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Kenneth Karl Badke

Augusta, Georgia -
Korean War Veteran of the United States Army - POW

"Going to Korea and being a POW probably changed me.  It gave me a more optimistic attitude about things.  I don’t think there’s any such thing that I can’t survive or that I can’t accomplish what I start out doing.   I think I’ve been through the toughest time. I’ve lived through the roughest of the rough."

- Kenneth Badke

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[The following is the result of an in-person interview between Kenneth Badke and Lynnita (Sommer) Brown in Macon, Georgia in 1999.  A Field First Sergeant with the 9th Regiment of the 2nd Infantry Division, Kenneth was a survivor of not only the cold, bloody battles at Kunu-ri, North Korea, but also was a prisoner of war who survived death marches and inhumane conditions in North Korean/Chinese POW camps.  Kenneth Karl Badke died in 2005.]

Memoir Contents:

• Pre-Military
• Drafted
• 9th Medical Company
• Kunu-ri
  • Reservoir Protectors
  • Retreat
  • Mining Camp
• Move to Pyuktong
  • Lack of Warmth
  • Diet & Health Problems
  • Chinese Fire Drill
  • Education on Communism
  • Fly Swatter for All
  • Ridiculous Punishment
• Camp 4
  • Hilarious Moments
  • Olympic Games
• Repatriated
  • Discharged
• Final Reflections
  • International Trade
  • Korean Entitlement
  • No Desire to Return
• Obituary - Kenneth Karl Badke

• Name Here's Photo Album
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Back to Memoir Contents

Pre-Military

My name is Kenneth Karl Badke.  I was born on August 27, 1922 in Cleveland, Ohio, a son of Frank C. Badke and Alta Adelaide Jordan Badke.  My father was the Executive Secretary of the Cleveland YMCA.  I was one of four children--all boys, one older and two younger.

I grew up in the outskirts of Cleveland in one of the eastern suburbs called Mayfield Heights. I attended grade and high school there, graduating from high school in 1938.  I grew up during the Depression, but our family never had any problems during that time because Dad was the boss of the YMCAs, and it was a job that paid well.  My parents were Christians, so we grew up in the church.  Dad's theory was that of a Christian-type person.  He said other kids in the neighborhood didn't have what we had.

After I graduated from high school I went to Ohio State University.  I was drafted out of Ohio State into the Army and didn't get out of the Army until 1965.  Neither parent was upset when I was drafted.  My dad was an ex-Navy man who had been through World War I.  My older brother was an engineer during World War II.

Drafted

I took my basic training at Camp Joseph T. Robinson, Little Rock, Arkansas. From basic training I went to Fitzsimmons General Hospital in Denver, Colorado for advanced training as a dental lab technician. When I got through there, I went to Camp Adair, Oregon, where there were two divisions being readied for overseas.  I worked in the dental laboratory clinic at Camp Adair. From there I went to OCS in Texas.  When I graduated from there, I was an administrative officer.

After graduating from OCS I went, of all places, back to Cleveland, Ohio.  I had an assignment at Crile General Hospital in Cleveland. I left there and went out to the west coast again to Ft. Lewis, Washington to prepare to go overseas to the Far East. I had not yet left the country when the war ended.  They turned me around and sent me to Europe. I wound up in a hospital unit that was servicing the Air Force at Istres Air Base just outside of Marseilles, France. After that based closed down, I was sent on up into Paris for about 30 days and was then assigned to a hospital unit in Stuttgart, Germany as part of the occupation forces after World War II. I was there from 1945 until 1949.

I was reassigned back to Ft. Gordon, Georgia as an officer in a medical unit there, training an Air Force engineering company. I got rifted when the reduction in force came in and had to take back my enlisted rank as 1st Sergeant. With it I got an assignment at Oliver General Hospital in Augusta. In June of 1950, just two days prior to the war in Korea, I got an assignment to go back to Ft. Lewis, Washington to Pier 91.

9th Medical Company

There were five of us that received an assignment there. We had a seven-day delay to get to Ft. Lewis. We couldn’t get a leave time, which was abnormal, but nobody said anything to me about the fact that war about to break out in Korea. We drove out to Seattle's Pier 91. When we passed through Denver, Colorado, the war in Korea started. I told the boys, “Hey look. Slow this thing down.” We took a couple of weeks vacation, but nobody said anything. When we got into Pier 91, they closed the gate behind us and reassigned us to the 2nd Division in Ft. Lewis, Washington.

The next day we were on a bus to Ft. Lewis, and from there we were loaded onto a transport. I was given an assignment as the Field 1st Sergeant of the 9th Medical Company of the 9th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Division which was at Ft. Lewis. We loaded on the bus, loaded on the transport, and landed in Korea on the 19th day of July of 1950 just a few days after that war got going.  We didn't even stop in Japan.  We went straight to Korea on the troop ship USS General Howze, landing in Pusan in the daytime.  I didn't give it a thought as to whether or not it was a country worth fighting for; I was Field First Sergeant and it was just a job.  I was to work at the front lines reassigning and working with the battalion aid stations.  When we got off the boat, they said, "Take off the Red Cross band and here's a weapon."

We went to Yongsan, Korea by truck and went into battle the next day.  We went from Pusan towards Masan and then to the area around Obong-ni, all of which were in what was called the Pusan Perimeter. The 9th Regiment was part of a task force that went over there basically at the same time. The task force included the 9th Regiment of the 2nd Division, the 2nd Regiment of the 1st Marine Division, and I believe the 19th Regiment of the 24th Division which came out of Japan. We went in there as a finger in the dam so to speak. We went there strictly to stop the further advances of the North Korean army, and we figured that we would be there for a while.

At this first area there was an intense battle.  The medical company had a Regimental Surgeon as its commanding officer, and he insisted that we take over a schoolhouse in this one area and set up. We were ordered to unload all of our trucks and set up various wards. It was very discouraging to me.  I told our CO, “Hey look. We’re going into combat. We’re not operating a hospital.” Two days later, the whole damn school was blown up. I mean, we lost everything we had--trucks and everything. We had to regroup and get out of there.  We were definitely in combat. We got fired upon from the time we left Pusan until the time we arrived at Yongsan.  When we got there, we were two miles inside of the Naktong River area.

