Every ten days, there was a small issue of sugar to each man, and a packet of tobacco. With this came two sheets of paper, each equal to four foolscap sheets: one for the latrine, one for smoking. As some men had the tobacco of non-smoking friends, but not their paper, any newspaper, lecture syllabus, or periodical left about for a moment would disappear instantly. Paper was at a premium.
Each evening, the six platoons in which we were organized would gather at the foot of the steps leading up to the main entrance to receive an address by the company commander—an elderly, grey-haired Chinese we called More-in-Sorrow-than-in-Anger on account of his reproachful look—or by one of the “vice-company commanders”, of whom our favourite, for the fun he provided, was a man with a squint known as Tilt. Two interpreters, Zee and Gen, spoke abominable English—Zee particularly. Flanked by sallow-faced Chinese, the speaker would begin his address in his own tongue, continue for about five minutes and then pause for the translation.
“Say, you guys,” Zee would say, “to-morrow is Thursday”—or whatever day it was. “The Company Commander, he say you gotta get outa your goddam beds. O.K.”
There would be another torrent of Chinese, another brief translation into English, sometimes unintelligible. The meeting would break up and another day would be almost over.
On the surface, this was the dull and irksome life of a prisoner; bearable, if tedious. Really, it was not like that at all. Every hour of the day, we were at the mercy of evil, political extremists who could—and did—reach into the Camp to take out those whom they wished to exploit for their own uses, and those who led and organized the demand for proper treatment as human beings. The real danger to a prisoner’s body—and mind—began when one of the Chinese staff came in to his room to say:
“You are wanted by the Headquarters. Pack your everything and come with me.”
Or when a Chinese came into a room to say:
“Which is so-and-so’s kit?” and begin packing it, heedless of the questions of the individual’s friends as to his whereabouts, as to his future.
The name of the Camp Commander was Ding. He was of medium height, pale skinned with fine bones and long fingers. His eyes were narrow even for a Chinese and glittered like a snake’s. He was a fanatical Communist; his staff were terrified of him; he hated us if only because we rejected the political indoctrination programme and remained loyal to our own Governments.
Ding’s Headquarters staff was extraordinarily large for the care of about three hundred and fifty prisoners. There were seventeen different staff officers, in addition to a deputy camp commander and an assistant deputy commander. Of this group, there were five with whom we had real contact as prisoners normally inside the compound: Wong, Chen Chung Hwei, Sun, Big Chu, Little Chu, and Niu. Wong was a big man, almost six feet tall, and broad. He swaggered about the camp, tried to bully any prisoner he got on his own, and lost no opportunity—however small—to have us punished. In the early days of captivity under the Chinese, Wong had lectured in his American-English both to Camp 5 at Pyoktong and Camp 1 at Chiangsong on the prospects for those who refused to take part in political study.
“No one knows you are our prisoners,” he reminded his sick and starved audience, “no one knows you are here. If you resist us, we shall put you in a deep hole where you will remain for forty years—and your bones will rot. The world will forget you.”
On another occasion, he demanded at the end of a lecture given to the officers that they should hand over all erotic photographs they possessed.
“We know,” he said confidently, “that you officers purchase many such pictures to keep with you. Everyone will hand them in at once.”
As there was no move to comply, each prisoner was searched but without result. It was suspected that Wong had hoped to make up a collection of these items and he thus earned the name “Dirty Picture” or “DP Wong”.
Chen Chung Hwei was a little man with a twisted body and a twisted mind. His spine was misshapen, hunching and bending forward his tiny shoulders. His face was scarred by a childhood burn. Walking along, his big eyes darting from side to side—pools of gravy in white saucers, the Padre called them—he resembled an evil gnome. A poor schoolmaster before the Communist Revolution, he had seized the opportunity to gain power and was prepared to go to any length to hold it. He was the staff officer concerned with maintaining order in the Camp; a task he loved, I think, because it involved spying on us.
Sun was also a little man, almost girlish in his mannerisms. Of all the staff he was, perhaps, the most sincere Communist; and he believed in the maxim that “the means are justified by the end.” For many months he had been the organizer of the political study programme, and it had been obvious to him from the outset that his programme was an absolute failure. As lectures were read out, certain passages—“the people of America are starving”, “Soviet Russia alone defeated Germany and Japan”—were greeted with boos, derision and genuine laughter. Sun’s little yellow face would darken as he cried:
“Keep silent! You do not want to hear the truth!”
Little Chu was a jack-of-all trades: he dealt with the mail; he helped Chen Chung Hwei with discipline; he kept the prisoners’ records. A short, slight, frog-eyed Chinese, he was a willing assistant in any unpleasantness that was inflicted on the prisoners.
Big Chu came into a different category. He was the staff member who undertook affairs of special significance: interrogation, discipline, even propaganda were his fields, providing that some important aspect was involved. Slim, about five feet ten high, he walked with a peculiar bouncing gait. When Big Chu paid a visit to a prisoner to converse in excellent English with a heavy Chinese accent, it usually meant that the Camp Commandant was concerned in his call.
