Interrogations went hand-in-hand with indoctrination. Prisoners were grilled regularly on order of battle, close air support, naval gunfire methods, UN aircraft, weapons, unit locations, and other tactical information. The Chinese were even more interested in the life histories and biographical data of their captives. POWs were required to answer “economic questionnaires” and at frequent intervals compelled to write elaborate self-criticisms of their political attitudes and class backgrounds. The CCF were satisfied only when prisoners—whose original truthful answers had been rejected—revised their own family status and income statistics downward. POWs, being interrogated, often found the Chinese arguing with them over such far-away matters as the prisoner’s parents or his own family annual income and social level.

In March 1951, after an indoctrination period of about eight weeks, the Kanggye POWs were transferred, and the camp itself was later abandoned. The officers were relocated at Camp 5, Pyoktong, while the majority continued the march westward to the newly opened Camp 1, at Chongsong.

Despite its numerical designation as Camp 5, the Pyoktong compound had been organized two months earlier and was the first of the permanent CCF centers. It became the headquarters of the entire prison-camp system. Approximately 2,000 UNC prisoners were interned here by the early part of the year. They were housed in native huts. New inmates arrived regularly from temporary collection centers in the south, where they had been held for months. Sometimes they were marched to the Yalu during the Korean winter while still wearing their summer fatigues. Pyoktong offered little chance for escape. The compound, situated on a barren peninsula that jutted out into the Yalu Reservoir, was so secure that the Communists did not even surround it with barbed wire or employ searchlights. It was hemmed in on three sides by fast water currents, while the one exit from the peninsula was closely guarded.

Conditions were far more severe here than at Kanggye. A starvation diet and complete lack of medical care quickly had their inevitable effect. Pneumonia, dysentery, and malnutrition were rampant. The basic diet of boiled corn or millet resulted in associated deficiency diseases, such as beriberi and pellagra. Between 20 and 30 prisoners died daily. Many experts, nonetheless, felt that “if the Chinese during the winter of 1950–51 killed their prisoners by deliberate neglect, the North Koreans who had handled the captives before they became primarily a Chinese responsibility killed them by calculated brutality.”582

Although now junior to some Army and Air Force officers, Major McLaughlin was elected by his fellow officer-prisoners to represent them. Recognized by the Chinese as a staunch non-cooperative and dedicated trouble-maker, the enemy concentrated their pressure on the Marine officer—and he was subjected to intimidation, maltreatment, and threats of death.

As they had at Kanggye, the CCF attempted to organize progressive groups to write peace appeals, propaganda leaflets, and articles condemning the United States for the war. Typically, progressive POWs (usually weaker, less resilient members) who went along with the Communist propaganda conditioning, received better rations and treatment. Rugged resisters, on the other hand, could dependably expect to stand a considerable amount of solitary confinement, usually in an unspeakably foul, vermin-infested “hole.” Here a POW was forced to remain in a debilitating, crouched position usually 56 hours or more. Throughout the war a good many Marines were to know this particular enemy treatment. One Marine artilleryman, Second Lieutenant Roland L. McDaniel, tied to a Korean POW in the hole for 10 days, emerged with pneumonia and tuberculosis.

In addition to the POW compounds at Pyoktong and Chongsong, other sites where Marines were held were Camp 3, at Changsong (nearby and with a nearly identical name to Camp 1), primarily for enlisted personnel, and at “The Valley.” This was a temporary medical processing center in the Kanggye area. Marine inmates here were often confined to a pig pen. Largely because of the filthy conditions of this camp, the death rate quickly earned the Valley the opprobrious name of Death Valley.

Another cluster of POW camps was located further south. These were primarily run by the North Koreans, and were transit camps where prisoners were collected and interrogated before being moved north by truck or on foot to the permanent establishments. Among them were collection centers at Kung Dong and Chorwon, and Camp 10, south of the North Korean Capital Pyongyang. The latter was also known variously as the Mining Camp, the Gold Mine, or Bean Camp—this due to its prevailing diet. At this southernmost Communist camp, POWs were required to dig coal in the nearby mine shafts. Loads of coal were then hauled in small hand carts over icy roads to the camp, a task made more difficult by the prisoners’ skimpy mealtime fare.

