From: Mike Davino <mdavino@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: KOREAN-WAR-L@raven.cc.ku.edu
To: KOREAN-WAR-L@raven.cc.ku.edu
Subject: 'US Soldiers Abused PoWs During The Korean War'
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 12:11:21 -0800 (PST)
I think the UK has a fifty-year "Official Secrets"
law. I wonder what other Korean War "secrets" like
this one will be coming out in the next couple of
years.
Mike Davino
War London Times
January 3, 2003
'US Soldiers Abused PoWs During The Korean War'
By Richard Ford and Richard Beeston
A young British army officer ordered to take over a
prisoner of war camp during the Korean War wrote a
scathing report about the treatment of North Korean
prisoners held by American troops.
The attack was brought to the attention of ministers
but kept secret until yesterday. It accused the
Americans of incompetence, ill-discipline, abuse and
breaking the Geneva Conventions on treatment of
prisoners. The document was written in August 1952 by
Major Dawney Bancroft of the King’s Shropshire Light
Infantry, who commanded a Commonwealth unit sent to
the island of Koje-do to take over the running of a
prison camp where 3,200 North Korean officers were
held. Although British troops were fighting alongside
the Americans against the Chinese-backed North
Koreans, co-operation between the allies appeared to
break down away from the front.
The British reported that American soldiers on sentry
duty often fell asleep, or abandoned their posts to
spend the night in local brothels. They rarely
searched the prisoners’ quarters and mail was
distributed erratically. He said that prisoners were
usually addressed by their American captors as
“slant-eyed, yellow bastards”.
Early on in his command, Major Bancroft intervened to
protect a sick prisoner who was being mistreated by an
American soldier assigned to take him to hospital.
“This was the first of many occasions I witnessed US
troops openly violating the Geneva Conventions,” he
wrote.
He was in no doubt of the fanaticism of the North
Korean commissars who effectively ran prison life. On
one occasion he watched as 100 prisoners were killed
in clashes with American troops trying to clear a
camp.
“It was during this phase of reorganisation that it
became more evident that the US officers and soldiers
responsible for the operation of enclosure thought the
Chinese and Korean PW (prisoners of war) were Oriental
cattle who were to be given quite different treatment
to a European,” he wrote.
Major Bancroft went on to become a brigadier-general
and died in 1995.
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