The Korean War (60 page)

So much of the prisoners’ experience teetered uneasily between tragedy and farce. ‘You see that now?’ said Comrade Lim to a Camp 5 group one morning, stabbing his blackboard as he denoted some refinement of proletarian organisation. A bee on the blackboard stung him, to the delight of his audience. ‘You see that now?’ demanded Lim furiously. ‘That is a capitalist bee.’ Chinese prurience was persistently affronted by the prisoners’ language: ‘Why all the time you effing, effing, effing?’ The Chinese regarded the obscenities as a deliberate insult to themselves. The prisoners, in their turn, laughed at the Chinese habit of walking into the compound holding hands with each other: ‘We thought they were a load of blooming fairies,’ said Bob Erricker. The Chinese discovery of this belief led to yet another lecture, to ‘correct their attitude’.

A fanatical young Marxist named Comrade Sun was Chief Political Commissar at Camp 2. His classes were conducted with weary, unrelenting zeal. The more senior an officer, the more likely to be singled out for correction:

‘Davies, stand up’ [he commanded the Gloucesters’ padre one morning].

I rose.

‘What is your opinion of the chapter we have just read?’ (It was from William Z. Foster’s
Outline History of the Americas
.)

Long pause, then:

‘I’m afraid I was not listening.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, I’m a British PoW and I have other interests than American history.’

Silence –

‘You will pay attention. You must correct your attitude.’

Ponderously –

‘I confess my crime.’

‘Sit down.’
¹⁷

Chinese behaviour was often unpredictable. Once, through the usual channel of the ‘All China Committee for World Peace’, Erricker received a letter from his mother, enclosing a photograph of the new Queen. He pinned it on the wall of his hut, and to his surprise, the Chinese made no attempt to remove it. Yet the Chinese at Camp 2 were furious when the British celebrated the Queen’s coronation with a parade and stockpiled home-brewed rice wine. Rations were cut in punishment.

The Chinese made determined efforts to destroy prisoners’ faith in religion. ‘If you believe in God, why doesn’t he help you now?’ the commandant taunted NCO prisoners in Camp 4. Lieutenant John Thornton, USN, noticed that the black prisoners – whom the Chinese worked steadily to distance from their white compatriots, held on to their religious faith better than many whites. One of the prisoners best-loved by his companions was Captain John Stanley, who delighted them with his guitar-playing and exasperated the Chinese by his dogged insistence: ‘I am an American, not a negro.’

Men became intensely moody, their spirits vacillating dramatically from one day to the next. Personal relations could become obsessive. Close friendships would form and persist for weeks, until broken by some fit of temper. But there was virtually no homosexuality: most men found, very early in their imprisonment, that they lost all interest in sex. It was only in the last weeks before their release, when the end was obviously near, that prisoners allowed themselves to think again about women. Most men believed that they learned from their time in captivity to count the blessings of daily life in freedom. Padre Sam Davies used to say: ‘When I get out of here, I shall never again moan about waiting for a bus in the rain.’
¹⁸

The attitudes of the ‘reactionaries’ – those who continued openly to defy the Chinese throughout their captivity – varied greatly. The most systematic defiance, not surprisingly, came from some of the inhabitants of the officers’ camp. Some officers, for instance, refused to speak to a Chinese at all, if this could be avoided. Others, like Anthony Farrar-Hockley, talked and argued with them at every opportunity. It was a matter of personal inclination. The behaviour of all prisoners tends inevitably towards the juvenile, because they themselves are unwillingly placed in the position of captive children, unable to make their own decisions. Thus too, some of their acts of defiance were childish. One morning, a dozen men would work furiously for hours, digging in a deep hole in the midst of the compound. Then, with great ceremony, they would place a piece of paper in it, and fill it in again. Inevitably, the curious Chinese would re-excavate it, to discover the simple message ‘Mind Your Own Business’. Some days, prisoners would reduce ‘Loll Call’ to chaos, only to parade with perfect discipline the next time. One morning, a group of men would run out into the compound, and spend an hour ‘flying’ around, pretending to be helicopters, amid the bewildered gaze of their guards. Another day, a crowd of spectators might stand watching two prisoners play ping-pong, their heads moving to and fro with the ball – except that there was no ball, no bats, no table – merely a mime show to needle the Chinese. Taking invisible dogs for a walk was always popular. One morning at Camp 3, ‘all of us decided to go crazy,’ according to Private David Fortune, ‘we rode round on invisible motorbikes, sat playing invisible cards. Some men really were that crazy . . .’
¹⁹