We didn't have air evacuation at that time.  We had regular medical ambulances left over from World War II that we used to evacuate the wounded over the mountains and back into Masan.  The first time we got our ambulances back from Masan there were bullet holes in them. So we took all of our ambulances, Jeeps, and 2 ½ ton trucks, went to Service Company, got ring mounts, cut holes in the top of all of our vehicles, and put 30 caliber machine guns up there.  The machine guns were also left over from World War II.

We stayed in that first area until the 27th day of August, when we kicked off. I remember that very well because that was my birthday. We took off and crossed the Naktong River about the same time that the army went into the landing at Inchon. We had a pincher movement there, and were under fire all the time. We went north and they came in through Inchon.

Medical Company wasn’t well equipped to defend itself. We lost everybody in the aid station about three times when they were overran by the enemy.  The enemy killed everybody in our aid stations. I think the first guy that got killed was a guy named Richardson. The reason I knew him so well was because the day that we came into Washington, we got our orders to move.  I was sitting in the 1st Sergeant’s office talking and this guy came up and stood just inside the door. I noticed him and said, “What the hell is he doing out there?”  I walked out and asked him what he was doing.  He had some kind of religious publication in his hand that they give out on street corners and he said that he had become a conscientious objector. He said, “I’m not going.” I asked him, “You’re not going where?” He said, “I’m not going to Korea.” I said okay and went to get one of my platoon sergeants.  I told the sergeant to go upstairs and be sure that the objector's clothes were all packed and everything. I told the platoon sergeant to take somebody with him, load it on the bus, and let the objector stand right where he was.  When the bus pulled up, I walked him up to it, put him on the bus, and when it got to the dock I took him off the bus and put him on the boat. We carried him onto the boat.  He got useful in battle real quick.  The first time he got shot he became a good soldier. He was later killed at one of those aid stations that were overrun at the Naktong.

We were reinforcements for Task Force Smith, the first group that flew into Korea from Japan.  We were the second group.  We were back and forth at the Naktong.  We would be in the Yongsan area, then we would be around Miriang.  The Marine regiment was the same way.  In other words, we stopped every North Korean that we could in that whole area.  We hung in there until the invasion of Inchon, but I know that we were across the river before the invasion because, like I said, we crossed it on my birthday on August 27th. We had to run the enemy out of there up to Pyongyang. We had some hellacious battles there at Pyongyang.

Each regiment had a medical company, but the 9th Medical Company of the 9th Regiment took care of all wounded that happened to come through our aid station, including North and South Korean wounded.  We were equipped with enough medicine, supplies, staff and everything to do this, but our biggest problem was that a lot of the men that went into the medical company at Ft. Lewis had never been n that type of situation before, including me.  I wasn't nervous about the situation, and I was not really afraid.  I was 28 years old.  I was the "old man" in the bunch. Perhaps because of my age I was less nervous.

The Inchon Invasion was merely a sidekick so we could pincher off the whole group of North Koreans that were in that area. We went up and into Seoul and the North Koreans were actually decimated by then.  We stopped at Pyongyang.  The North Korean army really didn't exist as an army once we got there.  One of the things that we never could quite figure out was why we had to leave Pyongyang.  It was at a narrow neck in North Korea.  There was nothing but dirty old hills and mountains that weren't worth anything beyond there.

On the trip from Pusan up to Pyongyang, we saw South Korean natives. There was a lot of confusion because the North Koreans had come down and we were taking back the areas the North Koreans had. I’m sure these people were quite confused because we would go into a village just to set up an aid station or we’d run into a village and take over a house in the village and set up an aid station. We wouldn’t be there more than a day or so when we set up a collecting point. The South Koreans were glad to see us come back, but I have never quite figured out why the North and the South got divided. Well, I know why they got divided, but it should never have been a divided nation.  Like any other war, it was a devastating situation.  We went into villages that had been overran from the North to the South, and then from the South to the North.  During that time there was no such thing as planting the rice and whatever other staples that were their livelihood.  They were probably not starved, but they were hungry.  Some of the South Koreans became litter bearers in our litter bearer section, and they were good.  They pretty well kept us informed about what was going on in the area.

Kunu-ri

We got to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, in October of 1950.  It was a good-sized city, but it was pretty well blown up.  When we got there we went into a schoolhouse and just kind of gathered ourselves together for the next push. We stayed there for about two weeks before heading north to Kunu-ri, west of the Chosin Reservoir. We went up north from Pyongyang through what they called the Central Valley over towards the Yalu River.

Reservoir Protectors

We got up there pretty well and didn't run into anything along the way.  Then I was awakened by my driver who told me, "Sarge, we've got a problem."  When I asked him what it was, he said, "There are South Korean army going by us in retreat."  They were retreating south, and there we were, sticking out like a sore thumb.  We had bypassed Chinese troops that we knew were there because our litter bearers had told us so.  Intelligence wasn't listening or paying attention to our Korean litter bearers. I wasn't nervous at the time because we had been told that if we ran into any Chinese troops we were not to get into a firefight with them because they were only there to protect the reservoirs. The Chinese were protecting the reservoirs all right. We got cut off. We got into hellacious firefights. Shoot, the medics and everybody else got into the firefights. I’m glad all of our vehicles had ring mounts and 30 caliber machine guns on them, because we sure used them to get over some rivers up there.

Retreat

We retreated back to an area just south of Kunu-ri. Orders came down that we were to form up a convoy and pull out now. We were the last ones at the end of that convoy, and we had approximately 250 wounded with us. Since we were on mountain trails, they told us that if we lost a vehicle we should just get out and shove it over the side of the cliff. We got into some firefights. The Chinese were coming down the hills and jumping into our vehicles. We got into a firefight that night that knocked out some of the lead vehicles and knocked out the convoy. Everything in front of us was blown up and shot up.

