The Korean War (66 page)

They drifted upon an unbroken swell of boredom. There were a few daily fatigue parties – the details marching out of the compounds each morning carrying great drums of excrement slung between poles, the men working on the drainage ditches in endless, hopeless attempts to clear the mud which overlay the entire camp. But most prisoners sat in their tents all day playing a Korean version of mahjong, carving wooden figures, reading, playing cards, cooking over their little fires. Within each compound, the Americans left the prisoners entirely to themselves. But their lot was not enviable. From one of the little dispensaries outside the compound gates, Private Maggio found ample opportunities for exercising his medical skills:

Koje-do wasn’t managed properly – there were far too many men in one enclosure. There was a lot of bronchitis, pneumonia, malaria, dysentery, pinkeye. TB was widespread. There were men with open wounds that were still draining. All of them had lice. The problem was washing their clothes – it should have been compulsory, but it wasn’t. The prisoners hated the delousing powder. Then there were always problems with the rats, which wasn’t helped by the way they all hid food under their mats. The Chinese prisoners had the cleanest compound and highest morale. They were by far the most disciplined group on that island.
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The UN Command could claim that despite all the medical problems, only a very small number of communist prisoners died
from disease on Koje-do, by comparison with the terrible toll on the Yalu. But the eyewitness evidence is also overwhelming that conditions among the prisoners would have been considered barbaric by, say, the inmates of a PoW camp in Germany in 1943. Their captors had simply installed the Chinese and North Koreans in the circumstances they considered appropriate to Asian peasants.

More serious than this was the rabble of the American and Korean armies who were entrusted with their custody. Maggio and other eyewitnesses describe the ferocious racial tensions between American groups among the guards – notably the blacks and Chicanos against the whites. For them, duty on Koje-do was almost as intolerable as for the prisoners. No serious attempt was made by officers to impose leadership or discipline. Gambling and local whores were the only diversions. Knife fights and brawls were commonplace. ‘The disciplinary situation was unbelievable,’ said Maggio. ‘I found the whole place a living hell – I was in fear constantly. There were fights in the barracks, fights in the compounds. Anybody who couldn’t make it on the line was sent down to do duty on Koje-do. We ended up with the scum of the army – the drunks, the drug addicts, the nutters, the deadbeats.’ To his overwhelming relief, in February 1952 Maggio was able to gain a transfer to an ammunition trucking company.

Sergeant Robert Hoop was posted to the 595th Military Police company on Koje-do in October 1951, after being wounded in combat for the second time, serving with the 15th Infantry. In five months on the island, he only once set foot inside the wire of a compound, escorting a medical orderly – ‘I was very scared every second I was in there. I just couldn’t wait to get out.’
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Hoop had constant disciplinary problems with his men – ‘getting mixed up with whores and getting drunk on duty’. In his sector of the camp, there were just three MP companies, American and South Korean, to control and guard some 24,000 prisoners. By the spring of 1952, it was debatable whose predicament was more wretched – that of the prisoners within the wire, or the guards outside it.

The root of the huge difficulties that burst upon the UN prison camps in 1952 was that, once the prisoners had been sent to the rear areas and interrogated, their custody and welfare became very low priorities for the UN Command. The officers and men who were entrusted with running the camps were, for the most part, among the least impressive manpower in the US and Korean armies. Many of the guards treated the prisoners as animals. The chief objective of their officers was to distance themselves as far as possible from the prisoners, and leave them in their compounds to administer their own affairs. Thus it was that when in the spring of 1952 the communists began infiltrating men who deliberately allowed themselves to be taken prisoner, with orders to seize internal control of the PoW compounds, they were able to do so without the slightest difficulty. An extraordinary storm broke upon Koje-do Island, of a kind never witnessed before in any military prison camp in history.

