Broken Soldiers
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: August 28, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 330
ISBN-13: 9780252025419
Subjects: American history: postwar, from c 1945 -; Asian / Middle Eastern history: postwar, from c 1945 -; Military engineering; Prisoners Of War; War & defence operations; Military History - Korea Conflict; History; History - Military / War; History: World; ASIA; The Americas; Military - Korean War; History / United States / 20th Century; Military Science; Korean War, 1950-1953; Prisoners and prisons, North K; Prisoners and prisons, North Korean; United States
First sentence: During the early morning hours of Sunday, June 25, 1950, a North Korean army of ninety thousand men crossed the 38th Parallel and attacked South Korea.
Description: "Traversing the no-man's-land of political loyalty and betrayal, Broken Soldiers documents the fierce battle for the minds of America prisoners during the Korean War. In scorching detail, Raymond Lech describes the soldiers' day-to-day experiences in prisoner-of-war camps and the shocking treatment some of them received at the hands of their own countrymen after the war.

Why, he asks, were only fourteen American soldiers tried as collaborators when thousands of others who admitted to some of the same offenses were not?".

"Drawing on some sixty thousand pages of court-martial transcripts Lech secured through the Freedom of Information Act, Broken Soldiers documents the appalling treatment and the sophisticated propagandizing to which American POWs fell victim during the Korean conflict. Three thousand American soldiers perished in North Korean camps over the winter of 1950-51, most from starvation.

Through the unsentimental testimony of survivors, Lech describes how these young men, filthy and lice-infested, lost an average of 40 percent of their body weight. Many also lost their powers of resistance and their grip on soldierly conduct."--BOOK JACKET.