If the Korean conflict is Britain's “forgotten war” of the mid-twentieth century, so the roughly one thousand of its servicemen who were incarcerated by the North Koreans and Chinese at some point between 1950 and 1953 are its forgotten POWs. Their experiences held relatively little appeal for publishers in the years following the end of the UN police action, because unlike their counterparts from the Second World War, the Korean War ex-POWs had no breakout stories to tell to a public interested in exciting boy's-own adventures. Escape from a Korean prison camp was more or less impossible. Even leaving aside the peninsula's daunting geography and climate, no British escapee could have ever made his way southward across hundreds of miles of hostile terrain without racially sticking out like a sore thumb. The story of Britain's POWs in Korea, therefore, is one of quotidian endurance rather than daring escapades. The exact circumstances of each man's captivity varied greatly from place to place, but it was generally characterized by inadequate food, shelter, and welfare, and a good deal of intimidation, both physical and psychological.
S. P. MacKenzie's new book seeks to critique and supplement the official account of the prisoners' ordeal provided by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) shortly after their release in 1953. The MoD's immediate concern at the time was to counter the Chinese assertion, repeated by sympathetic British newspapers like the Daily Worker, that the POWs had been well treated during their captivity in Korea and, moreover, that many of them had been responsive to the reeducation efforts of communist propagandists in the camps. The official line was to insist that throughout their imprisonment, all British soldiers had been “remarkably resistant” to efforts to undermine their loyalty to the Crown (4). MacKenzie does not seek to overturn this claim completely, but he does offer persuasive evidence that it is, at the very least, an oversimplified one. Although it is true that most of the attempts at communist indoctrination in the camps were simply too crude to be effective, a small number of prisoners labeled by their captors as “progressives” seem to have been genuinely influenced by them. Moreover, a somewhat larger number of men, albeit motivated by promises of better treatment rather than ideology, were persuaded to spy and inform on their comrades. The MoD's Special Investigation Branch suspected that at least thirty-nine returned soldiers had voluntarily aided the enemy at some point during their captivity, though it ultimately decided that there was insufficient evidence to charge any of them. As Winston Churchill himself pointed out, becoming a communist was not in and of itself a crime in the British army.
Most of the book is devoted to describing the physical conditions in the various camps where British prisoners found themselves during the war, as well as the multifarious efforts of their mostly Chinese captors to convince them that they were not loyal servants of the Crown at all but actually the deluded lackeys of a dying imperialist cause. Grim though much of MacKenzie's story is, these encounters between po-faced communist propagandists and their squaddie students make for very funny reading. The Chinese and North Koreans undermined their own efforts from the start by their ludicrous ignorance of basic social conditions in Britain, asking bemused prisoners how many pigs and chickens their families owned and expressing disbelief that any humble soldier might possess a radio or a motorbike. Their jargon-filled accounts of Marxist-Leninist ideology went over the heads of many of the men, who literally had no idea what their captors were talking about. Some took the opportunity during these lengthy indoctrination sessions to covertly sleep or play cards (Royal Army Education Corps instructors who had had a similar lack of success teaching citizenship courses to the troops during the Second World War might well have had a twinge of sympathy for the communists on this point).
While refusing to take propaganda lectures seriously was a simple enough form of dissent, matters became more complicated when soldiers were pressed to sign “peace petitions” or take part in pro-communist photo opportunities. Although some men bravely refused to have anything to do with such blatant stunts and suffered harsh physical punishment as a consequence, it was tacitly understood across the ranks that “stringing along” the Chinese and North Koreans was acceptable if it meant some amelioration of the troops' living conditions. If nothing else, writing letters to relatives back in Britain that warmly complimented the communists on their behavior allowed men to get word to their loved-ones that they were alive. “Peace marches” were made more tolerable by introducing elements of barrack-room humor too sly for most of the guards to spot: so slogans denouncing the Anglo-American aggressors would be interspersed with cries of “Everton for the cup!” A banner made by the prisoners featuring a well-endowed heroine of the revolution soberly called for a “firm front” in the war against imperialism.
Each chapter of the book looks at events at a different prison camp, which, given that the experiences of the British captives did not vary hugely from place to place, introduces a certain redundancy into the narrative that might have been avoided if a more thematic approach had been taken. Also, given that the author has written a particularly good book about the famous Colditz prison camp, it is a shame that he did not take the opportunity to offer some comparative reflections on the similarities and differences between the experiences of captivity in the Second World War and Korea. All the same, this is a deftly researched and fascinating account of an episode in recent British military history that deserves far more attention than it has previously received, and MacKenzie is to be applauded for shedding new light on the ordeal of these forgotten men.
