American POWs of war are photographed while calling for peace and refusing to be repatriated to the United States at the end of the Korean War.
Thousands of prisoners of war were exchanged by both sides once hostilities ended. But captured American soldiers who were held in North Korea and China had been subjected to previously unheard-of levels of indoctrination for months or even years of captivity. The captured soldiers had been completely unprepared for the tactics and mind games employed by the Chinese, which successfully turned the men against their fellow prisoners and discovered their individual weaknesses, one by one.
At the end of the war, 23 Americans and one British soldier refused to return home and publicly sided with communism and the Chinese government. These men all moved to China and were given jobs and provided language training.
The 23 nonrepatriates, as they were called, sent shockwaves through the US government and American public. They were seen both as willing collaborators, and occasionally as victims of a new form of aggressive indoctrination referred to as “brainwashing”.
Eventually, all of the nonrepatriates grew to regret their decisions to defect, some sooner rather than later. The first two men to come back on their own were quickly tried and sentenced to prison, but as time went on, many of the others returned quietly and attempted to pick up the pieces of their lives with as little fanfare as possible. One soldier, Corporal John Dunn, never returned to the United States during the course of his life, instead resettling in communist Czechoslovakia until he died in 1996.
For episode 29 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I talked with Professor Brian McKnight, author of the book “We Fight For Peace: Twenty-Three American Soldiers, Prisoners of War, and Turncoats in the Korean War.” We discussed the common denominators in the backgrounds of many of the men who defected, the conditions they endured during their long imprisonments by Chinese and North Korean forces, and what led some men to collaborate and others to resist until the end.
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