Americans who felt, and still feel, that their soldiers taken by a power of different culture and lesser standards of humanity should be, or will be, treated in accordance with decent Western standards are naïve.
They were naïve in 1950, since no American fighting men were prepared in any way to face what they could be expected to face. The Army, as well as government and society, was at fault. All had known for some years of Communist methods of indoctrinating POW’s — the world knew of Colonel General Paulus’ experiences after Stalingrad — and knew what Asian Communist culture was like. But just as they had not prepared their young men to fight, they had not prepared them to go into captivity.
[...]
In Andersonville, Americans fought each other for scraps of food, and let each other die. Tough panzer grenadiers of the Wehnnacht, whom no one has accused of being overly fat or soft, went listless in Communist pens, and died “for no reason.” Americans and Britons in Japanese prisons retreated into dream worlds, and some informed on their buddies.
A human being in a prison camp, in the hands of his enemies, is flesh, and shudderingly vulnerable.
A slender Chinese officer addressed American POWs at the mining camp they would come to call Death Valley:
He told them that the People’s Volunteers had decided to treat them, not as war criminals, but under China’s new Lenient Policy. Though the officer did not say it, the average Army POW would be treated much like an average Chinese felon or class enemy. No great pressures would be put on him, other than those of starvation, lack of medical care, and a certain amount of indoctrination.
This was the Lenient Policy. All American POW’s, however, were not subject to it. Airmen, in particular, who were bombing North Korea to rubble, rousing the hatred of both Chinese and Koreans, were criminals from the start. Later, when the typhus carried across the Yalu by the CCF hordes spread to the civil population, airmen would be accused of germ warfare, giving the CCF both an out and a chance at a propaganda coup.
Airmen, and some others, would be put under acute stress to confess alleged war crimes. Some were put in solitary. Some were physically tortured. All were starved and interrogated until their nerves shrieked. They were treated in almost the identical way that political prisoners had been treated by Communists for a generation.
Even under the Lenient Policy, no relief parcels were allowed to be delivered to Communist POW’s, nor were any neutral observers, at any time, allowed to inspect the prison camps.
[...]
It has always been customary to separate officers from sergeants, and sergeants from other ranks, in POW camps. It is the most effective way of breaking down possible resistance and cohesion in any group of prisoners, American or Hungarian. But the Chinese tried a new twist.
“No one here has any rank — you are all the same,” the Chinese said. To Sergeant Schlichter’s horror, this had an immediate appeal for many men.
One soldier went up to an officer and slapped him on the back. “Hey, Jack, how the hell are you?” He thought it was very funny.
The Chinese smiled, too.
In this way, and in others, such as putting ranking POW’s on the most degrading jobs, the Chinese broke what little discipline remained in the POW ranks.
[...]
Morale, among the captives, was already gone. Now the last shred of discipline went, and with it went many Americans’ hope of surviving.
There was no one to give the POW’s direction, except the Chinese.
[...]
The disciplines that hold men together in the face of fear, hunger, and danger are not natural. Stresses equal to, and beyond, the stress of fear and panic must be overlaid on men. Some of these stresses are called civilization. And even the highest of civilizations demands leadership.
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The veneer of civilized decency is much thinner than most Americans, even after seeing Auschwitz and Belsen, think.
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The food they received daily, in a bucket, was not enough to keep the average American in decent health. Rapidly, they began to starve.
A number had combat wounds that had received only cursory treatment. Infection and dysentery seared them, making the huts even more horrible.
[...]
Each day, Shadish and Schlichter, crawling from man to man, had to play God. To the four men who had the best chance to live, they administered the sulfa. The worse off, Schlichter said later, “We committed to God’s care.”
[...]
The prisoners continued to receive only a diet of millet and maize, boiled in a pot, delivered in a bucket, supplemented by dog. But the dogs grew more wary, and the prisoners weaker. Without salt, greens, or essential minerals, they sickened.
The sick and those with war wounds died first. Then the men without faith began to die, often, seemingly, of nothing at all.
The youngest men, oddly, died first.
[...]
In Charles Schlichter grew a feeling, which he never lost, that some American mothers had given their sons everything in the world, except a belief in themselves, their culture, and their manhood. They had, some of them, sent their sons out into a world with tigers without telling them that there were tigers, and with no moral armament.
[...]
There were some Turks and ROK’s with the Americans. To Schlichter’s knowledge, not one Turk had died.
[...]
Charles Schlichter closed out the hospital by burning the straw pallets on which the sick had lain. When the straw went into the fire, the floor and shimmering sides of the stoves were black with lice, trying to jump away.
[...]
As he left, he stood up in the cart, looking back. The last sight he had of Death Valley was of three starving Korean dogs, snuffling warily in from the hills to feed on the bodies of the young Americans they had left behind.