News-Info-Alerts

Re: New Book: Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War:
An Oral History of Korean War POWs

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: July 27, 2002

"POWs' experiences shed light on Korean War

By CALVIN CHRISTMAN / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

For many Americans, the Korean War lies in that hazy region between the "good" war of World War II and the "bad" war of Vietnam. Few Americans recall how or why nearly 40,000 of their countrymen died in combat. Only an occasional late-night viewing of The Manchurian Candidate triggers interest in the conflict, and then only to dismiss the Korean War as that time when the communists "brainwashed" all our prisoners.

Lewis H. Carlson, a retired professor of history at Western Michigan University, forces the reader to reflect upon those prisoners in his significant and long-needed study, Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War: An Oral History of Korean War POWs.

Mr. Carlson's collection of POW interviews and his professional analysis forcibly attack the stereotype of "brainwashed" POWs. In reality, only 21 Americans out of more than 7,000 POWs chose to go to China at the end of the war, and all but one of them ultimately returned to the United States. Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War
An Oral History of Korean War POWs, Lewis H. Carlson (St. Martin's Press, $24.95)

On the other hand, more than 40,000 Chinese and North Korean prisoners picked freedom over communism at the end of the war, refusing to return to their homeland. Quite clearly, the author argues, communist indoctrination had failed.

Beyond such psychological and intellectual arguments, however, lies the far more basic question of survival that each POW faced. Theirs was a draconian world of brutality, semi-starvation and disease.

Wracked by dysentery, infections and beriberi, while barely kept alive with a poorly cooked gruel of cracked corn or millet, the prisoners suffered, wasted away and all too often died. Nearly 40 percent of American POWs did not survive captivity.

MARCO RUIZ/Special Contributor
No matter what a prisoner's determination to endure, luck often served as the final arbitrator. One Chinese officer randomly picked 15 prisoners, lined them up, and then shot every third prisoner in the back of the head as a demonstration of his authority.

If you were captured in the summer, chances were much greater that you would die, since you would never receive an issue of winter clothing to protect against the numbing brutality of a North Korean winter.

If you were captured at a time when communist forces were retreating, it was quite likely that you would be shot, as with the case of the Tiger Death March or the Sunch'on Tunnel Massacre. Murder prevented your liberation by your own forces.

For all prisoners, each and every day held its cruel catalog of life-or-death "ifs."

These POWs were our fathers and brothers and sons. Their story is our story, and as a nation it is time that we remembered.

Calvin L. Christman, Ph.D., is a professor of history at Cedar Valley College. In the summer, he leads tours to American battlefields and sites in Europe. "