The Rosenbergs: Olivia Gordon

My project is on how Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were prosecuted, convicted, sentenced, and executed for "conspiracy to commit espionage" by the US government. Even today, there is no agreement as to if they were actually guilty, and if so, by what extent. My interviews highlight that disagreement.

*I have four interviews total. The rest will be posted as I gather consent from my interviewees.

Interview with Robert Meeropol, younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; founder/Executive Director of the Rosenberg Fund for Children (www.rfc.org)

June 11, 2010

Yesterday morning, I interviewed the FBI historian, and he said that “there is no doubt that the Rosenbergs betrayed their country.” Do you have something to say to that?

Well, from my parents’ perspectives….my beliefs are based on information that has trickled out much later……my father was involved with a group of young people who were trying to help the Soviet Union. They passed industrial military information. It was during WWII, and during a war, all industry is militarized. So if someone goes into a former automobile factory that is now making tanks, and takes pictures, they are committing espionage. This is the kind of thing that Julius did – he passed nothing to do with the atomic bomb. Also, Ethel may have known about his activities, and probably approved, but she definitely wasn’t involved with any of them. This is an important distinction to draw.

Did they betray their country? It wasn’t a betrayal of country. The trial was at the height of the Cold War….Do we know for certain that they were innocent? No.

There was a brilliant physicist by the name of Theodore Alvenhal who graduated Harvard at the age of 17 and was recruited to work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. He did a political analysis after WWII, and concluded that the United States was holding an atomic monopoly that was very bad for the world. So, he did what he could to provide the Soviet Union with atomic information. He was definitely a spy and he was never caught.

If the enemy is fascism, and McCarthyism, and oppression, you aren’t betraying the people, you’re helping the people.

In the song my adoptive father, Abel Meeropol, wrote, “The House I Live In”, he says that “America is the people”.

What constitutes loyalty, what constitutes treason, what constitutes betrayal are very important questions to discuss.

Would you have preferred your parents to have cooperated with the FBI to spare their own lives?

No, absolutely not. It is very possible that if they had cooperated, then neither of them would have been killed. It might have made my childhood easier, but it would have been a poisoned atmosphere to grow up in. It all comes down to whether they should have resisted, and have been themselves, or should have said that they were guilty and lied and implicated other people, and would have been David and Ruth Greenglass. If they had done that, Julius would have gotten a sentence like David’s, and Ethel would have been released to take care of me and my brother.

Looking back on it, would I rather have been the child of David and Ruth Greenglass? I would much rather have been the child of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I am proud of the actions they took.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that I would put my children in that kind of jeopardy myself. But my parents were in different circumstances, and in their political climate, their actions made sense.

In his sentencing, Judge Kaufman said that because of what your parents did, the Soviet Union was more aggressive in North Korea, and more people died than otherwise. Do you agree with this?

Well, that statement is based on the idea that they “stole the secret of the atomic bomb”. If you look at the Greenglass sketch of the “key principal” of the atomic bomb, it isn’t clear if he really drew it, or if he drew it for the government….either way, it is clear that the sketch is not the secret of the atomic bomb. When it was released in the 60’s, scientists analyzed it and said that there is no way that the Soviet Union could have developed the atomic bomb off of it. It was an amateur, rudimentary sketch that contained very little information.

How does our legal system need to be changed to prevent this from happening to anyone else?

The legal system has rules (well, prior to September 11), that, if they were followed, would prevent that from happening to anyone. There would be nothing to critique. The problem is that the law functions within the larger political context. In the 50’s, everyone was told that there was an international communist conspiracy out to destroy us. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights took a back seat to National Security. All kinds of things happened that would have been denounced as illegal in any other political context – for example, Kaufman being is a secret communication with the prosecution. The trial was a frame-up; they were executed for a crime they didn’t commit. If you go forward to the Bush era, the same kinds of things were happening: “enhanced interrogation” (torture), Guantanamo, and the rules aren’t enforced and judges see it as their role to protect the American security.

