The story of the Captivity and Deaths of Monsignor Pat Brennan, Fr Tommie Cusack, and Fr Jack O’Brien

The accounts of so many witnesses vary on matters of detail but the general picture emerges clearly. (The Mantle, Winter 1959)
Father Conneely wrote an article in The Mantle to celebrate what would have been the 25th Anniversary of Fr Tommie Cusack’s ordination. He said: “I set out to speak of Fr. Cusack and found that the story of the last months of his life is inseparably interwoven with the story of others who shared his captivity.”

On the night of 17TH JULY 1950 after dinner, two Columban Fathers , Fathers McGinn and Cleary, who had come down to Mokpo from up near the 38th parallel, challenged “the old Mokpo hands”, Pére Brennan and Father Henry, to a game of bridge.

The bridge game had just begun when the Korean houseboy told Monsignor Brennan, that there was a visitor at the door. Soon Pére (Brennan) returned and said, “Well boys, this is it”.

He introduced the visitor, a dishevelled young man named McDonald, from the US Embassy staff in Taegu, who had driven into Mokpo to tell Monsignor Brennan to get his men out as soon as possible and head for Pusan. The North Koreans had crossed the Kum River. General Walker, now commanding UN ground forces, was pulling back to hold the south-east corner; there would be only delaying action at Taejon, and the south-west, which included Cholla namdo province, would not be defended.

Pére Brennan found it hard to comprehend but there was no room for arguments. He thanked the courier who had made the trip of over two hundred rugged miles to warn them here and at Kwangju and suggested that he have a meal and a few hours’ sleep. He asked Father Harold Henry to go down to the port and look for any kind of boat that would take them to Pusan. With the Mokpo jeep and those of the visitors he could collect the men in the other parishes.

The crowded room was suddenly quiet, and Father Henry asked if he meant that he was not going with them. He said yes, he was going to stay. “It was no big deal, it went with the job. And would they now get moving for an early start.”

Father Cusack, the Mokpo pastor, then said he was going to stay. His assistant, Father O’Brien, said he was, too. The Pére looked at each of them a long, silent moment. He didn’t trust himself to speak just then but raised his hand in a half salute that said it all.

Within an hour or so, Harold Henry came back with the night’s first good news. A Korean gunboat had come into Mokpo for a repair job, and the captain had agreed to take the twelve young priests to Pusan. They should go on board soon, because he would sail when repairs were finished.

The others left in the early morning. The Pére was up to wave them off. His two companions had said their farewells and were asleep. He was subdued and in need of sleep himself, but optimistic still.

“We’ll be seeing you, boys!” he called as the jeeps began to move.

They echoed the promise and prayed in their hearts it would come true.

When they were saying their goodbyes on the evening of the 17th , Father Tommie Cusack entrusted Father Michael O’Connor, who was not long in Korea and who was learning the language, with a message to his mother which Father O’Connor sent from Japan.

It read:

5th Sept ’50

St Columbans,
No 56 Hikawa-Cho,
Shibuya-Ku,
Japan

Dear Mrs Cusack,
I am just arriving in Japan from Korea. I left Mokpo before the Communists came in but Fr Tom, Monsignor Brennan and Fr O’Brien stayed behind with their parishioners. Fr Tom was free to leave with us who were studying the language there but he told me to tell you he would never again be happy if he left his parish when his people needed him most. It breaks his heart to cause you such worry, but he was very happy and I leaving him. He knows that deep down in your heart you are happy with him and proud of him.

I was in Pusan for two weeks after leaving Mokpo but got no word from Fr Tom or the priests in Mokpo but I know Bishop Byrne, an American Bishop in Seoul, is free to drive around the city so we are quite sure that the Irish priests are safe but like the priests in China will not be able to write. But please God the Americans will soon drive the Communists back.

As soon as I get any news I will let you know. There are nine of our priests in Pusan and they might be able to get some news through to us from Fr Tom.

God bless you and strengthen you
M O’Connor.

(A member of Tommie's family has the original handwritten letter.)

