American POWs in Korea

American POWs in Korea PDF Author: Harry Spiller
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786405619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Over 7,000 Americans were captured during the three years of the Korean War. They wound up in 20 camps throughout North Korea with nearly 40 percent of them dying there. Some were murdered or starved, others died from poor medical treatment or from the severe cold. Despite brutal conditions, most of the POWs survived the isolation, cold, hunger and disease. Here are 16 personal accounts of men who fought the North Koreans and the Chinese and then faced life as a POW. They talk about the psychological effects, the living conditions, the medical situation, the day to day details, and liberation. These compelling stories paint a full picture of life as a prisoner of war in Korea.

American POWs in Korea

American POWs in Korea PDF Author: Harry Spiller
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786405619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Over 7,000 Americans were captured during the three years of the Korean War. They wound up in 20 camps throughout North Korea with nearly 40 percent of them dying there. Some were murdered or starved, others died from poor medical treatment or from the severe cold. Despite brutal conditions, most of the POWs survived the isolation, cold, hunger and disease. Here are 16 personal accounts of men who fought the North Koreans and the Chinese and then faced life as a POW. They talk about the psychological effects, the living conditions, the medical situation, the day to day details, and liberation. These compelling stories paint a full picture of life as a prisoner of war in Korea.

And the Wind Blew Cold

And the Wind Blew Cold PDF Author: Richard M. Bassett
Publisher: Kent State University Press
ISBN: 9780873387507
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
When Richard Bassett returned from Korea on convalescent leave in 1953, he set down his experiences in training, combat, and captivity. More than 20 years later, hospitalized for acute Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he once again faced his personal demons. This work expands the memoir to include his post-war struggles with the US government and his own wounded psyche. He describes the shock of capture and ensuing long march to Pyokdong, North Korea, Camp 5 on the Yellow River, where many prisoners died of untreated wounds, disease, hunger, paralyzing cold, and brutal mistreatment in the bitter winter of 1950-51. He recounts Chinese attempts to mentally break down prisoners in order to exploit them for propaganda. He then takes the reader through typical days in a prisoner's life, discussing food, clothing, shelter, and work; the struggle against unremitting boredom; religious, social, and recreational diversions; and even those moments of terror when all seemed lost. It refutes Cold War-era propaganda that often unfairly characterized POWs as brainwashed victims or even traitors who lacked the grit that Americans expected of their brave sons.

American Trophies

American Trophies PDF Author: Mark Sauter
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781491038987
Category : Korean War, 1950-1953
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The story of American heroes kept by our country's enemies and Washington's failure to recover them reads like a cross between "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Foreign Affairs." It uncovers decades of secrets and incompetence, right up to the Obama Administration, and reveals how Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang continue to thwart America today. Filled with previously secret documents and photos. Based on years of research around the world by an investigative historian and former Special Forces officer teamed with the POW/MIA expert son of a missing Korean War flyer, it is by turns both enthralling and upsetting. This book rips the lid off the one of the most disturbing scandals in modern US history. As you read the book, join our community to help with investigations the Pentagon and CIA can't -- or won't -- do themselves. Decipher names on declassified documents, track down Chinese and Russian officials and identify POWs in captured enemy film: cynicalattitude.com A "fascinating, disturbing and important book...America has to read it: " Sydney Schanberg, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and inspiration for the Academy Award-winning film "The Killing Fields." Wall Street Journal: "Independent researcher Mark Sauter and John Zimmerlee, the son of a missing-in-action U.S. Air Force serviceman, argue in a new e-book, that U.S. incompetence, combined with a desire to downplay the issue amid on-again-off-again negotiations with North Korea, have trumped the military's 'no man left behind' imperative. The two men also say that there is some evidence that American soldiers may still be alive in North Korea today..." Associated Press: "Mark Sauter, a private researcher and co-author with John Zimmerlee of 'American Trophies and Washington's Cynical Attitude, ' an e-book about POWs to be published this month, found in government archives a U.S. intelligence report from August 1955, two years after the war, calling for a bigger intelligence effort to learn about such POW transfers." Drudge Report: "Book: USA left POWs behind in NKorea, China, Russia..." The Washington Free Beacon: "The book, American Trophies: How American POWs Were Surrendered to North Korea, China, and Russia by Washington's 'Cynical Attitude, ' includes numerous cases of missing Americans from the Korean War, along with several from the Cold War and Vietnam War. It is based on years of research, interviews, and documents by the authors, Sauter and John Zimmerlee. Declassified intelligence reports obtained by the authors reveal that Americans were being held captive in China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union at least through the 1990s." Includes information on Korean War POWs in North Korean, Chinese and Soviet prisons; Vietnam War POWs reportedly taken to North Korea; Chinese espionage; North Korean/DPRK "salting" of American remains; KGB exploitation of US POWs; North Korea human rights/DPRK human rights; communist torture and brainwashing; Cold War history; covert action (requested by the Air Force Chief of Staff to rescue American POWs the year after the war ended); Korean War special operations; Cold War spy flights; Korean War history; Truman Administration; F-86; US-China conflicts; Soviet prison system, the Gulag; World War II prisoners of war, including German and Japanese POWs who reported Americans in Siberia; North Korean prison camps; North Korean military and government; Freedom of Information Act; North Korean agents; escapes; espionage; real-life adventures; real-life mysteries; B-29; new information on the Eisenhower Administration; F-51; Obama Administration mismanagement; National Archives; declassification and secrecy; the Punch Bowl; JPAC; 2nd ID; DPMO; Pentagon secrets; CIA operations; military intelligence collection; Korean DMZ; North Korean abductions; Stalin; Chou En-lai; US defectors; surveillance flights; and untold US diplomatic history.

