Chapter One
On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the qow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.
A.E. Housman
Evening, 19 August. Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Near the waterfront, a swimming gala was underway. It was a typical Saturday event at the colony’s premier sporting venue, the Portuguese Club, in the summer of 1950. The competitors were 1st Battalion, the Middlesex Regiment – a young, sport-focused infantry battalion – versus local defence force volunteers. The ambience was cheerful; colourful, too. Defying the humidity, officers were tooled up in, ‘No 1 dress, or mess kit or that kind of ridiculous stuff,’ said Major Dennis Rendell. His CO, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Man, was about to stand up and speak to the assemblage, when someone appeared and whispered in his ear. Without ado, the colonel departed. Officers were always being called away for one thing or another, so his absence was barely remarked upon. ‘We went back to having a jolly good time,’ Rendell said. In due course, Man returned. The gala continued.1
Swimming galas were just one of a number of pleasant diversions for servicemen in the Crown Colony, for 1950s Hong Kong was perhaps the most enviable posting in the British Army. Elsewhere, Britain was pulling back from an empire on which the sun was setting. Military commitments in India had wound down with independence; a messy counter-insurgency campaign had just been completed in Palestine; jungle operations against communist guerillas were underway in the Malay jungle. In Europe, the army was manning a range of garrisons across a tense, devastated continent, while home duty in grim barracks in the UK, a nation threadbare after the Second World War, was a dreary prospect.
Hong Kong was different. The colony was a trading port and the atmosphere in the stores, markets, cinemas, pubs, clubs and restaurants of ‘the shopping window of the Far East’ was sizzling.2 Streets were bustling, shop fronts were enlivened with colourful Chinese signage, rickshaws ran hither and yon. In the days before international tourism, this exoticism was exciting. ‘I had never been on a train till I joined the army, never seen a ship,’ said Jake Mutch, a private soldier in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. ‘It was all marvellous, all new to me; really exciting.’ For young Britons raised in the rationed UK, the goods offered were near miraculous – and available at prices even lowly soldiers could afford. ‘Coming up in the war years, I’d never had steak,’ said Middlesex Private Edgar Green, a 19-year-old National Serviceman from Herne Hill, London. ‘But in Hong Kong, if you went to a service club – “The Cheerio Club” or “The Soldiers and Sailors Club” – you would get steak, egg and chips for not even two shillings!’ Shopping opportunities were ‘out of this world’; Green sent his mother nylon stockings so fine he could post them in a letter.
The weather, sporting facilities and scenery made Hong Kong a healthy as well as a popular posting. ‘Ah, Hong Kong – a playboy existence!’ said Lieutenant Peter Baldwin, a former boy soldier and Signals Officer attached to the headquarters of 27th Infantry Brigade, part of the defence force posted in the New Territories. On weekends, soldiers could swim off fine beaches, though there were constant reminders of the fact that this was not Europe. ‘There was a float out in the bay, and junks and sampans used to come in, and they’d defecate over the side,’ said Argyll Roy Vincent. ‘Lads used to get a bit annoyed; strong swimmers would swim out and rock them.’
Still, relations with the Chinese were good; it tended to be British expatriates who looked down upon soldiers. ‘The Chinese businessmen organised beach parties and barbeques,’ Vincent said. ‘If you wanted a lift, you went to the end of road and you flagged down cars. British cars would bowl past you like you weren’t there, but Chinamen would stop, I once got a ride with a Chinaman in a Rolls Royce. I thought, “If he can do that, why can’t British?”’
