The Captive Audience

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,

Harrison had his shattered left leg amputated by Chinese doctors and received excellent medical treatment. But then he was turned over to North Korean police, who grilled him on Air Force secrets. He was put in a room with three other allied prisoners and denied food for a week while the others were fed in front of him. "I still would not talk. They stripped me naked and wired me to a chair. They forced my head back and put a wet towel over my face and kept pouring water on it. You can't breathe. It's like drowning. When I passed out, they would bring me back to consciousness by jabbing me with live cigarettes ... I never broke and I never told them anything."

For a Cigarette. Men who were captured early in the war all told of the gruesome death marches in the winter of 1950-51, of the 2,000 prisoners who died of dysentery, malnutrition and cold. But all the returnees agreed that their treatment improved noticeably when the Chinese took over, and again when the armistice talks began. The Chinese were tough but not brutal, punished prisoners for trying to escape or for ideological mistakes, seldom beat them. "Progressives" got better food, medical treatment and extra cigarettes. Many returnees were bitter about the progressive boys. Said Pfc. Amos McClure: "What would you think of someone who would sell out his country for a cigarette?" At least one progressive had been killed for informing, and at least eight progressives apparently were staying with their new comrades.

But for all the time and effort, and with all the advantages of one-sided interrogation, the Chinese had made few converts. The G.I.s in Munsan this week, catching up on Cokes and Stateside newspapers, were as unmistakably, incorrigibly American as the welcome sign overhead which read SHAKE, PODNER.

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