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UMI UMI Microform9987334 Copyright 2000 by Bell & Howell Information and Leaming Company. Al rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Bell & Howell information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 ‘Ann Arbor, Mi 48106-1346PRISONERS OF COLD WAR: SOVIET AND US EXPLOITATION OF AMERICAN KOREAN WAR PRISONERS, 1950-1956 Thesis Approved: Thesis AHvisor Cama Bh fe Dean of fe Graduate ege aitPREFACE This dissertation deals with the exploitation of American Korean War prisoners by both the United States and the Soviet Union for the purposes of propaganda from 1950 to 1956.1 Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, American observers of the Korean War Prisoner of War/Missing in Action (POW/MIA) issue have attacked the Soviet Union for kidnapping US POWs and the United States for ignoring this episode. This only exacerbated the POW/MIA controversy in the United States, which had become more contentious since the Vietnam War. This dissertation contends that the Soviets did not kidnap large numbers of American POWs nor did the United States ignore alleged Soviet actions. Rather, this dissertation presents an alternative interpretation that both superpowers used American Korean War prisoners for early Cold War propaganda initiatives. 1 For a general discussion of Cold War propaganda see, Laura A. “Defending a Way of Life: American Propaganda and the Cold War, 1945-1959,” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Virginia, 1996); Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union, (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Lynn Boyd Hinds and Theodore Otto Windt, Jr., The Cold War as Rhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945-1950, (New York: Praeger, 1991). Belmonts ivThis topic presents methodological challenges. Title 50, Section 435 Note of Public Law 102-190 successfully passed by the US Congress in 1991, better known as the McCain Bill after the principle sponsor Senator John McCain (R), called for the declassification of government documents relating to Korean War, Vietnam War, and Cold War POWs and MIAs.” Unfortunately, the bill had the opposite effect. This legislation made access to POW and MIA documents more difficult due to the fact that it required authorization from the Primary Next of Kin (PNOK) for researchers to gain access to POW/MIA materials.* The archivists at the College Park branch of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) can certainly attest to this fact. Other documents on the Korean War POW issue still remain classified by both the United States and Russian governments. While researchers and government officials have made serious efforts to declassify much of this 2 wpitle 50 USC, Section 535 Note as Public Law 102-190,” Office of the Law Revision Council of the House of Representatives, United States Code, 1994 Edition: Containing the General and Permanent Laws of the United States in Force on January 4, 1995: Volume Twenty-Six, Title 50-War and National Defense and Popular Names, (Washington, DC: USGPO: 1995), 115-118. > Ibid., 118.material, especially at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library (DDEL) in Abeline Kansas, there is still need for the opening of more documents. The Russian Federation has been far less cooperative with POW/MIA researchers. It has restricted access to the Presidential Archives in Moscow, as well as other archives. My own attempts to research the POW/MIA issue in various regions of the former Soviet Union have been met with nothing short of total resistance. None of this is surprising. Not the McCain Bill, not the failure of the US government to declassify all Korean War POW/MIA documents-some of which probably will never be declassified-and certainly not the unwillingness of the Russian Federation to cooperate in this research. By its nature, the POW/MIA issue is an explosive one. Americans take the issue seriously, as demonstrated by POW/MIA flags, statues, days of remembrance, and other icons that abound on the American cultural stage. The Russian Federation, the political successor to the former Soviet Union, also takes it seriously because it is a reminder of a difficult past and because it is a contemporary weapon of leverage over the United States. The sensitivity of the issue has raised barriers in creating an understanding of the Soviet and American exploitation of American Korean War prisoners. Few recent vihistories of the topic have been either objective or scholarly. But now when the veils surrounding the Korean War POW/MIA issue have begun to lift, it becomes clear that both superpowers exploited US Korean War prisoners as propaganda weapons during the Cold War. This is not unexpected. Nations have utilized POWs since the origins of warfare. Accounts of conquerors enslaving troops fill western mythology and historical chronicle since common times. The Korean War POW/MIA issue is part of this tradition, and now it is time to place the issue fully in the realm of historical scholarship. I received a great amount of help in completing this dissertation. I would, first and foremost, like to thank the head of my doctoral committee and advisor Dr. George Jewsbury for all of his help and support on this monograph. Dr. Laura Belmonte has also been invaluable to the production of this work through her careful editing of the original manuscript. I would also like to thank Dr. Joseph Byrnes, Dr. Joel Jenswold, and Dr. James Huston for their efforts in the final completion of this dissertation and for all their advice and support during the last five years. One important person who gave me an immense amount of personal and professional support, saw me through graduate school, and always acted as a true friend, and to vidwhom I wish to extend a heartfelt thanks, is Dr. Ronald Petrin. I would also like to thank a few people and organizations for institutional and research support. The Oklahoma State University Department of History generously let me stay on and continue to teach for the past five years, making the completion of this dissertation possible. Susan Oliver, the Department Secretary has played an important role in helping me to complete my graduate studies, and I wish to thank her. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Victor Dmitriev of the Oklahoma State University Department of Foreign Languages Russian Section for years of Russian language instruction. The staff of the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland greatly helped me during the research phase of my dissertation. John E. Taylor and Richard Boylan, two nationally distinguished archivists guided me through the myriad of documents at my disposal and expressed sympathy and even disgust with recent obtrusive legislation that prevented me from reviewing some non-classified material. The staff at the Eisenhower Library also greatly aided in the research phase of this dissertation. David J. Haight was extremely helpful in showing me how to navigate the Archive and, viiihimself an expert on POW/MIA issues, helping me to locate many needed documents. On the other side of the world I wish to express my gratitude to Kazak State National University for offering me employment in the Faculty of International Journalism and the Faculty of International Relations in the spring of 1999. Living in Almaty gave me both access to Soviet Cold War literature and helped me to increase my Russian language ability. I would also like to express my thanks to the staff at the “Ultik Kitapkhana” of Kazakstan, especially Dariga Khasanova. On a personal level, I would like to express a sincere thank you to all of my fellow graduate students who helped me through my course work and this dissertation, especially Julie Jones, Brad and Shelly Lemons, and Greg Maphet. I would like to give a special thanks to Karlygash Balapanova for her unwavering support and dedication in giving me the encouragement to finish this project. Finally, I would like to thank my parents Richard Joseph Faillace, Sr. and Annette Marie Faillace, to whom this work is dedicated. I am in debt to many friends and scholars for this work; all failings and mistakes are mine alone. ixTABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. PERCEPTIONS OF US KOREAN WAR POWS, 1953 TO THE PRESENT... . 2... e II. Tors Introduction... 6... ee eee The POW Collaboration Issue. .... The Heroic POW History... ..... Attack of the Academics... .... The Mass Media and Soviet Complicity with American POWs...) 1 ee Recent Studies of Soviet Complicity with American POWs... .. 2... Conclusion...) ee eee ee ee PRECEDENTS: SOVIET AND US EXPLOITATION OF WWII POWS, 1939-1955. ....... Introduction... .. ee eee eee Soviet Lessons Learned: Polish POW Exploitation. ...... Soviet Lessons Learned: Axis POWs Exploitation Allied Lessons Learne: The Great POW Swap... -- - es ee The German POW Issue... ... 22. The Japanese POW Issue... ..... The POW Issue Reaches the United Nations . 2 6. eee ee ee The Final Release... . 1.2... Conclusion... 1... 2-2. eee NORTH KOREAN AND CHINESE EXPLOITATION US POWS, 1950-1953, ......... Introduction... ... + - - ee ee The First American Prisoners. .... North Korean Attempts to use American POWs for Propaganda... . . North Korean Attempts to gain technological Information. .... . The Chinese People’s Volunteers and POW Administration. ....... Chinese Germ Warfare Charges Page ql 15 23 29 40 41 4. 42 47 54 65 73 80 85 90 92 92 94 101 104 108Iv. v. vi. VII. AMERICAN ATTEMPTS TO REPATRIATE US POWS, and US POWs... eee ee ee Conclusion. . 2. eee ee eee THE SOVIET UNION AND THE KOREAN WAR, 1950-1953... ee ee ee ee ntroduct 1oneat sy pepe mt et tet The Soviet Union and the start of the Korean War... . ~~ The Soviet War in Korea. .... ~ Soviet Interrogation of US POWs... ee ee ee ee ee The Transportation Issue... - . - Conclusion... .- +--+ ee eee SOVIET EXPLOITATION OF AMERICAN KOREAN WAR PRISONERS FOR PROPAGANDA, 1950-1953 . Introduction... ./ ee ee eee The Soviet “Peace Campaign”... - Communist Allegations of UN And US Atrocities... . sotee American POWs as Weapons of propaganda...) eee ee ee Germ Warfare and the exploitation of US POWs. ..... Conclusion. .. 2. eee eee ee AMERICAN EXPLOITATION OF US POWS, 1953. Introduction. ..---- ee ees American Attempts to exploit Communist POWs... ...- American Exploitation Of US POWs for Propaganda... . - The Biological Warfare counterattack... . ee eee Conclusion... - - / ee ee ee 1954-1956 2. 2 ee ee ee Introduction... -- ee eee The Geneva Conferences... . ~~~ American Attempts to Locate and repatriate US POWs in the USSR. . . Conclustomsse sete tren near xt 124 135 137 137 141 154 161 172 179 181 181 182 191 199 205 217 220 220 221 230 243 255 257 257 261 281 286CONCLUSION . BIBLIOGRAPY. APPENDIX I . APPENDIX IT. APPENDIX III . APPENDIX IV. APPENDIX V . APPENDIX VI. APPENDIX VII . APPENDIX VIII. APPENDIX IX. APPENDIX X . APPENDIX XI. APPENDIX XII . xii 289 301 333 335 337 338 340 341 343 345 347 348 355 357LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Biological/Bacteriological Warfare BW Body Not Recovered BNR Central Intelligence Agency CIA Chemical Warfare cw Chinese Communist Forces cce Chinese Communist Party cee Chinese People’s Republic ceR Chinese People’s Volunteers cev Christian Democratic Union cou Commonwealth of Independent States cis Communist Party of the Soviet Union KPSS Communist Third International Comintern Department of the Army DOA Department of State Dos Department of Defense DoD Department of Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Office DPMO Federal Republic of Germany FRG General Assembly Ga German Democratic Republic GDR Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’ noe Upravienie GRU Glavnoe Upravienie cupvr Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei SULAG xiii64" Independent Air Corps Interim International Information Service International Information Administration Joint Chiefs of Staff Killed in Action Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti Korean Communication Zone Korean Democratic Republic Korean People’s Army Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti Ministerstvo Inostranikh Del Ministerst’vo Oboroni Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del Missing in Action Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del National Security Council North Atlantic Treaty Organization North Korean People’s Army North Korean People’s Liberation Army Office of Public Information Operations Coordinating Board People’s Republic of China Primary Next of Kin IAC IIIs IIA Jcs KIA KGB KCOMZ KDR KPA MGB MID MoD MVD MIA NKVD Nsc NATO NKPA NKPLA opr oce PRC PNOKPrisoner of War Psychological Strategy Board Republic of Korea Social Democratic Party Task Force Russia Tsentral’nyi Kommitet United Nations United Nations General Assembly United States Air Force United States Information Agency Union of Soviet Socialist Republics World Peace Council World War Two xv POW/PW PSB ROK SDP TER Tsk uN UNGA USAF USIA uUssR weC wwITNOMENCLATURE Archives of Foreign Policy, Russian Federation Cold War International History Project Bulletin Current Digest of the Soviet Press Dwight D. Eisenhower Library Foreign Relations of The United States Foreign Service Posts of The Department of State Library of Congress National Archives and Records Administration Office of the Secretary of The Army Record Group Records of Headquarters U.S. Air Force Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Task Force Russia/ Joint Commission Support Branch United States Government Printing Office U.S.-Russian Joint Commission xvi. AVP RE CWIHPB cDSP DDEL FRUS FSPDS Loc NARA Osa RG RHUSAF ROSD TER/JCSB USGPO USRICCHAPTER I: PERCEPTIONS OF US KOREAN WAR POWS, 1953 to the Present “In the end I stopped looking at the lists, and by spring I'd forgotten his name, even if it had been on one of those damned sorry lists.”* The observation of an American Marine Corps Lieutenant about a fellow Marine taken prisoner during the Korean War. Introduction In the 19° century Europeans developed rules and regulations for combat that included the legal protection POWs to alleviate the abuse and suffering of war prisoners. The 20°" century witnessed the continuation of these idealistic notions. The Geneva conventions of 1929 and 1949, products of postwar thinking of two world wars, stresed such notions as “humane treatment” of POWs, regardless of “race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.”? These attempts to improve the treatment of POWs were unable to mitigate the new and harsher realities of the Cold War. Tragically, the protection of individual rights allegedly assured by these + James Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea, (New York: Pocket Books, 1990), 108. 2 Department of State, “Convention of July 27, 1929, Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War,” Article 2, Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776-1949, Vol. 2, 1918-1948. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office [UsGeo]: 1969), 938; Prisoners of War of August 12, 1949,” Part I, Article 3, Sec. 1. “Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment ofinternational agreements never existed during the Korea war. 3 This dissertation takes an international perspective on the Korean War. Early Korean War scholarship reflected the official us government position that the Soviets were largely responsible for initiating the conflict. With the rise of the revisionist school of thought in the 1960s, Korean War scholarship took another direction. I. F. Stone, in his 1969 work The Hidden History of the Korean War, contended that the United States intervened in Korea for imperialistic ambitions. I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War, (New York, 1969). Callum A. MacDonald, a British historian, in his work Korea: The War before Vietnam, also presented a revisionist view. C. A. MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam, (New York: The Press, 1987). Bruce Cunings’ immense two volume study The Origins of the Korean War, symbolic of this overall trend, described the conflict as civil in nature and absent of Soviet or overall Communist complicity. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: Volume I, Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); ___, The Origins of the Korean War: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). See also, Bruce Cumings, ed., Child of Conflict: The Korean-American Relationship, 1943-1953, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983). Within the last ten to fifteen years Korean War scholarship moved away from the revisionist perspectives of the 1960s and 1970s and more towards an international assessment, attempting to understand the complex relationships between all of the combatants. As one author summarized, the conflict was an “tinternational civil war’ reflecting the tragic fate and historic grievances of the Korean people.” Mineo Nakajima, “The Sine-Soviet Confrontation: Its Roots in the International Background of the Korean War,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 0 (January 1979): 19. Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War, was one of the first works to outline the complex relationship between Stalin and Mao and how that relationship influenced the origins of the conflict. Sergi N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Shu Guang Zhang added to the debate, in Mao’s MilitaryThe public reaction to the treatment of American Korean War POWs by the Communist forces during and directly after the conflict was one of disgust. The issue of “brainwashing” was perhaps those most notorious of all of these atrocity charges.‘ Furthermore, Americans expressed Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953, analyzing Chinese motivations for entering into the conflict. The work argued that the Chinese entered and remained in the war for strategic interests and for Mao's almost mystical preconceptions of heroic combat. The authors described this mysticism as “Mao's belief in human superiority over technical superiority..”, Shu Guang Zhang, Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950-1953, (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1995), 11. An early work that addressed a similar subject, but had few of the primary resources to draw on that Uncertain Partners did was Robert R, Simmons, The Strained Alliance: Peking, Pyongyang, Moscow, and the Politics of the Korean Civil War, (New York: Free Press, 1975). See also, Bernd Nonwetsch and Peter M. Kuhfus, “Die Sowjetunion, China und Der Koreakrieg,” Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgefchichte, 1 (Jahrgang 1985): 28-87. William Stueck argued, in his 1995 work The Korean War: An International History that the conflict was a replacement for a larger military clash between the two superpowers. The war was a microcosm of a bigger problem in international relations and a miniature superpower showdown that reduced the risk of further conflict. “In its timing, its course,” writes Stueck “and its outcome, the Korean War served in many ways as a substitute for World War III.“ William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3. See also, William Stueck, “The Korean War as International History,” Diplomatic History, 10 (Fall 1986): 291-309. The interpretation of American Korean War POWs ae an international problem only adds te the international perspective of the Korean War. ‘ See, United States, Defense Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War, POW, The Fight Continues After the Battle: The Report of the Secretary of Defense’s Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War, (Washington, OC, August 1955); US Congress, Senate. Committee on Government Operations, Korean War Atrocities of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmentshock at the fact that 21 POWs refused repatriation (as so many authors and scholars have pointed out) and were outraged that seemingly normal “all-American boys” could so easily and willing turn their backs on their nation.* The PoW collaboration issue stirred the emotions of people in the United States so greatly that it took the form of mass hysteria and with it anti-PoW sentiment in the ran high. Immediately after the repatriation of American POWs in the fall of 1953, the US Army began to investigate all former prisoners for possible anti-American activity during their internment. The interrogations occurred on US ships carrying POWs home and at Valley Forge Military Hospital during late 1953. Many returning POWs faced possible severe punishments based upon “the offenses of aiding the enemy and informing on fellow prisoners . . . “ according to the US Army.® But US military courts imposed only light Operations, 83" Congress, 1 Session, 1954, For a contemporary look at brainwashing see, Edward Hunter, Brain-Washing in Red China, (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951); Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, (New York: Norton, 1961); Edgar H. Schein, Coercive Persuasion: A Socio- Psychological Analysis of “Brainwashing” of Anerican Civilian Prisoners by the Chinese Communists, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961). 5 For a detailed study of the effect of the American non- repatriates on American politics see Gary Harold Rice, “The Lost Sheep of the Korean War,” (Ph.D. Diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 1998). Unfortunately, I have been only able to obtain a brief summary of this work and have not had the opportunity to read the text. § the National Archives and Records Adninistration, (NARA), “To: CGARMYSIX SFRAN CALIF, NR: DA 333850, 28 Jul $5,” 1, File: 383.6, Recorddisciplinary sentences against many of the POWs who engaged in questionable camp activities, such as making propaganda statements, writing for POW newspapers, and making radio broadcasts. In a few highly sensational trials, however, US military courts imposed more severe punishments. The feelings against the POWs, at least within military circles, ran so high that three of the non-repatriates who decided to return to the United States from China in 1955 immediately faced military court-martial proceedings.” The Eisenhower administration wanted to prevent such disasters from occurring in the future. In 1955 the administration found its solution, the creation of the Universal Military Code of Conduct. The Code attempted to redress the problems encountered in the Chinese and Korean camps, the betrayals, the confessions, and the total breakdown of military discipline, by creating an official statute of POW behavior.® The 1955 Code of Conduct set the Group (RG) 335: (Secretary of the Army) Office of the Secretary of the Army (OSA), General Correspondence Jan. 1953-Dec. 1956. Box 476. 