The gentle sex was abundant and of pleasing variety. Captain Andrew Brown, the Argylls’ ever-cheerful quartermaster, noted, as he took the Star Ferry plying between Kowloon and Hong Kong island, that British soldiers would gawp at the sudden flash of thigh revealed by the slit in a Chinese cheongsam dress, but ignore the generous cleavage displayed by European girls; Chinese males, on the other hand, goggled at buxom foreign bosoms, while paying little attention to slender local legs.3
Then as now, the Wild, Wild East was famed for its night life. Beer – San Miguel and Tiger – was cheap, chilled and good. More dubious indulgences were close at hand. The Middlesex’s padre advised his flock to avoid the notorious red-light district, Wanchai, with some robust advice: ‘He said, “Do what the good Lord said: take it in your own hand and satisfy yourself!”’ recalled Corporal Bob Yerby, a Middlesex regular. ‘He was a great padre for the lads!’ Spiritual warnings, however, did not dissuade amorous squaddies. ‘There was one place you could go in and get a tattoo, a meal, a tooth out, a drink and it was a brothel – all under one roof!’ said Mutch. ‘The police would raid and they’d say, “Where you been?” and you’d say, “Dentist!” They’d say to the next man, “Where you been?” and it was, “Tattoo!”’
Those who caught a dose of Cupid’s Arrows ended up with twenty-eight days in the guardhouse – and a rocket from officers.4 ‘There was bloke called “Major Snowball”, he was second-in-command, and a bloke from our company was up for trial because he had gonorrhea,’ recalled Mutch. ‘This guy from our company, his greens were black with ink because Snowball had thrown an inkpot at him and yelled, “You filthy brute!” He had to change his clothes, then go to jail.’
And of course, there was the tomfoolery that British military units customarily indulge in. When the NAAFI closed, Argyll Corporal Joseph Fairhurst and his mates filled a kit bag with beer, then retired to a monsoon ditch to drink under the stars. The battalion had a small shop set up in a tent, selling odds and ends; accounts were noted via a ledger: ‘You handed over a few cents or put your name down in the account book,’ Mutch said. One night, a tropical storm wreaked havoc on the tented camp. While men were dashing around dealing with the after effects of the deluge, others found time to visit the shop. ‘The first thing some lads did in this storm was go to the tent, get hold of the book and tear it up,’ said Mutch. ‘A clean sheet!’
An NCO in one battalion was dressed down by his CO after he paraded a full Royal Guard to welcome the San Miguel truck when it arrived to refill the sergeants’ mess. Men from the same unit took imaginative revenge on an unpopular company sergeant major with a drinking habit. The CSM staggered into his room one night after an heroic night at the mess bar and collapsed into bed. Early the next morning, soldiers nearby heard horrified screams, before the NCO appeared in dramatic fashion – leaping through his window and clipping a chip off his scalp on the window frame. Long-suffering soldiers had disinterred a corpse from a Chinese grave on the hill behind their base, and planted it carefully in the CSM’s bed while he was indulging in his wassails. Hungover, he woke beside a mouldering corpse.5
The pleasant off-duty existence soldiers enjoyed over weekends and the Quixotic episodes that enlivened barrack life did not, however, detract from the geo-political realities that necessitated a Hong Kong garrison. The colony had been seized in a particularly savage battle by the Japanese in 1942; in 1949, there were fears of a replay, for after years of fighting, Chiang Kai-shek’s ragtag nationalists had been driven from China by Mao Tse-tung’s communists. It was unclear how the new Peking would view an outpost of rampant capitalism on its southern flank. Whitehall had dispatched its quick reaction force, 27th Infantry Brigade – the 1st battalions of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the Middlesex Regiment and the Royal Leicestershire Regiment – to bolster 40th Division, the 20,000-strong force defending the colony. The brigade landed in July, 1949.6
Duties were tough. Days started with a mug of water and a paladrine tablet to keep malaria at bay, then a run through the assault course or PT. Then came the primary activity: Digging defences into the hills of the New Territories overlooking the China border. ‘Those hills, they were all solid bloody rock so to dig a hole you would put a charge down, blow it and then shore it up,’ Green said. Wearing only shorts, boots and berets, men laboured up the slopes with shovels, stakes, bags of cement and dixies of water. Over sun-drenched hillsides, sweat-soaked soldiers unrolled miles and miles of barbed wire, and carved trenches into the contours. Men grew lean and fit. Bunkers and observation points sprouted. From these positions, binoculars were aimed into the newly communised land.