 

24th July 1950:

The Communists entered Kwangju at 11 p.m. on July 24th and were in Mokpo within 3 hours. A truck load of soldiers pulled up at the front door, and when Dominic, the houseboy, told Monsignor Brennan that the Reds had arrived, Monsignor knelt down and began to say the rosary. When the Communists were told that this was a Church, they said they were not opposed to anyone’s religion and went away.

(The Mantle, The Splendid Cause Chapter Four, Apostolic Prefecture of Kwangju. Summary of Events)

25th July 1950:

The next morning the Communists returned to Mokpo and when Father O’Brien was going up to the Church to consume the Blessed Sacrament, he was not allowed to go but later Father Cusack was. When he consumed the Blessed Sacrament, he was marched around the whole town. So too was Father O’Brien. Father Cusack returned first and was told by the Reds that there was religious freedom. This was a ruse to put the Catholics at ease so that later they could find out easily who the Catholics were. The three were then brought to one police box and returned here and then brought to another police box and returned home and told to carry on.

One of the boys in the house was beaten and Monsignor apologised to him for it.

30th July 1950:

Mass was as usual on the following Sunday. After Mass some Communists arrived and asked Fr Cusack for a list of his parishioners. He refused to give it. Pressed, and threatened, he continued to refuse. Mgr. Brennan was next approached, and he too refused. “

4th August 1950:

On Friday, August 4 – the three priests were arrested and lodged in the local station. About a week later they were transferred, under guard, to Kwangju.
Kwangju, the provincial capital, is fifty-three miles distant from Mokpo. The prisoners were accompanied by two armed guards. Transport for the five consisted of one motorcycle with a sidecar. The priests were big-boned heavily built men. Presumably it was a ride to remember.

In Kwangju Fr Lucius Chang, himself a prisoner, was summoned to interpret for them before the chief of the secret police. He recalls how they looked: Father O’Brien “thin”; all three of them “terribly tired.” Fr Cusack, fluent in Korean, was spokesman; “he did all the talking and I really don’t know why I was there at all,” comments Fr Chang. The dreary, pointless interview dragged on in the manner of such Communist Interrogations. The priests were accused of spying; of living as drones off their parishioners. Had they been military personnel, they would have been killed immediately and without mercy. Now, however, they were in protective custody, to save them from the fury of the people. While the war lasted they must content themselves with ordinary prison fare; after that they would eat well, as they, and all the Communists, normally ate.

At some point in the interrogation Fr Cusack begged that they should be allowed some rest: “We haven’t slept for nights.” When the examination ended, they were lodged in a cell in the police station and Fr Chang was confined in the town prison. He never met them again.

The following is the next piece of information that we have.

Excerpts from an article in Argosy Magazine Mar. 1951 PP61-62

Fr Donal O’Keeffe gave me this document. He explained that it is “a less sanitised version of “I Met Them in Jail” written by Lieutenant Alexander G. Makarounis 438 Fletcher Street, Lowell, Mass., an American army officer who was taken prisoner by the North Korean Army in August, 1950.
In Kwangju Jail Lieutenant Alexander G. Makarounis met three Maynooth Missionaries, Mgr. Brennan, Father Cusack and Father O'Brien. These Missionaries are presumed to have been killed later in Taejon. Lieutenant Makarounis died on the 31st July, 1994. He also repeated this as part of his testimony at the hearings about The Korean War Atrocities.

This is his story:

War and Capture:

I was with an infantry group that shipped from Okinawa in July of last year and landed in Korea in the early days of the” police action” there. Almost immediately after our arrival we contacted the enemy. Outnumbered, pinned down in a rice paddy by mortar and machine-gun fire, our battalion suffered serious reverses. Many were killed; many were wounded; many survivors were made prisoners.

In this action I was wounded by machine-gun fire and taken prisoner. However, some time after our capture, three of us, Corporal Wilson from Detroit, Pfc Shaffron from Pennyslyvania and myself managed to escape during an air raid. We wandered aimlessly for days and then, on the verge of collapse, we again fell into the hands of the enemy. It was early in August, 1950.