7 Ibid., 1-2. " susan L. Carruthers writes, “Indeed, rather than the POW's record being a source of pride, it became a source of shame and anxiety. Such feelings were encouraged by the promulgation in 1955 of a new Armed Forces ‘Code of Conduct’, the very appearance of which seemed to contradict the Army’s assertion that the record of the Korean POWs had been ‘fine indeed’. Susan L Carruthers, “‘Not Just Washed but Dry Cleaned’: Korea and the ‘Brainwashing’ Scare of the 1950s," in Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s, (New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1999): 58. Article One of the Code of Conduct for Members of the Armed Forces ofstage and represented the centerpiece for the Korean War POW debate. The Code treated future POWs as possible collaborators and looked at POW conduct as a threat to national security. Authors and scholars writing about the Korean War POW issue in the mid-1950s molded their work around this interpretation. The POW Collaboration Is: e The American public wanted to know why some American GIs seemingly accepted Communist indoctrination. The answer that the public initially accepted was that the American male, weaned off his mother’s breast too late in life “lacked the emotional and physical toughness” to withstand the United States declared paternally, “I am an American fighting man. 1 serve in the armed forces which guard my country and our way of Life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.” Article Four, in Language more directly related to the perceived conduct of American Pols during the Korean War stated enphatically that, “I will give no informacion or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. If I am senior, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way.” Article Five dealt more specifically with the problem of collaboration. the general order stated that the solider is “an American fighting man, responsible for my [his] actions” and that the only appropriate information to revel to the enemy is “name, rank, service number, and date of birth.” Article Five further declared, “I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.” Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative, (Lawrence, Kansas: The University of Kansas Press, 1994), 57-58. The gender implications here are obvious and overpowering. For a general description of the development of masculinity in the United States see, Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, (New York: The Free Press, 1996).the onslaught of battle-hardened Communists.? Virginia Pasley's work 21 Stayed: The Story of American GI’s Who Chose Communist China-Who They Were and Why They Stayed encouraged this interpretation.” Pasley created a passionate and even sympathetic biographical sketch of the non-repatriates, and concluded that they embraced Communist ideology as a means to escape their dysfunctional lives in the United States.'! In the end, the work simply reinforced * Adam J. Zweiback, “The 21 ‘Turncoat GIs’: Nonrepatriations and the Political Culture of the Korean War.” The Historian, 60 (Winter: 1998): 349. Zweiback, further maintains that the end result of this debate in American society was the classification of these ex-POWs as “mamma! s boys” and outcasts. Adam J. 2weiback “The 21 ‘Turncoat GIs; Nonrepatriations and the Political Culture of the Korean War.” The Historian, 60 (Winter: 1998): 345-362. The return of POWs and veterans has also been a source of contention and fear. For a cultural history of the anxiety over the return of WWII veterans see David A. Gerber, “Heroes and Misfits: The Troubled Reintegration of Disabled Veterans in ‘the Best Years of Our Lives," 46 American Quarterly, (December 1994): 545-574. Post-war gender issues also entered the political arena. See for example, Greg Mitchell, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas-Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950, (New York: Random House, 1998). for an explanation of how gender identity affected General Douglas MacArthur see, Laura A. Belmonte, “No Substitute for Virility: Douglas MacArthur, Gender, and the Culture of Militarism,” Unpublished paper, 40 pages. 1 See also Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivit the American POW Narrative, for an interpretation of this work and for a Interpreting parallel discussion of the secondary source material on Korean War POW literature. Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative, (Lawrence, Kansas: The University of Kansas Press, 1994), 30. 4 Virginia Pasley, 21 Stayed: The Story of American GIs Who Chose Communist China-Who They Were and Why They Stayed, (New York: Farrer,the view that the POWs in Korea somehow failed to uphold American traditions and masculine values.'? Strauss and Cudahay, 1955); Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the Anerican POW Narrative, 30. ¥ It is interesting to note that recent scholarship and popular Works on the Korean War have begun to take a more cultural perspective of the conflict. Recent authors have published a number of works about the racial dimensions to the conflict. William T. Bowers, Black Soldier, White Army: The 24 Infantry Regiment in Korea, Curtis Morrow's What's 2 Conmie Ever Done to Black People? A Korean War Memoir of Fighting in the U.S. Army’s Last all Negro Unit, and Lyle Rishell’s With a Black Platoon in Combat: A Year in Korea symbolize this movement. William T. Bowers, Black Solider, White Army: The 24° Infantry Regiment in Korea, (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, US Army, 1996); Curtis, Morrow, What’s a Conmie Ever Done to Black People? A Korean War Memoir of Fighting in the U.S. Army’s Last all Negro Unit, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1997); Lyle Rishell, Wich a Black Platoon in Combat: A Year in Korea, (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993). A few works have concentrated on gender history and the Korean War, such as Dorothy G. Horwitz’s We Will not be Strangers: Korean War Letters Between a M.A.S.H Surgeon and His Wife and Peter A. Soderbergh Women Marines in the Korean War Era. Dorothy G. Horwitz, We Will not be Strangers: Korean War Letters Between a M.A.S.H. Surgeon and His Wife, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Peter A. Soderbergh, Women Marines in the Korean War Era, (Westport CN: Praeger, 1994). Additionally, over the past ten to twenty years authors have published a large number of oral histories and memoirs on the Korea War. See the following examples, James Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea, (New York: Pocket Books, 1990); Donald Chung, The Three Day A Korean Soldier’s Memoir, (Tallahassee, FL: Father and Son Publisher, 1989); David Hackworth, About Face, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989); Donald Hamblen, One Tough Marine: The Autobiography of First Sergeant Donald N. Hamblen, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993); Rudolph Stephens Old Ugly Hill: A GI’s Fourteen Months in the Korean Trenches, 1952-1953, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1995); Rudy Tomedi, No Bugles, No Drum: Promis An Oral History of the Korean War, (NewEugene Kinkead, a researcher and reporter who managed to obtain military support and encouragement to study the POW problem in late 1953, wrote prolifically about the poor conduct of American Korean War prisoners. Kinkead’s works were largely based on of the US Army study, U.S. Prisoners of War in the Korean Operation: A Study of Their Treatment and Handling by the North Korean Army and the Chinese 13 Based on this massive study Kinkead Communist Forces. published, “The Study of Something New in History,” in The New Yorker in 1957, and “Have We Let Our Sons Down?” in MaCall's Magazine in 1959 that preempted his thesis in his 1959 work In Every War But One. All three studies contended that American soldiers failed to uphold their duties and responsibilities as POWs because of the influence of the culturally decadent and feminized nature of American society.'! As such, American GIs simply could not take the rigors that Communist soldiers could. Yor! Veterans of the Korean War Recall the Forgotten War, Their Experiences Wiley, 1993); Arthur Wilson, Korean Vignettes: Faces of War, 201 and Thoughts and Wartime Photographs of that Era, (Portland, OR: Artwork Publications, 1996). 13 NARA, U.S. Prisoners of War in the Korean Operation: A Study of Their Treatment and Handling by the North Korean Army and the Chinese Communist Forces, (Fort George G. Meade, MD: November 1954), File: f/w 383.6 (1 Jun 54), RG 341: RHUSAF (Air Staff), Air Force Plans Decimal File, 1942-1954. Box 440. ¥ Robert C. Doyle wrote, “In Kinkead’s view, the idealistic and long-suffering captive communities of European and Asian captivity gave way in North Korea to a synthesis of American creature-comfortThe title itself, In Every War but One illustrated the heart of Kinkead’s position that the Korean War represented the only conflict during which American POWs did not live up to their expected obligations.'® The work presented an image of POWs as having opportunistically ingratiated materialism, what‘ s-in-it-for-me pragmatism, and to-hell-with-everyone- else-but-me individualism.Looking for a scapegoat, Kinkead blamed not only the prisoners but also the social, economic, and educational system that nurtured them.” Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative, 30. 1S Bugene Kinkead, “Have We Let Our Sons Down?” McCall’s, (January: 1959): 23-81., ___, In Every War But One, (New York: Norton); ____, “The Study of Something New in History,” The New Yorker (26 October 1957): 114-169. 16 Eugene Kinkead cited the fact that during the Korean War a large amount of American POWs died in enemy hands, implying that these POWs did not possess the same moral character in comparison to other US POWs from other conflicts. He contended that the fact that almost 118 of all American WWII POWs died as opposed to 388 of all Korean War POWs demonstrated this argument. Kinkead wrote, “And finally, to mention another calamity that might, not on the face of it, seem to point to any moral or disciplinary weakness among the prisoners, thirty-eight per cent of them-2,730 out of a total of 7,190-died in captivity. This was a higher prisoner death rate than that in any of our previous wars, including the Revolution, in which it is estimated to have been about thirty-three per cent.” Kinkead, “The Study of Something New in History,” 114; NARA, “Comparison of POW Deaths: World War IT and Korea,” Committee Documentation of the Secretary of Defense's Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War, CPOW/D-9b (Incl.4) 14 July 1955, File: 383.6 (1 June 54) Sec 2, RG 341: Records Headquarters U.S. Air Force (RHUSAF) (Air Staff) Air Force-Plans Decimal File 1942-1954 From 383.6 to [Blank]. Box 441, The real reason for the large number of POWs deaths in Korea, which occurred during the initial North Korean advance in the summer of 1950 and again during the Chinese offensive in the winter of 1950-51, was due to starvation, disease, and sheer brutality of the Chinese and North Koreans and not to individual weakness on the part of POWs. 10themselves with the enemy, having constantly betrayed each other, and willingly and under absence of duress, having given themselves to the North Koreans and Chinese for exploitation as propaganda tools. Kinkead further advanced the idea that the American mass media acutely exaggerated the extent of Chinese and North Korean brutality, which he maintained, never exceed abnormal levels.'’ American POWs simply crumbled under unsophisticated and even casual interrogation techniques. It did not help the political atmosphere of the time when 21 Americans who refused repatriation published their 1955 work Thinking Soldiers. The work painfully detailed the reasons why these men accepted Communism and decided to remain in Communist China. This type of propaganda seemed to suggest that Kinkead my have been correct in his gender assumptions.”* The Heroic POW History A number contemporary works presented an alternative to the Kinkead thesis and helped to create a view of the POW as 7 Susan L. Carruthers wrote, “Kinkead was reluctant to concur that ‘brainwashing’ had been employed. But, unlike them, in his vision of camp life extreme forms of psychological coercion and physical cruelty were simply airbrushed away.” Susan L. Carruthers, ‘Not Just Washed but Dry-Cleaned’ Korea and the ‘Brainwashing’ Scare of the 1950s,” 58. 1 Andrew M. Condron, and Richard G. Corden, and Lawrence V. Sullivan, Thinking Soldiers, (Peking: New World Press, 1955). aboth hero and victim.'? Most of these works were autobiographical accounts of POW experiences and possessed questionable historical value. Nevertheless, they had an impact on the POW debate. These authors, contrary to the Kinkead thesis, portrayed incarceration in Chinese and North Korean prisons as an appalling and brutal experience. Moreover, these works demonstrated that many prisoners resisted their captors with distinction and valor. The former POWs contributed an alternative possibility to Kinkead's interpretation, first in the form of memoirs. Sargent Lloyd W. Pate’s work, Reactionary!, General William F. Dean’s aptly titled work General Dean’s Story, and Lance- Corporal R. F. Mathews’ book, No Rice for Rebels: A Story of the Korean War, for example, presented a remarkably similar account of Chinese and North Korean cruelty and heroic POW resistance.*° Furthermore, these authors depicted POW ' Robert C. Doyle, as well, pointed out that the appearance of “POW accounts of resistance..” challenged the prevailing Kinkead thesis. Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative, 31. 2° William F. Dean, General Dean’s Story. (New York: The Viking Press, 1954); Francis $. Jones, No Rice for Rebels: A Story of the Korean War, (London: The Bodley Head, 1956); Sargent Lloyd W Pate. Reactionary!, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955); See also Harry Spiller, ed., American POWS in Korea: Sixteen Personal Accounts, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1998). Former prisoners of war have written a vast amount of literature concerning their incarceration during the course of the Korean War. See Stanley James Davies, In Spite of Dungeons: The Experiences as a Prisoner-of-War 12collaboration in Korea as substantial, but not as ideologically based as had Kinkead argued. The collaborators, as Sargent Pate advised “Were not Communists and they didn’t believe in Communism . . . They always had someone they could run to and now the Chinese were their guardians.”?} With the introduction of a heroic POW interpretation and growing apathy of the American public towards the prosecution of the repatriated POWs by the mid- 1950s, few had the will to continue the anti-Pow offensive.?? in North Korea of the Chaplain to the First Battalion, the Gloucestershire Regiment, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1954); Don, Snyder J., A Soldier’s Disgrace, (Dublin, NH: Yankee Books, 1997). % Sargent Lloyd W Pate, Reactionary!, 68-69. Authors have published works well into the 1990s that continue to grapple with the Kinkead thesis. One work, The Problens of U.S. Marine Corps Prisoners of War in Korea, published in 1988, continued to defend the idea that US Marine POWs acted according to acceptable military standards. James Angus MacDonald, The Problems of U.S. Marine Corps Prisoners of War in Korea, (Washington, 0C: History and Museums Division, 1988). ® Other authors took a different perspective on the POW issue and dealt with the problems of the North Korean and Chinese POWs in UN camps and compounds. These authors presented a picture of the heroic actions taken by anti-Communist POWs. Though, not directly related to the American POW issue, this represents an interesting caveat when viewed against the US POW issue. Kenneth K. Hansen, in his work Heroes behind Barbed Wire, argued that the anti-Communist North Korean and Chinese POWs in US camps during the Korean War acted gallantly. They and their US allies triumphed, Hansen maintains, when the Communist calls for forcible repatriation failed. Kenneth K. Hansen, Heroes Behind Barbed Wire, (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc. 1957). 13While the Kinkead thesis underrated and even mocked the idea that the Chinese employed a scientific approach to altering the mental state of American POWs, the American public readily accepted the brainwashing interpretation.*? The publication of POW memoirs helped to counter Kinkead’s arguments, but the American mass media further enhanced the view of the POW as victim. The debate over “brainwashing” led to the creation of a number of highly specialized psychological studies that attempted to examine this controversial issue academically. Almost all of these works arrived at a similar conclusion, that American POWs did not readily convert to Communism, and additionally, that the behavior of the POWs under the excruciating circumstances was rather exceptional.** Almost Hal Vetter, in his book Mutiny on Koje Island, built upon Hansen's thesis by contending that the North Koreans and the Chinese commanders in North Korea directly organized various mutinies among the pro- Communist POWs in the camps, especially the riot on Koje-do island in May 1952. The implication of Vetter’s work is clear; though a few of the POWs were devote Communists most felt lukewarm towards Communist ideology in UN custody, and it took outside influence, outside support, and outside orders to create such a disturbance. Hal Vetter, Mutiny on Koje Island, (Rutland, Vermont: Charles £. Tuttle Company, 1965). * the prime example of the mass media’s contribution to public paranoia concerning brainwashing, of course, is the famous 1962 movie, The Manchurian Candidate. 3 see, for example, Raymond A. Bauer, “Brainwashing: Psychology or Demonology, The Journal of Social Issues, 13 (1957): 41-47; Albert D. Biderman, “Effects of Communist Indoctrination Attempts: Some Comments Based on an Air Force Prisoner-of-War Study,” Social Problems, 6 (Spring 1959): 304-310; Edgar H. Schein, “Reaction Patterns to Severe, Chronic aall scholars on the subject also concurred that “brainwashing” as a form of altering a POW's personality through the combined use of drugs, torture, hypnosis, and indoctrination, was unwarranted.*® They generally maintained, however, that the Chinese and North Koreans exerted extreme pressure on American prisoners in order to force them to participate in propaganda activities or divulge military information. With these studies the historical view of the American Korean War POW slowly transformed from that of an active collaborator to a victim of a brutal Communist internment system. Attack of the Academics As Robert C. Doyle pointed out, in his work Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, most of the public and a vast majority of scholars no longer accepted the Kinkead thesis. Citing the examples of William Lindsay White's work, The Captives of Korea: An Unofficial White Paper on the Stress in American Army Prisoners of War of the Chinese,” The Journal of Social Issues, 13 (1957): 21-30; ____, “Epilogue: Something New in History?” The Journal of Social Issues, 13 (1957): 56-60; Julius Segal, “Correlates of Collaboration and Resistance Behavior Among U.S. Army POWs in Korea,” The Journal of Social Issues, 13 (1957): 31-40. #5 For a detailed discussion of the phenomenon of “brainwashing” from a psychological perspective see Dick Lee Anthony, “Brainwashing and Totalitarian Influence: An Exploration of Admissibility Criteria for Testimony in Brainwashing Trials," (Ph.D. Diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1996). 15Treatment of Prisoners of War and Albert D. Biderman’s book March to Calumny: The Story of American POW's in the Korea War, Doyle demonstrated the mounting attack by academic authors against the Kinkead thesis. Doyle wrote, “Biderman and White attempt[ed] to refute Kinkead’s hypothesis that communist reeducation or brainwashing was more than minimally successful among American prisoners in North Korea. “76 Scholarship in the 1960s and the Vietnam War contributed to the victim interpretation of American Korean War POWs, and POW history in general. During the Vietnam War the mass media once again bombarded the American public with stories of excessive levels of brutality exerted against American POWs by their Vietnamese captors. The new POW/MIA debate led to a reinvigorated assault against Kinkead’s thesis and brought about a series of attacks against Communist treatment of POWs. For the first time, the American public and academics almost unanimously viewed Fa the American POW as a victim.?? The American public and % Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative, 31; Albert D. Biderman, March to Calumny: The Story of American POW’s in the Korean War, (New York: Arno Press, 1979); William Lindsay White, The Captives of Korea: An Unofficial White Paper on the Treatment of War Prisoners: Our Treatment of Theirs, Their Treatment of Ours, (New York: Charles Scribner Son, 1957). ” peter Karstan, in his article “The American Democratic Citizen Solider: Triumph or Disaster?” briefly sketched the history of POWs in the United States from the American Revolution to Korea, concluding that 16US Korean War POWs behaved in a comparable fashion with their older brethren. Peter Karsten, “The Anerican Democratic Citizen Soldier: 34-40. H. H. Wubben, in “American Prisoners of War: A Second Look at the ‘something New in History’ Theme” supported and expanded Karstan’s thesis. He argued that not only did American POWs act in accordance with their predecessors, but that the Chinese enployed a brutal policy of exploitation that proved difficult, if not impossible to resist. The idea that life in the camps was by any means easy, Wubben maintained, is simply false. H. H. Wubben, “American Prisoners of War in Korea: A Second Look at ‘Something New in History’ Theme,” American Quarterly, 22 (Spring 1970): 3-19. John A. Witherspoon, in his Ph.D. dissertation “International Law and Practice Concerning Prisoners of War During the Korean Conflict, (1950-1954)," specifically argued that the North Koreans and Chinese completely failed to carry out any of the stipulations of the 1949 Geneva agreements on POWs. John A. Witherspoon, “International Law and Practice Concerning Prisoners of War During the Korean Conflict, (1950- 1954)," (Ph.D. Diss., Duke University, 1968). Michael Walzer, in a 1969 article entitled “Prisoner of Wa: ‘Triumph or Disaster?” Military Affairs, 1 (Spring 1966! Does the Fight Continue after the Battle?” argued that no, the fight does not. Prisoners, he affirmed, should not limit themselves to the rules and regulations that assume their continued resistance to the enemy, but should attempt to make their lives as comfortable as possible. Michael Walzer, “Prisoners of War: Does the Fight Continue after the Battle?” The American Political Science Review, 63 (September 1969): 777-786. Amazingly enough, one letter to the Secretary of Defense suggested a similar course of action, proposing “that in the event any of our military personnel fall into communist hand{s], they be instructed to renounce the U.S. and to praise Russia and her satellites in their motives(!].” NARA, “From: William F. Knowland, U.S.S., to Sec/Defense,” File: OSA 383.6 Prisoners of War, RG: 335 (Secretary of the Army) Office of the Secretary of the Army, General Correspondence, July 1947-Dec. 1950. Box 101. Richard A. Falk's “International Law Aspects of Repatriation of Prisoners of War during Hostilities,” further enhanced the image of the POW as a victim arguing that governments should institute a system for the early exchange of POWs during the time of conflict. Richard A. Falk, “International Law Aspects of Repatriation of Prisoners of War during aaeven the American government so readily accepted the POW victim thesis that even Morris R. Wills, a former POW who refused repatriation during the Korean War, managed to publish his apologetic autobiographical story, Turncoat: An American’s 12 Years in Communist China, The Story of Morris R. Wills as Told to J. Robert Moskin without serious legal difficulty in 1966.7 The Vietnam War POW also created a new American sentiment that began to see little distinction between the enemy in the field and the bureaucratic “traitor” in Washington.”