The officers responsible for Koje-do had plenty of warning of the impending furore. In the first months of the year, there was growing evidence of ideological and military activity inside the compounds. Prisoners manufactured dummy rifles, uniform caps headed with bottle-top badges bearing the red star, flags, banners. Openly, by squads and companies, they began to drill inside the wire. Their commissars harangued them. The first evidence of ruthless internal discipline appeared: prisoners were badly beaten up, even murdered within the wire. Yet in the face of all this, their custodians did nothing. The inmates were left undisturbed. The prisoners’ leaders began to make increasingly strident demands for improved conditions: writing paper, better food, changed routines. They were probing, testing the will of the Americans. It was found wanting. One morning, a crowd of prisoners began hurling cans of sardines and salmon back over the wire. The food was unsuitable, they proclaimed. They wanted fresh fish sent from Japan. The prisoners staged strikes in support of their demands. Their custodians, baffled, fearful of the wrath of this vast horde of apparent fanatics, desperate for tranquillity at any price, sought
earnestly to appease them. An extraordinary psychological situation developed, in which it was the prisoners behind the wire who held the initiative. Their captors danced to their tune.

There were violent incidents as early as the summer of 1951. In June, after a prisoners’ attack on a UN work detail, seven men were killed and four wounded by ROK fire. In August, there were demonstrations which ended with nine dead and twenty-five wounded on Koje-do, eight killed and twenty-two wounded at Pusan. Struggles in September caused twenty more deaths. In a more sinister development, on 23 December UN medical staff were unable to save the lives of ten prisoners fatally beaten by their fellow-inmates. No serious attempt was made to seek or punish the murderers. The same night, in a mass demonstration in another compound, fourteen prisoners were killed and twenty-four injured.

In the first months of 1952, the tempo of violence on Koje-do rose sharply. In February, the UN began its first attempts to screen the prisoners one by one, to determine who wished to be repatriated to North Korea and China. To the astonishment of the guards, the communist leaders of the first compound they entered launched a headlong assault with steel pickets, spiked clubs, barbed-wire flails and blackjacks. One American was killed – and seventy-five prisoners. On 10 April, when American medical orderlies entered Compound 95 on a routine visit to remove a wounded man, a wave of screaming prisoners charged them. Koje-do’s commandant, Brigadier Francis T. Dodd, sent a hundred unarmed ROKs into the compound to retrieve the prisoners. One ROK soldier simply disappeared in the ensuing struggle. He was never seen again. Eventually, the guards on the perimeter tried to give their men inside covering fire. An American officer and several ROKs were wounded. In another incident, prisoners staged a massed rush on a compound gate. An American officer and two men fought them off with a jeep-mounted .30 calibre machine gun. Three prisoners were killed and sixty wounded, along with four ROK guards.

Koje-do was becoming, as the communists intended, a second front in the Korean War. Their purpose was to achieve a major propaganda victory – to project the United Nations as the brutal persecutors and murderers of their prisoners. To this end, the fanatics within the compound were able to inspire or intimidate thousands of their wretched fellow-prisoners to hurl themselves, often under suicidal circumstances, upon the guns of their captors. Those responsible for the camps now faced the worst of all possible worlds. In their fear, they made absurd concessions to the prisoners and allowed their leaders ludicrous liberty to create an ideological hell within the perimeter fence. But Koje-do was also becoming the focus of growing world controversy, as reports grew of the casualty lists in the island disturbances.

On 7 May 1952, a far more serious, indeed grotesque episode took place. In the midst of preparations for fresh political screening of the prisoners in Compound 76, which housed 6,400 of the most fanatical prisoners, the commandant Brigadier Dodd went in to reason with them. At 3.15 in the afternoon, as he prepared to leave, a whistle was blown. There was a rush of North Koreans around him. He was seized by the communists and held hostage. A sign painted on ponchos, obviously pre-prepared, was hoisted: ‘WE CAPTURE DODD AS LONG AS OUR DEMAND WILL BE SOLVED HIS SAFETY IS SECURED, IF THERE HAPPEN BRUTAL ACT SUCH AS SHOOTING, HIS LIFE IS IN DANGER.’ The following day, with the compound now under siege by tanks, guards, and offshore gunboats, and the island under the temporary command of Dodd’s deputy, Colonel Craig, Dodd was allowed to communicate the PoWs’ near-farcical demands: to be permitted to form an association, to be provided with office supplies and a telephone. From Tokyo, Ridgway instructed Van Fleet to take whatever measures were necessary to regain control. On 9 May, Van Fleet arrived personally to investigate the situation. There were now some 15,000 heavily armed UN troops on the island, facing the mass of unarmed communists behind the wire. On the night of the 10th, Dodd was released unharmed, after negotiations. But to the profound
embarrassment of the Americans, it was found that he had signed a document which appeared to acknowledge a measure of justice in the prisoners’ case.

