The Korean War (70 page)

Lieutenant Clyde Fore of the 27th Infantry was on his way home to America aboard a hospital ship when the truce was
signed. ‘There was no rejoicing – we were just sad and quiet. This was the first time Americans had ever accepted a no-win war. Everybody else was acclimatised to no-win wars, but we were not. To me, Korea had been an abomination. So many people had died, for what?’
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Many of the same mixed feelings pervaded the ranks of the opposing army. Were the men of the Chinese 23rd Army Group disappointed to go home without victory? Wang Zhu Guang, one of its staff officers, lingers before answering:

We did our best. We felt that it was difficult to continue the war, to conquer the whole of Korea. We did our best. I was happy it was over. We talked to the men in the most down-to-earth manner, explained the situation. They were happy. We never expected to get the whole of Korea. We were told that we were going to support the Korean people in getting the Americans out of Korea, stopping the American invasion. But exactly how far – that was not made clear.
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When dawn came, men on the UN line peered out across the silent valleys between themselves and the Chinese. In many places, little clusters of bold spirits slipped forward through the wire and the minefields, searching with intense curiosity for their former enemies. What did they look like, these strange creatures who had been glimpsed only momentarily through binoculars, or as screaming shadows in the darkness of an attack? The same curiosity possessed their enemies. On the low ground between positions, there were stilted little encounters. The Chinese passed over beer and bottles of rice wine. UN troops offered chocolate and cigarettes. Some Chinese made it apparent that they were as delighted that the war was ended as the Westerners. But these meetings could scarcely be called fraternisation. They were impelled not by fellow-feeling for the enemy, but by the same impulses that would provoke any earthman to inspect visiting aliens.

Inevitably, the most intense emotional drama of the days after the armistice surrounded the release of the prisoners. The communists, truckload after truckload of them being driven north to the exchange point at Panmunjom, were in haste to dispel any suggestion that they had been well treated in the South. Some gashed their new fatigues into ribbons, to make clear that they had been clad in rags. Others cast out of the trucks the cigarettes, toothpaste, chocolate with which they had been provided. The most dramatic gestures of all were made in the last miles before the convoy reached the exchange point. Thousands of North Korean and Chinese prisoners stripped off their clothes and boots and hurled them away on to the road. They chose to return naked to their own people, uncontaminated by the contemptible handouts of capitalism. When the convoys had passed, one of the most unforgettable images of the post-armistice exchange was that of the empty road, strewn for miles with discarded fatigues and footwear.

Yet the other, still more memorable moment was that of the return of the United Nations prisoners from the North: some gaunt men; some broken men; some clutching the bitter shame and memory of collaboration: others physically devastated by paying the price of resistance. Some came weeping into ‘Freedom Village’, the encampment south of the exchange line, where beneath the ‘Welcome Home’ arch a small army of interrogators, doctors, and psychiatrists waited to receive them. Some strode boldly in, others shambled uncertainly into a life whose reality they had almost been taught to deny. ‘90 per cent of us would have much preferred to be liberated than released by the Chinese,’ said PFC David Fortune. ‘The shame, if it was shame, lay in being let go.’
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But it was enough to be free. They gorged themselves on bowl after bowl of ice cream while the psychiatrists talked to them. Each man was processed and examined to check whether he was fit for press interviews, or immediate repatriation. The first bitter denunciations of collaboration spilled forth, from prisoners who had been containing their hatred and disgust for years, in anticipation of this moment. Others – those who nursed private guilts – began to
mumble the excuses and explanations that would haunt the balance of their lives. ‘The average PoW was not really a human being when he was released,’ said Fortune. ‘He was a wild animal.’ Fortune, like many others, continued to lose weight for weeks after his release, and worked his way through many women and many bottles of whisky before he felt sufficiently sated to come to terms with life at a normal tenor.

