This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  The food they received daily, in a bucket, was not enough to keep the aver-age American in decent health. Rapidly, they began to starve.

  A number had combat wounds that had received only cursory treatment. Infection and dysentery seared them, making the huts even more horrible.

  What medical care they received was pitiful by any standard.

  Sergeant Schlichter, rather than an Army doctor, was placed in charge of the camp hospital, in accordance with the CCF policy of humiliating officers. The hospital was an old North Korean school building, high-roofed, heated by two pot-bellied stoves, without pipes.

  The stoves had only green wood to burn, and the smoke lay across the room like a blanket of death. Sergeant Schlichter and his surgeon, Captain Shadish, had to crawl about on their hands and knees to keep from choking.

  The crude "hospital" had pallets for only sixty men, among the hundreds who had untreated combat wounds, dysentery, pneumonia, jaundice, and psychic disorders. The Chinese allowed Shadish exactly enough medicines to give four men one sulfa tablet four times a day.

  Each day, Shadish and Schlichter, crawling from man to man, had to play God. To the four men who had the best chance to live, they administered the sulfa. The worse off, Schlichter said later, "We committed to God's care."

  Men died.

  Each morning Charles Schlichter came into the hospital and said, "Sit up." Then he said, "If the man next to you can't sit up, shake him. If he doesn't move, call me—"

  Then, after those who could sat up to be counted, Schlichter and Shadish carried out the dead. The ground was frozen, and they had no tools, but at first, while they still had strength, the bodies were buried in shallow graves. Later, when their strength began to fail, they turned the bodies over to a detail of South Korean prisoners. The ROK's threw the emaciated bodies on the ground outside the camp.

  The prisoners remained in Death Valley from the day after Christmas until 12 March 1951, and each day men died. They died of war wounds, of infection, pneumonia, dysentery. In most cases malnutrition was a contributing factor.

  The prisoners continued to receive only a diet of millet and maize, boiled in a pot, delivered in a bucket, supplemented by dog. But the dogs grew more wary, and the prisoners weaker. Without salt, greens, or essential minerals, they sickened.

  The sick and those with war wounds died first. Then the men without faith began to die, often, seemingly, of nothing at all.

  The youngest men, oddly, died first.

  Schlichter, who never lost his determination to live to return, or his faith in God, believed that most who died didn't have to die. For the first time in his life, he wondered if the will to die, when men's worlds have been turned upside down, was not stronger than the urge to live.

  There were men who had grown up with no strong belief in anything; they had received no faith from parents, school, or church. They had no spiritual home or haven. Exposed to horror and misery, when the man with the gun cut the line to home, destroyed every material reason for living, they could not adjust. They no longer wanted to live.

  Schlichter saw men who refused to eat the meager slop he was eating, in his own effort to stay alive. He heard men mumble fantasies, living in a dream world of their own warm, protected past. One boy angrily told him, as he urged the youth to eat, "My parents never made me do things like this!"

  Another told him one night, sobbing, "I know my mother is bringing me a pie tonight—a pie, Sergeant."

  In Charles Schlichter grew a feeling, which he never lost, that some American mothers had given their sons everything in the world, except a belief in themselves, their culture, and their manhood. They had, some of them, sent their sons out into a world with tigers without telling them that there were tigers, and with no moral armament.

  Most of those who could adjust, who wanted to live on, lived. It helped if a man could hold to something. Some lived simply because they came to hate the Chinese so much.

  And there were some, determined to live, who took food from the sick and dying, and there was no one to say them nay.

  Not all the quitters were youths. The older men went, too. One night a decorated officer said, simply. "I'm going to die." He lay in his hut, neither eating nor drinking, unspeaking, until he did.

  Without discipline, without a chain of command, there was no effective way to help the dying or aid the faltering. There were men who needed to be cheered, helped, cared for. No man would obey another, and no organized effort was ever made. Organization had broken down completely. It must be reported that few officers showed any willingness to take command. The failures were not of the few, but of the many.