The next morning we carried all of the wounded into a little valley.  We found about eight mud huts and put the wounded in there.  The first night we were probably not more than 200 yards out there when the Chinese army went by us double-time.  They knew we were there, but they had orders to go on south.  They didn't pay any attention to us.  But the next day, we started to draw some machine gun fire from across the valley into our area. I would say it was about 300 or 400 yards across that valley. There was a cornfield over there and we started to draw some fire from it. Another guy and I went back to the convoy, found the bazookas, and knocked out the machine gun. I guess about two hours later they decided we were a pain in the neck. They came down over the hillsides en masse.

Major Burton Couers decided that he would surrender the unit since the wounded were there.  We were turned over to the enemy on December 1, 1950.  There were some North Korean soldiers, but our captors were mostly Chinese.  There was a lot of confusion going on.  They gathered us up with some other people that they had captured in about that same area and put us on a hillside with guards all around us.  Unbeknownst to the Chinese, we had put out an ID marker to indicate where we were.  It was a marker that let the Air Force know there were friendly troops down there. The Air Force came over and started strafing on the side of us.  It was one of those times when I was probably a little bit worried about their aim. None of us were hurt by the strafing, but some of the Chinese were.  In the end, we wondered if we would see a Chinaman get his head blown off and whether the rest of them were going to get mad if he did.  They didn't.  The Chinese are a very peculiar people.

Mining Camp

They moved us out of there that night and into another area where we went into mud huts and stayed for two days. They shot whoever couldn't walk.  Of the 250 wounded in our group, only 15 made it out of the POW camps.  Then they took us back and put us in the coalmines or iron mines or whatever they were where the Chinese had been hidden all that time. There were probably a couple of thousand or so of them altogether.  We got into the mining camp probably about December 9 or 10, somewhere around there.  They put us in there for about two more weeks.

There might have been 15 or 20 buildings of various sizes in the camp.  When I say various sizes, I mean they held the miners that were still working in this area. We were on one side and there was a railroad. If you can imagine, there were high mountains on both sides of this mining camp. By the time we saw the sun, it was right there, but we very seldom saw it. It was cold.

The mining camp was a temporary camp. It was an experience that nobody should have. It was the start of a lot of dying of the prisoners because at that time the only food that we had was boiled corn millet or cracked corn. Both of them were very detrimental to our digestive system.  That's when the dysentery started to take its toll.  The younger wounded began to die.  I had never seen anything like it.  They gave up. They wouldn’t eat. They wouldn’t want to walk. They were tired. The younger men died in the first camps.  It seems like it would be the reverse and the older ones would die, but it wasn't. There were about 150 Turkish soldiers in the camp, and I believe only one of them died. He probably died of his wounds.  The diet and the degradation of that particular experience caused a lot of young men to give up. They quit. They would say, “I can’t do this. I can’t do that.” We carried people. We hauled them on stretchers. But they just gave up. They wouldn’t eat.

Dr. Bill Shadish, Dr. Lam and Dr. Anderson were our doctors in the camps.  Dr. Shadish's dad was a General in the Army, but I don't think our captors knew that.  We didn't have any medicine.  We didn't have any heat.  All the doctors had was a bedside manner.  If you're wondering what good a bedside manner is to someone who is dying, just seeing that there was a doctor automatically gave them something.  That’s basically all we had to give them. Our captors really wouldn’t let our doctors look at us. Once in a while Bill Shadish would just ignore them and come in.

It's hard to bury a man when the ground is frozen, so there were no burial details for the dead in the winter.  Instead, the Chinese came in and counted them, then the bodies were stacked up outside and hauled away by ox cart.

Move to Pyuktong

Somewhere between the 15th and 20th of December we were moved out of the mining camp.  They moved us north between incoming columns of Chinese soldiers.  It was more of a propaganda thing.  We were not marched in the daytime.  Instead, they put us in huts until it was time to march again. They fed us millet or cracked corn once a day.  I walked over the tallest mountain in North Korea, sweating myself to death while climbing 18,000 feet up the mountain on Christmas Eve. Once on the other side, we froze.  We were on our way to Pyuktong, although we didn't know that that's where we were going at the time.  I remember that a full moon came right up over that mountain, and there were prisoners who jumped off the cliff to just kill themselves and get it over with.

Around January 1st we arrived at Pyuktong.  The Chinese had taken the neck of the town of Pyuktong that stuck out in the Yalu River, put barbed wire across the front, and made that into POW Camp 5.  They didn't bother to put barbed wire fencing all around us because everybody was sick.  They put us in mud huts in a bay area of the river. Camp 5 was originally just a collecting area but later became a big prisoner of war camp with probably a couple of hundred buildings.  There were probably around 1,500 prisoners there.

Lack of Warmth

Morale was pretty low when we got to Camp 5.  It was about 20-30 degrees below zero and we didn’t have much heat. A Korean house is built on two levels with the kitchen pot area lower.  A fire was normally built down in that area and the smoke went up to the higher area. When they built the floor of a house they lined bricks or rocks up and made channels all through the rest of the house. The smoke went out the other end.  They only allowed us to build a fire at certain times.  Other times they wouldn’t allow us to heat the building.  When I got to the point where I could get out of the building, I went around behind it and lay down where the sun was starting to come up to get warm.  Sunshine is a healing thing.

Diet & Health Problems

Our diet caused internal health problems.  Besides dysentery, we were infested with intestinal parasites, including tape worms.  Some of the worms were longer than six inches and looked just like earthworms.  We could feel them when we defecated them.  On the outside of our bodies we had other parasites such as bed bugs and lice.  North Korea was infested with both.  The lice were big enough to see, and we picked them off of ourselves and killed them between our fingernails. Most of us had long hair and a beard at the time.  Mine was a typical beard that wasn't too long.  After the ice melted off the river, we could take a bath in it.

