War hero: Retired Air Force chaplain
fought for Korean orphans
By Stacy J. Willis
These children were left for dead. Their faces are
filthy and blank. Their little bodies are bloated from hunger and disease.
In these yellowing photos from the Korean War, hundreds of children
sit on a wooden floor, half-dressed, orphaned by battle.
But from these photos an unexpected story emerges
- a story of faith and humanity that ends in a Las Vegas living room.
Last month Las Vegas resident Russell Blaisdell,
90, flew to Seoul, where he was greeted by the Republic of Korea's first
lady, chased by hordes of media, and awarded an honorary Doctorate of
Social Welfare by Kyung Hee University. They called him a hero, a savior,
the "Schindler of the Korean War."
The Korean War Veterans Association named him an
"Ambassador for Peace," and filled his luggage with gifts-watches, medals,
paintings.
But in 1950 Blaisdell was a desperate chaplain whose
conscience charged with trying to save a thousand orphans from a battle
zone, even after his unit evacuated and the children had been written
off as casualties of war.
His saga started two months into the Korean War.
A Presbyterian minister from Hayfield, Minn., Blaisdell was assigned
to be the staff chaplain in the Fifth Air force stationed Seoul.
"Korea was in utter chaos," Blaisdell
said at his Las Vegas condominium. "The damage the communists did in
Seoul was incomprehensible. The Korean people got out most any way they
could - some fled to the mountains, some went south, some were killed."
Hundreds of children were left behind in the streets.
The U.S. military helped run an orphanage for the children, but when
the Chinese and North Korean forces again began moving south toward
Seoul, the city was evacuated again.
The U.S. forces, including the Fifth Air Force,
were among those to evacuate.
"But I didn't go," Blaisdell
said. "I knew these children wouldn't make it if we left them there.
A child in need is a child in need - Korean or American, black or white
- and I knew I had to get them out of there. I just didn't know how."
Blaisdell, the son of an orphan himself, managed
to arrange for a Korean boat to carry the orphans from the port of Inchon
"to anywhere other than Seoul."
But Inchon was 26 miles from the orphanage in Seoul.
Pressed for time, Blaisdell and Sgt. Mike Strand began making harried
trips to and from Inchon in their only truck, hauling the children to
the seaport.
But the promised boat never came. Instead, the only
boat there was an old scow that Blaisdell said wasn't seaworthy enough
to carry children.
"It was so disheartening. I had
done all I knew to do, so the only thing left to do was pray," Blaisdell
recalled. He hadn't eaten or slept for five days and he was "desperate
and sick."
On his last trip to Seoul-now an eerie, deserted
city-he made one last visit to his now-empty headquarters.
"Miraculously, I saw an Air force
general sitting inside," he said.
"That was an answer to my prayer.
He wasn't even supposed to be there. But he took a look at me and said,
'Chaplain, what has happened to you? You look terrible.' And I told
him the whole story. Without hesitation, he opened his books and said,
'I have a wing of C-54s (large airplanes) available. Can you get the
children to the airport in Kimpo?'"
Blaisdell told Brig. Gen. T.C. Rogers that yes,
he would somehow get the orphans to Kimpo-20 miles from Inchon-immediately,
although he had no idea how that would be accomplished.
"I just knew I couldn't quit,"
he said.
When Blaisdell got back to Inchon, he saw a unit
of Marines unloading trucks full of ammunition onto the scow. "That
was the second answer to my prayers," he said.
Blaisdell, who was a lieutenant colonel at the time,
pulled rank on each driver of each truck. "I ordered him to report for
duty with the orphans."
Soon he had a convoy of four trucks loaded with
children, and they made their way toward Kimpo.
A New York Times journalist had gotten word of the
chaplain's struggle and was there along with the wing of C-54s, when
Blaisdell and the children arrived.
The Dec. 21, 1950, New York Times described the
children as they were loaded onto the airplanes: "Scores of small pilgrims
in distress were covered with sores and their bodies were shrunken from
starvation."