The law enforcement needs to develop a greater respect for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, assumption of innocence until proven guilty. These need to have real substance over the immediate demands of political context.

Interview with Dave Alman, president of the NCRRC and author of a book about the Rosenbergs

May 28, 2010

What is your affiliation with the NCRRC?

I am currently its president.

How did you first learn about the Rosenberg case?

My wife and I lived in Knickerbocker Village in lower Manhattan. We read in the NY Times of their arrest, and learned they lived in another section of Knickerbocker Village. Then my wife recalled spending several minutes with Ethel Rosenberg some months earlier when both of them were introduced in a local park to which they had taken their children.

What do you hope to gain by re-opening the Rosenberg case?

We believe, on the basis of many hundreds of Department of Justice, FBI and other documents, that the prosecution knowingly used perjured testimony and a deceitful witness list to persuade the jury to return guilty verdicts. Moreover, the Justice Department substituted an oral indictment for treason on behalf of an enemy, for the formal indictment that accused the defendants of espionage on behalf of an ally.

What, in your opinion, was done wrong with the original case?

The substitution in the courtroom of the formal indictment with the oral indictment for treason, a crime for which there was no proof whatsoever. The U.S. never went to war against the Soviet Union and, in fact, from 1941-1945, the Soviet Union was our chief military ally against the Axis Powers (Germany, Japan, Italy). There is no such crime as committing treason on behalf of an ally.

Do you believe Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were innocent? Why or why not?

My wife and initially believed that, because they were communists, they were guilty. Later, on studying the trial record, and comparing the testimony of the government witnesses with their pre-trial statements to the government, we became convinced that although Julius Rosenberg may have been guilty of non-atomic espionage, there was no tangible or credible evidence of his having passed atomic information to the Soviet Union. As for his wife Ethel, the evidence against her, we learned from government documents, was non-existent, and her indictment was purely for the purpose of compelling a false confession of atomic espionage from her husband. She was known to be innocent by the government when she was executed.

Did the recent statement made by Morton Sobell in 2008 change the answer to the previous question? Change any of your opinions about the Rosenberg case?

No, his admission confirmed our suspicions, based on government documents, that the government inflated the crime by using suborned perjury to persuade the jury that the defendants had passed atomic information to the Soviet Union.

Soldier's Experience in the Korean War - Emile Gleeson

Introduction

These interviews are about the Korean War. Each interviewee served in the Korean War and so has direct experience with the topic. Each interview focuses on the interviewee’s personal experience as a soldier in the war (what was it like, what do they remember most, etc.). Each interview is about a different time period of the war (stated in the first paragraph of each interview).

Fred Cowan

I was in Korea for 1 year. 1953. I was an engineer; I was in the army engineers. I think I was around 23 years old, and I had never been in any other wars before.
I was a part of the engineer construction company. We were in the Port of Inchon. We worked on construction. We built warehouses, even outhouses (laughs). We worked on road repair as well. We also had a rock crusher which we used to crush huge rocks (laughs).
I was the company commander, my rank was lieutenant. There were 94 men in the company plus about 8 officers and around 300 ROK soldiers, who were really just laborers.
The most memorable thing that I remember from Korea was my living quarters. I lived in the BOQ, but most people lived in the barracks. The BOQ was only for officers. It was very nice. The engineering and construction company had built for themselves before the war started, which was why it was so nice.
We had a lot of equipment too. There were about 23 cranes which we used for unloading things at the port. We also had dump trucks which could carry 4 tons. We had tractors too. The tractors were really big.
(Long pause).
I didn’t see many communists myself when I was in Korea. How should I say this? … We thought of them as… well… Well you see they were bombing things they weren’t supposed to. They would fly overhead and drop hand grenades on us – they were very primitive. Once we were all inside eating dinner and then we heard a large noise and we looked and they had blown up our gas storage place. It started a huge fire that took us a long time to put out. It wasn’t good.
Luckily, the 1st marine division was located just north of us, so they were between us and the enemy. This usually meant that the communists didn’t reach us, which was why they were only sometimes able to bomb us. We provided the marines with the supplies they needed to fight the communists. We built things for them and kept their camp in good shape. We gave things to them and they protected us from the enemy. I guess we were both sort of protecting each other really.
The one thing that I learned from the war is this; don’t trust the enemy.


