The American Army had been ineffective at Koje-do, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), and the reasons lay in the background of the POW question:
The United States had never faced handling massed POW’s since the War Between the States, and both sides had botched it then; in World War I the Allies shouldered the burden; and in the last war it was not until 1943 Americans had any prisoners, and these were from a foe of the same basic culture, who sensed they were already beaten.
There had never been enough Japanese POWs to matter.
But in Korea the United States not only had taken thousands of POW’s of alien culture; it faced an alien psychology also. The “specially trained” guard units sent out from the States understood neither Orientals nor Communists.
The first mistake was taking prisoners, in the first place.
If you’re not prepared to deal with them, and they damn well should have been, then you don’t take them. There’s nothing in the Law of War that says you have to, and given the way the North Koreans and Chinese both treated US and ROK prisoners, they should have gotten precisely the same treatment–Hands wired behind back, stripped of their clothing, and then shot in the back of the head.
I’ve talked to too many guys who had to deal with that crap from the first year of the war, one of whom was a graves registration section leader. The crap he saw, and had to clean up after…? Yeah; you don’t want to know. Not even Fehrenbach managed to get it on paper. The North Koreans and Chinese did nothing to earn the right to be taken prisoner in the first damn place, and all of them should have simply been shot out of hand.
Korea was not a polite, genteel war as we fought in Europe. Aspects of it were arguably less humane than even the Pacific Theater, and we should have either been prepared to fight the ideological battle, or to simply fight a war of extermination, no quarter given, none asked.
You really, really do not want to know what happened to an awful lot of American and ROK soldiers that made the mistake of allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. That graves registration guy I knew only came through the experience as sane as he did because he was a deeply devout Lutheran and had his religious beliefs to fall back on. He kept track of a lot of his peers and subordinates, and the comment he made to me about that was that they’d never have a reunion because most of them were dead, one way or another, before 1960. Suicide, the bottle, or “suspicious self-inflicted automobile accidents”. If I remember what he told me, they’d had a company of guys combing South Korea looking for sites after Pusan and the advance north, with most of those guys being pretty damaged by the experience. It wasn’t just the way the US and ROK prisoners were killed, it was also the way they had to go digging through a lot of mass civilian graves to sort them all out.
Not surprisingly, they were all sworn to secrecy and told not to talk to the press about what they saw or found–Didn’t want to “inflame the public”, donchaknow?
We’ve been led by dumbass hypocrites for a long, long time.
Not coincidentally, you want to know the “real deal” about the wars we’ve fought in, you really need to talk to the graves registration types and the guys doing casualty recovery. Friend of mine from Iraq did that for his military career, and it was… Interesting, to say the least, talking to him about the missions they’d done inside North Korea. Many of the remains they recovered showed obvious signs of torture and really ugly deaths, and some of the ones they recovered in the nineties and managed to identify through genes showed ambivalent signs about when, precisely, they’d died. At least one set had indicators that seemed to show that the owner of those remains had been alive into the 1960s… Nothing was ever mentioned about that, though, by anyone–Just a blurb in the press about them being recovered, repatriated, and identified.