We Fight for Peace

Twenty-Three American Soldiers, Prisoners of War, and Turncoats in the Korean War

Brian D. McKnight

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612778648
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

At midnight on January 24, 1954, the last step was taken in the armistice to end the war in Korea. That night, the neutral Indian guards who had overseen the prisoner of war repatriation process abandoned their posts, leaving their charges to make their own decisions. The vast majority of men allowed to choose a new nation were Chinese and North Koreans who elected the path of freedom. There were smaller groups hoping that the communist bloc would give them a better life; among these men were twenty-one American soldiers and prisoners of war. "We Fight for Peace" tells their story.

During the four months prior to the armistice, news had spread throughout the United States and the world that a group of twenty-three Americans was refusing repatriation. In the interim, two of the twenty-three soldiers had escaped. Once back behind American lines, the first voluntary repatriate, Edward Dickenson, was given celebrity treatment with the hope that this positive experience would entice the others to return to the United States. Just one more American POW, Claude Batchelor, chose repatriation.

In the United States, Dickenson, who was being treated at Walter Reed Medical Center, was placed under arrest and charged with a variety of collaboration related crimes. Weeks later, Batchelor was similarly arrested. Over the course of the coming months, Dickenson and Batchelor, against the backdrop of Joseph McCarthy's Army Hearings, were prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. In the ensuing years, Dickenson and Batchelor, both of whom had voluntarily returned to the United States, watched from their jail cells as most of the remaining twenty-one Americans trickled back home, protected by the dishonorable discharges they received. Exhaustively researched and meticulously documented, "We Fight for Peace" is the first comprehensive scholarly work on this controversial event in international history.

Notes

Introduction

1. The abbreviations PW, for Prisoner of War, and PsW, for Prisoners of War, are used rather than the traditional POW and POWs. This is in keeping with Department of Defense usage.

2. Thomas D. Harrison, “Why Did Some GIs Turn Communist?” Collier’s, Nov. 27, 1953, 25.

3. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, N.Y.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972, reprint 1979), 284–322.

4. John Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control (New York, N.Y.: Times Books, 1979), 126.

5. Marks, “Manchurian Candidate,” 125–26.

6. Virginia Pasley, 21 Stayed: The Story of the American GI’s Who Chose Communist China—Who They Were and Why They Stayed (New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus, and Cuhady, 1955); and Tape #118, Firing Line television program collection, Hoover Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, California; hereafter cited as Stanford-Firing Line.

7. Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York, N.Y.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 101.

8. William Lindsay White, The Captives of Korea: An Unofficial White Paper on the Treatment of War Prisoners (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1957).

9. Eugene Kinkead, In Every War But One (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1959). Kinkead’s book was also published in 1959 with the title Why They Collaborated. See also Clara Amelia Copa, “American Prisoner of War Behavior in the Korean War,” M.A. thesis, Utah State University, 1970, 9–10.

10. Albert D. Biderman, March to Calumny: The Story of American POWs in the Korean War (New York, N.Y.: MacMillan, 1963).

11. Kinkead, In Every War But One, 25.

12. The Manchurian Candidate, movie poster, 1962.

13. Charles S. Young, “Missing Action: POW Films, Brainwashing, and the Korean War,” in Lori Lyn Bogle, ed., The Cold War, vol. 5: Cold War Culture and Society (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2001), 195–96; Susan L. Carruthers, “The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the Cold War Brainwashing Scare,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 18:1 (Mar. 1998), 75–76; and John Loken, Oswald’s Trigger Films: The Manchurian Candidate, We Were Strangers, Suddenly? (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Falcon Books, 2000), 2–12.

14. Morris Wills and J. Robert Moskin, Turncoat: An American’s 12 Years in Communist China (New York, N.Y.: Prentice-Hall, 1968).

15. William Adams, “Vietnam Screen Wars,” in Nicolaus Mills, ed., Culture in an Age of Money: The Legacy of the 1980s in America (Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 1990), 156–74.

16. Raymond Lech, Broken Soldiers (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2000), 3.

17. Lewis H. Carlson, Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War: An Oral History of Korean War POWs (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

18. Lech, Broken Soldiers, 3.

19. Adam J. Zweiback, “The 21 ‘Turncoat G.I.s’: The Political Culture of the Korean War,” The Historian 60 (Winter 1998): 345–62.

20. Gary Harold Rice, “The Lost Sheep of the Korean War,” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1998.

21. Clarence Adams, An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2007).

22. Elizabeth Lutes Hillman, Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005), 47–48, 54.

1. Beginnings and Backgrounds

1. Clarence Adams, Clarence Adams and the American Dream: The Story of an African American Korean War Combat Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China (original, unedited, manuscript version), 39.

2. Pasley, 21 Stayed, 245–48. Most of the biographical information contained in this chapter is derived from Pasley. Where possible, however, it has been supplemented by newspaper and other reliable accounts.

3. Federal Bureau of Investigation Form FD-263, Dec. 28, 1956, pages 2, 10, Andrew Fortuna FBI File, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., hereinafter cited as FBI-Fortuna. Various records state the subject’s birth year as 1926 and 1927.

4. Detroit News (Mich.), Apr. 29, 1956.

5. Federal Bureau of Investigation Form FD-263, Dec. 28, 1956, pages 3, 4, FBI-Fortuna.

6. Detroit News (Mich.), Apr. 29, 1956.

7. Harold Lavine, “Twenty-One G.I.’s Who Chose Tyranny: Why They Left Us for Communism,” Commentary (July 1954), 42–43.

8. Pasley, 21 Stayed, 151–54; Dallas Morning News (Tex.), Sept. 23, 1953; July 13, 1966; “Case Histories of Those 21,” Newsweek, Jan. 18, 1954, 56; and Summary of Information (Adams, Howard Gayle), NARAII-153-Summary.

9. Pasley, 21 Stayed, 221–25; Houston Chronicle (Tex.), June 2, 1985; and “Case Histories of Those 21,” Newsweek, Jan. 18, 1954, 54.

10. Edward Swanson Dickenson Statement, Nov. 6, 1953, 1 of 9, Edward S. Dickenson Court Martial Records, copy in the possession of Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Oberlin, Ohio. Hereinafter cited as Dickenson Court Martial; and Review of the Staff Judge Advocate, undated, 56, Dickenson Court Martial.

11. Pasley, 21 Stayed, 29–30, and “Case Histories of Those 21,” Newsweek, Jan. 18, 1954, 54–55.

12. Pasley, 21 Stayed, 30–31.

13. Pasley, 21 Stayed, 31–32; Special Agent Report, Oct. 2, 1956, 3–4, Richard Guy Corden...