The Korean War was “the war that was not a war,” writes Monica Kim in The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History. Kim, a Korean American historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, delves into a large archive of prisoner-of-war case files recently declassified by the US. She also draws on memoirs in English and Korean, interviews, even petitions written in blood. What results is a composite tale of the hundreds of thousands of POWs—rank-and-file soldiers and “civilian internees”—who were captured and held in sprawling, miserable camps on both sides of the 38th parallel.
For Kim, the newly revealed stories of these POWs help us understand the Korean War as an intimate civil conflict, not just a proxy battle between superpowers. In POW camps and interrogation rooms on the North–South border, soldiers and civilians were subjected to constant questioning. But the prisoners’ allegiances were, more than anything, a matter of survival. Just as on my wall map, the divide between the Korean people was, and is, imposed and often thin.
Two primary archives ground Kim’s research: investigation reports from the largest POW camp run by the US and UN, and files of more than one thousand US POWs who were interrogated by the US Counterintelligence Corps after returning from Chinese and North Korean camps. Reading through these documents, Kim finds time and again that loyalties were blurry. There was no intrinsic difference between a North Korean and a South Korean or a Korean leftist and a Korean rightist—or, for that matter, a Korean soldier and a Korean civilian.
Kim begins the book with the story of Oh Se-hui, who, in October 1950, was twenty years old and “making his way back to his home” in southern Korea, after serving in the North Korean army. Knowing that he would encounter North Korean, South Korean, and UN forces on his long journey, “he had stashed away four different pieces of paper in strategic places on his body”—each proof of a different affiliation. Stopped on a road by South Korean troops, he convinced them that he was not a soldier or a guerrilla. They took him as a prisoner of war.
Both sides of the conflict wanted not only to get information but also to promote their cold war ideology. They used coercion to prove the superiority of their cause. Americans and their allies interrogated South Koreans as well as North Korean and Chinese soldiers. Across the border, the North Koreans and Chinese questioned Americans, UN forces, and South and North Koreans. Where “no category—whether refugee, POW, anti-Communist, Communist—was stable,” Kim writes, every prisoner became a target of persuasion.