Written as a doctoral dissertation at Rutgers University (2003) under the direction of Lloyd Gardner, John Chambers, and Marilyn Young, Charles Young's comparative study of prisoner-of-war (POW) politics in the Korean War suffers from “MASH syndrome.” This affliction is the tendency to write about the Korean War through the prism of the Vietnam War, Cold War history written as if the U.S.-USSR rivalry were a fantasy created by partisan domestic politics in the United States.
Young's thesis is that the United Nations Command (UNC), by failing to repatriate all the Chinese and Korean POWs it held in 1951, prolonged the war, killing thousands. Young argues that although both belligerent coalitions committed criminal acts under the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War (1949), the culpability of the U.S.-led side was greater. He asserts that the UNC sponsored a reign of terror in the POW camp at Koje-do that made free individual...