Nordin was a POW in Korean War
By Joe Todd Historian
Feb 26, 2018 at 6:03 AM Feb 26, 2018 at 6:59 AM
EDITOR'S NOTE: Historian Joe L. Todd interviewed Cletus Nordin in Tulsa on Sept. 19, 2017.
Cletus Nordin ws born on March 2, 1925 in London, Ark., to William L. and Elta Leona (Johnston) Nordin. He went to school near Lamar, and in Webbers Falls. William Nordin was a sharecropper, and went to farm north of Porum. Nordin was 10 when the family moved to Oklahoma. He finished grade school at Conley School, north of Porum. He attended Porum High School, but also had to work the farm. Eventually, Nordin quit school and at age 16 was traveling to California for a job harvesting fruit near Bakersfield, California.
JOE TODD: Where were you when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor?
CLETUS NORDIN: I remember it plain. The English teacher brought her radio to school Monday morning and we heard FDR's speech on Monday morning after Pearl Harbor had been bombed. That was quite an experience to sit there and listen. I finished that year of high school and the next spring I went to California and started my fruit tramp life. The first trip out there, the guy I went out there with. He asked me if I wanted to go and I heard Bakersfield was a good place and he pulled into a place south of Bakersfield called Weed Patch, California, just a wide spot in the road. He told me to get out there because he was going west to the coast. So I got out and I was sitting there and there was a grocery store there and I went over and had a little suitcase with me with some underwear and socks in it. I sat down there and I took my money out and I had a dollar and sixty seven cents in my pocket. That is all I had left out of my thirty dollars. I thought, "How stupid can you be, you don't know a damn soul and here you are with no place to stay with no money to eat on." About that time a Greyhound bus pulled up on that dirt road and the air brakes came on and dust flew everywhere and a guy got out and said, "Anybody wanting a job fighting fire, the Sequoia National Forest has a forest fire and we will pay you a dollar an hour the minute you get on this bus until you get back." I thought he was crazy because no one got paid a dollar an hour. I went over and asked if they paid a dollar an hour and he said, "Yes, 24 hours a day, I have no idea how long we will be gone." I told him to hold me a seat and I took my little suitcase to the Tidewater service station and asked if I could leave it and he told me throw it in the junk room and got on that bus and I was gone 21 days and nights and was paid cash when I got back and I had more money than I thought ever existed, five hundred or six hundred dollars. I went over to the post office and wired some money to my mother back in Oklahoma. Then I had it made, I would wait on that truck and get on it. I bought me some clothes and the humidity was so dry, you could wash out a pair of pants and throw them on the line and they would be dry in a couple of hours. Everywhere there was work. I did that for three or four years in a row. Then I came back to Oklahoma and went to work for Dunlap Tire Company. The war had passed me up because I couldn't pass the physical.
T: When were you drafted?
N: I was drafted in 1948. I worked for Ernie Young at a Phillips Station here in Tulsa. He was my uncle. I figured they had turned me down and the war was over and they don't need people now. So I went to Oklahoma City for my physical and I got to the end of the line and the guy said, "You are in tip top shape". Of course I had been working on the service station driveway running and washing cars and I was in good shape. I passed the physical and got drafted and had ten days and had to report to the bus station in Tulsa. There was a bus waiting and must have been forty or fifty guys that had been drafted and headed for Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. It was Camp Chaffee then. It was the fall of the year in September or October.
T: Did you take Basic at Camp Chaffee?
N: Yes.
T: Where were you when North Korea invaded the south?
N: I went over as a reserve and the North Koreans had already captured Seoul when I got there.
T: Tell me about going to Korea.
N: I was recalled in September of 1950.
T: What unit were you with?
N: I was in the inactive reserves. When I left Chaffee the company commander called me over and he said I could get out of the Army if I wanted to. He told me that law had changed and if you have served twelve months, you can get out, but you have to transfer into the reserves.
T: When did you transfer to the reserves?
N: That was late 1949. I can't remember the exact date and called back September of 1950.
T: Tell me about the trip to Korea.
N: That's a good one. I was working at the Skelly station at 10th and Elgin and here came the postman with a special delivery and said, "I've got something for you." It was a set of orders to go to Oklahoma City for a physical. I went to Oklahoma City the next day and checked in and they guy said they may need some reserves in Korea. I asked how long I had and the lieutenant said at least three weeks and you may not even get called. Two days later I get my second set of orders and had to be on the train that night for Fort Hood, Texas. They read the articles of war to us at Fort Hood, Texas. They told us we were being shipped to Camp Stoneman, California to go to Korea and if you jump ship to go home to see the family, that is desertion in the face of the enemy and that is a firing squad, so you take a chance on facing a firing squad if you leave before you get to Korea. I went to Camp Stoneman and was there about a day and a half and they sent us to San Francisco and they lined us up to get on an airplane to fly to South Korea and officer in a jeep came in at 10:00 at night and he said "This plane has been confiscated to take officers to South Korea and a ship is waiting for you." I was in a platoon and they told us we were going to be guards on the ship until we got to Japan.
