Operation Thunderhead (3 page)

The first Geneva Convention also had close ties with the founding and recognition of the International Committee of the Red Cross. One of the successes of the meeting was the international agreement to respect the neutrality of hospitals and other buildings bearing the symbol of the Red Cross.

With the beginnings of a new century, the world tried again to control at least the worst excesses of war. At The Hague Peace Conference of 1899, the leader of the Russian Empire, Tsar Nicholas II, called representatives of the world together to try and establish a “real and lasting peace.” Additionally, the tsar wanted to limit the development of the weapons of war and restrict the world to the armaments that existed at that time. It was a worthwhile effort that is remembered today for outlawing the use of expanding bullets (soft-nosed or “dumdum” ammunition) for military use. The intent was to try and limit the pain and suffering that had been so prevalent just a few decades earlier when soft lead bullets had smashed into soldiers, shattering bones and causing numberless amputations to save a soldier's life.

Most of the other declarations of that first Hague Peace Conference didn't last the lifetime of the tsar. The prohibition on the use of poison gases was ignored inside of fifteen years. The other prohibition, outlawing the firing of projectiles from balloons, wasn't ignored as much as rendered obsolete. Balloons as military aircraft were soon overshadowed by the invention of the powered airplane. The dropping of bombs from the air, from aircraft or balloons (zeppelins), hadn't been really considered at the conference.

A second Hague Peace Conference, held in 1907, also tried to limit the destructive capability of military weapons. Again, it to failed to reach that goal. There was a greater range of rules of war established at The Hague, but any form of peace conference was doomed as the world hurtled toward the biggest war mankind had conducted to date.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on June 28, 1914, at the hands of Bosnian Gavrilo Princip was the spark that ignited the Europe powderkeg. The resulting explosion of combat was known to the combatants at the Great War. To history, it was World War I, to those who lived through it; it was the War to End All Wars.

Nearly every country in Europe clashed during World War I, the bulk of the fighting happening across France. There were more than 40 millions casualties from the fighting and bombardments of the war that lasted from 1914 to 1918. Those casualties included the nearly 20 million dead among both the military and civilian populations. As the lines of the war ebbed and flowed, prisoners were captured on all sides of the conflict.

The nearly 500,000 prisoners of war on both sides of the American Civil War paled in comparison to the almost 8 million men held in prison camps during World War I. The United States only joined in the fighting during the last two years of the war. Of all the soldiers and Marines that the United States sent off to that war, only 4,120 men were captured and interned as prisoners of war. Of the U.S. prisoners held, more than 3,900 of them were repatriated at the end of hostilities in November 1918. In spite of relatively good treatment of the Americans at the hands of their captors, 147 men died while POWs. Most of these men passed away as a result of wounds received in combat.

Among the prisoners of other combatants, the mortality rate was much higher. Nearly 8 million soldiers became prisoners and hundreds of thousands died as a result of their captivity. Many of the POW deaths were in areas such as Russia, where food was short and famine became rampant, starving prisoner and civilian alike. In other countries, even with food shortages, there were relatively few prisoner deaths. As compared to the nearly 20 percent of all Russian prisoners dying of starvation, less than 5 percent of the prisoners held by Germany died while in captivity.

In the aftermath of World War I, another effort was put forward to make the treatment of wartime prisoners more humane. More than forty countries signed or agreed to the articles of the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs. Several countries limited their acceptance of the new conventions regarding prisoners. Japan and the Soviet Union stood out in their opposition to most of the rules in the agreement and did not consider the agreement binding to their countries' actions during wartime. The new convention was soon tested, as war broke out ten years after its creation.

The opening years of World War II resulted in more U.S. military personnel being taken prisoner than at any other time in our history. In Europe, the USSR, and in Asia, millions of soldiers were taken prisoner as the Axis forces made up primarily of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan swept across their areas of conflict. From 1939 to 1945, World War II ravaged the landscape. Millions of soldiers died, but not all during combat.

