Tattooing, terror, and the American search for a “moral victory”: voluntary repatriation and the Korean War armistice

Abstract

This paper argues that the image of masses of Communist soldiers resisting the tyranny of Communism associated with “voluntary repatriation” was one of the most tenacious myths in the Cold War. The image that Truman and his advisers strenuously construed in the West stands in stark contrast with the harrowing brutality in the camps. Specifically, in the case of Chinese soldiers, the process of opting to go to Taiwan or to return to mainland China was horrendously violent. Tattooing was the pictorial evidence of the violence that individual POW suffered in the POW compounds. When one places Truman’s policy within the perspective of the historical background, it is easy to see that the voluntary repatriation policy was a logical outgrowth of America’s long-term policy of waging psychological warfare with the Communist world, as well as American partisan politics and Truman’s own preferences.