Jim Simms

I was an enlisted man, my rank was master sergeant. I was in Korea in 1950. I was in the Inchon invasion. I suppose I was about 21, or maybe 22. 21 or 22. I was in the 65th ordinance unit. We supplied ammunition and provided automotive repairs.
I had already served in the army before I went to Korea. I was in Japan in WWII from 1947 to about 1949. This was when I had my first experience with communists. Japan was going to have elections, and we were there to make sure that the communists didn’t interfere.
I arrived in Korea in July of 1950. One of my memories of the war is about the Inchon invasion. MacArthur was a genius. He used scientific data to predict the rise and fall of the tides at Inchon, and he planned the invasion to be at high tide so the ships could go in closer to the shore. There was a 40 foot tide in Inchon, much bigger than the one we have here – it’s only about 12 feet. Anyway, after MacArthur got all the ships in at high tide, then twelve hours later the water went out and the ships were already on the ground. It was genius. We didn’t have to drag the ships ashore at all. There were about a hundred ships left there on the ground. The North Koreans at that time didn’t have airplanes, well not good airplanes anyway, which is why they didn’t come and shoot at us when we were coming in. If they had had airplanes they could have flown out there and bombed us, but they didn’t.
We went ashore and began providing ammunition and other supplies. We didn’t do any shooting ourselves, only the marines did that. I was never out on the front lines except for a few times when we would have to run out there to provide ammunition to a soldier.
In Korea there was Inchon then Taegu moving south, and then another city… I can’t remember what it was called. (pause). Maybe I’ll remember later. Anyways, there was Taegu and then that other city and then all the way down to Pusan. The North Koreans pushed us all the way down to Pusan. At that time they had the Pusan Perimeter. The US fought off the North Koreans down at Pusan, but we didn’t kill a lot of them. It wasn’t a massacre or anything. We tried not to kill too many of them, we were just trying to fight them off. This was before Inchon, when I was there. When I came we invaded at Inchon and we cut off the North Koreans in the South because they were all down at Pusan. That was in July of 1950.
After Inchon I stayed in Yungdungpo. We provided ammunition to the soldiers there. There were no trees in Korea, just lots of hills. You could see the Chinese coming since there were no trees. They came in thousands. Like I said before, I only went out to the front lines occasionally, but I could see the Chinese coming anyways. First a man on a horse would come up to the top of a hill. He would blow his horn and soon the Chinese would come and fill up the entire hill. The Chinese overran everybody. They pushed us back south again. The Chinese came in waves. It was a human wave. They would come and then the first wave would get shot down and the second wave would come and pick up the dropped weapons and keep fighting. It was very hard to beat them because there were always more and more waves. They just kept coming.
The Chinese would take prisoners too. The soldiers wouldn’t know it was happening. They would just be sleeping in their sleeping bags and the Chinese would come and pick them up and swing the sleeping bag over their shoulder and just keep on going. They would get carried away like that. Because of this problem they made a new sleeping bag for the soldiers that you could push out of easily so you wouldn’t be trapped inside.
Now after that, I wasn’t in Korea anymore, but what happened was that we pushed back up to the 38th parallel again, but we didn’t go past it. Also, Truman relieved MacArthur of duty because Truman didn’t want to fight China. Now I’m not sure if this next part is true, so don’t take my word for it, I heard it from other people. They said that when the Chinese came over, because they had been captured by Mao, that he told the soldiers that they had to fight or he would kill them. This is just a rumor though. People were trying to explain why the Chinese would go out and fight without guns. They were basically sacrificing themselves, and no one could understand why they would do that. In the waves, so many of them died, and then they would have to pick up the weapons from those who had already fallen. Why would they want to do that?
Going back to when I was in Korea in December, the group that we had been helping provide ammunition to had all been killed. The Chinese had made a five mile blockade and killed everyone who was trying to retreat and go south. I didn’t do any fighting myself, but soldiers would come back to our base and tell us stories about it, so I had a pretty good idea of what it was like. It was very cold in Korea, because the Koreans didn’t have central heating. The building would have tile floors and you had to build a fire underneath the floor. Also, there were very few trees, maybe because they had been bombed and blown up.
One interesting thing I learned after I was in the war was that the Koreans were very helpful to the US after the fighting started, but they had been hostile before.
The food that the North Koreans ate gave their bodies a certain odor. They ate kim chee, which was fermented fish. They would bury the fish under the ground for months and then finally they would take it out and eat it. It was very gross. Who would want to eat that? (laughs). The South Koreans had a very different odor from the food that they ate. The Koreans were able to use this odor to tell whether someone was a North or South Korean. I couldn’t do that though. Us Americans couldn’t tell the difference.