After about three harrowing weeks during which I seesawed between here and the hereafter, we were held in the city of Kwangyang, where the soldiers with me were badly treated and deprived of their shoes. Our food during these days was nothing more than a ball of rice early in the morning and another after sunset. Then the three of us were taken south to the town of Kwangju. This is a good-sized city by Korean standards but only the main streets are paved; the houses are small and there are no stores such as we know them.

Kwangju Jail: 

We were taken to the jail – a large sprawling low building, set back from the road, with a large courtyard in front.

When we got into the prison, we were at the end of a long line of Koreans, and they started to pile them into cells that were already full. I believe there were at least ten cells down this one long corridor. Sometimes there would be as many as 75 men in each cell, and it was so crowded that everybody had to sit with his knees up to his chest continuously. They started to shove us into one such cell, and then, for no reason that we could see, changed their minds. And that was a lucky break for us.

Instead, they took us down another corridor and then made us take off our shoes and belts (they almost always made us do that) and put us into a dark cell that seemed to be deserted. The iron door creaked shut behind us and the lock snapped tight.

I was half asleep at the time, but I wasn’t too surprised when I heard this American voice say,” Don’t worry about it Mac. You just get some sleep tonight.”

We did, and I myself can say that I felt very good, hearing that American voice, which sounded kind and sort of home-like. You might put it down that I had dreams instead of nightmares that night. I might add this right here too: Even though whoever belonged to the voice couldn’t see me, he shared his blanket with me, and whoever else was in the cell did the same for Wilson and Shaffron.

The next morning it was wonderful; I turned over and opened my eyes, and there looking at me and kind of smiling were these three Roman Catholic priests. I’ll put their names here, though I didn’t find them out until later. One was an American Monsignor Brennan, and there was a Father Kusak and a Father O’Brien, both from Ireland and with these terrific Irish brogues. Father Brennan had one too, though to a lesser extent.

Father Kusak had spent 15 years in Korea, and he could read and write and speak the language. Father Brennan and Father O’Brien could say a few words each, not many. All three of them were missionaries and had been arrested about a week after the war started. They all three expected to be shot, but it didn’t seem to bother them. If it did, they didn’t let on.

I mean by that Father Brennan was always cheering us up. Once we heard a bird chirping outside the window, and he said, “That’s a good sign lad. That’s an omen of hope.” He said exactly that; I remember the words. Or Father O’Brien would sing songs, mostly Irish songs, and once he danced a jig, and one other time I will not likely forget he sang, “Far Away Places”, and we cried like babies, all six of us.

The food was quite good at Kwangju; we had half a bowl of cooked barley three times a day, and it tasted better than the rice, and also we were given pickled turnips, which were delicious, something like our dill pickles. We were in this cell two days and two nights, and once a doctor came in, and with him was a nurse. By this time my right side was practically just the bone with some of the skin rubbed off even, and my right hip was almost all bone too, every time I moved, my bones creaked something awful. I couldn’t sleep on my stomach or, for some reason, my left side either; so I had Father Kusak ask the doctor if I could sleep on my back, and he took a long look at my wounds and then said yes. And that night, our second in Kwangju, I slept better than I ever had before.

The second afternoon in Kwangju they took Wilson, Shaffron and me through a courtyard, then about 500 yards down the street and into a church which was pretty much like an American church, only poor, very poor. Inside this church were desks lined up against the wall, maybe 20 of them, and behind each desk was a Korean, an interviewer. They put me on a chair beside one desk with this captain. They took Wilson and Shaffron back out into the courtyard and shoved them inside a little house there.

This captain was a young man, as much as you can tell the age of a Korean, maybe in his twenties or thirties, but as he had a hard face, and he was mad clear through, because it took at least an hour to find an interpreter. They finally dug up this character who said he was a photographer, and he spoke fairly fair English.
All through the questioning the captain kept getting mad every once in a while. He’d say things against MacArthur and against Truman, and he’d say (and the translator would translate) and it was all Wall Street’s fault that there was this war. And he wanted to know about my family, too. He kept saying what did my old man do, and I said that he was retired but that he’d been a worker in the woollen mills in Lowell, and that seemed to please the captain. He also got quite a charge out of the fact that my mother was half Russian and was born over there. And he grinned from ear to ear when he asked did I own any property and I answered no.