Most of the British prisoners sought to maintain their national reputation for understatement at the moment of liberation. Colonel Fred Carne of the Gloucesters, three stone lighter in weight than he had entered captivity, worn down by nineteen months of solitary confinement, was chaired shoulder-high through Freedom Village by his cheering comrades. But imprisonment had done nothing to make him more communicative. He dismissed his experience laconically: ‘The food was rotten, and I was damn bored.’ The prisoners in Camp 5 had been forewarned that an announcement of an armistice would be made before they were paraded to hear it from the Chinese. The Americans exploded into spontaneous rejoicing. The British, by advance mutual agreement, dispersed in silence. On arrival at Freedom Village, the British shambled through their medical checks in an atmosphere of intense repressed emotion. One man, glimpsing a party of Chinese on their way north, said pityingly: ‘There’s nothing for them up there.’ Some men were provoked to their first overt displays of emotion by such simple, unexpected gestures as being handed a shirt, or seeing a copy of the
Daily Mirror
. The first, urgent questions from interrogators about cases of collaboration, or brainwashing, were met with silence. It was only gradually, over the weeks that followed, that the truth spilled out. The most conspicuous symptom of the tensions between different groups of ex-prisoners emerged when they were put on a troopship to go home. It was found expedient to disembark certain controversial individuals at Hong Kong, for separate passage.

Within a month of the commencement of ‘Operation Big Switch’ on 5 August, 75,823 communist prisoners had been sent
north, 5,640 of these Chinese. The communists, in their turn, handed over 12,773 men, 3,597 of them American, 7,862 South Korean. 22,604 prisoners in UN hands were surrendered to the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission in the Demilitarised Zone. 137 eventually agreed to repatriation. The remainder elected for resettlement in South Korea or Formosa. 359 prisoners in communist hands initially declined to go home. Ten of these – two American and eight Korean – changed their minds while in the custody of the Repatriation Commission. But for the remainder – 325 Koreans, twenty-one Americans and one Briton – there was no emotional arrival at Freedom Village. To the astonishment and profound dismay of their fellow-countrymen, they chose to join the society of their former captors.

In the compound in the Demilitarised Zone where the British Marine Andrew Condron and the Americans refusing repatriation were held in Indian custody, the renegades appeared before a press conference to explain their conversion to the communist cause. Their decision sent shockwaves through their own societies. What diabolical techniques could the communists have employed upon them, to cause men to choose a life of rice and cotton suits in preference to a return to Glasgow or Jersey City? What sort of reflection was it upon American political motivation and military training, that while twenty-one Americans had been successfully communist-indoctrinated, not a single Turkish prisoner had succumbed? At a moment when American political self-confidence was under great strain from McCarthyism, the growing alarm about ‘enemies within’ their own society, here was hard evidence of the communist capability to make conversions even amid the brutality of a prison camp regime. Seeds of fear and doubt were sown in America which took years to root out. The British were disposed to take a less alarmist view of the impact of communist captivity upon their own men, proportionately fewer of whom proved to have been successfully indoctrinated than among the Americans. Yet a decade later, British complacency would be sorely shaken by the revelation that the diplomat George Blake, captured
in June 1950 when he was serving as Vice-Consul in Seoul, had been successfully ‘turned’ during the three years that followed. He operated undetected for years as an important Soviet agent.

In August 1953, Andrew Condron was the only Briton to refuse repatriation, and to earn the disgust of his own nation. Condron, the chronic ‘loner’, the maverick, found himself the object of bitter press allegations, that he had been a ‘King Rat’ figure in his camp, and feared reprisals if he came home. In reality, most of his fellow-inmates rather liked and respected him as a man, and found his conversion pathetic or absurd, rather than evil. Condron himself sailed through his public appearances in the DMZ with the sublime assurance of the zealot: ‘I was totally convinced that what I was doing was right. I felt no fear, no remorse. My only pang was about my mother. I knew that my family was very shocked. My brother, who had been a prisoner himself, was the only one who began to understand. He said that you shouldn’t judge somebody unless you have shared that experience.’
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The Chinese, oddly enough, seemed profoundly embarrassed by their twenty-two foreign converts. They issued them with Western-style suits and fedora hats, and shipped them by train to Tsinan. From there, they were dispersed around China to spend as many years as they could endure studying or translating or working at such jobs as the Chinese could find them. They were actively discouraged from learning Chinese. Contact with civilians, above all women civilians, remained very difficult. Over the years that followed, most quietly trickled back to the United States as their patience with Chinese life – and Chinese patience with their Western habits – expired. Condron returned to Britain amid a brief blaze of publicity in 1962. He claimed to regret nothing, even if he had learned something: ‘In those days, we felt that the Americans had started the Korean War. Today? I’m not so sure.’ His son by a Chinese wife was educated at an English private school: ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’

