January 20, 2004
Korean War POW's escape
A South Korean prisoner of war who returned home last month after being held 50 years in North Korea was formally discharged from the army Monday as a military brass band played on a snowy parade ground outside Seoul. . .From the Guardian.Jun [Yong-il] is the latest of more than 30 South Korean POWs who have escaped the North since 1994, as the communist country relaxed control over the movements of its hunger-stricken populace.
Jun's return has helped galvanize the South's resolve to pursue the fate of at least 300 others still believed held.
Posted by David on January 20, 2004 11:24 PM
And let's not forget about a few of their allies, either:
The Korean War ended in July of 1953. The Chinese had controlled U.N. prisoners and were primarily responsible for accounting for them. POWs were returned throughout that summer during Operations Little and Big Switch. In the end, there were 8,217 Americans who did not come home and who were not accounted for. The U.S. government ("USG") was indignant at the time, citing various sources of information that indicated a grossly insufficient accounting by the Communists.Although thousands of men were suspiciously unaccounted for, the USG listed 944 men who specifically should have been accounted for, because circumstances surrounding their loss indicated that the enemy would have known what happened to them. Indeed, some of these men were known to have been alive in enemy hands at the end of the war, yet they were not returned. Who knew how many others of the 8,000+ men had been captured alive and not returned? Certainly some of them had died in battle or in the POW camps, but there were too many unexplained disappearances.
Posted by: Peter Shriner on January 25, 2004 2:03 AM
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