THE POW PAPERS OF CPL. ROGER DUMAS

"...neither my agency nor any other Government agency has uncovered evidence, other than that which was solicited by Corporal Dumas’ family, to indicate that he was ever captured and held prisoner by communist forces during the Korean War."
             Robert L. Jones, deputy assistant secretary of Defense
                            for POW/MIA Affairs; Feb. 23, 2000 letter to Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-CT.

 

"There was a Dumas there too."

                              April 1953 Debriefing Report of Sgt. Cecil V. Preston.

     THE first word the military had that Cpl. Roger A. Dumas was a prisoner of war surfaced in a U.S. Army hospital in Tokyo, Japan, in April 1953....
   

    Army Sgt. Cecil Preston, who had served in the 19th Regiment (24th Infantry Division), which was also Dumas' outfit, was interrogated by military debriefers about who and what he saw while a prisoner of the Chinese communists at Camp No. 5 on the Yalu River, North Korea's border with Manchuria...

    Sgt. Preston, who was released in the first (Little Switch) of two POW exchanges in 1953, gave the interrogators the names or descriptions of more than 30 men in camp with him. Some had died during their grueling imprisonment. But others had survived nearly three years of torture, starvation and deprivation.

    Three of the men he knew to be alive when he was released in April 1953 were never released, even in August and September (Big Switch) when thousands more UN POWs were exchanged with Communist POWs at the 38th Parallel.

  

   One of the three men was ROGER DUMAS.   Sgt. Preston was returned to the United States.  He assumed that all the prisoners except those who had died had followed him.

   Years later, when he learned from Roger's brother Robert that Cpl. Dumas had not been repatriated in 1953, he broke down in tears...

   
                            POW List of Sgt. Cecil Preston:

         Sgt. Preston named all the men he expected would be repatriated later in the year. Three of them - Dumas (No. 7), Pfc. Junior Ridgeway (No. 18.) and Pfc.James Bailey (No. 20.) - were not among those released in August and September 1953.  They were last seen alive in Camp 5, North Korea.

"There was a Dumas there too."  

A page from Sgt. Preston's April 1953 debriefing report.

          Many repatriated POWs were interrogated and debriefed numerous times in the months following their release. Only in some of the interrogations were the ex-POWs asked for names of men they believed would not be released. Much of the questioning dealt with camp conditions and examples of brutality and atrocities. When they were asked about men still in the camps, most of them replied with names of the so-called "progressive" prisoners who had exhibited inclinations of remaining behind voluntarily - as 21 Americans, one British and two Belgian POWs did.

            Some complained that their interrogators were more interested in identifying "collaborators" or POWs who may have acquired Communist leanings than in those men the Communists were intending to keep hostage.

            Preston's mention of Roger Dumas, however, was at least noted in the Dumas file.  And it undoubtedly accounted for his inclusion on future lists of Americans for whom the U.S. government asked the Communists to account.

See MORE REPORTS OF THE CAPTURE OF CPL. ROGER DUMAS