The Korean War You Never Saw (Part Three)

By Tim Shorrock | August 3, 2026 | Originally published in Empire Blues by Tim Shorrock

This is the last of three introductions written by investigative journalist, and KPI Associate, Tim Shorrock, to the three volume book, The Korean War you never Saw, released on July 27, the 73^rd anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, by Newstapa/Korea Center for Investigative Journalism.  Volume 1 is Scorched Earth Bombing; Volume 2 is Leaflet Psychological Warfare; Volume 3 is Prisoners and Panmunjom.  

Shorrock has written the introduction to each volume and has given KPI permission to reprint them.  For additional investigative reporting on Korea and U.S.-Korea policies subscribe to Shorrock’s, Empire Blues, a reader supported publication.

The Bridge of No Return in Panmunjom, as photographed by my father Hallam Shorrock in 1960. (Tim Shorrock collection)

On July 27th, 2026, the 73rd anniversary of the 1953 Armistice in Korea, Newstapa/The Korea Center for Investigative Journalism published three new books on Amazon Kindle about the Korean War, translated into English for an American audience. I was honored to write the introductions to all three volumes. Here is my essay for Volume 3, Prisoners and Panmunjom, slightly expanded for my Substack readers.

I first visited Panmunjom and the DMZ in October 1960, while my father was working as the director of Korea Church World Service, the largest private U.S. relief agency operating in South Korea. The black-and-white photographs he took that day never left my memory.

One shows the “Bridge of No Return,” which battle-weary POWs slowly crossed on their way home from battle. Another shot is of a building where post-armistice negotiations took place, depicting two North Koreans grimly facing an American and two South Koreans across the table.

These scenes are the subject of the third book in the Newstaps series, The Korean War You Never Saw. It documents the extraordinary story of the tens of thousands of prisoners seized by the U.S.-controlled UN forces, the Korean People’s Army, and the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army and subjected to political indoctrination before they crossed the border at Panmunjom or returned via other routes.

The cover is a photo of young women fighters captured by the U.S. and South Korean armies in the southern front of the counterinsurgency war - images that most Americans have never seen or even imagined. It was taken on August 6, 1953 — ten days after the armistice was signed — by a U.S. military photographer in the U.S. 1st Marine Division. The Newstapa authors write:

Young women in military caps are shouting something at the top of their lungs. No sound reaches us, yet the silent cry pouring out of the photograph seems to ring in the ears. Fierce emotion is etched into their young faces. A banner hung outside the train window carries a grim resolve. At a glance the writing is hard to read — it has been flipped by the wind. Reading it right to left, upside down, it says: “Long live the Korean People’s Army.” Looking at the strokes, you can tell the letters were not written with a brush-like implement. Something like bloodstains marks the area around the characters, so it appears to be written in blood. An image frozen at one moment of our modern history. Who are the subjects of this soundless clamor? How did they come to be aboard this train?

Women fighters being returned to North Korea after their imprisonment by the U.S. military (Newstapa/US National Archives)

The original U.S. Army caption reads: “Operation Big Switch frees North Korean communist women: this photograph shows women awaiting repatriation to the North, seen from south of the Freedom Bridge. From the moment they boarded the train in Incheon these women began shouting communist slogans and singing, and hours later, upon arriving here, they were still shouting slogans.”

These weren’t images that the U.S. government wanted the American public to see. Instead, during and after the Korean War, the U.S. media seized on a narrative that U.S. POWs in Korea were exposed to ominous “brainwashing” techniques that transformed them into virtual slaves of their communist masters.

The Manchurian Candidate

The fear was encapsulated in the famous 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, in which a U.S. soldier captured in Korea is imprisoned in China and programmed by his evil captors to assassinate a presidential candidate and trigger the overthrow of the U.S. government. The film created for Americans a lasting memory of the Korean War as a frightening battle for hearts and minds that justified the extreme violence unleashed by the U.S. military in Korea.

Yet we learn from this book that the “brainwashing” was one-sided, primarily directed by the U.S. military against soldiers and partisans fighting with North Korea and China.

“When the Korean War broke out, the United States drew up plans to use prisoners of war as a resource for psychological-warfare strategy, beyond merely detaining them,” the authors write. The “core aim” of the program was to turn captured soldiers and partisans (who were called “bandits”) into anti-communists.“It focused in particular on persuading prisoners who wished to be repatriated north to remain in the South. It also orchestrated, behind the scenes, a kind of coup in which anti-communist prisoner forces within the camp overthrew enclosures controlled by ‘pro-communist prisoner leadership’ — provoking conflict, murder, and violence among prisoners to that end.”