® In this view, the POW was both a victim of the enemy and the American government; the government ignored the fate of thousands of POWs while attempting to Hostilities,” American Journal of International Law, 67 (July 1973): 465-478. Howard S. Levie, in “International Law Aspects of Repatriation of Prisoners of War During Hostilities: A Reply,” expressed skepticism over the possibilities that Falk raised. While he praised Falk for his compassion concerning POWs, he did not see the proposed solutions as beneficial, Levie maintained that nations could employ established international legal regulations as the primary method of alleviating the suffering of POWs. Howard S. Levie, “International Law Aspects of Repatriation of Prisoners of War During Hostilities,” American Journal of International Law, 67 (October 1973): 693-710. * Morris R. Wills, Turncoat: An American’s 12 Years in Communist China, The Story of Morris R. Wills as Told to J. Robert Moskin, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966). %* For an excellent description of the issue of MIAs in United States culture during the Vietnam era see Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative, (Lawrence, Kansas: ‘The University of Kansas Press, 1994), Chapter 12, 263-280. 18bring about an end to the War.*? Though, the Vietnam POW/MIA issue falls outside of that of Korean one, the uproar that the Vietnam War generated over POWs and MIAs reinvigorated the Korean War issue and ultimately merged % The Vietnam War POW/MIA issue helped to generate a “mythology” about POWs and MIAs. As H. Bruce Franklin pointed out, in his work, M.I.A. of Mythmaking in Americé during the 1980s such as Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action (1983), Missing in Action 2: The Beginning (1985), Missing in Action IIT (1988) First Blood (1982), Rambo II (1985), and Rambo II (1988) contributed to the view that not only did POWs suffer at the hands of the enemy, but also from the incompetence of the American government. H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992), 140-149. Robert C. Doyle also pointed out in his work Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative, that these movies denoted an important trend in American popular culture concerning the POW/MIA issue. Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Intezpreting the American POW Narrative, 274-275. It is extremely interesting to note the difference between the Vietnam war films of the 1980s that glorified the suffering of POWs and the Manchurian Candidate (1959) that portrayed POWs as collaborators. Paul Budra, in his article “Rambo in the Garden: The POW Film as Pastoral,” viewed the evolution of POW films as a clear cultural marker of contemporary American public opinion during the 1980s. He wrote that “Films of the political right..do not condemn the American involvement in Vietnam, but they condemn American defeat; they do not portray American soldiers as tragically misplaced teenagers, but as heroes betrayed.” Paul Budra, “Rambo in the Garden: The POW Film as Pastoral,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 18 (1990): 188-189. See also Robert C. Doyle, “Unresolved Mysteries: The Myth of the Missing Warrior and the Government Deceit Theme in Popular Captivity Culture of the Vietnam War,” Journal of American Culture, 15 (Summer 1992): 1-18. US Congress, House. Hearings and Markup Before the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, POW/MIA’s: U.S. Policies and Procedures, 96" Congress, 1 Session, 1979-1980. the creation of Vietnam War movies 19with it.} Additionally, the uproar over government complicity in the Vietnam POW/MIA issue also spilt over to Korea. The Vietnam War also brought about the creation of organizations that actively sought to lobby the government to account for all POWs and MIAs. The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, formed in 1970, was one of the groups that publicized not only the plight of the individual POW or MIA, but subsequently lambasted US government policy for abandoning these personnel. The POW/MIA lobbies grew so powerful that even after the unsuccessful conclusion of the Vietnam War, they urged the US government to intensify investigations into its claims. The Carter administration, under pressure from these activist organizations, began to scrutinize charges that American POWs in South East Asia might still be alive and in Vietnamese hands.” Congress also debated how to find and locate MIAs, and explored the best means in which to force the Vietnamese government to provide information on any surviving Americans. Eventually, a series of negotiations materialized with the Vietnamese, but failed to produce any 3 US Congress, House. Hearings and Markup Before the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, POW/MIA’s: U.S. Policies and Procedures, 96" Congress, 1* Session, 1979-1980. 20results on a diplomatic level or in locating any live or dead POWs and MIAs. Even though the POW issue remained almost totally unresolved under the Carter administration the debate still continued. By the early 1980s, the US government continued to work with Vietnam to secure the human remains of American MIAs and sustained the quest to resolve any outstanding POW cases.*? This did little to ease the fears of POW/MIA activist organizations. Many of these groups instinctively saw the growing normalization of diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the US as damaging to efforts to locate POWs and MIAs. Throughout the 1980s the Regan administration and later the Bush administration attempted to bargain with the Vietnamese for new information concerning US POWs and MIAs, but nothing much came of these endeavors. POW and MIA organizations continued to express indignation that outstanding POW/MIA cases were not resolved. By the late 1980s and early 1990s the US government began to acknowledge officially the reports of thousands of MIA live sightings that it was receiving from Southeast Asia.** The National Alliance of Families suspected the US ® Ibid. % US Congress, Senate. Hearings Before the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, Analysis of Live Sightings, United States Senate, 102% 2.government of covering up this information for years, but now it appeared that new data might prove useful in untangling outstanding POW/MIA cases. The live sighting issue, though, frustrated both the POW/MIA organizations and the US government because not only was the intelligence data wholly unreliable but the “sighters” were suspicious characters at best. Eventually, the issue only reinforced the position among the activists that the US government was not working in good faith regarding the recovery of US POWs and MIAs. Some argued that the recently released reports of live sightings in Southeast Asia confirmed that the US government attempted to veil the fact that Vietnamese kept hundreds if not thousands of former US prisoners. This quickly brought the Korean War POW/MIA issue into the forefront: if the American government covered up the possibility that POWs and MIAs might be presently alive from the Vietnam era, why not from Korea also? One critical element was missing though, little information about US Congress, 2" Session, 4-5 August 1992. The POW-MIA Fact Book, a Department of Defense (00D) publication, declared that “Although we have thus far been unable to prove that Americans are still detained against their will, the information available to us precludes ruling out that possibility. Actions to investigate live-sighting reports receive and will continue to receive necessary priority and resources based on the assumption that at least some Americans are still held captive. Should any report prove true, we will take appropriate action to ensure the return of those involved.” The POW-MIA Fact Book, (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 1989), 23. 22Korean War POWs was forthcoming from the Chinese, North Koreans, and the Soviets at the start of the 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union changed this situation. If Vietnam turned the POW/MIA issue into a political football, the collapse of the Soviet Union transformed it into a national nightmare: it seemed that POW exploitation might have been more organized and systematic than once thought. The Mass Media and Soviet Complicity with American POWs The press readily exploited the issue of possible Soviet involvement with US POWs during the Korean War. New Russian documents, as well as recently declassified US material, proved circumstantially that the Soviet Union had employed a program of total POW exploitation during Korean War, and with US POWs during the entire Cold War era. With this new and sensational information, the US Senate predictably reopened the POW/MIA debate in 1992 including WWII, the Cold War, and Korea in its investigations. with large quantities of documents emanating from the former USSR, supposedly demonstrating Soviet complicity with American POWs and MIAs, some politicians blamed the Soviets for missing American military personnel from the entire Cold War. National hysteria over the issue helped Congress accept some outlandish conclusions, such as those of James °* US Congress, Senate. Hearings Before the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, Hearings on Cold War, Korea, WNII POWs, 102“ Congress, 2" Session, 10-11 November 1992. 23D. Sanders, Mark A. Sauter, and R. Cort Kirkwood, authors of Soldiers of Misfortune, who contended that the Soviets withheld some 25,000 US POWs following WWIT.** In June 1996 US governmental efforts to account for POWs in the Korean War again increased significantly.” The attacks against the North Koreans, Chinese, and Soviets for abusing and exploiting US POWs also intensified in almost parallel proportion.” POW and MIA activists further heightened the issue in the Hearing before the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the Committee on National Security in the House of Representatives on 17 September 1996. The hearing, entitled “Accounting for POW/MIAs from the Korean War and the Vietnam War”, heard sensational testimony from a number of former military personnel involved with POW/MIA issues. One Czech general, Jan Sejna, a defector who presented evidence that “At the beginning of the Korean War” that he helped plan and build a military “hospital” under orders “from Moscow . . . to experiment on American and South Korean POWs.”*? It was only a matter of time before 36 Tbid., 282. ¥ Us Congress, House. Hearings Before the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the Committee on National Security, Status of POW/MIA Negotiations with North Korea, 104" Congress, 2 Session, 20 June 1996. % Tbid., 1-6. % Us Congress, House. Hearing Before the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the Committee on National Security, Accounting for POW/MIA’s from the Korean War and Vietnam War, 104% Congress, 2% Session, 17 September 1996, 57. The opening statement of the hearing was 24the issue left the Congress and penetrated the conscience of the American public. In late September 1996, US News & World Report printed an article entitled, “Korea: An Old War’s Dark Secrets-Fresh Evidence of American POWs in Korea.” The authors wrote that the North Koreans retained American POWs after the cessation of hostilities, and recounted the testimony of General Sejna before Congress stressing the transportation of American POWs from Korea to the Eastern Bloc and the rumor that Czechoslovakian armed forces performed an array of medical “© Recently released documents of experiments on US POWs. Task Force Russia (TFR) gave this evidence more credibility. TFR, the Joint US-Russian organization at that time was in the process of attempting to determine the whereabouts of US POWs from WWII, Korean, Vietnam, and the Cold War, as well a predictable one. Congressman Robert K. Dornan (R) declared, “The Communist governments..with no military code, if they had one, could have been dissuaded from withholding American or allied fighting men. In fact, there was a continuous strategic objective in the Communist’s worldwide struggle against the allies of the free world. It was to sque captured Americans, especially those with technical knowledge, highly trained pilots and electronic ferret mission technicians. The Communists, in fact, were preparing for future heightened conflict while fighting all these lesser bloody struggles that we came to describe with the overreaching misnomer, the cold war.” US Congress, House. Accounting for POW/MIA‘s from the Korean War and Vietnam War, 3-4. Douglas Stanglin and Peter Cary, “Korea: An Old War's Dark Secrets-Fresh Evidence of American POWs in Korea,” US News & World Report, 121 (23 September 1996): 46-47. @ every ounce of intelligence information out of some unlucky 25as, to discover the exact nature of Soviet involvement with us Pows.‘? Approximately one week later, Time published an article entitled “Lost Prisoners of War: ‘Sold Down the River?’” The article centered on Colonel Philip J. Corso (rtd), who was intimately involved with the POW issue during the Korea War as a member of the Special Projects Branch of the Intelligence Division of the Far East and later with the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) and the Operations Coordinating Board (ocB).‘? For the first time Corso spoke out publicly about the US Korean War prisoners, accusing the Eisenhower administration of accepting an armistice with the Chinese and North Koreans while knowing that they and the Soviets still held American POWs.*? In 1996, for the first time evidence surfaced that seemed to suggest that the American government was involved in covering up the POW/MIA issue for the purpose of avoiding a major conflict with the Soviet Union and for bettering relations with all Communist nations. ‘TER was in operation from 1992 to 1996. @ the OCB replaced the PSB in 1953. William E. Daugherty, “psychological Warfare Organization and Personnel in the United States Since WWII,” in Propaganda and International Relations, (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1960): 32. Bruce W. Nelan, “Lost Prisoners of War: ‘Sold Down the River,” Time, 148 (30 September 1996): 45; US Congress, House. Accounting for POW/MIAS from the Korean War and Vietnam War, 8-10. 26‘The rightwing newspaper Insight on the News picked up the story and published a similar article in October of 1996 entitled “Soviets Used Our POWs for Nazi-Like Experiments.” The author R. Cort Kirkwood, in an interview with the authors of Soldiers of Misfortune: Washington’s Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union, (Kirkwood himself was a co-author of the work) stated that “POWs, especially potential live ones . . . are a thorn in the side of policy makers who ‘buried the issue.'’”"' After more than twenty years of accusing the American government of covering up the POW/MIA issue for “political considerations,” this new circumstantial evidence seemed to validate the worst fears of the POW/MIA activist organizations. By 1998 the activists further attacked the policies of the Clinton administration for not pressuring the North Koreans, Chinese, and the Russians on the POW/MIA issue. Ann Mills Griffiths, the principal administrator of the National League of Families, described Clinton’s foreign policy as marginalizing the POW/MIA issue in order to woo the Vietnamese.‘> Other reports circulated in late 1998 “CR, Cort Kirkwood, “Soviets Used Our POWs for Nazi-Like Experiments,” Insight on the News, 12 (21 October 1996): 8. “3 Us Congress, House. Hearing Before the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the Committee on National Security, POW/MIA Oversight, 105 Congress, 2" Session, 2 October 1998, 1-12. 21that added some legitimacy to these claims.‘ Donna Knox, President of the Coalition of Families of Korean and Cold War POW/MIA's had even harsher words for the Clinton administration. “The greatest slap in the face,” Knox declared, “was when Russia was having its trouble with Chechnya [1994-1995] and President Clinton actually did come out and voice concern and offer help for them with their Pow problem, and did not seize the window of opportunity to even mention our own.”*7 In another article published in Insight on the News, entitled “The Servicemen We Left Behind, argued that Clinton’s POW/MIA policy had everything to do with the present-day political climate, and nothing to do with the search for missing POWs and MIAs; the POW/MIA issue had become a secondary diplomatic tool of leverage for the administration and not a quest for the truth.** New Soviet evidence trickling out of that collapsed state reinvigorated the POW/MIA issue and it was not long until authors published monographs on the subject. “© In mid-December 1998 two South Korean POWs, who “were sisted as killed in action.“ returned to South Korea after 45 years in captivity in North Korea, These and other reports only added more hype to the American POW/MIA issue. “Korean Captives Free After 45 Years,” The Bergan Record, (16 December 1998): PA-13. “" US Congress, House. POW/MIA Oversight, 15. “* games P. Lucier, “The Servicemen We Left Behind,” Insight on the News, 14 (30 March 1998): 19-20, 33. 28Recent Studies of Soviet Complicity with American POWs The American public and the mass media readily accepted the contention that the Soviets covertly exploited US POWs and MIAs during the Korean War for technical information.‘ On a more general level, Korean War historians have embraced the concept that the Soviet Union covertly fought along side its North Korean and Chinese allies during the conflict. As Lester H. Bruce points out, in his article “Recent Scholarship and Findings about the Korean War,” it is common knowledge that “Joseph Stalin secretly sent nearly seventy thousand Soviet military personnel to help his Asian allies, and that Presidents Truman and Eisenhower found out but decided to keep the Soviet involvement secret.” What is not agreed upon is either the level or the nature of Soviet “ Scholars have also attacked the US government for abandoning POWs in Vietnam. See, James “Bo” Gritz, A Nation Betrayed, (Boulder City, NV: Lazarus Publishing Company, 1988); Craig Howes, Voices of the Vietnam POWs: Witness to Their Fight, (New York: Oxford University Pre: Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed its Own P.O.W.S in Vietnam, (Totonto, Canada: McLelland & Stewart Inc, 1990); Mark Sauter, The Men We Left Behind: Henry Kissinger, the Politics of Deceit and the Tragic Fate of POWs after the Vietnam War, (Washington, DC: National Press Book, 1993); Frank D, Simons, You Don’t Cry for Heroes, (Civil Fact Finding Commission for POWs/MIAs in Southeast Asia, 1989); Rodney Stich, Defrauding America: Encyclopedia of Secret Operations by the CIA, DEA, & Other Covert Agencies, 3 ed. (Alamo, CA: Diablo Western Press, Incorporated, 1998). ® Lester H. Bruce, “Recent Scholarship and Findings about the Korean War,” American Studies International, 36 (October 1996): 6. 1993); Monika Jensen-Stevenson, and William Stevenson, Kiss the 29complicity with US POWs or the overall level of Soviet participation in the conflict.** With the recent opening of Soviet archives and the cursory evidence unearthed by TFR, combined with the overall POW experience in America, authors began to argue that the Soviet Union perpetrated a large number of crimes against US PoWs. The Russian Federation vigorously denied allegations of exploiting US POW’s during the Korean War until 1992. In June of that year, the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, made a statement in which he declared “that the Soviets held 716 American serviceman for varying periods during World War II and interrogated 59 American POWs from the Korean War.”*? Whether this information is factual is under debate. It is possible that Yeltsin simply lied in response to Russian domestic and international political interests.°* The truth of the statement and the academic % mark O’Neill, in his doctoral dissertation, “The Other Side of the Yalu: Soviet Pilots in the Korean War, Phase One, 1 November 1950-12 April 1951,” analyzed Soviet military participation in the Korean War. ‘This “blank spot in history,” as O'Neill calls it, is an area that deserves further study. Mark Andrew O'Neill, “The Other Side of the Yalu: Soviet Pilots in the Korean War, Phase One, 1 November 1950-12 April 1951,” (Ph.D. Diss., Florida State University, 1996), 296-297. + “A Presumit Gesture,” Time, 139 (22 June 1992): 27. ‘3H. Bruce Franklin, in M.I.A. or Mythnaking in America, writes “Yeltsin had three goals. First, he wanted to turn the issue into a weapon to use against those forces in Russia hostile to his rule.Second, by presenting himself as the champion of the American people seeking to liberate POWs from the clutches of the evil Communists, he hoped to gain billions of U.S. dollars to support his rule. And third, recognizing 30debate that ensued did not stop more sensational authors from exploiting this new and almost totally unexamined information. Though the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the American POW/MIA activist organizations are separated by almost twenty years, their intermixing promoted a powerful movement to look toward Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States as the holder of POW/MIA secrets. These efforts yielded a number of works, both professional and amateur, which attacked the US government for “covering-up” the Soviet Union’s exploitation of American POWs since WWII. John M. G. Brown and Thomas V. Ashworth published one of the first works on the involvement of the Soviet Union with American, and other POWs, entitled, Moscow Bound: Policy, Politics, and the POW/MIA Dilemma, An Archival, Literary and Human Source Investigation into the Fate of American Prisoners of War.