The Greatest Traitor Page 12

  Britain was a non-belligerent in the war so its representatives were, at least in theory, under no threat. Blake and Owen were mindful of their brief to act as a ‘listening post’ in the event of invasion, so they too had no intention of deserting.

  Most of Tuesday was spent in nervous anticipation as the sound of gunfire grew ever closer. There were loud explosions and flashes of fire from the direction of the river, and Blake and his colleagues learned later in the day that the road and railway bridges had been blown up. Even if they had wanted to escape, there was now no way out. Blake and Owen spent several hours journeying to and fro from the American Embassy, laying in stores – principally quantities of food and petrol – that the departing diplomats had left behind.

  On Wednesday, 28 June, the sound of the fighting died down and an eerie silence descended on the city. The servants who hurried back and forth from the compound with scraps of information reported that Seoul was now in the hands of the invaders. Indeed, a large contingent of troops had taken over the broadcasting station directly overlooking the legation.

  In the evening, while waiting for the inevitable knock on the door, the party settled down for dinner in Captain Holt’s house. The meal had the feel of a Last Supper and for Blake, who saw Biblical parallels in most situations, there was a further analogy waiting to be drawn: an act of gross betrayal was about to take place back home in the corridors of Whitehall.

  On the previous day, Tuesday, 27 June, the Labour Cabinet had convened in Downing Street. Once the lesser matters of possible subsidies for beleaguered trawlermen and aid for similarly struggling hill farmers had been dealt with, the bulk of the meeting was naturally concerned with the crisis in Korea. The Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, had been forewarned that later that day President Truman would say ‘centrally-directed Communist imperialism had passed beyond subversion in seeking to conquer independent nations and was now resorting to armed aggression and war’. This made them nervous, as recorded in the Downing Street minutes.

  Attlee and his colleagues had no desire to depict the aggression by the North Koreans as part of a wider Communist conspiracy in the region. Simply put, they didn’t want to say or do anything that would draw the Chinese and the Soviets further into the equation at this stage. They even worried that America’s inflammatory words might provoke China to attack the British Crown colony of Hong Kong. Nonetheless, despite the Cabinet’s concerns, they swung behind America’s resolutions at the United Nations. The first one, Security Council Resolution 82, issued on the day of the invasion, simply condemned it. Then, later that day, Resolution 83 was published. This was a call to arms, recommending that member states provide military assistance to the Republic of Korea.

  Blake and his colleagues had, of course, been too busy with their own survival prospects to follow the latest political developments. More practically, the Cable & Wireless Company had evacuated the city the day before so they couldn’t communicate with their government back home. It was, therefore, with some consternation that they listened to the BBC news and discovered precisely what part Britain was to play. Attlee had told a subdued chamber in the House of Commons: ‘We have decided to support the United States action in Korea by immediately placing our naval forces in Japanese waters at the disposal of the United States authorities to operate on behalf of the Security Council in support of South Korea.’

  Winston Churchill, leader of the Opposition, vowed that his party would give Attlee ‘any support he needs in what seems to be our inescapable duty’. He asked the Prime Minister if the British naval force would ‘make a substantial contribution relative to the American forces which are there’. Attlee replied: ‘Yes, Sir. I think our forces are almost the same as those the United States have there.’

  Blake and his British colleagues were not safe after all: ‘What we heard was a great shock and surprise,’ he recalled. ‘We had been caught. Instead of being neutrals, as we thought, we were now belligerents in enemy territory . . . I did not blame SIS for what had gone wrong. I am certain that the British Government had not intended to join in the war but had been drawn into it by the United States. In fact, I don’t think that the Americans originally planned to get involved either, but General MacArthur pushed them into it.’

  Now that they found themselves behind enemy lines, Blake and Owen decided there was no time to lose and spent the rest of the night burning their codes and secret documents in a corner of the legation garden, hoping all the while that the smoke wouldn’t attract the attention of the North Korean troops outside.

