The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: the Untold History by Monica Kim

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: the Untold History by Monica Kim Grace Huxford The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: the Untold History by Monica Kim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 435. $35.00 hardcover, $24.95 paper, $35.00 e-book. Interrogation rooms sit at the heart of the history of the Korean War. By 1951, the conflict had shifted from a war of movement to one of stasis: the interrogation of prisoners of war (POWs) became a pivotal Cold War battleground. POWs from the United Nations (UN), China, and North Korea were subjected to wide-ranging interrogations not only by enemy forces but also, when they were released, by their own military authorities or by third parties seeking to situate them in the new postwar, postimperial world order. Interrogation revealed important military intelligence. How one responded to it could reveal, shape, [End Page 370] or even produce a sense of subjectivity, in the interrogated and interrogator alike. Interrogation rooms were thus critical to the wider Cold War battle over personhood. The Korean War, in particular, was always about individual people, their outlook, and the choices they made. Monica Kim’s innovative, imaginative, and ambitious book demonstrates the importance of the interrogation room and human interiority to the Korean War, in a way that few others have done before. Not only does Kim bring together an astonishing transnational range of Korean War interrogation rooms—from Koje-do (Kŏje 巨濟 Island), where communist North Koreans and strident anticommunists were interrogated by US forces and the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA), to the camps created by the Indian military on the thirty-eighth parallel for POWs refusing repatriation—but she also extends the temporal framework of interrogation. For example, chapter 1 explores the influence of the US Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) during the post-1945 US occupation of southern Korea. It examines how the bureaucratic, information-gathering, and intelligence systems imposed made “the ordinary Korean” learn well before 1950 “how to navigate different potential readings of his or her personhood by different groups” (p. 35). As Kim shows, CIC interrogations and the wider US occupation had a long-lasting legacy on Korean subjectivity. Kim also extends that chronology beyond the war, poignantly detailing in the final concluding chapter the post-1953 histories and “interior worlds” (p. 358) of individuals caught up in this battle. They carried these experiences with them beyond Korea, from São Paolo to Geneva and to Memphis, showing that this new type of warfare, much like the Korean War itself, never fully relinquished its grip on its former combatants. Personal stories occupy a central part in this book: these histories puncture established narratives of the Korean War and reflect the complex melee of subjectivities, political sensibilities, and nation-states that ran through the conflict. The book opens with Oh Se-hŭi, a captured twenty-year-old Korean People’s Army (KPA) deserter. Oh had four papers stowed away in different parts of his body, each of which would have offered him a different option if he had been caught by the ROKA (enrollment papers at Seoul University and a list of students he taught as a countryside middle-school teacher), UN (a leaflet offering safe surrender), or KPA (a “patriotic certificate”). When Oh was eventually confronted by a ROKA soldier, all his papers were torn up: Oh [End Page 371] was only taken prisoner due to the clearly unmilitary cut of his hair. Kim’s book is full of these fascinating and microcosmic examples, in which minds and bodies are “read” as much as documentation is. These life stories support Kim’s main argument about the importance of psyche and subjectivity in the Korean War. They highlight the relevance of personalities and decision-making in the conflict, which involved actors from the lowest private soldier, such as Oh, to the most senior general, such as General Francis Dodd (1899–1973), famously taken captive by POWs on Koje-do (explored in depth in chap. 4). Kim also shows how life narratives—how one’s origins were explained and understood—were critical in the interrogation room. As Aaron Moore demonstrates, autobiography has...