In June 1953, a riot by North Korean POWs broke out in a prisoner-of-war camp on Geoje Island in South Korea. Allied forces shot and killed the North Korean POWs to quell the riot. The bodies of many of the shot dead North Korean soldiers were laid to rest in parallel in the camp. The magazine LIFE had an internal rule not to photograph the faces of the dead, but in the photographs, many of the corpses were bleeding profusely and were stripped naked, with only the lower half of their bodies covered with blankets. In another month, the POW camp was to be liberated under an armistice agreement between the South Korean and US armies and North Korea.
Geoje-POW Camp was established in February 1951 in Geoje City and other parts of Geoje Island to hold captured Korean People's Army and Chinese Communist Army POWs during the Korean War, and operated until July 1953. Located on Geoje Island at the southern tip of Korea, the POW camp at the time of the Korean War held up to about 170,000 POWs, including about 150,000 Korean People's Army POWs and 20,000 Chinese Army POWs by the end of February 1951.On June 18, 1953, an anti-communist group refused to deport the Geoje POW camp, which was under the control of the Allied Forces, to North Korea. On June 18, 1953, President Syngman Rhee had about 27,389 POWs released, and the camp was closed after the signing of a ceasefire agreement on July 27.
The biggest obstacle to the armistice talks was the POW issue. The prisoners of war held by the UN forces are properly managed, but the number of prisoners of war held by the North Korean communist forces is less than half. China and North Korea demanded a full exchange of POWs. The communist forces massacred the POWs and even incorporated them into their own forces and forced them into combat. When the communists occupied Seoul and other cities, they forcibly recruited many young people in the occupied areas and incorporated them into the North Korean army. Therefore, the captured Koreans refused to be repatriated to North Korea in a prisoner exchange. The problem was complicated by the fact that the majority of them, including Chinese soldiers, refused to return to North Korea. Due to the lax controls in the Geoje POW camp, numerous violent incidents occurred among the groups of communist and anti-communist POWs that were not separated.
On May 7, 1952, Communist POWs abducted Brigadier General FT Dodd of the US Army, the director of the Geoje POW camp. As a condition for his release, they offered to improve the treatment of POWs, revoke the policy of repatriating POWs of their own free will, suspend the examination of POWs, and recognize the delegation of POWs. This riot was led by Ihakgu and others who surrendered to the US Army's 1st Cavalry Division at the Nakdong River front. The American troops refused to negotiate and confronted them, and the Americans opened fire, killing about 70 POWs and wounding about 140 others.
The Communist POWs refused to be tortured, assaulted, and abused, and based on instructions from Pyongyang, they planned an uprising in all the POW camps to be held on June 20, 1952. The newly appointed UN commander, Mark Clark, decided to disperse the POWs to prevent riot incidents and appointed Brigadier General H.L. Boatner as the POW camp commander, and from June 7 to 10, an incident at the Pusan POW camp where one Communist POW was killed while defying the guard triggered another riot. Brigadier General Boatner began to disperse the POWs while rescuing Brigadier General Dodd on June 10, but in the process 105 anti-communist POWs were killed by communist POWs.