  The following morning, the bell rang and the British contingent went to the gate to meet a delegation from the conquering army – a North Korean officer and two of his men. The soldiers were disarmingly polite; the only demand they made was that the Union Flag should be lowered as it might attract the wrong sort of attention from aircraft.

  For the next few days no further visits followed and by Sunday – a week after the invasion – Blake and the others were feeling a shade more optimistic about their prospects. Shut away from the world, they had no real sense of how the invaders were behaving, but what reports they did receive indicated no widespread marauding or retribution. Their guarded optimism, however, was swept away around 6 p.m. on Sunday, 2 July. This time, three jeeps full of armed soldiers drove through the gates of the legation and made their way up to the main house. The British contingent was told to assemble in the courtyard and despite protests from Captain Holt, were ordered into lorries and driven off to the Police Headquarters in Seoul. They were promised they didn’t need to take any clothes or provisions as they would only be detained for twenty minutes.

  Upon arrival, they faced detailed questioning, with the English-speaking interrogator appearing dissatisfied by their replies. A series of dramatic events then began to unfold. ‘While I was sitting at a narrow desk opposite the officer who was questioning me, somebody in a room below fired off a rifle,’ Blake recalled. ‘The bullet passed through the floor and the desk at which we were sitting, shattering the inkpot that was standing between us and covering us with ink, then whizzed past our foreheads and disappeared in to the ceiling.’

  No sooner had Blake recovered his composure than he witnessed a sickening sequence of incidents at the other end of the room. Two South Korean policemen were in the middle of being interrogated when their inquisitor decided to take a break and left his desk to smoke a cigarette. The policemen, who already bore the scars of severe beatings, managed to get to their feet and made for the second-floor window. There, with defiant screams, they threw themselves out, hoping to kill themselves and end their torture. A few minutes later Blake watched in horror as the men were dragged back to the room, bleeding profusely, their faces completely misshapen by scars and bruises, limbs torn and mangled. They were put back in their chairs. The interrogator put out his cigarette, turned to them and resumed questioning as if nothing had happened.

  Meanwhile Captain Holt asserted vehemently that the treatment meted out to him and his staff was contrary to international law and demanded to be allowed to communicate with his government. His protestations were in vain.

  Around midnight, he and his companions were given a sparse meal of rice packed tight into a ball. Shortly afterwards, the British and French contingent, together with a couple of American businessmen who had stayed behind, were bundled into the back of a lorry and driven out of the city, accompanied by guards with bayonets. Their nerves weren’t helped by the excitable behaviour of the ‘little major’ in charge of them who, along the way, persisted in practising with his newly issued Russian pistol, firing off volleys of indiscriminate shots into the darkness.

  After about an hour the vehicle stopped in a small valley in the surrounding hills. The captives were ordered out of the jeep and made to stand in a line. They had little doubt as to what was to happen next: ‘We all had the same thought. We’d been taken to this remote spot to be summarily executed. After all we had heard
about the Communists, this seemed to us the only explanation which fitted the circumstances,’ Blake recalled. ‘Even the reserve barrel of petrol we took as confirmation. It was to be used to burn our bodies afterwards.’

  As he would do constantly in the coming months, Commissioner Herbert Lord of the Salvation Army, attempted to rally spirits. ‘We nodded at each other, and we thought we might as well go happily. I said a short prayer.’

  Minutes passed and nothing happened. Then, after about an hour, a lorry drove up with two North Korean officers on board and the journey resumed. They had been reprieved, but the danger was far from over.

  It was a treacherous and frightening trip, 120 miles across the Parallel along bomb-cratered roads up to Pyongyang. The hostages gazed around them at abandoned trucks riddled with large-calibre bullet holes, and passed burnt-out villages where survivors wandered around dressed in rags and the stench of rotting corpses was overwhelming. They halted frequently while their captors checked on the possible presence of American B-26 aircraft in the area; the planes from the US Far East Air Force were busy sweeping the skies of North Korean aircraft. Eventually in the early evening, exhausted and hungry, the hostages reached their destination – two abandoned schoolhouses five miles out of Pyongyang that served as the main foreign civilian internee camp in North Korea.