  Each day Shadish and other doctors went to the filthy, crowded, lice-ridden, fecal-smelling huts, taking the sickest to the hospital.

  Each night Sergeant Schlichter reported to the Chinese commandant the number who had died. There were some Turks and ROK's with the Americans. To Schlichter's knowledge, not one Turk had died.

  On 12 March 1951, while winter still howled through North Korea, the enemy closed down Death Valley. There were fewer POW's now, and they could be consolidated in fewer camps. The men of Death Valley were assembled from their huts and marched north.

  Charles Schlichter closed out the hospital by burning the straw pallets on which the sick had lain. When the straw went into the fire, the floor and shimmering sides of the stoves were black with lice, trying to jump away. Schlichter loaded some twenty patients, pale with jaundice and too ill to march, onto a mule cart and rode north with them. He was the last to leave the valley.

  As he left, he stood up in the cart, looking back. The last sight he had of Death Valley was of three starving Korean dogs, snuffling warily in from the hills to feed on the bodies of the young Americans they had left behind.

  On the 17th of March he arrived at Camp Number 5 on the Yalu River. Here the officers, N.C.O.'s, and other ranks were separated.

  And here, now that they had been starved and sickened into a disorganized, slack-faced mob, more animals than men, their education began.

  The island of Koje, approximately the size of an American county, lies in the Korea Strait a few miles southeast of Pusan. Koje-do is only a mile and a half from the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, but it is five hours from Pusan by boat, twelve hours by twisting road, which in early 1951 was connected to the mainland by an ancient ferry.

  Koje-do rises green and lovely from the sea. It is a land of lush hills, clear streams, and delicately tinted paddies. The hills hold wild deer, and the streams run with trout. Korean farmers and fishermen have lived upon it since the dawn of history, and in 1951 the island was further populated with refugees from the north, diverted from teeming, crowded Pusan.

  Up close, the beauty fades, and the odor of Koje-do is indistinguishable from that of the mainland.

  To Koje Island, in early 1951, were sent the 80,000-odd prisoners of war taken so far by the United Nations during the Korean War. The Eighth Army was in full retreat, and there were rumors on the wind that all Korea might have to be evacuated. The thousands upon thousands of pow's gathered around the Pusan area were in the way; worse, they were a potential hazard. On Koje, it was felt they would be both secure and out of the Eighth Army's hair. In early 1951 all Eighth Army, from General Matt Ridgway down, was monumentally uninterested in the POW's it had taken. The Eighth Army had more pressing concerns.

  The problems of handling the POW's, of feeding, clothing, guarding, and disciplining them, was delegated to the 60th General Depot in Pusan, which later was to become the 2nd Logistical Command. The mission of the 60th General Depot was to supply the troops fighting in Korea, and they were doing a superb job of this. The fifteen technical service officers, under their Quartermaster Corps C.O., were proficient in the way that only American supply officers can be proficient.

  They had to be, for United States troops are prodigal on the battlefield.

  But however efficient these men might be at supply, none of them knew
anything about the handling, care, and feeding of Asian Communist prisoners of war. They were logisticians, not cops.

  But in their defense, it must be said that nobody else in the United States Army knew any more than they did. When the shattered conscripts of the Inmun Gun began to surrender in droves in the fall of 1950, the United States found itself facing a new situation.

  In World War I America's Allies had assumed control of all POW's.

  In World War II the United States came in late, and took over an existing British system. And the Germans and Italians captured after North Africa had proved to be a fairly tractable lot. In spite of Fascism there was no great cultural gulf between captors and captured; they understood each other, adhered to the same general code. Several hundred thousand POW's were sent to places like Montana and Texas; at the end of the war they were shipped home without incident.

  In spite of protestations at the time, World War II was never an ideological war, for Fascism and Nazism were fundamentally inexportable. The German Reich never stood a chance of winning a political victory in Europe; it stood and fell by arms alone.