After he was through with me he brought in Shaffron and Wilson, separately and they said he gave them the same business.

By the time all this questioning was over, it was dark outside. All of a sudden, a Korean major appeared at the little house we were in there in the yard, and he took us back into the church.

By this time there was blackout curtains on the windows, and the captain had disappeared. In one corner of the room were five scared looking South Korean prisoners, all of them handcuffed. The major said something sharp to them; then he took the handcuffs off the two of them and manacled Shaffron and me together and put Wilson together with one of the South Koreans. Incidentally this Korean soldier later turned out to be a parachutist in what you might call the South Korean Air Force, and he’d been dropped some place there and captured.

Journey to Taejon

When we were all set, the major said in a broken kind of English, “We will go to Seoul tonight.” Just like that. Then he herded us onto what was probably the same truck we’d come on; it was standing there outside the church.

First off, they drove us up in front of the jail, and in a few minutes all three of our faces broke into grins, because out of the door came the three priests, one after the other. And behind them to our surprise, were two G. I’s we’d never seen before.

I think it was Father Brennan that had said there were these two G.I’s that had been in the prison, but he thought they’d gone. One was named Miller, and I never did get the other boy’s name. They had started to march to Seoul from Hadong and got sick on the way; got the GI’s I believe. In case anybody’s forgotten, the GI’s is just an army name for dysentery. I might add that Miller was barefoot, and the other boy had some kind of stockings on but no shoes.

Generally, at this time, we were happy; we really were. It was crowded on this truck: maybe 32 of us altogether – us three, Miller and the other boy, the three priests, the five Koreans from the church, and lots of other South Korean prisoners that had been brought from the prison. Also, what with the branches of trees to camouflage the truck, you sometimes had a little trouble getting your breath.

But, like I said, we were quite happy. I mean by that, we had been told there were lots of American prisoners in Seoul and also there was good food and the Red Cross, and we figured we could write letters and get letters and that our folks would find out we were alright. So generally, we were encouraged. I hope nobody will take offence if I say here that most of these Koreans, I met reminded me of lawyers. You know, you ask a lawyer a question, and he’ll give you all the points for and all the points against, but you’ll never get anything definite out of him. The North Koreans were just like that, except when you did get a definite answer, it was almost always a lie. I don’t mean that’s necessarily true of lawyers of course. I mention that because there wasn’t any Red Cross in Seoul or anything like it.

Anyway, we started off, and I remember two things especially. First, these handcuffs were the kind that get tighter as you struggle. Well with the fast driving and going over these bad mountain roads, we jerked all the time – you couldn’t help it – and the cuffs would tighten. It was very painful. Also, about the guards on the truck. We judged them to be front-line troops who were maybe being given a break, and they hated us. You could tell that right away. As we rode along, they would point their guns at the hills and shoot – and then laugh and sing, and if we moved an inch (not that we could move much more than that) they’d jab their guns in our ribs and start to click the bolts, and then laugh again. I figured this was just more of the good old Korean sense of humour.

We were on the truck for three nights, three nights straight. We’d drive all night, and every morning we’d be thrown into a jail cell and given a rice ball. Then at dusk off we’d go again. It was cold too. Even though our bodies were huddled close together, we always seemed to be shivering and our teeth chattered.

Early in the morning of the third night, before dawn, the truck broke down. I never will know what was wrong with it; I think it just gave up. At that time Father Kusak said we were about seven miles outside the town of Taejon. And quite a loud argument developed among the guards – as to whether we should be marched into Taejon or let stay in a group of buildings just off the road from there.

The ones in favour of our walking won; they always did. So off we went, Miller with his bare feet started to bleed almost at once. The other boy’s stockings wore away after only half a mile or so, and the Korean prisoners who were ahead of us started to walk double-time – or faster.

