Introduction
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold,
Dominion over palm and pine,
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!
Rudyard Kipling
Since the turn of the millennium, the British public has been forced to relearn a painful lesson: Soldiers die in war.
While this might seem self-evident, the events of the 1980s and ’90s – bar that oddly old-fashioned conflagration, the Falklands War – seemed to prove it invalid. In peace-keeping operations in Africa and the Balkans, counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland and the one-sided adventure of Desert Storm, Britons suffered a reassuringly gentle trickle of casualties. The armed forces, it seemed, were so well trained and equipped that they could operate, either independently in low-level conflicts, or in alliance with their mighty American allies in larger ones, at minimal risk.
That shibboleth now lies shattered. In interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the army met a foe who, though lightly armed, fought skilfully, using guerilla tactics fired by religious zeal. Not only did he not collapse, he inflicted losses that soon exceeded a trickle, though have not (yet) reached a flood.
These conflicts are the best-covered wars the UK has ever fought, blazing across TV reports, video-sharing websites and the print of innumerable articles and books. Perhaps it is this firestorm of coverage that has led some commentators to suggest that the intensity of combat, the losses incurred and the perils faced, are unprecedented in the British Army’s post-1945 experience.
Nonsense. A conflict that received scant attention at the time, and which is today almost unknown in the UK, remains far and away the biggest, bloodiest, most brutal war fought by British troops since the Second World War: Korea.
The biggest: A war of advances and retreats of hundreds of miles, fought against the army of the world’s most populous nation. The bloodiest: 1,087 British servicemen fell in Korea in barely three years of fighting, a number greater than the total killed in the Falklands (255), Iraq (179) and Afghanistan (349) combined – 783.1 And the most brutal: A sampling of incidents in this book should make that clear.
The military’s ability to fight operations of scale and intensity rests upon national will, but twenty-first century Britain is casualty sensitive and cost-conscious. The slipped discs in today’s national spine – epitomised in 2007’s humiliating retreat from Basra – contrast with the solid backbone Britain exhibited in 1950. Then, the UK was bankrupt from the Second World War, abandoning empire and suffering military overstretch. But London had obligations: As a charter member of the UN, as an ally of the United States and as the defender of a state facing aggression. Even when China surged into the war, even when casualties soared, even though it meant lengthening National Service and raising the defence budget – Britain stayed the course. This was honourable conduct.
In 1950, an under-equipped, under-gunned British brigade was deployed into a high-risk conflict in a distant, primitive theatre against an unknown, alien enemy at ludicrously short notice. As in Afghanistan, they were fighting alongside US troops, though in the early months of the Korean War, the American Army was at a nadir. The scratch 27th Brigade – a good, but hardly elite formation – proved so effective, that despite lacking transport, armour and artillery, it was tasked with key missions. Meanwhile, the crack 41 Commando – a unit that did not even exist at the outbreak of hostilities – was embedded with America’s finest troops, the 1st US Marine Division. In the most harrowing campaign of the war, the commandos won a US Presidential Unit Citation and plaudits from their comrades that still echo six decades later.
* * *
This book is not a full history of the war – Sir Max Hastings’ The Korean War is recommended for casual readers, Dr Allen Millet’s The War in Korea trilogy is the best for the specialist. Nor does it detail the featured units’ full participation in Korea: All continued operations well into 1951.* What it is, is a narrative history of those formations during the war’s most dramatic period: summer to the end of the ‘Year of the Tiger’, 1950.
Those months cover the defence of South Korea and the charge into North Korea; the shock Chinese intervention and the catastrophic defeat of UN forces; the hellish retreat and the tragedy of a nation put to the sword. Even the weather mirrored the drama, as the seasons transitioned from summer to autumn to winter. This period has been covered by American historians, but this book features a group of actors whose experiences have gone largely unrecorded: the Australians and Britons who made up the UN Command’s first non-Korean, non-American ground troops.
Episodes include the worst ‘friendly fire’ disaster suffered by the British Army since the Second World War; a barely believable ‘mistaken identity’ action fought at handshake range; a desperate breakout to escape entrapment; and a harrowing fighting retreat amid Siberian temperatures. The units covered are large enough to encompass a broad range of experience, but small enough for individual characters to stand out. How, then, to tell their tale?
There are, essentially, three approaches to writing military history. The first is military science: the general’s art, the strategic picture, the broad sweep of arrow on map. The second is technical: The weapons of the combatants, their capabilities and drawbacks.The third is the human story: What actually happens to men in war? What do they see, do, think, feel?
For context, I have sketched in the broad background as it unfolded in the politicians’ chamber and across the generals’ maps, and included information on weapons and equipment, but my preferred approach is the third. War is – like all history – a jigsaw of biographies. While I have referenced books, articles, letters, unit diaries and personal notebooks, the meat of this story is oral, allowing the reader, I hope, to ‘meet’ these men, to witness the war through their eyes.
* * *
While conducting the interviews that are the heart of this book, I was surprised at how old soldiers opened up and told stories that, in many cases, nobody had ever asked them about before. There was emotion. One veteran choked back tears as he recalled the inspirational leadership of his platoon commander in their first battle. A commando, describing one desperate moment, flung his arm out, sending coffee flying over his carpet. His wife made no complaint, but confided that her husband would struggle in bed that night: Discussing the war would bring nightmares back to the surface. Another man handed me an essay he had written about his wartime experiences, then told me and two fellow veterans of a war crime he had witnessed but not committed to paper; I had the sense he had never spoken about the killing previously. The traumas of Korea may be judged by the fact that some veterans, haunted by the restless dead, still sleep with their lights on sixty years later.
