These stories can also be heard on Sunday mornings around 10 am on WILD 102’s “Look Back in Time” program. Each week’s radio story will be posted here on our website.
Weekly radio stories are researched, compiled, and read by Sheila Winstead, RCHS Board Member.
November 23, 2025
In the Roseau Times-Region of October 15, 1953, a story was told of a Roseau County veteran
who had just come home from Korea. I’ll read his story today.
Sgt. Willard D. Sorteberg came home last week. Home to a father who hadn’t seen him since
1948, when he entered the service. Home after 33 months of hell in Communist prison camps . . .
with not enough to eat . . . not enough to wear . . . and five months of pneumonia and malaria
attacks that left him only his will to live by. Home to freedom and love . . . and a chance to live
again and forget the smell of illness and death which was so much a part of his life for those
prison-bound months in Korea.
Sorteberg, who had lived in Roseau County for about seven years with his father, entered the
service in 1948 and, after training in Infantry and Medical outfits, went overseas as a company aid
man in 1950. He saw his first action north of Pusan in August of that year as a temporary aid
man. It was while serving there that he was captured.
“We were way up front when they hit us and we began to pull back. They had us cut off at a road
block, and as we couldn’t move fast with the sick and wounded, they overran us.”
The group of 50 or 60 wounded were scattered about, some in bad shape, when they were
captured. “We had to leave the ones who couldn’t walk,” he said. They just left them lying on the
ground. Those who could walk were forced to march to the north immediately. Sorteberg had to
walk all the first night without his shoes. He had been trying to dry his feet when captured and
the Reds wouldn’t let him put his shoes or socks back on his feet.
Sorteberg himself was wounded in the hand at the time. “They didn’t give our wounded any care.
We marched for 200 miles at night. They would put us up in a farm house or something during
the day,” he said. They crowded 25 men into a 10×10 foot square room and made them stay
there. They were fed only corn and millet on the march and those wounded who couldn’t keep up
were just left behind.
After the nightmare of the long march to the north the sergeant and those with him were ushered
into a camp they later came to call “Death Valley”. “We lost a lot of men on the march – and a lot
more in Death Valley,” he explained. “It was an old mining camp. We had no heat and there was
a lot of snow. Sometimes it got to 30 below zero and all we had to keep warm with was the
clothes on our bodies and what body heat we could get by curling up together in the small room.”
All he had on when captured was summer underwear, fatigues, a pile jacket and cap. He had no
gloves.
The men were let out a bit for exercise during the day but when American airplanes came over,
they were rushed right back in the buildings. If they had a fire outside and were cooking some of
the meager rations of rice, they had to douse them immediately. “They wouldn’t even let us talk
as they figured the airplanes would hear us . . . they sure were stupid,” Sorteberg snorted.
Later a number of the prisoners were transferred from Death Valley to other camps but he and
two doctors had to remain behind to care for the sick and wounded. Somehow he struggled
through the winter when the sun shown only from 11 A. M. to 1 P. M. because of the high
mountains.
From Death Valley he was marched to a camp near the Yalu River. By this time he estimated that
about 50 men were left out of the 500 he was captured with.
At this camp the soldiers were split into classes according to their rank, and intensive
propaganda methods were used to get them to accept Communism. “They kept throwing
propaganda at us . . . classes, lectures, newspapers. They tried to get us to sign papers saying
we used germ warfare . . . and wanted our names on propaganda sheets such as ‘Pull the
Troops Out’ . . . ‘Send the Fleet Home’”.
“They kept the germ warfare one going for about four months . . . that was all we heard,” he said.
“If the negotiations were going badly, the Communists said it was all the fault of the UN. They
preached about their glorious victories in battle and yelled about the ‘capitalists and imperialists’
all the time,” he remembered. “If we missed a lecture, we had to go on hard labor . . . and we
were so weak we could hardly do anything.” The Reds even threatened withholding what meager
food rations they had if they didn’t attend the propaganda mill.
In August of 1952 all the sergeants were moved from this camp to another farther north in Korea.
“This one was even worse,” the doughty soldier remarked.
Next week I’ll read the rest of Sergeant Sorteberg’s interview.
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for letting us share our county’s history with your listeners by donating air time, studio time, and production staff every week.