The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold Story by Monica Kim (review)

This book is not for readers intolerant of wordy, repetitive, and sometimes obscure prose or occasional minor factual errors. Yet those able to forgive such shortcomings will learn much from the original research and analysis provided by a promising young scholar.

Author Monica Kim takes the Korean War off the battlefields of military conflict and into the interrogation rooms in which prisoners-of-war (POWs) were grilled by their captors about their individual histories and beliefs. Making extensive use of post-colonial theory, Kim traces Korea's painful journey from independence, to a colony of Japan, to liberation from Japan under conditions that left the country divided and still imposed on from outside, to a brutal war that resolved little, and, finally, to the post-armistice dispensation of POWs. She devotes major attention to how the United States attempted to construct a liberal world order after World War II and how that attempt influenced the U.S. occupation of Korea, the creation (through the United Nations [UN]) of an independent South Korea, and eventually the policy of "voluntary repatriation" during the armistice talks in the Korean War.

Most importantly, Kim describes and analyzes how Korean POWs sought to maintain their lives and their individual identities under extremely difficult circumstances. She also includes a rich final chapter on the journey of American POWs through camps in North Korea and back to the United States, where they faced interrogations by their own government at least as rigorous as those executed by their former captors. The Interrogation Rooms and David Cheng Chang's The Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean War (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019) represent major contributions to the scholarship on the Korean War, especially in moving the ever-broadening fields of diplomatic and military history beyond their traditional concentration on high-level politics and battlefield tactics and strategies to integrate and contextualize the personal stories of soldiers who were captured.

Kim argues that the POW issue in the Korean War is best seen as part of "the changing script of warfare in the mid-twentieth century," a process in which "the interior worlds of individuals" became at least as important as "a traditional sense of sovereignty in the state-territorial sense" (p. 5). This is so because Korea and the other "hot" wars of the Cold War occurred in the context of decolonization in which societies were often deeply divided internally, in part due to outside influences. In South Korea the predominant external influence was the United States, for which "the interrogation room was a compressed site for the configuring and inventing of the labor, infrastructure, and policy required for [its] . . . new liberal empire" (p. 15). The United States created "a stark binary between 'voluntary' and 'forced' repatriation at the negotiating tables" and, in doing so, made "the stunning assertion . . . that the most opaque and coercive space of warfare . . . could be transformed . . . into a liberal, bureaucratic space" (p. 8). This assertion was nonsense, a point other historians have made, albeit with a less theoretical perspective.

The most original part of the book, other than Kim's sometimes labored theoretical constructs, develops the stories of individual POWs and their interrogators. Kim's writing is far more accessible here, and her research in U.S. archives—including the recently declassified records of the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps, Korean-language materials, UN and International Red Cross documents, obscure memoirs, and oral histories, over half of which she conducted herself—is truly impressive. Unlike David Cheng Chang, whose research on Chinese POWs is equally impressive, Kim devotes most of her attention to Korean prisoners in UN camps in South Korea and their interrogators and to U.S. prisoners in North Korea and their Chinese and North Korean interrogators. Two of the most fascinating stories are of the 76 Korean POWs who upon release chose to go to a "neutral" country and of Japanese Americans who served as...