The Greatest Traitor Read online

  More good news soon arrived, delivered by a brave 15-year-old Korean schoolboy, who risked the wrath of the guards to deliver updates on the war’s progress. They learned of General MacArthur’s daring amphibious assault on the strategically important city of Incheon on 15 September, the subsequent retreat of the North Korean Army to Seoul, and then the recapture of the capital by UN forces on 27 September.

  Blake and his colleagues began to excitedly calculate how long it would be before the UN advance reached Manpo. ‘Sweepstakes were started. Plans were made about freedom, about the gifts that we would buy for our relatives. That first telegram was mentally written and rewritten,’ recalled Deane.

  Blake and Deane’s friendship grew in this more invigorating period. Deane was particularly impressed by what he had quickly identified as Blake’s ‘characteristic ability to shed worry’.

  Larry Zellers, too, grasped the opportunity to get to know Blake better although, he didn’t know then the exact nature of the other man’s job, accepting the story that the ‘diplomat’ had recently entered British Government service and risen quickly in rank. Zellers recalled that Blake was interested in learning about the history of the American Southwest: ‘He occasionally showed some antagonism for the US government and its involvement in the Korean War, but never toward our American group. He seemed to feel that we were being held prisoner only because America had sent troops to fight for what he considered the very corrupt regime of Syngman Rhee in South Korea.’

  There were, however, aspects of Blake’s character and behaviour that he found unsettling. An occasional arrogance was one, exhibited when Zellers asked him to translate from French what had gone on in a conference between the British and French groups: ‘Blake answered with a question that was also a putdown: “Larry, don’t you know French?” I told him I did not but that I could struggle along in Spanish. He did not consider my remark worthy of comment.’

  Zellers also found Blake reluctant to open up about his adopted country: ‘One thing that bothered me was his unwillingness to share his knowledge about life and events in England. I was very interested in England and had been all my life, but he told me very little. He was always friendly, but when he wanted to leave, he would simply walk away, and at other times he didn’t want to be bothered.’

  The month in the old quarantine quarters at Manpo had been as comfortable an experience as the prisoners could have expected. Nourishing food, medical attention, decent enough accommodation and a relatively relaxed regime had raised their spirits. Added to that was the expectation that the conquering American forces would soon arrive to free them. All that optimism started to fade, however, when on Saturday, 7 October, they were given the alarming news that they were to be moved. The group of detainees weren’t to know it, but they were being evacuated – as were the American POWs near the railway station – to make way for more important guests: Chinese troops from Manchuria were about to enter the war.

  They were told to take themselves, along with their blankets, cooking utensils and food supplies, to a point on the river bank a couple of miles upstream. There they would wait until boats arrived to transport them to their next destination. The boats never came, and the party was forced to camp out in lashing rain. After two nights in the open, trucks finally appeared to take them to the village of Kosang, fifteen miles away, where they were put in another school building. After only a week in this camp, the group – now re-joined by the 700 or so American POWs – was moved on again, this time forced to march over mountain paths to a remote mining hamlet, Jui-am-nee. Here they were housed in rows and rows of large, derelict huts.

  Meanwhile over the hills came small groups of retreating North Korean soldiers, wounded, dispirited and hostile. The detainees thought they could sense the war drawing to a climax, and they had been told by some of the local people that the UN forces were just twenty-five miles away to the South. So near, yet so far from freedom.

  In this chaotic environment, the British and French internees got together and worked out a plan whereby a small group of them would – with the help of two of the Korean guards – attempt to reach the American lines and initiate a rescue. A party consisting of Blake, Holt, Deane, and the French trio of Charles Martel (Embassy Chancellor), Maurice Chanteloup (correspondent for the French Press Agency) and Jean Meadmore set out on the morning of Wednesday, 25 October, accompanied by their two Korean captors. They walked all that day, avoiding houses and villages, and rested overnight in a small valley. After resuming their journey the next morning, they travelled for a couple of hours before they reached a mountain pass, where they encountered three Korean soldiers coming the other way.

