Prisoners of the Empire by Sarah Kovner

Author:Sarah Kovner
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press

U.S. planes dropping supplies. Parachuting supplies was the fastest way to help POWs in the days immediately following Japan’s surrender. But the heavy pallets also posed a real hazard, in some cases causing injuries and even fatalities when they crash-landed. (US National Archives and Records Administration.)

Guy Round recalled going with the Japanese staff by truck on August 29 to pick up canned foods and cigarettes dropped by the B-29s. He also recalled Korean independence leaders, some of whom were political prisoners. During the war they had been held in prison with POWs in the civil jail. Now they sent cars to pick up the POWs and bring them out to dance halls. Guy Round later recalled one such evening at a dance hall where a former political prisoner gave a speech and then sang the patriotic song “Aegukka.”

In Seoul, on August 6, Lieutenant Colonel M. Elrington, who had been the senior Allied officer at Keijō, visited the Chōsen Hotel to dine with newly arrived American officers. The next day Captain Stengel and Captain V. H. P. Boeck, the medical officer of Headquarters Company, XXIV Corps, went to Keijō and spoke with Elrington and Noguchi.71 The prisoners there were primarily British. Elrington and his staff helped process the prisoners quickly, and the 158 POWs were told about the plans for their evacuation to Manila. After several hours of answering questions “ranging from the atomic bomb to what the people in the United States and England thought about the surrender in Singapore,” an inspection of the camp was made. Stengel noted they “were given to feel that their problems and future welfare are matters of concern to their Military establishment and their country and all that could be done to get them home as quickly as possible.”72

That same day, Stengel and Captain V. H. P. Boeck, the medical officer of Headquarters Company, XXIV Corps, first visited Keijō, then Jinsen.73 Together with the British POWs at Keijō was Carl Engelhart, the Japanese-speaking G-2 officer. By now the prisoners in Jinsen were primarily American. Among them were Lieutenant Colonel Curtis T. Beecher and the senior medical officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jack W. Schwartz.74

On September 8, advance elements of the Seventh Infantry Division arrived at Jinsen.75 On September 9, Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, commander of the XXIV Corps of the US Tenth Army—and future military governor of South Korea—landed with his troops to receive the Japanese surrender. Koreans initially welcomed American troops, but the jubilation dimmed when Hodge announced that Governor-General Abe Nobuyuki would be kept in office. Hodge planned to use Japanese troops to maintain order.76 Some prisoners found themselves in the capital celebrating Korea’s independence. The correspondent for the London Times noted that as a crowd of about 500 Koreans waved flags, Japanese troops fired on them, killing two and wounding ten others.

Repatriation soon began for Allied POWs from Korea—now United Nations Prisoners of War—and for civilian internees. The hospital ship Relief moved to Jinsen and recovered 168 Allied POWs, 138 of them from the Philippines, and 30 British from Singapore.

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