The only other member of Ding’s staff who was of importance in our lives was Niu. Niu’s likeness to an Oscar Wilde Clergyman was astounding. He could have played Dr. Chasuble without difficulty. He spoke slow but good English with an affected accent; he was intense about “culture”; he was never less than polite; and he was a thorough-going liar. Niu never became involved in any nastiness; he faded out of the picture before it began. His task, which began in the Spring of 1952, was to control our entertainment and recreation. In this he succeeded.
The Chinese made feasts of the American Thanksgiving Day and Christmas in 1951—a decision perhaps not entirely unaffected by the resumption of the peace talks and the international outcry following the publication of the Hanley Report on the treatment of prisoners-of-war by the Communist Command. Official photographers arrived to take pictures of all the jollity; every effort was made, without success, to get individual prisoners to write articles for the Communist Press in praise of the Chinese for all their good treatment and especially for the Christmas and Thanksgiving feasts. The photographers found it impossible to take a good picture, for the prisoners covered their faces whenever they appeared. The Press representatives found that none of the prisoners could write. At Christmas time, they attempted a new tactic: they insisted that the prisoners should send Christmas Greetings to General Peng Teh Huai—the commander of the Chinese Communist Forces in Korea—and to Ding. The prisoners Daily Life Committee refused to do so.
On arrival at the Camp, the prisoners had “elected” this committee, at the insistence of the Chinese, to deal with the day-to-day administration of the compound. As all the captives were members of their respective naval and military corps, there was no question of “electing” anyone. Naturally, a choice was made from amongst the senior officers, and their names were circulated amongst the remainder as candidates to be “elected”. In this way, we secured our own nominations to the committee; Colonel B and Denis being the American and British senior representatives respectively. Because of the long spell of solitary confinement our own Colonel—as the Senior United Nations Officer—had undergone in 1951, he was kept off the committee. He was universally respected by all nationalities in the Camp, and it was desired to keep him available
if some major issue arose.
As soon as the Christmas festivities were over and the last photographer and Press representative had departed, Colonel B was arrested for heading an “underground resistance movement” opposed to Chinese discipline, military interrogation, and political study. There was also the matter of withholding the prisoners’ Christmas Greetings for the Commander-in-Chief and Ding!—apparently a secondary, but actually a principal charge. In forty degrees of frost, he was placed without either greatcoat or bedding in an open cell in the centre of the village under close guard. He began slowly to freeze to death. An American major, a member of the committee, made representations to the Chinese for his release and was himself arrested. The two remaining members of the main committee, a marine and an engineer major, were arrested together. Denis, discharged from hospital after seven days’ treatment for his pneumonia, was arrested a few hours after his return to the compound. Finally, our own Colonel was arrested seven days after my arrival in the Camp. On 8th February, 1952, their “trial” began.
We were all ushered into the Library, where the walls were lined with armed guards and the Camp and Company Headquarters staffs. Squatting on the floor, we saw the Colonel, Colonel B, the three American Majors, and Denis come in. Denis was deathly pale and we saw that both his wrists had dropped. One at a time, beginning with Colonel B, the defendants came forward to read their “confessions” to the crimes of opposing the humanitarian policies of our captors. The words they read were in stilted English, quite obviously partly dictated by the Chinese; and what was even more pitiable was that we knew that the majority of the crimes to which they “confessed” were non-existent—illusions in the minds of the Chinese. With a word of warning to any potential offenders among us, the Chinese departed, having informed us that the punishments would be decided by higher authority and promulgated in due course. The “trial” was over. There had been no need for an arraignment, or for a defence: the defendants had “freely confessed” their guilt before us all. Leaving the library, we commented to one another that this was a pattern of judicial procedure which we had observed before at rather longer range. It seemed that what we had read about it in the “reactionary” Press had been true.
I do not know exactly how all the confessions were extracted before that trial; but I do know, in detail, what happened to Denis.
Initially, in spite of considerable pressure, he refused to say a word when charged with being a conspirator in a plot against the plans of the Chinese to improve our Daily Life—the Chinese term—and to teach us the Truth as our captors professed to see it.
Having no success with this stratagem, a new Une was adopted. Denis was asked to sign a document in which he acknowledged the Colonel’s responsibility for his actions. Very naturally, he refused. Then it was put to him that he could ameliorate the Colonel’s position by “confessing” his own guilt—and the wording of this confession was “suggested” to him. Thus, in an attempt to release the Colonel from implication, he made a statement assuming full responsibility for all he had done to ensure that the British element in the compound voted properly in the committee elections and followed the instructions of the Daily Life Committee. In this way, a confession was secured which gave the Chinese enough evidence to dispose of Denis for some time, though, in the event, they ignored that part of it which vindicated the Colonel. Denis now being in their grasp, they decided to follow up their advantage before the trial and obtain a certificate from him that he would give military information freely.
