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Re: Korean War POWs Remember Grueling Experiences

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: April 25, 2003

"Korean War prisoners remember grueling experience 50 years on
BEIJING (AFP)

As the Korean peninsula teeters precariously ahead of still uncertain US-China-North Korea talks this week, a 50-year anniversary is reminding veterans on both sides of the Pacific about the human cost of armed conflict.

In late April 1953, the two sides in the Korean War, who had been killing each other for nearly three years, began exchanging sick and wounded prisoners in what was nicknamed operation "Little Switch".

Although that operation, along with the entire conflict, has faded into history, the men who experienced it are still deeply divided over what happened in POW camps on either side.

"We didn't kill POWs," 76-year-old Kim Thae Hwa, a North Korean veteran, told AFP during a recent reporting trip to Pyongyang. "We treated them well. If they fell ill, we gave them medical care."

Kim's recollection, perhaps blurred by the passage of five decades and distorted by government propaganda, is contradicted by numerous accounts of summary executions of US prisoners, especially early in the war.

Those Americans who did make it to the North Korean hinterland in late 1950 faced grueling winter months when a large number succumbed to disease, starvation or maltreatment.

"I probably wouldn't have survived if I had been captured by the North Koreans," said Daniel Fenton, who was taken prisoner as a 24-year-old US Army corporal by the Chinese in April the following year.

"The North Koreans were brutal."

The Chinese, who deployed hundreds of thousands of troops on the peninsula to prevent US victory in the war, generally treated prisoners better than the North Koreans, historians agree.

But even the Chinese-run POW camps along the Yalu River that separates China from North Korea were a savage experience for the inmates.

"We had no meat and no fresh vegetables for over a year, and we had a lot of trouble because of lack of vitamins," said Fenton, who now lives in Florida. "I lost about one third of my body weight."

Mirroring Fenton's experience, Xie Shengdao was a 20-year-old Chinese private who was wounded in the thigh during fierce battles in July 1951, falling into American hands shortly afterwards.

"The first US soldiers we came across treated us very harshly, and kicked us with their heavy leather boots," he said.

"Later, one of their officers discovered I was wounded and I was transported to a field hospital behind the frontline."

While in hospital, Xie was interrogated by an American officer, who offered the young Chinese canned food.

Xie refused, remembering he had been told by his officers that food offered by the Americans was poisoned.

"Then the American took a mouthful from the can and said, If you die, Ill die too. Only then I dared eat," said Xie. "It was my first meal in seven or eight days."

Xie and Fenton both missed out on operation "Little Switch", and had to wait for "Big Switch", which was implemented from August 1953 and repatriated all POWs who wanted to return home.

During 28 months in captivity, Fenton and his fellow inmates gradually were accustomed to a routine that mixed hard physical work with tremendous boredom.

Every day the prisoners had to climb eight kilometers (five miles) up the mountainside to look for fuel.

Back in the camp they were given only Communist propaganda literature to read.

As an ordinary enlisted soldier, Fenton was never beaten or kicked, although higher-raking prisoners were physically abused, he said.

Instead, he was subjected to indoctrination or "brain-washing", then a newly-coined term, as political officers of the Chinese army tried to convince the prisoners about the blessings of communism.

"We had to endure four-hour sessions in sub-zero temperatures, two hours in Chinese, and two hours when what they said was translated into English," he said.

© 2003 Agence France-Presse. "