The Korean War (59 page)

In the summer of 1951, there was a dramatic change in Chinese policy towards the prisoners-of-war. It was determined that if
possible, they should be permitted to live. Conditions in all the camps improved markedly. Thereafter, the number of deaths among prisoners declined to a trickle. 99 per cent of all American prisoner deaths took place in the first year of the war. As Captain James Majury of the Ulsters put it laconically: ‘The Chinese realised that they needed some survivors if their propaganda about “the lenient treatment” was to have any meaning.’ At last, they were given the means to delouse themselves – and lice had been one of the most corrosive destroyers of morale. By the winter of 1951, to their astonishment the prisoners found themselves receiving sufficient food to sustain life. The Chinese killed an occasional pig, and its fat was distributed among the prisoners by self-administered roster. They began to receive a rice ration instead of millet. Captain Majury got his first letter home out of the officers’ camp in August, and received his first from his family in October.

Then, as the Chinese arrangements became more organised, the prisoners were broken down into ‘companies’, for daily political study sessions, at which they were required to write long, allegedly self-analytical political tracts. As part of the deliberate communist policy of destroying their existing leadership, in October the British and American officers were gathered together, and marched some hundred miles into the mountains to the new Camp 2, which remained the officers’ camp for the remainder of the war. Their uniforms were replaced by Chinese quilted suits and caps, a further blow to their identity as soldiers. The Chinese appointed company and platoon leaders from among the prisoners.

From beginning to end, the Chinese purpose was to reindoctrinate their prisoners politically, to convert them from their traditional political values to those of communism. Beyond obvious political instruction, the communists sought to destroy all existing structures of rank and command. No officer’s rank was recognised. Any internal attempt by the prisoners to organise their own leadership without approval from the Chinese was interpreted as a ‘hostile attitude’. When Sergeant Jim Taylor of the 8th Hussars, the senior British ranker in Camp 5, refused to salute a Chinese
one morning, he was sent to ‘The Hole’ for three days, literally to roast in the summer heat in a hole covered with a sheet of corrugated iron. Some men were kept in it for weeks at a time.

The problem of ‘hostile attitudes’ occurred most often among the officers in Camp 2, and resulted in the frequent removal of officers to ‘the cages’, where they were held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months. Major Denis Harding, a Gloucesters company commander, was held in solitary confinement, mostly in a hillside cowshed, from January 1952 until his release in the summer of 1953. Major Guy Ward, RA, had already endured four years of captivity in World War II. Throughout that experience, he was sustained by a feeling ‘that we were all together, like a family, that in the end things would be all right. In Korea, we asked ourselves: “How many years might this go on? Will it ever end?” ’ That first winter in the officers’ camp, like his fellow-prisoners, Ward would find himself suddenly hauled from his bed at 3 a.m., when human resistance was lowest, and taken to an underground bunker for interrogation. Once again, this was overwhelmingly social, and wearily repetitive: ‘What car does your father have?’

‘Are you a large family?’

‘How much capital have you?’

Ward said later: ‘The only Chinese who understood us were the younger ones who had been educated in the United States. We were conscious that the way they treated us was the way they treated their own people. You might see fifteen or twenty Chinese by the roadside, being kicked about in just the same way that they kicked us.’

The sheer dreary monotony of the political lectures aroused their contempt: ‘The Democratic Reformation and Democratic Structure in North Korea and the Peaceful Unification Policy of the North Korean Government’; ‘The Chinese People’s Right to Formosa’; ‘Corruption of the UN by the American Warmongers’. They were permitted only communist newspapers – the
Daily Worker
and
Chinese Pictorial
. The loudspeakers blared forth news each day which
announced fresh American defeats, never conceded a glimmer of United Nations success. Yet often, they would glimpse the white con-trails of high-flying aircraft, and occasionally they would see a dogfight, even see a communist MiG brought down. Thus they were reminded that the war was not yet over, that the communist armies had not yet triumphed.

There were a few tattered, dog-eared books which passed from hand to hand. Andrew Condron read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and was driven mad by the absence of the very last page, torn out by his captors. Years later, Condron discovered that it contained a casually hostile reference to communists. Generally, they were allowed to keep books the Chinese considered ideologically sound:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
,
War and Peace
, Lenin’s
One Step Forward
,
Two Steps Back
, some Steinbecks, those works of Dickens which were thought to present a sufficiently bleak portrait of the plight of the proletariat.

