For those who care, Friday, Sept. 20, is National POW/MIA Recognition Day.
The U.S. government’s official line is that in war or peace, “We never leave Americans behind.” The truth is different, however.
In World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War, with its sideshows in Laos and Cambodia, our country sent huge numbers of its best people to conflicts far away. Besides those killed in action, many others fell into communist captivity and never returned home — thanks to abandonment.
From the Korean War came an account of treachery and betrayal. The source, a Russian-Polish emigré, left communist China in 1955 to settle in Australia. As he passed through Hong Kong, he told his story to Air Force Lt. Col. O.D. Simpson, who was then the U.S. Air Force attaché in the western enclave.
The source, Simpson recalled, told of seeing “about 700” American soldiers and airmen while working on the railroad at Manzhouli, where the Trans-Siberian Railroad connects with a Chinese railroad. The captive Americans had to wait while workers changed the undercarriage of the train from the Chinese railroad to fit the Russian tracks to move the train and its unwilling passengers into the Soviet gulag. The source, Col. Simpson noted, knew the captives were Americans because they were speaking English. Moreover, he made accurate drawings of the insignia on the men’s uniforms. There was something else that the source could not forget.
“He had never seen Black men before, and he described these,” Simpson told this writer in a radio interview in 1992.
Simpson was convinced that the report was credible.
“He didn’t try to sell me anything,” Simpson concluded.
The story is substantiated with congressional testimony by a former national-security staffer for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Retired Army Col. Phillip Corso told the Senate Select Committee on Prisoners of War and Missing in Action in 1992 about the cover-up of some Americans captured in the Korean War.
“I know what happened, and I will tell you what happened, without any speculation. The president was in the Oval Office,” Corso testified under oath. “I saluted him, and he said, ‘I understand you have a report on prisoners of war going to the Soviet Union.’ I said, ‘Yes, that’s what I’m here for. So I compiled this report, not only here, but information from Korea which I said before that close to 1,200 — that we suspect, but about 900 certain. Our information is solid.”
Corso then added that Eisenhower had agreed that the story should not become public.
“That was the recommendation that he accepted and said not to tell the families at the time,” he said.
Had the story “gone viral” in its day, the public outcry to recover the lost Americans would likely have been a firestorm that the establishment could not contain.
The result was that Americans were and remain enslaved behind the Bamboo and Iron curtains. Moreover, careerist bureaucrats in Washington became collaborators with the communists — complicit in imprisoning our fellow citizens where no one can hear them scream.