I was tossed out with the dead once.  I was so weak I couldn't walk; I had to crawl.  At the time I was captured I weighed about 150 pounds, but due to malnutrition in the camps, I got down to half that weight.  I was down to nothing.  I was later told that they thought I had died.  They said, "Badke's dead.  Throw him out." Out I went onto a pile of dead outside.  I was dead.  I can remember that in my mind I was saying to the guys that threw me out, "You can't hurt me anymore.  I'm dead."   Dr. Shadish and one of my medics came along and found me, dragged me out of that pile of bodies, and hauled me down to their camp.  They revived me.  I don't have the slightest idea of why or what it took to bring me through it, but I'm sure that if they hadn't come along, the Chinese would have hauled me across the ice and tossed me out with the rest of the dead.  I'm sure it's possible that others who were actually alive were tossed out for dead.

Chinese Fire Drill

At Camp 5 one time we got hit by lightning. Some of the guys were playing basketball when lightning came down about a quarter of a mile up, traveled down the road, went right between a couple of buildings, and right through the basketball court. It killed one of the Americans.

One of the other things that happened early on in Camp 5 was what we here in the United States commonly call a "Chinese fire drill".  That's a description of something that is totally disoriented.  One day the cook house where the Chinese ate caught on fire. The Chinese grabbed the fire wagon. This was a two-wheeled ox cart that had a hose wrapped around it. Here they came running down the hill with that thing and we were all cheering. They grabbed the front end of the hose and ran towards this side of the building where there was one single spigot where the water came out. When the hose rolled off of it some Chinese grabbed the other end of the hose and they ran around the other end of the building, both of them trying to hook up to that spigot. We were cheering and laughing like crazy because the cook house was burning down. Nobody ever did get the hose hooked up to it.

Education on Communism

We went through an education program about communism at Camp 5, sitting out in the 20 degree below zero on the side of the hill listening to those characters.  Usually they tried to educate us as a group a couple of times a week, but once in a while they tried to sit down and reason with us one on one.  They didn’t understand why we didn’t agree with them. In fact, I’ll never forget telling one Chinaman, “Hey. I can buy a car if I want to.  I can go to the grocery store and buy all kinds of food.  When we have an election of government officials I can go to the polls and vote with a curtain behind me. I can vote for who I want to vote for and come out and nobody’s been watching. Drop my ballot in a box. Can you do that? And you tell me that communism is better than capitalism? You’d better go back to school."

Fly Swatter for All

In July of 1951, peace negotiations started.  Before that, the prisoners of war were dying of malnutrition, disease, and no medicine.  When the peace negotiations started, we quit dying.  They brought us food and there was speculation as to why.  After we were released, we found out what had happened (and this is not speculation, this is a fact). When we were captured we gave the Chinese our name, rank and serial number.  Occasionally a communist reporter came to the camp to report on the POWs.  When the peace negotiations started, the Chinese showed up with a different list since quite a few men that had been on the original list of captives had since died. Good old Uncle Sam said, “Where are the rest of them?” The communists lost face. They fed us from then on in. We still had to eat millet and cracked corn, but in addition they gave us rice.  Then they decided that they would load us up with soybeans.  The problem with soybeans was that a soybean diet could cause yellow jaundice.  Everything revolved around the fact that the peace negotiations had started.  We started to live because they started to feed us and they brought medicine in to us.  If the peace negotiations were going well for the North Koreans and Chinese, things got better for us during what we called "Love Americans Week".  But if the negotiations didn't go well for them, we called it, "This must be hate Americans Week" because things got worse for us.

They started what they called a "Lenient Policy" after the negotiations began.  They honored our Christmas and Thanksgiving and other normal special days for us.  They brought us a herd of pigs and herd of goats, but they wouldn't let us take care of them.  They had their own Manchurian soldiers be the goat herders.  They were big guys, but they were real dumb. I mean they were real dumb. We occasionally had goat meat. The pigs were infested with trachea--nobody would even let that pig keep living in the USA.  But we ate it anyway.  It was a matter of survival.

They started bringing tobacco to us.  Marijuana grew alongside of the creeks and the rivers, but tobacco was hard to find unless the smokers in the outfit could bribe a guard with something like a piece of clothing or something.  North Korea is noted for its flies.  When the peace negotiations began, the Chinese issued everybody a fly swatter and said, "If you want tobacco, you can have one cigarette for every ten flies you kill."  So we killed flies.  We walked around and "SWAT!"  Everybody in Camp 5 had a flyswatter and went around killing flies.  We probably had the most fly-clean area in North Korea.  My buddies and I decided that this matter of killing flies with a fly swatter was fine, but we knew how to make fly catchers to trap more of them.  The army had taught us that.  Back in the good old days before sanitation, the army issued fly traps.  We learned to take a piece of something like a window screen, make a circle out of it, make the bottom of it, and nail or tie down the sides.  We found just anything we could to make it and tie it down.

There were eight-holer latrines in the camp. All of the refuse went down and to the back of them,  About once a week the North Koreans would come in with a honey wagon--which was a huge barrel on two wheels pulled by oxen.  They would open the back of the latrine and with this big dipper that they had, they dipped the human waste out of the back, put it in the honey wagon, and then spread it over their rice or millet fields or whatever as fertilizer.  And you wonder why North Korea was full of flies?  Anyway, here's what we did.  We took three or four of the fly traps, ran everybody out of the latrine, covered all the holes up with a piece of wood, lifted up the back of the latrine, stirred the refuse up, and then slammed the back down again.  The flies would all fly up into the fly traps.   We would have probably 500-1000 flies in the traps. That added to our fly count.

I wasn't a smoker, but I used the cigarettes for barter.  They brought up to us by boatloads.  We probably had more hard candy than anybody in the world.  It was Chinese candy with a little wrapper around it.  We took the candy with us on work detail, and as we went through the town on the way out to work, we would barter with the kids that came out from between the huts for various things.  In fact, the first fish I ever caught up there I caught with fish hooks that I had bartered a kid to find for me in exchange for candy.  The guards found out about it, but we didn't get in any big trouble after the peace negotiations. If we had been caught before the negotiations began, we would have been in big trouble.

