This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  He was barbarian-proud of his manhood and his fighting ability. He knew, dimly, that his ancestors had been the backbone of Near Eastern armies since the Empire of Roum and that their courage with cold steel had rarely been equaled. He knew, dimly, that firepower had vanquished his vaunted empire and that economically he was backward, but this had not lessened his faith in Turks or Turkdom. What schools he had attended used no economic arguments in teaching the greatness of Turks.

  Even after thirty years of state anticlericalism, his faith in his God was childlike, ignorant, and complete.

  He had enlisted for a minimum of six years, and he could not hope to become a sergeant until after that first six years. He had served long with the men about him in these camps, and he expected to serve beside these same men again, if Allah willed him to survive. He could not understand these Americans who often acted like strangers to one another, and as if they would never see one another again.

  His senior enlisted man took command in the prison camp, because he was senior. Neither he nor the British N.C.O.'s held an election, as did the Americans—who elected in Camp Five a corporal masquerading as a sergeant who was popular with the Chinese guards.

  His senior enlisted man ran a detail roster daily. There was never any question of who would chop the wood, haul the water, or care for the sick—while American N.C.O.'s and doctors and chaplains often begged men to feed the sick, wash the unconscious, or go outside for firewood—and were told, "Go to hell, you're no better than I am!"

  When his senior enlisted man was threatened by the guards for defiance, it did them no good to remove him. The second, the third, even the hundredth senior man took over, and nothing changed.

  When one Turk was too friendly with the Chinese, court was held, and Sergeant Schlichter was invited to observe. The senior N.C.O. sat as judge, and trial was held, with argument and testimony. When one Turk was found guilty of amiability toward the enemy, he was severely beaten. His defense counsel was beaten, too, for daring to extol such a traitor.

  When Schlichter asked, "What happens if he does this again?" he was told,

  "Then we shall kill him."

  It was a rigid society, far from admirable by Western standards. Disturbingly, it had the best record of any group in Communist captivity.

  Americans should remember that while barbarians may be ignorant they are not always stupid.

  The sociologists, soldiers, and doctors will argue long why Americans died in Communist prisons, why some broke, and why others lived. The evidence has been fed into hearts, not computers, and the answers are unclear.

  In Prisoner of War Camp 5, at Pyoktong, the Chinese tried to reeducate their captives. The methods were much the same as those of all Communist reeducation—reiteration, argument, lies, confusion, and the application of force and fear with varying degrees of subtlety.

  It came to be called brainwashing, but it was nothing new. The Soviets had employed the same means against men they took at Stalingrad, with about the same degree of success.

  Men behind wire are always afraid of their captors. Only by tight inner discipline and complete cohesion can they hope to resist completely what their captors will do to them. Inevitably, when pressured, some men collaborate.

  Turks were asked to collaborate. They did not, because each Turk was firm in what he believed, and he knew implicitly that his group—the Turks—would never permit any individual lapses. A Turk who aided the Chinese was signing his own death warrant—and knew it.

  There was no such cohesion to the body of Americans within the wire. In any group of human beings, of whatever nationality, there are criminals, fools, and potential traitors. American policy within the wire remained disapproving of such—but tolerant.

  A certain number of Americans did criminal acts, against their own. A very few committed treason. A very few resisted fanatically.

  The great majority, although disorganized, confused, and completely uninstructed as to how to behave in this new situation in which they were asked to sign petitions and state anticapitalist opinions, resisted passively. They did not condone collaboration, though they made few moves to stamp it out, as did the Turks. They preferred to shun it.

  The Chinese educators were not diabolically clever; at times they were incredibly stupid. But they had the prisoners in their power, and they had them continually off balance. The POW's never understood the Communists, and never caught up with them.

  As Charles Schlichter reported, almost all POW's were under the misapprehension that they might be tortured at any time. They were threatened with it, though it did not materialize.

  Day after day, the POW's attended forced classes. They sat on hard wooden benches for six to eight hours a day, while Chinese lecturers hammered at them, over and over, about Okies, Roman Catholics, and Negroes in America, that all officials of the Republic were rich men, that all congressmen were college-trained, and that not one workingman had any say in the Republic's affairs, in American accents ranging from that of the deep South to Brooklyn.

  The POW's were never excused from class for any reason. Men fainted, and were left where they lay. There was no excuse to visit latrines, even for men with dysentery. These fouled themselves, and were forced by guards to continue sitting.

  The Chinese instructors found the POW's knew almost nothing of civics or the mechanics of American government, and of this they made big play. The fact that American soldiers knew so little, they said, proved that the ruling interests wanted it so.

  The fact was that the majority of the very young men taken in the early months of Korea had little education—averaging not much beyond eighth grade. They had imbibed very little, also, with their mother's milk, as to what they were and what they stood for.

  They knew the Communist lecturers were wrong—but they did not know how to refute them. American youth, during a grade-school education, or even beyond, do not learn the status of American Roman Catholics vis-á-vis the Constitution, discuss the plight of Okies, or hold debate on the ramifications of the Negro in American life.

