force and fear with varying degrees of subtlety.
It came to be called brainwashing, but it was nothing new. The Soviets had employed the same means against men they took at Stalingrad, with about the same degree of success.
Men behind wire are always afraid of their captors. Only by tight inner discipline and complete cohesion can they hope to resist completely what their captors will do to them. Inevitably, when pressured, some men collaborate.
Turks were asked to collaborate. They did not, because each Turk was firm in what he believed, and he knew implicitly that his group—the Turks—would never permit any individual lapses. A Turk who aided the Chinese was signing his own death warrant—and knew it.
There was no such cohesion to the body of Americans within the wire. In any group of human beings, of whatever nationality, there are criminals, fools, and potential traitors. American policy within the wire remained disapproving of such—but tolerant.
A certain number of Americans did criminal acts, against their own. A very few committed treason. A very few resisted fanatically.
The great majority, although disorganized, confused, and completely uninstructed as to how to behave in this new situation in which they were asked to sign petitions and state anticapitalist opinions, resisted passively. They did not condone collaboration, though they made few moves to stamp it out, as did the Turks. They preferred to shun it.
The Chinese educators were not diabolically clever; at times they were incredibly stupid. But they had the prisoners in their power, and they had them continually off balance. The POW's never understood the Communists, and never caught up with them.
As Charles Schlichter reported, almost all POW's were under the misapprehension that they might be tortured at any time. They were threatened with it, though it did not materialize.
Day after day, the POW's attended forced classes. They sat on hard wooden benches for six to eight hours a day, while Chinese lecturers hammered at them, over and over, about Okies, Roman Catholics, and Negroes in America, that all officials of the Republic were rich men, that all congressmen were college-trained, and that not one workingman had any say in the Republic's affairs, in American accents ranging from that of the deep South to Brooklyn.
The POW's were never excused from class for any reason. Men fainted, and were left where they lay. There was no excuse to visit latrines, even for men with dysentery. These fouled themselves, and were forced by guards to continue sitting.
The Chinese instructors found the POW's knew almost nothing of civics or the mechanics of American government, and of this they made big play. The fact that American soldiers knew so little, they said, proved that the ruling interests wanted it so.
The fact was that the majority of the very young men taken in the early months of Korea had little education—averaging not much beyond eighth grade. They had imbibed very little, also, with their mother's milk, as to what they were and what they stood for.
They knew the Communist lecturers were wrong—but they did not know how to refute them. American youth, during a grade-school education, or even beyond, do not learn the status of American Roman Catholics vis- a-vis the Constitution, discuss the plight of Okies, or hold debate on the ramifications of the Negro in American life.
Under the hammering, some of these men began to feel they did not even know who or what they were, or what their place might be in the grand design of the universe, while the Turks—fortunately protected by the language barrier—no Chinese spoke Turkish—sat happily aware that a Turk was a Turk, unarguably better than any pig of a Chinese Communist, educated or otherwise.
It was apparent to some men in Camp 5 that in order to permit Americans to live more amicably together, American education had done a great deal of damping of the flaming convictions men live and die by.
The men who had in one way or another come to hold strong, unswayable beliefs—such as Schlichter's reborn faith in his God, or some old infantry sergeant's belief in his service and Colors, or even some men's firm convictions on the superiority of Anglo-Saxon institutions—were the men who were untouched, whom the Chinese soon classed as reactionaries, and segregated.
Fortunately, after lectures, the POW's talked among themselves, and sometimes came up with answers to the provocative questions of their tormentors. Sometimes, they could not, although few believed in their hearts the Chinese had the right of it.
And, oddly, it was with the Okies, Catholics, and Negroes that the Communists, on the whole, had small success. Many of the disadvantaged understood the dream of America better than those who had enjoyed its benefits.
Sitting in the lecture room, Sergeant Schlichter, like so many others, was taken sick. He was sent to the crude Chinese hospital with pneumonia.
He almost died.
But here, as he said, he saw the greatest example of faith he had ever seen, in the actions of Chaplain Emil Kapaun, who had been taken at Unsan. Father Kapaun, ill himself, stood in front of the POW's, prayed, and stole food to share with other's. By his example, he sometimes forced the little bit of good remaining in these starving men to the fore.
But Chaplain Kapaun could not take command, and he soon grew deathly ill, probably as much from sorrow as from his own starvation.
Schlichter saw him put in a room, without food or medicine. No other American was allowed to treat the priest, and he soon died. He was not alone. Schlichter heard that no other chaplain survived the prison camps of Korea, the only class or group to be wiped out.
The Communists had no great fear of capitalist production; they hoped to surpass it. But as the proponents of what is certainly a secular religion, they feared and hated any sign of non-Communist spirituality, and showed it no mercy. They understood clearly that religion—not necessarily organized religion—was among the greatest stumbling blocks they faced.
They feared no church, as such; some of these they had come to control, in East Europe and elsewhere—but they were deeply apprehensive of forces such as neither Nero, Gallienus, nor Maxentius could destroy.
Also in the hospital was Dr. Kubenick, ill, like Schlichter, with pneumonia. Kubenick called to Schlichter, 'Sergeant, I want you to do me a favor.'
'Anything—'
'See my things get home to my wife—'
'Why do you think I'll live and you won't?'
'Sergeant, I know—that's all. I want you to promise.'
Later, Schlichter gave Kubenick's poor effects to Graves Registration. And later still, he visited Kubernick's wife, who asked him only if he had seen her husband die.
Among the families of men who died in the prison camps, there remains much bitterness. And there have been no reunions of POW's either.
On 3 October 1951, his thirtieth birthday, Charles Schlichter was released from the hospital. The next day the last man died in Camp 5 at Pyoktong.
Immediately after the deaths ceased, the Chinese saw a chance for propaganda. American doctors were removed from sick call, and more medical supplies were made available. The Communist Green Cross took over sick call.
Schlichter was made camp sanitation officer. 'What can we do to help living conditions?' the Chinese asked him, with apparent sincerity.
'Replace the American M.D.'s, if only for psychological reasons,' Schlichter told them.
'Ah, we can't do that—why, the American doctors didn't care whether you lived or died. Look how many died while they took care of you—'
It was the big-lie technique; the American doctors had held sway while the diet was at its worst, while men with wounds died without drugs, and with no cooperation from the guards. Only after the worst were they removed.
Yet many POW's believed this lie. Some never relinquished it, even after repatriation.