Ridiculous Punishment

After the peace negotiations started we found out that they wouldn't put us in the hole or shoot us.  They wouldn't do anything to us if we got out. Instead, they got us out in front of the crowd of prisoners and made us confess to the sin that we had committed.  That was easy.  One of the standard answers to that was, "I promise that I will never be caught doing this again.” The Chinese thought that was the greatest.  We thought it was a big riot.

The "hole" that I just referred to was back at Yongsan after we were first captured. They had dug a hole in the ground and covered it with logs.  Nobody really knew why we were chosen, but our captors would choose certain prisoners and interrogate them.  They put us in there if we didn’t give them the right answers.  Sometimes they would take us out on the ice, give us a piece of wood to hold over our head, and make us stand there on the ice with a guard nearby for long periods of time--hours, not minutes.  It was totally ridiculous.

They called me up one time to interrogate me about being a medic in the medical company.  The Chinaman talking to me spoke excellent English.  He had probably been educated in the United States.  As he was talking, I noticed that he had one of the training manuals of the medical department. He was asking me questions that he knew all the answers for because he had the manual. Stop and think about it. They had access to all of the things that I couldn’t get because of the United Nations. I’m sure they had some kind of underground system in the United States that had access to them. They knew the answers to everything.  I was ignorant.  I mean, I didn't tell them what they wanted to know.  I just pointed and tapped on the book and said, "Here's this.  What are you asking me for?"  That's when they put me in the hole for ten days.

It wasn't exactly an enjoyable experience.  I was in there alone with a guard standing out there. Nobody could get to me.  The Turks watched those holes to see if somebody was in them.  If someone was, they would divert the guard's attention and the Turkish soldiers would bring me some of their food. The Turks could survive on what they had because most of them were from that part of society in Turkey that had lived under similar circumstances quite a bit.  The Turks didn’t believe in salads. They didn’t know anything about them. They didn’t believe in fried steaks. They didn’t believe in hamburgers. So the Turkish soldier was on almost the same type of diet that the Chinese soldier was on.

Camp 4

I stayed at Camp 5 until June of 1952.  We tried to organize the camp like it would have been organized in the Army.  The sergeants tried to take command of their old units.  The Chinese didn't agree to that, so they decided to just get rid of us.  They put all of the sergeants on boats and moved us up the river to Camp 4--out of sight, out of mind.  We were way in the hell gone, up on the Yalu River.  We were the incorrigibles that could not be educated to communism. We could not be and that’s all there was to it.  They figured they might as well get us out of Camp 5 and put us up there, which they did. 

They separated us when we got there. The British lived in one compound. The Negroes lived in another compound. The Turks lived in another compound. Being at Camp 4 was better for us because they left us alone up there.  We had guards, but they didn't do anything to bother us. We did our exercises. (Don’t ever play soccer with the British because they’ll kill you.) We dug a 200-yard by 150-yard football field out of the side of a mountain.  We built basketball backstops and courts.

They let us take community baths at Camp 4.  They had a huge tub about three foot deep and as big as a room.  Just like the heating system in a Korean house, they had built a fire down underneath it. Every once in a while they would let us go up there.  Other than that, we bathed a lot in the river when the ice went off of it.  As far as hot running water, we didn't have it.

There were times when I got discouraged, but I never thought that I wouldn’t make it out of Korea. I don't recall ever crying and I don't remember ever thinking, “I’m not going to get out of here.” I dreamed of everything about home.  I had a wife and a child--a boy named Kenneth.  I wished that I could have been there, but the circumstances were what they were and to survive I just couldn’t let myself dwell on that.  Probably one of the most discouraging times was when they came in and turned the first group of prisoners over to Panmunjom. Then the peace negotiations fell through. I came out with the last group of repatriated soldiers on the 19th.  I crossed the line at Panmunjom on my wedding anniversary. I had married my wife Lois in March of 194_.  By the time the Korean War broke out she was used to being married to a military man.  She did a hell of a good job as a military wife.

I received mail twice when I was a POW.  Both times it was mail from my wife.  They were letters, not packages.  I received a letter from her after I wrote one to her.  The Chinese gave everybody a piece of paper and pencil and told us that they were going to let us write a letter home.  My letter home was very short.  We figured the only way to get a letter out of there was to say that we were being treated fairly, we hoped the peace negotiations were going well, and that we would like to see our families as soon as we got home.  I don't remember anybody that ever received a package--not even from the Red Cross.  The Chinese kept all of them.

As to the truth of being treated fairly, we were treated okay at Camp 4, but at Camp 5 we went through that period of time from capture to when the peace negotiations started.  You have to understand, those people absolutely did not care whether we lived or died.  That's just the way it was.  The North Koreans were mean as hell.  They didn't mind hitting us with the butt of a rifle.  They shot people.  There wasn't any question about that.  As I mentioned before, communist reporters had come to the camp and the Chinese and North Koreans had publicized in the Shanghai News and the French newspapers that they had captured all of these Americans.  But when they got to the peace negotiations and were asked why so many of them were no longer living, they lost face.  There was only one thing that could have happened to them and the Americans knew it.  The communists had to keep us alive after that.

At Camp 4 there was a young Chinese boy named Woo who was of Christian parents.  He had been born and raised Catholic.  His mother and father were probably in an internment camp in China and he, according to rule, was working off their sentences by being a Chinese People's Volunteer.  We adopted him.  In fact, we offered to smuggle him onto the box car and take him back with us, but he said no.  He was well-educated and spoke very good English.

Hilarious Moments

There were some absolutely hilarious moments at Camp 4 when we realized that they weren't going to shoot us.  We knew then that the hardest punishment we could get was going out and confessing in front of the group that we had done something and that we would never get caught doing it again. That was the standard answer. For instance, if they caught us talking with the kids when we were going down to unload the boats on detail, they would want us to criticize ourselves.  That's the communist way of overcoming something about us.  We would get up there and apologize for being caught. That was criticizing. That’s what they called it. "You must criticize yourself." So we would get up there and say, “I’ve been a bad boy and I’ll never get caught doing it again.” That's how we criticized ourselves. We often saw one of the good comrades walking up and down the area with his little red Marxist book of communism, reading it and talking to himself for two hours at a time.  We wondered if he had done something wrong and he was out there criticizing himself.