  Under the hammering, some of these men began to feel they did not even know who or what they were, or what their place might be in the grand design of the universe, while the Turks—fortunately protected by the language barrier—no Chinese spoke Turkish—sat happily aware that a Turk was a Turk, unarguably better than any pig of a Chinese Communist, educated or otherwise.

  It was apparent to some men in Camp 5 that in order to permit Americans to live more amicably together, American education had done a great deal of damping of the flaming convictions men live and die by.

  The men who had in one way or another come to hold strong, unswayable beliefs—such as Schlichter's reborn faith in his God, or some old infantry sergeant's belief in his service and Colors, or even some men's firm convictions on the superiority of Anglo-Saxon institutions—were the men who were untouched, whom the Chinese soon classed as reactionaries, and segregated.

  Fortunately, after lectures, the POW's talked among themselves, and sometimes came up with answers to the provocative questions of their tormentors. Sometimes, they could not, although few believed in their hearts the Chinese had the right of it.

  And, oddly, it was with the Okies, Catholics, and Negroes that the Communists, on the whole, had small success. Many of the disadvantaged understood the dream of America better than those who had enjoyed its benefits.

  Sitting in the lecture room, Sergeant Schlichter, like so many others, was taken sick. He was sent to the crude Chinese hospital with pneumonia.

  He almost died.

  But here, as he said, he saw the greatest example of faith he had ever seen, in the actions of Chaplain Emil Kapaun, who had been taken at Unsan. Father Kapaun, ill himself, stood in front of the POW's, prayed, and stole food to share with other's. By his example, he sometimes forced the little bit of good remaining in these starving men to the fore.

  But Chaplain Kapaun could not take command, and he soon grew deathly ill,
probably as much from sorrow as from his own starvation.

  Schlichter saw him put in a room, without food or medicine. No other American was allowed to treat the priest, and he soon died. He was not alone. Schlichter heard that no other chaplain survived the prison camps of Korea, the only class or group to be wiped out.

  The Communists had no great fear of capitalist production; they hoped to surpass it. But as the proponents of what is certainly a secular religion, they feared and hated any sign of non-Communist spirituality, and showed it no mercy. They understood clearly that religion—not necessarily organized religion—was among the greatest stumbling blocks they faced.

  They feared no church, as such; some of these they had come to control, in East Europe and elsewhere—but they were deeply apprehensive of forces such as neither Nero, Gallienus, nor Maxentius could destroy.

  Also in the hospital was Dr. Kubenick, ill, like Schlichter, with pneumonia. Kubenick called to Schlichter, "Sergeant, I want you to do me a favor."

  "Anything—"

  "See my things get home to my wife—"

  "Why do you think I'll live and you won't?"

  "Sergeant, I know—that's all. I want you to promise."

  Later, Schlichter gave Kubenick's poor effects to Graves Registration. And later still, he visited Kubernick's wife, who asked him only if he had seen her husband die.

  Among the families of men who died in the prison camps, there remains much bitterness. And there have been no reunions of POW's either.

  On 3 October 1951, his thirtieth birthday, Charles Schlichter was released from the hospital. The next day the last man died in Camp 5 at Pyoktong.

  Immediately after the deaths ceased, the Chinese saw a chance for propaganda. American doctors were removed from sick call, and more medical supplies were made available. The Communist Green Cross took over sick call.

  Schlichter was made camp sanitation officer. "What can we do to help living conditions?" the Chinese asked him, with apparent sincerity.

  "Replace the American M.D.'s, if only for psychological reasons," Schlichter told them.

  "Ah, we can't do that—why, the American doctors didn't care whether you lived or died. Look how many died while they took care of you—"

  It was the big-lie technique; the American doctors had held sway while the diet was at its worst, while men with wounds died without drugs, and with no cooperation from the guards. Only after the worst were they removed.

  Yet many POW's believed this lie. Some never relinquished it, even after repatriation.

  But prison life was not all horror. The Chinese announced a huge clean-up campaign of the camp. To get it rolling, they offered a pack of cigarettes for each two hundred dead flies caught, or three smokes for a rat.

  Each evening Sanitation Officer Schlichter picked up the dead flies and rats, counted them out, and marked them down in his notebook. Then, with a guard, he marched in front of a camp official, who determined if the count was honest with a broken chopstick.

  No one objected to Schlichter's handling the tobacco; he did not smoke.

  One sergeant, who had been active as a Scout, devised a gauze flytrap, and placed it over the reeking latrine. When he had about 1,500 flies enmeshed in it, he took them to the Yalu and drowned them.

  That night, when Schlichter turned in flies for cigarettes, the Chinese officer's eye popped. He said, "So many flies—good! Good!" Then his eyes narrowed. "How come no squash?"

  But he paid off.

  The Turks, closer to the soil than Americans, sought out pregnant rats, caught them, and slit them. Sometimes they got twenty-one smokes per rat.

  There were libraries available, stocked with books from Communist countries, extolling the beauties of collectivism and exposing the fallacies of the capitalist system. From boredom, everybody read them.

  The only newspapers available were old copies of the New York Daily Worker and the Shanghai Daily News, English-language sheets that gave only the Communist side.

  The sole English or American books in the library were Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and Dicken's A Christmas Carol, a story the Communists have never quite understood.

