A senior Air Force officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Brown, who headed POW units at Camp 2 and 5 between his tours of solitary confinement, declared:
I was extremely proud of the conduct of U.S. Marine Corps personnel with whom I came in contact during my period of confinement. Their esprit de corps was perhaps the highest of any branch of the Armed Forces of the United States during this period.[636]
[636] Ibid., p. 220.
And Navy Chief Duane Thorin, a former inmate of the Camp 2 annex, who later inspired the character of the helicopter pilot in James A. Michener’s The Bridges of Toko-ri, pointed out:
The Navy and Marine Corps POWs were generally excellent. The Marines who left something to be desired were more than compensated for by the majority of them.[637]
[637] Ibid., p. 223.
Another view was offered by a prominent neurologist and consultant to the Secretary of Defense Advisory Committee, Dr. Harold G. Wolff. After investigating the performance of American POWs in Korea, Dr. Wolff concluded they had not “behaved much differently from other men in other armies and places” but that Americans had been made to appear much worse “by the enemy’s propaganda devices and our own initial ineptitude in countering the Communist propaganda.”[638]
[638] Ibid., p. 237.
As a postscript to the POW story, five Marines received awards, on 11 January 1954, for their exceptionally meritorious conduct while serving as prisoners of the Communists in Korea. They were:
Lieutenant Colonel Thrash—awarded a Gold Star in lieu of a second Legion of Merit;