Cold Days in Hell

Cold Days in Hell PDF Author: William Clark Latham
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603447512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
Prisoners suffer in every conflict, but American servicemen captured during the Korean War faced a unique ordeal. Like prisoners in other wars, these men endured harsh conditions and brutal mistreatment at the hands of their captors. In Korea, however, they faced something new: a deliberate enemy program of indoctrination and coercion designed to manipulate them for propaganda purposes. Most Americans rejected their captors’ promise of a Marxist paradise, yet after the cease fire in 1953, American prisoners came home to face a second wave of attacks. Exploiting popular American fears of communist infiltration, critics portrayed the returning prisoners as weak-willed pawns who had been “brainwashed” into betraying their country. The truth was far more complicated. Following the North Korean assault on the Republic of Korea in June of 1950, the invaders captured more than a thousand American soldiers and brutally executed hundreds more. American prisoners who survived their initial moments of captivity faced months of neglect, starvation, and brutal treatment as their captors marched them north toward prison camps in the Yalu River Valley. Counterattacks by United Nations forces soon drove the North Koreans back across the 38th Parallel, but the unexpected intervention of Communist Chinese forces in November of 1950 led to the capture of several thousand more American prisoners. Neither the North Koreans nor their Chinese allies were prepared to house or feed the thousands of prisoners in their custody, and half of the Americans captured that winter perished for lack of food, shelter, and medicine. Subsequent communist efforts to indoctrinate and coerce propaganda statements from their prisoners sowed suspicion and doubt among those who survived. Relying on memoirs, trial transcripts, debriefings, declassified government reports, published analysis, and media coverage, plus conversations, interviews, and correspondence with several dozen former prisoners, William Clark Latham Jr. seeks to correct misperceptions that still linger, six decades after the prisoners came home. Through careful research and solid historical narrative, Cold Days in Hell provides a detailed account of their captivity and offers valuable insights into an ongoing issue: the conduct of prisoners in the hands of enemy captors and the rules that should govern their treatment.

Name, Rank, and Serial Number

Name, Rank, and Serial Number PDF Author: Charles S. Young
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199381836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Vietnam POWs came home heroes, but twenty years earlier their predecessors returned from Korea to shame and suspicion. In the Korean War American prisoners were used in propaganda twice, first during the conflict, then at home. While in Chinese custody in North Korea, they were pressured to praise their treatment and criticize the war. When they came back, the Department of the Army and cooperative pundits said too many were weaklings who did not resist communist indoctrination or "brainwashing." Ex-prisoners were featured in a publicity campaign scolding the nation to raise tougher sons for the Cold War. This propaganda was based on feverish exaggerations that ignored the convoluted circumstances POWs were put in, which decisions in Washington helped create.

