Review | The Korean war – an intriguing new angle in book about POW interrogations and the captives’ fate after armistice

Their battlefields were dimly lit wooden huts rather than rice paddies or mountains, but the contest for information was just as relentless

Monica Kim’s book is at its best recounting the experiences of prisoners and their interrogators – including Japanese the US had interned in second world war

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A US marine with North Korean prisoners of war in Korea in 1953. Photo: Alamy

Published: 10:00pm, 20 May 2019Updated: 11:45pm, 20 May 2019

The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History, by Monica Kim, pub. Princeton University Press, 4 stars

Despite hopes in recent months that an end to the Korean war might finally be in sight, nearly 70 years after North Korean troops crossed the frontier with the aim of uniting the peninsula by force, the two sides’ armed forces continue to eye each other warily across the spectacularly poorly named demilitarised zone.

Known in the history books as “the forgotten war”, there has been a lot more written about one of the 20th century’s most enduring and intractable conflicts in recent decades.

Monica Kim’s new book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War, breaks interesting new ground on an aspect that has been largely overlooked.

A Chinese prisoner of war (left) is questioned by two Korean translators in September 1952. Photo: Anzac Portal/Douglas Lee

Tens of thousands of North Korean and Chinese men – and a number of women – found themselves behind barbed wire in South Korean prison camps in the years after fighting broke out in the summer of 1950.

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