Of all the Americans on this site, Richard Desautels is the one the United States government has already conceded. In writing, in 2011, the Pentagon acknowledged that he was taken into China during the Korean War and died there. Every other case here asks a reader to follow a chain of inference. This one asks them to explain a document the government produced itself — and then to ask why, having admitted it, the government stopped pursuing it.
Sgt. Richard George Desautels, U.S. Army.
The farm boy
Richard Desautels grew up on a Vermont dairy farm in a French-Canadian family, speaking two languages. As a boy he rode his favorite cow back to the barn, but what he loved most was driving the tractor and fixing things. “He could fix things and keep them going right,” his younger sister, Lucille Allen, recalled. “He was a strong young man and he could get through a lot of things and I thought that he would always make it through.”
In Manchuria he survived by driving and repairing trucks for Chinese soldiers who “often had no idea how to drive, let alone fix engines,” and back in camp he angered his captors by telling fellow prisoners what the guards were saying. In 2009 his brother Rolland asked that the case become “the benchmark for Chinese cooperation.” (Rolland Desautels letter, July 21, 2009.)
Key facts
- Who: Sgt. Richard G. Desautels, U.S. Army, Company A, 2nd Engineer Combat Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division, from Shoreham, Vt.
- Captured: Dec. 1, 1950, in Korea.
- What the government acknowledged: In 2011 the Pentagon acknowledged in writing that he was taken into China and died there. DPAA says Chinese records list his death at Mukden (Shenyang) on April 29, 1953.
- Status: DPAA Active Pursuit. Beijing has acknowledged holding a file on his fate and has not produced it.
- Do you have information on what happened to Richard Desautels? Contact us in confidence, in English or your own language.
What is known
The man. Richard G. Desautels, service number RA 11 188 218, U.S. Army — Company A, 2nd Engineer Combat Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division. He grew up on a dairy farm near Shoreham, Vermont, in a bilingual French-Canadian family; his parents were Armand and Evelina, and his sister was Lucille Allen. He was eighteen or nineteen when he was captured; the records disagree. DPAA’s current profile states that he appears in Chinese records as having died at Mukden (Shenyang) on April 29, 1953, and lists his case in its Active Pursuit category.
A note on his rank. He is carried here as Sergeant, the rank used in the Pentagon’s own 2011 acknowledgement of his case and in the published record. He appears as Corporal on the contemporaneous casualty roster and in the RAND study of the Korean War missing, most likely a later or posthumous adjustment. We record the discrepancy rather than resolving it silently.
Captured. 1 December 1950, during the Chinese assault on the 2nd Infantry Division around Kunu-ri. He had been shot in the knee.
Alive in captivity. He spoke to his mother in a radio broadcast on 22 December 1951. Letters reached home, the last dated 23 February 1952.
What the RAND study recorded. Its March 1956 addendum states that he drove trucks, learned Chinese, and was seen shortly before the last repatriation.
Declared dead. In 1954 the Army wrote to the family, presuming him to have died in North Korea. In 1955 an FBI agent visited the farm, after the family had donated five dollars to a group called Fighting Home Folks of Fighting Men.
What his fellow prisoners said
These accounts come from the debriefs of returned prisoners, as in PIP’s files (Sauter and Zimmerlee, 2013). The book carries no endnotes, so the book is cited here.
He reached Camp 5 at Pyoktong wearing the uniform of a Chinese army truck driver. He had been taken across the Yalu into Manchuria after his capture and held there for roughly ten months. He learned Chinese well enough to translate the guards’ conversations for other prisoners, which got him classed as a reactionary.
He told me that the Chinese would not let him come in contact with other POWs as he knew too much.
They may hold him because they crossed the border with him in 1950.
Clarence Banks, a returned prisoner, on seeing him:
We hollered to him and when he stood up we could see he had been severely beaten and had lost 20 or 30 lbs and seemed to be in quite a daze.
In mid-April 1953 he told other prisoners he was being taken to Antung — today Dandong, on the Chinese side of the Yalu. And then he said the thing this case turns on:
At that time he mentioned if he should disappear to make inquiries concerning his whereabouts with the proper military authorities.
He was not among the men China released at Big Switch. In 1958 a returned prisoner came to the farm in Vermont: the two had agreed to meet five years after coming home.
What China has said — three accounts that cannot all be true
- The 1950s: that he escaped. China said the same of Capt. Harry Moreland, a double amputee. The claim appears in the communist side’s March 1954 accounting and again in 1956.
- 1992: “None of the POWs under Chinese control was transferred to a third country or to the Chinese territory.”
- March 2003, in Beijing: a People’s Liberation Army representative said he had found a complete record on the case in the Chinese archives — and that Desautels became mentally ill on 22 April 1953, died on 29 April 1953, and was buried in a cemetery near Shenyang, the graves later moved for construction with no record of where the remains went.
The 2003 account contradicts the 1992 denial outright. It also sits badly against the RAND study, which records him seen shortly before the last repatriation — Big Switch ran through August and September 1953, four months after the date China gives for his death. Both cannot be right.
