UNITED NATIONS: A Story of Blood

This week grey-haired Dr. Charles Mayo of Mayo Clinic fame took the floor in the U.N. General Assembly’s political committee to answer with a surgeon’s precision the Communist charges that the U.S. had waged germ warfare in Korea. When he sat down, he had inscribed in the record a new and unforgettable chapter in the black chronicles of Communist treachery and brutality.

The Communist germ warfare propaganda, said Dr. Mayo, involved “the honor and integrity not only of my country and her soldiers but also of the U.N. itself. We cannot allow this whole distorted story to slide away like water off a duck’s back.” It was a story not of water but of blood.

Target: Free Men. It was minutely detailed, and supported, as Dr. Mayo pointed out, by hundreds of eyewitness reports. The Communists accused at least 107 captured U.S. airmen of engaging in bacteriological warfare, and ordered them to sign confessions. Forty, despite long torture, heroically refused to sign. Under duress, 36 did sign. What is a man’s breaking point? “Many other individuals died in the process,” said Mayo. Fourteen are confirmed as dead, 17 others are still listed as missing.

The interrogating and torturing was based on Soviet methods and directed on the spot by Soviet personnel. “Past masters at the business of getting the kind of confessions they want,” Mayo called the Russians, looking toward the seat where old Soviet Purge Trials Prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky usually sits (he was absent that day). Vishinsky, noted Mayo, “is an authority on this subject.”

“We must remember,” continued Dr. Mayo, “that all this was not done as mere senseless brutality; it was done for one single purpose, to make free men serve Communist ambitions.”

Cry in the Dark. Captured airmen were separated from other P.W.s and taken to a place near Pyongyang that the prisoners came to call “Pak’s Palace.” It was a command center of Russian-directed Chinese and North Korean interrogators. Some of the airmen were taken to a similar center in Mukden, Manchuria. From the documented and sworn statements of returned prisoners, U.N. Delegate Mayo read out the record:

“The tortures used in these cases, although they include many brutal physical injuries, are not like the medieval tortures of the rack and the thumbscrew. They are subtler, more prolonged, and intended to be more terrible in their effect. They are calculated to disintegrate the mind of an intelligent victim, to distort his sense of values to a point where he will not simply cry out ‘I did it!’ but will become a seemingly willing accomplice to the complete destruction of his integrity and the production of an elaborate fiction … It is a method obviously calculated to bring a man to the point where a dry crust of bread or a few hours’ uninterrupted sleep is a great event in his life. All the [victims] were subjected to the same pattern . . .

“The total picture presented is one of human beings reduced to a status lower than that of animals; filthy, full of lice, festered wounds full of maggots; their sickness regulated to a point just short of death; unshaven, without haircuts or baths for as much as a year; men in rags, exposed to the elements; fed with carefully measured minimum quantities and lowest quality of food and unsanitary water . . .isolated, faced with squads of trained interrogators, bullied incessantly, deprived of sleep and browbeaten into mental anguish.”

The case histories spoke for themselves. Here were five men who never broke:

15T LIEUT. JAMES L. STANLEY of Decatur, Ga.: “He was stood at attention for five hours at a time; confined eight days in a doorless cell less than six feet long; held to the ground by two guards while a third kicked and slapped him; stood at attention 22 hours until he fell, then hit while lying down with the side of a hatchet . . . interrogated for three hours with a spotlight six inches from his face, ordered to confess while a pistol was held at the back of his head; placed under a roof drain all night during a rainstorm; left without food three days and water eight days; . . put before a firing squad and given a last chance; hung by the hands and feet from the rafters of a house.”

15T LIEUT. FRANCIS A. STRIEBY of Okonoko, W.Va.: “Interrogated for ten days while in handcuffs … He refused to yield and was taken to Mukden . . . There his legs were shackled with chains, the chains kicked into his shins by guards and the wounds in his shins left to fester with no medical aid. Three separate times he was dragged about the floor, kicked in the legs and back and almost lifted from the floor by his hair and ears. Once in an effort to open his clasped hands five guards pinned him to his cell wall, hit him repeatedly in the body and forced open his fingers and thumb one by one, whereupon he struck them back.”

15T LIEUT. ROBERT C. LURIE of Chicago: “Interrogated over 50 times, was tried four times for being a ‘war criminal’ and sentenced to death three times . . . The Chinese Communists repeatedly told him he could avoid all these trials and pressures by a simple ‘confession.’ ”

15T LIEUT. JOSEPH E. MORELAND of Oil Hill, Kans.: “Interrogated for over 1,800 hours. He observed Soviet personnel guiding the interrogations. He was taken to Mukden . . . tried twice for refusing to confess germ warfare. The first trial ended in a sentence to a corrective labor camp—and a sentence of execution against his daughter in the U.S. At all times he was in solitary confinement.”

2ND LIEUT. EDWARD G. IZBICKY of Chicago : “Interrogated 8½ hours a day for 60 days and four hours a day for 54 days. On May 25, 1953, he was sentenced to solitary confinement for 100 years—or until he accepted the germ warfare charges. He was then thrown into a hole 5 ft. long, 4 ft. wide and 4 ft. high, where he was left for a week without food or water. He never wrote a confession.”

There were more like them. It was no surprise that some had given in at last; what was remarkable was that so many courageous men had not.

“Consider the evidence on those who did not yield,” said Dr. Mayo proudly. “A prisoner who the Communists assume is already acting like an animal is offered in sharp terms a purely animal stimulus: food or death. The obvious animal response is expected. Yet in one case, a man was sentenced to death twelve times and he refused to yield. Another man was made to dig his own grave, was taken before a firing squad, heard the command to fire and heard the pistols click on empty chambers; and he refused to yield. Such testimony as this seems to teach us that the spirit of man can run deeper than the reflexes of Pavlov.”