March 2008
We do not have, just yet, an invitation from North Korea to do recovery work during 2008. It might come a little later, or not. I can’t speak to any specifics, but I haven’t given up on the possibility of “going North” later this year. Meanwhile preparations continue for work in South Korea. Our friends at the Joint POW Accounting Command (JPAC) hope to visit several areas, including the POW march routes leading north into the present Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Work there looks really promising. In just a first “road recon” last year, our JPAC team was able to recover two sets of likely remains, and this year, they’ll be able to get into some of the planting areas before new crops go in. That gives us a lot more room to work, and it gives local villagers a lot more time to talk. This is one of the things we’d hoped for, and it is proving true. Very often, we are dealing with members of the same Korean families and they still remember events from during the war. At least some of the second and third generations are not far from the original villages. True, most of these areas evacuated as enemy forces moved forward. But there were people who could not get out, and their stories are pretty well known, family by family. So we’ll have a lot to listen to and look for.
Picking up, now, on a previous story, we’re also looking much more closely at some of the Unknown burials at National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP) in Hawaii, “the Punchbowl.” There were a total of 867 burials from the Korean War. One went on to Arlington. Ten others have already been exhumed, and six of them have now been identified. The bad news is that we still cannot use DNA on bone cuts from the early Punchbowl burials to do identifications. The bone material was effectively scrubbed by the preservatives used prior to burial. But we are getting limited results with new methods, so we haven’t given up there, either.
The good news is that we’ve gotten to know these Unknowns a lot better than ever before. Some examples… Two of the burials are from the United Nations Military Cemetery (UNMC) at Inchon. We know the exact dates of original burial for both men, and we have locations and approximate dates of death. One man was likely a POW en route north, early war, from the group that followed Tiger Group in September 1950. We are trying to sort out names. The other man’s remains were pretty badly destroyed in combat, but even that gives us a “window of possibility” to work with.
Twenty-one others are from the UNMC at Masan, deep within South Korea. It was set up by the 25th Infantry Division, opened in July 1950, and had its last Unknown burials early in 1951. Now consider the numbers: early war, far south, and many of the missing men from nearby were either known or suspected POWs who worked northward before they died or disappeared. Many names can be excluded very quickly. We’re not ready to exhume anyone returned from UNMC Inchon or UNMC Masan just yet, but we are trying to “fine down” the names that are still possible. Can’t promise, but I am expecting good progress from both sites. Once again, we have a real advantage in working with Unknowns from South Korea, originally recovered by our own people, for we know exactly where and when they were found.
Now consider the other side of the coin. For those returned from North Korea during Operation Glory, it’s a lot less exact. The Chinese and North Koreans did provide location information for the human remains they passed back. We know from experience, meaning previous identifications, that sometimes they were quite truthful and accurate. And sometimes they were not. Remains coming from Camp 1, Camp 5, and the Chosin Reservoir battle zone, including the temporary cemeteries that we left behind, were typically “pretty close.” The Chinese and North Koreans often got individual names wrong, but they weren’t too concerned with that. At least they got the locations right.
But there’s another case where the Chinese and North Koreans just about “got it all wrong.” We opened a large, temporary cemetery at Pyongyang, North Korea. Then we had to leave the burials behind in December 1950 as allied forces fell back. UNMC Pyongyang contained around 650 U.S. and allied burials. When the Chinese and North Koreans returned human remains during Operation Glory, in September and November 1954, they claimed that 439 of the caskets held remains from Pyongyang. Our people at Kokura, Japan, worked on these remains, and identified many of them. So far, so good. But they were also able to positively identify dozens of others, reported from field burials around western North Korea, who were actually from the Pyongyang cemetery. We know, because we had buried them by name, and these remains “matched up.” So, at a given point, it was very obvious that someone among the Chinese and North Koreans was playing an ugly little game.
Our best belief, right now, is that UNMC Pyongyang was exhumed completely, except perhaps for one isolated plot containing six graves. It had been part of the main cemetery, but was separated from the other rows by an open area reserved for those still falling in daily combat. Most of the open area was not used, and, quite plausibly, the Chinese and North Koreans never discovered the final six men. We can say this reasonably because there were identifications from every other plot and row within the cemetery. Our task now is to reconstruct which Americans, originally buried at Pyongyang but later wrongly cited from elsewhere, are among the Unknowns at NMCP in Hawaii. We believe that 52 of 58 by-name burials from Pyongyang are now in the Punchbowl. The other six are from that isolated row, and were likely missed, but we’re checking for them, as well. This is “needle in a haystack” work, because we’re having to go over the burial records for every one of the North Korean returns. But it’s worth doing, and the process is very rewarding. Here again, we’re not yet ready to start exhuming, but as lists of possible names get shorter and shorter, we will be.