Perhaps the most imaginative pinprick ‘tease’ of their captors was perpetrated from the officers’ camp, at the height of the Chinese propaganda campaign alleging that the Americans were employing bacteriological warfare in Korea. Some prisoners attached a dead mouse to a small parachute, and one morning when unobserved, they hurled it some yards beyond the wire of the compound. They were rewarded by the spectacle of an earnest
cluster of Chinese, surrounding a doctor in a face mask who arrived to examine and at last, with infinite caution and ceremony, remove the specimen. It was another contribution to the prisoners’ tiny, sometimes pathetic efforts to demonstrate to themselves, as well as to their captors, that they had not yet surrendered all control of their own affairs.

Although there were many friendships among prisoners that transcended nationality, in general each group hung closely together. The Turks were greatly admired for their indomitable toughness and resistance to the Chinese. Their only collaborator was quietly killed by his compatriots. When one of their men was sick, two of his comrades undertook responsibility for his survival. The British seemed to suffer fewer difficulties than the Americans with ‘give-upitis’. Resignation and adjustment to the inevitable are British national characteristics. Most British prisoners took it for granted that it was preferable to eat the unspeakable food they were offered, rather than to die. There were sub-divisions within the national groups: the American aircrew, for instance, tended to distance themselves from their army counterparts. Each nationality tended to keep its own secrets, above all in Camp 2, the officers’ camp. There was deep suspicion of a handful of American officers, one senior, who were believed to be collaborating with the Chinese, even to the extent of betraying escape plans.

The nationalities often argued about what approach to adopt to specific enemy demands. In the officers’ camp, there was a protracted debate when the Chinese demanded that prisoners’ group commanders should assemble and count them each morning. The Americans were uncertain whether or not this was a reasonable demand. The British flatly refused. They said: ‘If the Chinese want to count us, okay. But we will not do it for them.’ Two British officers were dispatched to solitary confinement in the course of that dispute. It would be foolish to deny that there were considerable tensions between the British and American officers in Camp 2. While the British greatly admired individuals, such as the Marine Major John McLoughlin, and Tom Harrison of the USAF,
limping on his wooden leg, there was considerable mistrust at group level. The Americans considered some British behaviour and acts of passive resistance absurd and counter-productive. The British simply did not confide in some Americans about their plans or intentions, because they did not trust them. The British, historically conditioned to despise the open display of emotion, were bemused by the American readiness to weep. Lieutenant Bill Cooper was bewildered to see a US Army captain cry one afternoon, when one of his team dropped a catch during a softball game. Another officer burst into tears when he found his bedding had been switched, when he wanted to sleep next door to a friend. It was a difference of cultures. Lieutenant John Thornton, an American helicopter pilot universally known as ‘Rotorhead’, who behaved with great courage throughout his captivity, said afterwards: ‘We were very poor PoWs – we envied the British regimental tradition. The attitude among most of our men was “hooray for me. Screw you.” The communists were largely successful in isolating us from each other.’
²⁰
Private David Fortune said: ‘Among many Americans, one saw every principle of the code of conduct for PoWs break down. The whole idea of having faith in one’s fellow-man collapsed.’

