[582] Rees, Korea, p. 330.
Although now junior to some Army and Air Force officers, Major McLaughlin was elected by his fellow officer-prisoners to represent them. Recognized by the Chinese as a staunch non-cooperative and dedicated trouble-maker, the enemy concentrated their pressure on the Marine officer—and he was subjected to intimidation, maltreatment, and threats of death.
As they had at Kanggye, the CCF attempted to organize progressive groups to write peace appeals, propaganda leaflets, and articles condemning the United States for the war. Typically, progressive POWs (usually weaker, less resilient members) who went along with the Communist propaganda conditioning, received better rations and treatment. Rugged resisters, on the other hand, could dependably expect to stand a considerable amount of solitary confinement, usually in an unspeakably foul, vermin-infested “hole.” Here a POW was forced to remain in a debilitating, crouched position usually 56 hours or more. Throughout the war a good many Marines were to know this particular enemy treatment. One Marine artilleryman, Second Lieutenant Roland L. McDaniel, tied to a Korean POW in the hole for 10 days, emerged with pneumonia and tuberculosis.
In addition to the POW compounds at Pyoktong and Chongsong, other sites where Marines were held were Camp 3, at Changsong (nearby and with a nearly identical name to Camp 1), primarily for enlisted personnel, and at “The Valley.” This was a temporary medical processing center in the Kanggye area. Marine inmates here were often confined to a pig pen. Largely because of the filthy conditions of this camp, the death rate quickly earned the Valley the opprobrious name of Death Valley.
Another cluster of POW camps was located further south. These were primarily run by the North Koreans, and were transit camps where prisoners were collected and interrogated before being moved north by truck or on foot to the permanent establishments. Among them were collection centers at Kung Dong and Chorwon, and Camp 10, south of the North Korean Capital Pyongyang. The latter was also known variously as the Mining Camp, the Gold Mine, or Bean Camp—this due to its prevailing diet. At this southernmost Communist camp, POWs were required to dig coal in the nearby mine shafts. Loads of coal were then hauled in small hand carts over icy roads to the camp, a task made more difficult by the prisoners’ skimpy mealtime fare.
The most notorious of all the camps, however, was Pak’s Palace,[583] the interrogation center near Pyongyang. POWs also called it Pak’s Death Palace for its chief interrogator, a sadistic North Korean officer, Major Pak. Captain Martelli, a F4U fighter pilot from VMF-323 shot down in April 1951, was the first Marine processed through Pak’s, where POWs were continuously threatened and beaten with little or no provocation. Another Marine aviator, Captain Gerald Fink, VMF-312, upon being asked during interrogation here why he had come to Korea won a sentence of several days solitary confinement in the hole for his forthright answer: “to kill Communists.” Second Lieutenant Carl R. Lindquist, also of VMF-312, was the only one of 18 Marine officers captured in 1951 not processed through Pak’s before being sent north.
[583] The Secretary of Defense Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War later adjudged Pak’s to have been “the worst camp endured by American POWs in Korea.” MacDonald, POW, p. 104.
Gradually the Chinese developed the policy of segregating officer and enlisted personnel. Commenting on this procedure, one British observer offered the following:
By this means the lower ranks were deprived of their leaders and for a short time this had a depressing, and generally bad, effect. It was not long, however, before the natural leaders among the rank and file asserted themselves. The standard of leadership naturally varied in different compounds; but in all there was some organization and in some it was highly efficient. It was ... the policy of the Chinese ... to discourage the emergence of thrustful leaders.... Consequently, clandestine rather than open leadership was usual.[584]
[584] Barclay, Commonwealth, p. 190.