Korea

by Philip Chinnery

  By 26 July, both sides agreed to discuss the following five items:

  Pass the agenda of the talks.

  Determine the military demarcation line between the two sides in order to establish a nonmilitary zone. This would provide a foundation for the hostile actions in Korea to come to an end.

  Arrange details for an effective cease-fire and armistice in Korea, including the organization, authority, and responsibilities of a committee supervising the implementation of the clauses concerning the cease-fire and armistice.

  Exchange prisoners of war and civilian internees.

  Propose items needed to be suggested to the governments related to the two parties.

  The procedure for processing Chinese prisoners of war, as of August and September 1951, was to send them to a collecting point not far behind the front lines within twenty-four to forty-eight hours of their capture. The wounded would be given medical treatment, before being sent to hospitals at Pusan. The non-wounded prisoners were registered, tagged, deloused, given haircuts etc and kept at the collecting point for varying periods before being sent to Pusan. There they would stay for a few days to a month before being sent on to POW compounds on Koje-do, an island off the south coast of Korea.

  At that time it appeared that few officers were being taken prisoner. It later became obvious that captured officers were claiming to be enlisted men and as they all wore the same uniform it was difficult to differentiate between the two. A major source of Chinese prisoners was the destruction of the 180th Division and the capture of 3,000 prisoners including the Division Commissar Pei Shan. His identity was revealed by one of the prisoners during an interrogation session and he was promptly hanged by his own side.

  Many of the prisoners were remarkably forthcoming once their interrogations were under way. A captured Chinese soldier, Lee Zeu Win, prisoner of war number 704110 from the 579th Regiment, 193rd Division, 65th Army, claimed that on 8 May 1951, he and two unnamed others shot and killed two captured British prisoners in the vicinity of the Imjin River. The prisoners were not bound but were required to sit on the ground and were shot in the back. The bodies were not buried. A sketch was made of the place of execution.

  Interrogation of the prisoners of war soon revealed that many of them were formerly members of the Chinese Nationalist Army who had been captured and impressed into the Communist Army. Many others were South Koreans who had been forced to join the North Korean Army. The decision facing the UN Command was whether to repatriate all of the prisoners of war, including those who did not wish to return home, or allow the men to decide themselves. The Allies had learnt a hard lesson at the end of the Second World War, when they forcibly repatriated tens of thousands of Russians who had surrendered to the Germans. Stalin had insisted on their return, so he could punish them for surrendering in the first place. Although not all of them had agreed to join the German Army in order to escape starvation in their prison camps, they were all shipped off to the Siberian prison camps as punishment; the officers were generally shot as soon as they set foot again on Russian soil. The ill-feeling that this created behind the Iron Curtain caused the supply of enemy defectors to dry up for some years after the end of the war. Why defect or surrender to the Americans if they only send you back to where you came from? If the Allies repeated this process in Korea, what effect would it have in a future war – would enemy soldiers be more reluctant to surrender if they knew they might be sent back for punishment at the end of the war?

  It was decided to allow the prisoners of war to choose for themselves whether they wanted to return home or not. This angered the Communist delegation who demanded that all prisoners be sent home at the end of hostilities. This sticking point would delay the signing of an armistice for two more years and cause hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides.

  Perhaps there is another explanation for the Allied insistence on right of choice for the prisoners; they knew that not all UN prisoners of war would be returned at the end of the war. The CIA had discovered that at least two train loads of UN prisoners had been sent to the Soviet Union via China. The CIA source was at the railway station at Manchouli, near the border of Manchuria and Siberia when the first transfer took place late in 1951. He saw hundreds of men in American uniforms boarding a train en-route to Siberia. A large number of them were negroes. He went to the railway restaurant and observed three POWs who were under guard and were conversing in English. They wore sleeve insignia which indicated that they were Air Force non-commissioned officers. The CIA source, a Greek refugee who eventually left China through Hong Kong, observed a second train load of POWs in the spring of 1952. At no time did he see prisoners returning from Siberia. The Consulate General and the Assistant Air Liaison Officer at the Hong Kong consulate evaluated the information as ‘probably true’.

