Chapter Twelve
I see the world gradually being turned into a
wilderness, I hear the ever approaching
thunder, which will destroy us too…
Anne Frank
Under heavy grey skies, the snowfields lay in winter silence.
The last elements of 8th Army had retreated from North Korea by 15 December. There was no pursuit. In the hills, 27th Brigade’s soldiers dug positions, and when not on duty, stripped the twisted, blackened ruins of Uijongbu to build shelters. Against a backdrop of craggy hills, constructions of corrugated iron, planking, rice straw matting and tent canvas sprouted in the snow. Bonfires and lanterns flickered in the shanty town.
Inside their shacks, men filled shell cases with earth soaked in petrol and lit them. As improvised heaters the devices worked, but many men would wake up black. Baths were rigged: 44-gallon drums cut lengthways, filled with water, and fires lit in trenches underneath. ‘It was a question of getting in, soaping, up, getting out into the snow and getting dressed as soon as possible,’ recalled Diehard Corporal John Pluck, who, like others, found his chest and stomach infested with body lice.
Brigadier Basil Coad, recovered after his breakdown, returned from Japan on 18 December. Known to the 3 RAR as ‘the grey-haired old bastard’, his return was greeted in uproarious fashion. ‘All the Diggers were shouting, “Hi Bas, get any geishas did you?”’ recalled sniper Ian Robertson. ‘He loved it, but the brigade major came out and said, “You can’t speak to the brigadier like that!” And one Digger said, “Go on Bas, give him a couple of lashes with the cane” – and he did! He said to the brigade major, “I am speaking to my mates” – and gave him a couple of ceremonial whacks! He knew how to win the troops over.’ Lieutenant Peter Baldwin was surprised at how touched Coad was by the Australians’ welcome: He seemed to have tears in his eyes.
Another player exited the stage. 8th Army Commander General Walton Walker, who had orchestrated the defence of the Pusan Perimeter then overseen the rout at the hands of the Chinese, was on his way to present 27th Brigade with a South Korean Presidential Unit Citation for its Naktong actions, when a ROK truck pulled out in front of his jeep. Walker was flung out, sustaining serious head injuries. He died hours later.
News of the UNC catastrophe in North Korea had by now reached Seoul. Late at night, the young artist, Kim Song-hwan, sketched trams trundling from the railway station, through dark, battered streets. Their destinations were city hospitals, their cargoes heaps of soldiers wounded from up north. With the fighting burning south once again, the ancient Korean folk fear of a Chinese invasion was reignited.
Middlesex majors John Willoughby and Roly Gwynne went into the battered capital for a day. The two men were invited into the British Embassy for tea and sandwiches, served – remarkably, given the circumstances – on fine China. They had hoped to view the National Museum’s pottery collection, but it was closed. Hearing Western music down an alleyway they investigated. The music emanated from a building, outside which were stacked firearms of every model: ‘I suppose when you left, you just took your pick,’ Willoughby thought. Inside, were jammed soldiers from every contingent of the UNC, most lolling drunkenly against the walls. Through a fug of tobacco smoke, the two majors made out a woman dancing in the centre of the room. ‘It was such a debased sight that two minutes were enough,’ Willoughby wrote. ‘Thankfully we made our way out.’ In the streets, apart from new ROK recruits being hastily drilled, the civilian population appeared listless, but at the Han River, the two majors were confronted by the sight of thousands of refugees, belongings piled upon ox carts, crowding around the entrances to the bridges south.1
Even the gentlest hollows of Korea’s landscape contained death. On a road recce of the brigade’s LOC, Willoughby came across a pretty village buried in the hills, overlooked by, ‘a most attractive little pleasure garden’ – probably a Buddhist temple. He hiked up. ‘Looking down … over a precipice directly below was a slab of rock. In the middle was a body, a skeleton in fact, the flesh had gone and most of the clothes. It must have been there for months and was now part of the view.’2
* * *
Though the enemy was out of contact, the killing continued. Australian journalist Harry Gordon joined a B26 Intruder raid into North Korea. The bomber’s crew was obliging: Gordon was belted into the co-pilot’s seat, then the bomber droned up into the night sky. Over enemy territory, the mission became a rushing, flashing nightmare of explosions in the blackness. ‘It was frightening: At times, we would screech down to track level, then roar up again.’ Anything moving, even ox carts, were targets. The dark, frozen landscape was soon dotted with blazes. ‘They did not want to return with any weapons on board,’ said Gordon. ‘They were attacking anything that moved, blasting any light; I thought it was needless slaughter.’
Many victims of the strafing were refugees escaping the devastated north. Foot patrols were detailed to search those stumbling in. ‘One of our jobs was to carry out roadblocks to search and strip civvies – they would carry arms strapped to their waist, or to their legs,’ said Diehard Ted Haywood. ‘It was not a very nice thing to search them in the intense cold, every morning you would see women, children, old people frozen to death on the sides of road: They walked till they dropped, then that was it.’ The brutality of the times was not ameliorating. A South Korean attached to 3 RAR who raped a woman was handed to a South Korean officer. ‘This captain spoke English, he said, “Thank you very much,” pulled out a pistol and shot him,’ said Sergeant Jack Gallaway. ‘This was common.’
Defences were emplaced against guerillas, and the luck of Second Lieutenant Owen Light continued to hold. He had placed booby-traps – live grenades, pin removed and levers depressed, in tins strung from wire; if the wire was kicked, the bomb would tumble out of the tin, releasing the lever, and it would detonate – around his position. The next morning, a heavy snowfall had obscured the traps – until Light kicked one. ‘It was under my feet, it was smoking,’ he said. He leapt sideways and to the ground as it erupted. ‘Grenades blow up and out, if you are close to it, you get away with it; I was unharmed. Relief!’