Everything happened on the good side in Camp 4.  We had our own kind of entertainment at Camp 4.  We used to get together and sing. They brought us some instruments--a banjo and guitar. The British were crazy. They were nuts, Talk about comedians. They were the best comedians in there.  We could also always count on Pappy Akers to make us laugh.  He's dead now, but he was a hard nut in the prison camp. He did a lot of things.  To give you an idea, we had an air raid one time. The communists came to town and said that we had to build a marker for POW Camp 4 so that the Air Force would know we were there.  We had to build a platform about as big as a room and high off the ground on the other end of the parade field.  After it was built we painted it white and then some Chinaman got some chalk and drew off some Chinese characters on it that indicated that it was a prison camp.  They then used red paint on the characters.  Pappy went over to the side of it and signed it, "Sergeant __________ [CAN'T DISTINGUISH THE WORDS]"  I’m sure the Air Force has pictures of that stupid thing. Another time, we were walking by the entrance to the gate that came into the schoolyard. There was a fence around this thing, but on the other side we used to go up and sit on a hill. Pappy and I walked by one day and the guard was standing there. Pappy said, “Watch this.” He walked up to the guard and said, “Let me see that weapon.” Pappy snatched his gun away from him, ran it through an inspection, handed it back to him, and said, “That’s a clean gun.” And then he walked away. The guard just stood there looking at him.

Olympic Games

One time before they released us they decided that they would establish Olympic games between the camps.  I knew several of the guys who participated in the Olympics.  I didn't because I wasn't an athlete.  I was in Camp 4 at the time, and it didn't have a recreation area so the Olympics were held at other camps.  They even brought in a boatload of beer to drink while the games were going on.  I mean, it was ridiculous what they were doing. We played it to the hilt. We told them that we weren’t going to cooperate with them just because they brought us some beer. We wouldn’t do this and wouldn’t do that. Towards the end there, we just kind of took over and did things that we wanted. Even though there was still a guard at the gate, we knew we were going home. I weighed 204 pounds when I was released.  When my wife saw me when I came home, she said, “I thought you were dying.”  They had fattened us up.

Repatriated

When they announced the war was over, we got a copy of the Shanghai News.  I guess we left at the end of August and were sent to a railroad up in North Korea on the Yalu River.  We left by rail and went to the North Korean capital.  It took us about four or five days to get to Panmunjom.  When we got there and they opened the back door of that ambulance, I fell out of it and onto the ground and cried like a baby.  I looked at that American flag and cried like hell.  That's what I had been waiting for evidently.  I cried and I cried and I cried. To this date when I see that American flag and I hear the National Anthem, I cry.

My old 1st Sergeant that had come overseas with me was there.  1st Sgt. Willie Nils [NOT SURE OF THE LAST NAME] met me with a box of cigars in one hand and a fifth of liquor in the other.  I was crying when he came over to me.  I got up and I was still crying.  I will always remember that.  I didn't smoke the cigars, but we drank the whiskey.  Sergeant Nils [NOT SURE OF LAST NAME] lives in Augusta.  I see him quite frequently.

They checked us out briefly for verification and we gave them name, rank and serial number.  We were fed anything we wanted.  When they asked me what I wanted to eat, I told them that I wanted a hamburger.  We were allowed to shower and bath, and then we went into a barracks type area.  I think we were there probably two days.

We left Korea on the General Howze.  We had free time during the trip, but we were also interrogated by military interrogators.  A Colonel came in to interrogate me.   He walked in there and said, “You know, it’s my opinion that every prisoner of war was a traitor.” I said, “This conversation is over.” I got up and walked out.  They never debriefed me again until I got back to the United States.  I was upset with that Colonel.  Even though I had come under fire many times while I was in Korea, I never gave it a thought as to whether or not I would come out of Korea alive--and I really never felt guilty that I was captured.

Discharged

We landed in San Francisco.  There was a band playing and people waiting there, but nobody was waiting for me.  I called my wife and told her that I would soon be there.  I met her in Atlanta.  Returning home and getting off that plane in Atlanta was emotional for me. There was a whole group there waiting for me.

I was discharged in November and then reenlisted in the Reserves.  Before I reenlisted, the FBI called me up to their compound.  I lived within two blocks of their place, so I went up there. They started to interrogate me concerning some of the things that had happened in the prison camps. They had a list of names and they said, “Do you recognize any of these people?” I told them that I did.  They said, “Do you know that they were considered collaborators?” I looked at that list of names and I said, “In what respect?”  When they said that they had collaborated with the enemy I asked them, “You mean in the prison camp?” I said, “Well, let me tell you one thing. Do you know at what point during torture or during not being fed and dying that you will break down and cooperate with the enemy?"  I told them that I didn't consider any of the people on their list to be collaborators, even though they told me that some of them had stayed with the Chinese.  I didn't know those guys, but I could have showed them other guys.  They wanted me to say something bad about them, but they had no idea at what point they would break during the conditions that we existed under for six months to a year.  I told the FBI agent, "If you think that I’m going to say anything bad about these people, you’re crazy."  Some people would never break, but nobody knows what their breaking point is.  The guy interrogating me said, "You're not going to cooperate with me, are you?"  When I told him no, he walked out and I haven't heard anything more from them since.  In 1953 there was a lot of concern over collaborators, possibly because of McCarthyism.  I personally do not know of anybody that collaborated with the enemy that caused any harm to the prisoners. A couple of those guys probably did, but they probably did because they wanted to get something to eat.  I sure resented the FBI trying to get information from me about them.

I had two weeks active duty every summer while in the rRserves.  There was a hospital unit at Ft. Jackson, so I went to the Reserve unit there. I had had 12 years of active duty. I then had 10 years and 22 weeks in the Reserves, retiring out in 1965 as a Captain through the Reserve program.  Just before retirement I went into automobile sales in 1964.  After that I was General Manager of Goshen Plantation Country Club for many years, and later opened Goshen Realty with my wife Phyllis in 1985.

