WE soon learned the rules of the prison. At five o’clock in the morning the dense mass of bodies, overlapping one another on the wooden floor, responded like automatons to a single word of command from one of the warders. As one man, almost, without a second’s pause, they would rise into a sitting position, their legs crossed, their shoulders drooping in an attitude of contrition, their heads bowed. At dawn, one man was permitted to stand up, in order to remove the cardboard blackout from the tiny window in the top, left-hand corner, at the far end of the cell. He would climb on the little, knee-high, rickety wooden screen which afforded all the privacy allowed to prisoners when they were permitted to visit the cell latrine—a square hole in the floor at the far end under the window.
Two or three hours later, the heads of the prisoners would move—just slightly; a move that could not be seen by an observer in the passage behind. In some way unknown to me, they knew that food was coming. For perhaps another five or ten minutes my straining ears could catch no sound at all. Surely, I would think, they must be wrong this time! Not even the faintest echo of a clattering food tin, or rattling of our crude, metal bowls could I hear. Yet a few minutes later I would hear the sound of preparation; a few minutes after that the food would come along. As the warder reached our door, my cell-companions scattered to form a large circle, their backs to the cell walls. From inside their filthy, ragged clothing, they produced chop-sticks—two little pieces of unsmoothed wood per man—and their own preparations for the meal were complete. Bowls of millet, kaoliang or maize—mostly the latter—were passed into the cell: half a bowl per man. Occasionally, there would be a little thin bean soup, and in anticipation of this delicacy the saliva almost ran from their eager mouths. Tom and I were lucky. The only concession made to us as prisoners-of-war was that our bowls were half-filled with cold rice (left over from the police dining-hall) and, sometimes, a little fish. When we could do so secretly, we shared our fish with those that sat near us; for they looked at it with such longing eyes, poor wretches. When we had finished our meal, the bowls were passed back through the serving-window in the cell door, places were instantly resumed, and the pattern of motionless bodies was re-established.
Day and night, the electric light shone down on us from the ceiling. At dusk, the cardboard black-out was replaced. The evening meal was brought along at five, the prisoners long since aware of its proximity; and at ten o’clock the second command of the day was shouted. Before the echo had died in the passage, the cell floor was covered with recumbent bodies, so closely packed that, even when lying on one’s side, one’s legs overlapped another prisoner. In this press Tom and I, almost lice-free on entry, speedily found ourselves crawling again, our clothes and hair providing fresh nests for the quickly multiplying creatures.
One of the prisoners is to be punished. The Weasel, creeping up and down the passage in his usual way, hoping to find someone disobeying the rules and regulations, thinks that he has discovered a man whispering to another in our cell. It is useless for the man to protest his very real innocence. He moved, and his clothing, rubbing against that of another man, has caused a slight noise. The Weasel believes—or pretends that he believes—that the prisoner is guilty of talking. He stands behind the passage window, rapping out questions, and what sound like threats, to the cringing prisoner, who, standing at the Weasel’s order, is facing him, terrified. After a few minutes, he is sent to the end of the cell. Tom and I do not understand what is happening. He is raising his arms above his head. The Weasel shouts at him and he raises them higher; he is stretching them to the utmost. Slowly, the nature of his punishment becomes apparent to us. His back is now turned to the passage. He cannot tell whether or not he is still watched by his tormentor, and so, as his arms become tired, he cannot rest them, fearing worse punishment if he moves without orders. An hour passes. Now and again, Tom and I can just hear the Weasel’s footsteps as he comes back; or sometimes we hear him cough slightly above us, and we realize that he has returned silently. Four hours pass. When the Weasel calls out to the defaulter, we see that his cheeks are wet with tears of agony as he turns to answer. Only when darkness falls, only when the tormented man is about to faint, does the Weasel give him permission to lower his arms and return to his place.
No one moves in the cell. No eyes are lifted in sympathy. No hand is raised to give him a friendly, comforting pat, as he resumes his cross-legged posture. From further up the cell block, there comes a swishing sound, followed by a cry of pain. The Weasel has transferred his centre of operations. I think it is a woman whose cries we hear.