‘It was very interesting, you were looking into China proper,’ said Ralph Horsfield, a Doncaster lad serving with the Argylls. ‘You’d pick up different things: How many vehicles crossed a bridge? Who got on them?’ Movements were noted in logs and passed to higher command. The Chinese were doing the same. ‘The communists had big blockhouses on the other side,’ said Wigan native Corporal Joseph Fairhurst, another Englishman in the Argylls. ‘We could see them; they could see us.’
Soldiers, patrolling the border fences, were wary of local wildlife in the thigh-deep mud and water of the rice fields. ‘All the paddies were filled with snakes,’ said Middlesex Lance Corporal Don Barrett. ‘Every sergeant carried a razor blade to cut the bites and suck out the blood.’ The mud, water and humidity caused a number of afflictions. ‘Everybody had diseases,’ Barrett recalled. ‘Blotches – all your scrotum goes gungy and smelly – and diarrhoea.’ Men attended duty painted with blue medical liniments.
By summer 1950, geopolitical tensions were easing. Mao, it appeared, was not going to storm the border. Despite the high hills, high temperatures and rough barracks – the Argylls lived in tents, the Middlesex in stables – Hong Kong was, for the British soldier, a very agreeable existence.
The same could not be said elsewhere in the Far East. In Europe, the Cold War had stabilised, largely in favour of the capitalist democracies. Tito and Stalin had split in 1948; the following year, the Berlin Blockade was lifted, the Greek Civil War ended and NATO was founded. The centre of gravity of the great ideological conflict was shifting eastwards. China, the ‘Middle Kingdom’ at the continent’s heart, was now red, and in February 1950, the Sino-Soviet pact had been signed. European colonial powers, their prestige shattered by early Japanese success in the Second World War were in the descendent. Communism had climbed into bed with nationalism, and leftist guerillas were fighting in the jungles of Indochina, Malaya, and the Philippines.
The message that had summoned Lieutenant Colonel Man from his battalion’s swimming gala on 19 August was a harbinger of ill tidings. 27th Infantry Brigade was about to be pitch-forked from the best posting available to British troops in 1950 to the worst. Potential communist menace had brought the Argylls and Middlesex to Hong Kong; actual communist menace would propel them into the vortex of the struggle for tomorrow’s Asia.
This would be no low-intensity guerilla conflict in tropical jungle, but a savage, all-out war fought over a primitive, cruel and rugged land. On 25 June 1950, an armoured invasion force, fully outfitted and advised by the USSR, had rolled over an unheralded frontier. The communist blitzkrieg was cleaving across a mountainous peninsula 525 miles long and 200 miles wide, that few Argylls or Middlesex had even heard of. Korea.
* * *
It was a warm, early summer day, and Kim Song-hwan, a slight, cheerful-looking high-school student was sitting with friends on a hilltop on the northern outskirts of Seoul, the capital of South Korea. At their feet were the curved tiled roofs and thatch of a typical Korean village; beyond stretched paddy fields and a dust road heading northward. All eyes were focused on the blue hills on the northern horizon, where great puffs of grey smoke were blossoming, then dispersing. Kim got to work. As always, he had pencils, watercolours and sketchbook with him, for the 17-year-old student was also an artist, earning money working for Seoul newspapers, which could not afford cameramen. The watchers knew the smoke was from artillery impacts, but were unconcerned. ‘We had heardover the radio that North Korea had invaded, but were told over the radio that the South Korean Army had pushed them back,’ Kim recalled. In fact, the barrage on the hills heralded not a successful defence, but the imminent arrival of armoured spearheads of the North Korean People’s Army, or NKPA; its formidable T34 tanks had crushed flimsy frontier barriers and were now rattling down the road toward the capital. ‘I am bitter about those broadcasts,’ Kim said. ‘Because of them, many people did not flee.’
