The Greatest Traitor (16 page)

As he would do constantly in the coming months, Commissioner Herbert Lord of the Salvation Army, attempted to rally spirits. ‘We nodded at each other, and we thought we might as well go happily. I said a short prayer.’

Minutes passed and nothing happened. Then, after about an hour, a lorry drove up with two North Korean officers on board and the journey resumed. They had been reprieved, but the danger was far from over.

It was a treacherous and frightening trip, 120 miles across the Parallel along bomb-cratered roads up to Pyongyang. The hostages gazed around them at abandoned trucks riddled with large-calibre bullet holes, and passed burnt-out villages where survivors wandered around dressed in rags and the stench of rotting corpses was overwhelming.
They halted frequently while their captors checked on the possible presence of American B-26 aircraft in the area; the planes from the US Far East Air Force were busy sweeping the skies of North Korean aircraft. Eventually in the early evening, exhausted and hungry, the hostages reached their destination – two abandoned schoolhouses five miles out of Pyongyang that served as the main foreign civilian internee camp in North Korea.

During the first two weeks of July, fresh groups of prisoners arrived at the old schoolhouse to join Blake and his colleagues. Eventually there were around seventy in all, a disparate collection of diplomats, missionaries, journalists and others, of all nationalities – British, American, French, German, Austrian, Australian, Russian, Turkish, Swiss and Irish – and all ages, including small children and the elderly. At first they entertained hopes that they were being gathered in one place as a prelude to some sort of prisoner exchange arranged through the International Red Cross – even the pitiless Japanese had approved some Red Cross involvement in the Second World War – but it quickly became apparent that the North Koreans had no intention of allowing any such swap.

The prisoners were locked into five rooms off a long corridor, forbidden to communicate with anyone beyond their own four walls, and punished if they talked too loudly. The regime was a harsh one. They were only allowed to leave their rooms under supervision to go to the lavatory. Buckets of water were placed in a corridor and members of each room had to queue to wash in the mornings. They were desperately hungry all the time as the food was little more than a starvation diet, consisting merely of a small cupful of rice a day and a bowl of ‘soup’ – hot water flavoured with leek or cabbage. Just occasionally, some unripe apples or plums would be added to the menu. The main distraction was found in fighting off the army of insects that invaded their cells. ‘What we suffered most from were mosquitoes, fleas and lice, and we became experts at picking the lice off each other,’ recalled Blake.

Spirits were raised at the end of July with the arrival of Philip Deane, the fearless, ever-optimistic correspondent of
The London Observer.
Wearing his arm in a sling and leaning on a stick, he nonetheless sported a big smile and flashed the famous Churchill victory sign, whispering to fellow captives that the Black Watch, one of Britain’s elite fighting units, was on its way to the country.

The Greek-born journalist had just experienced an extraordinary few weeks, even by his standards. What he had witnessed on the frontline at Yongdong was sheer carnage, the gallant General William F. Dean and five thousand troops from the 24th Infantry Division attempting to stem the Red tide from the North: ‘A flood tide of Communist soldiers, well led, Russian-equipped, confident and victorious, faced by mere kids of seventeen and eighteen, who have gone straight from school into the Army and only a few weeks ago were still enjoying their first tentative experiments in manhood in the heady role of occupiers of Japan.’

Deane watched GIs dying under sniper fire alongside him, and had tried to drive a group of soldiers to the safety of UN lines before being ambushed and captured. Bleeding copiously from his untreated wounds, he was made to walk over a hundred miles in five days, traipsing mountain and country paths until he and his fellow prisoners reached Communist Army Headquarters near Suwon. Taken to Pyongyang, he was accused of being a spy. Having convinced his captors he was merely a journalist, they urged him to make a broadcast condemning the ‘American atrocities’ and the United States ‘unjustified intervention in a civil war – contrary to the United Nations charter’. Deane didn’t break, however, and so it was, a week later, that he found himself in the old schoolhouse with Blake and the other prisoners.

With his natural good humour and cocky yet careful attitude towards authority, he immediately lifted their spirits, teasing and provoking their captors yet never quite overstepping the boundaries of rebellion.

