Themes

R H Johnson

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Chon Chin Camp

The Koreans moved Johnson to a prison camp at Chon Chin on 13th July 1951. Conditions here were far better than at 'Pak's Palace', but they had only recently improved. Previously they had been so bad that 36 prisoners died a day. After this time the Chinese, Communist allies of the North Korean Forces, took the camp over.

They interrogated Johnson on military matters for the first few weeks. They soon left him alone, however, after he repeated the same story and they considered him to be trustworthy. The Chineses subjected him to intense political indoctrination whilst at Chon Chin. The only newspapers he could read were the 'Shanghai News' , the ' Daily Worker', or other similar Communist publications from Britain or America.

Johnson also spent two weeks in the Camp hospital with a kidney complaint. The conditions were terrible. They placed people who the doctors deemed were definitely dying in a hut called 'the dungeons' and left them to die. All the doctors in the camp were incompetent except for one female Chinese surgeon and they forbade British and American doctors imprisoned at the Camp from treating the sick.