Additional Information:
Dates of the news summary are probably off by
one year. MSG MacDonnell would have been sent to
Japan in the summer of 1950 (vs. 1951), and would
have
deployed to Korea with the rest of the division
in July of 1950.
Company C, 19th Regt, 24 ID was commanded by
CPT Louis "Rocky" Rockwerk, and was
overrun by Chinese forces at the Battle of
Anju on 4 November
1950. Many of the soldiers in this unit were
either killed or captured. Because of his age
(46) at
the time of capture, MacDonnell would have
had a greater challenge in surviving. Temperatures
averaged well below zero and prisoners had
only
the clothing they were captured with; the 24th
ID was one of several units that had not been
issued winter clothing. On rare occasions,
the Chinese
forces would move prisoners by truck, but most
prisoners had to march all the way to Pyoktong
(on the
Yalu River), and the Chinese forces often executed
those sick
and wounded who could not keep up.
The memoir Korea POW: A Thousand Days of Torment
by William
H. Funchess describes the battle and the events
leading up to it in some detail. Funchess was a
platoon leader in the company; like MacDonnell,
he was captured by the Chinese forces and barely
survived the march to Pyoktong. One of the appendices
in Funchess's memoir shows a handwritten list of
Americans who died in captivity, including the name
of MSGT F.J. MacDonald (sic). Funchess hid the list
in a fountain pen and smuggled it out when he was
repatriated.
According to a former POW,
Dr. Sid Essensten, American POWs were dying
at the rate more than a dozen per day in January
and
February of 1951 due to exposure, malnutrition,
and dysentery. At that time, the camp was run
by the North Koreans. Conditions improved
slightly when the Chinese
forces assumed control of the camp and milder
weather arrived in April of 1951. Conditions improved
significantly in July of 1951 once peace talks
began with the
UN.
Several authors have written about Camp Five,
which was one of the most notorious POW camps
in North Korea. Albert Biderman's March
to Calumny and
Raymond Lech's Broken Soldiers are
two of the best documented accounts of Camp
Five. Clay Blair's The Forgotten
War discusses
the 24th Infantry Division in detail, to
include the Battle at Anju.