Frank Roe

I was in Korea from 1951 to 1952. I was in the 1st marine division. I was part of the headquarters battalion. I was 26. I remember because I had just gotten married in September, and then I got shipped out in January. I had previously been in WWII, in Japan in the navy.
What did I do in Korea? Well, I did what I was told. I don’t really remember exactly what I did.
I flew in from Japan, to outside of Taegu. There were no civilians there, and we were told by the officials there to hitch a ride. They said, “That way’s north,” and then they left the rest to us. The various army camps fed us on the way up, they were very nice. Eventually, we found our way to the marines and were sent out to the artillery. I remember there was a big ridge there, and you could go out and stand on it and look down and see the army.
Once I stole a half track with some other guys. It was broken down. The army had left it on the side of the road. The terrain in Korea was rough, it was all hills. That was probably why they had to abandon it.
The Chinese soldiers had the German 88 rifle. It shot straight, so it wasn’t any good with the hills. The guns that we had shot up in an arc so we could shoot them over the hill and they would hit the Chinese on the other side. The Chinese came in human waves. You could never shoot fast enough to kill them all. But you would always know when they were coming because you could hear the bugle that they would blow. We always had a fallback position just in case.
One of my first memories of the war that comes to mind is my mustache. When I went to Korea I grew a mustache. It was 6 inches long by the time it was summer. The Koreans respected it, because they respected old age and mustaches. The most respected Koreans were the old ones with the long droopy mustaches (laughs). They had long droopy beards too. (laughs). In the fall though, I shaved my mustache because of the rain. When it rained on my mustache it got longer and I would be eating and then I would wonder what I had in my mouth and it would be my mustache! (laughs).
I don’t really remember what exactly I did in Korea. I never saw anyone doing clerical work though. I didn’t do clerical work either. I don’t know how it got done.
We didn’t think of the Communists as too bad. They were fine. It was their indoctrination that was bad. The commissars were the ones who would try to convert you to Communism. The communist Chinese actually liked us. They didn’t really want to be fighting us. The common guy wasn’t bad. The commissars were bad. The commissars would claim that people had dumdum bullets and make them kneel down and shoot them in the head just to teach someone a lesson.
When we would go out on patrol we would get counted after we came back from our walk so they would know how many Chinese had snuck in with us.
I felt kind of bad for the Chinese soldiers in Korea. They always had on light summer gear, even in the middle of winter. They must have been very cold.
We got a lot of time when we were allowed to rest when I was in Korea. We would go to the rivers sometimes – they had a few rivers near our camp. If the river was high, then it was fine for swimming, but when the river was low it smelled like human poop. (laughs).
I can’t remember what I did in Korea. I remember that the Chinese could only shoot straight, so we would always get down behind ridges and then they couldn’t shoot us. I also remember that we would have to take our baths out of our helmets. You could put water in your helmet and then heat it over a flame and then you would use that water for your bath.
I mostly saw Chinese soldiers. There were very few North Koreans left after we knocked the hell out of them. The soldiers were almost all Chinese by the time I got to Korea. The Chinese though, they were incredibly stupid. They would leave the mine wrappers lying out on the ground so you would always know when there was a mine around.
By the fall when I was in Korea, the US had moved above the 38th parallel. When we were up there we would come across old Chinese fox holes. They would be filled with dead Chinese. They had just been lying there all summer. Their skin would be very tight and wrinkled around their bones. They looked like mannequins. Because of all the dead Chinese everywhere you always went 100 yards or so upstream so there wouldn’t be any dead Chinese in the water when you were trying to get water for bathing or drinking or swimming or whatever. The dead Chinese were everywhere. It was very hard to avoid them.