  During the first two weeks of July, fresh groups of prisoners arrived at the old schoolhouse to join Blake and his colleagues. Eventually there were around seventy in all, a disparate collection of diplomats, missionaries, journalists and others, of all nationalities – British, American, French, German, Austrian, Australian, Russian, Turkish, Swiss and Irish – and all ages, including small children and the elderly. At first they entertained hopes that they were being gathered in one place as a prelude to some sort of prisoner exchange arranged through the International Red Cross – even the pitiless Japanese had approved some Red Cross involvement in the Second World War – but it quickly became apparent that the North Koreans had no intention of allowing any such swap.

  The prisoners were locked into five rooms off a long corridor, forbidden to communicate with anyone beyond their own four walls, and punished if they talked too loudly. The regime was a harsh one. They were only allowed to leave their rooms under supervision to go to the lavatory. Buckets of water were placed in a corridor and members of each room had to queue to wash in the mornings. They were desperately hungry all the time as the food was little more than a starvation diet, consisting merely of a small cupful of rice a day and a bowl of ‘soup’ – hot water flavoured with leek or cabbage. Just occasionally, some unripe apples or plums would be added to the menu. The main distraction was found in fighting off the army of insects that invaded their cells. ‘What we suffered most from were mosquitoes, fleas and lice, and we became experts at picking the lice off each other,’ recalled Blake.

  Spirits were raised at the end of July with the arrival of Philip Deane, the fearless, ever-optimistic correspondent of The London Observer. Wearing his arm in a sling and leaning on a stick, he nonetheless sported a big smile and flashed the famous Churchill victory sign, whispering to fellow captives that the Black Watch, one of Britain’s elite fighting units, was on its way to the country.

  The Greek-born journalist had just experienced an extraordinary few weeks, even by his standards. What he had witnessed on the frontline at Yongdong was sheer carnage, the gallant General William F. Dean and five thousand troops from the 24th Infantry Division attempting to stem the Red tide from the North: ‘A flood tide of Communist soldiers, well led, Russian-equipped, confident and victorious, faced by mere kids of seventeen and eighteen, who have gone straight from school into the Army and only a few weeks ago were still enjoying their first tentative experiments in manhood in the heady role of occupiers of Japan.’

  Deane watched GIs dying under sniper fire alongside him, and had tried to drive a group of soldiers to the safety of UN lines before being ambushed and captured. Bleeding copiously from his untreated wounds, he was made to walk over a hundred miles in five days, traipsing mountain and country paths until he and his fellow prisoners reached Communist Army Headquarters near Suwon. Taken to Pyongyang, he was accused of being a spy. Having convinced his captors he was merely a journalist, they urged him to make a broadcast condemning the ‘American atrocities’ and the United States ‘unjustified intervention in a civil war – contrary to the United Nations charter’. Deane didn’t break, however, and so it was, a week later, that he found himself in the old schoolhouse with Blake and the other prisoners.

  With his natural good humour and cocky yet careful attitude towards authority, he immediately lifted their spirits, teasing and provoking their captors yet never quite overstepping the boundaries of rebellion.

  Two months of monotonous captivity went by. Then, on the evening of Tuesday, 5 September, Blake and his fellow prisoners were hastily assembled and told to hand in their blankets and food bowls and be ready to leave the schoolhouse in just half an hour. A short, fat Korean colonel, whom they dubbed the ‘Panjandrum’, addressed them in words of bogus reassurance: ‘Life for you is becoming too difficult and dangerous, with these rascally Americans raining bombs on women and children, and especially on schools. So we are sending you to a nice place in the mountains where you will have peace and comfort.’

