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Panmunjom, Korea

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Peace talks usually take place after an enemy has been defeated and the killing has ceased. Toward the end of the Korean conflict, however, neither of these conditions existed. The war was fought only as a campaign within the larger context of the ongoing Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. The communists wanted to see if the West would respond to the challenge in Korea. Truman and the United Nations were determined not to let the challenge go unanswered.

The two sides had fought to a stalemate along the former border between North Korea and South Korea, the 38th parallel. By the summer of 1951, it was clear that unless each side wanted to escalate the scale of the conflict, the Cold War would not be decided in Korea. So both sides faced the difficult task of restoring peace.

The UN leadership and the Soviet Union agreed that the time had come to talk about peace terms. As the major supplier of financial, military, and political assistance to communist China and to North Korea, the Soviets played a major role in bringing the communists to the conference table.

During May and June 1951, secret and unofficial discussions took place between representatives of the United States and the Soviet Union. These behind-the-scenes contacts resulted in an announcement on June 23, 1951, by the Soviet Union that it was in favor of opening peace discussions between North Koreans, communist China, and a representative of the United Nations.

Those talks began on July 10, 1951, at a small town called Kaesong, just north of the 38th parallel and within reach of enemy lines. On several occasions, UN negotiators on their way to the talks were harassed by North Korean soldiers. As a result, the conference site was moved to a safer spot, a town called Panmunjom, just west of Kaesong but outside the reach of communist forces.

The UN negotiating team was headed by Adm. Turner Joy, General Ridgway's naval chief. He and his staff confronted two Chinese generals, Hsieh Fang and Teng Hua, and three North Korean generals, Nam Il, Lee Sang Cho, and Chang Pyong San.

The Most Bizarre Events in History

The peace talks were among the most prolonged and bizarre events in diplomatic history. The talks were carried out while the most vicious and destructive phases of the conflict occurred. From July until November 1951, during the battles on the ridge lines, there were nearly 60,000 UN casualties, of which more than 22,000 were American, and almost 234,000 North Korean and Chinese casualties. The talks dragged on for nearly twenty-five months. Admiral Joy described them as proceeding "with all the speed of a stiff concrete mix.”

The talks were stalled by disagreements over the shape of the negotiating table, by the intrusion of armed soldiers, and by the occasional walkout of angry negotiators. But peace was so clifficult to achieve because of the substantial differences that continued to divide the two warring sides. Like everything else about the Korean War, the peace talks were simply another manifestation of the Cold War. Neither side wished to give the enemy an advantage in this ongoing ideological conflict.

All the items on the agenda created major disputes. One issue was the location of the final line dividing North and South Korea. UN troops had moved north of the 38th parallel along a line of ridges in order to hold strong positions on high ground. Admiral joy wanted to keep that advanced line as the new boundary. The communists found, this line unacceptable. So the two armies continued to battle for the land between the ridges and the 38th parallel for another two years. The communists also opposed the idea of a twenty-mile-wide demilitarized zone between the two countries that the UN negotiators wanted as a buffer area against future attack. The UN negotiating team anticipated the continued presence of a UN peacekeeping force in Korea after the fighting ceased. The communists adamantly opposed the ongoing presence of "foreign troops" on Korean soil.

Prisoners of War

Finally, the peace talks bogged down over the emotionally charged issue of what to do with prisoners of war. The United Nations wanted all prisoners to be free to choose where they wanted to live. The communists feared freedom of choice would result in the refusal of communist prisoners to return to their countries.

For a brief moment in 1952, Americans believed that the dreary conflict would end. Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to succeed Harry Truman as preaiclent. One of Eisenhower's campaign promises had been to break through the deadlocked negotiations at Panmunjom. So in November 1952, Eisenhower fulfilled his campaign promise to "go to Korea." But his three-day visit did nothing to speed up the peace talks. Instead, Eisenhower discovered, as Truman already knew, that the peace talks were tightly bound up in the ideological rhetoric of the Cold War. It would require an extraordinary event to b break the deadlock.

As a result, the talks dragged on endlessly while thousands of men on both sides died, not only on the battlefields of Korea but also in the prison camps. In fact, the fate of the prisoners of war (POWs) often seemed more important in the negotiations than that of the soldiers on the front lines. Admiral Joy was especially concerned about freeing UN POWs because reports of their treatment were horrifying. United Nations representatives knew they had to get these POWs out soon or they would not survive.