  The CIA received a number of reports during the war concerning UN prisoners of war held in China. One was dated 25 October 1951 and stated that local people had been forbidden to talk to American and British prisoners of war held in a compound at 52 Fu Hsing Road, Shanghai. The order was issued by a staff member of the Central and South China military area headquarters on 13 September and the prisoners included men from the US Eighth Army, the British Gloucester Regiment and the Argylls. The names included First Lieutenant Metcalf, Warrant Officer Booth and enlisted men Ross, Wright, Jarvis and Borden, none of whom ever returned home again.

  It was clear that none of these men would never return. As far as the author can determine, the subject of men passed on to the Russians was never discussed at the peace talks and their return was not made a condition of the armistice. The Chinese and Russians had started the game of not returning prisoners; the United Nations would finish it.

  The twelve months of bloody fighting had shown Mao Zedung, Joseph Stalin and Harry Truman that total victory was unattainable and could even lead to total war between the Communists and the West. General MacArthur was already advocating the use of nuclear weapons on the concentrations of Chinese troops, a frame of mind which would eventually lead to his dismissal.

  As their political masters had decided to enter negotiations to end the war, the Generals of both sides were reluctant to engage in any major offensives while the talking progressed. They confined their activities to exchanges of artillery fire, raids and patrols and the occasional attempt to seize nearby hills to improve their defensive lines.

  The first main stumbling block was the agreement of a cease-fire line. The Chinese wanted both sides to withdraw to the 38th Parallel, from which the war had initially begun. The Americans however, insisted on the cease-fire line being where the two sides were currently dug-in, because the terrain was easier to defend. The communists broke off the talks on 23 August and the fighting continued.

  The UN forces had been trying to take over an area known as the Punchbowl, which served as an important Communist staging area. The fighting was concentrated around three interconnecting hills south-west of the Punchbowl known collectively as Bloody Ridge. Three days after the Communists walked out of the talks the ROK 7th Division captured the mountain after a week of heavy combat. The next day the North Koreans recaptured the mountain and held it against the best efforts of the US 2nd Infantry Division's 9th Infantry Regiment. Finally the Division commander ordered his units to outflank the mountain and the North Koreans pulled back on 5 September. The cost of the effort was approximately 15,000 North Koreans and 2,700 UN soldiers killed, wounded or captured.

  On 25 October the UN and Communist negotiators resumed their discussions at a new location, a collection of tents in the village of Panmunjom, six miles east of Kaesong. The Communists agreed that the truce line should be based upon the current lines of contact, but in order to prevent them from ignoring the other issues, the Americans insisted that the proposed line be valid for only thirty days. The fighting would continue until all other issues had been resolved.

  The main item of contention was the return of all prisoners of war, as required by
the Geneva Convention. The Chinese and North Koreans insisted that all their men be returned, whereas the American position was that the Communist prisoners should have a choice as to whether or not they went home. It is quite ironic when one considers the fact that both China and Russia were sending UN prisoners of war to camps behind the Iron Curtain from which they would never return.

  The UN prisoners of war in the Communist camps along the Yalu River were also being used as pawns in the negotiations. The Chinese were unprepared for the large numbers of prisoners of war and it was not until January 1951 that permanent camps were established to house them. In the meantime 40 per cent of the US prisoners had died from starvation, disease or neglect.

  The Communists were not in a hurry to improve the conditions of the prisoners. They were less likely to make trouble or try to escape if they were weak and hungry. They then began to ‘brainwash’ their captives, by promising better food and conditions if they made anti-war or anti-American statements or broadcast Peace messages over Peking Radio. Many men pretended to go along with this coercion in order to stay alive, although some became genuine Progressives and came to embrace the Communist line. Some became members of the Central Committee of American and British Prisoners Promoting Peace and issued a letter in December 1951: ‘To Peace-Loving Peoples of the World. We want to go home. Though the Chinese Peoples Volunteers treat us very well here, cooking good food and taking good care of us, we still miss our hometowns and families very badly etc’.