Now and again, as the days passed, we were allowed to wash. That is to say, every third or fourth day, the door was opened about an hour before our first meal, and six men or women were allowed out from each cell in pairs to wash their hands and faces. Twice I was permitted to carry Tom pick-a-back down the passage, to the little room at the end where our feeding bowls were kept, and where there was a single tap from which ice-cold water constantly flowed. On those days when we were not lucky enough to wash, we were able to exchange a few words with our cell companions; for Stoat, Weasel, and Ferret were always busy on such occasions and could not watch all the cells. Besides, the next pair had always to be ready at the door, waiting their turn to run up to the washroom as soon as the previous pair came back. In this way, we had warning of the warder’s approach.
There was a boy in our cell who spoke a little English learned at a Korean high school. He was seized by a high fever two or three times a day, but received no medicine for it. He told us that he came from a town called Pyoktong where there were many prisoners, closely guarded by the Chinese. Mi-gook, Yun-gook—every kind of prisoner. He had been arrested for speaking to them as they passed. We asked him what his sentence was; he had no sentence. Arrested five months before, he had had no trial. How long would he be here? He did not know. Maybe till he died. This was a political prison. There were men there because they had been Christian leaders; men who had been members of the Communist Party, but had fallen from favour; others who had been arrested for no reason known to themselves—perhaps on the old system of a lettre de cachet. Trial? They had not been tried. They would not be tried. They would stay here until some powerful friend could get them released, until they were moved to another prison, or until they died. Tom and I tried to comfort them from our horror-stricken hearts, but though they were grateful, they were comfortless. They knew better than we did what the future held.
Coming back down the passage after our second wash, we were followed to our cell by the Stoat, who began to question Tom about his leg. He thought it a great joke that Tom had to hop about, and that he found it difficult to visit the latrine hole with such a disability. In this genial mood, he informed us that there was another European prisoner in the next cell down. Such were the circumstances of our imprisonment, that he had been there all the time without our even suspecting his presence. Leaving us standing by the window, the Stoat went down the passage and began to talk to someone inside. A cheerful voice with a broad Australian accent answered.
“More prisoners-of-war, eh?” said the voice, evidently speaking for our benefit rather than to the Stoat. “Good-oh! Hope to get a chance to see ’em before long, eh? This place is a dinkum chamber-of-horrors!”
Now I realized what it was that one of the Koreans had been trying to tell me on the previous wash-day, when we had not been allowed out. He had repeated “Hoju” again and again. This was a word I had never heard before; it means, of course, “Australian”.
Two days later, we heard the “Hoju” come out of his cell. It was meal time and, peering through the door bars, I caught a glimpse of a mass of curly hair and a huge, light brown beard.
“Just off,” he called, apparently to a warder at the far end of the passage.
“God Save King George,” I called back; and I was lucky that the Stoat was on duty and in a good humour. He kicked the door with the side of his boot, setting it rattling, but left his rebuke at that.
Ferret and Weasel are both in a foul temper. Although it is four days since anyone had a wash, no one has been allowed out this morning to the wash-house. They are looking for trouble: if there is no trouble, they will make it.
For a time, they vent their spleen in one of the cells further up the passage; cries and a sobbing voice are heard by us all. After a period of silence, Ferret’s voice screams out from the window above where I sit with Tom. He has obviously slipped down to our cell, hoping to find someone to punish. He has found two or three, apparently; he and Weasel are not going to be content with tormenting just one man this morning.
First they pick on a little man sitting to the left and forward of me, who had been brought in two days ago after we had a clear-out. (Five men had left our cell, wired together with telephone cable. We received word from the boy that they were being taken to work in one of the coal mines.) Now this man has been chosen to teach the five newcomers a lesson in discipline. Neither Tom nor I can understand what he is accused of: we shall have to inquire later. It is probably for talking or visiting the latrine without good cause—these are favourite reasons for punishment by Weasel and Ferret. Whatever it is, they have called the prisoner over to the cell door. Yesterday, they kept a prisoner at that door for over an hour, taking it in turn to twist his arm, which they pulled through the bars. Turning it almost to the point where it broke, bringing the prisoner to the verge of fainting, they would stop, rest him for a moment, then start on his other arm. This morning, the punishment seems to be quite mild: they are pulling his hair, twisting his ears and nose; punching his face through the bars. He dare not step back out of reach, but stands there, apparently willing to suffer these sadistic acts; in reality chained there by his fear of worse punishment.