The land over which was this war was raging was an ill-fated one, for though it had been independent in language, custom and governance since the Dark Ages, the Korean peninsula is the strategic heart of Northeast Asia, the crossroads between the more powerful, more populous lands of China, Japan and the Russian Far East. It was a cockpit of war. The Mongolians launched their ill-fated thirteenth-century invasions of Japan from the peninsula; the Japanese launched their equally doomed sixteenth-century invasion of China over the same terrain. After the Japanese devastation of the sixteenth century and a Manchurian onslaught in the seventeenth, the traumatised Korean people closed their gates against the outside world and hoped for the best.
It was a doomed strategy. With colonial powers thrusting ever further east, the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ was swimming against the historical tide. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in a dynamic response to the rising West, Japan modernised swiftly and radically. Sleepy Korea became the prize in a trilateral power game. In 1895, Tokyo defeated Peking in the Sino-Japanese War, and in 1905, smashed Moscow in the Russo-Japanese War. These victories staked her claim on the mountainous peninsula. With the acquiescence of London and Washington, Tokyo annexed a bewildered Korea in 1910. The sun sank on the house of Yi, the royal dynasty which had claimed Korea’s dragon throne exactly one hundred years before Columbus had discovered America. Korea had never been much known beyond East Asia. As a colony of Japan, she was erased from global consciousness.
Tokyo would prove no benevolent overlord. In the early stages of its thirty-five-year rule, Japan governed with an iron fist. Resistance generated more lenient policies; twentieth-century infrastructure and a modern economy were installed. But come the 1930s, Japan was turning militaristic, ultra-nationalistic. Korea became the springboard for Tokyo’s conquest of Manchuria in 1931, then her invasion into China proper in 1937. In 1941, war flames spread across the Pacific, to be extinguished four years later by atomic flashes over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a last-minute Soviet thrust into Manchuria and northern Korea. Japan lay shattered.
What of her colony? In an afterthought at the end of the Second World War, the peninsula was divided by the Americans along a line on a map, the 38th parallel. In the North, Soviet forces installed Kim Il-sung, a former anti-Japanese guerilla and major in the Red Army who had fled to the Russian Far East when Manchuria got too hot for him, to rule the country’s nine million people from Pyongyang. The Americans installed Rhee Syngman, an anti-Japanese nationalist who had spent the colonial years in exile in the US, over the South’s twenty-one million in Seoul. The arrangement was meant to be temporary, but the Second World War had morphed into the Cold War; neither Rhee nor Kim would compromise with the other. In 1948, competing governments were established on both sides of the 38th parallel. Guerillas took up arms against the South, sparking brutality and massacre. Clashes flickered along the inter-Korean frontier. The Seoul government boasted that if war came, it would ‘eat lunch in Pyongyang, dinner in Sinuiju’.7But with neither insurgency nor border fighting promising an end to division, it would be Kim – fully outfitted by Stalin with offensive weapons, advised by Soviet planners – who made the decisive bid for unification. In the early hours of Sunday, 25 June 1950, he launched the NKPA southward in a full-scale invasion. This was not an insurgency, nor support for said; this was naked aggression. A heretofore-unknown peninsula was about to explode onto the world’s consciousness.
Among those in Seoul, as communist divisions rolled south, was a student of literature, Lee Jong-yun. A native of the border city of Kaesong, he had once read Chong Kamnok, a 300-year book of divination which had prophesied a terrible war in 1950, the Year of the Tiger, but living in Kaesong, had grown used to gunfire. Like many, he believed early reports of the fighting referred to frontier clashes. Then he saw refugees arriving from Uijongbu, the town 15 miles north, where Kim had watched artillery impacts. Though apolitical, Lee was convinced that the North Koreans would recruit him into their army – something he wanted to avoid. He decided to flee.