  The two sets of soldiers sat down to a long conversation. For Blake and his companions, the outcome was a dispiriting one: ‘When our guards rejoined us we at once noticed a change in their demeanour. They told us that the situation had changed completely in the last twenty-four hours and that the Chinese volunteers had come to the rescue of the North Korean Army and were now engaged in heavy fighting . . . it was now too dangerous, indeed impossible, to get through to the American lines and there was nothing for it but to return to the camp. Freedom had seemed so near and had now receded indefinitely.’

  The dejected group trudged back to the camp and the colleagues they had left behind in Jui-am-nee. The next day, 28 October, they were ordered to return to their old refuge in Manpo. Now the situation was clear – they witnessed Chinese soldiers pouring past by the thousand, complete with artillery, automatics and brand new Molotov lorries. ‘Those, perhaps, were our worst moments,’ recalled Deane.

  The party spent the night in a Presbyterian church near the main road before resuming the trek to Manpo. Three miles from the town, they were diverted from the main road and taken across fields to a burnt-out house near a sawmill. A fire was built and maintained most of the night, but even so it offered little protection against the harsh wind that blew across the Yalu River. During the night a Korean officer came and kicked it out.

  Conditions were far more severe for the 700 GIs who had been made to camp in an open cornfield, half a mile away. In an attempt to ward off the bitter wind, they collected into groups of five and made for hollowed-out shelters – nothing more than shallow holes – on the lee side of a slope. There, they huddled down together in an effort to share body heat. Others found odds and ends of wood or scrub, apparently, as the civilian captives saw a few small fires glowing fitfully.

  Meanwhile Blake had been pondering what had happened to his escape party a couple of days earlier. Had the guides told them the truth about their conversation with the Korean soldiers? Had they simply become apprehensive and backed out? Could the American lines really be that far away? Realising the desperate situation they were now in, he decided to make another escape attempt.

  That day, Monday, 30 October, Blake canvassed opinion among a number of his fellow prisoners. One of those he asked to join him, 17-year-old Sagid Salahutdin, declined to do so, preferring to stay with his large family. After some deliberation, Jean Meadmore also decided against: ‘I said no, I haven’t got the guts to do it, and it’s doomed to failure. You’ll be caught and shot as a spy.’

  So, alone, Blake headed off into the hills after nightfall, once the guards had settled down in front of the campfire. He calculated that the American lines lay fifty miles or so to the South, and his strategy was to walk mainly at night, avoiding roads and villages, and fortify himself with maize and berries. He had only been walking for two hours, and was about to descend into a valley through a cornfield when he heard a bolt click, and a torch shone in his face. A young North Korean soldier stepped out with a rifle and screamed something at him – presumably asking who he was and where he was going: ‘I told him I was a Russian. He evidently did not believe me or, if he did, felt I should establish my identity to his superiors for he ordered me to follow him.’

  After a short while they arrived at what looked like the entrance to a cave, where a group of ten N
orth Korean soldiers were seated around a fire. The captain of the company began to question him, in Korean, and at first – through a mixture of a few words and a lot of hand gestures – Blake tried to keep up the pretence that he was Russian. When asked to produce his papers, he realised his story wouldn’t stand up and so he admitted to being a British diplomat who had escaped from a camp near Manpo. He was eventually told to go and sit against the wall of the cave, where he remained, closely watched, for the rest of the night. Tired and depressed that his efforts to flee had failed so soon, he could only guess what awaited him in the morning.

  At breakfast time the soldiers washed in a nearby stream and then ate, all the while observing their prisoner with great interest, guffaws of laughter intermittently bursting forth as they assessed this rare specimen of a white man. Blake was given a meal of pork soup and rice and a packet of cigarettes, before the questioning resumed. Now the mood of the captain and his senior colleagues took a turn for the worse, and they shouted at him, accusing him of being a spy and telling him he would be shot. Eventually a new officer arrived, a major, and he and two soldiers accompanied Blake on the two-hour walk back to Manpo. His life was very much in the balance, he felt.