With ROK units dug in to the north, 27th Brigade was made IX Corps reserve. Patrols tailed off as units prepared for Christmas.
* * *
In the distant southeast, 41 Commando – the final toll on the 235-man unit was ninety-three casualties, almost half of those who had fought at Chosin Reservoir – was attached to 1st MARDIV in a huge tented camp at Masan.3 ‘We were reorganising, licking our wounds,’ said Marine Michael O’Brien. A Christmas tree was set up, decorated with pieces of brass from ammunition boxes and inflated condoms for balloons. While the US Women’s Temperance League blocked a dispatch by the Milwaukee Brewers’ Association of one million cases of beer for troops in Korea, 41 was well supplied by the British Embassy in Tokyo, enabling a cocktail party in the officers’ mess tent.4 But with so many men still getting to mental grips with their experience in the Chosin crucible, it was a quiet Christmas.
27th Brigade’s Christmas preparations demanded some initiative. The Middlesex officers’ mess was established in marquee; officers were best advised not to ask its source. ‘I got the tent from the Yankee rear echelon!’ said Sergeant Paddy Redmond, a popular man among the Americans for his Irish songs. ‘We went down and dismantled it and a staff sergeant said, “What are doing?” and we said, “We’ve been told to move it.” It was the Yanks’ toilet tent!’ One of Alan Lauder’s Jocks obtained sheets of white linen for the Argyll lunch tables in a Quonset hut. The subaltern was taken aback when he heard the material’s origin: undertakers’ shrouds. ‘We developed a strange sense of humour as a kind of defence mechanism,’ he said.
Christmas Day was a blizzard. For lunch, American turkeys, roasted in 44-gallon drums, were served. Men were warned to avoid local moonshine, such as ‘Hwarang Brandy’, its label denoting a sword-wielding warrior, and ‘Old Hawk Whisky’, reputedly coloured with horse urine. Instead, bottles of Japanese Asahi beer passed around as officers served men: ‘Colonel Man was in the thick of it, just like at home,’ said Private Ken Mankelow. The Middlesex received gifts of knitwear from the people of Middlesex – ‘there were some bloody funny colours!’ recalled Private Edgar Green – and letters: Man insisted his men write thank-you notes. Most men’s priorities were simple. ‘I got drunk,’ recalled Middlesex Corporal Bob Yerby. ‘We met up with an Aussie who had some black navy rum it was just, “Cheers, thank God we’ve survived, and it’s Christmas!”’
The Argylls – who received Christmas puddings from their colonel-in-chief, Princess Elizabeth – found themselves oversupplied with food. Quartermaster Andrew Brown had heard of an orphanage nearby, so invited the children over. The orphans had an orchestra, which played ‘God Save the King’, then they were fed. ‘There were these hard-bitten Jocks saying, “Come on, eat up!”’ said Brown. ‘But the kids probably had a bad night, they had not eaten that much in ages.’
3 RAR’s A Company cooks had adopted a pair of boys in their field kitchen when a ROK recruiting squad arrived, demanding the lads be handed over. The Digger cooks cocked their rifles and told the ROKs that the two were performing their war service with the Australian Army. The squad backed off – to the relief of Captain Ben O’Dowd, who had serious doubts about the cooks’ martial abilities.5
Individual soldiers did what they could for children. Frank Screeche-Powell, the Irish corporal so disturbed by the murder of the old Korean by a Middlesex mortar man, took care of a tiny brother and sister, giving them rations and a gift of a mouth organ. Their father, a refugee, wrote him a letter:
Dear sir
I thank you very mutch your kindly and many present to my childrens Siho and Whaja. they are very like you. I think present some thing to you but I can not it because I all losted in this war and from came Seoul. please you understand to me
Lee
New Year’s Eve. Above Uijongbu’s ruins, the winter sky faded into translucene, the mountains turned purple and darkness fell on the last day of 1950. A three-quarter moon rose, glittering on the snow.
‘We went down to the Argylls’ Sergeants Mess for the Hogmanay Party in a big tent and there was the RSM, a big fella, and a little bloke was playing the bagpipes, you couldn’t hear yourself speak,’ said 3 RAR Sergeant Jack Gallaway. ‘The RSM handed you a tumbler of whisky and said, “Drink! If ye dinnae drink, ye dinnae get in!”’ The whisky flowed, to the point where the Digger RAP sergeant lost his false teeth when the truck taking the Australian NCOs back to their shelters overturned. ‘We all got a bit charged,’ admitted Gallaway, who was expecting the war to wind down. ‘There was not a Chinese within miles and miles of the place and we could not believe that MacArthur was going to carry on after getting his nose busted in North Korea, we thought he’d try and come to some kind of agreement.’
There would be no agreement. On 15 December, the UN had proposed a ceasefire. On 16 December, President Harry Truman declared a US state of emergency. On 22 December, Peking rejected the ceasefire offer. While Gallaway and other sergeants caroused, those soldiers of 27th Brigade still sober and alert as the final hours of the Year of the Tiger ticked away, heard an ominous rumbling a dozen miles to their north.
Marshal Peng Te-huai had not been idle. Of the CPVA who had been fighting in Korea since late October, perhaps twenty-five per cent were dead or disabled. But a regrouped and refitted NKPA – a fresh force, 75,000 strong – had now united with the Chinese. Mao had demanded a new offensive, designed to seize Seoul and lay the groundwork for a spring attack that would drive the UNC into the sea.6
The rumble heard at twilight on New Year’s Eve, 1950, was a barrage fired by six Chinese artillery regiments. On New Year’s Day, 1951, 267,000 communist bayonets surged across the 38th parallel.