  Ideology never raised its ugly head in the prisoner-of-war camps outside Russia in World War II.

  The Japanese POW's taken in the Pacific were so few as to be insignificant. The Japanese-Americans herded into detention camps after Pearl Harbor showed a remarkable restraint toward the intolerance of their native land.

  When the Korean War began, therefore, the United States had no experience in the handling of hostile prisoners of war. It had developed no real doctrine; it had trained no personnel. And worse, the United States Army understood Asians imperfectly, and Communists not at all.

  When the thousands began to flow into the POW cages in Korea, U.S. authorities were certain of only one thing: they did not want to bring almost 100,000 Orientals to the homeland for detention. The prisoner-of-war compounds on Koje-do were born of expediency. And like so many measures so adopted in the modern age, the temporary solution became permanent. Once rid of the POW's, General Ridgway, and his successor, Van Fleet, never wanted them back.

  It was up to the logisticians at Pusan to make out as best they could.

  Major William T Gregory, Corps of Engineers, was engineer supply officer of the 60th General Depot on Christmas Day 1950. Bill Gregory was a career reservist, tall, redhaired, and skinny. He held a Regular Army warrant as master sergeant, and he intended to return to his North Carolina home only when the Army made him go.

  As a part of rounding out his career, the Army sent young Major Gregory to Koje-do. The C.O. of the 60th General Depot called him in and said: "Bill, the POW's are coming to Koje Island. You are appointed Procurement Officer for them. Go buy food—all you can find."

  The C.O. didn't know just how many were coming, or just when they would arrive—all he could do was to send Bill Gregory and a small party on ahead to the island.

  LST's crossed the choppy strait from Pusan, dumping thousands of small, miserable, brown-skinned men on Koje's beaches. Soon there were 40,000 prisoners, mostly Koreans, herded together in the open rice paddies up from the sea. There were less than two hundred U.S. personnel to guard them, and not even a barbed-wire fence to wrap around them.

  Cold, hungry, and apathetic, the POW's sat in the fields, and waited. They gave no trouble. They expected to be badly used, after the way of all captives in the Orient. At the best, they expected to wear their lives away in labor battalions, slaving for their captors. At the worst, they expected to be shot.

  On Koje-do there were no combat troops, no HQ, no organization. There were no compounds. Fortunately, the POW's gave no trouble. Bill Gregory ranged the island, buying rice. He was the first of the big spenders come to Koje; all he could find, he bought. Soon he had tons and tons of rice stored on log foundations some of his engineers had built over the marshy soil.

  But as fast as Gregory bought it, the POW's ate it. Koreans and Chinese ate a hell of a lot of rice, together with fish, vegetables, and other items. Finally, just before the economy of Koje-do collapsed, Gregory got authorization to purchase supplies directly from Japan. Now, with the competent Japs securing mountains of fish and rice for shipment across the strait, Gregory was relieved of food procurement.

  He was ordered to begin constructing compounds. The POW's could not live in the fields forever. The Neutral Nation inspection teams were raising hell. A few more American troops came in, plus the 93rd Engineer Construction Battalion and two battalions of ROK's.

  The ROK troops weren't much help, but with the U.S. Engineers Gregory began building barbed-wire compounds. These were jerry-built affairs, for time and labor were limited; even wire was scarce. Inside the wire, Gregory constructed living quarters—huts—and sewer lines running down to the sea, for the forty thousand POW's were consuming rice by the ton, with no place to dispose of it.

  One source of labor was indigenous personnel. In a very short time, most of the inhabitants of Koje discovered there was such a thing as the U.S. payroll. For all of them it was a very happy discovery. The half of the island that was unable for some reason to get on the payroll was able to sell or otherwise do business with those who had.

  The Chinese and North Koreans were moved into the new, hardly secure compounds, already overcrowded as more and more POW's reached Koje. But the comptrollers were screaming over the expense: good or bad, there was to be no more money for pow camp construction.

  Through it all the POW's remained subdued and quiet. They made no trouble.

