hands received a kick. ‘Study hard, Comrades, with open minds, and you will get home soon,’ the Chinese commandant told them. ‘But if you don’t, we’ll dig a ditch for you so deep that even your bourgeois bodies won’t stink.’