POWs recognize shock on faces

Images from Iraq stir vivid memories of hunger, cold and torture at the hands of the enemy, but some POWs find signs of hope in the pictures.

By CHRIS TISCH, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 26, 2003

Bill Allen refused to step on the bodies.

He and other captured American soldiers had been forced to dig graves for 14 of their comrades who had died in North Korea as prisoners of war. The ground was frozen and they could only dig a few inches deep.

A guard ordered Allen to step on the bodies, to pack them into the earth.

"I figured I couldn't live with myself," Allen said. "So I figured, well, they can shoot me."

Instead, the guard forced Allen to hold a large rock over his head. If he dropped it, he would be shot. His fellow soldiers then scurried to find debris to cover the bodies.

Allen survived that day, and every other day of the 32 months he was a prisoner of war in North Korea in the early 1950s. But emotional wounds left by that experience will never go away.

Allen, 71, and other local former prisoners of war recognized the looks on the faces of American soldiers taken captive in Iraq this week. They hope those soldiers won't have to endure the torture many POWs experienced.

"You're so scared," said Ed DeMent, who was a prisoner of the Germans for a year during World War II. "You don't know what's going to happen to you."

Former POWs said the soldiers held in Iraq are certainly in shock.

"When I saw them on the television, I could see it in their eyes," said Allen, the Korean War POW. "You have no control over what you want to do or want to say."

Allen went to Korea in 1950 at age 18, then saw his company shredded from 200 strong to only 13 men. As the Americans tried to escape, Chinese soldiers camouflaged in white sheets popped out of the snow banks.

Allen was in the rear, armed with a rifle.

"When they didn't shoot me right away, I thought I had a pretty good chance," Allen said.

But 32 months of hell awaited him. The first two months were the worst, as Allen and his fellow soldiers had to carry the wounded on a march through the snowy mountains. He remembers the squeak the snow made under his feet.

Temperatures dropped to 45 below zero. They received no clothing or medical aid. The food was like cattle feed. Allen lost about 70 pounds.

"The first winter, you didn't need to have any torture," he said. "Half the camp died off."

Allen knows fellow soldiers were tortured, beaten and shot. Attempts at brainwashing were frequent. Troublemakers were confined to an old bank vault.

Allen's only beating came when a guard demanded a bracelet his father had given him. Allen refused, prompting the guard to beat him with a flashlight until it broke.

But he never gave up the bracelet. He still keeps it, along with other war memorabilia.

Of about 4,000 American soldiers captured during the Korean War, more than half died in captivity. About 800 never have been found and are missing in action to this day, including a soldier who vanished from Allen's camp the day before they were liberated.

DeMent was a gunner flying over Yugoslavia in 1944 when his plane was shot down. His chute tore through a fig tree before he was tossed to the rocks below. He suffered dislocated knees, a ruptured naval and a broken nose. He sat for nearly six hours before the Germans found him.

They carried him down a mountain and put him on a flatbed. Along the route to a prison camp, some civilians, who had endured the bombs of American planes, got ahold of him.

"They worked me over pretty good," he said.

DeMent remembers being cold and hungry. Sanitation sometimes was little more than a slop bucket.

St. Pete Beach resident Homer Still, 82, also was captured after his plane was shot down.

He was in a German prison camp for seven months, crammed with 22 men in a room not much larger than his living room.

"It was close company," he said.

The food was skimpy: "Potatoes, rutabagas and bread that tasted like 80 percent pine tree," Still said.

Local POWs said they are hopeful the soldiers in Iraqi captivity will make it out alive. Allen said he sees some encouraging signs.

He saw bandages on the feet of one soldier, meaning they may be receiving medical treatment.

Local POWs also said they hope the International Red Cross is allowed access to the soldiers. During Still's activity, the Red Cross provided rations with Spam, evaporated milk and chocolate.

"If they let the Red Cross come in, they'll see they get decent treatment," DeMent said.

But even if the soldiers get out safely, they will have to live with the terrifying memory of being a prisoner of war. Many of that fraternity have difficult lives full of emotional breakdowns, fractured families or substance abuse.

Allen, who now lives with his wife in Tierra Verde, took early retirement from Ford Motor Co. in Michigan. He started receiving treatment in the 1980s.

When it snowed, he would cross his hands around his chest, as he did when he marched the mountains as a war prisoner. He would look behind him whenever the snow made that haunting squeaking sound under his feet.

When he visits restaurants, he looks for the closest exit. When a plane flies overhead, he glances upward. And when he visited Pikes Peak in Colorado, all the snow was overwhelming.

"It was like looking right through Pikes Peak and right back into Korea," he said. "I have buddies who won't eat rice. Or look at anything having to do with turnips. Or eat potatoes. Those things never leave you."

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