The concession, and what followed it
In 1990 the Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency told Congress in writing that there were no intelligence indicators that U.S. personnel from the Korean conflict were not returned to U.S. control at the end of the war.
How the admission came out is itself part of the record. In 2008 documents that had been given to an elderly member of the Desautels family five years earlier were recognized for what they were, and the Pentagon acknowledged that in 2003 Beijing had dropped decades of stonewalling on the case. The Associated Press carried it on 19 June 2008.
Three years later the Pentagon put it in writing. A Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office official wrote to Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff on 25 February 2011, released under FOIA case 12-F-0956:
Regarding queries about Americans being taken into China during the Korean War, we have one case in which an American, Army Sergeant Richard Desautels, who drove trucks for Chinese forces died while in China. The Chinese provided information on this individual in 2003, and in 2009 we requested the PLA archivists search for additional information on his death and burial. We did not resubmit his name in 2010 because we had just asked the archivists for data a few months earlier.
Read the last sentence again. The reason given for not asking in 2010 is that they had asked in 2009. On 24 May 2016 the Pentagon confirmed that the China archival program had resolved no last-known-alive cases, and that China had never provided the Desautels file.
What remains unresolved
- The file itself. A PLA representative described a complete record of nine to ten pages, in the Chinese archives, still classified. As of a DPAA statement of May 24, 2016, China had not provided it. See the lead on that file.
- The grave. Which cemetery near Shenyang; which construction project moved it; whether Liaoning provincial or Shenyang municipal records of the reinterment survive.
- The contradiction. Escaped, never transferred, or died on 29 April 1953 — against a U.S. study recording him alive shortly before the last repatriation.
- The debriefs. The prisoner statements above are quoted from the book rather than from the underlying Army debriefs.
- How many others fit this pattern. Denial, then admission. PIP has not found a systematic answer to that question.
Why the case matters
Because it is the exception that the standing denial has to be written around. After 2003 the official formula narrowed from “no evidence” to “no credible evidence other than Desautels” — a carve-out for one man who, the argument runs, went into China alone and for an obscure administrative reason.
If that is right, it should be demonstrable from a nine-page file whose custodian has already described it. If it is not right, then the category of Americans taken into China is not one man wide.
Evidence and sources
- DPMO email of 25 February 2011 to Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, released under FOIA case 12-F-0956 — the written concession.
- DPMO memorandum T-03/005850, 5 May 2003 — the record of what the PLA representative said in Beijing in March 2003.
- RAND, MR-351 volume 3, appendix 13, March 1956 addendum — trucks, Chinese language, seen shortly before the last repatriation.
- PIP research files — the prisoner debrief quotations, cited to the book because the underlying debriefs have not been obtained.
- Associated Press, 19 June 2008 — “China Admits Taking, Burying U.S. POW.”
- Related U.S. records: NARA RG 319, Entry A1 134-E, Container 140 — the Denny–Desautels detainee files; and RG 24, the BuPers 1957–60 Report of U.S. Prisoners in China.
Request for information
Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.
- Information on other Americans secretly taken from the known POW camps in North Korea to China.
- Reports on U.S. POW camps in Mukden (Shenyang) during and after the war.
- Additional Chinese or Soviet records on what happened to Desautels.
China says he became mentally ill on April 22, 1953, and died a week later. A U.S. study recorded him seen shortly before the last repatriation, months after that date. U.S. intelligence reports indicated Shenyang was a processing point for POWs sent to the Soviet Union. Is it more likely Desautels suddenly died of a “mental illness” and Beijing lost his body? Or was he shipped to the Soviet Union? Or did the Chinese execute him for knowing too much?
Write to contact@powinvestigativeproject.org. We treat every approach in confidence.
中文
理查德·G·德索特尔斯（Richard G. Desautels）— 寻求信息
美国陆军中士，军号 RA 11 188 218，隶属第2步兵师第2工兵战斗营A连。1950年12月1日在军隅里一带的战斗中被中国人民志愿军俘获，时年十八或十九岁。据同营归国战俘回忆，他被带过鸭绿江进入中国东北，约十个月后才出现在碧潼第5战俘营，身穿中国军队卡车司机制服，并已学会中文。1953年4月中旬，他告诉难友自己将被送往安东（今丹东）。他没有出现在1953年的战俘遣返中。
1992年，中方表示没有任何战俘被转移到第三国或中国境内。2003年3月在北京，一位中国人民解放军代表告知美方，中国档案中有一份关于此案的完整记录，共九至十页，仍属机密；并称德索特尔斯于1953年4月29日死亡，安葬于沈阳附近一处墓地，后因施工迁坟，改葬地点没有记录。
我们希望了解：一、其他从朝鲜境内已知战俘营被秘密转往中国的美国人的情况；二、战争期间及战后奉天（沈阳）关押美军战俘的情况；三、有关德索特尔斯最终下落的任何其他信息。美方文件中他的姓名也曾被误拼为 Desaultels、Desautel、Dessautels、Desautelles。
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