  Once back at the camp, his fellow inmates, men, women and children, were instructed to form a circle, and he was made to stand on a wooden box in the middle. At best, the scene seemed like a classroom lecture for a miscreant pupil; at worst, it had all the trappings of a show trial. The major who had brought him to the camp spoke for twenty minutes, haranguing Blake for his escape attempt, while Commissioner Lord, alongside him, translated for the benefit of the group.

  At the end, there was huge relief: ‘He ended up with the warning that if I ever tried to escape again I would be shot there and then and so would anybody who tried to emulate me.’

  Blake’s admonisher that morning would, as events unfolded, become known to them all as ‘The Tiger’. One of the GIs later explained the nickname: ‘He was mean and he loved killing.’

  The ‘Death March’ was about to begin.

  8

  Death March

  Some of the missionaries had encountered The Tiger in the early weeks of the war when, in his crisp white jail-governor’s uniform, he had interviewed them in their solitary confinement in Chunchon. Now he was clad in the blue of the North Korean security police. An Australian priest, Father Philip Crosbie, described The Tiger as a tall, lithe man, wearing knee breeches and a tight-fitting jacket: ‘When he walked, he leaned forward a little. His features were regular, but protruding teeth gave him a perpetual grimace. His bright eyes were keen and restless.’

  On the afternoon of Tuesday, 31 October, there was a sense of grim foreboding among the captives as they were brought together to hear The Tiger’s plan for their future. To the East, in the cornfield, they could see the American POWs lining up and preparing to move. ‘You see,’ The Tiger said, pointing to his military epaulette, ‘I have the authority. Everyone must march. No one must be left behind. You must discard at once everything that can be used as a weapon. After all, you are my enemy, and I must consider that you might try to do me harm.’

  After those words, he proceeded to inspect the line of prisoners, stopping in front of Father Paul Villemot, an 82-year-old French priest, who was leaning heavily on his wooden cane. ‘That can be used as a weapon. Throw that away,’ The Tiger told the sick old man. He then proceeded to mock the missionaries in the group. ‘Suppose you were the engineer on a train and the locomotive broke down. What would you do? Would you kneel down and pray that it would run? Or would you get an expert who knew about such things to repair it? In this country we know what we would do. We don’t need you religious people anymore: you are parasites. There are things in this world that need repairing; we know what to do about it.’

  Once The Tiger had finished his speech, Commissioner Lord made desperate entreaties on behalf of the older members of the group, who were clearly in no state for a long march. He relayed Father Villemot’s bleak assessment of his chances: ‘If I have to march, I will die.’ The Tiger’s response was brief, matter-of-fact and all the more chilling for it: ‘Then let them march till they die.’ And with that, he gave the direction to move out of the camp.

  The Tiger had orders to transport his group of 800 prisoners as quickly as possible to the north-eastern town of Chunggangjin, some 120 miles away. It was all too evident he was prepared to use any methods at his disposal to achieve this objective with no regard for human life or suffering. As the prisoners started to assemble, they heard an unmistakable burst of machine gun fire from the field where the POWs had been corralled. Six sick soldiers were the first victims of what they would soon realise was The Tiger’s ruthless policy of abandoning the enfeebled and the ill.

  The march began – a long, slow, straggling, pathetic-looking column of men, women and children, with the GIs at the front and the civilians following. To the sound of ‘ballee, ballee, ballee’ (quick, quick, quick) constantly barked in their ears by the guards, they struggled on, weak, hungry, already chilled to the bone and now facing an arctic wind blowing in from the North.

  ‘It was to be the darkest and most dramatic period in our captivity,’ Blake recalled. ‘We walked all day through wild mountain country, stopping at night in fields or deserted villages, where we sometimes found only burnt-out shells instead of houses.’

  The group covered about six miles before being ordered off the road by The Tiger just before midnight, to spend the night in an open field. He was angry because his meticulous schedule had already been disrupted: on day one he had planned to cover sixteen miles.