Throughout this, Ferret keeps questioning him, giving more point to each query by a sharp tug at the handful of hair he has, or a hard rap on the nose. The prisoner answers in a whisper. Now another prisoner is called over, and Weasel transfers all his attention to him. Ten or fifteen minutes pass in this way; the remainder of the prisoners sit mutely by, hearing all, but seeing nothing; terrified that their names may be called at any moment. Our hearts burn because we are unable to do anything at all to aid these men.
A third man is called up; but not for punishment—yet. The two others are made to kneel down, their heads towards the far end of the cell. The third man is ordered to kick them and he does so—their seats, their sides, their legs. But his kicks, though hard enough to cause the two wretches to cry out, are not hard enough to satisfy Weasel and Ferret. With the steel rods they carry in their hands, they reach through the bars and begin to beat the third man, urging him to kick harder. The cries, the sound of the blows, and the swishing of the steel rods mingle in this way for about five minutes. Only then are the groaning men permitted to sit down again, a shout from Weasel silencing the exclamations of agony that their bruises cause them.
Outside in the courtyard flies the flag that represents the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea.
At last we were to move again. Fifteen days after our arrival, we were taken out of our cell and told to prepare for a journey. Our belts were returned, but my Chinese shoes had been stolen. After a great deal of fuss, threats, and argument, they contrived to find me a very old pair of canvas shoes. The little box of matches, and the few cigarettes that the Chinese truck-driver gave to me on the journey up from Chinju, were not returned to me.
How glad we were to climb on to a truck, even though my wrists were bound with wire and Tom’s crutches had been removed from his reach. We looked back, as the truck drove off down the street, remembering the unfortunate ones who must stay behind. From the gateway emerged a long column of prisoners, taken from the cells at the same time as ourselves, wired together for their march to another prison or a labour camp.
At first we headed east, taking the road that runs parallel to and just south of the Yalu River. Northwards, we could see the huge jagged peaks of North-East China; southwards, the country alternated with rice paddy and low hills. Four nights later, after a crazy journey that had led us gradually south and then south-west, we found ourselves back in Pyongyang.
We reached a wooden police building about two o’clock in the morning but, to our delight, were not put into a cell. We dozed until daylight and, sometime after nine, were given breakfast of stale, cold rice and bean curd. Neither of us was very anxious to eat this stodgy, unappetising food: the last police station on the way down had given us, on the previous evening, our best meal for more than a month, but we ate all the bean curd because of the nourishment it provided. A young Korean in a cheap, European-style lounge suit brought the bowls of food down, and confided that he, too, was really a prisoner but was permitted to do small jobs about the area. He had been at Pyongyang high school for some time and spoke understandable, if limited English, though he seemed unable to tell us why he was in the hands of the police. It was plain that he did not wish to be caught talking to us, but we did manage to discover from him that the Peace Talks had started up again at Kaesong. He would say nothing more than that, and then changed the subject by saying that another American Air Force Officer had passed through this very building, on his way to a prisoner-of-war camp run by the North Koreans. We were probably going to the same camp in four or five days, he added.
At dusk, a lieutenant-colonel of the police, with a small escort, took us in his jeep along the road to Chinam-po. A few miles from the city we turned off the main highway on to a dirt track, which led us through several villages to a large Korean farm standing on the edge of a community of about forty houses. It had probably belonged to a Japanese formerly, for it had a brick barn and its rooms were spacious compared with others in the village. The colonel knocked on a huge double gate of wood, calling something out as he did so. As soon as the gate was open, we were ordered to leave the jeep and enter the courtyard. There was a sentry, armed with a burp-gun on the gate—the first North Korean private soldier of the infantry I had seen for a very long time. Near him was a corporal, who was receiving some sort of orders about us. Two or three minutes later, the corporal opened one of the double-doors of the barn and switched on an electric light. I was told to enter, Tom following on his crutches. Inside, lying on some straw, covered with a piece of matting was the “Hoju” from Sinuiju jail, and, with him, a freckle-faced young man wearing an American flying-suit. We had a warm welcome.