  Life, through 1951 and 1952, was composed of details, now, in addition to the constant education. Men cooked, cut firewood, and wondered about the war.

  There was almost no news. Newer prisoners, taken after the big hauls during the summer and winter of 1950, were never allowed to mingle with the older prisoners.

  There was free enterprise, even in a Communist camp. The troops had been paid just before Kunu-ri, and almost everyone had a great deal of MPC. Money was useless; besides, all knew that the Military Payment Certificates had been changed, and doubted if the government would make the old ones good. An old watch went for $200. A cigarette cost $10, or sold at a volume price of three for $25.

  Some men gambled. Schlichter saw as much as $1,000 rest on the turn of a card—though men seldom bet their food or sugar ration.

  Inevitably, some men in Camp 5 soon had all the money there was to be had.

  That was also part of free enterprise, any way you cut it.

  For recreation, the POW's were taught to sing the "Internationale," and "The Chinese People's Volunteers' Marching Song." Sometimes, by a particularly hearty rendition of these, they could get extra chow.

  Slowly, bitterly, even though the dying had ended, the months dragged on.

  Finally, on 12 August 1952, Schlichter and many others, classified as reactionaries unfitted for further education, were sent to Camp 4, at Wewan. This was a camp reserved for sergeants; there were three POW companies: Number 1 contained three French N.C.O.'s, Puerto Ricans, Niseis from the 5th RCT, 35 British sergeants, and 23 Turks. Number 2 was wholly American and white, while Number 3 was filled with colored soldiers.

  Here, one man asked Schlichter, "Do you think a POW-camp promotion will be permanent?" The man was a private who had told the Chinese he was a sergeant.

  Schlichter answered him that, unlike a posthumous promotion, he didn't think it was.

  On Koje Island, the U.N. compounds were now filled to bursting with Chinese and North Koreans. The 2nd Logistical Command in Pusan, under whose command Koje-do remained, continued to cope as best they could.

  Actually, all seemed to be running very well.

  The POW's were busy in workshops, making placards, flags, and newssheets, with which they flooded the island. They were making other things, too, but these they hid.

  Each day one American N.C.O. with a couple of POW trusties made routine inspections of the compounds housing the 80,000-odd captives. There was no question that food, clothing, and housing were adequate, although the number of POW's in each compound made control difficult, and close inspection almost impossible.

  POW's still disappeared or turned up dead; there still seemed to be dissension in the compounds. But none of the guards thought it was their business, or of any great concern.

  In the absence of concern, or pressure, the control of the camps tended to grow lackadaisical.

  And certain of the POW's tended to grow more and more arrogant.

  The command of Koje-do changed rapidly, now, as Colonel Fitzgerald became a sort of permanent executive officer to various officers sent in by 2nd Logistical Command in Pusan. In all there were thirteen different commanders, none with any experience with POW's—and none with any backing from higher up.

  Certain nations of the U.N. were hypersensitive over the treatment of the POW's, whether because of common geographical background or fear of American discrimination, or whatever. These, and the International Red Cross, and the Neutral Nations Inspection Teams—called NITS by all Americans—harassed the POW Command regularly regarding POW rights and privileges.

  None of these agencies could enter North Korea because of the blunt refusal of the Communists, but they compensated by being twice as officious on Koje-do. Because of their vigilance and constant complaints, higher head-quarters in the Eighth Army and FECOM made it quite cl
ear that no force of any kind might be used against the POW's, regardless of their actions.

  Colonel Lee Hak Ku and the mysterious Hong Chol were spreading their network of control through the compounds day by day. Certain American officers knew this, but their hands were tied. As Major Bill Gregory said: "No commander could get any backing from General Yount in Pusan, General Van Fleet, Ridgway, or anyone else. Ridgway himself never seemed to care a hoot in hell about what happened in Koje-do."

  There were certainly no appropriations for new compounds, new wire, new construction materials. Eighty thousand potential tigers milled behind the flimsy, jerry-built wire pens that had been erected in early 1951; no better ones were ever built. Such requests were promptly rejected.

  One big reason so little concern was shown for the POW camps was that higher headquarters, with the start of truce talks, was convinced the war would end any day, automatically ending the POW problem by repatriation.

  There were matters that needed straightening out within the compounds—but each commander on Koje-do knew clearly that if the hair of one POW were bruised, if one guard bashed a prisoner, neither Van Fleet nor Ridgway would lift a finger to aid during the ensuing hue and cry.

  It is very clear that if Washington and Far East Command had been less concerned with world and neutral opinion and more with internal order, the near tragedy that was to come to Koje-do could have been averted.

  By late 1951 it was already clear to both Americans and neutrals that there was intense political ferment within the compounds. The POW's were dividing into Communists and non-Communists—and amazing to the neutrals, who would not at first believe this—many POW's began to petition the U.N. not to allow them to be repatriated.

  The treatment of the POW's, and their glimpses into non-Communist life, had had some results. More fundamental, however, was the fact that many Koreans and Chinese had been forcibly pressed into the Communist armies, and many of these had no political belief and even, in thousands of cases, a genuine hatred of their rulers.