The most notorious of all the camps, however, was Pak’s Palace,583 the interrogation center near Pyongyang. POWs also called it Pak’s Death Palace for its chief interrogator, a sadistic North Korean officer, Major Pak. Captain Martelli, a F4U fighter pilot from VMF-323 shot down in April 1951, was the first Marine processed through Pak’s, where POWs were continuously threatened and beaten with little or no provocation. Another Marine aviator, Captain Gerald Fink, VMF-312, upon being asked during interrogation here why he had come to Korea won a sentence of several days solitary confinement in the hole for his forthright answer: “to kill Communists.” Second Lieutenant Carl R. Lindquist, also of VMF-312, was the only one of 18 Marine officers captured in 1951 not processed through Pak’s before being sent north.

Gradually the Chinese developed the policy of segregating officer and enlisted personnel. Commenting on this procedure, one British observer offered the following:

By midyear, noncommissioned officers were also separated from the enlisted men, in an attempt to better control prisoners. In October of 1951 another one of the Yalu River Camps was set up. This was Camp 2, at Pi-chong-ni, which thereafter served as the main officers camp. The next month a POW column of nearly 50 men, including 6 Marines, left Kung Dong for these northern camps on a death march that covered 225 miles in two weeks. During the excruciating march, prisoners had been forced to strip naked and wade across the Chongsong River, a procedure which caused several deaths and cases of frostbite. One British participant, however, recalled that the “Marines banded together during the terrible march, and the Royal Marines were drawn close to the U.S. Marines.”585

In December 1951 the Communist and UNC forces exchanged lists of captured personnel. The list of 3,198 American POWs (total UNC: 11,559) revealed that 61 Marines were in enemy hands. Nine others, captured late in the year, were still in temporary collection points and thus not listed. Although Marines represented only a small portion of the total POWs, they were present in most of the nearly dozen regular camps or collection points then in existence. In any event the 1951 POW list586 gave a picture of the growing Communist camp system.

As 1951 was drawing to an end, the Camp 2 commandant, a fanatical Communist named Ding, ordered UNC prisoners to prepare and send a New Year’s greeting to the commander of the CCF, General Peng Teh-huai. Senior UN officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Brown, USAF, was determined that the prisoners would not sign the spurious holiday message. Major McLaughlin voluntarily organized Marine resistance, and senior officers of other nationality groups followed suit. No greetings were sent. As usually happened, an informer reported the organized resistance and furnished names of the reactionary leaders. The following month, the six ranking officers were sentenced to solitary confinement, ranging from three to six months, for their “subversive activities.”

The episode marked the first really organized resistance to the Chinese. “Although the principals were subjected to months of solitary confinement, coercion, torture, and very limited rations during the bitterly cold months of early 1952, their joint effort laid the foundation for comparatively effective resistance within Camp 2 during the remainder of the war.”587

In January 1952, Major McLaughlin and the other five officers were removed to begin their long tours of solitary confinement. Although the remaining Marine officers at Pi-chong-ni had “formed a tightly knit group and consulted among themselves on every major issue,”588 the atmosphere within the camp itself became highly charged and strained. Suspicion of informers and opportunists was rampant. The officers at Camp 2 were generally agreed that Marine Lieutenant Colonel Thrash, who arrived in June, was largely responsible for restoring discipline. He issued an all-inclusive order about camp behavior for all personnel which read, in part:

Expectedly, it was not long before Lieutenant Colonel Thrash’s efforts to influence and organize his fellow officers outraged CCF officials. In September he was removed from the compound, charged with “Criminal Acts and Hostile Attitude against the Chinese People’s Volunteers.” The Marine airman spent the next eight months in solitary. Here he was subjected to constant interrogation, harassment, and duress. On one occasion he was bound, severely beaten, and thrown outside half naked in sub-zero weather. Shock of the severe temperature rendered him unconscious, and he nearly died. Throughout his eight-month ordeal there were demands that he cooperate with the “lenient” Chinese upon his return to the compound.

