October 1998
Summary of news for the entire month.
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01 OCT 98: 2,079 Americans remain unaccounted-for from the Vietnam War: Vietnam - 1,552 (North, 564; South, 988); Laos - 446; Cambodia - 75; and the Peoples Republic of China territorial waters - 8. 138 Americans have been accounted-for during the present administration: Vietnam - 72; Laos - 62 and CambPersian Gulf War - unsatisfactory accounting. Korean War - 8,139 remain unaccounted-for, 42 possible remains returned, 4 identifications. World War II - Over 78,000 remain unaccounted-for.
Secretary of Defense William Cohen met with the Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Nguyen Manh Cam at the Pentagon. It is report that Secretary Cohen reiterated the POW/MIA issue as a priority in the developing U.S.-Vietnamese relationship.
Field Operations are scheduled to begin in Laos. These will include trilateral cases involving Vietnamese witnesses to incidents occurring in Laos.
02 OCT 98: Prisoners Of War who were interned in the Soviet Union after World War II will meet in Seoul. The meeting will highlight the plight of Korean POWs, who were detained in prisons and labor camps and seek compensation for their internment.
05 OCT 98: For 52 years, the fate of prison of war Private Robert Pallister was a painful mystery to his family. Pvt. Pallister was captured by the Japanese and became a victim of war atrocities at Sandakan camp, North Borneo. Of the 2,434 Australian and British soldiers captured only 6 survived. Recently, Lynette Silver located the graves of 18 soldiers who have been identified.
08 OCT 98: In a letter received from DPMO, the following information is offered: 1) Official number of U.S. individuals listed as unaccounted for in Laos: 604; 2) Number of missing Servicemen in that official number: 578; 3) Number of lost civilians in that official number: 26; 4) Official number of live U.S. individuals repatriated from Laos: 26; 5) Number of live servicemen repatriated from Laos: 15; 6) Number of live civilians repatriated from Laos: 11; 7) Number of U.S. individuals whose remains have been repatriated and identified: 132; 8) Number of Servicemen whose remains have been repatriated and identified: 129; and, 9) Number of civilians whose remains have been repatriated and identified: 3.
09 OCT 98: The skeletal remains of five Korean War-era Americans were returned by North Korea through the border village of Panmunjom. The remains were recovered by a U.S. military forensic team and will be sent to the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. 20 sets of remains have been found since the joint recovery operation began. About 230 sets of remains have been repatriated by North Korea, but fewer than a dozen have been identified. The recovery of remains of American war dead is a key U.S. demand for improving relations with North Korea.
10 OCT 98: Forensic experts have found more than 170 bodies in one of the biggest mass graves discovered from Bosnia's civil war, officials said Friday." We anticipate we'll find 100 more'' bodies, said Jill Gould, a Wichita, KS, pathologist who's working with Boston-based Physicians For Human Rights. Most of the bodies are in military plastic bags, orderly placed in the mass grave, officials said. Meanwhile, 25 bodies were discovered in a grave Friday in Celije, Croatia, near the Croatian border with Yugoslavia said Ivan Grujic, who heads a Croatian commission for prisoners and missing persons.
11 OCT 98: More than 30 South Korean prisoners of war still alive in North Korea have been identified, the Defense Ministry said yesterday. The valuable information was provided by Chang Mu-hwan, a former South Korean POW, the ministry said. Chang, 72, escaped North Korea in August and returned home late September via China, 45 years after being captured during the 1950-53 Korean War. Chang was reported to have stated in a probe that he and some 70 other South Korean POWs had been forced to work in the same coal mine in the North. He managed to remember the names of the 70 war colleagues. Among them, 40 have died, and the remaining 30 have very difficult lives due to shoddy work conditions and the current food crisis, Chang was quoted as saying. Another former POW, Yang Soon-yong who escaped last year, recently said he knew of 42 South Korean war prisoners still being held alive in the North. Their testimony brought to about 130 the number of South Korean POWs who are confirmed still held alive in the North, a ministry official said.
13 OCT 98: South Korea will launch a campaign to account for its soldiers missing from the Korean War. The statement comes after a south Korean soldier, who escaped after being held in North Korea for 45 years, said he knew of about 30 other prisoners of war still alive in the communist country. South Korea says more than 40,000 prisoners were not returned at the end of the Korean conflict.
