The Tough Prisoners

There was quite a celebration last week in the mining town of Benham (pop. 3,500), in Kentucky's Harlan County. A parade of 200 cars passed through the main street and 10,000 spectators from Benham and nearby towns looked on. At the athletic stadium, local leaders put on a big program of speeches and gift presentations. The occasion: the return of Army Staff sergeant Jack Flanary, 21, after 32 months in a prison camp in North Korea.

In the middle of the welcoming ceremonies, Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion officials suddenly walked off the platform. They said there were rumors that Sergeant Flanary, while in prison camp, had become a "progressive," i.e., responsive to the Communists' indoctrination program. A Tennessee reporter, covering Flanary's arrival, quoted Flanary as saying that the U.S. Government would have to prove to him that it did not resort to germ warfare in Korea.

Flanary later denied that he believed the germ-warfare charge, but he admitted that "some others" in his camp called him a progressive. His explanation: he had just done a lot of reading in the camp library to better his vocabulary. He stoutly insisted that he believed in capitalism, not Communism, and wanted to be a good American citizen.

Flanary's Harlan County neighbors, people of strong opinion themselves,* were confused by these strange charges, and their confusion was shared by a great many U.S. citizens. The returned prisoners had gone through an ordeal which no group of Americans, not even the prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, had ever experienced--captivity by an enemy methodically intent on mobilizing prisoners' minds, as well as their military information, for his own purposes. It was hard for the home folks to grasp what this experience had meant.

It was still harder for the prisoners to talk about what they had gone through. A man suddenly released to freedom after long immersion in Communist captivity is apt to get some bad psychological bends. One of the best descriptions was given by Corporal Joe Green, 23, a Negro infantryman who survived 32 months in a Red camp: "When I first got home," he said, "I was in a daze, like maybe I had been hit on the head or something. Then I began to get on my feet, and now the whole thing is just as though I had gone and seen a movie about it happening to somebody else. And that's the way you got to keep it, if you don't want to go back to being dazed again."

Every Man's Breaking Point. Just what had the prisoners gone through? Their most brutal suffering was the early treatment by the North Koreans. The long march north to the Yalu in the fall of 1950 was as bloody an experience as the Bataan Death March. After December 1950, the Chinese Communists took complete charge. Where the North Korean atrocities were largely spontaneous, individual acts of cruelty, the Chinese used cruelty calculatingly, as an organized means to a specific end.

The Chinese Communists, when dealing with prisoners, had two big immediate objectives: 1) military and other information. 2) confessions from U.S. airmen to substantiate their phony "germ warfare" charges. They proceeded in their interrogations partly by fairly orthodox tactics--orthodox, at least, since the era of total warfare has made obsolescent the old Geneva Convention safeguard that a prisoner need tell only his name, rank and serial number. There is not much an average prisoner can do against enemy intelligence officers equipped with a good file system and the determination to stop at nothing if the man under examination seems to have valuable information.

The Chinese also interrogated prisoners endlessly, at all hours of the day and night. Said Infantryman Green, who was first questioned on his way to the prison camp: "They'd march us in the evenings, and when you were tired enough to drop, they'd stop around midnight, and the interrogators would take over.

"They were English-speaking Chinese, and they were good. They knew their stuff. There was no rough stuff, at least as far as I was concerned, but they would keep at you and keep at you. I kept telling them that I was a soldier and didn't have to give anything more than my name, rank and serial number, and that if I did, my government could punish me. There was one Chinese officer who used to stare at me when I said that, and then he'd sort of snort and say, 'Your government! Don't worry about your government now, boy. It will never lay hands on you again; but, you know, it's completely within my power to take your life if I choose to do so.' "When the Chinese wanted information or confessions badly, they tortured. Last week the U.S. heard about the ordeal of two young Air Force colonels, Walker Mahurin and Andrew J. Evans, both of them World War II aces with brilliant flying records (Mahurin shot down 22 planes in World War II, 3 1/2 in Korea). Mahurin was made to sit at attention on a stool for hours, until he would collapse. This lasted for 30 days and drove him to attempt suicide. Evans was thrown into a cell no bigger than a packing case, where he was not allowed to sleep, lie down or shut his eyes. Under such treatment, they "confessed," and they saw the confessions of some 200 others. Said Evans: "Every man has his breaking point."

