The Battle for Control

The all-but-incredible story of chaos and bloodshed in the U.N.'s prison stockades, of almost complete lack of U.N. control, continued to emerge last week. On top of the disgraceful Dodd-Colson affair came new light on prisoner cabals that scorned interference by U.N. guards. Worst of all, observers were beginning to realize that the prisoner vote on repatriation, which at first had seemed the only creditable and politically valuable aspect of the whole affair, had not been arrived at by the U.N. in a true and careful polling, but was in some-cases a rough & ready guess.

Last September the Communist and anti-Communist prisoners waged a bloody 30-day battle for control. Kangaroo courts in many of the compounds tried, sentenced and executed opponents of the controlling faction, leaving bodies neatly laid out next morning for the U.N. guards to inspect. The struggle went on in the hospital camp on the mainland, near Pusan as well as on bloody Koje Island. Under such conditions, no fair or complete balloting on political preference was possible. Washington apparently did not realize this. Washington knew only that "voluntary repatriation" was morally impeccable, and also politically shrewd and foresighted.

The Nose-Counting. So the screening orders went out, and General Ridgway passed them on to the Eighth Army, which passed them on to the Second Logistical Command at Pusan, and so on down. The screeners did their best, but their best was poor. Some compounds successfully resisted all screening. Undoubtedly, there were many men who hungered for freedom, but had no way of making their wishes known. In one compound where anti-Communists had got the upper hand, the leaders announced they would hold a preliminary screening of their own. They called for repatriation volunteers; when two loyal Communists stepped forward, the pair was set upon and done to death.

The Eighth Army kept the physical details of its nose-counting under wraps, but somehow or other it emerged with 59,000 North Korean and Chinese prisoners who would not "forcibly resist" repatriation. By scraping around among dissident South Koreans, it raised the number of those willing to go north to 70,000. When this number was passed on to the U.N. truce negotiators, they were stunned. They had already (and unwisely) given Nam Il & Co. a much higher estimate; they knew the Reds would not accept the 70,000 figure. The U.N. negotiators reportedly asked Matt Ridgway for a rescreening. Ridgway referred the request to Van Fleet. Van Fleet, however, stoutly insisted that the prison stockades were under control, and resented any suggestion that they were not. Ridgway—and Washington—backed him up.

Gaudy Propaganda. So the 70,000 figure was presented to the Communists and they exploded. In presenting the figures as if every prisoner had been specifically consulted, the U.N. made a serious mistake. But the Communists also made a mistake. Apparently they knew everything that went on in the stockades; with the force of facts, they could have attacked the U.N. figures as incomplete and distorted by prisoner-to-prisoner intimidation. Instead, following their preference for the