Two months of monotonous captivity went by. Then, on the evening of Tuesday, 5 September, Blake and his fellow prisoners were hastily
assembled and told to hand in their blankets and food bowls and be ready to leave the schoolhouse in just half an hour. A short, fat Korean colonel, whom they dubbed the ‘Panjandrum’, addressed them in words of bogus reassurance: ‘Life for you is becoming too difficult and dangerous, with these rascally Americans raining bombs on women and children, and especially on schools. So we are sending you to a nice place in the mountains where you will have peace and comfort.’

The seventy prisoners were first escorted to Pyongyang jail, where they remained for a couple of hours, from time to time glimpsing ‘wretched-looking convicts and grim-faced warders’. Then two trucks arrived and took them to the railway station. They were heading far north to a town called Manpo on the Yalu River, which forms the border between Korea and Manchuria. Accompanying them on the trip – and for further journeys in the next few months – would be more than 700 American prisoners of war.

As Larry Zellers, the Methodist minister, stared out of the window of his carriage, he saw long lines of haggard-looking young GIs marching past to board the train further on down the platform. It was a sight that profoundly shocked him: ‘I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. These ragged, dirty, hollow-eyed men did not look like any American soldiers that I had ever seen . . . the North Koreans had provided no special consideration for the wounded. Some of the more badly injured prisoners were half-carried by companions; others limped along as best they could.’

The soldiers were all survivors from the 19th, 21st and 34th regiments of the 24th Infantry Division, the first to engage the North Korean Army at the Battles of Osan and Taejon, where they were subject to humiliating defeat. Many of these men were physically and mentally spent. After capture in July, they had been marched to Seoul, where they were interrogated and many of them tortured, taunted by their Korean captors who said that they were ‘bandits’, not prisoners of war, and thus liable to receive a shot in the back of the head at any
moment. By the time they boarded the train for Manpo – corralled in the open coal trucks, while Blake and his fellow prisoners were put in the only passenger coach – a good number of them were suffering from dysentery, dehydrated through lack of food and water.

Lying cramped together, the stench of body odour and the rotting flesh of the wounded compounded the GIs’ misery. Four died during the six days it took for the train and its large human cargo to make it to Manpo; two of whom, after much pleading, were allowed proper Catholic burials. The other bodies were just discarded near the tracks.

At one point in the journey Blake and Holt managed to engage the highest-ranking Korean officer in conversation, and as a result this ‘very polished, well-educated’ colonel called the group together. If they were expecting words of explanation, of any comfort whatsoever, they were quickly disabused. He launched into a ferocious attack on the American nation, ending with a withering assessment: ‘The American soldier is the worst and most cowardly in the world. In fact, one soldier of our army is the equal of ten American soldiers . . . I think I might be able to handle eight myself.’

All the while the prisoners could hear the roar of approaching planes over the mountains and the crackle of their guns; the danger of being strafed by F-51 fighters with their six 50-calibre machine guns was ever present. There was also evidence of large-scale traffic moving towards the battlefront, as the freight trains that passed in the night were often long and had two engines to haul them. Tanks, artillery and lorries were clearly visible on the flat cars or in the open trucks.

On the afternoon of Monday, 11 September, the party finally reached their destination. They discovered Manpo, an industrial town with several large lumber mills, also to be a place of great natural beauty. The River Yalu meandered through its narrow valleys on its long journey towards the Yellow Sea, while away to the north of the town, as far as the eye could see, were the imposing Manchurian mountains.

The GIs were placed in cramped barracks close to the railway station
while the civilian prisoners were taken along a road that followed the river west and, after two miles, they reached their destination. Their new home was a former Japanese quarantine station for immigrants arriving from Manchuria. It proved to be a totally different environment from the harsh regime at Pyongyang. Here, they were allowed to do their own cooking and the daily food ration was plentiful, including rice, vegetables, cooking oil and dried fish. They were given meat three times a week, and sugar too.

‘From time to time we were given the choice between a kilogram of apples or a small tobacco ration,’ Blake recalled. ‘Korean apples are delicious and I chose them in preference to the tobacco. Since then I have never smoked again.’