During 1952, the Communists developed the system of keeping newly-captured Marines (and other UNC troops) apart from those taken prior to January 1952 who had suffered more brutal treatment. Beginning in August, noncommissioned officers were also segregated. They were removed from Chongsong (Camp 1) and taken further north along the Yalu to the “Sergeants Camp” (Camp 4) at Wiwon. Although a few Marines had been interned at the Camp 2 Annex, at Obul, from late 1951 on, they were not sent there in any sizable number until mid-1952.

Adjacent to a steeply-walled valley, the Obul camp was also known as “No Name Valley.” Although the inmates of the annex were aware of other POWs in the main compound and throughout the valley, they were under heavy guard to prevent contact between the groups. An Air Force officer, the senior member, and Major Harris, the ranking Marine, went about organizing the prisoners in a military manner. In order to exchange information, notes were hidden under rocks at common bathing points or latrines. Messages were baked in bread by POWs on kitchen detail, and songs were loudly sung to convey information. Hospitalized POWs, meanwhile, were held at the Pyoktong (Camp 5) hospital or, in the southern sector, at a second hospital a few miles north of Pyongyang. Other locations where prisoners were confined in 1952 were “Pike’s Peak,” also in the same general southern area, and the Manpo Camp on the Yalu.

For POWs incarcerated behind the bamboo curtain, 1952 marked several other developments. It was the year that American airmen began to receive special grilling and threats from their Communist captors. This was in connection with the germ warfare hoax, to be discussed later. It was also the year that Marine POWs at Pi-chong-ni (Camp 2) observed their own traditional 10 November Marine Corps birthday ceremony. Eggs, sugar, and flour were stolen for a cake surreptitiously baked and suitably decorated with the Marine Corps globe and anchor. Another group accomplished the task of bootlegging rice wine. When the special date arrived, the Marine officers toasted the President, Commandant, and Marine Corps and spiritedly sang the National Anthem and Marine Corps hymn. One of the invited guests, Quartermaster Sergeant James Day of the Royal Marines, later recalled the reaction of other prisoners:

This same month the Chinese staged a “Prisoner of War Command Olympics” at Pyoktong. Although most Marines opposed the idea of participation in the event, because of its inevitable propaganda exploitation by the CCF, the decision rendered by the senior UN officer was that POW athletes would be represented. Much improved quality food was served for the occasion, Communist photographers were everywhere, and a CCF propaganda brochure (with articles written by POW turncoats) was later distributed in Geneva purportedly to show the healthy recreational activities available to UNC prisoners. An Air force pilot, in describing the performance of Major McLaughlin, noted that “his skill as an athlete helped restore the prestige of the officers torn down by the enemy’s propaganda.”591

More important, he defied the guards by deliberately circulating among the enlisted men (often younger, impressionable, less mature individuals) to point out lies in enemy propaganda tactics designed to slander the U.S. government and its leaders. The Marine officer also collected names of American POWs held in isolated places who it was suspected the enemy might attempt to hold as hostages at the end of the war—possibly as a bargaining tool for the granting of a seat to Red China in the UN.

During the last year of the war although a number of prisoners were still being captured in some of the most savage attacks unleashed by the enemy, the lot of the average POW had improved. More attention was being paid to the former pitiful medical care. The men were more warmly clad, even though still huddled into filthy, crowded huts. And the monotonous poor chow had improved. Most POWs, although carefully kept from learning developments of the outside world, naturally suspected that some reason lay behind the changes. And so there was: the Communists had no desire to repatriate skeletonized prisoners.

