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When he died in 1978, Maj. Ronald Alley of Bar Harbor was buried in a military uniform, honoring his 16 years of service in the U.S. Army, including combat duty in World War II and the Korean War.
But according to the Army, Alley did not deserve to be buried in a uniform, or with his many medals. In 1955, two years after Alley was freed after nearly three years in a North Korean prisoner of war camp, the Army court martialed him and sent him to prison for collaboration with the enemy during his time as a POW — the only POW to ever be so convicted in modern history.
Alley maintained his innocence right up until the end. According to a 1982 Washington Post article, Alley was on his way to an interview with Don Snyder, editor of the Bar Harbor Times, to talk about his situation when he died from a heart attack at age 55.
When he joined the Maine Army National Guard in 1939 at age 17, Alley said he was fulfilling a childhood dream of serving his country. He was called up for active duty in 1941, and served throughout World War II, where he saw combat in both France and Belgium. After the war ended, in 1946 he was promoted to captain, and served in the military government of Germany during Allied occupation. While there, he met his wife, Erna, a German citizen who eventually returned to Maine with Alley. They had two children, Evelyn and Gary.
His time back in Maine was short-lived. In August 1950 Alley was called back to active duty in Korea, at which point he had been promoted again to major. In December of that year, he and many other soldiers were captured by Chinese forces during the battle at the Chosin Reservoir, where they were eventually marched to a prisoner of war camp.
Alley would be held prisoner in North Korea until August 1953, in a camp where disease ran rampant, food was scarce and soldiers were subject to brutal interrogation. When he was finally released, he spent months in a U.S. military hospital before returning home to Maine in April 1954.
Alley once again would only have a brief respite with his family, when in March 1955 he was informed that he would be charged with collaborating with the enemy, and would face a court martial and possible time in a military prison.
Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, telling the enemy anything more than name, rank, serial number and date of birth constituted collaboration. Alley maintained that if he did that, he and potentially other U.S. prisoners would have faced certain death. Nearly all those soldiers who were tried for collaboration agreed that they all “collaborated” to some extent, in order to keep their fellow soldiers alive. Korean War POWs had the highest death rate among U.S. prisoners in any war, with 38 percent dying while still in captivity.
In November 1955, he was found guilty, and was dishonorably discharged and sentenced to 10 years confinement at Fort Leavenworth. Though hundreds of soldiers were suspected of collaborating and 14 were court martialed, only Alley was convicted and sentenced to prison.
Though Alley would ultimately serve less than four years of his sentence, by the time he was released in June 1959, he was determined to clear his name. For the next 19 years, Alley repeatedly sought justice for what he said was a politically motivated sentence during the McCarthy era, with the Army using him as a scapegoat for losses during the Korean War. In the 1970s, then U.S. Rep. William Cohen offered to try to get Alley a presidential pardon, but Alley refused, saying a pardon would require him to admit he was guilty.
In the end, Alley died without getting the justice he sought. Don Snyder, the Bar Harbor Times editor who he was traveling to see when he died, was one of the people who kept Alley’s case alive, alongside his widow, Erna, and Cohen. Snyder eventually wrote a book about Alley, “A Soldier’s Disgrace,” published in 1987.
The case was finally reopened in 1982 when an Army board agreed to hold a hearing, where a number of former Korean War POWs testified on Alley’s behalf. They told harrowing stories of the inhumane conditions in the camps, of starvation, disease and both physical and psychological torture. One fellow POW told the board that “if Ronald Alley was guilty, then I was guilty, too, and so was everyone else there.”
In 1986, the Army board ruled that the court martial had been correct. To this day, the ruling has not been reversed, and Alley remains the only U.S. prisoner of war to be court martialed and sent to prison. His gravestone at Mountain View Cemetery in Bar Harbor is engraved with the American flag. Despite the disgrace he was met with, Alley was as proud of his service then as when he first joined the Army as a teenager.