Final Reflections

Surviving being a prisoner of war had to be on-the-job training because we never had any survival training before that.  I think that one of the reasons that I survived was my upbringing.  I mean, I was an outdoors kid. I learned to hunt. I learned to fish. I learned to live in the woods. I was born and raised out in the country. The people that survived were the old dogs. Certainly there were older people that died, but it was the young people that came from the cities and so on that mostly did not survive.  The greater percentage of them were in their early 20s or less. In the first place, they didn’t have any training that made them tough. Those who had the right upbringing as a kid, as far as education toward surviving, lived. Those who didn’t, died.  Take the younger generation today, put them in the military, put them out in the survival training, abd you’ll know which ones will be able to survive. You can tell who will say, “I can’t eat that. It doesn’t taste good. I don’t have the guts to try to get up and try to walk. I just can’t do it.” Too many of them. That’s one of the reasons why the younger people didn’t survive.

For me, the hardest thing about being a POW was the walking.  We had nutritional edema, or beriberi.  Our legs would swell like that of a pregnant woman.  I got that.  Everybody had it in one stage or another. To this day I have a hell of a time with my legs. I have to overcome the pain in my body. As my dad used to say, “It’s just one of those things you have to live with.”

I know a lot of kids that go into the army. My stepson went into the Air Force.  As the old Sergeant Major, I tell them that basic training is like a game.  Just approach it as a game. Never lose your cool. Just take it in. When you get through basic training, just remember--it was a game, and you won. If you approach it that way you’ll never have a problem, I don’t care how tough they get with you. If you look at it that way, you’ll make it. That's how I looked at being a POW.  I had to.

I know where the bodies of many of those that died in Korea are located. The government--probably both the American and the North Korean--will not allow us to go back over there.  I have no idea why not.  We have had people who have volunteered for this job, but I won't ever go back.  Government representatives come to our POW reunions to get information about the missing, but I don't think they are really working on it.  I think they're wasting their time because they’re not going to be allowed to go back over there. It’s as simple as that.

International Trade

Hell. We’re back in Vietnam. We do business with Vietnam. We do business with China. That’s probably one of the things that you might say bothers me.  I try not to buy anything that’s made in China. I’m sure that my wife gets upset about it.  I’ve got a grandson, and when I go shopping with him I say, “That’s made in China. We can’t buy that.” I'm a firm believer in international trade because I believe that is a method in which people can cooperate with each other. They can become more understanding. But it’s gotten into the politics. For instance, I have a brother-in-law who has been in the Far East for 12 or 15 years with Kindle Company [NOT SURE IF HE IS SAYING KINDLE OR CANDLE.] . He’s been through Malaysia. He’s been in Japan. He’s been in China. He said the only way you can do business with China is the typical Far East way. You pay. You pay the police chief in the city. You pay the mayor of the city. You pay the communist leader of that particular area. You pay to do business. We have people in our government who are willing to accept that. I don’t believe in that.  It’s China in particular that does that, but all Far East countries do that. It’s a way of life with those people. It’s been a way of life ever since probably the Chinese warlords when China was first opened up to the rest of the world, and it’s still there now.

I walked into Sears and Roebuck to buy a new doorknob once. A young sales clerk took me back to where they were. He said, “This particular set of doorknobs has the Sears and Roebuck label on it.”  He handed it to me and said, “Here. This is something new.” I looked at it and, of all things, it said, “Made in North Korea.” I looked at him and said, “I wouldn’t buy that if my life depended on it.” It shocked him and he said, “Why not?” I told him that I had been a prisoner of war in that country.  "I’m damned sure not going to support it,” I said. He had been in the military--he was one of those three year guys.  He looked at it and said, “My God!  What is Sears and Roebuck doing selling something that was made in North Korea?” I told him to ask them, because I wasn't buying it.  It was a shocker to me that we sell items made in North Korea.

The way we do business has gotten so much out of hand. I firmly believe that Ron Brown, who was the Secretary of Commerce, was killed on purpose.  What was the Air Force doing flying Ron Brown in an entourage of the government of the United States in the Far East? What in the hell were they doing over there? They don’t have any business flying in an Air Force plane. The Air Force flew that plane into the side of the mountain and killed him. I hate that.

I know damn well that America will be in trouble if another war breaks out because of what’s happening internally in America. What’s happening to our civil service. What’s happening to our military. We just had another military man say that he’s going to resign because of it. There is no question about it. Why do you think Colin Powell quit after the Far East? Why do you think those two generals were probably the last of the good generals? Why do you think they quit? They just kept their mouth shut and got the hell out. Why do you think we have an Air Force that’s getting out of it? Why do you think some of our best pilots--combat pilots who work for Delta, Eastern and Continental--are getting out of the service?  They’ll tell you why.  What are we doing in Kosovo? Those people have been fighting for hundreds of years over there.

Korean Entitlement

I have Korean friends that are in the United States. In fact, I rent a piece of land for an office from a Korean.  This Korean and I get into wild conversations because he doesn’t really speak the best of English.  He came over here during the Korean War when he was very young under the auspices of the United States government. The United States government will give these people a two percent loan to purchase businesses that are what we call service businesses—laundries, dry cleaning, 7/11 stores. They own most of the 7/11 stores. I don’t know who in the hell in Washington, DC approved that situation, but it exists. I can’t get a loan. I have no way of doing that.  Unless they are war brides, the Koreans that come to the United States normally come from wealthier families in Korea. When they come to the United States, they are entitled to these loans and they have ten years to pay off their loan at 2% interest. Nine years after they’re here, brother Willie comes to the United States and takes over the business and he’s entitled to another ten years at two percent. Then momma comes over and she’s entitled to the same. You cannot buy a piece of property from a Korean. The Korean who owns the property where my realty business is located and I get along well.  I have offered to buy it from him, but he won't sell.  We josh about it.