14 OCT 98: Tim Morrison will load seven half-gallon jars of dirt into his car and drive to Indiana so 38 Tennessee Confederate soldiers who died in a prisoner of war camp in 1862 can be covered with some of their native soil. Morrison collected the soil form each of the soldiers' home counties - Williamson, Giles, Marshall, Lincoln, Bedford, Lawrence and Franklin. The native ground will be used to honor the dead during a dedication ceremony Saturday in Greenbush Cemetery in Lafayette, Indiana. The ceremony culminates more than two years of diligent research to identify the men who, after their surrender at Fort Donelson, endured a grueling steamboat and rail trip to Lafayette, but failed to survive their temporary confinement there in a local meat-packing house. Until now, their graves have identified them simply as "Unknown, C.S.A."
18 OCT 98: Russia has returned the remains of 13 former Japanese prisoners of war found in a former World War II concentration camp, the ITAR-Tass news agency said today. Workers supervised by the Japanese Health Service and Social Welfare Ministry have been digging up remains from the Khalaza-2 concentration camp in the Russian Far East since the beginning of October. The POWs were kept at the camp from 1945 to 1948. Russia and Japan have been working together for six years to find the remains of missing POWs. Buraya said 113 burial sites have been found in the Primorye region alone and that 1,100 remains have been returned to Japan. Of the 600,000 Japanese POWs held in the Soviet Union after the war, 60,000 died and were buried there. Russia and Japan have never signed a peace treaty formally ending hostilities.
19 OCT 98: American and Laotian experts are excavating eight sites where the remains of U.S. servicemen missing in action during the Vietnam War are believed to be buried, the U.S. Embassy said today. The operation, which began Oct. 1, marks the 40th time American and Laotian teams have scoured for clues to the fate of the MIAs. The search will last until the end of the month and involves the cases of 24 missing servicemen in three southern Laotian provinces -- Savannakhet, Saravan and Xekong. There are 2,079 Americans still unaccounted for in Southeast Asia, of which 446 are in Laos. Most were airmen bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail to stop North Vietnam from moving troops and supplies through Laos. Although not officially at war in Laos, the United States backed the government against Vietnamese-backed communists.
Five American Korean War combat pilots faced six Russians here Sept. 24 during an unprecedented meeting geared toward helping the Russians account for missing fliers. The American pilots joined Russian members of the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs to tell where and when they shot down MiG-15 aircraft in Korea. "This was the first time the Russians have asked us for assistance in resolving cases of Russian airmen missing in action from the Korean War," said Larry Greer, spokesman for DoD's POW/Missing Personnel Office, which arranged the meeting. "The Russians have assisted U.S. investigators in clarifying the fate of 70 of 249 American pilots since the commission was established in 1992," he said. "In turn, the U.S. has helped them account for 10 of their missing pilots." "This first meeting with American fighter pilots is very valuable and creates a new stage of our work in the Korean section of our commission," said Russian Col. Aleksandr S. Orlov, who co-chairs the commission's Korean War Working Group with U.S. Rep. Sam Johnson.
20 OCT 98: A small group representing family and veterans organizations are on a four-day visit to North Korea to observe operations to recover the remains of Americans missing from the Korean War. The joint operation team, consisting of soldiers from both the U.S. and Democratic People's Republic of Korea, are working to find the remains of missing Americans. This is the fifth and final joint recovery operation for 1998. Current 1998 reports show that only 13 sets of probable American soldiers have been recovered and repatriated to the United States.
26 OCT 98: Veteran nonfiction directors Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders' "Return With Honor" is a potent look back at the experiences of American POWs in North Vietnam, one made strikingly immediate by the unprecedented amount of hitherto unavailable enemy propaganda footage. Despite such will- breaking conditions, many found ways to resist, such as one man's painting a cell wall with his own blood, or another's signifying the word ``torture'' with his eyebrows when made to recite pro-Ho Chi Minh dogma for the cameras. All developed elaborate codes for communication (mostly by tapping on cell walls) so that the prisoners eventually knew one another quite well -- often without having any visual contact whatsoever. This vocal testimony would be powerful enough abetted only by the still photos and Western military footage seen here. But ``Return With Honor's'' most stunning element is its additional deployment of reels only recently released by the now-friendly Vietnamese government. The wartime-era North Vietnamese propaganda minister believed such extensive visual records were an inestimable tool in boosting morale. So, from planes being downed to ground capture, on through their cell life and rare public moments (e.g., being paraded through the streets of Hanoi for heckling, debris-throwing crowds), POW experiences are often shown exactly as recalled. Of course, Viet Cong filmers refrained from preserving torture sessions -- though the medieval-looking restraints and devices are duly spied by contemporary documakers visiting the abandoned prison sites. Stories are deftly woven into one reasonably clear, chronologically ordered narrative. A significant sidebar gives air to several military wives, who remember being kept from speaking publicly about their husbands' whereabouts or status (when known), though they finally organized to petition for greater government openness and action re American POWs.
LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY: ESCAPE FROM LAOS tells the incredible true story of Dieter Dengler, the only U.S. pilot to have successfully escaped from a North Vietnamese-controlled prison. An intense and riveting documentary that brings a personal perspective to the horrors of the Vietnam War. Playdates: Nov. 9 (6:40 a.m.) and 25 (9:15 a.m.) On CINEMAX Reel Life. After he went to college and enlisted in the Navy, he was assigned to duty in Vietnam, he was shot down on his first bombing mission over Laos in 1966. Thrown from the plane upon impact, Dengler ran into the jungle -- and entered a horrific nightmare of prison, torture and a fight to survive against all odds. Two days later, he was captured by Laotian forces.
HBO Signature Double Take, THE DEATH TRAIN tells the prisoners' story of the Stalin railway when it debuts SUNDAY, NOV. 8 (7:45-9:00 p.m. ET). Other playdates: Nov. 13 (8:15 a.m.), 16 (10:30 a.m.), 18 (2:20 a.m.), 19 (noon), 21 (10:45 p.m.) and 25 (7:45 p.m.). Hundreds of thousands of men were shipped by train and barge to Siberia. If they survived the journey, enduring starvation, disease and brutal cold, more of the same awaited in the camps. From the beginning the project was doomed by engineering faults and bureaucrats who cared more for meeting deadlines than for the welfare of the prisoners or the structural integrity of the railway. As one survivor recalls, ``All human emotions -- love, friendship, envy, mercy, honesty -- fell away from us along with the meat of our muscles...The only thing left was anger: the most enduring of human emotions.'' THE DEATH TRAIN documents these atrocities through archival film footage, excerpts from several prisoners' published memoirs, and interviews with five survivors. On March 5, 1953, Stalin died. His railway project was abandoned 20 days later. It is estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 prisoners died constructing the railway. In the end, approximately 500 miles of track had been laid -- one ``sleeper'' (railroad tie) for every corpse.
28 OCT 98: A former South Korean prisoner of war who recently escaped from famine-hit North Korea said a growing number of people there were trying to sell their blood to smugglers to survive, Seoul's defense ministry said on Wednesday. A ministry statement quoted former prisoner Chang Mu-hwan as saying the numbers of smugglers seeking blood and those voluntarily selling it were increasing despite North Korea's attempts to ban such activities.
29 OCT 98: Switzerland's 275 million Swiss franc ($206 million) World War II fund is set to pay $400 each tomorrow to Eastern European concentration-camp survivors in Minsk, Belarus, Swiss newspapers, including Neue Zuercher Zeitung, reported. Swiss Holocaust Funds President Rolf Bloch will attend the ceremony for 609 former prisoners interned in camps and 400 Jewish Holocaust survivors. To date, the fund, created by the Swiss National Bank and the country's biggest banks, has paid out about 40 million Swiss francs to 40,000 Holocaust victims in Eastern Europe.
30 OCT 98: A former South Korean prisoner of war finally ended his military service in a tearful ceremony Thursday, 45 years after he was captured and subjected to a lifetime of forced labor by communist North Korea. Corporal Chang Mu-Hwan returned home last month following a dramatic escape from the starving North where he spent four decades toiling in state coal mines. On Thursday, the frail 72-year-old made an emotional journey back to the site of his Korean War unit, the spot where he was captured by Chinese troops in 1953, to finally win his discharge from the army. "I, Corporal Chang Mu-Hwan, report my retirement on orders dated October 29, 1998," the old soldier shouted in a trembling voice at this frontline unit which was overrun by Chinese troops in the final days of the conflict. His long-separated wife and children looked on as the old man, wearing a South Korean military camouflage uniform and floral garland, officially closed the chapter on his epic ordeal.
Chang was honored with a special promotion to the rank of corporal and awarded 45-years back pay from the army amounting to 120 million won (91,000 dollars). He was also given a monthly pension and an apartment. After the ceremony, his wife, Park Nam-Sun, 69, who refused to re-marry after her husband was declared missing and presumed dead in action, put a new watch on Chang's wrist. "I kept you waiting for too long," said Chang who choked back tears as he squeezed the wrinkled hands of his wife, who last saw him at age 24.
31 OCT 98: Family Updates are conducted in cities around the U. S. to reach families in their local areas and update them on the government''s work to achieve the fullest possible accounting of our missing service personnel. This is to ensure that no family member is denied an opportunity to learn more about the accounting effort, and to discuss, privately, the details of their own case. 1998 is the third year this program has been led by DPMO. These monthly briefings include presentations about work in Southeast Asia, North Korea, Russia, as well as information on archival research, joint field excavations and forensic identification procedures.
POW-MIA Issue Update November 1998