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Trial by Degradation. In Korea, the committee reported, the 7,190 P.W.s were crowded into 20 squalid camps—if they could survive the death marches to get there. "On one of these marches 700 men were headed north," the committee reported. "Before the camp was reached, 500 men had perished."
Inside most of the camps the P.W.s got a diet of rice, occasionally augmented by foul soup. Men in the "bad" camps lost 50 pounds in a few weeks; hundreds died from dysentery. The committee continued: "By [Communist] design, and because some officers refused to assume leadership responsibility, organization in some of the P.W. camps deteriorated . . . The men scuffled for their food. Hoarders grabbed all the tobacco. Morale decayed to the vanishing point. Each man mistrusted the next. Bullies persecuted the weak and sick. Filth bred disease, and contagion swept the camp." This was often the point where the Communists offered food and better treatment to those of the P.W.s who would become "progressives." "The prisoner might start the hard way—and be punished by restricted rations and other privations," said the committee. "If he began to show the 'proper spirit'—to cooperate with his captors—he was lectured and handed Communist literature. A docile prisoner who read the literature and listened politely to the lectures was graduated to a better class. Finally, he might be sent to 'Peaceful Valley.' In this lenient camp the food was relatively good. Prisoners might even have tobacco . . ."
Trial by Indoctrination. The committee continued: "When plunged into a Communist indoctrination mill, the average American P.W. was under a serious handicap. Enemy political officers forced him to read Marxian literature. He was compelled to participate in debates. He had to tell what he knew about American politics and American history. And many times the Chinese or Korean instructors knew more about these subjects than he did. This brainstorming caught many American prisoners off guard. To most of them it came as a complete surprise, and they were unprepared . . .
"A large number of American P.W.s did not know what the Communist program was all about. Some were confused by it. Self-seekers accepted it as an easy out. A few may have believed the business. They signed peace petitions and peddled Communist literature. It was not an inspiring spectacle . . . Ignorance lay behind much of this trouble. A great many servicemen were teenagers. At home they had thought of politics as dry editorials or uninteresting speeches, dull as ditchwater. They were unprepared to give the commissars an argument . . . The uninformed P.W.s were up against it. They couldn't answer arguments in favor of Communism with arguments in favor of Americanism, because they knew very little about their America."