Monica Kim - The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History

THE INTERROGATION ROOMS
OF THE KOREAN WAR

Locations of prisoner of war camps on the Korean peninsula

The Interrogation Rooms
of the Korean War

THE UNTOLD HISTORY

MONICA KIM

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2019 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

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All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938277

ISBN 978-0-691-16622-3

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Amanda Peery, Eric Crahan, and Pamela Weidman

Production Editorial: Mark Bellis

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Publicity: James Schneider

Copyeditor: Dawn Hall

This book has been composed in Arno

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother,

and my father,

CONTENTS

NOTE ON LANGUAGE

FOR ALL REFERENCES TO and mention of places and people in Korean that come from the files of the United States military or government at the time, I have kept the spelling of Korean and Chinese names according to the Romanized versions appearing in the archived documents for ease of possible later reference in the archives. US military Romanization of Korean did not consistently follow any format at this particular time, so spelling can be highly idiosyncratic and vary greatly.

The names of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese persons appear via the usual practice of placing the family name first, then the personal name. I have used the McCune-Reichauer system for the transliteration of the other references in Korean, with the noted exceptions of well-known figures like Syngman Rhee, who are often associated and referenced with particular renderings of their names.

Orientals or Asiatics were terms commonly used in the United States to refer to East Asians, whether in Korea, Japan, or the United States. Whenever archival material or an oral history employs such terms, I have kept the term intact. However, I do use Japanese Americans in my discussion of the POW interrogators and their history. Using Japanese Americans for this time period is indeed anachronistic, as Asian American would later be created by student movements in the 1960s as a term for expressing the political solidarity of students from different Asian backgrounds. Although Japanese American is awkward to use in a sense, the use of only Oriental within this chapter would replicate much of the conflation between the Asian citizen of the United States and the Asian subject of US projects in East Asia. As a result, I have decided to use Japanese American to help initially parse a divergent, but ultimately converging, history.

ABBREVIATIONS

THE INTERROGATION ROOMS
OF THE KOREAN WAR

Introduction

War and Humanity

IT WAS OCTOBER 1, 1950, and twenty-year-old Oh Se-hi was making his way back to his home in Kyngsang Province, after multiple stints with the northern Korean Peoples Army (KPA). After General MacArthurs successful landing at the port of Inchon two weeks earlier on September 15, the KPA had been in steady retreat, and Oh had seized on a chance to return home. Oh stepped out of the wooded hills onto a road that wound around a cabbage field and began to walk north.

A voice barked out from behind himHands in the air! Oh raised his hands slowly in the air. He had already deemed it inevitable that he would eventually run into a soldier of the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA), the United Nations Command (UNC), or even the KPA againand in preparation for such encounters he had stashed away four different pieces of paper in strategic places on his body. The first, a handwritten patriot certificate attesting to his true dedication to the KPA, he had folded carefully and placed into the lining of his beret-like hat, one worn often by guerilla fighters. The second, a leaflet dropped by UN reconnaissance planes, guaranteed his safe surrender, and he had placed it, like precious cargo, in the inside pocket of his coat. The third, tucked away in the right back pocket of his pants, was his student papers stating that he was enrolled at Seoul University, the prominent, national university of South Korea. In the left back pocket of his pants the fourth piece of papera slim notebookcontained the registered names of his students when he had been a middle school teacher in the countryside. He had rehearsed over and over in his mind what he would do when he met a member from the KPA, or a US soldier, a guerilla fighter, or an ROKA soldier. The certificate would hold him in good stead with the KPA and the communist guerilla fighters; the UN surrender leaflet appeared to have the most wide-ranging application since the military forces of sixteen different nations, including the Republic of Korea (ROK), were operating on the Korean peninsula under the auspices of the UNC, led by the US military; the student and teacher papers attested to his civilian status and ROK citizenship, possible necessary evidence for someone of the ROKA.