CCF “Lenient Policy” and Indoctrination Attempts592

As early in the war as July 1951, the CCF was seeking propaganda benefits out of its so-called “lenient” policy toward captured United Nations personnel. Basically, this could be described as “calculated leniency in return for cooperation, harassment in return for neutrality, and brutality in return for resistance.”593 Others have characterized the CCF psychological techniques of indoctrination as monotonous and single-minded “repetition, harassment and humiliation.”594

In some respects, it is true that the Chinese treatment of prisoners appeared to be more humane than that of the North Koreans. The latter freely used physical cruelty and torture, to the point of being barbaric.595 Sometimes it appeared that Allied POWs did not receive any harsher treatment from the CCF than did local civilian prisoners.

Whereas the NKPA regularly resorted to physical brutality, the Chinese “introduced a more insidious form of cruelty.”596 Although they used physical violence less often, it was usually more purposeful and combined with deliberate mental pressure. CCF officials announced that treatment of captives would be “fair and lenient,” but that wrongdoers would be publicly punished. Usually this CCF punishment took the form of less drastic methods—solitary confinement, prolonged interrogation, and a reduced diet. Even under this decreed lenient policy, however, no relief parcels were delivered to POWs, nor were any neutral observers ever allowed to inspect the prison camps.

In any event, the Chinese were considerably more effective than the NKPA in their intelligence activities. Often their skilled interrogators were officers who spoke excellent English. Occasionally, they had even attended such U.S. schools as the University of Chicago and had considerable insight into American psychology, customs, and values—even slang. Interrogation sessions usually employed recording devices and sometimes were further equipped with one-way mirrors. One Marine, subjected to frequent interrogation, was kept awake by the Chinese who slapped his face and blew smoke in his eyes.

From early 1951 to the end of the war UNC prisoners were subjected to a systematic attempt at mass conversion to Communism. This intensive indoctrination effort—like the riots of Communist prisoners in Allied POW camps and the CCF germ warfare fabrications—was designed to gain a propaganda advantage. From highest-ranking officer to lowly private, no one was immune to this thought-reform process. General Dean, prize Communist captive, who was subject to three years of intense Marxist-Leninist indoctrination, upon his release commented wryly, “I’m an authority now on the history of the Communist Party and much of its doctrine.”597

English-speaking POWs, both American and British, particularly became the target for Communist thought-control conditioning. Many experts have discussed glowingly the superb example and iron discipline—both on the battlefield and in POW camp—displayed by the Turkish soldiers. This is true, and their outstanding performance is to their credit as a national group. The fact remains, however, that the Turks were long-term professional soldiers. Usually they were left alone by the Communists who neither spoke their language nor needed them for propaganda purposes. As a rule all non-American troops of the United Nations received better treatment than American and British personnel.

The basic tenet of the Communist party line was that this aggressive war against the peace-loving people of Korea had been caused by American imperialists seeking additional foreign markets. All UNC soldiers were, therefore, by simple definition war criminals who deserved no better treatment than death. But as most UN soldiers were misguided and misled by their capitalist rulers they would “not be shot if they admitted their mistakes and showed themselves to be progressive”598 by becoming properly indoctrinated.

Often, the thought-reform processing started long before prisoners reached their permanent camps, while they were under initial interrogation in the transit collection center. Captain Samuel J. Davies, Anglican Chaplain of the British Gloucestershire Regiment,599 noted that lecture subjects presented to his officer group at one North Korean temporary collection center included:

• Corruption of the UN by the American warmongers;
• The Chinese Peoples’ right to Formosa;
• The Stockholm Peace Appeal;
• Progress in Peoples’ China;
• Churchill, tool of the Truman-MacArthur-Dulles Fascist clique;
• The Soviet Union heads the World Peace Camp.600

Systematically the enemy ground away at theory and practice of Communism, with its superiority to American democracy. From emphasis on the Korean War as imperialist aggression, the programmed thinking then dealt with shortcomings of western countries (particularly Southern lynchings, poor treatment of Negroes, and colonialism) to the idyllic socialism in people’s democracies where “everyone is equal.” “Together with the emotional pressures involved, this dramatic presentation of Marxism-Leninism to prisoners who often not only failed to comprehend why they had fought in Korea, but even the rudiments of democracy itself, was bound to have some sort of effect.”601

