[591] Ibid., p. 195.
More important, he defied the guards by deliberately circulating among the enlisted men (often younger, impressionable, less mature individuals) to point out lies in enemy propaganda tactics designed to slander the U.S. government and its leaders. The Marine officer also collected names of American POWs held in isolated places who it was suspected the enemy might attempt to hold as hostages at the end of the war—possibly as a bargaining tool for the granting of a seat to Red China in the UN.
During the last year of the war although a number of prisoners were still being captured in some of the most savage attacks unleashed by the enemy, the lot of the average POW had improved. More attention was being paid to the former pitiful medical care. The men were more warmly clad, even though still huddled into filthy, crowded huts. And the monotonous poor chow had improved. Most POWs, although carefully kept from learning developments of the outside world, naturally suspected that some reason lay behind the changes. And so there was: the Communists had no desire to repatriate skeletonized prisoners.
CCF “Lenient Policy” and Indoctrination Attempts[592]
[592] Unless otherwise noted, the material in this section is derived from: MacDonald, POW; Barclay, Commonwealth; Clark, Danube to Yalu; Fehrenbach, Kind of War; Leckie, Conflict; Rees, Korea.
As early in the war as July 1951, the CCF was seeking propaganda benefits out of its so-called “lenient” policy toward captured United Nations personnel. Basically, this could be described as “calculated leniency in return for cooperation, harassment in return for neutrality, and brutality in return for resistance.”[593] Others have characterized the CCF psychological techniques of indoctrination as monotonous and single-minded “repetition, harassment and humiliation.”[594]
[593] MacDonald, POW, p. 61. One former Marine POW commented: “The ‘lenient policy’ applied to the ‘liberated soldiers,’ who had supposedly been ‘liberated’ from the American capitalists by the Chinese People’s Volunteers. Unless a prisoner accepted this absurd concept, he was a ‘war criminal’ and subject to being treated as such. The North Vietnamese use this same characterization (‘war criminal’) in reference to U.S. POWs when queried by U.S. representatives at the Paris talks.” MajGen John N. McLaughlin ltr to Dir, MCHist, HQMC, dtd 17 Jul 70.
[594] Rees, Korea, p. 337.
In some respects, it is true that the Chinese treatment of prisoners appeared to be more humane than that of the North Koreans. The latter freely used physical cruelty and torture, to the point of being barbaric.[595] Sometimes it appeared that Allied POWs did not receive any harsher treatment from the CCF than did local civilian prisoners.
[595] There were, for example, instances when POW columns were being marched north and the NKPA treatment was so rough that “Chinese guards intervened to protect the prisoners from the North Koreans.” MacDonald, POW, p. 43.