Despite his efforts to remain unnoticed, Harry Iredale, of the ship’s oceanographers and civilian, found himself targeted by the North Koreans like everyone else. One morning, he was hauled into an interrogation room where he faced Possum, his room “daddy,” along with three other officers and a guard. “Who is the CIA agent?”

Possum demanded. “Who made you try to fool us?” When Iredale said he didn’t understand the question, the officers abruptly filed out, and the guard began beating him. Later, Possum and the others returned to ask the same question. Again, Iredale claimed confusion. Enraged, one of the officers punched him in the mouth. Fear jolted through Iredale—no officer had ever struck him before. The communists, he thought, were panicking. They ordered him to write a confession naming the CIA man and detailing his shipmates’ supposed plots.

The oceanographer spent the rest of that day and the entire night writing. Despite his fear, frustration had replaced his earlier compliance. Back in January, an interrogator had mocked him for being “weak” and giving in too easily. The insult still burned. This time, Iredale resolved, he would give them nothing.

“I’m English,” he explained many years later. “I got stubborn.”

When he finished, his “confession” amounted to little more than a rehash of old statements. He named no CIA agent and revealed nothing new about the crew’s resistance. In the morning, someone came to collect his work. A few hours later, the same guard who had beaten him returned and attacked him again—punching and kicking until Iredale flew out the door into the corridor.

That afternoon, he was taken to a larger room where the Bear and three other guards waited. They forced him to kneel, jamming a thick wooden pole behind his knees. Two guards jumped up and down on each end while the Bear screamed threats. Then the brute produced a wooden hammer handle and began striking Iredale on the crown of his head. The oceanographer screamed as loudly as he could, hoping to convince the Bear he was inflicting too much pain.

When it was over, Iredale looked like a man who had been through a prizefight. His lip had swollen to three times its normal size, his scalp was covered in red welts, one eye was swollen shut, and a blood-red halo circled the other. His ribs, hips, and knees ached terribly. But he hadn’t broken.

He was ordered to draft yet another confession, and this time he added a small detail—that he had once served aboard the USS Banner. At dusk, an officer told him to wash his own blood from the floor and walls with a rag, forcing him to stand on a chair to reach the higher splatters.

Around four a.m.—after 39 hours of beatings and interrogation without food, water, or sleep—he was finally sent back to his cell. When his cellmates groggily asked if he was all right, Iredale mumbled something about still being alive before collapsing on his bed.

SGT Bob Hammond, USMC

With his history of defiance, Marine Sergeant Bob Hammond expected to be singled out for severe punishment—and the thought terrified him. As he listened to the chaos around him, he considered ways to end his own life: jumping from a window or attacking a guard so he’d be shot.

But Hammond had a wife and two small children. He couldn’t do it. Instead, he decided to stage a fake suicide attempt, hoping to exploit the North Koreans’ apparent desire to keep their prisoners alive.

One night, he broke a mirror and tried to cut his wrists. The shard barely pierced his skin, so he tried another approach. Lying in bed, he pressed the glass against his stomach and rolled over hard, tearing a gash so deep he feared he had gone too far. The bleeding eventually stopped, and he drifted into an exhausted sleep.

The next morning, guards found him lying in his bunk, smeared with dried blood. Alarmed, they took him to a duty officer, who demanded to know why he had hurt himself. Hammond screamed like a madman, demanding to be shot and calling the officer “chicken” for not doing it. Later, a communist colonel gave him a strange, almost fatherly lecture about why he should live. The ruse worked—Hammond was never beaten again.

On the morning of December 19, 1968, the ordeal ended as suddenly as it began. The beatings stopped. Glorious General’s enforcers withdrew. Silence settled over the halls, and an uneasy calm descended upon the battered, exhausted Americans. “Hell Week” was finally over.

Source “Act of War”, by Jack Cheevers