This is a couple or 3 dots off centreline for this Thread but
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/30a6b8cc-e9e...ext%3Dcaldwell puts things in an interesting perspective. It makes parallels between brainwashing in the Korean War and the treatment of the CORNWALL 15. It points out the social differences between our Society then and now, along with relative resistance to attitude and belief forming.
What happened in North Korean and Chinese POW camps between 1950 and 1953, wrote T.R. Fehrenbach, one of the war's first historians, "has become an emotional issue, and for that reason will probably never be clarified". The Korean war is known as the "forgotten war" because Americans have strong incentives to repress the memory of it. The US Army court-martialled 14 soldiers as weaklings and bad actors, convicted 11 and tried to wash its hands of the matter. But the episode created an undercurrent of paranoia that one can see in, for instance, the film The Manchurian Candidate. In 2000, a fine book, Raymond Lech's Broken Soldiers (University of Illinois Press) used declassified documents to show that brainwashing could be almost universally effective when skilfully applied. US soldiers behaved like a colonial population evangelised overnight. POWs wrote for in-house communist newspapers in exchange for cigarettes. They set up "peace committees". They offered to spy. They signed documents declaring the United Nations the aggressor in Korea. Two POWs confessed (under torture) to dropping biological weapons. At war's end, 21 prisoners chose to stay in Korea.
It is not easy for publics to accept that, well, such things happen in war. One reason is that the public senses inclination to be brainwashed. along with the captives. There are telling similarities between the Korean war era and our own. In both cases, a shock to the international order (the Chinese revolution of 1949, September 11, 2001) precipitated a military intervention, which in turn exacted a much higher toll than the public was willing to bear. During Korea, a certain current of western opinion wanted to believe the claims, however fraudulent, that the UN was waging germ warfare. (Maybe then we can bring the soldiers home.) In Britain, columnists have urged that more credence be given to the absurd and self-contradictory Iranian account of the seizure. Reality gets harder for the general public to read. It is possible to see in retrospect the pivotal role Korea played in softening up the US for McCarthyism in the 1950s. The behaviour of a soldier in captivity is often an indictment of the virtues of the society that produced him. Turkish captives, with their strong sense of authority and their vernacular religiosity did better in Korean prison camps than Americans, according to Mr Fehrenbach. British prisoners, with their sense of social hierarchy, did somewhat better. "American education," Mr Fehrenbach wrote, "had done a great deal of damping of the flaming convictions men live and die by." Brave and upstanding though they might have been in other contexts, Americans were quite unsuited to such an ordeal. The British soldier of today is more like the open-minded American of 1950 than the class-bound Briton of 1950. Open-mindedness, perhaps the ultimate democratic is a more ambiguous virtue once violence enters the equation.
I do realise, of course, that the N Koreans/Chinese had blokes for months and not just days. The general mechanism seems valid, nonetheless.