Word: boatner
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Koje Island's new prison commandant, a first-class combat man, emerged last week as a soldier who could also use his wits in the most disagreeable of rear-area jobs. Boldly and shrewdly, Brigadier General Haydon L. Boatner had chosen Compound 76, scene of the Dodd-Colson coup, as the first to be tackled in bringing order to the prison. After the bloody battle in which Compound 76's 6,000 hard-core Communists were subdued (TIME, June 16), the other tough enclosures on Koje toppled like ninepins, with no further fighting between guards and prisoners...
Meanwhile, the prisoner death list following the battle of Compound 76 rose to 41.* At least twelve of these were killed by last-ditch fanatics for refusing to fight or for trying to obey Boatner's orders, some were bayoneted in the trenches by U.S. paratroopers, and others died in buildings captured only after concussion grenades were tossed in. The Americans did not fire a shot, although the prisoners fought with spears, homemade swords, clubs and barbed-wire flails. Also found were maps which indicated that a Communist capture of the whole island had been planned...
Kangaroo Courts. When the order to move went to the next pen-Compound 78-the inmates, who had watched the battle of 76, lined up meekly and were taken away. Compound 77 was next, and it was here that Bull Boatner made his one tactical mistake of the week. He gave 77 a day's advance notice of the move, and the Communists inside used their last night to execute antiCommunists. After the evacuation, 16 bodies were found, hacked, beaten or strangled, tossed into water-filled ditches, jammed into metal drums, and even hidden under hut floors. Compound...
...Boatner's paratroops moved on to Compound 95. While the prisoners were being moved, interpreters passed orders for the column to turn left, but added that anti-Communists could fall out to the right. No fewer than 400 anti-Communists turned to the right. Some of these dashed their red-starred caps to the ground...
...Boatner expected some trouble from the swaggering, defiant North Korean officers of Compound 66, but after he had taken representatives from the enclosure on a tour of the blood-spattered ruins of Compound 76, the officers marched out in orderly ranks, five abreast. As a reward for obedience and a mark of respect for their rank, Boatner ordered the machine-guns on the watchtowers turned skyward during the transfer. Only one North Korean officer stepped out of ranks; he identified himself as an antiCommunist...