efforts to support Chiang Kai-shek and Nationalist China and how – in a sense – Chinese soldiers who became prisoners of the United Nations Command, faced the additional burden of having to make the decision, under pressure, as to where and how their future lives would be spent. It is fortuitous that much of the content of War Trash is verified by the increasing emergence of serious studies on the subject of the Chinese Communist intervention in the Korean War, the impact of continued U.S. Unusual in fiction the author provides a respectable bibliography of the literature on the subject of the Korean War. War Trash, to paraphrase a talk-show program which recently discussed trends in non-fiction which turn out to be fiction, is an example of fiction that reads like non-fiction. Being inspired by fiction to re-open the study of historical actuality is perhaps skating on thin ice. War Trash reminds us all too well of a time when national ambitions, ideological differences and cultural complexities clashed so violently that even now, half a century later, the subject still inspires a gamut of emotions. The Road to Abu Ghraib and – to a far greater degree, War Trash – renewed the writer’s interest in a subject first explored – and last given any serious thought to – in connection with a research project at the Army War College in 1971-1972. The army’s study followed the appearance of a novel, War Trash4F4 – which explores the subject through the eyes of a fictional character who offers an ex- Communist Chinese soldier’s bird’s eye view of little-known history that – in one reviewer’s words – “most of us have forgotten or never knew about, to begin with.”
Mismanagement of prisoners taken by United Nations Command troops in the war should be looked at in the light of the reminder by the author of the study that, “the surprise and rapidity of the North Korean invasion of South Korea forestalled any effort to plan for the care of EPWs2 on the scale necessary.”3 In this essay we will explore some of the unusual circumstances, particularly those of the Chinese prisoners of war, which would lead to subsequent and perhaps inevitable allegations of prisoner abuse in the UNC prison compounds. experience in the prisoner-of-war issues of the Korean War. During 2005 the Army Combat Studies Institute took a hard look at the subject of “detainee doctrine and experience” noting in the introduction that, “the perception of just treatment held by citizens of our nation and, to a great extent the world at large, have been and are being shaped by the actions of the US Army, both in the commission of detainee treatment but also, and more importantly, in the way the Army addresses its institutional shortcomings.” In tracing the history of this sometimes seriously misunderstood subject the author of The Road to Abu Ghraib1 revisits the U.S. The widely-publicized events at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad focused worldwide attention on how we appeared to be carrying out the responsibility which evolves upon a country with prisoners in its custody. Controversy has, rightly or wrongly, also characterized American views of the military prison facility at Guantanamo Navy Base in Cuba as a detention center. The handling and dispositions of enemy prisoners of war, as a national responsibility, established itself on the front-burner of America’s attention span, as a crucial sidebar to the war in Iraq.
Chinese Soldiers as Prisoners in Korea: Ideological Enigma Bruce Jacobs