CHAOS, KANGAROO COURTS, AND COMMUNISM AT KOJE-DO

The U.S. Army made some serious mistakes during the almost forgotten, but historically significant, Korean War. One of them was assigning combat officers untrained for prison administration as commanders of the United Nations prisoner of war camps. The communist POWs took full advantage of that and made life miserable for them, their guards, and fellow prisoners who were not committed to their ideology. Riots in the prison camps became deadly on an almost daily basis and kangaroo courts cost many POWS their lives via brutal murders—at the hands of their supposed comrades. That was fine with the POWs as long as they kept chaos alive. They brought life to the saying the inmates are running the asylum, which they did until the fourteenth U.S. camp commander finally took back control of the camps in May 1952. The two-and-a-half-year standoff between commanders and communists marked a new era in prisoner of war history which set a precedent for future wars involving westerners versus easterners. This book tells that story in an educational, entertaining, and riveting fashion.