** The work dealt with the overall preoccupation of the Soviet Union with American that normal political and economic relations between the United States and Vietnam would wipe out what remained of Russian economic interests in Vietnam, he was firing a well-aimed salvo at the process of normalization.” H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in American: How and Why Belief in Live PONs has Possessed a Nation, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 187. 5 John M. G. Brown, and Thomas V. Ashworth, Moscow Bound: Policy Politics and the POW/MIA Dilemma, An Archival, Literary and Human Source Investigation into the Fate of American Prisoners of War, (Eureka, CA: Veteran Press, 1993). atPows, arguing that from the time of the 1917 Allied intervention in Bolshevik Russia until the end of the Cold War, the leaders of the Soviet Union systematically attempted to exploit and kidnap Americans. The work was highly polemical, as all future MIA/POW histories concerning the Soviet exploitation of American prisoners. Soldiers of Misfortune: Washington’s Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union, a work extremely similar to Moscow Bound, is another example of this type of inquiry. The three authors, James D. Sanders, Mark A. Sauter, and R. Cort Kirkwood, presented an outline of Cold War history based around the POW/MIA issue, concluding that the Soviets abducted large numbers of US POWs and MIAs from WWII until the final days of the Cold War. While aware of these occurrences, the US government disregarded them to avoid further conflicts and worsening relations with the Communist world.®* This thesis was identical to that which Corso presented to Congress and the American public in 1996. Nigel Cawthrone, a friend of the authors of Soldiers of Misfortune, published his own work, entitled The Iron Cage in 1993, which wrestled with the same issues, but froma British perspective.*® The work suggested that from the end % James D. Sanders, Mark A. Sauter, and Cort R. Kirkwood, Soldiers of Misfortune: Washington's Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union, (Washington, DC: National Press Books, 1992). % Nigel Cawthorne, The Iron Cage, (London: Fourth Estate, 1993). 32of WWII the Soviets methodically stole, kidnapped, and exploited British Pows.*” Last Seen Alive: The Search for Missing POWs from the Korean War, is the most important book in relationship to this dissertation because both cover many of the same issues. Written by Laurence Jclidon, the book presented a conspiratorial view of both Soviet exploitation of American POWs and the US government's complicity in this episode. Jolidon declared in the preface of his work, As some like U.S. Sen. Robert Smith of New Hampshire and the dedicated family members who comprise a devoted battalion of activists argue, it is time to give the question of MIAs from the Korean War and the Cold War a higher priority. In doing so, we should always remember that those who kept American prisoners from coming home [The Chinese, North Koreans and, the Soviets] bear the heaviest guilt for their absence and their families’ pain and grief.** Last Seen Alive, in line with other contemporary works on the Korean War POW question, took a definite moral tone. The search for the truth, as Jolidon described it, is in actuality a quest to determine the fate of individual POWs. 5’ gor example, Nigel Cawthrone argues that the UN command was aware that the Chinese and the North Koreans did not return 944 UN POWs. What Cawthrone fails to point out is that the United States quickly lowered the number of men on the list to approximately 470 in a few years time, and moreover these were rot verified POWs, but individuals who the UN command suspected as POWs. The number of known POWs held by the Communists after the conclusion cf the war was 15. Nigel Cawthorne, The Iron Cage, 226-233. 8 Laurence Jolidon, Last Seen Alive: The Search For Missing POWs from the Korean War, (Washington, OC: Ink-Slinger Press, 1995), xx. 33Objectivity was not the goal of the work, nor was it an attempt to evaluate the POW/MIA issue in relationship to the Soviet Union within the overall context of the Cold War. This is a common trend among vorks on Soviet exploitation of US POWs and MIAs. Additionally, Last Seen Alive possesses a number of problems that detract from its overall relevancy. First, the book largely reiterates the minutes and documents of TFR (without citing the vast majority of them), which are open to the public and easily accessible. The documents of TER are a friendly source of primary information and material, but they are fragmentary and many times argumentative. Furthermore, the work possesses almost no analytical foundation, aside from pleading for the continued search for MIAs and POWs from the Korean War—in the Soviet Union. Like other recent authors of the Soviet exploitation of POWs and MIAs during the Cold War period, Last Seen Alive’s value emanates from its ability to popularize the POW/MIA issue but not from its scholarly analysis. All these works addressed two specific issues: the question of the Soviet transportation of US POW and MIAs to the USSR during hostilities and the question of the US government's allegedly passive acceptance of Soviet kidnappings. The authors are correct that the Soviets did bring US POWs to the Soviet Union from WWII to the end of 34the Cold War, but the scale they suggest is simply too massive. Additionally, they are accurate that US policy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War was tempered by the POW/MIA situation. But they failed to correctly interpret how American and Soviet actions were affected by the POW issue and that both superpowers used POWs as propaganda pawns to wage the Cold War. Nore sophisticated works did develop the issue beyond pure sensationalism. Peter G. Tsouras, an official in the Department of Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Office (DPMO) arrived at a similar as argued in Soldiers of Misfortune and Last Seen Alive, in his report The Transfer of U.S. Korean POWs to the Soviet Union, though predicated on a much more complex analysis. Tsouras concentrated his efforts specifically on the question of the transportation of US POWs to the Soviet Union. He concluded that the Soviets did indeed transport American technical specialists to the territory of the USSR, especially those POWs with information about American aircraft technology. Paul M. Cole’s three volume work POW/MIA Issues was the only work published during the 1990s that attempted to examine the WWII, Korean War, and Cold War POW/MIA issues professionally. This multi-volume study presented the 35history of American Korean War prisoners in an orderly and objective fashion, which few books concerning the MIA/POW issue can claim. Cole argued that the Soviets utilized American Korean War POWs and MIAs from the 1940s through the Eisenhower administration for both technical and propaganda reasons. Unlike other Korean War POW/MIA authors, Cole contended that the Soviets did not transport massive amounts of US POWs during WWII to the USSR either during WWII or at any time during the Cold War, as suggested by other observers. During World War II and the Korean War a select few American POWs had value, Cole argued, but the Soviets did not engage in a sizeable or exhaustive effort to kidnap these individuals. What was more important to the Soviets, Cole explains, were the questions of nationality (especially during WWII), the level of technical expertise a POW might have, and, of course, the location of the POW (it is much easier to exploit POWs for information or propaganda value iff that POW was shot down over China or the Soviet Union). Furthermore, this is the first work to objectively address the issue of American Korean War prisoners as part of the superpower relationship. While Cole critiqued recent studies concerning the issue of Soviet involvement with US POWs, other works % Peter G. Tsouras, DAC and others, The Transfer of U.S. Korean War POWs to the Soviet Union: Working Papers, (Joint Research Support Branch, [JCSB] Research and Analysis Division, DPMO, August 1993). 36produced during the 1980s and 1990s also attacked the overall POW/MIA culture in America. H. Bruce Franklin’s work, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, thrashed the POW/MIA issue from a leftist perspective. He contended that the cultural phenomenon of the POW/MIA issue stemmed from political concerns of the Nixon administration and perpetrated itself through the Regan years due to both governmental support and rightist agitation in the Us. There are no live POWs in South East Asia, Franklin argued, but the issue saturated itself within American political cultural as such a dominant icon that it became almost impossible to question critically its proponents. Franklin's book, though almost excessively critical of POW/MIA activist organizations as being too “capitalistic,” and too “political,” represented one of the first serious academic attacks against the orthodox POW narrative. It would not be the only one. Susan Katz Keating, in her work Prisoners of Hope: Exploiting the POW/MIA Myth in America, took a softer line in her critique of the POW/MIA phenomenon than Franklin, but she also equally maintained that the POW/MIA issue was a political football utilized by politicians and non- governmental organizations to advance their own agendas. The work further demonstrated that the POW/MIA activist organizations took an increasingly militant tone towards 37both the Communist Cold War belligerents and the US government by the 1980s and 1990s. Keating echoed Franklin's conclusion, that there are no living pows.© Both Franklin and Keating concentrate their works upon the Vietnam POW/MIA issue, which is hardly surprising due to the high volume of attention that POW/MIA activist organizations devoted to that war. But the POW/MIA issue of Vietnam had a great impact on that of Korea. The two issues were inextricable linked.* Robert C. Doyle, in Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative presented one of the most objective works on POW history. The primary focus of the work was to compare the entire POW experience across the entirety of American history, to clarify the important connections between narrative literature and society and to show that the civilian and military captivity narrative is an important literary form, one that has chronicled part of the American experience for three hundred years.” Although the book does not center upon the Korean issue, he gave a concise historiographical summary of the POW/MIA © susan Katz Keating, Prisoners of Hope: Exploiting the POW/MIA Myth in Anerica, (New York: Random House, 1994). © Asc. A. MacDonald, in Korea: The War before Vietnam, made the intellectual and political connection between the two conflicts, a connection between the POW/MIA issue of the two conflicts also exists. C. A. MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam, (New York: The Press, 1987). © Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative, 1 38issue of the Korean War.©? Doyle, like Cole, is one of the few authors who gave an air of professionalism to POW histories. Although scholars commenced an attack on the solidification of POW/MIA myth in American culture, few modern popular works have reflected this trend. Sandy Strait, in her 1997 work, What Happened to American Prisoners of War in Korea, for example, gathered various personal accounts of Korean War POWs, in order to illustrate the brutality of the Chinese and North Korean captors. In one chapter, “‘Good and Honorable Men,’ Life After the War,” Strait paid particular attention to the various psychological problems and physical problems inflicted on American POWs by their jailers.* Again, the victimization theme manifested itself in this work. She even went as far to write in the preface of her work; “Very little editing was done because I wanted to keep each individual's voice, emotions, and expressions. No concessions have been made to political correctness; these men had thousands of reasons to speak ill of their captors. . . .”® The POWs, the author implies by this statement, have their turn to do “ill.” © bid. 30-32. “ sandy Strait, What Happened to American Prisoners of War in Korea, (Unionville, New York: Royal Fireworks Press, 1997). © sandy Strait, What Happened to American Prisoners of War in Korea, 8. 39Conclusion From 1953 until the present, the image of the American Korean War prisoner has gone through an extraordinary metamorphosis. When the first POWs returned home from their captivity, the US government and the American public viewed them as traitorous and weak. This view, however, slowly changed. By the early 1960s academics began to postulate that perhaps Korean War POW behavior was not as horrendous as originally thought. The Vietnam War solidified this contention. After the war in Vietnam, and the development of the American myth that POWs might still be alive in South East Asia, it appeared that the Communists were not the only nations criminally blameworthy for abusing US POWs in Vietnam, the US government was also negligent in failing to account for all POWs from Vietnam. The development of POW/MIA mythology in American popular culture combined with the fall of the Soviet Union had a chilling effect on Korean War POW/MIA scholarship. For the first time scholars had the ability to analyze the Korean War POW/MIA issue from the perspective of Soviet complicity. The flood of documents and data seemed initially to prove unequivocally that the Soviets, as well as their Communist Cold War allies, had exploited US POWs for technical information and strategic data. Deductive logic also seemed to suggest that since the Soviets 40exploited Axis POWs for this type of information during World War II (WWII), they must have also exploited US POWs during the Cold War. CHAPTER II: PRECEDENTS, SOVIET AND US EXPLOITATION OF WWII POWS, 1939-1955 Introduction As S. P. Mackenzie pointed out in his article, “The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II,” the Axis and Allied powers combined took about thirty-five million POWs, the largest amount of POWs ever captured before or since in a single conflict.' The number indicates the immeasurable problem the captors had caring, feeding, clothing, providing medical care, and giving all of the other basic amenities of life to these millions of soldiers. Most of the combatants quickly realized that it was wiser to employ POWs in various sectors of their economies. The Geneva Convention specifically stated that POWs should work to maintain their camps and their living areas. POWs, if nations properly employed them, did not represent a liability, and could provide a valuable source of labor for the war effort. 1s, PB. Mackenzie, “The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II,” The Journal of Modern History, 66 (September 1994): 487. anAdditionally, all of the belligerents discovered that POWs provided a more important weapon than a physical one, they provided psychological leverage over one’s enemies. The United States and the Soviet Union through their experiences with POWs in WWII learned a series of lessons that defined part of their post-war relationship; both discovered that POWs, if used effectively, constituted a means of waging propaganda campaigns. The WWII POW issue, in its own right, evolved into a major diplomatic controversy that turned into a protracted propaganda battle between the US and the USSR. Furthermore, the lessons that the two adolescent superpowers grasped in the immediate post-war period, they later reapplied with cunning and precision to Korean POW issue. In many ways the WWII POW experience was a dress rehearsal for Korea. Soviet Lessons Learned: Polish POW Exploitation Throughout WWII official Communist Party proclamations labeled the war as “patriotic."* While the Soviets considered the war as a patriotic struggle, Soviet leadership also viewed the conflict as a political fight, a means in which to advance their system of government. As 2 postanovienie sovnarkoma SSSR i TsK VKP (b) o sozdanii stavki glavnovo komandovaniya vooruzhenni'kh sil SSSR, 23 iunya 1941 g., Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri Tsk KPSS," in Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza v rezolutsiyakh i reshehiyax s'ezdov, konferentsii' i plenumov TsK, tom shestoi', 1941-1954, (Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury: Moskva, 1971), 12. 42such, the Soviets considered Axis and other POWs as one of the many vehicles by which to advance their political system. The POW system that Soviet leadership implemented centered upon two basic principles; first, that POWs represented a labor pool. Second, that POWs paradoxically denoted a threat to the Soviet State and a means to increase Soviet political clout. The Soviets would learn their first POW lesson with their captured Polish soldiers. on 5 September 1939, five days after the German attack on Poland, the Soviets cunningly assured the Polish ambassador to the USSR that they had no desire to enter the conflict.? Soviet political considerations changed rapidly. By 17 September 1939, the Soviets claimed that the war was now threatening their citizens.‘ Stalin, not wanting to miss out on the spoils of war, which Germany promised to him in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, commenced the Soviet 2 “zapis besedy narodnovo komissara inostrannykh del SSSR V. M. Molotova s poslom Pol'shi v SSSR V. Gzibovskim" 5 sentyabrya 1939 g. sekretno,” AVP RF, £. 001, op. 4, n. 24, d. 5, 1. 29, in Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, 1939 god. Vol. 12, Book 2, (Moskva: mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1992), 25. ‘ zapis besedy zamestitelya narodnovo komissara inostrannykh del SSSR V. P. Potemkina s posiom Pol'shi v SSSR V. Gzhibovskim, 17 sentyabrya 1939 g. sekretno.” AVP RE. F. O11, op. 4, n. 24d. 7, 1. 176- 179; “Nota Pravitel'stva SSSR, vruchennaya posly Pol'shi v SSSR v. Gzhibovskomy, 17 sentyabrya 1939 g.,” AVP RE, f. 059, op. 1, n. 313, d. 2185, 1. 49-51. Opubl. Izvestiya.-1939.-18 Sent., in Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, 94-95, 96; See also Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941-1945, (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1964), Chapter III, “The Partition of Poland,” 54-65. 43attack. As described by Molotov on 31 October, “the population {of Poland and the Baltics] greeted their liberation from the yoke of gentry with indescribable enthusiasm, and rapturously hailed this great new victory of the Soviet system.”* Unfortunately for the Soviets, one unanticipated, yet easily solvable problem developed, the Soviet forces captured large numbers of Polish POWs during their quick campaign. Stalin had all but decided the final fate of these POWs. External allied pressure may have been the only thing that kept any of these POWs alive. A number of nations in Eastern Europe accused the Soviets of lying about the number of Polish POWs held in the ussR. On 3 July 1941, in a response to the British government over charges made by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia that the Soviets possessed over 300,000 POWs, the Soviet ambassedor in England, I. M. Maiskii asserted that the Soviet Union “does not and never had three-hundred thousand Polish POWs, but only twenty-thousand Polish POWs . 5 See Geoffrey Roberts’ work The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War: Russo-German Relations and the Road to War, 1933- 1941, for a detailed political study of the this issue. Geoffrey Roberts, The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World Wa Russo-German Relations and the Road to War, 1933-1941, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 92-102. © Vv. M. Molotov, Molotov’s Report to the Supreme Soviet, 31 October 1939, (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 139), 11. 4."’ The real reason why the Soviets desired to cover up the number of POWs was twofold. First, the Soviet probably did not, as the British claimed, capture 300,000 soldiers (the vast majority were probably civilian interns), and second, the Soviets viewed these POWs as an inherent threat but a threat that they could handle with appropriate force. At the Katyan Forest Massacre alone, the Soviets, according to Robert Conquest, killed at least 4,143 POWs, and most likely this was not the only massacre.® Those who the Soviets merely arrested had a long internment to look 7 “1941 g., iulya 3, Moskva.—Telegramma NKID SSSR pos’ lu SSSR v Anglii I. M. Maiskomu o pozitsii Sovetskogo pravitel'stva v voprose 0 vosstanovlenii natsional'nykh gosudapstv Pol'shi, Chekhoslovakii i Yugoslavii i 0 soglasii Sovetskogo pravitel'stva zaklyuchit s pol'skim emigrantiskim pravitel'stvom soglashenie o vzaimopomoshchi,” in Dokumenty i materialy po istorii Sovetsko-Pol'skikh otnoshenii Vol. VII, 1939-1943 gg. (Moskva: Izdatel'stvo "Nauka," 1973"), 199. Robert Conquest, in The Great Terror, writes concerning the Katyan Forest Massacre: “Apart from the c. 440,000 Polish civilians sent to camp, in September 1939 the Russians took about 200,000 Polish prisoners of war. Most of the officers and several thousand soldiers were sent to camps in Staroblsk, Kozielsk and Ostachkov. In April 1940 there were about 15,000 of them their, including 8,700 officers. Only forty-eight were ever seen again: these had been removed from the camps and sent to Soviet prisons. ‘The missing group included 800 doctors and a dozen university professors.” Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, (London: The Macmillan Company, 1968), 482. " Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, 483. Robert Szymczak argues that the Soviets killed up to 15,000 Polish POWs in his doctoral dissertation, “The Unquiet Dead: The Katyn Forest Massacre as an Issue in American Diplomacy and Politics,” (Ph.D. Diss., Carnegie-Mellon University, 1980). 45forward to in the Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei (GULAG), with the amenities of forced labor and political indoctrination.° With the advance of Nazi armies in late 1941, Stalin apparently altered his perception of the value of the Polish POWs. On 22 June 1941, Polish officers interned in the Soviet Union, no doubt under duress, voiced their support for the Soviet state, and their commitment to fighting the Germans.'° In late December 1941, the Soviet Union began financially to support the exiled Communist Polish government in Moscow.'t Less then one month later, on 22 January 1942, the Soviet government provided the Polish Army with money to form combat units.'