The photos of the U.S.-run POW camps are also a reminder that the U.S. military put down - sometimes with brutal violence - outbreaks of rebellion among its thousands of prisoners from Korea and China.

The POW camp at Koje-do was the scene of one of the largest uprisings by North Korean POWs. It was put down with the use of gas grenades. The bottom two photos show US soldiers displaying flags and other items seized from the prisoners. (Newstapa/US National Archives)

During the war, the POW issue became “a major stumbling block during the ceasefire talks in Korea, each side accusing the other of atrocities, presenting lists and counter-lists of prisoners and trying to score propaganda points,” according to the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett.

In his book Koje Unscreened, Burchett “set out to investigate the veracity of each side’s claims,” according to an anthology of his writings edited by his son George Burchett, who lives in Hanoi. He “contrasted the generally good conditions he had observed in North Korean and Chinese-run POW camps with the reportedly appalling conditions and brutality in Allied prisoner of war camps, though in writing about this he indulged in some hyperbolic language he would later regret using.” The elder Burchett was the first foreign journalist to report from Hiroshima after the atomic bombing and later became known around the world for his coverage of Vietnam from behind enemy lines.

American missionaries were part of the pychological warfarfe campaign

Prisoners and Panmunjom reveals that among those participating in the U.S. re-education programs were psychological-warfare officers, psychologists, and sociologists, whose “curriculum centered on anti-communism, the superiority of the U.S.-style liberal-democratic system, and the emphasis on individual freedom.”

In my own research into the U.S. policies on POWs, I was appalled to discover that American missionaries were employed by the U.S. military to convert communist prisoners to U.S.-style Christianity.

The Presbyterian missionary and Army Chaplain Rev. Harold Voelkel preaching American-style Christianity to North Korean POWs at the prison camp where he worked. Photo from the Presbyterian Historical Society archives in Philadelphia.

The best known of these chaplains was the Rev. Harold Voelkel, who had been a Presbyterian missionary to Andong in North Gyeongsang Province in the 1930s. He was deployed to the camps from 1950 to 1953, and claimed in his book Behind Barbed Wire in Korea (with an introduction by the famous evangelist Billy Graham) to have “converted” hundreds of North Korean POWs to Christianity.

Voelkel’s work can only be described as a religious crusade carried out by the most powerful state in the world. It is ironic that the much of the U.S. civilian participation in the POW camps was managed by the Civil Information and Education Section (CI&E) of the U.S. occupation forces based in Japan. CI&E was initially established to dismantle state-sponsored Shinto in Japan; instead, America used CI&E to impose its own state religion of Christianity on Korea and China.

Readers unfamiliar with this history should read The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War by the Korean-American historian Monica Kim. Through the “prism” of the U.S. interrogation rooms, Kim demonstrates “how the Korean War evolved from a fight over territory to one over human interiority and the individual human subject, forging the template for the US wars of intervention that would predominate during the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond.”

During the armistice negotiations at Panmunjom, Kim explained, “the United States and their allies proposed a new kind of interrogation room: one in which POWs could exercise their ‘free will’ and choose which country they would go to after the ceasefire.”

The complex web of interrogators and prisoners—Japanese-American interrogators, Indian military personnel, Korean POWs and interrogators, and American POWs—that Kim uncovers contradicts the simple story in U.S. popular memory of “brainwashing” during the Korean War.

The third Newstapa volume helps us understand that convergence in the most vivid way possible. 🌺

This was the "enemy." On the left, "During Operation Mongoose — a joint ROK Army and KMAG operation to suppress the Korean People's Guerrillas — a Korean People's Army nurse-officer captured on Mount Jiri is interrogated by a military police officer of the ROK Capital Defense Division. With a face full of worry, she holds a POW registration tag reading "PRISONER OF WAR." On the right, "U.S. troops capture and body-search boy-soldier prisoners; a "Do Not Release" stamp is on the image. The sight of stripping and searching boy-soldiers lays bare the barbarity of war." (Newstapa/US National Archives)

Order and download The Korean War You Never Saw: Prisoners and Panmunjom here.

Tim Shorrock is a journalist and writer who grew up in Japan and South Korea in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War. His 3-volume collection of declassified U.S. government documents revealing the complicity of the United States in the South Korean Army’s suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising was published in Korean translation in 2024. He lives in Washington, D.C.