Not all the quitters were youths. The older men went, too. One night a decorated officer said, simply. 'I'm going to die.' He lay in his hut, neither eating nor drinking, unspeaking, until he did.
Without discipline, without a chain of command, there was no effective way to help the dying or aid the faltering. There were men who needed to be cheered, helped, cared for. No man would obey another, and no organized effort was ever made. Organization had broken down completely. It must be reported that few officers showed any willingness to take command. The failures were not of the few, but of the many.
Each day Shadish and other doctors went to the filthy, crowded, lice-ridden, fecal-smelling huts, taking the sickest to the hospital.
Each night Sergeant Schlichter reported to the Chinese commandant the number who had died. There were some Turks and ROK's with the Americans. To Schlichter's knowledge, not one Turk had died.
On 12 March 1951, while winter still howled through North Korea, the enemy closed down Death Valley. There were fewer POW's now, and they could be consolidated in fewer camps. The men of Death Valley were assembled from their huts and marched north.
Charles Schlichter closed out the hospital by burning the straw pallets on which the sick had lain. When the straw went into the fire, the floor and shimmering sides of the stoves were black with lice, trying to jump away. Schlichter loaded some twenty patients, pale with jaundice and too ill to march, onto a mule cart and rode north with them. He was the last to leave the valley.
As he left, he stood up in the cart, looking back. The last sight he had of Death Valley was of three starving Korean dogs, snuffling warily in from the hills to feed on the bodies of the young Americans they had left behind.
On the 17th of March he arrived at Camp Number 5 on the Yalu River. Here the officers, N.C.O.'s, and other ranks were separated.
And here, now that they had been starved and sickened into a disorganized, slack-faced mob, more animals than men, their education began.
The island of Koje, approximately the size of an American county, lies in the Korea Strait a few miles southeast of Pusan. Koje-do is only a mile and a half from the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, but it is five hours from Pusan by boat, twelve hours by twisting road, which in early 1951 was connected to the mainland by an ancient ferry.
Koje-do rises green and lovely from the sea. It is a land of lush hills, clear streams, and delicately tinted paddies. The hills hold wild deer, and the streams run with trout. Korean farmers and fishermen have lived upon it since the dawn of history, and in 1951 the island was further populated with refugees from the north, diverted from teeming, crowded Pusan.
Up close, the beauty fades, and the odor of Koje-do is indistinguishable from that of the mainland.
To Koje Island, in early 1951, were sent the 80,000-odd prisoners of war taken so far by the United Nations during the Korean War. The Eighth Army was in full retreat, and there were rumors on the wind that all Korea might have to be evacuated. The thousands upon thousands of pow's gathered around the Pusan area were in the way; worse, they were a potential hazard. On Koje, it was felt they would be both secure and out of the Eighth Army's hair. In early 1951 all Eighth Army, from General Matt Ridgway down, was monumentally uninterested in the POW's it had taken. The Eighth Army had more pressing concerns.
The problems of handling the POW's, of feeding, clothing, guarding, and disciplining them, was delegated to the 60th General Depot in Pusan, which later was to become the 2nd Logistical Command. The mission of the 60th General Depot was to supply the troops fighting in Korea, and they were doing a superb job of this. The fifteen technical service officers, under their Quartermaster Corps C.O., were proficient in the way that only American supply officers can be proficient.
They had to be, for United States troops are prodigal on the battlefield.
But however efficient these men might be at supply, none of them knew anything about the handling, care, and feeding of Asian Communist prisoners of war. They were logisticians, not cops.
But in their defense, it must be said that nobody else in the United States Army knew any more than they did. When the shattered conscripts of the Inmun Gun began to surrender in droves in the fall of 1950, the United States found itself facing a new situation.
In World War I America's Allies had assumed control of all POW's.
In World War II the United States came in late, and took over an existing British system. And the Germans and Italians captured after North Africa had proved to be a fairly tractable lot. In spite of Fascism there was no great cultural gulf between captors and captured; they understood each other, adhered to the same general code. Several hundred thousand POW's were sent to places like Montana and Texas; at the end of the war they were shipped home without incident.
In spite of protestations at the time, World War II was never an ideological war, for Fascism and Nazism were fundamentally inexportable. The German Reich never stood a chance of winning a political victory in Europe; it stood and fell by arms alone.
Ideology never raised its ugly head in the prisoner-of-war camps outside Russia in World War II.
The Japanese POW's taken in the Pacific were so few as to be insignificant. The Japanese-Americans herded into detention camps after Pearl Harbor showed a remarkable restraint toward the intolerance of their native land.
When the Korean War began, therefore, the United States had no experience in the handling of hostile prisoners of war. It had developed no real doctrine; it had trained no personnel. And worse, the United States Army understood Asians imperfectly, and Communists not at all.
When the thousands began to flow into the POW cages in Korea, U.S. authorities were certain of only one thing: they did not want to bring almost 100,000 Orientals to the homeland for detention. The prisoner-of-war compounds on Koje-do were born of expediency. And like so many measures so adopted in the modern age, the temporary solution became permanent. Once rid of the POW's, General Ridgway, and his successor, Van Fleet, never wanted them back.
It was up to the logisticians at Pusan to make out as best they could.
Major William T Gregory, Corps of Engineers, was engineer supply officer of the 60th General Depot on Christmas Day 1950. Bill Gregory was a career reservist, tall, redhaired, and skinny. He held a Regular Army warrant as master sergeant, and he intended to return to his North Carolina home only when the Army made him go.
As a part of rounding out his career, the Army sent young Major Gregory to Koje-do. The C.O. of the 60th General Depot called him in and said: 'Bill, the POW's are coming to Koje Island. You are appointed Procurement Officer for them. Go buy food—all you can find.'
The C.O. didn't know just how many were coming, or just when they would arrive—all he could do was to send Bill Gregory and a small party on ahead to the island.
LST's crossed the choppy strait from Pusan, dumping thousands of small, miserable, brown-skinned men on Koje's beaches. Soon there were 40,000 prisoners, mostly Koreans, herded together in the open rice paddies up from the sea. There were less than two hundred U.S. personnel to guard them, and not even a barbed-wire fence to wrap around them.
Cold, hungry, and apathetic, the POW's sat in the fields, and waited. They gave no trouble. They expected to be badly used, after the way of all captives in the Orient. At the best, they expected to wear their lives away in labor battalions, slaving for their captors. At the worst, they expected to be shot.
On Koje-do there were no combat troops, no HQ, no organization. There were no compounds. Fortunately, the POW's gave no trouble. Bill Gregory ranged the island, buying rice. He was the first of the big spenders come to Koje; all he could find, he bought. Soon he had tons and tons of rice stored on log foundations some of his engineers had built over the marshy soil.
But as fast as Gregory bought it, the POW's ate it. Koreans and Chinese ate a hell of a lot of rice, together with fish, vegetables, and other items. Finally, just before the economy of Koje-do collapsed, Gregory got authorization to purchase supplies directly from Japan. Now, with the competent Japs securing mountains of fish and rice for shipment across the strait, Gregory was relieved of food procurement.
He was ordered to begin constructing compounds. The POW's could not live in the fields forever. The Neutral Nation inspection teams were raising hell. A few more American troops came in, plus the 93rd Engineer