Yet their war is non-existent in popular culture. There are few books, fewer films. The predominant visual references, black and white photographs, do little justice to the war’s sights: the sparkling emerald summer paddies, the orange blossoms of napalm, the icy blue of winter mountains. The disinterest of filmmakers and novelists, and the resultant public amnesia is odd, for the drama of this war remains unsurpassed in the post-1945 era. It changed pace and character with an intensity the wider world struggled to comprehend, and which was, for the men with the rifles, bewildering and terrifying. Korea escalated from a civil–ideological war to the first UN war. It featured the only free world invasion of a communist state and the first (and only) battlefield clash of superpowers. Those soldiers of 1950 were in the eye of the hurricane when modern China stormed, shockingly, onto the global stage.
Some veterans expressed surprise at the spotlight focused on today’s troops, fighting a campaign significantly less perilous than that of half a century previously. Today, almost every death in Afghanistan merits media coverage, but in Korea, it was not simply individuals who faced extinction: This was the only war fought by the UK and US since the Second World War when entire units were consumed. In 1950, British troops were peripherally involved in the trial-by-fire of the 2nd Infantry Division at Kunu-ri, and fought with 1st US Marine Division as it broke free of the massive trap sprung at Chosin Reservoir. For the US Army, the decimation of two regiments at Kunu-ri, and the destruction of another at Chosin, were disasters unequalled even in the heaviest combat in Vietnam.
Survivors still struggle to verbalise the near-Biblical devastation of the ‘scorched earth’ retreat from the north. One likened it to the climax of a James Bond film, when, in the final scene, the set explodes and collapses around the hero as he fights clear in the nick of time.
In no Cold War conflict were the furies unleashed with such demonic energy, for the war raged over a peninsula brutalised by thirty-five years of Japanese rule, then polarised for five years by contrasting ideologies. Most atrocities were intra-Korean affairs – every veteran recalls civilians slaughtered by one side or the other, heaped in ditches or among ruins – but the reader will also encounter brutalities committed by Australian and British troops: the burning of villages; the shooting of wounded and captured enemy; the killing of civilians.
From the comfort of armchairs and the viewpoint of six decades, should we judge? Perhaps. But as citizens of a democracy, we must acknowledge that when our government dispatches men to do a dirty job we must bear some responsibility for deeds done in our name by those cultured, educated and raised among – and by – us.
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This is not a happy tale. As Melville wrote of Moby Dick: ‘a Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.’ Every character in this book left friends in Korea’s rocky soil. For South Koreans, the war fought to defend them spun out of control, to the point where the cure – UN intervention – became almost as bad as the disease – communist invasion. Yet if anyone questions the author’s opinion on the broad issues, let me be clear, for I am as unequivocal on this as a falling guillotine: Korea was a just war.
The 1950 attack was naked aggression, abetted by Josef Stalin, one of the most murderous figures of mankind’s deadliest century. It was ordered by Kim Il-sung, a leader who engineered a state that, today, grinds down the human spirit more than any other. Kim’s ‘achievements’ – if they can be so dignified – grant post-event justification to the UN cause. In fact, UN troops had largely reunified the peninsula in November 1950: It was Mao’s counteroffensive that guaranteed Kim’s continued existence and almost extinguished South Korea.
Almost. The agonised efforts of the soldiers of 1950 proved sufficient. The UN Command escaped annihilation, enabling its own regeneration in 1951. In 1953, an uneasy armistice was signed. While some soldiers, experiencing first-hand the horrors of the war, questioned the justice of the cause then, none who have returned on veteran revisits – where they are greeted with remarkable warmth by South Koreans – harbour any doubts now.
South Korea did not just survive, it thrived, becoming a model of economic, and more latterly, political and social advancement. The events in this book show how fragile the existence of the greatest national success story of the twentieth century was a mere six decades ago – a time-span that lies comfortably within a human lifetime.
* * *
In their autumn years, Korea veterans have an eye on posterity. At the conclusion of several interviews, I was thanked by those whose memories I had mined. The gratitude is mine. As a writer I felt privileged – in some cases, humbled – to record such great and terrible, but largely unknown, events.
And these memories have contemporary significance, for these events could re-occur; the final act of Korea’s tragedy remains unwritten. North Korea remains one of the world’s most dangerous states and China continues to support her wartime ally. With the flashpoint peninsula frequently splashed across front pages, it is germane to remember – or learn of – the staggering devastation and appalling carnage of war in Korea.
Specialists on the conflict will learn nothing new herein on politics or strategy. But by zeroing in on its human stories, I hope that, six decades after the outbreak of the ‘Forgotten War’, this work will reopen a window onto the holocaust that laid waste the ill-starred peninsula in 1950. I hope, further, that it will breathe a spark of life back into the forgotten men of 27th Commonwealth Brigade and 41 Commando, before living memories of the tragedy they played so distinguished a role in are extinguished forever.
Andrew Salmon
Seoul, January 2011
* The author’s To the Last Round picks up the story of British troops in Korea in 1951, where this book leaves off, albeit the action turns to 29th Brigade.
Note to the Reader
On spellings:
In 2000, the South Korean government changed its official Romanisation system for Korean words; Pusan became Busan, Inchon became Incheon, and so on. I have stuck to the old spellings. For consistency’s sake, I have also stuck with the pre-Pinyin spellings of Chinese, hence Mao Tse-tung not Mao Zedong, Peking not Beijing.
On notations:
Interesting information that would break narrative flow or remove the reader from the timescale of the events in the text, have been added as footnotes. Endnotes are exclusively used to identify sources.
On sources:
Sources in the narrative not end-noted are oral sources (for details of oral and written sources, see Acknowledgements and Sources, at end of book, for details). Some sources – e.g. Jack Gallaway, Fred Hayhurst, Ben O’Dowd, John Shipster and David Wilson – granted interviews and published accounts. In cases where they are not endnoted, their quotes are from oral sources.