ROTTERDAM — Dick Whalen still carries in his wallet a tattered black-and-white snapshot of the small peninsula village along the Yalu River valley.

Today, the 80-year-old Rotterdam town historian and Korean War veteran blends a bit of humor with his recollections of Pyoktong. His picture shows the rolling North Korean mountains leading down to a picturesque village that was bisected to form Camp 5.

Photo Gallery

Honoring veterans

Enlarge photos
View thumbnails

“There’s the prison camp,” he said removing the small photo from a collection of cards tucked in the wallet’s back pocket. “If it was in Lake George, it would be a hit.”

But the area was one of the most notorious wartime prisoner camps, where Whalen remained for all but five months of the conflict. Then a cook in the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, he was captured by the Chinese inside the Unsan territory of North Korea and arrived at Camp 5 at a time when prisoners were dying at a rate of nearly a dozen per day.

Whalen himself came close to becoming a casualty of the bitter North Korean winter and the diseases that festered in the camp. When he was finally released, the military hastily airlifted him back to the United States where he spent more than a year undergoing treatments for advanced tuberculosis.

Despite his brush with death, Whalen regards his days at the camp as an experience that may have saved his life. Many other soldiers weren’t nearly as fortunate on the front lines or in their march to the camp.

“I was lucky,” he said. “I got captured by this group [of Chinese soldiers] and treated well.”

Harry Brown was among those less fortunate. The 77-year-old Rotterdam resident was also captured by the Chinese in Unsan, 25 days after Whalen.

Prior to his capture, Brown’s unit came under heavy fire from the droves of Chinese soldiers pouring into the country from the north. He was among a group of about two dozen survivors from his unit captured and brutally marched more than 30 miles across the frozen mountainous region to Camp 5 three months later.

At the camp, he used his knowledge of books to entertain the clusters of starved and sickly soldiers huddled in cramped mud-thatch huts amid sub-zero temperatures. On the ground, a sickly Whalen was among the ones listening.

It wasn’t until a chance encounter decades after the war that the two veterans realized they had unknowingly shared a slice of the same hellish experience. Whalen had noticed a Rotterdam address on a list of Korean War prisoners list so when he spotted Brown wearing a POW insignia while shopping at a hardware store on Altamont Avenue, the two veterans struck up a conversation.

“He named a couple of names and I knew them very closely,” Brown said. “I had no idea anyone in New York state was a prisoner of war there and then he was here right in my backyard.”

Routes to war

The two veterans took different paths leading up to their capture. Whalen joined the military in September 1946 hoping to cash in on the educational benefits offered through the G.I. Bill, while Brown enlisted the following year, drawn by the notion of serving in the Army.

At the time, the military was trying to replace the World War II occupation force in Japan with fresh recruits. Whalen was given four weeks of basic training, 30 days of leave and then sent across the Pacific to Tokyo, where he served as a military policeman. Then hostilities broke out on the Korean peninsula in June 1950.

After some initial setbacks, Whalen’s division was part of a combat line that pushed the North Koreans back and occupied their capital of Pyongyang by October.

“We stayed a while thinking the war was over and we’d be back in Tokyo within a month,” he said. “To our surprise, the Chinese had entered the war.”

Whalen was moving with the division’s 8th Cavalry component into Unsan when they were surrounded by an overwhelming Chinese army at nightfall. Those who advanced suffered heavy losses, while most of those who retreated were captured.

Whalen fled into the moonlit night with a South Korean soldier, but was spotted by the Chinese at dawn. To his surprise, the South Korean shot at the surrounding soldiers and was killed on the spot.

For the next month, he marched throughout the night with his captors. Remarkably, he said, the soldiers treated him with civility, even allowing him to eat with them along the way.

At Camp 5, his fortunes weren’t as good. Though the camp wasn’t heavily guarded, it was wracked with starvation and disease, which killed roughly 1,500 of the nearly 4,500 captives held there.

“The death rate was quite substantial,” he said.

When Brown arrived at the camp in January 1951, the conditions had become deplorable. Soldiers were crammed shoulder to shoulder in the huts, which served as breeding grounds for lice.

“The lice would be sapping our blood right out of our bodies,” he said.

The Chinese offered a paltry diet of millet and sorghum to their captives, many of whom slowly wasted away. Those who didn’t fall to the brutal winter cold found themselves contending with pneumonia and dysentery.

The conditions were enough to prompt Brown to attempt two escapes from the camp, only to be captured both times. He said desperation among the captured troops was enough that many found themselves in moral dilemmas.

“To say ‘I know you’re going to die soon, Charlie, so can I have your boots when you go?’ This is something I could never shake,” he said. “These were desperate times.”

Both Brown and Whalen were released from the camp in August 1953 after a cease-fire was established at the 38th parallel. They returned to the United States, where Whalen went back to his hometown and became an insurance agent and Brown became an electronic engineer in the Rotterdam area.

Neither man will ever forget his experiences during a conflict some call the forgotten war. Most of all, they’ll never forget their memories of Camp 5.

“You never get that out of your system,” Brown said.