We had to keep up; a rifle but jabbed in our ribs convinced us of that. I hobbled along as best I could for a while, and then my chest started to heave, and the first thing I knew I was practically out. Father Brennan, who was beside me, was having an even worse time. The Father was in his forties. I’d say not young; and also, he was a stout man. He said he’d lost 50 pounds or so since his capture, but he still weighed a good 150.

He was puffing away, but he was thinking more about me than himself. He kept saying, “fall down lad. They won’t shoot you.” But Father Kusak , who was right behind us said, “For God’s sake, don’t do that. These guards say they’ll shoot anybody that falls out.”

So I kept on, I don’t know how I did it, but I did. Then we came close to this long bridge, maybe a mile outside the city – we could see the buildings from where we were – and the pace got even faster. I didn’t know why, but I found out almost immediately. A bunch of airplanes – light bombers, I think – started roaring overhead, and we all ducked under the bridge. I just fell to the ground, and for a minute there I blacked out. Maybe Father Brennan did too, because he slipped on the rocks leading down to the water. He had slipped as much as eight or ten feet when Father O’Brien reached over and grabbed his hand and pulled him back.

The planes didn’t bother the bridge, and a few minutes later the guards made us get up again, and we started off at an even faster pace. This time I knew I wouldn’t make it, and I was sure I’d be shot; and I just gave up when a guard came up to Father Brennan and me and hit us on the arm with his sub-machine gun and motioned us to fall out of the column. I could see Father Brennan’s lips moving, and I knew he was praying, and I guess I did too, and I looked back at Wilson and Shaffron and Father O’Brien and Father Kusak.

I think I said, “Goodbye.” Something like that. I knew it was the end, but it wasn’t. This guard indicated to us that we could walk slow. Well, I never thought anything like this could happen to us and I guess I cried a little. The rest of the column went ahead, and Father Brennan and I continued at a nice slow pace. When we got into Taejon, our guard who seemed sorry for us in some way, took us into a big stone building, and there were the rest of the prisoners.

I went to sleep right on the floor, and about an hour later a civilian came in and woke up us five GI’s.

We didn’t say goodbye to the priests – there were never any goodbyes – and we never saw them again either. I think about them sometimes even now, and I hope they weren’t shot. I hope maybe Father Brennan was right.

He kept saying. “Everything will come out alright in the end if you trust in God.” Maybe that sounds kind of corny, you know, but it sounded fine at the time. And I kept remembering those words all the time later…

The five GIs left and any information that we have on what happened in Taejon after that came from different sources.

Fr Donal O’Keeffe told us that the “valuable prisoners” were billeted in the Franciscan Monastery in Taejon. The North Korean Forces made this monastery their temporary headquarters and each time there was an air raid by UN forces, the Western prisoners were ordered on to the roof to be used as human shields.

15th September 1950:
The American forces landed in Incheon, laid siege to the city and sent a task force south towards Taejon to block Communist troops from rushing to the defence of the capital. Simultaneously, the American Eighth Army broke through its containing line in the south east and drove north-west to link up. Arrangements were made to dispose of the prisoners held at Taejon. (The Mantle)

24th September 1950:
The wife of a Korean Judge said that she had been confined to the same room as the three Priests from Mokpo in the Franciscan Monastery for forty days. She was released on the afternoon of September 24th and later testified that when they heard a prisoner being interrogated about Catholics in Taejon “the three foreign priests went down on their knees and prayed throughout the night for that prisoner and then their knees were so stiff that they couldn’t get up.”

After the massacre, when the North Koreans had left, she and her friend Teresa went back to look for the priests’ bodies but could not find them.

The Judge’s wife who heard the three Priests being interrogated. This lady lived to be 97. She is the most reliable witness they have

On the night of September 24th a General massacre of Prisoners took place in Taejon as Red troops prepared to hurry north so as not to be cut off by advancing United Nations troops Between 5,000 and 6,000 people died. This included prisoners from the Franciscan Monastery and the jail in Taejon. Among them were Father Jack O’Brien, Monsignor Patrick Brennan and Father Tommie Cusack.

We, their families, were always told that the story ended with: “Their bodies were thrown into a disused well and they were never found.”

While this is true, it is not the end of the story. To understand what happened next, please follow the link by clicking here..