We made the final decision to escape while working on the hill one morning. After telling the story of my captivity to my new companions, very naturally the subject of another escape had arisen. With the rapid onset of the Korean winter, I had originally decided, after my discharge from Sinuiju jail, that I would take up winter quarters in a prison camp and make a fresh escape in the following spring. In any case I had Tom with me; and I had felt that I could not leave him alone with the North Koreans, knowing that he would suffer at least in part for my misdemeanour if I managed to get away. Now, talking to the two working with me—Jack, the young American flier, and Ron, the Australian—it seemed to me that circumstances had changed considerably from those on which I had based my former appreciation.
The first change had been that we found ourselves in a North Korean interrogation centre, and not in a prisoner-of-war camp. Though we had not expected to find any luxuries in the latter, we had anticipated sufficient food to maintain life throughout the winter. Here we were getting a diminishing ration of boiled millet daily with a very thin soup, containing a bean or a radish leaf to convince our stomachs of its authentic nourishment value. Worse, Tom, who was under intensive interrogation, was being punished for his lack of response by being starved. His rations had been cut off completely, and they were now threatening to cut off his water supply. Our efforts to feed him from our own meagre issue of millet had been circumvented; at mealtimes we were supervised to the point where the guard commander or a sentry actually watched us eat.
In the second place, the barn in which we were quartered was now bitterly cold at nights. The North Korean troops in the village had all been issued with warm winter garments, but the interrogators made it clear that they would not issue clothing to those who did not co-operate with them. We were not co-operating and had no intention of doing so. It seemed as if the bitterest phase of the North Korean winter would find us in what threadbare garments we still possessed. Jack was the worst off. He had been shot down in mid-summer, wearing only thin underclothing and a summer flying suit. Ron, who had parachuted from a Meteor shot down over Sinuiju, was only better equipped to the extent of a woollen shirt.
The staff of the interrogation centre were the most unpleasant and unscrupulous captors I had encountered up to that time, being either fanatical Communists, sadists, or a combination of both. The commander was a lieutenant-colonel of the infantry who spoke a little English. After our arrival, he had pointed out that, as war criminals of the worst sort, we could not expect a proper ration of food while awaiting our turn to be interrogated, unless we worked for it. This meant, in fact, hard labour, constructing air-raid shelters for his headquarters, digging and removing earth and rocks, carrying water for cementing over a long distance, and carrying timber and bricks up to the hill from the village. We were all weak from the privations of our captivity, and on our coarse, poor diet we were expending strength we could ill-afford. There were sometimes additional tasks in the evening. For instance, the officer who dealt principally with us was an infantry major—referred to by Kim, the civilian interpreter, as the Young Major. He hated us bitterly. Whenever possible, he would find us unpleasant tasks, such as cleaning out the filthy head- quarters latrine—a huge stone jar sunk in the earth which had to be emptied with a small can by hand into a leaking bucket. What enhanced his pleasure in setting us this duty was that he could refuse us permission to wash afterwards, so that we must return to our quarters filthy with latrine matter. On other occasions, we had to work the crude machine that cut fodder for the cattle, or clean up the animal-stalls—jobs we minded less because we were sometimes able to steal a diacon (a cross between a turnip and a radish), which, though raw and unpalatable, filled our empty bellies for a short time. I protested to Kim on my first two initial interrogations about this treatment, without result. He excused himself by saying that it was no affair of his, but betrayed his feelings, by replying to my remarks about the Geneva Convention and its Prisoner-of-War clauses, with a comment that the Convention was an instrument of bourgeois reaction which, anyway, was inapplicable to war-criminals such as ourselves. Kim was a vain man, who posed as an ex-professor in political economy at Seoul University, but let slip to Jack one day that he had really been an announcer on the Seoul Radio. He had a marked inferiority complex and, like the Young Major, was really a savage under a thin veneer of education.
