March 2013

I’ve often been asked, how many men were Prisoners of War (POWs) during the Korean War?  I don’t know exactly, and this story is worth telling.  Government figures are quite good, and the number most often seen is 7140.  It takes in 2701 men who died as POWs, 4418 who returned alive, and 21 who refused to come home.  Those who came back alive include Little Switch and Big Switch, near the end of the war, and quite a few who escaped from forward areas.  But our friend, CSM Tim Casey, has discovered well over 5200 survivor names.  This number includes quite a few others who were cut off by enemy forces, then escaped after a few days.  Many simply returned to their units.

National Archives has a list of 4447 returning POWs, but it also misses many of these short-termers.  There was also a problem with POW deaths in South Korea.  Massive battles around Hoengsong in February 1951 give us an example.  Whole battalions were encircled, with many men captured.  They were gathered up and held locally before marching northward by night.  Some died along the wayside or in villages were the groups of 50 to 100 were held by day.  After the lower ends of these tracks were retaken by friendly forces, graves registration work picked up, on both battlefields and routes.  When remains of men reported as POWs were found and identified, they were returned to their families as POWs.

But sometimes missing men who died along the wayside were simply tagged as killed in action.  We’ve found cases in which the bodies of men lost, especially in February-May 1951, were 10 or 20 or even 50 miles from their battle zones, typically farther north.  Very obviously, they had marched northward as POWs.  Left behind in villages, names were often forgotten by those who went on.  Yet when bodies were found and identified, it was very obvious that some had been short-term POWs.

We handle things very differently today.  Most of the human remains turned over by the North Koreans in 1990-94 and 2007 are men known to have died there, but a few were MIA from South Korea where they were last seen alive.  We’ve taken special care to inform families whenever these men are identified.  There are other examples, as well.  Our recovery teams worked at both the Unsan and Chosin Reservoir battle zones.  But some of our recoveries (and some of the North Korean turnovers) have been from north of the fighting areas.  More identifications have followed, and where the remains themselves provide evidence of captivity, we’ve told the families.  So how many men were captured?  Counting men in all the different categories, as many as 7900.  As time moves along, we’ll try to make that more exact.