Compulsory lectures and discussions often went on until 2200. Together with the unceasing indoctrination efforts, the CCF attempted to maintain complete control over every aspect of POW life. Each camp was divided into POW companies (ranging from 60 to 300 men), platoons, and squads. Squad leaders, appointed by the Chinese, reported regularly to authorities the opinions of men in their group. “Converted” progressives were responsible for much of the internal policing. Every prisoner with reactionary tendencies was isolated. The varied pressures of hunger, fear, constant threats of torture, coercion, nonrepatriation, anxiety, and guilt602 were used to break him down.

In an attempt to convert the Marines and other prisoners to their own beliefs, the Communists prohibited the use of the term “prisoner of war.” Instead they used the phrase “newly liberated friends” and insisted the POWs do likewise. They also denounced religion as a superstition and device for controlling people’s minds. Curiously, POWs were often permitted to retain whatever religious articles they had on them when captured, so that Bibles, rosaries, etc., were available for squad groups that sought to hold informal religious discussions and readings. Such religious expression was, of course, strictly forbidden. It might be noted here that Marines, as a group, did not appear to be any more or less interested in religious services than other POWs.

By mid-1952 the compulsory lectures were considered a failure, and the emphasis shifted to “voluntary” study groups led by progressives. More insidious methods of indoctrination were being used—books, papers, and articles written by camp progressives. Personal interrogation and indoctrination had proved it could have a more powerful effect than attempts at mass conversion. Then, too, the Chinese had by this time perfected another propaganda tool that admirably suited their purposes. It was to have even still more effective, far reaching results.

The Germ Warfare Issue603

Besides their routine interrogations and indoctrinations, by 1952 the Communists had found a new angle to exploit. This was to have strong repercussions on the treatment of some captured personnel. And, ultimately, it was to affect American public reaction to the entire Korean War and to shake the nation’s confidence in some of its fighting men who became POWs.

The germ warfare issue developed from an incident in January 1952 when the Communists shot down a U.S. Air Force B-26 bomber. Several months later, in May, the enemy propaganda campaign moved into high gear when the navigator and pilot both purportedly confessed that they took part in a raid in which germ bombs were dropped on North Korean towns. After the CCF successfully extracted false confessions from the two USAF officers, the enemy exposed both prisoners to a select group of Oriental medical specialists and newspapermen. The two Americans apparently performed according to plan, and a relentless flood of Communist propaganda was unleashed on the world.

While the allegation of bacteriological warfare was not new in the Korean War, it was not until 1952 that the Chinese successfully exploited it. After suffering their first reverses in Korea in September 1950, the Communists charged that Americans were waging germ warfare. Even after they regained the tactical initiative in late 1950 they continued their campaign of vilification. In early 1951, while the UNC battled epidemics of smallpox, typhus, and amoebic dysentery prevalent among the civil population and within the POW camps, the CCF branded medical efforts to curb the diseases as experiments in germ warfare. A formal complaint was made by the CCF to the United Nations in May 1951; thereafter, the germ warfare charges lay dormant for the rest of the year.

The effect of the two airmen’s “confessions” in 1952 was far-reaching. From that time until the end of hostilities “captured aviators of all services were subjected to a degree of pressure and coercion previously unknown by prisoners of war. Prior to the turn of the year aviation and ground personnel received relatively the same treatment in Communists’ hands. After January 1952, aviators were singled out for a special brand of treatment designed to wring bacteriological warfare confessions from them.”604 North Korean officials joined the CCF spokesmen in loudly denouncing American bacteriological attacks. As the campaign gained momentum, an elaborate, cleverly-concocted “War Crimes Exhibit” was set up in Peiping in May. Similar displays were later on view at the UNC officers’ camp at Pi-chong-ni, including hand-written and sound-recorded confessions by the two American pilots, as well as a convincing array of photos depicting the lethal “bomb containers.”