By Steve Chawkins
Los Angeles Times
Brig. Gen. J. Robinson ‘Robbie’ Risner is credited with destroying eight MiG-15s and damaging another while assigned to the 336 Fighter Squadron in South Korea. On Sept. 21, 1952, the then-major scored double kills. He achieved ace status on Sept. 15, 1952, downing his fifth MiG-15.
U.S. Air Force
He had been beaten up and starved, thrown for months into a dark cell crawling with rats, held immobile with his legs pinned in stocks, and strapped with ropes so tightly that his right arm was torn from its socket. When he passed out from pain, the ropes were briefly loosened until the ordeal could start yet again.
Now, with his jailers ordering him to do a propaganda broadcast, J. Robinson Risner, in the solitude of his cell, tried to destroy his voice.
“I began pounding my throat as hard as I could,” he wrote in his 1973 memoir “The Passing of the Night.” After he delivered repeated judo chops to his larynx, he drank a paste made from acidic lye soap and intensified the burn by screaming as loud as he could into a rag he clamped over his mouth.
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Source: Stars and Stripes