Cold Days in Hell: American POWs in Korea

1. The Summer Soldiers

1 The Summer Soldiers It would be good for someone among the prisoners to make a statement on the radio that the treatment of prisoners by the Koreans is very good. Joseph Stalin At  hours on the morning of June , , the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) fired a short, heavy bombardment at key targets south of the th Parallel. At precisely , armored columns crossed the border along six major attack routes, the most important of which was the corridor through Uijonbu toward the South Korean capital of Seoul. Accustomed to sporadic gunfire along the border, many civilians, including Larry Zellers, an American missionary in Kaesong, assumed the predawn ruckus was merely another “rice raid.” He would regret that mistake for the next three years. He and his fellow missionaries spent them in North Korean prison camps. At Kaesong, the attackers were opposed by a single regiment of South Korean infantry, dispersed along a fifteen-kilometer front. The North Koreans had concealed their attack preparations so successfully that on the morning of the invasion, many South Korean soldiers were absent on weekend passes, leaving only eleven thousand troops along the th Parallel to man the border defenses. Behind the armored columns came agents of the North Korean Home Affairs Department. Their mission was to identify and arrest enemies of the people, including land owners, government officials, North Korean refugees, and Western “spies,” such as Zellers and his fellow missionaries. The NKPA invaded with more than one hundred thousand soldiers, many of whom were veterans of the Chinese civil war. North Korean premier Kim Il Sung had planned the invasion for more than a year, hoping to crush the newborn Republic of Korea’s pro-American regime and reunify the peninsula under his rule. With generous Soviet support, Kim had built a modern, mechanized juggernaut armed with high-performance aircraft, selfpropelled artillery, and T- tanks. In addition, Soviet advisors trained the The epigraph that opens this chapter is from a ciphered cable sent by Stalin to the Soviet ambassador in Pyongyang, North Korea, on July , . 8 chapter 1 NKPA and provided battle plans for the invasion. North Korean spies and infiltrators had been gathering intelligence for months. Koreans had endured the first four decades of the twentieth century under the harsh colonial rule of the Japanese Empire. When that empire collapsed in , American and Soviet diplomats agreed to divide Korea into “zones of influence,” separated by the th Parallel, until national elections could be held (see map ). In the north, the Soviets sealed the border, rejected the proposed elections, and installed a “people’s government” led by a young Stalin protégé, Kim Il Sung. In the south, the US Army reluctantly provided combat units to administer the southern zone, guard the border, and assist in the creation of a competent indigenous constabulary force. In , South Koreans elected a representative parliament and their first president, rightwing nationalist Syngman Rhee. President Truman withdrew the combat units in , leaving behind a skeleton crew of advisors—the Korean Military Advisors’ Group (KMAG)—to continue training South Korean forces. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (l.) and Dr. Syngman Rhee, Korea’s first President (r.). (Courtesy Defense Imagery Management Operations Center [NARA file # -SC-]) the summer soldiers 9 On paper, these forces seemed capable of repulsing the northern invaders . The army of the Republic of Korea (ROK), whom Westerners commonly referred to as “ROKs,” fielded ninety-eight thousand soldiers, trained and equipped by their American sponsors. Unlike their northern cousins, however, ROK units were armed only with light artillery, antiquated antitank weapons, and no armored units. In addition, the ROK Army suffered from desultory training and often inept leadership. Syngman Rhee was both a staunch anticommunist and a corrupt and brutal dictator. The ROK Army included courageous, professional officers, but promotion within its ranks depended more on political patronage than competence. As David Halberstam would later write, it was “the most marginal kind of army fighting to defend the most marginal kind of country, a nation that did not yet really exist.” The US Embassy in Seoul had realized the threat of an invasion, but American officials initially misread both the North Koreans’ strength and the South Koreans’ weakness. At midnight on the evening of the attack, US ambassador John Muccio belatedly directed the evacuation of American civilians from the peninsula. While the Americans fled...