The Korean War -Rachel Blazevic

My interviews are about different people’s experiences in the Korean War. I have interviewed someone who was in the National Guard, someone who was a POW and a pair of civilians who were affected by the war.

Interview with my Great Uncle Jerome Blazevic (84 years old):

Before joining the Korean War, Jerome served in World War 2 as a soldier in the army in Belgium during the occupation of Germany after the war. He was discharged after the war and there was a recession sort of like the one today. The plant he was working at almost shut down, so instead of losing his job, he joined the National Guard in Duluth, Minnesota.

The base that Jerome worked at was one of the bases that would protect America from Russian bombing. He never flew, but he was one of the support personal. By that I mean that he worked in the medical department.

Whenever we were at a crisis point (i.e. Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Gary Powell incident), he was on base because the country was on high alert because of the fear of an attack. This was true especially of his base because it was up North and coming into the United States from the North was the shortest route for Russia.

And although today, Russia has said they would not bomb us, having a good defense with things like that will make them stick to their word.

Jerome’s life in the National Guard lasted for 30 years. He had three sons who also joined the National Guard at the same base. Now one of his grandsons has joined the Air Force Academy in Colorado.

Being in the Cold War changed his direction in life. He served his country. He was also a very successful trapper, and a very successful Scout Master being awarded the highest Silver Beaver award by his scouts.

Interview with my Great Uncle Raymond Blazevic (86 years old):

Hel- *cut off*

Well, first you should know that I grew up in Duluth, Minnesota. In high school we all had to register (for army, as soldiers, etc.) and I did. I got drafted into the army. Then I got went to Fort Snelling (spelling correct?). I had to take lots of tests, and I passed for the Navy’s Officer Program. So I went into the Navy. I also went through electrical courses. I worked on electrical stuff and navigation equipment.

World War 2, and after, I was in Hawaii. We stayed in barracks with no windows. I would fly lots of different planes.

And then I got transferred to San Francisco and I flew sky radar.

When we were in Korea, everything moved at night. During the day, everything was still and no planes were out or anything. Everything moved at night. We would get catapulted off in our planes and the pilots would bomb. We worked with 250 lb. bombs a lot which would destroy bridges. On one of these night time bombings, we had done all of our bombings and we were heading back. We had already been hit multiple times, but we were hit again and the plane caught on fire. We were captured by the Koreans. We went to an interrogation place near the capital. To Manchuria.

I was a prisoner of war. They had a political program and I didn’t agree with it at all. And 3 out of 5 POWs in Korea died. Near the end, there were so few prisoners left. We had to build our own camp out of sticks and mud (chuckles). We had no medical care and two meals a day. We had to carry everything. We had to carry wood, water. We had to boil the water to get rid of the bacteria and bugs before we used it. In the winter we had padded clothing. No one ever escaped. It was 100-150 miles to the nearest port and no one would ever make it. They’d get shot or just die before they made it anywhere.

And, well, what else can I tell ya?

