Between 5 August-6 September, 3,597 U.S. servicemen were returned during Operation BIG SWITCH, including 129 ground and 28 air Marines. This 157 figure represents a total of 42 officers and 115 enlisted repatriated during this second and final POW exchange. Of the 27 Naval personnel freed, at least 6 were hospital corpsmen serving with the 1st Marine Division when they were taken. Counting the 157 Marines released in Operation BIG SWITCH and the 15 wounded POWs sent back in April, a total of 172 division and wing Marines were returned in the two POW exchanges.
Although the switch took place over a five-week period, 38 Marines, or 24 percent, were not released until late in the proceedings, in September. As one author noted, “It was Communist policy to hold the ‘reactionaries’ ... to the last.”[555]
[555] Fehrenbach, Kind of War, p. 651.
Two of the best-known Marine “reactionaries” who had openly defied their Communist jailers during their entire period of captivity, were then-Lieutenant Colonel William G. Thrash, a VMA-121 pilot, and then-Major John N. McLaughlin, taken POW in November 1950. McLaughlin was released on 1 September and Thrash on 5 September in a group of 275 Americans returned, the largest number for any single day’s transfer since the exchange began. The most famous U.S. prisoner held by the Communists was Major General William F. Dean. Formerly commander of the U.S. Army 24th Division, he had been captured in August 1950 after the fall of Taejon.
Ever since Operation BIG SWITCH got under way, every returnee had been asked if he had seen or heard of General Dean. None had. Many UN officers felt—uneasily—that he would probably be the last officer to be sent back. In fact, he emerged from imprisonment on 4 September “to be greeted with cheers at Freedom Village.”[556] Major Walter R. Harris and the most senior Marine captured during the war, Colonel Frank H. Schwable, later to be the central figure in a Court of Inquiry, were among the last nine Marines returned on 6 September, the final day of the switch. And so, one by one, the last 160 American POWs passed through Panmunjom. All were men marked by the enemy as “war criminals.”
[556] Life Magazine, v. 35, no. 11 (15 Sep 53), p. 42.
One Army sergeant, who freely admitted he could “never adequately describe how he felt when he knew he was going home”[557] recalled those final moments as a newly-freed prisoner:
[557] Fehrenbach, Kind of War, p. 651.
At 1100 his truck pulled up at Panmunjom, the last convoy of American POWs to be exchanged. A huge, moustached Marine master sergeant walked up beside the truck, called out: “I will call out your last name. You will answer with your first name, middle initial, and Army serial number ...”
“Schlichter!”