  Five weeks after the first captives had landed on Koje, a specially trained Military Police Detachment arrived from Camp Gordon, Georgia, to assume direction of the island. This unit, from its commander down, had been given careful instruction on how to handle POW's, which was, after all, an MP function.

  There was only one problem—the instructors hadn't known anymore than the people they taught. But they had given them some ideas.

  Colonel Fitzgerald, the MP commander, took charge at once. He called all officers on the island to a staff meeting.

  "These people are our equals," he said, strongly. "Our job is to teach them democracy." However dimly, someone in the States had recognized the essentially ideological nature of the conflict with Communism. "We're going to treat these people as human beings. I want you to understand that if a pow is abused, or refuses to work, and a U.S. guard strikes him, the guard will be court-martialed. We are here to teach these people democracy, and we can't do it by being a bunch of bullies."

  The inescapable Anglo-Saxon sensitivity to race—all the captives belonged to the colored races—tended toward a certain overcompensation on the part of the American guards. It was not enough to stress that the POW's were human beings, to which there could be no argument; it must be brought out that they were fully equal human beings, which was debatable.

  However, the assembled officers shifted their feet and got the message. The prisoners were to be equals, and not to be bashed, no matter what. They were also to be taught democracy. That was clear enough.

  Nobody asked Colonel Fitzgerald, however, the approved method by which democracy was taught, which was probably just as well. As it turned out, the method seemed to consist in giving the POW's anything they wanted. As Bill Gregory put it: "We told 'em we're here to serve you. If you want anything, you let us know, boy. We're going to show you what democracy means. You're all damn fools to be Communists—you do the way we do, and you'll be living on top of the world."

  It was a materialistic approach. The main idea seemed to be that democracy was better than Communism because it produced a life richer in the goods of this world.

  Colonel Fitzgerald had plenty of help. In addition to the Americans, there was the International Red Cross, informing the POW's of their rights, and a U.N. Commission on Korea, called UNCORK by the GI's for reasons having nothing to do with their announced mission.

  The POW's were furnished books on democracy, and copies of the United States Constitution. That too
k care of the theory, for those who could read.

  For the rest of it, tons of athletic equipment, much of it abandoned by U,S. units in Pusan, were shipped in. A new hospital was built, with sick call daily. North Korean and Chinese doctors treated the POW's; these men were allowed all the drugs and medicines they desired.

  Mess halls were constructed. The POW's own cooks worked in stone and baked clay kitchens, with new Korean utensils. They were given more rice, fish, and vegetables than nine-tenths of them had seen in their lifetime.

  They were inspected for cleanliness and health by a special Medical Sanitation Company.

  They were given new clothing, some of which, like socks, they didn't know how to use. Because most of the U.S. supply of fatigue uniforms had been diverted to surplus sales and relief work around the world and now with a new war were scarce, the POW's were issued new officers' pinks and greens, straight from QM depots. Each man received new boots and a clean mattress cover.

  Major Gregory saw many men inside the barbed wire walking about in better uniforms than he owned. American officers had to pay for their uniforms, and Bill Gregory had a family in the States.

  Now the POW's were screened, to determine their sentiments. Already it was becoming known that many of them were not true Communists. Of the nearly 80,000 Koreans, many were conscripts taken in South Korea, or men torn from their homes in the North, with no interest in or inclination toward politics or the war. Of the nearly 6,000 Chinese, many were soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek forcibly incorporated into the Chinese Peoples' Volunteers; many had suffered, or their families had suffered, from the Communist conquest.

  Already, there was ferment in the compounds between the fanatic Communists and the non-Communists, as different factions jostled for control. This ferment was dimly seen by the guards, and not understood at all. Communists and non-Communists were treated alike, as equals.

  But the screening did have one result. The worst Communists, officers and men alike, were segregated into compounds like the soon-to-be-notorious 76. The segregation did not have the desired result; instead, it concentrated Communist talent.