So, how long were you a POW in North Korea?

I was a POW for 27 months.

And earlier you said something about a political program, what was that?

It was the interrogation center. Where they (the North Koreans/Chinese) would try to indoctrinate you into the Communist system. It would be 50 below 0 and we would be sitting there listening to these lectures about how communism was good and capitalism was evil. I didn’t agree with any of it. None of it. But their views and what they said about communism being good and capitalism being bad were interesting.

Also when it came to ruling over the POWs, the Chinese were much better than the North Koreans. They just did it better.

What was the most terrifying thing about being a POW in North Korea?

Oh, I was never terrified. There was lots of interesting things. I saw people get shot and fell into a ditch and was just left there. But nothing scared me or terrified me. The idea of death never scared me.

And the Chinese were a whole lot smarter than the U.S. in interrogation methods. They’d have this hole in the ground and put one of the older POWs in it and have a guard stationed at the top. In the 50 below 0 nights and little food and sitting in their own waste, after a month, they could make the person sign petitions or confessions for this person or that.

And the Chinese tried to blame Japan for the high death rate. In Vietnam too.

How has being in the Korean War, and all the other wars you were in, affected your life today?

It hasn’t. All those people who say they come back with post traumatic stress disorder and whatever, no; they had all the emotional problems before they joined the war. Emotional problems don’t bother me, and not from any war.

The wars, the Korean War, World War 2, the Vietnam War, were just part of my life and they didn’t change it in any particular way.

You said before that you flew lots of different kinds of planes. Like what kinds?

Patrol planes, attack planes, night fighters, lots of different kinds.

And what exactly was your job while flying those.

Oh, I was a radar operator. I told pilots where the targets were and where to drop the bombs and stuff. I was really interesting in electronics and flying. We would also jam enemy transmissions. And now all the computers in the planes are automatic, but then they weren’t. In 1939, I was in 10^th grade and I heard about computers and how they were going to be the next big thing. During the Korean War, we only had analog computers and we had to do most everything by hand, like finding the coordinates of the targets and such. But during the Vietnam War, we only had digital. Those were fantastic planes. We could fly over North Vietnam in no time at all.

During World War 2, I worked on Whidbey Island, near where you are. I was a technician then too, and we would fly from the Aleutian Islands, Sitka, to Japan and bomb, and then come back. And we never lost any planes to the enemy, only to weather. There were some bad storms up there. We worked from 4 to 6, 7 days a week.

You know, you kids have it so easy these days. With the grocery stores and electronics and everything. When I was your age in high school I had to make my own lunch from homemade bread, jam from handpicked berries, and butter from our cows. If I didn’t have a nickel for a carton of milk at school, then I just had a glass of water.

How long were you in the Navy?

I was in the Navy for 3 years, and Korea for 2.5 years. I earned $75 a month. I sent $50 to my family, and by the time all the charges and such were taken out, I was living on about $5 a month. But you get used to it. It’s just how you live, life is.

What is your opinion of the Korean War?

It was caused by the North Koreans deciding to come into South Korea. World War 2 started in 1939. President Roosevelt told Japan to get out of China. They cut off all the oil, fuel, and metal going to Japan. World War 2 ended not with the atomic bomb. All the fire bombings were worse than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Korea ended with President Eisenhower. We were killing the Chinese 10 to 1. He said we were going to bomb Korea in the negations didn’t go through. And what do you know, the negotiations went through.

During the (Cuban) missile crisis, they told Kennedy that they had 7 missiles ready to go and B52s were airborne. Kennedy told them not to go and went to negotiations instead. He didn’t trust the navy or the military, or … That’s a good thing because if the missile crisis had happened, the whole U.S., even Seattle, would be radioactive.

Anything else?

Nope I think that’s it. Thank you so much.

Mhmm. Not a problem.

