Word: boatner
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...news of the week from Korea, dominated by General Boatner's success in cleaning up the prisoner-of-war camps (see WAR IN ASIA), was ominously backlighted by a more enduring fact: the Korean war, long in a mess, is falling into a worse mess day by day. Washington muddling has fashioned a deadfall in which U.S. policy has been trapped. The current U.S. policy position 1) gives the Reds every reason not to allow a truce and 2) invites the Reds to take the offensive in Korea, or elsewhere in Asia, with the assurance of minimum retaliation from...
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...
Brigadier General Haydon Lemaire ("Bull") Boatner was ready for his big test on Koje Island. He intended to break up the big compounds, and he decided to start with the 6,000 hard-core North Koreans in Compound 76-the gang that engineered the abduction of Brigadier General (now Colonel) Francis T. Dodd. To impress 76's inmates, he staged a rehearsal with tanks and flamethrowers in an empty compound next to theirs. The prisoners answered by digging chest-deep trenches and continuing to turn out steel-tipped spears and other crude weapons on their hidden forge...
This week Boatner sent a message to 76's tough leader, North Korean Colonel Lee Hak Koo: "This is a legal order for you to prepare the prisoners of war in Compound 76 to move out into the newly constructed compounds . . ." Lee ignored the order. When the paratroopers of the 187th Airborne Regiment moved in, the prisoners fought tooth & nail. In the first hours of battle 32 Communists were killed and at least 85 wounded; one of the paratroopers was killed and 13 wounded. But eventually a heavy tear-gas barrage brought the Communists out of their trenches, choking...