A riveting tale of surviving North Korean prisoner of war camps

TBO.com: A riveting tale of surviving North Korean prisoner of war camps
BY ROGER K. MILLER

Published: February 20, 2011

"Valleys of Death: A Memoir of the Korean War" by Bill Richardson with Kevin Maurer (Berkley Caliber, $25.95)

Aside from those who fought in it, and perhaps their surviving family members, few Americans today know much about the Korean War.

That is why it is so appropriately called The Forgotten War.

Few know, for instance, that 2010 marked the 60th anniversary of its outbreak. Nor that, officially, the war has never ended.

But Bill Richardson knows. He was, for a time, one of their number.

Measured by the grim relativity of luck, Richardson was one of the luckier ones.

After being missing in action, he survived 34 months of hell in prisoner of war camps in North Korea to come back home and tell the tale.

Richardson was a corporal in the U.S. Army and home on leave in Philadelphia when war broke out June 25, 1950. He had spent four postwar years in Europe and hoped to be reassigned there.

Instead, within two months he was in Korea, the leader of a 57 recoilless rifle section in the 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, helping in the defense of the Pusan Perimeter at the southernmost port of Korea. After invading South Korea, the North Korean troops had come close to pushing the American and other U.N. defenders off the peninsula.

Once the U.N. forces broke out of the perimeter, they pushed the North Koreans, badly overextended in their supply lines, all the way back up the peninsula.

In one of several engagements near Unsan in late October-early November, Richardson and several of his comrades were captured by North Koreans.

They suffered cruelly in a march northward, criminally ill-clad for the Siberia-like weather. Many died; most were wounded or sick; all were severely malnourished.

The rest of Richardson's account is further confirmation of what other survivors already have told: the horrors and misery of POWs' life in North Korea. One thing still angering Richardson is the lack of military discipline among some POWs. Too often it was every man for himself, with the strong preying on the weak.

He feels that cohesion, despite being hard to achieve in their circumstances, would have improved their chances overall.

An armistice was signed July 27, 1953, and Richardson was released with other POWs in a prisoner exchange. He had been in five POW camps.

He stayed in the Army, married, had five children, and rose to the rank of colonel.

"Valleys of Death" imparts the immediacy of contemporary events and a sense of what it was like to be a soldier in that drawn-down postwar Army, depleted of men and material, frantically ramping up for a new war.

Roger K. Miller, a U.S. Army veteran, is the author of "Invisible Hero," a novel inspired by the life of an American POW in the Korean War.