Historically, Americans have not been very effective in dealing with the radical mindset. Like Neville Chamberlain who really believed the growing hostility with Hitler’s Germany was just a big misunderstanding, Americans have too often believed that if we could only sit down with the Osama bin Ladens of the world they would see that we are a sincere, reasonable people and violence is of no benefit to anyone.

Contained in the century-long slow leak of Christianity from Western culture are many things of value, not the least of which is the doctrine of evil. Now, a vaguely expressed secular notion that people are basically good and are motivated by similar desires and felt needs is the reigning paradigm.

But conflict with some people, some nations, and some groups is not a question of mutual understanding. It is a question of evil. It is a lesson Americans learned the hard way — but learn it they did — during the Korean War. And in this culturally defining moment, it is a lesson we would do well to recall.

After Operation Chromite in September of 1950 — MacArthur’s daring landing at Inchon and drive across the Korean Peninsula — hundreds of thousands of (North) Korea People’s Army (KPA) soldiers were encircled, captured, and destroyed. As a consequence, the UN prisoner of war population swiftly rose from less than a thousand in August to more than 130,000 by November.

Makeshift POW camps were hastily constructed to house more than 80,000 of that number on Koje-do (Geoje in many modern spellings), a county-sized island just off the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. Prisoners were divided into four massive enclosures, with each containing eight compounds. U.S. soldiers of subpar quality and insufficient quantity were assigned to keep them there.

When ceasefire negotiations began at Kaesong in July 1951 — which were later moved to Panmunjom — resistance among prisoners became systemic, organized, and violent. Messages were cleverly passed between General Nam Il, North Korea’s chief negotiator at the talks, all the way to Koje-do where they were delivered through the wire to the communist leaders within the prison camps.

The general’s instructions were clear: create martyrs for the communist cause and thereby undermine America’s moral authority at the negotiating table. To this end, communist enforcers at Koje-do accused their jailers of brutality, cultural insensitivity, and gross mistreatment; they staged riots in an effort to provoke an armed response; and they prepared for a general prison breakout, to force the UN to transfer front line troops to the rear echelons.

Brigadier General Francis Dodd, the commander of the Koje-do island installation, naively took prisoner complaints at face value. Hence, the communist strategy, part of an old radical playbook, met with startling success. Prisoner violence (usually against other prisoners) was largely overlooked while every accusation of mistreatment from their guards resulted in an investigation, dismissal, and a Drew Brees-like mea culpa. But the communist leaders would not be placated. Like the endgame to coronavirus quarantines, the goal posts were continually moved.

In his classic history of the Korean conflict This Kind of War, T.R. Fehrenbach writes:

[In World War II] it was not until 1943 Americans had any prisoners, and these were from a foe of the same basic culture, who sensed they were already beaten. (There had never been enough Japanese POWs to matter.) But in Korea the United States not only had taken thousands of POW’s of alien culture; it faced an alien psychology also.

On May 7, 1952, Dodd, failing to understand the “alien psychology” of which Fehrenbach wrote, agreed to meet with KPA Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku at the gate of Compound 76. It was there that Dodd stood before a rioting prisoner mob like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. At a prearranged signal, the American general was seized and pulled deep inside the compound before guards could react. Any attempt to rescue him by force, Americans were told, would result in General Dodd’s immediate execution.

What followed was, in the words of General Mark Clark, “the biggest flap of the war.” In the stuff of a Hollywood epic drama, Dodd was placed on trial for crimes against humanity while ideologically unreliable prisoners were tried and summarily executed by the fanatical communists within the camp.

North Korea and China wasted no time in accusing the U.S. of violating the Geneva Convention. And in a mind-bending twist of facts, the likes of which have not been seen since the New York Times and the Washington Post last went to print, their anti-American allies in the media quickly turned the Koje-do fiasco into a propaganda bonanza. Moscow’s Pravda screamed:

Koje Island! Again, we learn that ‘civilized’ Americans can be yet more inhuman, yet more infamous than the bloody Hitlerites. Dachau was a death camp, Maidenek was a death factory; Koje is a whole island of death. The American hangmen are torturing, tormenting, and killing unarmed people here. They are experimenting with their poisons on them. 

At Panmunjom, General Nam capitalized on his own success in engineering the revolt on Koje-do. 

Day after day, facing his opposite numbers across the conference table, Nam II poured out crocodile tears for the fate of the communist prisoners whom he alleged were suffering fiendish torments inflicted by the “sadistic and inhuman” United Nations jailers. Under a smoke screen of pious platitudes, Nam Il coolly directed the apparatus of subversion, terrorism, and political murder which throttled anti-communist opposition among the POW’s and turned the compounds at Koje-do into armed camps of Red defiance.

An embarrassed President Truman ordered outgoing UN Commander General Matthew Ridgway to bring Koje-do to heel. Ridgway simply passed the problem along to incoming UN Commander General Mark Clark who, in turn, ordered Brigadier General Haydon “Bull” Boatner to the island to quell the insurrection brewing there.