Kim, the young newspaper artist, had returned to Seoul and found a vantage point: He stood on the medieval city walls, where they climbed up the mountain side near the fortress-like East Gate, watching brown smoke rise over the adjacent market and the grey tiled roofs of the suburbs. Curious civilians crowded the walls, trying to see what was going on. Republic of Korea, or ROK soldiers were posted nervously in doorways; the war was not proceeding according to plan. An infectious panic was spreading. Desperate people were running through alleyways, bundles of possessions on their backs or their heads. Soldiers started to lose their nerve. Kim watched ROK troops changing into civilian clothes, hiding uniforms and weapons.
Rhee’s army has proven unable to check the invaders. While Moscow had liberally supplied Kim with armour, artillery and warplanes, Washington – fearful that Rhee might invade the North – had withheld heavy weapons. Lacking tanks, warplanes, heavy artillery and effective anti-tank weapons, the ROK Army was disintegrating.
Lee, meanwhile, was heading south, caught up in what was becoming, for some, a mad rush: ‘I ran like I was running from a volcano,’ he said. Soon he was out of the city proper, moving across paddy dykes, through the rice fields and thatched hamlets of the countryside. ‘It was pretty peaceful there,’ Lee said. ‘People were just watching what was going on.’ He reached the kilometres-wide Han River. The bridges had been blown by ROK engineers – Kim was not to know it, but hundreds of civilian refugees had been obliterated in the detonations – and the brown river was swollen and fast flowing with summer rains. No ferries were available; they had been commandeered by the military. However, Lee was a strong swimmer. Stripping off, he held his clothes on his head, and entered the swirl. He was carried downstream, but reached the south bank safely.
On 28 June, Seoul fell to the NKPA. Kim watched victorious columns trundle up the tree-lined boulevards. First came the Soviet-built T34 tanks, scout cars and motorcycle side-cars and trucks pulling artillery, all heavily camouflaged with scrub. Then, lines of marching men, rifles and submachine guns slung. Finally, the logistic tail: lumbering ox carts, also well camouflaged. In tan uniforms, the troops were dusty from the road, and some eyes, under peaked caps, were wide with battle shock, but most looked stern, tough and competent; many were combat veterans of Mao’s communist forces and the Chinese Civil War. Splashing colour across the scene were the red banners and flags the men from the north were carrying. Modest crowds lined the route. ‘Some workers welcomed them, they thought it would be a different world!’ said Kim. ‘There were NKPA going by in jeeps saying, “Give them a big hand!’‘ but it was only some workers and children who did.’
Meanwhile Lee, temporarily safe south of the Han, had halted. ‘I thought I’d return to Seoul in a few days and the North Koreans would be defeated,’ he said. But looking back, he could see smoke rising over the city: ROK troops were burning supplies. He stayed in a Buddhist temple for three days, buying food from nearby farming villages. Then the NKPA forded the Han. Lee set off again, heading for the south-central city of Taegu. In the town square in front of the railway station, was a sign asking for English interpreters. A student of English literature – his favourite poem was T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, a work appropriate to the times – Lee spoke the language reasonably. Men like Lee were suddenly in high demand. ‘The Yankees’ had landed.
Kim’s invasion had not gone unchallenged. Amid frantic US-led diplomacy – aided by the absence of the Soviet delegation, boycotting the organisation in protest at the UN’s refusal to grant a seat to Mao’s China – the UN Security Council passed resolutions on 25 and 27 June recommending UN members act to ‘restore international peace and security in the area’. On 30 June, US President Harry Truman ordered the US Supreme Commander in the Far East, Tokyo-based General Douglas MacArthur, to deploy US ground forces to assist the South. On 7 July, the UN Security Council recommended that UN forces be placed under US command. On 8 July, MacArthur was put in charge of the ‘United Nations Command’, or UNC.8 For the first time in its history, the New York-based multinational body was going to war.