? But the new Polish Army within the boundaries of the USSR did not live a long life. This verbal support amounted to an attempt on the part of » See Slavomire Rawicz’s The Long Walk for a description of the GULAG by a captured Polish soldier. Slavomire Rawicz, The Long Walk, (New York: Lyons & Burford, Publishers, 1984), 62-93. to »1941 g. iyunya 22, Moskva.—Pis'mo gruppy ofitserov pol'skoi armii v Narodnyi komissariat gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR s pros'boi predostavit im vozmozhnoct prinyat uchastie v voine protiv fashistskoi Germanii,” in Dokumenty i materialy, po istorii Sovetsko- Pol'skik otnoshenii, 197. 1 “govetsko-Pol! skoe soglashenie o zaime pravitel’stvu Pol’ skoi respubliki dlya okazaniya pomoshchi pol’ skim grazhdanam,” in Vneshnyaya politika Sovetskogo Soyuza v period Otechestvennoi voiny: Dokumenty i materialy 2 vols. (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi Literatury, 1946), 193. 12 “sovetsko-Pol! skoe soglashenie o zaime pravitel’stvu Pol’ skoi respubliki na soderzhanie Pol’ skoi armii na territorii SSSR,” in Vneshnyaya politika Sovetskogo Soyuza v period Otechestvennoi voiny: Dokumenty i materialy 2 vols., 216. 46the Soviets to score a propaganda victory. The actual realty of the situation was far-removed from Soviet rhetoric. George Kennan, then a staff member assigned to the US Embassy in Moscow, wrote that the Soviet placed tremendous burdens in the path of the creation of a Polish Army on Soviet soil.’ The Soviets clearly had every reason to fear an actual Polish military presence on their territory. Kennan, wrote “such units as could be assembled were finally removed, by common agreement, from the Soviet Union.” By March 1942, the Polish forces finalized their evacuation agreements with the Soviets and by the next month the majority of 66,000 Polish soldiers remaining in the USSR departed.’® The Polish POW situation in the Soviet Union during WWII demonstrates the paradoxical stance of the USSR towards the treatment of its prisoners and the formation of an embryonic Soviet policy of using POWs for propaganda purposes. Soviet Lessons Learned: Axis POWs Scholars do not know the exact numbers of German and Axis POWs captured by the Soviets during WWII, but most 3 George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 201. Tbid., 202. 18 Michael Alfred Peszke, “A Synopsis of Polish-Allied Military Agreements during World War Two,” Military Affairs, 44 (October 1980): 131. aestimates run between two and three million Pows.** The Soviets claimed that at the end of the war they possessed approximately 2,500,000 Axis POWs.'’ The Soviets placed the vast majority of the Axis POWs under the jurisdiction of the Glavnoe Upravlenie (GUPVI) of the NKVD, “a close brother of the GULAG.”!® out of these POWs, Germans made up the majority, approximately 1,700,000, as reported by Stalin in May of 1945.'° It was easy for the Stalinist Russia to dispose of a few hundred thousand Polish POWs, but the sheer amount of German POWs taken proved a more daunting \ For a general discussion of the impact of WWII on the Soviet Union see, Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941-1945. For a Soviet rendition of WWII see, for example, P. A. Zhilin, Vtoraya Mirovaya Voina, kratkaya istoriya, (Moskva: Nauka, 1985). "7 “Dokument # 260, Iz zapisi besedy Predsedatelya Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov SSSR s lichnym predstavitelem prezidenta SShA i s poslom SShA v SSSR, 28 maya 1945 g.,” in Sovetsko-Amerikanskie otnosheniya vo vremya Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941-1945 ¢. 2. 1944-1945: Dokumenty i materialy v duykh tomakh, (Moskva: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1984): 409. Out of these two and a half million POWs, some sources claim that up to one million died in Soviet custody. S. P. Mackenzie, “The Shackling Crisis: A Case~Study in the Dynamics of Prisoner-of-War Diplomacy in the Second World War,” International History Review, 17 (February 1995): 78-98. “1. Vv. Bezborodova, “Inostrannye voennoplennye i internirovannye v SSSR: Iz istorii deyatel‘nost Upravleniya po delam voennoplennykh i internirovonnykh NKVD-MVD SSSR v poslevoennyi period (1945-1953 gg.},” Otechestvennaya Istoriya, (sentyabr/oktyabr 1997): 165. 4 “Dokument # 260, Iz zapisi besedy Predsedatelya Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov SSSR s lichnym predstavitelem Prezidenta SShA i s poslom SShA v SSSR, 28 maya 1945 g.,” in Sovetsko-Amerikanskie otnosheniya vo vremya Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941-1945 t. 2. 1944-1945: Dokumenty i materialy v dvukh tomakh: 403. 48challenge. Simply killing off large amounts of German and other Axis POWs was not a viable option in the mind of Stalin and the Soviet leadership. But the basic notion of the prisoners as active members of their nation’s armed services continued to exist, thus the Soviets viewed each prisoner as a threat and only a possible asset. Therefore, one of the primary goals of the Soviets was to co-opt the political convictions of the POWs and replace them with pro- Soviet beliefs. In general, the Soviets used POWs as slave labor only after the prisoners responded to a minimal level of political indoctrination. Soviet treatment of Axis POWs and their use of these PoWs for propaganda purposes directly related to their military situation. During the initial stages of the war, especially before the battle of Stalingrad, few German POWs experienced the hospitable environment envisioned by the Geneva Convention of 1929. But as the war progressed into 1943, and as the Soviets felt less offensive military pressure from the Germans, the Axis POWs endured fewer hardships. Moreover, by 1943 the Soviets greatly enhanced their indoctrination of prisoners, and launched a systematic program to exploit POWs for propaganda purposes. The Soviets coordinated their indoctrination campaign and their propaganda initiatives among the prisoners to have an effect 49‘on both the POW populations in the USSR, the domestic Soviet population, and on the military situation at the front. In January of 1942, for example, sixty-three German POWs signed a letter of protest to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva Switzerland “against the inhuman treatment of Soviet prisoners of war in Germany. "7° The German prisoners, who claimed that the Soviet authorities treated them with extreme kindness and compassion in the camps, presented a series of orders issued to them by Nazi authorities on the treatment of captured Red Army soldiers. German soldiers reported that it was Nazi policy not to take prisoners in order to conserve valuable supplies.” One German POW declared that all German soldiers received orders that “It is needed to shoot Commissars of the Red Army right on the spot, because you can't baby-sit them. Do not deal with wounded Russian prisoners they need to be killed on the spot Other captured Germans recounted events about how they carried out these orders in the field. 2 wprotest Nemetskikh voennoplennykh protiv zverskogo obrashcheniya Germanskikh vlastei 2 Sovetakimi voenncplennymi, mezhdynarodnomu komitetu krasnogo kresta, yanvar 1942 g.,” in Dokumenty obvinyayut: Sbornik dokumentov o chudovishchnykh zverstvakh Germanskikh vlastei na vremenno zakhvachennykh imi Sovetskikh territoriyakh, vypusk I. (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1943), 209-214. * Ibid., 209. 2 pid. 50Richard Gillig, a German POW, recalled how “under the orders" from his own officers he witnessed the illegal killing of Red Army soldiers.?? Hanz Zelov, reported how he saw nine Soviet POWs murdered by German troops.** Wolfgang Sharte recounted that seven days after the commencement of the war he saw Soviet POWs shot by German soldiers and that “After that they stabbed them in the ears with bayonets in order to make sure that they were dead. The German officers stood happy and laughing."*> These same German POWs reported that they were overjoyed by kind Soviet treatment. “We live here in the winter in heated quarters . . . ” these prisoners reported and “We are supplied with all necessities, and we regularly receive hot food . . . Regularly we are given pocket money established by the Soviet Government."** Furthermore, as the report stated, Our work day here is shorter than in German factories during the wartime. We receive medical care here..In the camp we have cultural institutions, and nobody expected such cultural life which we have here. They provided us with musical instruments, we also have a German library with almost all the German classics and a reading room. We watch movies, we have the opportunity to perform amateur shows, etc..’” ® Ipid., 212. % Tbid., 210. 2 pid. 6 rpid., 213. ™ pid. SLThe Soviets did not only use common soldiers as instruments of psychological warfare. Generals also made excellent propaganda weapons. Field Marshal Von Paulus, former commander of the German 6" Army at the battle of Stalingrad and legendary for being the first German Field Marshall ever to surrender, actively participated in Soviet propaganda initiatives as a member of the National Committee for a Free Germany.*® Other groups such as ANTIFA, and the “Association of German Officers,” regularly gave speeches, presentations and propaganda statements for the Soviets.” Officers in the National Committee for a Free Germany declared through radio broadcasts to German soldiers at the front such statements as: “The war is coming to anend. . . ” and that “Germany must be rescued before the collapse. You have been misled and mistreated.” The examples of Soviet exploitation of German POWs for propaganda purposes are almost limitless.** What is important, though, is the Helmut M. Fehling, One Great Prison: The Story behind Russia's Unreleased POWs, (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1951), 26. 2 NARA, “Facts and Figures used in Secretariat Briefings on Problems, AGF,” Committee Documentation of the Secretary of Defense's Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War, CPOW/D-9b (Incl. 12) 14 July 1955, 2, File: 383.6 (1 June 54) Sec. 2, RG 341: RHUSAF (Air Staff], Air Force-Plans Decimal File, 1942-1954. Box 441. % Fehling, One Great Prison: The Story behind Russia’s Unreleased POWs, 26. 3 See Frank Biess’ article, “‘Prisoners of a New Germany’: Returning POWs from the Soviet Union and the Making of East German Citizens, 1945-1950,” for a discussion of both POW experiences and how 52fact that the Soviets considered the employment of POWs in propaganda activities as important to their military and political objectives.*? Propaganda would not be the only employment the Soviets would find for the Axis POWs.” The Soviets used POWs for practical purposes, specifically to rebuild their war-torn country. The vast majority of Axis POWs simply represented common labor or slave-labor and not technical specialists.** In one talk political indoctrination affected the development of the East Gernan state. Frank Biess, “‘Prisoners of a New Germany’: Returning POWs from the Soviet Union and the Making of East German Citizens, 1945-1950," Central European History, 32 (1999): 143-80. % For an example of Soviet usage of their own POWs as propaganda weapons see, Dokument obvinyayut: Sbornik dokumentov 0 chudovishchaykh prestunleniyakh Nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikivni Sovetskoi territorii, vypusk II, (OGI2-Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoi literatury, 1945); Filial Instituta Marksizma-Leninizma pri Tsk KPSS, My obvinyaem, (Riga: Izdatel’stvo “Liesma”, 1967), 161-183. The Soviets officially condemned Nazi and Japanese atrocities against Soviets POWs after WWII at Nuremberg. See “Materialy sudebnykh protsessov: Glavnykh Nemetskikh voennykh prestupnikev v Nyurnberge i glavnykh Yaponskih voennykh prestupnikov v Tokio (fevral-oktyabr), Istyazaniya i ubiistva voennoplennykh,” in Vneshnyaya politika Sovetskogo Soyuza, 1946 god: Dokumenty i materialy, yanvar-dekabr 1946 goda, (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1952), 677-680. % the United States, as well, attempted to “reeducate” former Nazi soldiers. For a description of these attempts see Arthur Lee Smith, The War for the German Mind: Re-educating Hitler’s Soldiers, (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996). 1, V. Bezborodova, “Inostrannye voennoplennye i internirovannye v SSSR,” 166. % Many US officials claimed that after the war, the Soviets retained as many technical specialists as possible. General Lucius Clay wrote that “In the summer of 1946 we learned that discharged prisoners of war from the west, returning to their homes in east Germany, were 53with the American ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell w. Harriman (ambassador from 1943-1946), Stalin made a number casual of remarks about the use of Axis POWs. During a 28 May 1945 conversation between the two Stalin said that German POWs “worked only average, not very bad and not very good . . . “ even though the Soviets always maintained that they did not use as slave labor.** The Soviets actively attempted to locate and separate prisoners with technical and/or scientific skills from the general POW population. These are patterns, which they, along with their North Korean and Chinese allies, duplicated during the Korean War. But the Axis POWs, though, were not the only POWs to educate the Soviets during WWII. The Great POW Swap of WWII During the last years of WWII, the United States and the Soviet Union encountered significant logistical and political problems concerning the return of their being screened and that officers and skilled specialists were being detained.” Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1950), 139. 36 “Dokument # 260, Iz zapisi besedy Predsedatelya Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov SSSR s Lichnym Predstavitelem Prezidenta SShA i s poslom SShA v SSSR, 28 maya 1945 g.,” in Sovetsko-Amerikanskie otnosheniya vo vrenya Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941-1945, tom. 2 1944-1945: Dokumenty i materialy v dvukh tomakh, 409. 54‘’ During late 1944 and the respectively liberated POWs.” first half of 1945, the Soviet Union and the US liberated hundreds of thousands of POWs from the Nazis. The logistics of returning the former prisoners to their native countries were colossal. Predictably, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed differing opinions as to the best method to repatriate these former prisoners. Solving these problems required a great deal of patience and understanding on the part of the policy makers and people charged with implementing the actual transfers.”* The forced repatriation of Soviet POWs and citizens was one issue that both nations agreed upon. However, US officials experienced regret over having to transport anti- Soviet Russian citizens, who fought with the German armed forces, to the Soviet Union.*? Some POWs had the ” For a detailed and objective discussion of the US-Soviet WHIT POW issue see Paul M. Cole, Chapter One “World War II,” POW/MIA Issues: Volume 2, World War II and the Barly Cold War, 1-31. * See Patricia Louise Wadley’s work, “Even One is Too Many: An Examination of the Soviet Refusal to Repatriate Liberated American World War II Prisoners of War,” for an in-depth discussion of the issue of POW repatriation between the Soviet Union and the United States during WWII. Patricia Louise Wadley, “Even One is Too Many: An Examination of the Soviet Refusal to Repatriate Liberated American World War II Prisoners of War,” (Ph.D. Diss., Texas Christian University, 1993). % For a heartfelt account of the WWII issue of forced repatriation of POWs to the Soviet Union see Nicholas V. Feodoroff (ed.), Forced Repatriation: The Tragedy of the “Civilized” World, (Commack, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 1997); and Mark R. Elliott, 55unfortunate luck of possessing duel citizenship with the USSR and states from Eastern Europe, or having been forcibly conscripted by the Nazis. Either way, the Soviets wanted them returned to their control after the end of the war. Forced repatriation did just not seem right to FDR (it was a policy that Truman considered a mistake and would not repeat during the Korean War), but nonetheless, the US forcibly repatriated POWs who did not wish to return to Soviet control.‘ Pawns of Yalta: Soviet Refugees and America’s Role in Their Repatriation, (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982). “© Regardless of many accusations, the Soviets did not intern some 23,500 American troops as Soldiers of Misfortune and others claim. The authors wrote that “the United States and Britain cheated on the hostage exchange [during WWII], retaining many anti-Communist Ukrainians and Byelorussians to help fight the rapidly developing Cold war. Stalin learned of the deceit, and, in return, kept up to 23,500 Americans and 31,000 British and Commonwealth Soldiers.” James D. Sanders, Mark A. Sauter, and R. Cort Kirkwood, Soldiers of Misfortune: Washington's Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union, 15. The Soviets did fail to return all American and Allied POWs, but the vast majority of the cases, which numbered approximately 200, have explanations t.” Furthermore, the Soviet Union did intern a number of American Army Air Corps personnel during the course of WWII. See, Lieut, Col. Robert G. Emmens, Guests of the Kremlin, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949), for a detailed account of one such crew. Paul M. Cole wrote, “During the American War against Japan, dozens of American aircraft made forced landings in Soviet territory after being damaged by Japanese air defenses. Many of the crew members perished in the crash landings. Others survived and were repatriated during the war in an elaborate operation that involved the Soviet Foreign Ministry and cooperation with the NKVD. This operation was a closely held secret, in part because the Soviet Union, which was not a belligerent at the time in the war against Japan, was obligated as a neutral to hold the outside of Cold War “dece: 56During the opening stages of WWII the United States and the Soviet Union cooperated cordially on issues concerning POWs. The Soviets graciously, as a neutral power in the war against Japan, transported food, supplies, fool parcels, mail, and other amenities to American POWs in the Pacific Theater." In late 1944, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain began to establish the diplomatic protocols for POW repatriation and attempted to formulate a unified POW policy. In October 1944 the Allies drafted a warning to the Nazis that they would consider German retaliation against allied POWs as a serious offense.‘? Though the Americans as detainees.” Paul M. Cole, POW/MIA Issues, Volume 2, World War IT and the Early Cold War, 12. “the United States, through Soviet mediation, attempted to come to an agreement with the Japanese concerning the delivery of supplies and mail to Allied POWs in early January 1944. Almost a year later, with the help of the Soviets, the United States and Japan reached a basic agreement on the shipment of supplies through territory of the USSR for Allied POWs. In a letter to the Soviet Ambassador in the United States, the Secretary of State wrote that; “This question is close to the hearts of a large number of the American people. The Soviet Government may be assured of their deep gratitude for its continued cooperation in making possible further shipments to the Far East of relief supplies so desperately needed by Allied nationals in Japanese custody.” “The Secretary of State to the Ambassador of the Soviet Union (Gromyko), Washington, January 4, 1945,” Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) 1944, Volume IV: Europe, (Washington, DC: USGPO: 1966), 1198. See FRUS 1944, Volume IV: Europe, 1159-1198 for the complete documented history of this event. ® the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington, 22 December 1944,” FRUS 1945, Volume III: Diplomatic Papers, (Washington: USGPO, 1968), 697. 87warning was not sent until 23 April 1945, it demonstrated that the three governments could jointly cooperate with one another on the POW issue.*? By April 1945 the Americans and British agreed to the “Steadfast Accord” that promised the Germans that the Allies would not reassign liberated POWs to the European theater of operations in exchange for German promises not to relocate POW camps to avoid Allied liberation.‘‘ Though official Soviet acceptance of the policy was not forthcoming, they did gave it their tacit support. ** On 8 February 1945, the Allied governments and the Soviets concluded a basic agreement at the Yalta Conference under the Argonaut meetings that solidified the rules of allied prisoner repatriation. The agreement attempted to clarify the status of liberated POWs and plan their repatriation. The agreement seemingly settled the issue, but the Soviets, due to both bureaucratic and logistical ‘© press Release Issued by the White House, April 23, 1945,” FRUS 1945, Volume III: Diplomatic Papers, 709. Part of the text stated, “Any person guilty of maltreating or allowing any Allied prisoners of war, internees or deported citizens to be maltreated, whether in battle zone, on lines of communication, in a camp, hospital, prison or elsewhere, will be ruthlessly pursued and brought to punishment.” FRUS 1945, Volume III: Diplomatic Papers, 709. “ acceptance of German Proposal that Prisoners of War be Left in camps as Allies Advance, Provided Allies Agreed not to Return Prisoners to Active Duty,” FRUS, 1945 Volume III: European Advisory Commission; Austria; Germany, (Washington: USGPO, 1968), 710-717. “ qbid., 710-717. 38difficulties, found quick and efficient POW repatriation difficult to implement. The Soviets, however, returned the vast amount of Allied POWs it liberated and attempted to live up to the ideals of the accord.** But by the conclusion of WWII, the problems surpassed what seemed to be a straightforward repatriation process. Liberation was the first problem. On numerous occasions the United States government questioned the Soviets about emancipated American POWs under Soviet military control.