  At daybreak the next morning, after a derisory meal of boiled corn, they were off again, heading towards the distant snow-capped mountains of the Kosan Pass, with The Tiger setting an even more gruelling pace. He split the group of 800 into fourteen sections, instructing the American officers assigned to ‘command’ each one to keep their charges moving, and to make sure they kept a distance from the section in front.

  That sort of discipline proved impossible to maintain, with GIs collapsing by the roadside and the older civilians stuttering along painfully. After two hours, an enraged Tiger halted the column and ordered the officers in charge of each section to gather round. He then explained through his interpreter, Commissioner Lord, that he would shoot the five officers whose sections had collapsed into disorder. Lord proceeded to beg for the lives of the young Americans, pleading that they had acted in good faith and his decision was unjust. The Tiger reconsidered: ‘Then I will shoot the man from whose section most men were allowed to fall out. Who is he?’

  That man was 34-year-old Lieutenant Cordus H. Thornton of Longview, Texas, who stepped forward, whispering to Commissioner Lord as he did so: ‘Save me if you can, Sir.’

  Just then a group of haggard and exhausted North Korean soldiers, in retreat from the frontline, passed by, and The Tiger decided to recruit them as his ‘jury’ in Lieutenant Thornton’s ‘trial’. Larry Zellers heard The Tiger ask the soldiers: ‘What is to be done to a man who disobeys the lawful order of an officer in the Korean People’s Army?’

  ‘Shoot him!’ they all shouted.

  ‘There, you have had your trial,’ The Tiger mockingly told Thornton.

  ‘In Texas, Sir, we would call that a lynching,’ the American replied contemptuously.

  A weeping Commissioner Lord sank to his knees and started to beg for Lieutenant Thornton’s life, only to have the gun waved in his face before being pushed brusquely away.

  The Tiger began to prepare for the execution. He asked Thornton if he wanted to be blindfolded. On receiving an affirmative reply, he instructed one of his guards to tie a handkerchief round the American’s head. A small towel was then used to bind his arms behind his back.

  ‘You see,’ The Tiger said, pointing once again to the epaulettes on his shoulder, ‘I have the authority to do this.’ Pausing for a moment, The Tiger pushed up the back of Thornton’s fur hat. Zellers
continued to gaze in horror at the unfolding scene: ‘I had seen too much already; my eyes snapped shut just before The Tiger fired his pistol into the back of Thornton’s head.’

  In the terrifying moments that followed, there was no flicker of movement nor a word spoken. Then The Tiger barked out: ‘Bury him!’ A tall, fair-headed prisoner of war (POW) stepped forward and, gazing around at the group of horror-stricken fellow prisoners, pleaded: ‘Won’t some of you come down to help me?’ Sergeant Henry (Hank) Leerkamp of Company L, 34th Infantry Regiment, 24th Division, from Chester, Missouri, was Thornton’s close colleague. He clambered down the steep slope to a level spot some fifteen feet below the road, and started to dig away at the stones with his bare hands. Someone threw down a crude shovel, and then others came down to help him. They dug a shallow grave, laid Thornton’s body in it, and covered it as best they could with large rocks. Once more the prisoners fell into line, and the march resumed.

  The meagre food the captives were given once a day (twice, if they were lucky) was almost always a ball of half-cooked maize, which was difficult to digest but even more so for the older ones who had lost their teeth.

  The threat of being hit from the air was ever present. ‘Sometimes our column was attacked by American fighters which, sweeping down low, machine gunned us so that we had to scatter hastily in ditches and fields,’ Blake recalled.

  No one, POWs and civilians alike, was dressed for the cold, all having been captured in the summer. The civilians had been issued with thin blankets that afforded hardly any extra protection; some of them also followed the example of Russian prisoners, stuffing their clothes with straw and tying a rope round their trouser legs at the ankles. The GIs had only their fatigues, lightweight coats and the fur hats they had managed to pick up in an abandoned warehouse at Jui-am-nee.