Research Paper Introduction

American Manifest Destiny in Prisoner of War Camps During the Korean War

The Korean War was an ideological conflict between communism and capitalism. Throughout the course of the war, approximately 4 million casualties were reported from the 20 countries that had participated in the devastating war.[1] The United States launched a psychological war against communist prisoners of war (POWs) to show the ideological excellence of freedom: liberalism. The Korean War presented the rare chance to communicate with communists in person, which wasn’t an option after the start of the Cold War. Thus, the United States saw the Korean War as an opportunity to spread liberalism [to POWs and even to many South Koreans], especially the American faith in such values.

During the Korean War, the United States began a reeducation program with South Korean assistance for Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war. Ideology became a means of war by encouraging communist POWs to think about and change their beliefs. This process of education was vital and essential in spreading the excellence of both liberalism and capitalism in both moral and physical terms. At the peak of the reeducation program, about 170,000 communists POWs were receiving instruction in these ideals.[2] As part of this effort, the United States government also launched a Civil Information and Education (CIE) program. Under the CIE program, the propagation of individualism, liberalism, capitalism, and religious education became the mainstream. These reeducation programs derived from the National Security Council’s document, titled NSC-81/1, of 1950.[3] The document determines that the United States must make full use of all its propaganda in quenching the Korean people’s hatred of the United States and rousing the flames of hostility and acrimony against communism. In particular, paragraph 22 of NSC-81/1 specifies the orientation programs and the psychological warfare that POWs would be subject to so that they would influence the populations of North Korea and China after they return home.[4]

This research paper will focus on the ideological aspects of the NSC 81/1 document and how the United States’ perspective of manifest destiny was applied to its’ prisoner of war camps throughout the Korean War. The research will thus try to achieve the historiographical objective of understanding the North Korean and Chinese reeducation programs within the comprehensive framework of the dominant ideology of the Unites States. Additionally, it will address the warring perspectives on the reeducation of POWs as psychological warfare in the ideological struggle between liberalism and communism and the United States and the Soviet Union.[5] Ultimately, the focus will remain on how the Korean War became a great medium and opportunity for the United States to spread its values around the world through the reeducation of POWs for strategic purposes.

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[1] Staff, CNN. “Korean War Fast Facts.” CNN. June 21, 2016. Accessed March 29, 2017.

[2] Scheck, William. “In 1952 Communists at Koje-do POW.” Military History 19, no. 2 (June 2002): 72. History Reference Center, EBSCOhost (accessed March 27, 2017).

By the summer of 1951, 170,000 POWs were kept in POW Camps.

[3] NSC-81/1, United States Courses of Action with Respect to Korea, 9 September 1950, Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 7, 1950, 712–21.

[4] Ibid, 718.

[5] Callum M. MacDonald, Korea: The War before Vietnam, New York: The Free Press, 1987, 137. See also Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union, New York: New York UP, 1999, 211–13.