*’ Official Soviet documents invariably gave a story of complete cooperation. On 3 March 1945, Harriman sent the Soviet Foreign Minister, V. I. Molotov a letter asking about the conditions and the possible “© article 2 of the “Agreement Relating to Prisoners of War and Civilians Liberated by the Soviet Armies and U.S. (British) Armies” stated that “Soviet and U.S. (British) repatriation representatives will have the right of immediate access into the camps and points of concentration where their citizens (or subjects) are located..”, Article 7 declared that “The handing over of these liberated citizens (and subjects) shall in no way be delayed or impeded by the requirements of and that “Hostile propaganda directed against the contracting partners or against any of the United Nations will not be permitted.” The Dwight D. Eisenhower Library (DDEL), Office, U.S. Secretary of the Combined Joint Chiefs. Argonaut Conference, January-February 1945: Papers and Minutes of Meetings Argonaut Conference, 3 Vols., 177-179, File: Combined Chiefs of Staff: Conference Proceedings, 1941-45, Octoagon, Argonaut, Terminal. Box 3. “’ patricia Louise Wadley, in her Ph.D. dissertation, “Even One is their temporary employment. ‘Too Many,” recounted these events, arguing that the Soviets did not cooperate to the best of their ability with the Roosevelt administration in locating and returning US POWs throughout March 1945. Patricia Louise Wadley, “Even One is Too Many,” 174-175. 59repatriation of American POWs liberated by the advancing Red Army.“* Harriman claimed that he “received reliable information that approximately 3,000 of our former prisoners of war remain in Poland.” He petitioned the Soviets to allow American military representatives to enter Poland and ensure the safe repatriation of these American POWs. On 4 March 1945, the issue reached a higher political level. FDR sent Stalin a letter stating that American intelligence reports had alerted him to the possibility that the Soviets had liberated a number of American POWs from German internment camps in Poland and Eastern Europe.** Stalin responded to FDR’s inquiry the next day and informed him that his intelligence was indeed correct, and that the “* NARA, “To: Molotov, From Harriman, 3 March 1945,” TER 1-1, File: Joint Task Force (POW/MIA), TER 1-2, RG 330: Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (ROSD), Task Force Russia/Joint Commission Support Branch (TER/JCSB), Reports and Verbatim Translations Prepared for the U.S.—Russian Joint Commission (USRJC) on ?0W/MIAS. Box 6. Harriman was extremely frustrated over the seemingly lack of cooperation fon the POW issue on the part of the Soviets. Cathal J. Nolan, Notable U.S. Ambassadors Since 1775: A Biographical Dictionary, (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1997), 139. “NARA, “To: Molotov, From Harriman, 3 March 1945,” TER 1-1, File: Joint Task Force (POW/MIA), TFR 1-2, RG 330: ROSD, TFR/JCSB. Box 6. % Ipid., TER 1-2, 1-2. * “pokument # 276, Lichno i sekretno diya Marshala Stalina ot Prezidenta Ruzvel'ta, polucheno 4 Marta 1945 goda,” in SSSR, Perepiska: Predsedatelya Soveta Ministrov SSSR s Prezidentami SShA i Prem'erministrami Velikobritanii vo vremya Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1945-1945 gg. (Moskva: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1989): 205. 60Soviets had already relocated the majority of liberated American POWs to the main Soviet repatriation center in Odessa.** Ambassador Harriman questioned the legitimacy of the Soviets claims, stating on 8 March 1945 in a telegram to FDR that “there appear to be hundreds of our prisoners wandering about Poland trying to locate American contact officers for protection. I am told that our men don’t like the idea of getting into a Russian camp.” Harriman further lambasted the Soviets for disregarding previous agreements on providing adequate housing, clothing, food, and general care to liberated POWs, as stipulated at the Yalta Conference. Accordingly, the Roosevelt administration repeatedly requested permission from the Soviet government to send American representatives to Poland in order to assess the status of liberated American POWs.*! By March the Soviets only allowed one US team into Poland.** “Dokument # 277, Lichno i sekretno ot Prem‘era I. V. Stalina Prezidenty g-ny F. Ruzvel'ty, 5 marta 1945 goda,” in Perepiska: predsedatelya Soveta Minidtrov SSSR s prezidentami SShA i prem‘erministram{ Velikobritanii vo vremya Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1945-1945 gg., 206. “The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Harriman) to President Roosevelt, Moscow 8 March 1945,” FRUS 1945, Volume V: Europe, 1074-1075. “ task Force Russia reported that, “Although legitimate U.S. representatives were denied access to combat zones rear areas in Poland and, later, Germany by the Soviet: done in order to disguise any mass abductions of U.S. POWs. Rather, the Soviets did not want outsiders to witness their activities in the newly we find no evidence that this was 61At the same time, the Soviets and the Americans debated the most effective means by which to repatriate liberated Pos. The Roosevelt administration accused the Soviets of deception and failure to respect the Yalta agreements, while the Soviets attacked the United States for not returning liberated Soviet POWs and Soviet citizens captured in German 36 uniform.** The issue had degenerated into political ‘Liberated’ regions, where they were quickly and ruthlessly installing puppet governments. Judged against the way Red Army soldiers were treated by their own authorities, the handling of U.S. POWs does not appear to have been intentionally hostile. While, as stated in earlier TER reports, the confusion at the close of the war was so great that some gray-area cases may never be resolved, we have found as yet no evidence of a conspiracy to hide large numbers of U.S. POWs in the GULAG as has been asserted in various books and articles. Authors who suggest otherwise have yet to offer documented evidence to support their claims. Even the sincerest seem to have no understanding of the ‘fog of war’ and the difficulty of military administration even in peacetime.” NARA, “Report to the U.S. Delegation, USRIC on POW/MIAs, 9 October 1992,” 3, File: Report to the U.S. Delegation, USRJC on POW/MIAs, 9 October 1992, RG 330: ROSD, TFR/JCSB. Box 1. %* “the Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Harriman) to President Roosevelt, Moscow 12 March 1945,” “The Ambassador to the Soviet Union (Harriman) to the Secretary of State, Moscow, March 14, 1945,” FRUS 1945, Volume V; Europe, 1077-1081. % See, “President Roosevelt to the Chairman of the Council of People’s Conmissars of the Soviet Union (Stalin) 17 March 1945,” “The Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union (Stalin) to President Roosevelt, March 22, 1945,” “The Acting Secretary of State to the Anbassador of the Soviet Union (Gromyko), Washington, March 23, 1945,” “The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Harriman) to President Roosevelt, Moscow 24 March 1945,” and “The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Harriman) to the Secretary of State, Moscow, April 2, 1945,” FRUS 1945, Volume V: Europe, 1082-1088. 62,mudslinging.*” But by the end of March the Red Army began to collect the “wandering” American POWs in Poland and commenced with extraditing them to the main repatriation center in Odessa and the US government slowly dropped the issue of non-forced repatriation.** It appeared that the controversy of the POW issue was calming down.** Andrei Vishinsky, one of Molotov's representatives and later the Soviet Foreign Minister during the Korean War, replied to the US ambassador on 16 August 1945 that the 57 games D. Sanders, Mark A. Sauter, and R. Cort Kirkwood, in Soldiers of Misfortune, saw the issue of US POWs in Poland in a much different light. “The United States had declared defeat in its attempt to recover all U.S. POWs from Poland.” they wrote, “FDR, the commander in chief, had been asked to authorize pressure to force the Soviets to comply with the Yalta [Agreement]. But the president's response confirmed what Stalin most likely already knew from his White House spies, that Roosevelt was too tired, too sick and too pro-Soviet to force the issue.” James D. Sanders, Mark A. Sauter, and R. Cort Kirkwood, Soldiers of Misfortune, 59. “NARA, “The Secretariat of Comrade I. V. Stalin, To: Comrade A. N. Poskrebvshev, 24 March 1945,” TFR 1-22, TER 1-24 to 1-25, File: Joint TER (POW/MIA) Translations, 17 July 1992, RG: 330 ROSD, TFR/JCSB. Box 1. According to Edwin Bacon's work The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives, out of the 2,775,700 (Bacon's number of POWs) repatriated Soviet POWs only a fraction actually entered the Gulag. Edwin Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives, (Washington Square, New York: New York University Press, 1994), 93-94. % the Soviets and Americans also cooperated jointly on the issue of liberated US POWs held by the Japanese. “Dokument # 308, Pis'mo posla SShA v SSSR narodnomu komissaru inostrannykh del SSSR, 24 avgusta 1945 g.,” in Sovetsko-Amerikanskie otnosheniya vo vrenya Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941-1945 tom 2 1944-1945: Dokumenty i materialy, tom vtoroi, 492. 63Soviets would return all US POWs to the US government.® As of 1 March 1946, the Soviet Union repatriated a total of 22,487 former US POWs.*' The controversy that surrounded the WII POW issue and the possibility that the Soviets forcibly interned thousands of US POWs is simply false, as Cole points out in POW/MIA Issues.* The Soviets lagged “Dokument # 310, Pis'mo zamestitelya narodnogo komissara inostrannykh del SSSR poslu SShA v SSSR, 26 avgusta 1945 g.,” in Sovetsko-Amerikanskie otnosheniya vo vremya Velikoi Otecht voiny, 1941-1945 t. 2 1944-1945: Dokumenty i materialy, tom vtoroi, 493. © NARA, “Number of Liberated, Inventoried and Repatriated Allied and Foreign POWs and Interned Citizens, as of 3/1/46,” TFR 1-29b, File: Joint Task Force Russia (POW/MIA) Translations 17 July 1992, RG: ROSD, TFR/JCSB. Box 1. The numbers of captured and repatriated American POWS that the Soviets processed during WWII is not clear. Omitrii A. Volkegonov informed President Boris Yeltisn in August of 1992 that, the Soviets had liberated “over 23,00 US citizens” during WWII. The Library of Congress, (LOC) “To: Prezidentu Rossii, Yel’tsin B. N., From: D. Volkogokov,” Dmitrii A. Volkogonov Papers, Shelf no. Mss. 21, 595, Reel 7, Polder: Personal Papers, Correspondence File, Yeltsin Boris Nikolyevich, April 1991-Feb 1993. @ paul M. Cole wrote, “Charges have been made in Senate Select Committee hearings and elsewhere that more than 23,000 American POWs liberated from Nazi German POW camps by the Soviet forces were transported to USSR territory and never repatriated. These accusations are without merit.” Paul M. Cole, POW/MIA Issues Volume 2, World War IT and the Barly Cold War, 28. Paul M. Cole only cites Soldiers of evennoi Misfortune as the propagator of this rumor, however, other more academic works have argued a similar thesis. Patricia Louise Wadley, in her Ph.D. dissertation, “Even One is Too Many,” stated, “There was no way to force the Soviets to repatriate the POWs unless they desired to do so, in fact any public pressure would have proved detrimental to the POWs. Millions of Soviet citizens had disappeared into the Soviet GULAG, and twenty thousand U.S. POWs could disappear there without a trace.It is probable that the U.S. Government thought that diplomacy might work to bring the POHs home. For whatever reason a cover-up began and has continued to the 64behind in their repatriation commitments due to logistical problems. Is it possible that the Soviets withheld POWs with special skills and technical knowledge? Of course, but the US government accounted for the vast majority of POWs that the Soviets liberated. Moreover, the US and the USSR had their first taste over the POW issue as a political weapon. The start of the Cold War would give them another one. The German POW Issue The American government created a de facto policy of exploiting POWs for propaganda purposes after WWII that it subsequently reapplied to the POW situation in Korea.® The present time.” Patricia Louise Wadley, “Even One is Too Many,” 115. Although the Soviets did return the vast majority of US WHII POWs, some did remain in the Soviet Union. Repatriated Axis POWs during the late 1940s to mid-1950s told countless tales of a vast number of Anerican military personnel in the GULAG. For example, one informer, an Austrian previously interned in the Soviet Union, claimed in 1954 that he was a prison mate with Colonel Paul Cerny, but the Anerican Enbassy officials questioning him were not too sure how to react his assertions. As they stated: “Even more dubious were his allegations (Cerny’s] that it was he who knew where the Lindbergh baby had been hidden, as well as the story that he had played a leading role in rounding up John Dillinger, America’s ‘Public Enemy #1’, in the early ‘thirties. On one occasion, source could not help asking CERNY why he told such highly incredible stories, whereupon CERNY replied: ‘Just for the hell of it.'” NARA, “From: Vienna Embassy to: The Department of State, Washington, April 28, 1954," RG 59: The Department of State, U.S. State Department Confidential Files, The Soviet Union, Foreign Affairs, 1950-1954. © For an account of US efforts to wage propaganda inside West Germany from 1945 to 1951 see Albert Norman, Our German Policy: Propaganda and Culture, (New York: Vantage Press, 1951); For an account 65US resorted to propaganda exploitation of POWs after the end of the conflict to wage the Cold War, and specifically to attempt to rally German and Japanese public opinion against the Soviet Union. The German and Japanese governments considered this issue among the most serious that they faced and the US considered the strategic need to galvanize German and Japanese public opinion against the Communists as crucial.“ The POW issue was not simply one for exploitation, but also one in which the US attempted to ‘of the overall propaganda battle in Germany from 1950 to 1955 see, Valur Ingimundarson, “East Germany, West Germany, and U.S. Cold War Strategy, 1950-1954," (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1993). Robert G. Moeller in his article "War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany,” writes that, “the British and Americans were taken to task for viewing German losses through the distorted lens of theories of ‘collective guilt.’ To be sure, in the early 1950s, descriptions of German suffering were more likely to portray the losses inflicted on Germans by the Red Army than cities destroyed by U.S. and British bomber pilots; it is not surprising that in the context of the Cold War, attacking the Soviet Union-past and present-was far easier than recounting the sins of former enemies who Were now allies.” Robert G. Moeller, “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany,” The American Historical Review, 101 (October 1996): 1019. See also, Atina Grossmann, “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Soviet Occupation Soldiers,” in, Women and War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted with or without Consent, (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999): 162-183. John Lewis Gaddis, in his most recent work on the Cold War We Now Know, argues that the “semi-sanctioned mass rapes” of German women by the Soviet Army after the end of WWII led to anti-Soviet sentiment and “dramatized differences between Soviet authoritarianism and American democracy in ways that could hardly haven been more direct.” John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 286-287. 66demonstrate its moral superiority over the Soviet Union. The United States and the West truly believed that the Soviets represented a threat tha: needed to be combated with every possible weapon. on 23 April 1947, in Moscow the Western Allies and the Soviet Union reached a basic agreement concerning the repatriation of Axis POWs. This “Foreign Minister’s Agreement” called for the total repatriation of Axis POWs from all countries aligned against the Nazis and Japanese during WWII by the end 1948, The agreement sympathetically assumed that the sheer bulk Axis POWs and investigations into war crimes of the prisoners would make quick and effective transportation impossidle.® But, in late January 1949, the Soviets still held an “unspecified number of German prisoners of war . . .” according to the US embassy in Moscow. Tass, contrary to the claims of the US embassy, reported that German POW repatriations were going “ By this time the United States had already begun its project “operation Winger,” the interrogation of German and Japanese POWs about the Soviet Union. Laurence Jolidon wrote, in Last Seen Alive, “Each returnee had been asked a long set of questions whether they had encountered Americans while in a Siberian prison.” Laurence Jolidon, Last Seen Alive, 92. “ United Nations, General Assembly Official Records, Agenda item 67, Annexes Fifth Session, New York 1950, 3. © NARA, “No 120, 14 July 1950,” 2, File: 321.4 1950 PW’s German, RG 84: Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State (FSPDS), Moscow Embassy Confidential File, 1950-54. Box 146. 61“according to plan.” Cognizant of the German public's skepticism on this issue the Americans attempted to use it to influence the domestic political situation in German. The Soviets not only lagged behind cn their repatriation commitments, but it seemed to some observers in the West that the Soviets were still holding a large number of POWs, possibly indefinitely. Repatriated German POWs told horror stories of political indoctrination, forced labor, and worst of all, the fact that the Soviets possibly still held hundreds of thousands of ex-Nazi prisoners.® The Paris Herald Tribune reported on 18 January 1950 that the West German government claimed that the Soviets were “secretly retaining a slave-labor pool of 400,000 German war prisoners.” Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949) privately reaffirmed both the validity of the accusation and the number of German POWs “ soobshchenie TASS, in Vneshnyaya politika Sovetskogo Soyuza, 1949 god: Dokumenty i materialy, yanvar-dekabr 1949 goda, (Gosudarstvennce izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1953), 37-38. © The arrival of former German POWs also made a lasting impact on much of the German population. Werner Knop, in his 1949 work Prowling Russia's Forbidden Zone: A Secret Journey into Soviet Germany, wrote that “I watched the arrival of two thousand men and thirty women—ten thousand years of captivity in Siberia behind them, and upon their faces ten times as many years of wretchedness.” Werner Knop, Prowling Russia’s Forbidden Zone: A Secret Journey into Soviet Germany, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), 153. 79 NARA, “West Berliners Say Russia Holds 400,000 German PWs” Paris Herald Tribune, 18 January 1950, File: 321.4 1950 PW’s German, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1950-54. Box 146. 68held by the Soviets.”! During the German election of 1949, the POW situation weighed so heavily on the minds of the Germany voters that it helped Konrad Adenauer and the anti- Soviet Christian Democratic Union (CDU) win a marginal victory over the pro-Soviet SPD in August 1949.77 In January 1950, US military intelligence in Germany was reporting that the Soviet repatriation rates remained stable, but during the course of the next few months, the pace slowed substantially.”? The Truman administration feared that the Soviets wished to conclude their repatriation efforts while holding onto thousands of POWs. Their suspicions proved justified. On 4 May 1950 the Soviet Union announced that they had finished the process of repatriating all remaining German POWs.” The Soviets also announced that they still held 13,546 German POWs for "NARA, “2 from FRANKFURT SENT DEPT 496 RPTD LONDON 10 PARTS 19, January 18, 1950,” File: 321.4 1950 PW’s German, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1950-54. Box 146; For a recent account of Acheson, which focuses on his career after working for the Truman administration, see Douglas Brinkley, Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953-1971, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Konrad Adenauer, Memoirs, 1945-53, Translated by Beate Ruhm von Oppen, (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1966), 167-8, 174-6. 7 NARA, “German Pls Repatriated from the USSR and Satellites via US Zone in Jan 1950, 16 February 1950,” File: PW’s German, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File, 1950-54. Box 146. ™ NARA, “141 From London, May 12 1950,” File: 321.4 PW's German, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1950-54. Box 146. 69various reasons.”> They did not return the vast majority of these POWs due to “grave war crimes,” and “whose war crimes [are] in [the] process of investigation.” 14 POWs did not make the repatriation list due to “treatment for illness.”” The declaration shocked Dean Acheson, who shared the belief held by many US allies that the Soviet Union was lying about the number of POWs it retained. But the Department of State (DOS) decided to take advantage of what they considered to be a significant Soviet diplomatic mistake. The DOS thought it obvious that the sheer number of actually repatriated Axis POWs indicated that the Soviets did not repatriate all German POWs and thus had failed to live up to the 1947 Moscow Agreement.” The American ambassador to the Soviet Union saw this as a golden opportunity. In a 13 May 1950 letter to Acheson, ambassador to the Soviet Union Admiral Allen G. Kirk (ambassador from 1949-1952) stated that We could scarcely asked for [a] better opening than here presented. Thus, we have (an] unusual and long- term source of pressure and propaganda to use against the Sov[iet]s on one hand and to show our own good faith vis-a-vis German people on [the] other hand. 7 NARA, “33 From Frankfurt, May 9 1950 (7 pm),” File: 321.4 PW's German, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1950-54. Box 146. 7 NARA, “401 From SECSTATE, May 10 1950 (7PM),” File: 321.4 ews German, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1950-54. Box 146. wid. 7 NARA, “1377 to SECSTATE, May 13 1950 (1PM),” File: 321.4 Pw's German, RG: 84 Records of the FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1950-54. Box 146. 70It is [a] recurring theme which can be used at will for [a] long time ahead, and I hope [it] will be exploited to [the] utmost and often.” By the end of May the DOS claimed that the POW propaganda was having a positive impact on the West German pcpulace.