KOREA: The Reactionaries

After all the unhappy stories of informers and “progressives” among American prisoners in Communist hands, the hardy and happy released prisoners who jumped out of the trucks at Inchon last week had a different tale to tell—candid, bitter, and heartening. They were inmates of tough Camp Three at Changsong on the Yalu. They were the anti-Communist “reactionaries” who resisted indoctrination.

Most of them were young, tough, freewheeling Americans of 20 and 21, and they had the courage to have their say and the strength to take their punishment. Said Corporal “Buster Brown” White, of Alabama City, Ala.: “If they accused us of somethin’, we said we didn’t know nuthin’ about it. If they tossed us in ‘the hole,’ we just kept our mouths shut. We just didn’t do nuthin’ they told us to do.”

The prisoners at Camp Three never stopped harassing their captors. Recalled Corporal Salvatore Conte of Brooklyn: “They said that Chiang Kai-shek had no legal rights to Formosa. It was supposed to be a free discussion, and so I piped up and said that according to agreements made between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, there wasn’t anything wrong with Chiang being on Formosa. I really didn’t know what I was talking about, but . . . I wanted to say something to knock them down.” The reactionaries set fire to the lecture hall, poured ink into Chinese laundry baskets, refused to carry Red banners in demonstrations, cussed out their guards. When British Communist Newsman Alan Winnington visited the camp, the P.W.s booed him down and he never came back. Once, the reactionaries ganged up on the handful of progressives in the camp, sent 15 of them to the hospital for repairs.

The men of Camp Three paid heavily for their “hostile attitude.” They had almost no medical care, and their food was bad and wormy. They labored long and hard, climbing up mountains to gather wood, digging ditches, tending fields. Some, like Conte, squatted for months in “the hole,” a tiny cell in which a prisoner could not stand or lie down. “My biggest worry was that I was going to lose my mind in there,” said Conte. “Then I learned to keep my mind a blank for hours on end, and somehow I didn’t go nuts.”

Some men were forced to kneel for several hours on sharp pebbles, supporting a 200-lb. stone on their shoulders. Angry guards bayoneted one P.W. when he walked out on a Russian movie. A Texas corporal was forced to stand on tiptoe, his hands tied behind his back, his neck in a noose that would choke him if he sagged. Some were beaten. Said Sergeant Fisher Watkins: “They pistol-whipped me, but they didn’t knock me down.” He added confidently: “They couldn’t hit you that hard.”