I went to one of his buddies the other day who has a dry cleaning business up the road. He wanted to buy a piece of property that I have as one of my realty company listings. I told him what it would cost him and he had the standard answer that a Korean wishes to purchase always has. “Oh, that’s too much money.” I guess I had had it up to about here.  My wife had left some clothes there to be cleaned and I had come in to pick them up.  I looked at the bill and said, “Won, that’s too much money.” I said, “You tell me that that land is too much and I’m telling you that that dry cleaning is too much. I don’t want to pay you that much money.” He absolutely was in a state of shock. I said, “I fought in your country to give you the opportunity to be free and you don’t even treat me like that.”  I took my dry cleaning, paid him, and said, “Never again.” I mean, he’s entitled to low interest government loans, but he tells me that that’s too much money when I'm trying to sell him a piece of property that is less than it's supposed to be.  That was the first time in years that I got totally upset with a person.  I don't really have trouble with Orientals other than him.  He just hit me wrong.  I will not go back to do business with him.  No way.

No Desire to Return

Korea was a test--a communist test.  There's no question about it in my opinion.  And China was behind it.  Do you think the Koreans would have jumped in that war if they didn’t know that China was sitting right over on the other side of the Yalu River? Certainly they did. That was a test, and we passed it.  But we also failed it when we didn't stop at Pyongyang in North Korea.  There was nothing up there.  We could have stopped it at Pyongyang, but we didn't.  That's the way it goes.

I never went back to Korea and I don't want to go back.  We have been invited to Korea at the expense of the Korean government, but I will not go.  They don't owe that to me.  I went over there at the orders of the President of the United States.  I have no desire whatsoever to see how the country has changed.

Because of my time in Korea, I am 100 percent disabled due to problems with my legs and hips.  I especially have trouble with my legs caused by nutrition edema.  I have arthritis and I've got heart disease.  I don't have dreams of being a POW, and I don't have post traumatic stress.  I know some of the guys have PTS and they are just in terrible shape.  I guess I don't have it because of my total outlook.  The only thing I know that I'm even emotional about is that, when a band plays and that flag is there, I cry.  And I don't like crying. 

I have three boys and I have talked to them in detail about being in Korea.  I also talk to people who ask me questions about it.  But I don't belong to the VFW or American Legion because I'm not interested in that type of organization.  I'm only a part of the Ex-POW Association.  I go to the reunions to see my buddies--my friends that I don't see through the year.

Going to Korea and being a POW probably changed me.  It gave me a more optimistic attitude about things.  I don’t think there’s any such thing that I can’t survive or that I can’t accomplish what I start out doing.   I think I’ve been through the toughest time. I’ve lived through the roughest of the rough.

American prisoners in Korea went through two periods from the standpoint of being prisoners. There was the pre-negotiation period and then came Panmunjom.  There were a lot of atrocities against the prisoners during that first period.  There is no question about that. But it was not just one side that was doing the atrocities.  It never has been during war.  Americans committed atrocities, too.  When they were through interrogating the South Korean people, they shot them in the head.  They didn't take prisoners. War is a way of life in this world. The human animal is the most vicious animal on this earth. The human animal will kill for whatever. You don’t get that from a lion or tiger. They kill for something to eat. The human animal would blow your head off and laugh about it and keep right on going. This is the theory that I have lived with after Korea.  Stop and look at the wars that we have had. Have we ever gone through life without a war? Never. Some place in this world there’s a war going on. In Africa they’re killing thousands of people. Our government isn’t paying too much attention to it. C’est la vie.

Obituary - Kenneth Karl Badke

Kenneth Karl Badke, husband of Phyllis Holland Badke, died Tuesday, October 11, 2005 at University Hospital in Georgia.  He was buried in Andersonville National Cemetery, Andersonville National Historic Site, Macon County, Georgia. He was born August 27, 1922 at Mayfield Heights, Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

Ken was a native of Mayfield Heights, Ohio, serving in the U.S. Army during World War II and Korea. He was captured and held prisoner by communist forces for 33 months in North Korea.  He returned home to Augusta after his liberation, where he worked for Georgia Carolina Manufacturing and Pontiac Masters, where he was top salesman for several years. Ken joined Boardman Land Corporation in 1971 and played an integral part in the creation and development of Goshen Plantation & Country Club. Ken was the General Manager of Goshen Plantation Country Club for many years and was a member of the Georgia Association of Club Managers. Ken sold real estate for Southern Finance Corporation and in 1985 opened Goshen Realty with his wife, Phyllis and sold real estate until his retirement in 2002.

He was an avid fisherman, golfer and bird watcher. He looked forward to his annual trips to the Canadian wilderness with his adventure loving sons and friends. He was a member of the American Ex-POW's and held office as State Commander and Augusta Chapter Commander. He and his wife and their many friends enjoyed their annual trips to the POW conventions held throughout the United States. Ken, who was often referred to as the "Mayor of Goshen" was loved by all of the neighborhood children and could often be found fixing their fishing rods or cutting them new bamboo cane poles.

Additional family members include his sons: Ken A. Badke and wife, Janice, Mike W. Badke and wife, Ann, Jeff K. Badke and wife, Shirley, Bert C. Holland; daughters: Tammy H. Hunt and husband, Bill, Trisha H. Sprouse; former wife: Lois J. Badke; grandchildren: Erica Badke, Teresa Badke, Michelle Jackson, Joseph Badke, Christopher Badke, Andrew Sprouse, Michael Badke, Julianna Badke and great-grandchildren, Olivia and Caleb Jackson. Mr. Badke was predeceased by his brothers, Frank, Robert and Larry Badke.

A Memorial Mass was held Friday, October 14, 2005 at 11:00 a.m. at St. Joseph Catholic Church with Rev. John Lyons, celebrant. Inturnment was held Monday, October 17, 2005 at 1:00 p.m. at the Andersonville National Cemetery in Andersonville, Georgia. Honorary pallbearers were members of the Greater Augusta Chapter of America's Ex-POW's.

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