T: What unit were you assigned to?
N: Company K, 19th Infantry Regiment 24th Infantry Division. I was assigned to a recoilless rifle squad because in Basic Training I had training on the recoilless rifle. I really didn't look forward to serving on the recoilless rifle because firing it at night, you are not supposed to fire three rounds in any one position because it lights up the whole position and you are always on Nordin the high point of the position and everyone is trying to get you. When I was assigned to K Company, the company commander said, "Anybody know anything about the recoilless rifle?" I never said a word. He looked up the records and called my name and said I was on the recoilless rifle squad. The guy had been killed the day before so I took his place.
T: Where did you land in Korea?
N: Inchon.
T: Were you there for the invasion?
N: We were there after the invasion and Seoul was just north of Inchon and inland about 20 miles and had been captured by the North Koreans and they had pushed south all the way to Pusan. The Pusan perimeter was all we had left. We landed at Inchon and they put us on trucks and took us to a place called Yong Dong Po to a replacement depot and that is where we were assigned to our companies. There was a lieutenant with a clipboard and he called names and you got on the truck. They called everyone except me and I was the only one still there with the lieutenant. I said, "Sir, where in the hell am I supposed to go?" He asked my name and he said I was to be in the 24th Division. I told him he didn't call my name and he said I should have been in the group that left before and I told him we just got here and wasn't here when they left and he told me to get on a truck. It was going in that direction and it close enough that I could walk to the 24th. I was assigned and the captain pointed out a guy and told me that was my squad leader and his name was Pate. I went over and introduced myself and told him I was his replacement and he told me I was his assistant gunner. He asked if I had ever been an assistant gunner on a recoilless rifle and I told him I had in Basic Training and knew how to do it. He told me had been the line for five weeks and needed to get a bath and shave and he took off. About an hour and a half later I saw this guy sitting that looked familiar and went over to him and it was Pate, my squad leader. He was a kid, a teenager and looked like he was 40. He had been in combat the whole time in Korea.
T: Where were you in South Korea?
N: At that time we were south of the 38th Parallel, about thirty-five miles south of Seoul. Really we were just waiting for orders to see where we were to be ordered the next morning. This was before the Chinese came in. They didn't come in until November 1950 and we were still fighting North Koreans. We had taken Panmunjom; the North Korean capital and the North Koreans were trying to take it back. MacArthur made a parachute drop at the 38th Parallel. Everybody said he couldn't invade Inchon because the water was too shallow but he had it down to a certain hour where you could get in then he made that parachute drop along the 38th Parallel and caught the North Koreans by surprise. We then went north because the troops that were still in South Korea were slaughtered. They were shot down like dogs and that was the objective, to just kill them, we didn't have time to capture them. When on enemy soldier is captured, it takes five American soldiers to take care of him and the same way with the enemy. (Nordin and his platoon were caught in a firefight and captured by the Chinese.) We went back the other way and found an officer and we were sneaking down this valley and had two South Korean soldiers with us. We were coming to a roadblock and the two South Korean soldiers said they thought they were friendly so we got up and must have walked into a thousand Chinese soldiers. We dropped our weapons and I had already destroyed that 37 mm recoilless rifle. I knew we were not getting it out. They put a Chinese soldier with a BAR on one side of us and one on the other side of us. Pate and I shook hands and I said, "This is the end of the line, buddy." An English speaking Chinese officer came up and he said something in Chinese and the two guys with the BARs got up and left. He came to us and said, "You are prisoners of the Chinese People's Volunteers, the war is over for you." We walked over five hundred miles north to POW Camp #5. I was captured New Year's Day and it was the seventh or eighth of January when we headed back north. We walked about fifteen miles every night until daylight the next day. They did that to keep our own planes from strafing us. We got to Camp 5 March the sixth.
T: Where is POW Camp 5?
N: Pyoktong, North Korea.
T: Where was the cemetery at the camp?
N: Before we got to the POW camp, we just put them on the side of the road. At the camp, there was a mountain behind us and they had a burial detail of the healthiest guys that could carry a stretcher and they gave us a dull axe and we had sixteen inches of frozen ground to cut into. That axe had a blade that was as dull as the side of your hand to dig a hole. We couldn't dig very deep because we were weak. We dug a few inches, lay the body in and lay the frozen stuff over the body and then dig another one. In August or September of 1951, the Chinese called out names and moved about three hundred of us to Camp Three at Changsong. By the winter of 1952, they called us out and spoke to us in Chinese and it had to be translated and Mao came out with an easy treatment policy. All we wanted to eat and that sounded promising. They started bringing milo in and they steamed it just like they do rice.