The days were warm and bright, and nearly every afternoon there was an excursion to the Yalu River. A guard would escort them half a mile down the road and then through fields to the water’s edge. There, they could wash their clothes, bathe in the river and bask in the sun. Judging by the standards of the neighbouring villagers, they were living in the lap of luxury.

More good news soon arrived, delivered by a brave 15-year-old Korean schoolboy, who risked the wrath of the guards to deliver updates on the war’s progress. They learned of General MacArthur’s daring amphibious assault on the strategically important city of Incheon on 15 September, the subsequent retreat of the North Korean Army to Seoul, and then the recapture of the capital by UN forces on 27 September.

Blake and his colleagues began to excitedly calculate how long it would be before the UN advance reached Manpo. ‘Sweepstakes were started. Plans were made about freedom, about the gifts that we would buy for our relatives. That first telegram was mentally written and rewritten,’ recalled Deane.

Blake and Deane’s friendship grew in this more invigorating period. Deane was particularly impressed by what he had quickly identified as Blake’s ‘characteristic ability to shed worry’.

Larry Zellers, too, grasped the opportunity to get to know Blake better although, he didn’t know then the exact nature of the other man’s job, accepting the story that the ‘diplomat’ had recently entered British Government service and risen quickly in rank. Zellers recalled that Blake was interested in learning about the history of the American Southwest: ‘He occasionally showed some antagonism for the US government and its involvement in the Korean War, but never toward our American group. He seemed to feel that we were being held prisoner only because America had sent troops to fight for what he considered the very corrupt regime of Syngman Rhee in South Korea.’

There were, however, aspects of Blake’s character and behaviour that he found unsettling. An occasional arrogance was one, exhibited when Zellers asked him to translate from French what had gone on in a conference between the British and French groups: ‘Blake answered with a question that was also a putdown: “Larry, don’t you know French?” I told him I did not but that I could struggle along in Spanish. He did not consider my remark worthy of comment.’

Zellers also found Blake reluctant to open up about his adopted country: ‘One thing that bothered me was his unwillingness to share his knowledge about life and events in England. I was very interested in England and had been all my life, but he told me very little. He was always friendly, but when he wanted to leave, he would simply walk away, and at other times he didn’t want to be bothered.’

The month in the old quarantine quarters at Manpo had been as comfortable an experience as the prisoners could have expected. Nourishing food, medical attention, decent enough accommodation and a relatively relaxed regime had raised their spirits. Added to that was the expectation that the conquering American forces would soon arrive to free them. All that optimism started to fade, however, when on Saturday, 7 October, they were given the alarming news that they were to be moved. The group of detainees weren’t to know it, but they were being evacuated – as were the American POWs near the railway
station – to make way for more important guests: Chinese troops from Manchuria were about to enter the war.

They were told to take themselves, along with their blankets, cooking utensils and food supplies, to a point on the river bank a couple of miles upstream. There they would wait until boats arrived to transport them to their next destination. The boats never came, and the party was forced to camp out in lashing rain. After two nights in the open, trucks finally appeared to take them to the village of Kosang, fifteen miles away, where they were put in another school building. After only a week in this camp, the group – now re-joined by the 700 or so American POWs – was moved on again, this time forced to march over mountain paths to a remote mining hamlet, Jui-am-nee. Here they were housed in rows and rows of large, derelict huts.

Meanwhile over the hills came small groups of retreating North Korean soldiers, wounded, dispirited and hostile. The detainees thought they could sense the war drawing to a climax, and they had been told by some of the local people that the UN forces were just twenty-five miles away to the South. So near, yet so far from freedom.

In this chaotic environment, the British and French internees got together and worked out a plan whereby a small group of them would – with the help of two of the Korean guards – attempt to reach the American lines and initiate a rescue. A party consisting of Blake, Holt, Deane, and the French trio of Charles Martel (Embassy Chancellor), Maurice Chanteloup (correspondent for the French Press Agency) and Jean Meadmore set out on the morning of Wednesday, 25 October, accompanied by their two Korean captors. They walked all that day, avoiding houses and villages, and rested overnight in a small valley. After resuming their journey the next morning, they travelled for a couple of hours before they reached a mountain pass, where they encountered three Korean soldiers coming the other way.