  This favourable treatment was not being extended to the members of the Kennel Club, a punishment cell for Reactionaries in one of the Chinese prison camps. The kennels were boxes five feet long, less than four feet high and just wide enough for the occupant to lie on his back. The five boxes held Lance Corporal Mathews of the Glosters, Fusilier Derek Kinne of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers and Americans ‘Doc’ McCabe, Tom Cabello and Sal Conte. McCabe was being punished for trying to reconvert prisoners who had fallen for the Chinese propaganda; Mathews was suspected of being a member of the escape committee and Kinne was probably one of the toughest of the lot. He had escaped with two others, but had been recaptured after struggling for eighteen miles with a rupture. Tom Cabello had also escaped and over nineteen days covered over 200 miles before he was recaptured, almost in sight of friendly lines. These men would be held in harsh conditions right until the end of the war.

  In the UN prison camps near Pusan, screening had begun to determine which prisoners would like to stay and which ones would like to go home. Some 40,000 South Koreans who had been forced to fight for North Korea were reclassified as ‘civilian internees’ and would be eventually released in the South. The screening process aggravated tensions between the pro- and anti-Communist prisoners. There were now Communist agents in the camps who had deliberately allowed themselves to be captured and they fermented violent uprisings during the spring of 1952. These had to be suppressed by US paratroopers using tear gas and fixed bayonets.

  In April 1952 UN officials announced that only 70,000 of the 170,000 civil and military prisoners then held by the United Nations wished to return home to North Korea and the Peoples Republic of China. This was of course unacceptable to the Communists who would clearly lose face and the talks became deadlocked.

  In order to increase the pressure on the UN negotiators the pro-Communists, armed with a variety of home made weapons attempted to take control of the interior of the camps. In May they scored a stunning coup when they succeeded in capturing Brigadier General Francis Dodd, the commandant of the main POW camp on Koje-do, when he came too close to the compound gate as a Communist working party walked by. In order to secure his release the Americans pledged to suspend additional repatriation screenings in a poorly worded communiqué that appeared to substantiate Communist allegations that the UN had been mistreating prisoners. He was released and subsequently relieved of his command.

  On the front lines, the grand offensives had been replaced by local raids and artillery duels. The Chinese had greatly increased their artillery strength with captured American weapons and equipment supplied by the Soviet Union. Some days up to 20,000 shells would be fired at the UN lines and the American gunners would respond ten-fold.

  Atrocities continued to take place on the front lines during 1952. On 21 September an American artillery forward observer team and a squad of South Koreans were dug-in on Hill 854 near Samchi-yong. Their position was overrun by the enemy, but recaptured the following day. An affidavit made by the lieutenant who found the bodies of the two Americans read: ‘One of the boys had no head. It seemed to have been mashed or beaten and was lying all over the road. Both of his feet had been cut off about half way between the knee and ankle. It appeared as though they had been chopped off with a dull instrument. The other GI had his eyes gouged out, and nothing remained where his eyes were except holes. He had been bayoneted all over the body with the upper parts of his legs completely laid open to the bone.’ The bodies of the South Koreans had received similar treatment, one of them having had the genitals severed with a sharp instrument – they were lying alongside the corpse.

  When the peace talks stalled again on 8 October, General Van Fleet decided to increase the pressure on the battlefield and gave the order to capture the Triangle Hill mountain complex three miles north of Kumhwa. He was confident that two infantry battalions, with sufficient support, should be able to capture Triangle Hill and its neighbour Sniper ridge in five days with about 200 casualties. He could not have been more wrong. Despite 200 fighter bomber sorties and the support of nearly 300 artillery guns the Chinese could not be moved. He threw one battalion in after another and the US 7th Infantry Division and the ROK 2nd Division suffered over 9,000 casualties in a futile attempt to take the mountain. Chinese casualties were estimated at over 19,000, but they had plenty more men to take their place. The United States did not and after all, it was an election year.

