A true propagandist

The most generous readers of Burchett's work in Korea could perhaps read these claims as coming from someone who was himself a victim rather than a voice of Chinese propaganda.

However, the case against Burchett tightens once one examines the role he played in the centrepiece of the Chinese strategy to build their propaganda case: the use of confessions by captured American pilots that they had dropped germs on their enemy. Burchett here seems to have talked to some of the confessors and helped translate and edit their “confessions”.

Here the story takes its sorriest turn regarding Burchett. If the supposed germ warfare was clearly a hoax as the evidence bears out, how were American airmen forced to confess to crimes they did not commit? Torture seems reasonable to presume.

Although he worked in the POW camps of North Korea, Burchett makes no mention of the killing and torture of US and South Korean soldiers, facts well documented in a number of studies. Instead when describing the North Korean POW camps he writes: “This camp looks like a holiday resort in Switzerland. The atmosphere is also nearer that of a luxury holiday resort than a POW camp.”

Elsewhere he claims, “The overwhelming consensus was that no group of POWs had been so well treated in modern history”.

Australian academic Robert Manne in his short book on Burchett contends these camps were as bad as any during the 20th century, a claim substantiated by Rudolph Rummel's research. Rummel, a professor at the University of Hawaii, estimates that the “North Koreans killed from 5,000 to 12,000 ROK [South Korean] POWs” and were responsible for the “murder of 5,000 to 6,000 American POWs”.

Burchett's writings ignored the poor treatment of POWs by the North Koreans and Chinese. Instead he chose to emphasise the bravery of the American pilots in confessing to their crimes, although their forced confessions were filled with stock phrases from communist propaganda such as “Wall Street warmonger”, making them less than credible even at the time. The fact that we now know that they did not even commit these crimes points to a deplorable distortion of the truth by Burchett.

It is a shame that chroniclers of Burchett and his career have ignored this archival evidence, available now for a number of years. It seems those who have held him up as a brave hero have a vested interest in not examining evidence to the contrary. However for me there has always been ample reason to doubt Burchett's version of events.

He was a strong advocate of both Mao and Josef Stalin; the depth of evil these two men were capable of is recounted in recent biographies such as Chang's and Halliday's book and Simon Montefiore's Stalin.

Chang's and Halliday's book also has interesting new information on why Mao was keen to fight the Americans in Korea. It was a war in which Mao was prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives (preferably ex-nationalist troops) to kill a few thousand Americans, apparently because he believed, like Osama bin Laden, that Americans had no real stomach for war and would soon capitulate.

During wars, reporting from the other side is often crucial in assessing the just nature of how a war is conducted. The Korean War was the first and most potentially combustible conflict of the Cold War. Sandwiched as it was between World War II and the Vietnam War, it is also often referred to as the unknown war. Historical writing on the conflict is often patchy and not particularly good at telling the human side of this encounter.

Particularly lacking is an account of the toll it took on northern Koreans, with no reliable figures on how many civilians died in northern Korea during the war (a figure of up to three million people is mentioned by leading historians). In the early years of the war, there was serious debate within the American government and military over how to avoid civilian casualties and the inappropriateness of fire-bombing cities (a tactic used with devastating effect in the latter part of the war against Japan), but eventually most cities in northern Korea were levelled by US-led bombing campaigns. The fate of the peoples of these cities is the forgotten history of the Korean War.

Burchett was one of the few journalists in the right place to cover this story from the other side. However, his over-enthusiasm for the North Korean and Chinese regimes saw him squander this opportunity. After examining Burchett's career in detail and adding in this latest evidence, he emerges not as the true rebel journalist his followers claim him to be but rather a true propagandist, and a huge disappointment to both journalists and historians alike.