® The Soviet Union did not sit idly by and let the US and its allies mercilessly attack the USSR on the POW issue. They launched a counter-propaganda campaign of their own. By spring 1950, the USSR presented two distinct charges against the United States, alleging that the US inflated the number of WWII POWs in the USSR and that the US detained massive amounts of WWII POWs. The Soviets claimed, as the US embassy in Moscow stated, that the “Nazis withheld announcements of battle loses by approximately 1.5 million and that such accounts for popular impression that [the] ot Soviets captured more POWs than was fact. According to the Soviets, the US, knowledgeable of this Nazi failure, ignored the causalities lists to attack the USSR. In May 1950, the American embassy in Berlin cited the Soviet press accusing the US of Ibid. "© NARA, “53 From Berlin, May 17 1950 (5PM),” File 321.4 1950 eW's German, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1950-54. Box 146. ‘The American Ambassador in Berlin, in this State Department letter, further declared that he “Strongly concur[s] [with] Moscow's suggestion that [the] issue be kept alive and [the] theme receive info[ormation] media attention as appropriate.” "NARA, “33 From Frankfurt, May 9, 1950,” 2, File: 321.4 Pus German, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1950-54. Box 146. nendeavoring [to] create [the] impression that large number(s] [of] PWs [Prisoners of war] remain [in the] USSR, in order [to] distract attention from unlawful retention [of] hundreds of thousands [of POWs] by western powers for labor and for cannon fodder against national liberation movements [of] colonial and semi- colonial countries. After almost two months of attempting to reach an agreement on the exact wording of a draft note to the Soviets, the British, French, and US Embassies in Moscow issued a response to the Soviet proclamations of having officially terminated the repatriation of German POWs on 14 July 1950. The notes accused the Soviets of having failed to live up to the previous repatriation agreements and reaffirmed that the US and the allies had repatriated all Axis POWs. Moreover, they accused the Soviets of having violated previous Geneva Conventions on the treatment of POWs. They demanded that the Soviets submit to international inspections and return any non-repatriated 3 German POWs.*? The Truman administration hardly considered the issue classified. On the next day The New York Times, NARA, “1420 to SECSTATE, May 18 1950 (1PM),” File: 321.4 PW’s German, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File, 1950-54. Box 146. “7 NARA, “No. 120, 14 July 1950,” 4, File: 321.4 1950 PW’s German, RG 84: Records of the FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File, 1950-54. Box 146. On 15 July 1950, even Luxembourg, through its Embassy in Moscow, requested to know the fate of its soldiers who the Germans conscripted and deployed on the Eastern Front. NARA, “Moscow, July 15, 1950 (Translation) From: Rene Blum, Minister of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Moscow,” File: 321.4 PW’s General, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy, Confidential File. Box 145. 12among other newspapers, published the American notes sent to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs." The US clearly wanted the issue open and public. The Japanese POW issue During the closing months of WWII the Soviet Union honoring its treaty obligations with the United States and other Allied powers declared war on the Japanese. The Soviets waged a quick and decisive war against Japan in Manchuria and Korea and subsequently took hundreds of thousands~if not millions-of POWs. The Soviets never provided an accurate or exact number of the Japanese troops they captured during their brief conflict. The US and the post-WWII Japanese government estimated that the USSR took at least 2,726,000 POWs; “the number of Japanese who were located in the areas which forces of the Soviet Union and Communist China occupied at the end of World War II...” The Soviets did not repatriate at least 370,000 of these POWs by 1950.°° “ Special to the New York Times, “U.S. Asks Moscow to Permit Inquiry on War Prisoners: Seeks International Accounting of ‘Actual Fate’ of Germans Still in Soviet Hands: American Note Doubts Russian Figures and Cities Violation of Pacts on Captives,” The New York Tines, 16. , “Position Paper for the Third Session of the United Nations Ad Hoc Commission on Prisoners of Wer (Geneva, August 25, 1952),” 4, File: 321.4 “erisoners of War,” RG 84: FSPDS, Japan Tokyo Enbassy, Classified General Records, 1952. Box 47 John W. Dower, in his work Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, wrote, “By far the most extensive, protracted, and abusive treatment of surrendered 13As with the exploitation of German and European Axis PoWs, the Soviets used Japanese POWs in rebuilding the devastated economy of the USSR at the end of WWII. The Soviets employed the Japanese POWs in a variety of tasks from working in scientific and technical fields to building the National Theater in Alma-Ata.* Also like the German POWs, the US and the USSR used Japanese POWs to wage their wars of propaganda.*? The US fired the easiest salvo in early 1950, accusing the Soviets of not faithfully attempting to live up to the repatriation agreements and of mistreating Japanese POWs in Soviet custody.®* In February 1950, the Soviets denied American allegations that they were mistreating Japanese POWs, and accused the United States of having “extracted [false forces came at the hands of the Soviets..” John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 51. “© According to Bazar Khamzeeva, a historian at Kazakstan State National University, in Almaty the Republic of Kazakstan, Kazak SSR employed Japanese POWs on a variety of public works projects. Interview with Bazar Khamzeeva, Ph.D., Kazakstan State National University, 10 March 1999, " For a detailed description of the strategic importance of Japan during the start of the Cold War see Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); ___, “Securing the Great Crescent: Occupied Japan and the Origins of Containment in South East Asia,” The Journal of American History, 69 (September 1962): 392-414. "" As John W. Dower points out, between 1945 and 1947, “a total of 625,000 men had been formally repatriated.” John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War IT, 52. ™information] from repatriates by torture.”** Ambassador Kirk reported to Acheson in April 1950 that the Soviets claimed that they had “completed [the] repatriation [of] Japanese war prisoners . . . ”* According to Soviet estimates, they released a total 510,000 soldiers, with only “1,487 convicted of war crimes, 9 who will be repatriated after completion [of] medical treatment, and 971 who committed war crimes against [the] Chinese people and who are to be placed under (the] jurisdiction [of the] CPR (Chinese People’s Republic].”* The Soviets did not limit their propaganda campaign to defensive counter-allegations. For example, in May 1950, the Soviets collected almost 70,000 signatures from Japanese POWs who denounced the United States and expressed “Gratitude” to [the] head [of the] Soviet Gov[ernmen]t Tovarisch Stalin.”*? In June 1950, the Soviet Union further attacked American and Japanese assertions. Tass declared, as Kirk reported to Acheson, Notwithstanding exhaustive data, provided these official announcements, fantastic information being spread [by the] USA and Japan about [a] large number " NARA, “399 to SECSTATE, February 6, 1950, (12PM),” File: 321.4 P's General, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 145. °* NARA, “1206 to SECSTATE, April 21, 1950, (2eM),” File: 321.4 PA's General, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 145. hid. % NARA, “1310 to SECSTATE, May 6, 1950 (1PM),” File: 321.4 PW's General, RG @4: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 145. 1s[of] Japanese POWs, supposedly reaming [in the] territory [of the] USSR. TASS empowered announce that indicated information foreign circles has [an] evil slanderous character concerning [the] Soviet Union and [the] goal [of] divert[ing] [the] attention [of the] Japanese people from [the] policies [of the] USA, directed towards [the] economic and political enslavement [of] Japan.” In mid-July 1950, the United States was still was pressing the Soviets for information concerning Japanese POWs in the USSR. Through the Moscow Embassy, the Soviets publicly urged that the American government to review previous Soviet statements on the matter. The Soviets counterattacked US propaganda claiming that it was the United States and not the USSR still retaining a large amount of Japanese POWs. Overall, the Soviets estimated that the Americans were forcibly detaining over 245,000 Japanese POWs.** On 16 July 1950, in response to repeated American questions concerning the POWs, the Soviets claimed that the United States had “exhausted” the issue.” The Soviets held a number of Japanese War criminals immediately after the conclusion with the war. As with the German POWs, the Soviets, not recognizing the stipulations °° NARA, “1601 to SECSTATE, June 9, 1950 (1PM),” File: 321.4 PW's General, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 145. * NARA, “149 to SECSTATE, July 17, 1950 11AM,” File: 321.4 PW's General, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 145. °° NARA, “S09 to SECSTATE, August 25, 1950 (7PM),” File: 321.4 PWS General, RG: 84: The FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 145. 16of the Geneva Convention on the repatriation of POWs due to the implications of the Nuremberg Trials, simply labeled large numbers of POWs as war criminals, thus technically revoking their Geneva Convention rights.°*’ The Soviets began to develop a specific pattern of behavior in dealing with Japanese war criminals, which they would repeat, under the auspices of their Chinese and North Korean friends in Korea. The Soviets initiated a war crimes tribunal in Khabarovask in December 1949 against Japanese POWs. But this one was specifically devoted to the problem of biological and chemical warfare. The only problem that the Soviets encountered was that many of the war criminals they wished to prosecute were presently living in Japan and relatively immune from punishment because of their working % “Noscow Rebuffs U.S. On Prisoners: Broadcast Says Subject of Repatriation of Japanese is “Exhausted in Full,”, The New York Times, 17 guly 1950: 5. % The Soviets were not the only ones to circumvent the Geneva Conference on POWs. As James M. Diehl pointed out in his article, “U.S. Policy toward German Veterans, 1945-1950,” “The Allies designated newly captured German military personnel either as Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF) or Surrendered Enemy Personnel (SEP), a maneuver that permitted their captors to circumvent the formalized rules for treatment of POWs laid down in the Geneva Convention of 1929. For U.S. authorities, the main advantage of the new designation was that it permitted a quick recycling of captured German forces back into civilian life and allowed the removal of a massive economic and adninistrative burden.” James M. Diehl, “U.S. Policy toward German Veterans, 1945-1950,” in American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945-1955, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 355. 7relationship with the US military and government. on 1 February 1950, the Soviet government sent a report to Acheson, informing him that they had tried and sentenced a number of Japanese war criminals who had, intended to use bacteriological weapons in the aggressive wars which were being prepared by them against the peace-loving peoples and they proposed to use these in mass quantities for the destruction of troops and the peaceful populace including old people, women and children by means of the spread of such death-bearing epidemics as the epidemics of plague, cholera, typhus, glanders, malignant anthrax and others. *? The report detailed the employment of bacteriological and chemical weapons by the special Japanese detachments 731 and 100 during the course of WWII, against China, the Soviet Union, the United States, and all other Allied powers fighting in the Pacific Theater. The tribunal additionally called for members of the Imperial Japanese government, as well as the participants, who the United States had granted de facto immunity, to also stand trial. % Rosemary Foot, “Making Known the Unknown War: Policy Analysis of the Korean Conflict in the Last Decade,” Diplomatic History, 3 (Summer 1994), 425. % NARA, “From: A. Panyushkin, To: Dean Acheson, Secretary of State, February 1, 1950,” 1, File: 321.6 War Criminals, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 146. ¥0 stanley Sandler, ed. The Korean War: An Encyclopedia, (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995), 45. 78The Soviets even summoned Emperor Hirohito and the infamous Lieutenant-General Shiro Ishii to stand trial.’ The United States, protecting many of these individuals and possibly using a number of them to develop advanced chemical and biological warfare projects, simply dismissed the Soviet requests to establish a new international war 2 Acheson stated in a memo crimes tribunal as propaganda.’ that The timing and content of the Sov{iet] note-coming as it did 4 % years after the surrender and many months after the war crimes trials in Japan had been terminated-strongly suggest[s] that the principal motivation of the note is to divert attention from Soviet] failure to repatriate or otherwise explain the fate of over 370,000 Jap{anese] prisoners detained in Sov{iet]-held territory.!? The Soviets continued their attempts to bring the Emperor and other Japanese War criminals in Japan to justice and the United States continued to ignore these entreaties. By mid-1950, the Soviets were growing frustrated over the lack of any answer from the US or any other Western power, 14 As a matter of course, the Soviets criticized the American 1 NARA, “From: A. Panyushkin, To: Dean Acheson, Secretary of State, February 1, 1950,” 8, File: 321.6 War Criminals, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 146. 1 Stanley Sandler, ed. The Korean War: An Encyclopedia, 45. 103 NARA, “102 From: SECSTATE, February 3, 1950,” File: 321.6 War Criminals, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 146. 10 votes of the Soviet Government to the Governments of U.S.A. and Great Britain,” (Pravda and Izvestia, June 1, p. 2. Complete text:), ‘The Current Digest of the Soviet Press (CDSP), Vol. II, No. 22, (15 July 1950): 25. 79position on Japan, accusing the US of rearming the Japanese for offensive purposes, “and consequentially” as one Soviet news report declared, “restoring industry of death, organized by Jap[anese] militarists headed by Japanese 05 The United emperor, biologist, by education, Hirohito. States and its allies formulated a plan of action regarding the POWs, and the best means of using the situation for anti-Soviet propaganda. The POW Issue Reaches the United Nations Acheson, in a letter dated 6 August 1950 to the Embassies in London, Paris, Vienna, Tokyo and Frankfurt, stated that the US government was presently working on a resolution to condemn the Soviets for not returning Axis PoWs “in clear violation of [the] Moscow agreement Apr[il] 1947, Potsdam proclamation 1945, SCAP-USSR agreement 1946 and recognized standards of international conduct . . .” and wanted the US embassies and allied nations to aid in this 6 Acheson planed to bring the entire issue to the process. * UN. On 14 August 1950, under pressure from a number of allies, including the Greeks and Italians, US officials concluded that the United Nations was the best forum for 18S NARA, “1347 To: SECSTATE, May 10, 1950, (2PM),” File: 321.6 War Criminals, RG 84: FSPDS Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 146. ¥06 NARA, “103 from SESCTATE August 5, 1950 (2PM), File: 321.4 PW’'s General, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 145. 80addressing Soviet incarceration of POWs and foreign nationals.” A number of problems surrounded this proposal. First, the United States wanted the West German and Japanese governments to contribute to the UNGA debate. But, at the same time, the political climate that surrounded the normalization of German and Japanese diplomatic relations dictated that this might weaken the possibility to score a propaganda victory. Second, the United States wanted to enlist the support of its NATO allies in order to present the campaign as an international effort as opposed to an isolated US struggle. The US now considered the POW issue an important means of humiliating the Soviet Union and influencing the international political situation. In late September 1950, the DOS circulated a memo stating that the reason for the attack at the UN was to cause the Soviets “maximum embarrassment on the eve of Soviet elections . . . “1% Additionally, the Germans were planning a “Week of the Missing Persons” which the DOS wanted to coincide with the GA meeting for propaganda support and hoped that the NARA, “406 to SECSTATE, August 14, 1950,” File: 321.4 PW’s General, RG: 84 FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 145. .' NARA, “27 from Frankfurt, Sept 21, 1950 (8PM),” File: 321.4 PW’s General, RG: 84 FSPDS, Moscow Embassy, Confidential File. Box 145. a1Japanese POW issue would supply a “further step in normalizing Japans’ international status.”!? At the 325*" Plenary Meeting Thursday, 14 December 1950, the United Nations (UN) voted to condemn the prolonged holding of WWII POWs in the USSR. The two resolutions A/1690 and A/1718 did not specifically mention the Soviet Union, but the implication against the USSR was clear, The Soviets denied the allegations and reiterated that no PONs, outside of war criminals and those too ill to travel, remained in the USSR. The Soviet delegate to the UNGA stated that “the question of the repatriation of prisoners of war from the USSR is completely closed.”!? The Soviets attempted to regain the offensive by arguing that not only did the USSR completely finish the process of Axis POW repatriation, but it was the West that failed to return Axis war prisoners. The Soviet ambassador at the UN claimed: the Soviet Union delegation cited well-established facts proving that the Governments of the United States, France, and Australia had failed to carry out their obligations to repatriate German and Japanese prisoners of war, hundreds of thousands of whom had not yet been returned to their homes." Ibid.; NARA, “UNNUM from Tokyo, August 29, 1950,” File: 321.4 PWs General, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy, Confidential File. Box 145. 40 United Nations, Official Records, Records of the General Assembly, Fifth Session: Plenary Meetings, Verbatim Records of Meetings— Volume 1, 19 September to 15 December, 325 Plenary Meeting Thursday, 14 December 1950 at 3 p.m., 668. ML pid. 82Soviet protestations notwithstanding, the successful passage of the resolution and implied condemnation of the Soviet Union represented an important, albeit minor, propaganda victory for the US. The Deputy Director of the Office of United Nations Economic and Social Affairs wrote to the US delegation to the UN, “on this item the three sponsoring Delegations-Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States-put the Soviet Union completely on the defensive and scored a resounding victory, 43-5-8.”"? After the UNGA resolution, the DOS celebrated its victory of the “Peaceful Solution of the Problem of POWs” by continually requesting information from the Soviets about unaccounted for WWII PoWs, while reiterating that the US had faithfully repatriated all of its POWs by 30 June 1947.1? The successful passage of the resolution led to the creation of the United Nations Ad Hoc Commission on Prisoners of War, which operated from the summer of 1951 to the summer of 1952. The purpose of the Commission was to enforce the UN resolution, but in reality the Commission 42 wYemorandum by the Deputy Director of the Office of the United Nations Economic and Social Affairs (Green) to Mr. David H. Popper, Principal Executive Officer of the United States Delegation to the General Assembly, December 22, 1950,” FRUS 1950, Volume II: The United Nation and the Western Hemisphere. (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1976), 576. 33 NARA, “Sent to USUN New York Mar-27-51,” “Sent to SCAP, Tokyo, USPOLAD 1466, HICCG, Frankfurt 6883, APR-27-1951," “Sent to: USUN New 83amounted to nothing more than a debating club and a forum for US propaganda interests.’ The UNGA resolution did not end the POW problem or the use of POWs as propaganda by either East or West. On 25 September 1951, Pravda claimed that the US was in the process of rebuilding a Japanese Army from former POWs interned in Alaska.4® On 8 January 1952, the US again requested the Soviet Union to provide information on German and Japanese POWs illegally detained in the Soviet Union."!® The Soviets responded, [The] Mentioned American note cannot be considered other than [a] slanderous attack against [the] Sov[iet] U[nio]n to which [the] Gov{ernment] (of the] USA resorts obviously in order to deprecate guilt [from] those Ger[man} and (Jap]anese war criminals who drew Ger{many] and Jap{an] into [a] war adventure resulting in [the] second world war and who use [the] ruling circles [of the] USA for [the] preparation [of a] new world war.47 York APR-27-51," File: 321.4 Prisoners of War, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1951. Box 160. M4 NARA, “Position Paper for the Third Session of the United Nations Ad Hoc Commission on Prisoners of War (Geneva, August 25, 1952),” 2-5, File: 321.4 “Prisoners of War,” RG 84: FSPDS, Japan Tokyo Embassy, Classified General Records, 1952. Box 4. HS NARA, “To SECSTATE Sept 28, 1951,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 160. 46 NARA, “To SECSTAE 1212 Jan 21, 1952,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War-General, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 168. "7 pid. a4The DOS did not keep this diplomatic correspondence secret. The Department of State Bulletin published a copy of the letter immediately on 9 January 1952.1° The Final Release With the Death of Stalin on 5 March 1953, and the process of dismantling the GULAG system, the leaders of the USSR more readily began to negotiate with the United States on the WWII POW issue.'? By 1953 the WWII POW issue was still lingering in the United States government and in the 120 United Nations. By late October 1953, however, the DOS 48 U.N. Commission to Discuss Prisoners of War,” 26 Department of State Bulletin, (21 January 1952): 90. For a recent study of the Stalinist system and its ultimate collapse after Stalin’s death see, Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); For a discussion of the GULAG system from a Russian perspective see the famous work Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); For a Soviet rendition of Stalinism see Roi Medvedev, 0 Staline i stalinizme, (Moskva: Progress, 1990). See also, Rossiiskii Mezhdunarodyi Fond Kul'tury, Tak eto bylo: Natsional'nye repressii v SSSR 1919-1952 gody, v 3-tomakh, (Moskva: “Insan", 1993) and Yu. P. Senokosov, ed, Surovaya drama naroda: Uchenye i publitsisty o prirode Stalinizma, (Moskva: Tzdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1989). 