Places in Korea: The Geoje POW Camp

For those who have read my series of postings about General Haydon Boatner (Part 1 begins here) you may be interested in visiting the modern day site of the Geoje POW camp.  Today a small section of the former Goeje Island POW camp has been reconstructed into a museum to remember this little known chapter of the Korean War. The museum is located adjacent to the modern day city Gohyeun which is more well known for its massive ship yards than for its significant Korean War history.  At the entrance to the museum visitors are greeted by the flags of all the nations that participated in the defense of the Republic of Korea during the Korean War:

Just passed the flags is this quite impressive fountain and statue of a rifle with a fixed bayonet:

One thing about war memorials in Korea that I have always liked is that they have a lot of really impressive sculptures and this one is no different. Before heading into the main camp visitors will go through the prison’s museum. Inside the museum they have artifacts and recreations of what happened here during the Korean War using mannequins:

These recreations do a good job of visually displaying how large the camp once was as well as the tough living conditions the prisoners found themselves contending with:

Of course the recreations include the final uprising in the prison:

Unfortunately I could not find a recreation of North Korean Colonel Lee Hak-ku hiding in a ditch after the uprising. The recreation pictured above actually reminded me of some of the protesters I’ve seen outside of Camp Red Cloud before. Just take PW off their shirts and I would think they were Hanchongnyun members.

Once you finished checking out the museum you can walk towards the actual prison camp recreation by crossing a bridge over the tree line and then walking through the gate you see below:

Inside the enclosure there is a number of tents and buildings that were used to house the prisoners.  Here is an example of your typical quonset hut building of the day:

Many of these buildings were also used as classrooms to teach democracy and capitalism to the prisoners while other ones served as job training centers. There are also the ruins of a few of the actual buildings from the 1950’s that are still visible:

This ruin used to be the camp’s post exchange (PX). The floor to the PX was paved with concrete because the building also served as the officer club and dances were often held here. It makes me wonder if this was the building where General Boatner was invited to a cocktail party when he first arrived at the out of control prison camp?

Here is a view from slightly above the camp that shows the modern day city of Gohyeun that is adjacent to this museum:

Now compare this picture with what this place looked like during the Korean War:

As you can see the camp’s tents and buildings used to fill the entire valley that is now occupied with the high rise apartments and buildings Gohyeun.

Overall, a visit to the museum may be worthwhile if you are visiting the island anyway or if you are a Korean War scholar that likes to visit historic sites like this from the war. However, what I didn’t like about the museum is that it felt more like a Korean War theme park than an actual museum. The perfect example of this picture below:

Visitors can have their pictures taken as prisoners in the camp. This seemed pretty outrageous to me since this place should have a more solemn tone to it considering the serious and tragic nature of what happened here. Most of the Korean War memorials in the country do have a solemn tone to them so the fact that this one has turned into a carnival atmosphere is actually an exception to the rule. Never the less an interesting place to visit, but probably not worth your time to see if your sole purpose for coming to Goeje Island is to visit this museum.