where youths from their countries were dying even as their leaders attempted to negotiate an armistice with a stubborn Communist enemy.
Optimistic talk of "Home by Christmas" had long since been dismissed as a pipe dream by the troops, a far different army from the raw, green boys who had arrived in Korea to face war for the first time a year and a half ago. Now, they knew what war was as they faced death every day in the icy cold of their second Korean winter, fighting an enemy that had prepared for this for years.
The armistice talks on which they had embarked with high hopes a half a year ago were to drag on through all of 1952 and halfway into 1953 while the two armies traded blows in a savage war with neither victor nor vanquished. Even the cease-fires that the negotiators reluctantly called from time to time provided no respite for the men on the front lines, for both the U.N. forces and Communist forces used the lull to strengthen their defenses and replenish their manpower and supplies.
Though the military headquarters directing the forces of the United Nations was located in Tokyo, and Japan was the home base and rest station for the troops, all the action was on the peninsula on the other side of the straits while the key policy decisions were being made in Washington or in the United Nations. The correspondents, concerned only with the action, traveled to Korea in a steady stream from No. 1 Shimbun Alley to report and film the war. Korean correspondents played a major role in gathering the news. It wasn't only the language difficulties involved. The names of Korean newsmen like Bill Shinn of AP, George Suh of UP, and Bang-Yang Lee of UP Movietone, whose names became synonymous with top-line news reporting, had the best contacts and news sources in both the government and military forces of South Korea.
A starting point for the armistice talks in Korea seemed to have been reached on December 3, 1951, when the Communists agreed to the freezing of foreign troop strength in Korea and for the first time agreed to admit inspection teams north of the 38th parallel, and the United Nations reciprocated by dropping its insistence upon aerial inspection and retention of control over U.N.-occupied islands north of the cease-fire line.
The negotiators moved on to the first question on the agenda, prisoner exchange, and came up against a stone wall. The United Nations was committed to freedom of choice: each prisoner should be free to choose whether he wanted to go north or south. The Communists were equally stubborn in demanding that every Red army captive be repatriated to where he came from. Moreover, before discussing exchange rules, the Allied side wanted to know how many Allied prisoners the Communists would release for the 132,000 Communist prisoners in U.N. hands.
To break the stalemate, the negotiators took a step-by-step approach. They decided first to count actual numbers of POWs desiring repatriation and those choosing political asylum. The U.N. began by screening the prisoners held in the giant POW compounds on Koje Island, off the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula.
Koje-do was turned into a prisoner-of-war camp by the U.N. Command early in 1952. On the island, it erected four barbed-wire enclosures, each divided into eight compounds, and confined in them more than 132,000 POWs and 38,000 civilian internees. Though controlled nominally by U.S. and ROK guards, the inmates were infiltrated by commissars and cadres, trained to organize rebellion and unrest. These "bosses" kept the compounds constantly in ferment, with fighting, riots, and murders almost a daily occurrence.
On December 11, when debate on prisoner exchange began at Panmunjom, the U.N.'s figures showed total casualties of 305,000 dead, wounded, missing, or captured, of which 192,000 were South Koreans, 104,000 Americans, and 9,000 from other U.N. countries. By contrast, the U.N. listed in its hands 132,474 Communist POWs, of which 95,531 were North Koreans, 20,700 Chinese Communists, and 16,243 former South Korean troops who were captured and impressed into the Communist army.
Against these figures, the Communists said that they held 11,599 U.N. POWs, consisting of 7,142 South Koreans, 3,198 Americans, and 1,219 other U.N. nationals. This stark contrast with the U.N.'s calculations and the claim of 65,000 captives made by Communist radio in the first months of war led to an angry outburst from the U.N. side.
Despite this, screening began in February at Koje-do, only to be disrupted by a series of violent outbreaks as the Communist commissars attempted to cow fellow inmates into choosing repatriation. Units of the 27th Infantry Regiment sent to preserve order were attacked by 1,000 prisoners who charged out of their barracks wielding spears, knives, and axes. In the resulting melee, one American and 75 prisoners died, and 39 Americans and 139 prisoners were wounded.
The screening revealed that only seventy-five thousand of the POWs at Koje-do wanted repatriation back to Communism. The Reds broke off armistice talks.
On May 7, when the prisoners of Compound 76 demanded a meeting with the newly arrived camp commandant, Brigadier General Francis T. Dodd, he stood outside an open gate talking to their leaders when the prisoners charged and pulled him inside the compound. Dodd's aide saved himself by clinging to a gatepost. Shinn's report was sent to AP in Tokyo, and, after the U.N. Command withdrew its hold order, made headlines in America.
Dodd was released three days later after being forced to sign a statement that U.N. forces had killed and wounded some prisoners. Though the U.N. disclaimed the statement, calling it a "lie" made under duress, the incident gave the Communists food for propaganda that was expanded into charges that the U.N. used the prisoners as guinea pigs for bacteriological tests. A mob of correspondents descended on Koje-do to report on the situation there.
When Dodd's replacement arrived to take charge of Koje-do, he broke up the prisoner compounds into smaller groups of five hundred inmates each. During their transfer to their new compounds, another wild melee occurred at Compound 76. U.N. paratroopers, backed by tanks, subdued the prisoners by force.
During this time, furious battles raged daily along the front of outpost hills which won fleeting fame in newspaper headlines. Though small, they were lethal enough to keep correspondents and photographers busy. Adding to the difficulty of reporting the developments in Korea were the differences on the U.S.-U.N. side over the U.N. goals in entering the war, the question of military strategy versus political policy, strained further by the outspoken insistence of President Syngman Rhee that the goal of the fighting was a united Korea.
A propaganda warfare ensued with the U.N. charging the Reds of being afraid to admit that the Communist prisoners in U.N. hands didn't want Communism. The Reds countered by broadcasting "confessions" of captured American pilots to engaging in bacteriological warfare.
Throughout these exchanges, the Allied soldiers kept their sense of humor. "Just about every dugout carried a sign posted near the entrance," Poats reported. Anything from "Waldorf Towers Basement" to "Home Sweet Home," and "Marilyn Monroe Slept Here." And fallen off a rickety bridge post near the 38th parallel, a sign: "Gateway to Manchuria."
In the second year of the war, from mid-1951 to mid-1952, the air force stepped up its attacks. This systematic destruction of Communist supply lines "raised the price in man-hours and precious supplies that Communist China and Russia had to pay to support a massive army," according to Rud Poats. Though the U.N. prevented the Communists from launching a new offensive, the Red Army was able to rebuild its strength. "By mid-1952,