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Re: Korean War POW Refused to Die

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: July 26, 2003

"He refused to die
Former POW recalls torture

By JULIE SHAW Advocate Reporter


ST. LOUISVILLE -- Walter Nickells crawled under the porch of a South Korean home, praying that the North Korean soldiers above wouldn't hear nor see him. That night, they slept right on top.

He had to urinate and used his empty canteen. He made no noise.

The next day, the North Korean soldiers haggled with the farmer next door to give them his chickens. They picnicked after chasing the birds.

Then to Nickells' fear, the farmer seemed to lock eyes with him through the openings of the wooden slats of his picket fence. If he saw Nickells, the farmer didn't say a word.

Five decades later, as the world marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War on July 27, 1953, Nickells -- Licking County's sole surviving prisoner of war from that conflict -- retold the harrowing tale of his capture by communist forces and the three years he spent in North Korean and Chinese camps.

According to the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle Barracks, Pa., 33,643 U.S. troops were killed in action in the Korean War.

Nickells, 76, couldn't stop talking recently as he sat in the living room of his St. Louisville home, his voice at times raised with anger at the remembrance of his treatment by some North Koreans and U.S. officers. At another point, he removed his glasses to wipe away tears.

He said he had warned his commanding officer of the North Korean soldiers, disguised as civilians, who had surrounded the town of Taejon, South Korea. His commander didn't believe him.

The next day, they swept in and killed most of the Army's 24th Infantry Division, 34th Infantry Regiment, to which Nickells, a corporal, was assigned. That's when Nickells escaped under the porch.

The second night under the porch, he crept out, starved and thirsty. The North Koreans soldiers had left earlier that day.

Nickells knew he had to leave the area and walked all night along a river bank. He had snuck some water from a squeaky well, but refused to drink from the river.

"It was full of dead men anyway," he said.

He went into a dirt-floor home, searching for food. He saw plenty of pots and pans, but nothing edible.

During the day, he slept behind a straw stack outside. Then he heard voices.

The man and woman who lived at that home were on the porch, pointing to his shoe prints in the mud.

Nickells came out, putting his hand to his mouth, begging for food. They warned him of troop movements and motioned him to leave.

He jumped over a stone wall and fell into a yard, where a woman hollered and screamed. "Yap, yap, yap," he said, mimicking her.

He ran up a hill. Another woman with a German shepherd in her yard gave him a can of food and motioned for him to move on. He later thought that a general in his division, who had a German shepherd, was hiding in that house and told the woman to feed him.

Nickells hid behind a bush, but another South Korean civilian saw him. As a North Korean patrol came by, the South Korean man gave him away.

He was captured July 22, 1950.

"The first thing they done they took our shoes," Nickells said. "They had no shoes."

The trip into North Korea with other POWs was a zigzag of train rides and barefoot walks through rivers and land strewn with glass.

"It didn't bother me a bit," said Nickells, who grew up on a farm and ran up hills barefoot. "Other grown men, their feet bled, were tender. ... My skin was tough."

At the border with Manchuria, where the train tracks ended at the Yalu River, Nickells and other prisoners undertook one of many death marches, so named because of the many men who died.

Part of his time in prison camps, Nickells stayed in a schoolhouse, where men just slept piled on top of each other for warmth. In winter, it was 40 degrees below zero, Nickells said.

His feet froze and his toenails fell off.

The prisoners ate one bowl of millet a day. Sometimes, they would get some protein when they had dog meat in their soup broth. But with dysentery and other diseases, anything they ate didn't last inside their system long.

Stealing to survive

At one point, Nickells and two other prisoners were assigned to peel garlic bulbs in a shed. Out of hunger, Nickells found a way for them to hide some bulbs by folding and tying up their pants legs, filling them with bulbs.

"Our pants were getting awfully puffy," Nickells recalled. A guard noticed.

The guard made the three POWs kneel in front of all the other prisoners. He ordered them to eat the garlic bulbs, without stopping, or else they'd get hit on the side of their heads with a gun.

"Tears were running down my eyes bigger than my thumb," said Nickells, who wouldn't let himself get beaten. "My mouth was burning up, burning all the way down."

Nickells did get beaten a few other times, when he stole away from the group while gathering wood in the mountains on another work detail. He was looking for something to eat.

"I never dreamed I would die," he said. "I would just find something to steal, live off of. The worst thing was to give up. A lot of guys just gave up eating."

Close to freedom

The second half of Nickells' imprisonment turned out better. In October 1951, he and other prisoners were put on boats to travel downriver on the Yalu River to be turned over to the Chinese.

They were skin and bones. Nickells' weight dropped from 185 pounds from when he got caught to 80 pounds.

The Chinese fed them well, he said. When they arrived, they were given a troughful of rice and told to eat all they wanted. And when they finished that, the Chinese gave them another troughful. During their stay, they were also given chicken, goat and steamed bread.

Nickells received his first bath in more than a year when the Chinese deloused him with boiling-hot water.

On Aug. 23, 1953 -- after 37 months, one day and two hours -- he was turned over to the United States at Panmunjom, the site of the peace negotiations.

"It was like going from hell to heaven," he said.

Reporter Julie Shaw can be reached at 328-8544 or jshaw@nncogannett.com

©2003 The Advocate. "