Interviewer’s Note: When Raymond was shot down and captured as a POW he was first thought to be dead, because his plan was on fire and crashed and no one thought that he could have survived. But he did. When his family found out they were relieved and happy that he was a POW because that meant he was alive, although being a POW was not the best thing in the world. I have two newspaper articles concerning this event from his hometown in Duluth.

Interview with my Grandfather (David) and my Gram (Sally/Sarah):

How did the Korean War affect your lives as civilians in the United States?

Your Grandmother was at Mary Washington College and your Grandfather was at the University of Minnesota when the Korean War broke out. Two things happened: [1] many men were going into the Armed Services, and [2] there was a demand for war materials of all kinds. Your Grandmother graduated in 1951 with a degree in Chemistry, and obtained a job at a chemical company building “solid stage” rockets. Your Grandfather graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and obtained a job in a new steel mill being built because of the Korean War required a lot of steel. So, in a way, the Korean War was helpful as we started out of college. Prior to the 1950’s, the Cold War between the Communistic and Capitalistic countries had been in effect since 1946. Both of these developed nuclear bombs, but both were afraid to use them. However, each side tried to win countries to their side, and “local” wars supported by each side to gain an advantage. One such place was the Korean Peninsula where the North was supported by China and Russia, and the South by the United States and other countries.

During this period we (the people in the USA) were always worried that a major war and bombing of the United States could occur. Many people built “bomb shelters” in their backyards and stockpiled them with food, water, and flashlights to survive a few days in a bomb were dropped. Also my brother Raymond was in the war in Korea, and my other brother were at the “fighter” airplane base in Duluth. So to us, it was more of a “background” worry; but not much a problem of doing without gas, tires, shoes, meat, butter, etc., which had occurred in the Second World War. The feeling can best be described as a “worry” about something that might happen over which we had no control. The options, was let the “worry” be the biggest problem; or live life as if we had a future. Most Americans chose to live life, and “hope” for the best.

What was your opinion of the Korean War?

Most wars were originally about living better at someone else’s expense. My tribe attacked your tribe to get more land, slaves, and food; and your tribe attacked our tribe for the same reason. Slowly the tribes grew to be groups and countries combining their power, but they still went to war over more land and food. In between these wars, there were many “religious” wars by groups who insisted everyone had to believe in the religion I believed in. In the Western world there was the Muslim wars in the 700 to 1000 AD years, the Protestant and Catholic wars in the 1600’s, and probably many smaller wars over the centuries. Slowly, the religious differences were accepted, but after the Industrial Revolution starting in the 18^th Century (1700’s) countries started to fight over countries, minerals, manufacturing processes. These wars were spent capturing colonies and the economic benefits all over the world, and enforced by the military power of many different countries. During this time the education and thinking of people increased, and they saw that the “economic control” was the way to go. In the 1800’s and 1900’s two schools of thought were developed. One was the “capitalistic” concept of letting each individual gain from his “labor” and “ingenuity” with some consideration given to the less gifted people for the common good. The other one was the “communistic” concept that all the land, manufacturing output, minerals, etc. belonged to everyone; and they (meaning those in governmental power) should decide and determine what and how everything is done. The Korean War was a “pin-prick” at the capitalistic group of countries to see if it would quite. It became a “tie”, but China increased its military and manufacturing capacity, Russia used up more of its money for no gain, and the USA and Europe expanded to become more prosperous nations. In my opinion, the Korean War was the “breaking point” of communism, but it took 30 years for Russia to “fall” and China to change its path closer to capitalism.

After the Korean War ended (fighting-wise), how were your lives changed, if at all?

Our life changed because we knew Raymond who was a prisoner of war was coming home, and in relation to work, raising a family, and living the best we could that war meant nothing at all to your Grandmother, Grandfather, or your father.

How did you feel knowing people (soldiers) who were in Korea during the war?

We had friends in the Korean War and were concerned in the same way anyone would be if someone you knew were sick or hurt in an accident. In the case of my brother Raymond, the feeling as stronger because of the relationship was closer.