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June 20, 2000
Web posted at: 5:00 p.m. EDT

(CNN) - Seven thousand American soldiers were captured during the Korean War. Of those, three thousand died in North Korean prison camps during the winter of 1950-1951. These POWs were subjected to intense communist indoctrination; many cooperated with the enemy to survive. A few were court-martialed upon their return to the U.S. after the war.

Raymond Lech's new book, "Broken Soldiers" — available in the fall of 2000 -- describes the experiences of American POWs in Korea. Lech researched 60,000 pages of primary source documents for the book. He is a former national director of the Navy League of the United States and the author of "All the Drowned Sailors."

Chat Moderator: Welcome to CNN Korea Series Chat, Raymond Lech.

Raymond Lech: Hello! I am willing to accept any questions that the audience may have on prisoners of war in Korea.

Chat Moderator: Please tell us about your book, "Broken Soldiers."

Raymond Lech: "Broken Soldiers" is published by Illinois Press and is coming out in October; they are pushing it now. However, on the University of Illinois Web site, they took an excerpt about the "brainwashing" in chapter four. That is on the University of Illinois Web site, http://www.press.uillinois.edu. Any reader can go to the Web site and read that chapter on the indoctrination program.

The entire book spans a time period of five years, 1950 to ‘55, and it covers all of the POW camps in Korea. Although the war was over in 1953, the book continues for another two years with the court-martial in America of 14 soldiers who were POWs. And the question any author would have on this subject is, why 14? Why not 24? Why not 1400, when every soldier who was a POW admitted collaborating with the enemy!

Question from Nic4all: What inspired you to write this book?

Raymond Lech: I was going through the New York Times for 1954 and 1955 and, throughout those years, all I saw were pictures of U.S. soldiers with words "court-martial" for collaborating with the enemy. I, as a military historian, had never seen anything like that and I decided to investigate the matter.

Chat Moderator: Why do you think those 14 were singled out?

Raymond Lech: The entire process was decentralized in the U.S. Army. What happened is that after the war, the prisoners were returned to the United States. The U.S. was divided into different "zones of the interior" and each was commanded by a lieutenant general. Any POW that was returned to New York, for instance, could have been court-martialed by the "convening authority." Meanwhile, the policy in another jurisdiction may have been to court-martial everyone, or no one.

Most prisoners admitted to collaborating. I am confident that every one of these prisoners collaborated. There may be two or three percent that did not, and that would be a big number. Obviously we have to define collaboration. Collaboration, according to the U.S. Army, was furnishing the enemy more than your "name, rank, and serial number."

Question from Talk2: Lech, did you find evidence that soldiers who went over to the North Koreans were mostly young with little time in the Army or blacks who were easy pickings for the brainwashing of the North Koreans?

Raymond Lech: No. Everyone, almost, was easy picking for the Chinese, not the North Koreans! The North Koreans did not run the POW camps. There were a few camps like Pyongyang that were run by the Koreans -- insignificant interrogation centers, not for indoctrination per se.

Many people, just as your question infers, think the North Koreans ran these camps. We must keep the North Koreans out of the picture. Three thousand men died and the Chinese killed them. We are not saying that the Koreans did nothing wrong here, but the Chinese were the masters of the killing.

There is a term I don't like and that is "brainwashing," and I hardly ever use it. There were essentially no brains to be washed! Many of the American prisoners were 15 and 16-years-old; no education, nothing to wash!

In the POW camps in North Korea, the POWs of America were getting an education for the first time, an indoctrination into communist ideals, meanings and values. They were so indoctrinated that when they came back to the U.S., many of them were setting up communist cells in the U.S. with the objective of the eventual overthrow of the U.S. government. They were so indoctrinated that when repatriation came around, Operation Little Switch and Big Switch, 23 men refused to come home!

Question from WisOldMan: Mr. Lech, do you believe that it is a tragedy that a government would first send troops, only to further persecute soldiers who, while captured and tortured, give more information than name, rank and serial number?

Raymond Lech: It's not a just a tragedy. It is shameful, and many scholars and defense attorneys have used that word "shameful." It is not my word — shameful -- that it happened. The bottom line is that you court-martial everyone or no one! But you don't take 14 men who have suffered immensely and make them the "bad guys." That is totally unfair.

There are other reasons that men collaborated, including Major General William Dean --- the highest-ranking American POW -- and the reason they collaborated was fear. Within a six month period, until April of 1951, the Chinese had captured 7,000 men. And, in that period, they killed 3,000. They killed them by starving them to death. The will to resist had been obviously removed. It was a very dirty, mean business. In fact, statistically over 43 percent of the men died in six months from starvation. Any higher percentages did not exist except on the Eastern front in WWII in Germany and Russia.

Therefore, the Chinese told them to collaborate and they did it. They were frightened, young and uneducated. One of the major problems was the officer corps. The officers did not lead. There was absolutely no unity among the officers. When the enlisted men looked for leadership, they did not get it. The officers collaborated as much as the enlisted men; they were also frightened. That is all they talked about, how frightened they were!

Question from HowardZinn: Americans were just sent to die without any education? Are you saying they were lab rats?

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Raymond Lech: The POWs had no background. They were only told to give name, rank and serial number. We must remember that this took place only five years after World War II. The cream of the officer corps had left the Army by this time. The senior commissioned officers and enlisted men had all been discharged.

Question from ChrisTex: Had the men been trained on how to feign cooperation?

Raymond Lech: Every soldier in boot camp is told he can only furnish the enemy with his name, rank and serial number. When you are in a Chinese POW camp and there are people dying, heaps of bodies around you every day, you are going to do what you are told. If you stuck with "name, grade and service number," you would have been killed.

That never has worked, never will work. It is a technical solution to a difficult problem. And the POWs in Korea shattered the "name, rank and serial number" rule to pieces.

I have in my possession 250 tape recordings of American prisoners broadcasting, defaming the United States, making broadcasts from Radio Pyongyang. I have one document in my possession called a "peace appeal" written by the Chinese. It was being sent to the United Nations -- not only defaming the United States but asking for peace, with 1,675 signatures from only one camp, the major camp on the Yalu River known as Camp 5.

Question from Hawkeye: Had any POWs escaped from the prison camps?

Raymond Lech: That is a fabulous question! People think POWs escaped, but they didn't. Not one single one ever escaped a POW camp in Korea. And that is provided in secret Army documents. And if you look at a map of North Korea, where would you go? On the north is Manchuria, the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan on the sides, and to the south was enemy territory!

Question from WisOldMan: Mr. Lech, are you a Korean War veteran yourself?

Raymond Lech: No I am not. I was in the Marine Corps after Korea in 1957. The Korean War ended in 1953.

Chat Moderator: Thank you for joining us today, Raymond Lech. Do you have any final thoughts for us today?

Raymond Lech: All of this could have been corrected. The British were very successful in the Chinese camps in North Korea because they were unified. Their officers held things together.

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The problem is the education and continuing education of the U.S. officer corps, what to do and how to do it when captured, not just "name, rank and serial number." The Marine Corps Commandant Shepherd said that, "Even though you are in prison, you are still a Marine." But these men gave up, including doing anything their captors asked them to do, even returning to the USA and plotting to overthrow the U.S. government with their secret communist cells!

Chat Moderator: Thank you, Raymond Lech!

Raymond Lech: Thanks for inviting me.