These were the circumstances surrounding our captivity—with a prospect of deterioration. Before we met that morning to make our decision, however, one other important aspect had been considered: Tom’s future as a lone captive in the hands of a group of men who hated him, as an American major of the regular service, perhaps more bitterly than the remainder of us. He was, to them, the epitome of all the power and abundance in life which they coveted so much, feared so much, and thus hated so profoundly. What had led me to consider leaving Tom at all was that our escape might make our captors afraid that the news of his treatment would become known to the outside world. If successful, we should actually institute such enquiries through Kaesong to ensure that he received the care a human being might expect. But both Tom and I knew that their fury on discovering our absence might be so unbridled that he would not survive it.
The night before we took the final decision, I rolled over on to my side and began to whisper in Tom’s ear, putting to him the prospect as I saw it and the hope that escape held for us. Tom said:
“Of course you must go. As the senior officer here, I order you to disregard my safety, if you feel you have a chance of making it.”
I reminded Tom that he would be absolutely at the mercy of the Young Major’s temper—a temper we knew to be demoniac in character.
“You must go,” said Tom, again.
Knowing him, I should not have expected any other answer. On the following morning we reviewed the position and made our decision: I would begin work that night.
Initially, my interrogations had been conducted by Kim alone. These had been of an entirely political nature, in order to sound me out as a possible convert to their cause—or, at least, a co-operator. They had a young soldier elsewhere in the village, who had ostensibly accepted their views and supplied them with a certain amount of information after a terrible sickness which had left him looking like a skeleton. We saw him twice and he begged us, in a voice that might have belonged to a very old man, to abandon resistance to our captors. To his knowledge, he said, one American who had resisted them, had already been starved to death in the very building we now occupied. He was led away from us by U, his principal instructor, who urged him not to waste his time speaking to us.
On the very night that I was determined to begin work on breaking-out, I was called out after darkness for an interrogation by the Young Major, a Captain Li, and a lieutenant I called Poker-Face. Kim interpreted; the others spoke no English except for Li, whose vocabulary was extremely limited. As I followed Kim along one of the village paths to a hut just below the air-raid shelter on the hill, I wondered whether this was to be another political interrogation or military interrogation in earnest. If the latter, what would they ask me? I knew that the greater number of their questions to Tom were concerned with information he could not possibly have given them, even if he had been prepared to do so; for they had demanded all the details of the top-secret codes used by the Far Eastern Air Force Headquarters—insisting that he must know these as a major flying with an operational squadron in Korea! The questions they asked me that night were even more fantastic. When I was brought before the Young Major, he asked me through Kim:
“Give us the organisation, means of recruitment and training, method of dispatch, and system of communication of the British Intelligence Services throughout Europe and the Far East.”
I was so amused to think that they believed me to be intimately in the confidence of the War Office that I smiled. Captain Li began to hit me about the head with a heavy wooden ruler. After an hour of threats, blows, and a warning to reconsider my attitude during the next day, I was taken back to the barn.
At that particular time, the sentry on duty outside the barn door was an unpleasant youth with pimples whom we called “Hoju” because he used this term to Ron. We loathed him because he delighted in making our lives difficult. It was he who had caused the straw that we lay on to be removed; who had spied on us during meals and seen us hiding food to give to Tom; who prevented us from visiting the latrine. Whenever he was on duty, we were forced to talk in whispers, or he would get the guard commander to separate us in different corners, and insist that we neither lay down nor stood up, but sat up. At first, we had tried humouring, then ignoring, him; finally, we resisted his every command for as long as we could. I was glad to see him standing there on sentry, for I knew that before long he would be relieved. Though the attention he paid us was not directly intended to prevent us from escaping—it was merely a means of demonstrating to himself his power over us—his attention on this night might lead to disaster. I waited in the darkness until the new sentry came on, and then began my work.
I planned to cut a hole in the outside wall of the barn. The lower half of the wall was of brick and too hard for my poor tools; but the top half was of wattles and mud, running up between stout timbers from brick to roof. While working outside, I had picked up an old screwdriver and a rusty table-knife. With these tools and a Shick razor blade that I had secreted since the days at Munha-ri, I had to cut away the hard mud, bound with chopped straw, and to cut out the wattles on which the mud was mounted. The sentry was fifteen feet away, at the far, gable-end of the barn, by the main entrance to the courtyard. To enter the barn, if his suspicions were aroused, he would have to come into the courtyard—a matter of five paces—unlock the door, and switch on the light. If I kept a careful watch, I might have time to assume a sleeping pose but, after a certain point in my work, I would not be able to explain why there was the outline of a hole in the wall above us! Knowing that I should probably fail to cut my way through completely in one night, I decided to reach a point on the first night which might be explained, if noticed during the next day, by a fall of mud from the wall. Of course, I could not begin to cut the wattles but hoped to be able to look at the few I had exposed in daylight, so that I should be able to make a work plan for the following night.
