with it. On the rolls of the Pentagon, where slowly human hearts and the legends men live by are being replaced by computers, this unit no longer exists.
The Gloucestershire Regiment, now with forty-five battle honors and an American citation, will never understand.
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27
Death Valley
— General of the Army George Catlett Marshall.
FROM THE TIME man first raised fist to man, the lot of prisoners of war has been hard. The ancient peoples sometimes crucified captives; they invariably enslaved them, for life. From the time of Peter of Dreux, who burned out the eyes of prisoners, with hot irons, to the captives of Stalingrad and the hell camp of Cabanatuan, it has often been better for men to die fighting than to be taken by the enemy.
No nation, no culture has an unblemished record in what is merely a part of the long story of man's inhumanity to man. Germans have starved Russians; Russians have worked Germans to death. Napoleon's seamen rotted, chained like beasts in English prison hulks. A Swiss-American in the uniform of the Confederacy turned other Americans into snarling animals at a place in Georgia called Andersonville.
In recent years Western Civilization has begun to give the moral and ethical questions of the treatment of prisoners of war agonized consideration. The Geneva Conventions, as part of the hopeless task of making war more humane, specified that a prisoner of war must be treated in the same fashion as a nation's own prisoners.
But while Western Civilization has tended to grow more humane in the treatment of its prisoners of all kinds, the balance of the world has not. In World War II it was found that the Geneva Conventions did not adequately cover the subject. The problem was one of culture and chemistry.
An American, or other Westerner, will starve and die on a diet that Japanese peasants or prisoners may live on almost indefinitely. And it is patently impossible to force a belligerent to treat foreign prisoners of war better than, say, its own political detainees.
The question of toughness or decadence aside, American body chemistry has undoubtedly changed in the past two hundred years. A by-product of the rising Western standard of living has been larger bodies, the need for more food, and a psychological inability to readapt easily to the animal-like existence normal to much of the world.
In postwar Japan, Americans imprisoned by the Japanese Government for various reasons have been given a special diet, heated cells, and recreation facilities—none of which are given to Japanese prison inmates.
This has been done because the Japanese Government, since the signing of a peace treaty in 1952, has been peculiarly sensitive to American opinion and pressures.
During World War II the Japanese handled Americans and Britons in the same brutal fashion with which they treated their own miscreants and other Asians. Thousands of Americans and English died or went mad in the POW camps. Almost all the lives of the men in the bamboo camps were shortened, even if they survived.
Yet, in many cases, putting aside the unmistakable brutality of the Japanese guards, the Japanese were able to demonstrate that they had fed the pow's as well as they had fed their own Korean laborers.
The Germans had a peculiarly defined system of standards in handling their own POW's, based on Nazi notions of race. Westerners, including British and Americans, were not coddled, but were generally well treated. Other races, particularly the Eastern European, were handled in a way to suggest that the Germans felt extermination was the final solution.
Americans treated their own POW's, Japanese, Italian, and German, as they vainly hoped they themselves would be treated. The Soviets treated the Nazis and Japanese in kind. Most of the men who were taken in Russia disappeared behind the iron curtain and were never heard from again. Survivors have written of the wholesale degradation and death in Communist prison camps.
The problem is one of chemistry, and culture.
Americans who felt, and still feet, that their soldiers taken by a power of different culture and lesser standards of humanity should be, or will be, treated in accordance with decent Western standards are naive.
They were naive in 1950, since no American fighting men were prepared in any way to face what they could be expected to face. The Army, as well as government and society, was at fault. All had known for some years of Communist methods of indoctrinating POW's—the world knew of Colonel General Paulus' experiences after Stalingrad—and knew what Asian Communist culture was like. But just as they had not prepared their young men to fight, they had not prepared them to go into captivity.
In the first six months of Korea, American arms faltered on the battlefield because of a lack of American material and psychological preparation for bloodletting, and in those first six months almost all the American POW's were taken.
Whatever failures there were, in the bleak and dreary prison camps of North Korea, were no more than a continuation of the failures on the battlefield, by the same men.
For some reason, the POW camps have been much more widely publicized than the battlefields. What happened in them has become an emotional issue, and for that reason will probably never be clarified.
Let one thing be clear, however.
What happened in those camps was not unique. It had been known to history before. If it was new to Americans, who pride themselves on being informed, the fault was their own.
In Andersonville, Americans fought each other for scraps of food, and let each other die. Tough panzer grenadiers of the
A human being in a prison camp, in the hands of his enemies, is flesh, and shudderingly vulnerable.
On the battlefield, even surrounded, he still has a gun in his hand, his comrades about him, and, perhaps the most important thing of all, leadership. If he has training, and if he has developed pride, he can stand as a man.
In a POW cage, he is flesh, however strong the spirit. He has no gun, he has no leader, and his comrades are flesh, too.
Americans often forget there are millions of brave men and women behind the iron curtain, living in virtual prisons. They have no love for Communism, yet they accommodate. The Roman Catholic primate of Poland—whom no man accuses of Communism—'collaborates.'
In a prison, most men, if their jailor wills, may be broken.
Men there are like all men, everywhere, in that some will never do wrong, and some will never do right. The great majority will lean the way the wind takes them as most men have since the dawn of time.
There were utterly reprehensible acts committed by Americans in the prison camps. These have been recorded, and punished. There were also acts of incredible courage, which have been rewarded, in some cases.
The average man was neither courageous nor cowardly.
Young, untrained, with the iron most men expect in soldiers not yet forged in him, he was forced to face the tiger as best he could.
In the snow-covered bauxite mining camp they would call Death Valley, Sergeant Charles Schlichter and the other Americans taken at Kunu-ti were gathered into an old school building.
Here a slender Chinese officer addressed them in broken English.
He told them that the People's Volunteers had decided to treat them, not as war criminals, but under China's new Lenient Policy. Though the officer did not say it, the average Army POW would be treated much like an average
