International: The Captive Audience

• Share

As the timid, thankful repatriates told their stories at Munsan and Inchon last week, one fact became increasingly clear: the Chinese Communists have waged a ceaseless battle for the minds of their captives. Whatever cruel or gentle things the Chinese did, their purpose was to convince the P.W.s that the U.S. started the war, that the Chinese "volunteers" were their friends, that the U.S. was conducting germ warfare and had massacred North Korean and Chinese prisoners. "Physically," one ex-prisoner said of his Chinese camp, "it was all right, but mentally it was damn rough." Almost to a man, the returnees reported that it was the North Koreans who had abused them with wanton brutality.

How successful was the Chinese brainwashing? Some Americans were influenced by the endless harangues, and were known and despised by their mates as the "progressives." Others (the "reactionaries") never gave an inch to the Communists. Some occasionally feigned agreement in order to improve their lot, then "came back to Uncle Sammy's side" in private.

Said Pfc. Thomas R. Murray of Baltimore: "A lot of the time I worried about what was right and what was wrong. After they've pounded it into your head so long, you begin to wonder. I wavered myself—it would last for a week—and then I'd say, 'Hell, that don't sound right,' and I'd go back to thinking the way I always did . . . But after three years, you had a little doubt, you were a little confused."

Jim Crow. In Camp No. 5, at Pyoktong on the Yalu River, where most of last week's repatriates had been held, the Chinese segregated Negroes from whites, tried to separate them ideologically as well. Negroes who tried to chat with their white friends were told: "You can't talk to them in America; why talk to them here?" For two hours a day, the Negroes were lectured on the Negro problem in the U.S. Pfc. Alfred Simpson, a Negro from Philadelphia, said the men were encouraged to speak out freely in discussion groups, but were punished if they said the wrong things. Reported Simpson:

"The Chinese would say you had a hostile attitude and they would . . . put you under the floor in a hole without food until your hostile attitude changed." Other "hostile" prisoners were confined alone up to 30 days in a cold, barren "jail," forced to sit at attention for 16 to 18 hours a day on rough log benches, or given onerous work details.

Third Degree. Lieut. Colonel (then Major) Thomas D. Harrison, a West Point Air Force officer and a cousin of the U.N. chief armistice negotiator, got harsher punishment for not cooperating. Shot down in May 1951 in his F80 plane,