Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.P.O.W.S: Twenty Years in China
In the winter of 1951, Mary Downey waved goodbye to her eldest son John at a small Connecticut train station. She had only a vague notion of the job he was going to take in Japan —it had something to do with the Korean War. "A shudder went through me then," she recalled, "and I have always felt it to be a premonition of the horrible thing that was to happen to Jack."
A year later, she was informed that he was missing on a flight from Japan to Korea. In 1953, she received...
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