Some Started Crying. The end of military interrogations gave no relief to the prisoners, for then the ceaseless attempts at Communist indoctrination began. They followed a pattern. First, the prisoners were split up according to rank and race. Officers, for instance, ended up in Camp No. 2, most Negroes were put in Camp No. 5, "reactionaries," i.e., those who gave the Communists trouble, were put in Camp No. 3 (TIME, Sept. 7). Negroes were generally segregated, and the Communists tried their unsuccessful best to stir them up against their white fellow prisoners.

While the U.S. provost marshals on Koje Island were letting the Communist prisoners organize their own compounds, Chinese political officers started indoctrinating the Americans. Each camp compound had libraries stuffed with Marx, Lenin, Stalin, the New York and London Daily Workers, the party-line National Guardian (of Manhattan), even specially prepared U.S. history books "all fixed up," as one P.W. put it, "about how bad we treated the Indians and the Spanish."

In their long daily harangues, the Red officers kept endlessly repeating the same propaganda charges, and prisoners could not leave until they in turn repeated the satisfactory answers to the Communists' questions, e.g., Why did the U.S. start the war in Korea? One camp was refused food until every man in it signed the Stockholm "peace" petition. There were some beatings and tortures, but generally the Reds worked the carrot-and-stick techniques--better food and treatment if they got the right answers, no food and brutal treatment if they did not.

If a man looked psychologically weak, they gave him the full propaganda treatment, from special lectures to free liquor and cigarettes. Said Corporal Green: "They concentrated hardest on the kids, those 20 or under. It seemed as though they were the easiest to break down. I know of three or four kids who went clear out of their minds under the pressure."

"You Couldn't Argue." The prisoners responded differently to the unending Chinese pressure. The stout-hearted "reactionaries" openly defied the Reds and took the brunt of their beatings and other bad treatment. The greater number of the P.W.s did what they were told, ducked Communist propaganda chores as much as possible, but stayed out of trouble. "Progressive" was a flexible title. A "progressive" might be one of the rare out-and-out Red sympathizers or simply a man the "reactionaries" thought was not vocal enough in his opposition.

On the whole, although they had skillful military interrogators, the Reds overplayed their propaganda efforts too much to have a lasting effect. Most of the political officers were clearly victims of their own doctrinaire sermons. (Sometimes, Russian interrogators had to come around to help them out.) Said Pfc. Jesse Durham, a confirmed "reactionary": "You couldn't argue with them. They were just like children; they didn't have any reasoning ability."

Corporal Green, whose experiences were typical of most, thought the Red indoctrinators were "clumsy." They were also very literal-minded. Said Green: "We learned to answer them real quick, saying anything that came to your mind, just so it was false. I told them that my folks lived in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills [they live in a small five-room house in Los Angeles], that we all drove Cadillacs and that my best friends were Clark Gable and Henry Fonda. They'd carefully take it down on notepads and let me go back to the company."

In sum, there is no doubt that the U.S. prisoners were valuable to the Chinese Reds, for propaganda reasons, during their captivity. There is equally no doubt that naive Chinese efforts to sow some lasting seeds of Communist propaganda failed. Out of 3,500 prisoners, only 90 have been identified as "progressives." Of these, Army officials believe that fewer than 30 showed themselves really susceptible to enemy propaganda, and some of the 30 had histories of pro-Communist leanings before induction. The great majority of the U.S. prisoners met the challenge well. They proved that the U.S. soldier fighting indoctrinated Communists is a pretty well indoctrinated fighting man himself.

* Says an old union song, called Which Side Are You On?, written in the hard-shooting days of Harlan's labor unrest: They say in Harlan County, There are no neutrals there; You'll either be a union man, Or a thug for J. H. Blair . . .

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