Though Nazi Germany treated captured Soviet forces in a subhuman manner, the regime maintained many of the principles of the Geneva Convention of 1929 in regards to their treatment of British and American prisoners. As the war progressed, many American prisoners held by the Germans came from downed air crews. Being held in European prison camps gave the POWs a real chance at escape, many of whom did so during the war. Escaped POWs had a possibility of blending in with the local population, especially if they managed to learn some of the language. The existence of local resistance groups gave active aid to escaping prisoners, once contact could be established.

In Asia under the Imperial Japanese Empire, the situation was drastically different. In the first full year of the war in the Pacific, thousands of Americans were taken prisoner as the Japanese seized island after island. In the Philippines, American forces held out against the approaching Japanese for months. Cut off from resupply and any reasonable means of escape, the Americans forces finally surrendered after holding out for four months. This was when the Japanese first held large numbers of U.S. soldiers and civilians as prisoners.

The military class of Imperial Japan followed the Bushido code of moral principles to guide their actions. It was the greatest honor to follow the orders of their emperor to the death. Surrender was an almost inconceivable disgrace, one that could only be slightly relieved by the death of the individual. When the Japanese were in possession of thousands of surrendered military prisoners, they felt disgust that such men had not committed suicide rather than face such shame. The arrogance of the Imperial Japanese military allowed them to feel superior to any other race on the planet to begin with. It was very easy for them to consider the POWs they held to be something less than human, and to treat them as such.

The first major example of how the Japanese treated the prisoners under their care came when the captured men were forced to march ninety miles to a camp. Thousands died along the way from bayonets, shootings, and beheadings at the hands of Japanese officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs). The men who died quickly were considered lucky when compared to the many who died as a result of subsequent beatings, starvation, dehydration, heat, and untreated wounds. Of the 11,796 American POWs who took part in the Bataan Death March, 600 to 650 men died along the way. Some escaped into the jungle to fight alongside the Philippine people, who also suffered greatly at the hands of their captors. Of the approximately 72,000 prisoners, the bulk of whom were Filipino, about 54,000 lived to reach the camp.

More than half of all U.S. prisoners held by the Japanese during World War II died at the hands of their captors, either by neglect or design. The Japanese subjected their prisoners to starvation diets and brutal labor tactics. Just surviving day to day took a terrible toll on the prisoners, knowing that at any moment they could be killed by any Japanese soldier for any reason—or even no reason at all. Disease was rampant in a population of prisoners weakened by starvation and heavy labor. Escape was considered difficult at best because the Americans, even in their emaciated states, stood out among the local populations. For the POWs held in the camps on the main Japanese islands, escape was barely a dream.

To transport prisoners, the Japanese packed them aboard transport ships, quickly named “Hell Ships” by their suffering human cargo. The unmarked transports were sent through areas known to be hunting grounds for Allied submarines. More than 3,800 American prisoners were killed when their transports were targeted by U.S. Navy submarines. Of the more than 25,000 American POWs taken by the Japanese, nearly 11,000 died at the hands of their captors. After the war ended, it took years to prosecute Japanese camp guards, commanders, and staff for war crimes.

The brutality of prisoners during World War II was addressed soon after the end of the war. It was not just the Japanese who mistreated their prisoners in a criminal fashion. The Germans killed the Russians and the Russians killed the Germans, both sides causing the deaths of more than 1 million men each. In 1949, the Geneva Convention was revised to try and minimize or even eliminate the mistreatment of prisoners. The definition of who would be considered a prisoner of war was expanded, as were the protections and treatment of the prisoners. Prisoners were to be protected from violence or other acts against them by the general public. Nor were they to be exploited by forcing them to work at hard labor, or even simply be on display to the public. The mutilation or torture of POWs, or their being used for medical or other scientific experiments, was expressly forbidden. Medical care was to be given and camps or other holding facilities were required to be open to inspection by neutral parties and the International Red Cross.