Men’s reaction to imprisonment varied enormously. It was difficult to generalise about the kind of man who held together best. A US Marine pilot, who was little regarded at first by his fellow-prisoners because of his taciturn manner, his apparent inability ever to say more than ‘Uh-Huh?’ or ‘Shit’, proved one of the most rugged and respected ‘reactionaries’ in the officers’ camp. A British officer who had been a prisoner of the Germans in World War II was one of the most visible resisters for months. Then, imperceptibly, he began to deteriorate. Like so many others, his will was weakened by illness and hunger. By the end, he seemed one of the most broken-spirited. To many British prisoners, it seemed a criminal blunder by the War Office to have recalled for service in Korea so many ex-World War II PoWs. It was an unspeakable experience for men who had already endured two, three, four years of their youth in captivity now to be exposed to the same misery once more. It was worst of all for those who had been held by the Japanese. At least five of the British prisoners had been captives in Korea in World War II. They, from the outset, remembered the Korean guards as their most atrocious and brutal
tormentors. Colonel Fred Carne of the Gloucesters seemed, to most of his companions, astoundingly untroubled by captivity. The Chinese singled out Carne for special treatment, as the senior officer fellow-prisoners treated as their commander. He spent much of his time in their hands in solitary confinement. Yet Carne behaved throughout with his customary taciturn serenity. His example impressed his comrades for the rest of their lives.

By common consent, most of the doctors and chaplains – those with a very obvious and visible role to play in the camps – behaved well, some outstandingly so. Despite the pitiful absence of drugs and equipment, the doctors spent hours attempting to persuade men stricken with ‘give-upitis’ to eat. Among the padres, Sam Davies of the Gloucesters was remembered by his fellow-prisoners with immense affection and respect. But perhaps the most beloved of all was Father Emil Kapaun, Catholic chaplain of the US 1st Cavalry. Kapaun’s cheerful selflessness, his genius for scrounging and devotion to the suffering, his nightly sick rounds, became a legend. He died in Camp 5 in May 1951, worn out by dysentery and a blood clot in his leg. In Camp 2, the prisoners hoarded rice paper on which to compile a copy of the Book of Common Prayer. When Padre Davies was dispatched to solitary confinement, James Majury took over the conduct of his services. Davies secretly baptised six Americans, and prepared nineteen British and American officers for confirmation, in the camp. He was bitterly chagrined that, because of his officer status, the Chinese would never allow him to go among the other ranks.

Lieutenant Bill Cooper found it helpful to demand of himself at the beginning of each day: ‘What worthwhile thing are you going to do today?’ He would often accept the job of washing the ghastly rags of men crippled by dysentery: ‘It was horrible, but you felt that it was a job worth doing.’
¹²
For most men, the nights were the worst. It was then that they lay silent, but awake, brooding in the loneliness about their families and their societies, going indifferently about their business so many thousands of miles away. Desperately as they hungered for letters, life became almost more intolerable
on the rare occasions when these came. In two years, Bill Cooper received three letters from home, and five of those he wrote reached his family. Jerry Morgan received his first letter from home in April 1952, enclosing a photograph of the son born in the United States whom he had never seen. Many men did not even achieve this level of contact. There was so much a man yearned to know, that was not in the simple scraps of paper they received.

‘Dear Robert,’ Lance-Corporal Bob Erricker’s father wrote from his little house in Surrey to his son in Camp 5 on the Yalu,

I have just received the news via the War Office that you are a Prisoner of War in North Korea, it’s wonderful and we are so thankful to know you are safe and well, shall be watching every day for the post . . . Look after No. 1. I had a nice letter from Lt. Alexander’s father. His death was in The Times. PC O’Halloran has been made Sergeant and is going to live at Milford. Daisy has got another Girl two month old. Mrs Terry has left Alford and Eileen Brunet is living in their bungalow. We celebrated the good news of your safety by going to the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia. Mum was ‘Frisking about’ like a 2-year-old, bought a Hoover Washing Machine for £31, and she aint got 4d.