  In January 1953 Dwight D. Eisenhower succeeded Harry S. Truman as President of the United States. A former five-star General with his reputation made in Europe during the Second World War, his election caused uncertainty amongst the Communist leaders. Although he had campaigned on a platform of ending the war, he might well have decided to do so by winning it.

  On 13 December 1952, the Executive Committee of the League of Red Cross Societies, meeting in Geneva, adopted a resolution proposed by the Indian delegate that recommended the sick and wounded prisoners be exchanged prior to a truce. The proposal was put directly to the Communists in February 1953, but no reply was received. However, on 5 March, Joseph Stalin died and China and North Korea realized they could make their own decisions without looking over their shoulders towards Moscow. On 28 March, the Communists not only agreed to exchange some sick and wounded prisoners, but also proposed a resumption of the truce negotiations which had been suspended six months previously.

  The exchange took place in April 1953 at Panmunjom, where the Communist ambulances would drive to a chalk line fronting a series of reception tents. The sick and wounded were counted and a receipt given for their delivery. A brief medical check followed to ascertain whether the returning prisoner was strong enough for the forty-five minute ambulance ride to Freedom Village, or whether he should be taken by helicopter. There were two Freedom Villages, one each for returning ROK prisoners and for American and UN prisoners. They were huge compounds with processing and hospital tents. General Mark Clark, the Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command, was there to welcome each of the 149 American prisoners home.

  A total of 684 UN prisoners were returned, including 32 British and in exchange 6,670 North Koreans and Chinese were sent home. It later transpired that an additional 234 sick and wounded US and UN prisoners and 141 South Korean prisoners who were eligible for repatriation, were kept back by the Communists.

  Unfortunately, the Chinese were not playing by the rules. Instead of repatriating the most sick or injured of their prisoners, they sent back lightly wounded to appear to the
world that they had been treating the men well. They also returned many prisoners who were sympathetic to the Communist cause – so-called ‘progressives’. However, it was a start.

  The prisoners who came back during ‘Little Switch’ were questioned and had much to report about death marches and the conditions in the enemy prisoner of war camps. It was estimated that on one of the six main death marches, from Tokch'on to Death Valley in the eastern province of North Korea, between 200 and 800 of the prisoners died or were killed on the march. The death rates in the prisoner of war camps were equally shocking. Between 3,000 and 6,000 men died of their wounds or starvation or were deliberately killed. At Camp 5 at least 1,800 died and are buried on the hills surrounding the camp on the border with China.

  While the news of the deaths of prisoners in enemy hands was new to the UN Command, the subject of war crimes and atrocities was not. By the end of June 1953, the War Crimes Division files held details of 1,615 alleged atrocity cases. The majority, 1,134 took place in South Korea and 478 in North Korea. The files revealed that the North Korean Peoples Army was responsible for 1,164 of the atrocities and the Chinese Communist Forces were instigators of 439. The perpetrators of a dozen other cases were still to be identified.

  As many as 57,000 people, both civilian and military were reportedly killed in these atrocities and the bodies of 10,032 had been recovered, as well as 533 survivors who provided proof of these acts. As far as the author can ascertain, no war crimes trials were ever held. Some of the perpetrators had been captured and had admitted their participation in war crimes. However, some were repatriated during ‘Little Switch’ and others would disappear in mass break outs from the POW camps in June 1953.

  The final four months before the ceasefire was agreed saw one crisis after another. In May 1953 the Communists gave such indications of bad faith and evasiveness that General Clark was authorized by Washington to terminate the talks and continue the war. All the while South Korean President Syngman Rhee was threatening to derail the peace talks. Not only was Korea still divided in two, but he now had over a million Chinese facing him across the 38th Parallel.