By midyear, noncommissioned officers were also separated from the enlisted men, in an attempt to better control prisoners. In October of 1951 another one of the Yalu River Camps was set up. This was Camp 2, at Pi-chong-ni, which thereafter served as the main officers camp. The next month a POW column of nearly 50 men, including 6 Marines, left Kung Dong for these northern camps on a death march that covered 225 miles in two weeks. During the excruciating march, prisoners had been forced to strip naked and wade across the Chongsong River, a procedure which caused several deaths and cases of frostbite. One British participant, however, recalled that the “Marines banded together during the terrible march, and the Royal Marines were drawn close to the U.S. Marines.”[585]
[585] MacDonald, POW, p. 127.
In December 1951 the Communist and UNC forces exchanged lists of captured personnel. The list of 3,198 American POWs (total UNC: 11,559) revealed that 61 Marines were in enemy hands. Nine others, captured late in the year, were still in temporary collection points and thus not listed. Although Marines represented only a small portion of the total POWs, they were present in most of the nearly dozen regular camps or collection points then in existence. In any event the 1951 POW list[586] gave a picture of the growing Communist camp system.
[586] Negotiations broke down at this point. No other list was offered by Communist officials until the first exchange of wounded POWs, 17 months later, in the April 1953 LITTLE SWITCH operation. Montross, Kuokka, and Hicks, USMC Ops Korea, v. IV, p. 223.
As 1951 was drawing to an end, the Camp 2 commandant, a fanatical Communist named Ding, ordered UNC prisoners to prepare and send a New Year’s greeting to the commander of the CCF, General Peng Teh-huai. Senior UN officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Brown, USAF, was determined that the prisoners would not sign the spurious holiday message. Major McLaughlin voluntarily organized Marine resistance, and senior officers of other nationality groups followed suit. No greetings were sent. As usually happened, an informer reported the organized resistance and furnished names of the reactionary leaders. The following month, the six ranking officers were sentenced to solitary confinement, ranging from three to six months, for their “subversive activities.”
The episode marked the first really organized resistance to the Chinese. “Although the principals were subjected to months of solitary confinement, coercion, torture, and very limited rations during the bitterly cold months of early 1952, their joint effort laid the foundation for comparatively effective resistance within Camp 2 during the remainder of the war.”[587]
[587] MacDonald, POW, p. 138.
In January 1952, Major McLaughlin and the other five officers were removed to begin their long tours of solitary confinement. Although the remaining Marine officers at Pi-chong-ni had “formed a tightly knit group and consulted among themselves on every major issue,”[588] the atmosphere within the camp itself became highly charged and strained. Suspicion of informers and opportunists was rampant. The officers at Camp 2 were generally agreed that Marine Lieutenant Colonel Thrash, who arrived in June, was largely responsible for restoring discipline. He issued an all-inclusive order about camp behavior for all personnel which read, in part:
[588] Ibid., p. 164.
Study of Communist propaganda would not be countenanced. If study was forced on them, POWs were to offer passive resistance and no arguments.