In the course of the entire war, there was not a single successful escape back to the UN lines by a prisoner in the Yalu camps. But there were many attempts. Some prisoners such as Captain Farrar-Hockley tried again and again, and remained at liberty for some days. PFC Fortune, a 35th Infantryman captured on 2 January 1951, got out of Camp 3 with a comrade, and remained at liberty for three days and nights in the winter of 1952. On the third night, the two men were peering curiously at a Chinese anti-aircraft battery when they were spotted and seized by North Korean militiamen. The Koreans behaved with predictable savagery. The Americans were stripped naked, paraded through the nearby village, and beaten up. Then they were tied up, to be mocked and spat upon by the local children for a few hours before being returned to the Chinese. Back at the camp, they were rewarded
with two weeks’ solitary confinement. The Chinese liked to say to the prisoners: ‘The guards are not here to keep you in, but to save you from the Korean people.’ There was a disagreeable strand of truth in this.

One of the most notable Chinese failures was the establishment, in August 1952, of a ‘penal camp’ for ‘reactionary’ noncommissioned prisoners. This was a fenced compound, where men were compelled to do hard labour, often as meaningless as digging holes and filling them in again. Yet the very qualities in a prisoner that qualified him for the penal camp were those that bound him to his fellow-‘reactionaries’ with a coherence that was achieved in no other compound. ‘Everybody in that camp was a good man,’ said Dave Fortune. ‘Morale was much higher.’ There were no informers, no collaborators, no burden of mutual mistrust. After a few months the Chinese realised their mistake, and redistributed the 130-odd inmates among the other camps.

The notion that the Chinese ‘brainwashed’ the bulk of their prisoners in Korea is simply unfounded. They appear to have employed the sophisticated techniques generally associated with this term only in one case: that of the American aircrew from whom they extracted confessions of participation in bacteriological warfare, their most notable propaganda achievement. In the Korean prison camps, the Chinese attempted large-scale thought reform, with a very modest degree of success. What was astonishing about their attempts to convert their prisoners to the cause of communism was the crudity, the clumsiness, the stupidity with which these were conducted. There is no difficulty in understanding their approach – the ‘lenient treatment’, the efforts to build a sense of community between captors and captives. It was precisely that by which the communists achieved such success during their civil war with the Kuomintang, by the end of which millions of Chiang Kai Shek’s soldiers were successfully absorbed into the armies of Mao Tse Tung. It was founded upon the willingness of the defeated, throughout China’s historical experience, to throw in their lot with the victors, to recognise a new leadership, a new
source of power and patronage. Yet for the overwhelming bulk of the UN prisoners in Chinese hands, the notion that they had anything to learn from Mao Tse Tung’s society was risible. Themselves the products of a highly technical, relatively educated society, they saw the absolute poverty, the pathetic ignorance of their guards and indoctrinators – and despised them. ‘One or two of the Chinese were laughably pleasant,’ said Major Guy Ward. ‘But not one of them showed the intelligence really to make us like and respect them.’

The Chinese were trying to persuade us: ‘Our world is better than your world’ [said Captain James Majury]. In my own mind, I would say, ‘Okay, anything you’ve done with your own society has got to be better for you than Warlordism.’ But there was no way that a Chinese could ever convince me that his world would be better for
me
. Very few people were truly brainwashed. I said to the Chinese towards the end: ‘Surely you must realise that you will never change us?’ And yes, I think they had given up. If they had really been smart, if they had really wanted to make an impact, they would have pampered us from the beginning.
²¹

Yet two years of grinding repetition of political dogma, two years of isolation from their own society, two years of Chinese scorn – ‘You know that your country is not interested in you’ – made a decisive impact upon some men. ‘Do not think that, because you get home, we cannot reach you – we can always get you if we want you,’ they were told. In their impotence, some prisoners found this perfectly believable. The most effective means of breaking a man’s will was the appeal to his physical weakness – offering secret access to the commodity whose absence dominated their lives, food. A prisoner who accepted an egg, a fistful of tobacco from a Chinese in return for some tiny act of betrayal was half-doomed already. His own self-respect was cracked. It remained only for his captors to make the treason absolute, to extract some hint about an escape plan, secret religious services, ‘hostile attitudes’.