The next morning, when the guard commander opened our door to bring in our bowls of millet, we all came near to heart failure. Looking at the wall, we saw that a large number of the wattles had been laid bare, and that the main area of mud removed was just about the size for a man to crawl through! It seemed that the great dark patch shrieked at the guard commander and sentries to be noticed.
The day passed in the normal way. When we returned from work, we at once asked Tom if anyone had taken an interest in the wall. Apparently, it had remained unnoticed. We ate our evening meal, and settled down for the night, ostensibly to sleep. Hoju was on guard immediately after dusk that night, so we knew he would not be on duty again for six hours. Shortly after he dismounted, I began work.
Tom, Ron and Jack lay back under the mats, listening to the talk of some of the officers of the interrogation centre, whose room was in the western half of the barn. Once I began to cut the wattles, we became absolutely committed to escaping that night, and I increased my speed as much as I dared. Every noise, however slight, seemed to echo through the room. I felt that, at any moment, there would be a cry of alarm from the officers next door, chairs would be thrown back, the doors opened, and a crowd of infuriated North Koreans unleashed upon us. Now and again, the anxious voices of one of the others would reach me, asking for a progress report, and I would reassure them as best I could. I removed a complete section of wattles, after about two hours’ work, and began to cut the hard mud away that lay beyond them. After about ten minutes, I made a disappointing discovery: there was another section of wattles between us and the outside. Though the room was very cold, the sweat ran from my forehead, face, and neck, as I cut, prised, pulled, and scraped as quickly as I could. Another hour passed before the second section was free. I pulled away the mud that remained on the far side, touched a smooth, flexible surface, pushed against it, and felt my hand slide through into the cold night air outside.
I returned to the floor, where the three were lying beneath their mats. Jack and Tom were talking in whispers. Ron had fallen asleep! Waking him, I went back to the hole and crawled through as quickly as I dared, dropping on to my hands on the far side. The wide ledge which ran along the outside wall was covered with empty bottles, buckets, tin cans, a motor-car tyre, and an old cast-iron wood stove. Standing on the ledge, I removed the bottles and the stove to one side to make way for Ron, who was the next to come out. His head appeared in the hole, his shoulders, his hips. Suddenly, he lost his balance. He fell forward, swept the ledge with his arms, and knocked the stove on to the track below. A loud crash rang through the village.
Nearby was an ox, lying in its stable. As Ron disappeared back through the hole in the wall, I ran across to the ox and lay down behind him, waiting for the reaction to the alarm. Several minutes passed, but no sound came above the heavy breathing of the sleeping ox. After ten minutes, I returned to the hole and called to Ron in a whisper. This time he managed to get right out of the hole before knocking a bottle off the ledge but I caught it before it could fall. Jack followed. The three of us moved, as planned, to a stack of dried corn stalks about eighty yards from the barn. Here, Jack and Ron concealed themselves, while I returned to the courtyard. We had completed the break-out.
In a corner of the courtyard was a pile of old padded jackets and a pair of padded trousers. It was most desirable that we should have these, because of the lightness of Jack’s and Ron’s clothing—I was afraid that Jack, especially, might suffer from cold shock once we reached the coast, I crawled back into the courtyard through an opening in the wall, normally used to pass fodder through to the cattle-shed. Laden with clothing, I returned the same way to the corn-stalks.
Both Jack and Ron felt much better when they had donned their new clothing. I took the old black raincoat that Jack had discarded and we set off across the rice paddy on a course that led north-west to the mountains. Neither shots nor other sounds of alarm reached us, as we crossed the main Chinam-po highway, and left the interrogation centre behind a hill—free men once more.