General S. L. A. Marshall, perhaps America’s finest combat historian of the twentieth century, described Korea as ‘the century’s nastiest little war’. In those days before Vietnam, its claim to that title seemed unlikely to be eclipsed. 1,319,000 Americans served in the Korean theatre, and 33,629 did not return. A further 105,785 were wounded. 45 per cent of all US casualties were incurred after the first armistice negotiations with the communists took place. The South Korean army lost 415,000 killed and 429,000 wounded. The Commonwealth – Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – lost 1,263 killed and 4,817 wounded. Belgium, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Holland, the Philippines, Thailand and Turkey between them lost 1,800 killed and 7,000 wounded, of whom almost half were Turks. The Americans estimated that more than 1.5 million Chinese and North Koreans had died. If this estimate is exaggerated, it seems reasonable to assume that China cannot have lost less than half a million men given the manner in which she fought her war. Few people of any nationality, four years earlier, would have supposed that barren peninsula would ever be worth any fraction of those lives.

18 » HINDSIGHT

Many United Nations veterans came home from Korea to discover that their experience was of no interest whatsoever to their fellow-countrymen. The war seemed an unsatisfactory, inglorious, and thus unwelcome memory. It had begun as a crusade to save South Korea from communism, and enjoyed a brief public popularity in Europe as well as the United States. This died in the mud and blood of retreat in the winter of 1950. Thereafter, Korea was seen only as a running sore, belatedly cauterised in July 1953. A woman saw Private Warren Avery in the street of his home town in Connecticut when he was discharged from the service, and remarked severely: ‘So you finally got out of jail?’
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John ‘Rotorhead’ Thornton of the US Navy returned from captivity to hear his wife declare that he had been wasting his life. Once too often, friends had asked her: ‘Gee, I haven’t seen John for a while. Where is he?’ The first day after his return, they argued into the night. Thornton said: ‘I guess I just couldn’t accept the fact that we hadn’t won, that we couldn’t beat the communists. The only people who welcomed me back were my neighbours in Philadelphia, who gave me a block party.’ His Navy Cross had been posted to his home through the mail. ‘I thought I would go round telling people what communism is – hanging Major Hume up by his thumbs until he froze, for instance. I ended up feeling like most returning PoWs I know – that I was shovelling shit against the tide. You talk about Mao and the millions he killed, and they just say you’re a McCarthyite.’ Many PoWs came home to discover that their wives had made ‘other arrangements’. Most felt themselves returning to a new unfamiliar world that cared little for their experience.
‘We went away to Glenn Miller. We came back to Elvis Presley,’ said Thornton without enthusiasm.

In the Southern states, perhaps, traditional patriotism was a more active force than in the East. PFC David Fortune was embarrassed by the display that greeted him in his home town of Pickens, South Carolina, after more than two years on the Yalu. They gave him a brand-new 1953 Ford Fairlane, and treated him as a hero: ‘In my part of the country, I don’t know anybody who opposed the war.’ He spent three years’ pay in three months and declared proudly that at the end of it, he had nothing to show.

Stan Muir of 45 Field Regiment RA arrived back at Woolwich after a year in Korea to be apprehended by two Military Policemen at the station, who told him to take his hands out of his pockets. Lieutenant Bill Cooper of the Northumberland Fusiliers returned from two years in captivity to discover that most of his fellow-professional soldiers knew little about what had been happening in Korea, and cared less. He adjusted rapidly to saying nothing about his experience. His own mother forcefully chastised him for the damage he had done to his military career: ‘How on earth did you allow yourself to be captured, boy? Three years wasted. You’d better get on and pull yourself together.’ Which indeed Cooper did, and served for another twenty years in the British Army. Captain Tony Farrar-Hockley went on to a distinguished military career which culminated in the command of Allied Forces in Northern Europe. But some ex-prisoners suffered marriage breakups, alcoholism, lasting physical and psychological damage. Private Henry O’Kane of the Ulsters endured months of difficulty with twilight blindness caused by vitamin deficiency, and years of chronic insomnia. For the rest of his life he could not trust himself to keep the peace in a Chinese restaurant after a couple of drinks.