The POW North Korea Could Not Break

On Remembrance Day this Nov. 11, veterans of the Korean War who attend Armistice ceremonies, are being urged to Turn Towards Pusan, Korea, for a moment of silence.

The gesture is officially encouraged by Koreavetnews.com and the Korean Veterans Association as respect for fallen comrades – in preparation for more lavish ceremonies in 2010 marking the 60th anniversary of that war.

Koreavetnews.com carries more information about Korea than most internet sites, and this year in Pusan (Koreans call it “Busan”) honoured guests will be William Speakman of the Black Watch who won a Victoria Cross at the 1951 Imjin Battle, and Derek Kinne of the Northumberland Fusiliers who earned the George Cross for his relentless defiance and courage as a tortured prisoner of the Chinese.

Kinne brought back memories for me. He figured prominently in an Australian court case where journalist Wilfred Burchett (who died in 1983) sued Senator Jack Kane and Aussie journalist Denis Warner for libeling him as an agent of the KGB.

Burchett’s Aussie passport had been confiscated for some 17 years, after covering the Korean war from the Chinese side. He also covered the Vietnam war from the perspective of Hanoi and the Soviets.

In the Korean war, Burchett led accusations that the U.S. used germ warfare (dropping infected rats on the north). He also allegedly wrote or extracted confessions from British prisoners.

Evidence against Burchett was mostly anecdotal from POWs and his own writings. During the Vietnam war the CBC used his reports and commentaries. I scolded at the time that while the CBC had a right to use whatever journalists they wished, they also had an obligation to identify the ideology and communist sympathies of Burchett’s reportage.

Former POWs Derek Kinne and U.S. Air Force Col. Walker Mahurin came to Australia to testify against Burchett. Col. Mahurin recalled Burchett saying he could have him shot: “He stared at me like a snake staring at a mouse.”

Kinne, who today lives in Arizona, recalled Burchett trying to brainwash prisoners into confessing to imaginary crimes. There were even allegations that Burchett wore a North Korean uniform.

I was a friend of Denis Warner, a great Australian journalist, and got him to write columns in the Toronto Sun. Through him, I got transcripts of Kinne’s and Mahurin’s testimony that we excerpted in the Sun.

If Burchett wasn’t KGB, he was certainly an “agent of influence.”

His defender and colleague was another pro-Soviet Aussie journalist – Alan Winnington. Yet another was Rupert Lockwood, who had been caught writing derogatory profiles of influential Australian MPs for the KGB – who gambled, who needed money, who was a womanizer, who drank too much. Useful for KGB blackmail. Lockwood fled Australia to Moscow where he wrote for Western communist newspapers, and whom I remember for his irreverent mockery of Soviet inefficiency.

As for Derek Kinne, his defiance as a POW is legendary. Repeatedly beaten for “non-conforming,” he once hit an abusing Chinese officer, got 18 months solitary, was strung up to stand on tip-toes with a noose around his neck to strangle if his legs gave out. Kinne never gave an inch, no matter the punishment. Never recanted, boosted morale, inspired others.

Kinne’s George Cross citation notes: “Every possible method, both physical and mental, employed by his captors to break his spirit proved beyond their powers.” A man who couldn’t be broken.

He and Speakman attending ceremonies in Korea on Nov. 11 is reason enough for Korean vets to “Turn Towards Busan.”