The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War

The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War PDF Author: Monica Kim
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069121042X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Traditional histories of the Korean War have long focused on violations of the thirty-eighth parallel, the line drawn by American and Soviet officials in 1945 dividing the Korean peninsula. But The interrogation rooms of the Korean War presents an entirely new narrative, shifting the perspective from the boundaries of the battlefield to inside the interrogation room. Upending conventional notions of what we think of as geographies of military conflict, Monica Kim demonstrates how the Korean War evolved from a fight over territory to one over human interiority and the individual human subject, forging the template for the U.S. wars of intervention that would predominate during the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. Kim looks at how, during the armistice negotiations, the United States and their allies proposed a new kind of interrogation room: one in which POWs could exercise their "free will" and choose which country they would go to after the ceasefire. The global controversy that erupted exposed how interrogation rooms had become a flashpoint for the struggles between the ambitions of empire and the demands for decolonization, as the aim of interrogation was to produce subjects who attested to a nation's right to govern. The complex web of interrogators and prisoners -- Japanese-American interrogators, Indian military personnel, Korean POWs and interrogators, and American POWs -- that Kim uncovers contradicts the simple story in U.S. popular memory of "brainwashing" during the Korean War

Cold Days in Hell

Cold Days in Hell PDF Author: William Clark Latham
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603440739
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Prisoners suffer in every conflict, but American servicemen captured during the Korean War faced a unique ordeal. Like prisoners in other wars, these men endured harsh conditions and brutal mistreatment at the hands of their captors. In Korea, however, they faced something new: a deliberate enemy program of indoctrination and coercion designed to manipulate them for propaganda purposes. Most Americans rejected their captors’ promise of a Marxist paradise, yet after the cease fire in 1953, American prisoners came home to face a second wave of attacks. Exploiting popular American fears of communist infiltration, critics portrayed the returning prisoners as weak-willed pawns who had been “brainwashed” into betraying their country. The truth was far more complicated. Following the North Korean assault on the Republic of Korea in June of 1950, the invaders captured more than a thousand American soldiers and brutally executed hundreds more. American prisoners who survived their initial moments of captivity faced months of neglect, starvation, and brutal treatment as their captors marched them north toward prison camps in the Yalu River Valley. Counterattacks by United Nations forces soon drove the North Koreans back across the 38th Parallel, but the unexpected intervention of Communist Chinese forces in November of 1950 led to the capture of several thousand more American prisoners. Neither the North Koreans nor their Chinese allies were prepared to house or feed the thousands of prisoners in their custody, and half of the Americans captured that winter perished for lack of food, shelter, and medicine. Subsequent communist efforts to indoctrinate and coerce propaganda statements from their prisoners sowed suspicion and doubt among those who survived. Relying on memoirs, trial transcripts, debriefings, declassified government reports, published analysis, and media coverage, plus conversations, interviews, and correspondence with several dozen former prisoners, William Clark Latham Jr. seeks to correct misperceptions that still linger, six decades after the prisoners came home. Through careful research and solid historical narrative, Cold Days in Hell provides a detailed account of their captivity and offers valuable insights into an ongoing issue: the conduct of prisoners in the hands of enemy captors and the rules that should govern their treatment.

Lonesome Hero

Lonesome Hero PDF Author: T. I. Han
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1463411766
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
T.I. Han relates his experiences as a prisoner of war during the Korean War.

March to Calumny

March to Calumny PDF Author: Albert D. Biderman
Publisher: New York : Macmillan [1963]
ISBN:
Category : Korean War, 1950-1953
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description


Last Seen Alive

Last Seen Alive PDF Author: Laurence Jolidon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
LAST SEEN ALIVE presents startling new evidence of Stalin-era war crimes that sealed the fate of thousands of men unaccounted for after the Korean War & more than 100 secret reconnaissance flights downed by the Soviets during the Cold War. Exclusive interviews with Russian veterans & newly declassified documents disclose the last live-sightings of Americans in the Gulag, China & North Korea. After Soviet search parties combed crash sites for survivors, Soviet intelligence officials were the last to see the American POWs they interrogated in Manchuria & the Soviet Union alive. Compelling evidence shows hundreds of American POWs, both officers & enlisted, were shipped to Manchuria & Siberia. The author's groundbreaking research spotlights decades of public & government apathy & inaction that prematurely declared thousands of POWs dead & failed to hold the Communists accountable. This is the first book to tell the full story of Korean War/Cold War MIAs & assess the work of the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission formed to investigate reports of Americans held in the USSR. This carefully researched work by an investigative journalist, war correspondent & Vietnam veteran is essential reading for veterans & their families, historians, students, government & military officials. To order, write Ink-Slinger Press, 1733 20th Street, N.W., #301, Washington, D.C., 20009; Tel: 202-667-9232; FAX: 202-265-6020.