The communists had scored a propaganda triumph, and focused the spotlight of foreign attention upon Koje-do. In the days that followed, a procession of official and unofficial visitors descended upon the island, and without exception castigated the authorities for the collapse of control. The British Air Vice-Marshal Bouchier reported on the lack of parades and rollcalls, the open display of communist flags and military drilling by prisoners: ‘In short, the Communist PoWs in these compounds have held, and still hold, undisputed control within their own compounds.’
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Van Itterson, the Dutch representative to the UN Korean Commission, who was a former PoW of the Japanese, declared: ‘The Americans have no idea how to treat Asiatic PoWs. The fact that they still don’t act strongly enough causes an ever increasing audaciousness of behaviour by the prisoners. It is clear that only drastic measures can help.’
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In the months that followed the Dodd seizure, far from improving, the situation appeared to deteriorate. 115 prisoners died in rioting between July 1951 and July 1952. American attempts to reassert authority generated only more unfavourable publicity. On 9 June 1952,
Pravda
reported gleefully that the Americans were employing gas chambers and torture, and forcibly preventing prisoners from expressing their wish to be repatriated. When General Mark Clark expressed his desire for token British and Canadian contingents to join the UN guard force on Koje-do, the British reluctantly complied, but the Canadian government agonised for days about whether it was willing to allow its troops to be associated with the unsavoury situation on the island. Renewed communist rioting was met with strong American repressive action, and scores more deaths. The communist ‘journalist’ Wilfred Burchett wrote in the
Daily Worker
: ‘Two hitherto unreported massacres of Korean and Chinese prisoners in the American compounds on Koje-do have now come to light . . . The brutality used
to make a prisoner agree not to return home is now clearly revealed.’ Strained relations between London and Washington were worsened by the difficulty of gaining accurate reports about what was going on at Koje-do. The Washington Embassy minuted the Foreign Office: ‘I think this is just one more instance of the difficulty of getting detailed information in Washington about operations in Korea.’

One of the most interesting outsiders’ views of the Koje-do drama was presented in a report by Major D. R. Bancroft, the British commander of a company of the King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry sent to the island on 25 May 1952. Within hours of their own arrival, the KSLI had ‘invaded’ a compound and removed reserve food supplies, escape maps and contraband which it was plain had been sold to the prisoners by ROK guards. An hour later, two prisoners broke away from the compound and sought asylum with the British. They reported that the communist commissars were furious at having lost face, and had ordered that the prisoners must forcibly resist the next ‘invasion’. Bancroft was appalled to discover that each compound possessed its own blacksmith’s shop, in which prisoners could forge weapons, and that American supply vehicles were providing them with petrol, with which to start their fires. Accidental discharges from the weapons of guards, causing death or serious injury, appeared commonplace. On 10 June, some prisoners who sought to seek refuge from the commissars were speared to death by the inmates under the eyes of the guards. American troops entered the compound to restore order, and a battle followed. The Americans’ ‘bearing and control was of the highest order’, reported Bancroft. ‘The fanaticism displayed by the prisoners was alarming . . . Even when half the compound had been cleared and there were over 100 dead and wounded lying around, the commissars harangued the masses to greater endeavours.’ On 11 June, fifteen prisoners in one compound were murdered overnight by the commissars.

The British attempted a new approach in the compound under their control, to contest the commissars’ supremacy. They ordered
and supervised the election of prisoners’ leaders by secret ballot. Thereafter, when the compound misbehaved, the prisoners’ representatives were compelled to stand mute in the corner of the athletics field without food or water for up to twelve hours. The loss of face obviously caused them bitter pain. When the prisoners hoisted communist flags in their compounds, the British tossed in tear-gas grenades until they were taken down. Matters began to improve generally on Koje-do with the appointment of a new commandant, General Boatner. It was considered a damning comment upon the situation that prevailed before his appointment that, within a few days of his arrival, every single member of the former commandant’s staff had been sacked and replaced. Efforts began to remove the 8,000 prostitutes who had taken up residence close by the compounds, for whose services so many sentries were accustomed to abandon their posts.