9 Eisenhower even linked the WWII POW issue to questions of world peace. In one lecture in the spring of 1953 he stated, “We are only for sincerity of peaceful purpose attested by deeds. The opportunities for such deeds are many. The performance of a great number of them waits upon no complex protocol but upon the simple will to do them. Even a few such clear and specific acts, such as the Soviet Union’s signature upon an Austrian treaty or its release of thousands of prisoners of war held from World War II, would be impressive sings of sincere intent.” “address “The Chance for Peace’ Delivered Before the American Society of 85knew that the propaganda strength of the issue had fallen significantly, and that accusing the “USSR with holding hundreds of thousands of living POWs, since it was quite clear that these figures were not true . . .” was not worthwhile." By the beginning of 1953, the Japanese government began to negotiate actively with the Soviets and the Chinese for the repatriation of its POWs. At first, through a series of informal negotiations in New Delhi, India, Japanese officials attempted to gain the release of some “30,000” WWII POWs in the Soviet Union.’? The Japanese did not believe that many of their POWs would be returned, citing the fact that the Soviet Union and the Chinese ignored the 1949 Geneva Convention and liberally applied the term “war 2 criminal” to anyone they did not want to release.’”? The Newspaper Editors. April 16, 1953,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, January 20 to December 31, 1953, 184; NARA, “Circular Telegram, INFOTEL,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1953. Box 175. M21 NARA, “Information Circular, To Certain American Diplomatic Officers, CA-2332, October 27, 1953,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1953. Box 175. 12 NARA, “Aembassy Tokyo, A-9989 May 20, 1953,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File 1953. Box 175. 123 The Soviets maintained that “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics does not consider itself bound by the obligation, which follows from Article 85, to extend the application of the [Geneva] Convention to prisoners of war who have been convicted under the law ofJapanese Foreign Minister in February 1953, wary of the “war criminal” label, articulated that the Chinese continued to hold Japanese POWs for the purposes of technical exploitation. * Nonetheless, on 16 February a Japanese mission made it’s way to Beijing “to negotiate repatriation [of] Japanese nationals detained [by] Communist China . . mas From 31 October 1953 to 18 November, the Soviets and the Japanese Red Cross met in Moscow to consider the possible repatriation of Japanese prisoners of war. 176 on 19 November 1953, the Japanese Red Cross and the Soviet government agreed to return 1,274 Japanese POWs and interns the Detaining Power, in accordance with the principles of the Nuremberg trial, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, it being understood that persons convicted of such crimes must be subject to the conditions obtaining in the country in question for those who undergo their punishment.” NARA, “Recovery of Unrepatriated Prisoners, Study Group III,” 14 July 1955, File: Committee Documentation of the Secretary of Defense’s Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War, RG 341: RHUSAF (Air Staff), Air Force-Plans Decimal File, 1942-1954. Box 441. 12 NARA, “34 from Tokyo, February 16, 1953, 4 pm,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War (General) 1955, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 208. 45 NARA, “35 from Tokyo, February 16, 1953,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War (General) 1955, RG 84: FSPDS Moscow Embassy, Confidential File. Box 208. 426 NARA, “Communiqué on Repatriation from Territory of the Soviet Union of Japanese War Prisoners and Civilians who have Served Sentence, Been Amnestied and Released before Time,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War (General) 1955, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 208. 87to Japan.¥*7 The Soviets previously branded these prisoners as “war criminals”, but they agreed to their release because they “have either (a) served their sentences; [and/or] (b) been released under last spring’s amnesty or by Supreme 2 18 Court decision. The Soviets continued to assure the Americans and the world that they only continued to hold a little over 1,000 Japanese war criminals.'?* Japan and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations in 1956. On 17 September 1955 the Soviet Union decreed a general amnesty for all prisoners, including most foreign POWs who had fought or collaborated with the Nazis or Japanese.'° According to contemporary sources the decree effectively wT NARA, Secstate, no 600 Routine, November 21, 1953,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War (General) 1955, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 208. 12 NARA, “To: Secstate, no 598 Routine, November 20, 1953," “To: Secstate, no 600 Routine, November 21, 1953,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War (General) 1955, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 208. 9 NARA, “To: Secstate, no 600 Routine, November 21, 1953,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War (General) 1955, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 208; “The Edict of the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the USSR of March 27, 1953” freed a number of WWII POWs and collaborators, though the amnesty for the vast majority of POW and prisoners would not come until 1955. “Communiqué on Repatriation from Territory of the Soviet Union of Japanese War Prisoners and Civilians who have Served Sentence, Been Amnestied and Released Before Time,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War (General) 1955, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 208. 130 NARA, “Sent to: Secstate Washington Routine 677, September 18, 1955," File: 321.4 Prisoners of War (General) 1955, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 208. 88brought an end to the vast penal labor system that had grown " The decree came at an up under Beria and Stalin.’ interesting time, after the death of Stalin in March 1953 and the arrest and execution of Seria in June. In 1955, the USSR and the FRG began the process of normalizing their relations. On 13 September 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the USSR established diplomatic relations.‘ In exchange for West German diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, the USSR repatriated 9,626 German POWs.'?? Privately, the US suspected that the Soviets still held approximately 138,000 German POWs, among other Pows.'* But this was the last time the Soviets would 131 One contemporary report stated that “One of the motives for the changes appeared to be a belated recognition that the old system-for which Beria and Abakumov are now officially blamed-was wasteful because of the extremely low productivity of Labour it entailed.Anether reason was undoubtedly the widespread prisoners’ strikes of the last two years, which the authorities seem to have met everywhere with a great deal of uncertainty and hesitation in the beginning, as well as the attention aroused by them abroad.” NARA, “Subject: Information From Prisoners-of- War Released by the USSR, October 25, 1955," File: 321.4 Prisoners of War (General) 1955, RG 84: FSPDS, Moscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 208. 1 Robert M. Slusser and Jan F. Triska, A Calendar of Soviet Treaties 1917-1957, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 336. 333 A, A. Gromyko and B. N. Ponomareva, eds., Istoriya vneshnei politiki SSSR 1917-1976, v dvukh tomakh, tom vtoroi, 1945-1976 gg.+ (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka”, 1977), 153. 1M DDEL, “Memorandum for the President, July 18, 1955," File: Dulles, John Foster—July 1955, (Ann Whitman File), Dulles-Herter Series, Eisenhower, Dwight D.: Papers as President of the United States, 1953- 1961. Box 5. agrelease any former Nazi POWs. Cognizant of Soviet difficulties in transporting the remaining German POWs, the US saw this as a propaganda opportunity.* The Office of the Secretary of Defense wanted “a public offer by the U.S. Government of transportation to return these German POWs to their homeland.” %* Arguing that, “If the offer is accepted by the Soviet Union, it is considered that some advantages will accrue to the U.S. with the West German Government. If the offer is refused, it is considered that some propaganda advantage can be taken of the Soviet failure to cooperate.” In June 1955, the Soviets once again declared that they had repatriated all German and Japanese POWs. The West Germans appeared satisfied with the repatriation but the Japanese claimed to possess evidence that over 12,000 Japanese POWs were still “known to have been in Soviet custody. "8 Conclusion 138 DDEL, “Return of German Prisoners of War from the USSR,” Filé oca 383.6 (File #2) (2) (June 1954-July 1956], OCB Central File Series, While House Office, National Security Council Staff: Papers, 1948-61. Box 118. 38 Ibid. 7 Ipid. 138 NARA, “31 From Tokyo, Sent 18 June llam,” File: 321.4 Prisoners of War (General) 1955, RG 84: FSPDS, Mcscow Embassy Confidential File. Box 208. 90During and after WWII the United States and the Soviet Union developed specific policies for exploiting POWs. Both nations used POWs for the purpose of furthering their own international propaganda objectives. The Soviets had effectively utilized German POWs during the War as a means of achieving tactical advantages on the battlefield. Whereas, the US used the German and Japanese POW issue as a means of solidifying support in German and Japan in order to counter the perceived Soviet threat during the early Cold War. The lessons that these two nations gathered from this experience were not lost during the Korean War. In many ways, the American Korean War POW issue and the question of German and Japanese POWs in the Soviet Union merged together. Both represented a means for the US government to attack the Soviet Union and counter Soviet propaganda charges. The primary difference between these two POW issues, however, was that the Soviets used WWII POWs directly, while during the Korean War they would secure propaganda from US POWs via their North Korean and Chinese allies. a1CHAPTER III: CHINESE AND NORTH KOREAN EXPLOITATION OF US POWS, 1950-1953 Introduction During the Korean War the North Koreans and the Chinese exploited American POWs for technical information and for propaganda purposes. The Soviet Union, not an overt belligerent in the conflict, made use of propaganda gathered by its allies to bolster and support their “Peace Offensive” during the early 1950s (see Chapter V: “Soviet Exploitation of American Korean War Prisoners for Propaganda, 1950- 1953”). The manner in which each nation exploited American POWs and MIAs may have varied, but the general mission of using POWs for waging the psychological campaigns of the Cold War remained. Due to a deficiency of material and an insufficient infrastructure, the North Koreans experienced the most difficult time in handling the influx of American POWs. American POWs therefore, usually received harsh treatment in their hands.’ The North Koreans also hoped to exploit US POWs. Before the Inchon invasion, the North Koreans employed US POWs in limited propaganda and psychological warfare operations, as well as exploiting them for technical information. After Inchon and the almost total destruction * susan L. Carruthers, “'Not Just Washed but Dry-Cleaned’: Korean and the ‘Brainwashing’ Scare of the 1950s,” 54. 92the North Korean Army during the fall 1950 the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) played a secondary position in POW matters. The Chinese Communists, due to their previous policies in dealing with POWs during the Chinese Civil War, did not treat American POWs with exceptional cruelty; nonetheless they still manipulated their US POWs into participating in a variety of propaganda activities. As General Matthew Ridgway reflected on the conduct of the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV), “The Chinese, we were to learn, was a tough and vicious fighter who often attacked without regard to casualties. But he was a more civilized foe in some respects than we found the NKPA to be.”? As such, the Chinese introduced a more subtle policy of POW exploitation for the purpose of eliciting propaganda from their American PowWs than the North Koreans instituted.’ This enabled the Chinese to develop an effective system of POW exploitation. 2? Matthew B. Ridgway, The Korean War, (New York: A Da Capo Paperback, 1967), 59. ? The entire US military did not agree with this assessment. Paul M. Cole wrote, “Col. James M. Hanley, head of the War Crimes Section of the U.S Eighth Army's Judge Advocate Section, took exception to the Eighth Army's Training Directive No. 6, August 26, 1951, which implied that captured prisoners would receive better treatment in the hands of the Conmunist Chinese Forces than from the North Korean People’s Army.According to Hanley’s report, between November 1950 and November 1, 1951, the North Koreans had ‘wantonly killed 147 American prisoners of war.’ The Chinese, on the other hand, had ‘killed 2,513 (United States) 93But it was the Soviets who relocated the POW issue from an operational problem in the Korean theater to a level of strategic importance on the international scene. The First American Prisoners of War The first American POWs bore immense hardships because they were unprepared for the rigors of the North Korean POW system. The US forces that President Truman initially deployed to defend South Korea after the North Korean invasion on 25 June 1950 did not have appropriate equipment, included few combat veterans, and lacked morale.‘ When these US forces encountered the battle-hardened NKPA of Kim IL Sung in early July 1950, the outcome was disastrous, as 5 well as predictable.* The American troops were ineffective in halting the North Korean advance and those Americans who prisoners of war since November 1, 1950..” Paul M. Cole, POW/MIA Issues: Volume 1, The Korean War, 24-25. ‘Walter LaFeber, in his work America, Russia, and the Cold War, agreed with Bruce Cumings’ interpretation, in Cumings’ two volume work The Origins of the Korean War, (and cited him) that the North Koreans were not entirely responsible for the origins of the conflict. LaFeber wrote, “Both superpowers..found themselves trapped in a bloody civil conflict, Korean killing Korean, which astonishingly claimed 100,000 lives after 1946 and before the formal beginning in June 1950 of what Americans call the ‘Korean War.” Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 8 ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), 99. 5 Clay Blair, The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950-1953, (New York: Times Books, 1987), 91-93; T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, (New York: Macmillan Company, 1963), 108-123; Burton I. Kaufman, The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command, 2" ed., (New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.), 19- a1. 94the North Koreans took prisoner were not prepared for their future internment. The North Koreans handled their American POWs brutally because they viewed their advance southward in the summer of 1950 as their singular goal. POWs required food, medicine, transportation, and other precious supplies that the NKPA needed at the front. Not surprisingly, few supplies reached American POWs. However, the North Koreans usually did not commit atrocities or murder American POWs out of bloodlust, although this also occurred, but out of a more basic need to continue the southward advance. “KPA leaders had ordered against such practices . . .” writes Bruce Cumings in The Origins of the Korean War, “According to POWs, these executions appear to have occurred when it became onerous or impossible to take American prisoners to the North, and they were done in the traditional battlefield ‘humane’ manner: one bullet behind the ear.”® Immediately after the war US Army intelligence concurred with Cummings’ facts but not his interpretation. “Upon capture by the Communists,” wrote one G-3 report, “the unwounded and the walking wounded prisoners were herded into groups for marching. The seriously wounded * Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: Volume II, The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 703. 95were left on the field and often killed by small arms fire and bayoneting.”” News of various atrocities quickly reached the American press. By July 1950, The New York Times was reporting North Korean massacres of American military personnel.® On July 12, General Douglas MacArthur publicly acknowledged that the North Koreans engaged in the systematic slaughter of American POWs.® The North Koreans quickly countered MacArthur's charges stating that, “The People’s Army of the Korean People’s Democratic Republic hereby declare that prisoners of the enemy forces will be treated under the humanitarian principles of democratic governments and under m® two days before, the UN principles of international law. Secretary General Trygve Lie implored the belligerents “to abide by international conventions against war atrocities T NARA, “Communist Mistreatment of United States Prisoners of War,” 2, File: G 3 383.6 (Section 4), RG 319: Records of the Army Staff (RAS), Records of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2), Army-Operations Decimal Files, 1953. Box 206. " one of the first articles to appear in The New York Times “Korea Reds Execute 7 Americans Who Surrender in Road Ambush” reported that the North Koreans systematically murdered American POWs with “their hands tied behind their backs and shot through the face.” The United Press, “Korea Reds Execute 7 Americans Who Surrender in Road Ambush,” The New York Times, 11 July 1950: 1, 4. ® special to the New York Times, “Atrocities Proof Cited by M'arthur: Commander Has Documentary Evidence-Holds Leaders of Koreans Responsible,” The New York Times, 12 July 1950: 5. MacArthur was referring to the same incident as stated in the previous note. 96and to accept the offer of the services of the International Committee of the Red Cross.”'? But reports of North Korean atrocities continued to circulate.” Regardless of the barbarities committed on the battlefield, both the North Korean and South Korean governments affirmed the proposal of the Secretary General. But by early August, the North Koreans continued to refuse entrance of the International Red Cross to inspect American and other UN POWs.** Secretly, the North Koreans were in the process of transporting US POWs to semi-permanent encampments north of the battlefield. The death marches north, which started in September 1950, proved the most trying time for the first American 1 worth Koreans Deny Shooting Prisoners,” The New York Times, 15 July 1950: 5. 4 special to the New York Times, “U.N. Plea Goes Out To End Atrocities: Lie Urges North, South Korea Both Also to Take Offers of International Red Cross," The New York Times, 13 July 1950: 4. 1 By late December of 1951 the “The International Committee of the Red Cross appealed directly to the Soviet Union and Communist China..to permit Red Cross officials to travel through their territory to North Korea.” The two nations, predictably denied the request. The Associated Press, “Red Cross Appeals to Soviet on Korea,” The New York Times, 23 December 1951: 1. 13 Special to the New York Times, “Both Sides No-Atrocities Pledges In Korea Fighting Reported to U.N.: South Republic Replies to Lie, Awaits Geneva Red Cross Delegate-Northern Red's Radio Says They ‘Observe’ Rules of War,” The New York Times, 14 July 1950: 3. “A.M, Rosenthal, “Russian Accuses U.S. of Atrocities: Malik Demands Action by the U.N.—Commission Holds Korean Reds Responsible,” The New York Times, 9 August 1950: 12. 97PoWs. Out of the 2,638 POWs who died during their internment during the Korean War, almost 1,500 died between June and December 1950.'5 The marches lasted for months and the North Koreans drove the walking wounded and the sick along the route north at an exhausting pace. The North Koreans simply eliminated POWs who could not mange to stay in formation or who were too ill or wounded to make the horrid journey in order to keep on schedule. In once instance, the infamous North Korean POW leader the “Tiger”, a commander of a POW column executed an American Lieutenant for falling out of line. He declared, “'You see... I have the authority to do this . . . You have just witnessed the execution of a bad man, This move will help us to work together better in peace and harmony.”?* Poorly trained and physically weak, many of the POWs lost the resolve to face their captors. Many American soldiers simply decided to “give-up”. The problem became so pervasive, especially during the first year of the war, that the comrades of these soldiers diagnosed them as having a 1 Source: U.S. Prisoners of War in the Korean Operation-A Study of Their Treatment and Handling by the North Korean Army and Chinese Communist Forces (Ft. Meade: Army Security Center, 1954), Appendix xX, P+ 633 in, Paul M. Cole, POW/MIA Issues: Volume 1, The Korean War, 224, Table 7.1. % Larry Zellers, In Enemy Hands: A Prisoner in North Korea, (Lexington, KY: The University of Kentucky Press, 1991), 91. 98case of “give-upitis”.'’ As one scholar on the Korean War wrote, “In an extraordinary fashion, they lost the will to live, above all the will to eat. Many Americans simply declined to eat the mess of sorghum and rice with which they were provided. They chose instead to starve.”'® Furthermore, the North Koreans did not have or were unwilling to provide medical supplies and captured US Army doctors who wished to help these POWs invariably received a negative answer from the North Koreans.'? Besides starvation, frostbite was a serious problem for the UN and US POWs on the marches during the winter months.” Medical treatment on the marches and in the camps improved little throughout the course of the conflict.” " Max Hastings, The Korean War, (New York: Touchstone, 1987), 291. * Ibid. 1 major Clarence L. Anderson, Major Alexander M. Boysen, Capt. Sidney Esensten, Capt. Gene N. Lam, and Capt. William R. Shadish, (MC), U.S. Army, “Medical Experiences in Communist POW Camps in Korea,” The Journal of the American Medical Association, 156 (11 September 1954): 120. * As the report “Communist Mistreatment of United States Prisoners of War” stated, “Many marches were made under severe cold weather conditions. The Communist guards took shoes and other articles of clothing from some of the prisoners. Freezing cf feet and hands was common. One prisoner reported marching in bare feet until the flesh was gone from his toe bones.” NARA, “Communist Mistreatment of U.S. Prisoners of War,” 2, File: G 3 383.6 (Section 4), RG 319: RAS, Records of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2), Army-Operations General Decimal Files 1953. Box 206. 21 the authors of “Medical Experiences in Communist POW Camps in Korea” wrote, “During the summer and fall of 1951, all of the British 99