The USS Pueblo is captured - January 23rd, 1968

On this day in 1968, the USS Pueblo and its 83 crew members were captured at sea by North Korean forces.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio,
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that looks at the ups and downs of everyday history.
I'm Gay Bluesier, and in this episode, we're looking at
a humbling moment in US naval history, a tense year

(00:22):
long standoff with North Korea that's now known as the
Pueblow Incident. The day was January twenty third, nineteen sixty eight.
The USS Pueblow and its eighty three crew members were
captured at sea by North Korean forces. One member of

(00:46):
the crew, Dwayne Hodges, was killed during the seizure, and
the other eighty two American sailors were held in captivity
for the next eleven months. The Pueblow was a small,
lightly armed US Navy ship that had originally served as
a cargo hauler in the nineteen forties. It had since
been refurbished as an intelligence vessel and was engaged in

(01:08):
a routine surveillance mission for the top secret operation Click Beetle.
At the time of its capture, the Pueblow had been
dispatched on its first mission with an inexperienced crew and
a first time captain thirty eight year old Commander Lloyd
Pete Boucher. According to US reports, including those of the crewmen,
the ship was in international waters, nearly sixteen miles from

(01:32):
the shore of the Korean Peninsula. Nonetheless, North Korean patrol
boats and fighter jets turned their guns on the Pueyblow
and demanded its surrender. The Americans tried to make a getaway,
but the ship was too slow, and the North Koreans
quickly caught up and opened fire. The crew of the
Pueblow knew their capture was inevitable, so they used what

(01:54):
little time they had to frantically destroy as much of
the classified information on board as they could. Unfortunately, there
was too much material for the ship's shredders and incinerators
to handle under heavy fire. The crew eventually resorted to
throwing the documents overboard, many of which were later recovered
by the North Koreans and shared with the Soviets. By

(02:17):
the time North Korean forces boarded the Pueblow, the ship
had been rendered defenseless and many of the crewmen had
been wounded. The eighty two survivors were bound and blindfolded
and transported to Pyongyang, where they were charged with spying
and imprisoned. When the US government learned what had happened,
it immediately demanded that the sailors be released, insisting that

(02:39):
they hadn't breached North Korea's twelve mile territorial limit. The
demand was swiftly refused, and in response, President Lyndon Johnson
ordered a military build up in the area. Roughly two
hundred and fifty US combat aircraft were sent to American
bases in South Korea, and three aircraft carriers and about

(02:59):
two twenty five warships were stationed in the Sea of Japan.
This show of force was purely symbolic, as President Johnson
had just launched the tet Offensive in South Vietnam and
wasn't eager to start another war by retaliating against North Korea.
Doing so would have risked spreading American forces too thin,

(03:20):
especially since the Soviet Union likely would have come to
the aid of its allies, thus escalating the Cold War
into a hot one. But North Korea called Johnson's bluff
and continued to hold the sailors captive. With few options remaining,
the US began negotiating for the prisoner's release, meeting with
North Korean leadership at the Pon Munjom Truce village in

(03:43):
the demilitarized zone dividing the Korean Peninsula. The talks were
not productive and would ultimately drag on for the rest
of the year. In the meantime, North Korea tried to
ring public confessions out of its prisoners by subjecting them
to private torture session. The crewmen resisted for months, maintaining
they had never strayed from international waters. Finally, though North

(04:07):
Korean authorities shifted their focus to Captain Boucher. They tried
to force a confession by putting him in front of
a firing squad, and when that failed, they threatened to
execute his men in front of him one by one.
It was only then that Boucher agreed to confess and
apologize to North Korea. The statement prepared for him read quote,

(04:30):
we intruded into the territorial waters of the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea and committed hostile acts. I will never
again be a party to any disgraceful act of aggression
of this type. The rest of the crew later signed
the confession as well, and afterward they were transported to
a second compound in the countryside outside the capitol. They

(04:53):
were forced to study propaganda materials as a form of indoctrination,
and when they resisted or expressed disdain, they were beaten severely.
That said, the crew members still found ways to rebel
against their captors, while also showing the outside world that
their fighting spirit hadn't been broken. For example, when North

(05:13):
Korean authorities photographed the men for use in propaganda, the
captured crew famously raised their middle fingers at the camera.
The act of defiance went unnoticed at first, as North
Koreans weren't familiar with the gesture, and the crew told
them it was the Hawaiian sign for good luck. The
guards eventually caught on to the truth, though, and they

(05:33):
punished the sailors with beatings, freezing temperatures, and sleep deprivation
in ordeal. They later became known as Hell Week. The
crew's nightmare finally came to an end in late December,
when US and North Korean negotiators reached an agreement for
their release. Under the terms of the settlement, the United
States admitted that the Pueblow had crossed into North Korean territory,

(05:57):
apologized for that action, and pledged to do it again.
The eighty two surviving crewmen were released that very day,
December twenty third, nineteen sixty eight, exactly eleven months after
their capture. They walked one by one across the Bridge
of no Return at Panmunjam to South Korea, and from

(06:18):
there they were flown to San Diego, where they received
a hero's welcome on Christmas Eve. Diplomacy had won out
in the end, but the victory came at a steep cost.
The imprisoned crew had experienced severe physical and psychological trauma,
and the reputation of the United States had been dealt
a humiliating blow. The Pueblow incident led to a mix

(06:41):
of soul searching and scapegoating among American policymakers, but the
consensus was that the US government had been wrong to
assume that North Korea was working from the same Cold
War playbook as the Soviets. The capture of the Pueblow
made clear that North Korea had its own national agenda
and that the country was willing to make bold moves

(07:01):
to achieve it. If the US had recognized that from
the outset, it probably wouldn't have sent a lightly armed
spy ship so close to Korean shores without backup. That
misjudgment not only led to an embarrassing international incident, it
also taught North Korea that standing up to a military
giant can sometimes be worth the risk. The country has

(07:24):
apparently taken that lesson to heart too, as evidenced by
its ongoing nuclear weapons build up today. As for the
USS Pueyblow, the ship itself remains in North Korean custody
and has since been turned into a floating tourist attraction.
It's currently moored in a river in Pyongyang as part
of the country's Victorious War Museum. To this day, the

(07:48):
Pueyblow is the only commissioned ship in the U. S.
Navy to be held in captivity by a foreign power,
an embarrassing fact that seems unlikely to change any time soon.
I'm Gabe Lucier and hopefully you now know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. You can

(08:10):
learn even more about history by following us on Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have
any comments or suggestions, you can always send them my
way by writing to this day at iHeartMedia dot com.
Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again

(08:32):
tomorrow for another day in history class.