Communist Atrocities

There were thousands of POW lives at stake. During the first months of the Korean crisis, both sides captured many prisoners as the armies moved swiftly across the Korean peninsula. When the UN troops moved north in September and October 1950, they begun to discover how prisoners were treated by the enemy. Advance units came upon the bodies of dead prisoners. The hands of these UN prisoners had been tied behind their backs, and most of the men had been shot in the back of the head.

The worst single atrocity of the war came to light as the English Army moved north from Pyongyang, the North Korean capitol, in October 1950. Brig. Gen. Frank A. Allen, Jr., and his party discovered a sad and sickening sight near a railroad tunnel near Myongucham, about five miles northwest of the town of Sunchon.

General Allen came upon the bodies of sixty-five American POWs who had been murdered, starved to death, or died of disease as the North Koreans hurried north with their prisoners, trying to escape the bombs of the planes that accompanied the advancing UN army. tly details of their experience. One survivor related the following account:

Two trains, cach carrying about one hundred and fifty American POWs left Pyongyang on October 17, 1950, crawling slowly and repairing the heavily broken tracks as they went. These were the survivors of a group of three hundred and seventy Americans the North Koreans had marched north from Seoul shortly after the Inchon landing. Each day five or six Americans died of dysentery, starvation, or exposure. Their bodies were removed from the train. A few Americans escaped along the way. On October 20th, while a paratroop drop was in progress, the second of the two truins remained in the Myongucham tunnel. It still had about one hundred Americans, crowded into open coal gondolas and boxcars. That evening, the North Korean guards took the Americans in three groups to get their evening meal. The North Koreans shot them down as they waited for it. Most of the Americans who survived did so by feigning death. The guards and the train left that night.

These atrocities were not isolated events. Much later, the world would learn about the horrible conditions in which UN POWs lived and died in the Chinese prison camps near tile YaIu River. PFC Lawrence Bailey of C Company in the Thirty-second infantry was one of the few POWs to survive to tell the story of those camps. He describes in graphic detail the conditions under which he lived in "Death Valley," a POW camp consisting of a group of unheated huts run by the Chinese communists:

After a month or so in Death Valley, people who had frozen body parts actually started pulling them off - toes and fingertips and ears - and putting them in a pot the Koreans left in our huts. I don't know what the Koreans did with those rotting parts of human beings. I do know that some of our people were talking about eating them. I hope no one ever did, but I wouldn't be surprised if one had. You get a little crazy when you are starving. I lost all the toes on my right foot and four from my left and I lost the little finger of my right hand.

By the time we had been in Death Valley for a month people were dying, two and three every night, mostly from starvation and untreated wounds. But there were deaths from other causes, too. The lice were thick, and we had cases of what must have been typhus. It was hard to be sure. There were no medics with us. In a way, the dead helped the rest of us stay alive. We would keep the bodies covered up for as long as we could so that we could collect the dead men's rations.

Operation Little Switch

In April 1953, the United Nations and communist negotiators were able to come to the first agreement over POWs, called Operation Little Switch. Under the agreement, sick and wounded POWs would he exchanged. Many of the other outstanding POW issues were resolved within the next three months.

By June, both sides had agreed to establish a Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission to oversee the return of POWs. Those prisoners who wished to return to their homes were free to do so within sixty days. Those who refused repatriation, or a return to their country, were turned over to the commission, consisting of Indian troops. The troops would protect the POWs for ninety days, during which time communist educators were available in case the POWs wished to change their mind.

Many feared that the exchanges would not be carried out smoothly. Operation Big Switch, the major exchange of POWs, began in August 1953. UN prisoners were turned over to the UN command, and those North Koreans and communist Chinese who wished were permitted to stay in South Korea or go to Formosa.

At last, the Korean War was over. An armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. Korea remained divided at the 38th parallel, roughly where the conflict started three long years before. North Korea ended up being about twenty-one thousand square miles smaller than it had been in June 1950. The political differences between the two halves of Korea continued to poison relations between them.

Deborah Bachrach. Peace Negotiations. The Korean War (America's Wars). Lucent Books, Farmington Hills, Michigan, U.S.A., 1991.

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