It was a kind of agony, to hear this simple domestic small change amid the sorgum and dysentery of a hut on the Yalu. Camp 5 was for ‘progressives’, the men whom the Chinese considered to be adopting the most positive attitude to their own political education. If its inmates were marginally better treated than those in ‘reactionary’ camps, there is little evidence that most of them treated the Chinese any more seriously. Many British and American rankers simply decided that there was no harm in playing the Chinese game, if by doing so they could gain better food, and marginally improve their own chances of survival. Even when attendance at political lectures was made voluntary, in the later stages of imprisonment, some men continued to attend, merely to pass the day.
¹³

The biggest enemy in a prisoner’s life is boredom [said Henry O’Kane]. All the average British soldier ever read was the sports page. He didn’t know much about Lenin’s ‘One Step Forward’ or the crimes of John Foster Dulles. A lot of people appeared to take in the Chinese lectures, then you found afterwards it hadn’t made the slightest real impression on them. They were simply playing it the safe way. You knew the answers the Chinese wanted, and a lot of the time you’d give them. You’d write any old propaganda nonsense they wanted to get a letter passed to be sent home. Then, every now and again, you’d get bored and kick against the traces, tell them what you really thought. Then the Chinese might forget the ‘lenient policy’ for a bit, and hand somebody over to the Koreans for a while. There were some people who always did it the hard way, who told the Chinese exactly what they thought of them – Kinney of the Northumberlands, Brierley, Richards, Andrew McNab of the RUR.

O’Kane shook his head: ‘Two years, and the Chinese couldn’t do a thing with McNab.’ He laughed. ‘But then, nor could the Royal Ulster Rifles.’
¹⁴

The first serious shock to Western consciousness about the PoWs in Korea was the transmission by Radio Peking of broadcasts by American and British captives. Some made recordings at the behest of the Chinese because they could sincerely see no harm in them. Some represented communist successes in political indoctrination. Some were merely willing to pay any moral price for a greater prospect of survival. But the revelation in the West that some captives were co-operating, if not collaborating, with the communists was a profound shock. What was happening to men in the hands of the enemy, that they could be persuaded to speak to their own people across the airwaves in such terms?

Hello. This is Marine Andrew Condron speaking. Hello, Mum, Dad and all at home. By courtesy of the Chinese People’s Volunteers I am broadcasting to you now, to tell you how we are getting on here, and about our preparations for Christmas . . .

A further confusing element in the lives and loyalties of the prisoners was the visits of Western communists to the camps. In World War II, the handful of British renegades who chose to put themselves at the disposal of the Germans were unhesitatingly branded as traitors, and several – including the son of a British Cabinet Minister – were hanged in 1945. Yet during the Korean War, as during Vietnam, the communists extracted a major propaganda advantage from invitations to Western left-wingers to visit their martyred country. In April 1951, Monica Felton, the communist chairman of Stevenage New Town, went East, and wrote a gushing little book about her uplifting experience. She eulogised the ‘lively, critical, indoctrinated’ schoolchildren she met in Prague, as against the ‘docile blankness of English girls I knew whose minds were being kept antiseptically free from the infection of any contemporary ideas’.
¹⁵
She found that ‘arriving in Moscow seemed suddenly like coming home’.
¹⁶
But she saved her highest flights of rhetoric for the heroic spectacle of North Korea under air attack, the tales of American atrocities and United Nations perfidy. She said nothing in her book about her proselytising visit to the Turkish UN PoW compound, where she spent several days. She was rewarded only with a contemptuous document drawn up by the Turks, suggesting that she peddled her ideological wares elsewhere. She anticipated by a generation the antics of Miss Jane Fonda in Hanoi. Representatives of the ‘World Peace Council’, together with such communist journalists as Alan Winnington of the
Daily Worker
and Wilfred Burchett of
Ce Soir
visited UN prisoners in their camps. Some prisoners such as Andrew Condron – not, perhaps, the most reliable witness on this issue – suggest that the Western visitors did what they could to get conditions for the prisoners improved. Others, however, recorded contemptible behaviour by the ‘journalists’, including taunting of the ‘reactionaries’ behind the wire. It is difficult to regard the behaviour of the
visitors, to a nation with which their countries were at war, with much enthusiasm. It contributed something, at least, to the communist purpose of confusing the minds of the UN prisoners, as well as the world, about the unity of national purpose behind the UN war effort in Korea.