  The seventy prisoners were first escorted to Pyongyang jail, where they remained for a couple of hours, from time to time glimpsing ‘wretched-looking convicts and grim-faced warders’. Then two trucks arrived and took them to the railway station. They were heading far north to a town called Manpo on the Yalu River, which forms the border between Korea and Manchuria. Accompanying them on the trip – and for further journeys in the next few months – would be more than 700 American prisoners of war.

  As Larry Zellers, the Methodist minister, stared out of the window of his carriage, he saw long lines of haggard-looking young GIs marching past to board the train further on down the platform. It was a sight that profoundly shocked him: ‘I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. These ragged, dirty, hollow-eyed men did not look like any American soldiers that I had ever seen . . . the North Koreans had provided no special consideration for the wounded. Some of the more badly injured prisoners were half-carried by companions; others limped along as best they could.’

  The soldiers were all survivors from the 19th, 21st and 34th regiments of the 24th Infantry Division, the first to engage the North Korean Army at the Battles of Osan and Taejon, where they were subject to humiliating defeat. Many of these men were physically and mentally spent. After capture in July, they had been marched to Seoul, where they were interrogated and many of them tortured, taunted by their Korean captors who said that they were ‘bandits’, not prisoners of war, and thus liable to receive a shot in the back of the head at any moment. By the time they boarded the train for Manpo – corralled in the open coal trucks, while Blake and his fellow prisoners were put in the only passenger coach – a good number of them were suffering from dysentery, dehydrated through lack of food and water.

  Lying cramped together, the stench of body odour and the rotting flesh of the wounded compounded the GIs’ misery. Four died during the six days it took for the train and its large human cargo to make it to Manpo; two of whom, after much pleading, were allowed proper Catholic burials. The other bodies were just discarded near the tracks.

  At one point in the journey Blake and Holt managed to engage the highest-ranking Korean officer in conversation, and as a result this ‘very polished, well-educated’ colonel called the group together. If they were expecting words of explanation, of any comfort whatsoever, they were quickly disabused. He launched into a ferocious attack on the American nation, ending with a withering assessment: ‘The American soldier is the worst and most cowardly in the world. In fact, one soldier of our army is the equal of ten American soldiers . . . I think I might be able to handle eight myself.’

  All the while the prisoners could hear the roar of approach
ing planes over the mountains and the crackle of their guns; the danger of being strafed by F-51 fighters with their six 50-calibre machine guns was ever present. There was also evidence of large-scale traffic moving towards the battlefront, as the freight trains that passed in the night were often long and had two engines to haul them. Tanks, artillery and lorries were clearly visible on the flat cars or in the open trucks.

  On the afternoon of Monday, 11 September, the party finally reached their destination. They discovered Manpo, an industrial town with several large lumber mills, also to be a place of great natural beauty. The River Yalu meandered through its narrow valleys on its long journey towards the Yellow Sea, while away to the north of the town, as far as the eye could see, were the imposing Manchurian mountains.

  The GIs were placed in cramped barracks close to the railway station while the civilian prisoners were taken along a road that followed the river west and, after two miles, they reached their destination. Their new home was a former Japanese quarantine station for immigrants arriving from Manchuria. It proved to be a totally different environment from the harsh regime at Pyongyang. Here, they were allowed to do their own cooking and the daily food ration was plentiful, including rice, vegetables, cooking oil and dried fish. They were given meat three times a week, and sugar too.

  ‘From time to time we were given the choice between a kilogram of apples or a small tobacco ration,’ Blake recalled. ‘Korean apples are delicious and I chose them in preference to the tobacco. Since then I have never smoked again.’

  The days were warm and bright, and nearly every afternoon there was an excursion to the Yalu River. A guard would escort them half a mile down the road and then through fields to the water’s edge. There, they could wash their clothes, bathe in the river and bask in the sun. Judging by the standards of the neighbouring villagers, they were living in the lap of luxury.