War: In the Second Tent

The Communists rejected the U.N. appeal for the immediate exchange of sick and wounded prisoners. They also refused Matt Ridgway's request for Red Cross inspection of their prison camps. Such scrutiny, the Reds said loftily, was unnecessary. The men were well fed, clothed and sheltered, they said, "in complete accordance with humanitarianism."

To hear them tell it, the Reds gave their prisoners a soft and cozy life. But a brutally contrasting glimpse got through when they tried to account for 1,058 U.S. names which were not on their lists. They were the names of men identified by U.S. authorities from Red broadcasts, pictures, prisoners' letters, Red Cross lists, other means. They had been prisoners once; where were they now? Said the Communists: 152 had escaped, three had been turned loose, 571 had died, 332 were unaccounted for but still the subject of inquiry. The Reds claimed that some, but not all, of the 571 known dead had perished under U.N. air or artillery attacks. The others, they said vaguely, had died of disease, or of wounds, or because of climatic rigors, or because of some strange "lack of will to survive."

It did not sound like the sort of life to make inspection superfluous.