The type of amiable accommodation that could sometimes be made, without compromising one’s standards, was once successfully demonstrated by Captain Jack E. Perry, VMF-311 briefing officer. On a bombing run his F9F fuel tank was hit, and he parachuted down. Seized almost immediately by the Chinese, his captors “showed him bomb holes from numerous strikes in the area, and they pointed out several wounded soldiers. Then, as he describes it, ‘They laughed like hell.’ Although Captain Perry failed to see anything funny, he laughed along with them.’”[616]
[616] Ibid., p. 109.
Three Marines captured during the Korean War had suffered a similar fate in World War II. Ironically, Staff Sergeant Charles L. Harrison, of the Military Police Company; Warrant Officer Felix J. McCool, of 1st Service Battalion; and Master Sergeant Frederick J. Stumpges, Headquarters Company, were all captured in the same 29 November 1950 action. Comparisons of treatment by the Communists and Japanese were inevitable. A survivor of the Bataan Death March, Stumpges felt that although the Japanese confinement was more difficult physically, imprisonment in North Korea was a far worse mental ordeal. “They [the Communists] were around all the time and you could never speak your mind.”[617]
[617] New York Times, dtd 30 Aug 53, p. 2.
The other two Marines similarly thought that the Japanese were more brutal but had more character. Harrison, captured at Wake Island, said he admired them because “they really believed in their cause and were loyal to it.”[618] The Chinese, on the other hand, he characterized as employing “false friendship and deceit.”[619] McCool, who had spent 70 hours in a slimy, lice-infested hole for refusing to confess to a phony charge of rape and pillage, knew that he “hated the Chinese Communists far more than he had hated the Japanese.”[620]
[618] MacDonald, POW, p. 79.
[619] Ibid.
[620] Ibid., p. 167.
Master Sergeant Cain had distinguished himself by flying little OE reconnaissance planes 184 hours and had 76 combat missions in one month. Just before his capture, Cain had paid for six months’ education for nine Korean youngsters who lived near his air base. Because of his graying hair and lack of rank insignia, Sergeant Cain was mistaken for a senior officer. In fact, the Chinese insisted that he was Lieutenant Colonel Cain, CO of VMF-121. His equal amount of insistence that he was not a Marine officer, plus his refusal to reveal any significant information, made him a particular nuisance to the CCF. He was subjected to intensive interrogation sessions, confined to the hole, and stood at attention for periods of five to eight hours. Describing the occasion on which he thought it was all over, Sergeant Cain related that he:
... was taken to a hillside, blindfolded, and placed in front of a firing squad. He heard rifle bolts click. The commander of the firing squad asked if he was ready to tell all.[621]