Broken Soldiers
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15
Ratings1
Average rating3
"Traversing the no-man's-land of political loyalty and betrayal, Broken Soldiers documents the fierce battle for the minds of America prisoners during the Korean War. In scorching detail, Raymond Lech describes the soldiers' day-to-day experiences in prisoner-of-war camps and the shocking treatment some of them received at the hands of their own countrymen after the war.
Why, he asks, were only fourteen American soldiers tried as collaborators when thousands of others who admitted to some of the same offenses were not?".
"Drawing on some sixty thousand pages of court-martial transcripts Lech secured through the Freedom of Information Act, Broken Soldiers documents the appalling treatment and the sophisticated propagandizing to which American POWs fell victim during the Korean conflict. Three thousand American soldiers perished in North Korean camps over the winter of 1950-51, most from starvation.
Through the unsentimental testimony of survivors, Lech describes how these young men, filthy and lice-infested, lost an average of 40 percent of their body weight. Many also lost their powers of resistance and their grip on soldierly conduct."--BOOK JACKET.
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Focuses in on a dozen or two American POWs taken in North Korea and follows them through their experiences in the camps, and the court martials that followed their return for crimes of collaboration with the enemy. Discusses the huge level of early mortality (over 40% died in first 6 months) followed by far fewer deaths and fewer cases of beatings and overt killings after the Chinese take over the camps and especially after the list of POWs turned over the UN forces.
Makes great use of transcripts but left me feeling uneasy about a number of things:
1) The anecdotes that he builds more than half the book on come from transcripts and records that he then shows to be deeply problematic when used in the context of court martial trials. How much can we believe? There needs to be a similar work which hopefully can find some other Chinese or Korean sources.
2) Would love to have seen even some slight discussion of the conditions of ROK prisoners in the North or of Chinese/DPRK soldiers in Koje (very brief mention of latter)
3) Because the book focuses almost entirely on some of the court martialled troops, there isn't much discussion of those who never came under suspicion for collaboration - instead this larger mass are merely referred to as a majority who mostly did similar things to those who were put on trial. I suspect the picture is more complex.
4) The transition from high-coercion, torture, beatings, killings, and completely inhumane conditions in the earliest stage to still problematic and underfed prisoners in camps after the first half year is really important - whenever Lech wants to emphasize the evil of the Chinese/Koreans he keeps referring back to this first stage - seeing the transition as one of strategy, rather than explained by availability of supplies, better organization, and correction of excesses. I think this is deeply unfair to the PRC/DPRK side which, though clearly guilty of atrocities I doubt are quite the monsters throughout that are described.