T: What is your worst memory of the prison camp?
N: Camp 4 was ragged, run down and bombed out but it was welcome because it was the end of an all-night march. You had to face it every night. At least you could be where you could sit down but you might freeze to death while you sit. At first we didn't know if we were going to get in a building or not. Then the way they piled us in there, it was just being in a deep freeze. It sounds ridiculous but anyone that was there will tell you the same thing. It was two or three days before we got to Camp 5 and they were putting us in villages that had been vacated rather than hiding us in the woods. I had to go to the bathroom and you yell at the guard that you had to go and I forget what the word is and he said it was OK to come out. The latrine was up the side of the hill.
T: How did you work your way into Chinese headquarters?
N: You get their confidence. This was the first time history that an enemy had tried to indoctrinate their prisoners of war with their form of government. We were brain washed. We were taught the socialist system. We listened to it in Chinese and we listened to it in English then we had to go off in a room and discuss it among ourselves. There were prisoners that would rat on you for a piece of candy. Pate and I wanted to know who was doing this. They were writing atrocity articles for favors. One was written that I came up on this South Korean woman that was pregnant and I took my bayonet, gutted her and cut the head off the baby. If you write articles like that for favors. We figured we ought to try to stop that if we could. The best way to stop it was to see it before it got out of camp. The logical way to do it was to get somebody inside the Chinese camp. There was another guy involved and his name was David Fortune. He was a good soldier and mean as a junk yard dog. But he had a temper and he would go off his handle and get us all killed. He couldn't control his temper.
T: How long were you a prisoner?
N: Thirty one months and 23 days. I kept a calendar and that is 960 days. The reason I know. after I came home, they decide since they didn't have to feed us since we were prisoners, the decided to give us a POW pay allowance of two dollars and a half a day. I counted the calendars and had nine hundred and sixty six days. The first time they paid me, they paid me one hundred days short. I called them and told them I could prove it and I got my other hundred days.
T: Tell me about being released.
N: When we left North Korea, they put us on trucks.
T: How were you notified you were being released?
N: The Chinese told us. We knew there had been a change. They had Soju, like our White Lightning and is made out of rice and will kick the crap out of you. About a month before they told us, they said there had been improvements in negotiations at Panmunjom and maybe we would go home soon. About a month later they gathered us together and said the armistice had been signed and we would be going home soon. But there was a delay because the International Red Cross has to come and inspect all these POW camps. The Chinese didn't even recognize the Red Cross. During World War II we could drop Red Cross packages into the prison camps so the prisoners would have something to eat, the Chinese wouldn't allow it. Well, I wanted to go home. They gave us a little brown sack that had a little wooden handle toothbrush, a small comb and a little tube of toothpaste. It had four cigarettes and a little book of matches and that was about it. We waited three weeks in the POW camp for them to show up and they didn't get a very warm welcome. There was a bunch of mad soldiers, we just wanted to get home.
T: Tell me about coming home.
N: We got on the ship and the first morning out of Japan, we had to go to a meeting below deck. We had to go to a psychiatrist. I felt pretty good, I had already been to the PX and bought a camera and cigarettes. We spent the rest of the day with CID and military intelligence and they asked us what we did. I didn't dare tell them what I did because they were not going to believe it. I had lost track of Pate because he had been sent to a Korean jail and I heard they had killed him but it was a different Pate. They asked me and I told them things were pretty normal. One morning there was an FBI guy there and he said, "You are not telling us everything." I told them that I was trying to tell them everything. He asked, "Do you know a Lloyd Pate?" I said, "Man do I, do you know where he is?" He said, "He is one ship ahead of you on the way to San Francisco. He is telling us a story that is a little hard to digest." I asked, "What is he telling you?" He said, "That is not the way it works and what if what you tell us doesn't jive with what he has told us, you are in a lot of trouble." I told him I expected that but when you hear the facts it will change. From then I met with the FBI, CID, Criminal Intelligence and Military Intelligence all the way to San Francisco. The Chinese asked if I wanted to be one of the guys that stayed and I told them no. He asked me why and I told him, "What I have learned here I am going to take back to the states." The FBI said, "Wasn't that a little risky? I said it was. That FBI man asked if I wanted to proceed and I said if it helped my country, yes. When I got to Muskogee there was an FBI man contacted me and there was one in Tulsa. They were waiting on me. This court martial thing came up and I gave a hundred fifty seven page deposition on Gallagher because I had firsthand information on him talking to the Chinese I would be in there listening.