Buried alive for 52 hours: Korea Exhibit sheet 2b for Bangkok, 1954

A Thai-language exhibit sheet, Korea Exhibit No. 2b, in the U.S. Information Agency file, catalog date 30 August 1954. A sergeant stands beside a photograph of bodies on a slope, and the caption says he is pointing to the pit where he was buried alive for 52 hours after being captured and shot (NAID 6949015).

What the sheet holds

The upper half is a scene: a uniformed sergeant beside a large photograph of bodies lying on a slope, and a map marked with the number 38 and the name Kaesong. One caption explains what he is pointing at. The lower half is a collage of typed Thai pages, each headed with a case number, laid over one another like a file of statements.

พันจ่าเอกแครี่ ไวเนิล ชี้ไปยังรูปหลุม

ซึ่งเขาถูกฝังทั้งเป็นเป็นเวลา ๕๒ ชั่วโมง

หลังจากถูกจับและถูกยิง

[English, as given by the archive:] Master Sergeant Carey Weinel [name as transliterated from the Thai] points to the picture of a pit in which he was buried alive for 52 hours after being captured and shot.

Part of an exhibit

The National Archives files this sheet in Record Group 306 with the U.S. Information Agency's posters for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, catalog date 30 August 1954. The site's Korean War hub describes the whole Thai Korea Exhibit as post-armistice work that pairs the UN General Assembly's December 1953 resolution on atrocities against prisoners of war with survivors' testimony and photographs of the dead. Beside 2b in the archive sit sheet 2a, a UN resolution text, and sheet 2c, weapon and casualty photographs. No sender is printed on 2b as transcribed, and FRAME classes the source as blurred.

Testimony as proof

FRAME's tags are testimonial and outrage bait. The first describes the method: a named survivor and a stack of typed statements stand in for the evidence. The second describes the effect the photograph of bodies is built to have.

The charge is grave. If the caption is accurate, a prisoner was shot and left in a pit, and a government holding a survivor's account had good reason to make it public. Publishing it this way has a cost. A Thai visitor to the exhibit saw a caption, a rank and a name, and typed statements laid one over another, which the archive itself did not transcribe. The record does not show where the statements came from, who took them, or whether any were tested by anyone outside the governments at war. Testimony offered with its sources can be weighed. Testimony offered as a backdrop asks the viewer to feel first.

The Korea Exhibit sheets are in the site's Korean War gallery; several show bodies. For another 1954 sheet aimed at Thai readers, see Religious Oppression 171e. The U.S. Information Agency hub describes the program.