As had been specified in the 1929 Convention, a prisoner could not be forced to give information, military or otherwise, to his captors. By Convention standards, a POW was only required to give his name, rank, service number (if his country used such), and date of birth to his captors.

Over time, more than 150 countries became signatories to the 1949 Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, the ideals of the Convention were not followed by all who had agreed to it. This was proven out within a year of its creation, when war broke out on the Korean peninsula.

Most of the major combatants in the Korean conflict had not formally ratified their agreement to the 1949 Geneva Convention by the time war started. But most involved stated that they would follow the principles of the Convention. The North Korean Communist forces, backed by their allies in Communist China, captured more than 7,100 Americans during the conflict's four years. These prisoners became used for a new form of political warfare fought by the Communists against the rest of the world: the war of propaganda and influencing public opinion to further the aims of the Communists.

Brutal, savage treatment of prisoners at the hands of the North Koreans was comparable to some of the worst excesses of Imperial Japan from only a few years earlier. The Koreans had suffered greatly at the hands of the Japanese, as had much of Asia's overall population. The North Koreans took that barbarism and added some characteristics of their own.

In a kind of nightmare reminder of the Bataan Death March, the North Koreans took American and UN prisoners on forced marches from the frontline areas to the POW camps. POW food was poor at best, though the North Koreans complained that their own soldiers ate the same food. A diet of rice and little else was barely enough to feed the Asian people, who had been living on it for millennia. For American and other UN troops, it was a means of slow starvation. The brutal environment, particularly in the cold Korean winters, helped to cause disease to sweep through the ranks of the POWs, already suffering from malnutrition.

In spite of their protestations that they were treating the POWs humanely, at least 2,701 of the 7,140 Americans held prisoner during the Korean War died while in captivity. Refusing to recognize the International Red Cross as an impartial, neutral organization, the North Koreans did not allow any inspections of the camps where the prisoners were held. If those inspections had taken place, they would have shown a new form of abuse given to the POWs by the Communists.

Physical torture was commonplace as a means of extracting military information from the prisoners. But psychological abuses of prisoners was something new. Beatings, threats, and psychological pressure were all brought to bear to try and force the POWs to admit to knowledge of war crimes—the employment of germ warfare by the UN forces against the people of North Korea was something the Communists wanted to “prove” very much.

Coercion and indoctrination were the methods used by the Communist Chinese who took over the interment of POWs as the war progressed. The intent was to change the political outlook of the prisoners, turn them to the Communist side, and have them confess to war crimes. The confessions were broadcast to the world, particularly the Communist world, as proof that UN forces and particularly the Americans were the aggressors in Korea. The experiences of the POWs in Korea added a new word to the American public and military:
brainwashing
.

At the end of the Korean War, more than 21,000 of the approximately 120,000 Communist troops taken prisoner by the UN forces chose not to be repatriated to North Korea or China. Of the 4,418 American POW survivors who were returned to the United States after the war's end, twenty-one POWs elected to stay in North Korea. The Communist indoctrination had taken hold. For the first time in a major conflict, POWs had become a significant pawn to try and influence the opinion of a population. It was not the last time.

CODE OF CONDUCT

The actions of the POWs held by the Communists during the Korean War concerned the staff of all of the services. The new style of interrogations, torture, and brainwashing had soldiers cooperating with the enemy unlike ever before in U.S. military history. Besides revealing military secrets to their captors, soldiers were helping to create propaganda opportunities for the enemy. The Korean War had not only shown the world how warfare with the Communists would be waged, it showed how POWs could be used, manipulated, and exploited in a conflict to influence their populations back home. In spite of only a very few of the total number of POWs being ‘brainwashed” and cooperating with the enemy, the problem was considered a different one from those of past U.S. conflicts. It required a new means of training the soldier to resist, and the creation of more practical guidelines for that resistance.