Ding dealt personally with this case, as he had dealt personally with the Colonel in securing a “confession”. Denis was brought before him, a proposition was made, and turned down. As Ding never personally supervised physical pressure on prisoners, it was Sun who took Denis away to an out-house and had him strung up to a beam, arranging it so that Denis’s hands were secured so far up behind his back that he had to stand on tip-toe. Every hour, for four hours, Sun returned to ask Denis if he had changed his mind: Denis had not. Sim left him until the morning, when he was cut down. The next night began with another refusal to sign the certificate, after which Sun left Denis, stripped to the waist, outside Ding’s house until he was blue with cold and too chilled to speak. After being taken back to a warm room for a time, he was sufficiently revived to utter another refusal. Sun took him to a cell down in the centre of the village and tied him again to a beam in the same way as on the previous night. This time, however, he realized that Denis’s resistance was stronger than they had anticipated. After returning twice to give him an opportunity to change his mind, Sun left him for good. In the morning the Guard Commander untied him and the matter of the certificate was not raised again. This was the reason why Denis’s wrists had dropped when we saw him at the trial.
Some days later, the varying, long sentences were announced in the Library, amidst booing: the Colonel, Colonel B and Denis got six months imprisonment each. The three American Majors were each sentenced to three months. By this time, hope was high that the peace talks might succeed before the longer sentences expired.
In and abound the village were other prisoners, quartered singly or in pairs: men who had been removed from the compound for renewed military interrogation; men who had never been into a compound with other prisoners and were deliberately kept in permanent solitary confinement in an attempt to prise information from them; men who had seen too much since their capture and were thus too dangerous to release to a compound; all sorts of men in little rooms, and holes in the ground, living under varying conditions of discomfort. These men were seen only occasionally when a party of men from the main compound passed on a ration detail or to collect wood. An unknown, bearded face might appear in a doorway, pass down an alley to a latrine, accompanied by one or two guards; unable even to smile in reply to the greetings of comrades as he passed.
This was the life to which the six sentenced officers were now committed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BY the time I arrived in the Camp, almost all my friends had had mail. Every two or three weeks, mail would be issued—old letters that had taken but a few days to reach the exchange point at Panmunjon, and over two months to cover the few hundred miles north to the Yalu River. Some men were lucky, receiving one or two letters by every post: others were less fortunate. Try as we might, we could see no plan behind the issue of letters. Bill, Denis’s second-in-command, and Carl, the Gunner, had both served terms of solitary confinement, yet never failed to receive something. Others who had been in far less trouble received letters infrequently.
The outgoing mail, too, was a mystery. About a quarter of those in our compound had received acknowledgment from their families of ten or twenty letters since the Chinese had commenced to hand these over in apparent earnest. But, as late as May 1952, men who wrote regularly three times a month—the regulation maximum—had not succeeded in communicating with their next-of-kin or other addresses.
The Chinese had a simple, consistent answer to men who complained about lack of mail, or the pointlessness of writing letters that never reached their destination.
“The American bombing is responsible. Your mail is destroyed so often that only a little gets through to the neutral zone.”
One morning, a huge pile of mail we had written earlier was brought into the Library to prove their words concerning air attack on the mail trucks. Sure enough, all of it was spoiled, at least half of each letter having been burnt. The two Chinese with it, Little Chu and a sulky youth named Tien, would not let us have our letters back, saying that they were of no further use. However, by one means or another, four men managed to take a closer look. The top pile contained mail posted over seven weeks before; but another pile had letters posted on the previous day !
On another occasion, Bob, Spike, and I were working outside the fence near the Camp Headquarters by an old air-raid shelter. The remains of what had been a considerable bonfire was smoking nearby. On the edge of the fire, were a number of half-burned pieces of paper�
��the remains of letters from the United States. It is true that they were only the envelopes, but where were the contents? Letters delivered to prisoners were always issued in their envelopes—even though the wrong letters were sometimes put back by the censors.
Finally, there is the case of Chuck, an American 1st Lieutenant of the Chemical Corps. Called out for a brief interrogation, he was shown two letters of comparatively recent origin, addressed to himself. He was informed that he could have his letters when he answered the questions put to him. He came back without the letters and, in front of his platoon, demanded of the interpreter when he was going to get them. No attempt was made to deny that they were held by the Camp staff: the interpreter merely replied that it was not his business to interfere. Other officers had similar experiences. None of them received those particular letters.
I became so depressed at attending each issue of mail without getting anything that I gave it up. One day in May, I was washing down by the bath-house during mail call, when Ron, the Australian, came running down to find me.
“You’ve got a letter! You’ve got a letter,” he called.
I ran up to the Library, hardly daring to hope that it was true. Someone thrust a letter from my wife into my hand; the first one I had received in fourteen months of captivity. By that time, my wife had written me over three hundred letters.
In late February, an epidemic of influenza spread through the compound. Overcrowding in the rooms, and lowered powers of resistance served to increase the casualty rate. About half a dozen men got pneumonia; I was one,
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