For MacArthur – the victor in the Pacific; a general who combined a brilliant strategic mind with the instincts of an actor and the ego of a duke – Korea was the last chance for glory. His troops had been engaged almost from the start of hostilities: On 27 June, with the US Air Force evacuating US personnel – mainly members of the 500-man military advisory group working with the ROK Army – a North Korean Yak fighter had been shot down by a US Air Force F-82. On 1 July, US ground forces landed.9
The first American soldiers to arrive in Korea were garrison troops from the four-division US occupation force in Japan, the 8th Army. On 5 July, the North Koreans and Americans clashed for the first time. A Regimental Combat Team, or RCT, ‘Taskforce Smith’ proved no match for the hard driving NKPA: The RCT’s blocking position was rolled over by armour outside the town of Osan. The taskforce broke. Reinforcements landing in the southeastern port of Pusan were hastened to the front.
Among those recording events was an Associated Press photographer, Max Desfor. His editor expected the war to be over in two weeks – ‘that was the prevalent opinion’ – but Desfor, then in AP’s Miami bureau, had leapt at the chance to shoot a real story: ‘It was a hell of a lot different from catching a bunch of senators shaking hands, smiling and looking at the camera!’ No stranger to combat, the Bronx native had covered the Indonesian fight for independence against the Dutch and prior to that, the battle for Okinawa in the Second World War. Not a man to cover war from HQ, Desfor headed for the front. He was unimpressed by the troops. ‘There was a lot of criticism of them and I felt it too: the 24th and 25th Divisions were occupation troops, “good time Charlies’‘,’ he said. ‘They were not prepared to fight and I don’t know if they had any idea why they were fighting.’
With a nuclear deterrent and a strategic air force in hand, Washington had massively downsized and downgraded US ground forces after the Second World War. The 8th Army, after the easy living, booze and broads of occupied Japan, was unprepared for the primitive conditions of Korea and unfit for combat. Their leadership was third-tier: Only the lowest performing US military cadets were assigned to the Far East.10 Many units were under strength, particularly in artillery. Less than ten per cent had combat experience. Moreover, in a budget-cutting move, the key brains and nerve centres of any army – the corps headquarters – of US forces in Japan had been eliminated.11
The result was that neither US nor ROK troops were capable of holding the NKPA. Retreat, defeat, retreat. A new term entered the military lexicon: ‘Bug out’. Lines of refugees and soldiers slogged south down baking dust tracks winding through Korea’s paddy fields, thatched hamlets and rocky hills. The summer sun burned down.
In occupied Seoul, Kim Song-hwan adjusted to new realities. Many people got on with life, but leftists had emerged and were denouncing rightists. Many scenes he saw and sketched, were snapshot tragedies he never learned the beginning to, or the end of. Camouflaged North Korean troops roughly questioning a terrified man – his face as pale as a ghost’s – in a village alley. A wounded ROK soldier, abandoned by doctors and stripped of his trousers by villagers trying to find his wounds was dying on a blood-soaked stretcher. A desolate couple sobbed next to a body in a paddy. Ubiquitous corpses lying under the ubiquitous rice sacking, the ubiquitous flies buzzing around their wounds. ‘There were flies everywhere,’ Kim recalled. ‘Some bodies attracted more than others; maybe the flies liked fresh blood?’
But as the weeks passed, indications appeared that all was not well with the communist leadership. Food was becoming difficult to obtain; Kim decided to head north to join his aunt in Kaesong. On the way, he noted how difficult it was to take transport: The skies were dominated by US aircraft. He watched North Korean soldiers in camouflaged foxholes firing in angry futility at distant bombers. In Kaesong, the ancient Korean capital on the 38th parallel, he took refuge in an inn. Like many males, he was now virtually in hiding, for the NKPA was press-ganging men into the army. When he did go out, he carried a walking stick and faked a limp to demonstrate unfitness. Hiding under the beams of the inn, sketching, the young artist thought of a pen name for himself:Gobau or ‘Strong Rock’.
The USAF was not restricted to southern or central Korea; strike squadrons, skimming over paddies and hills, were ranging far and wide, paying visits to the towns as far from the battlefield as the industrial city of Hamhung, 150 miles northeast of Seoul. There lived Lim Geum-sook, a 19-year-old girl, no supporter of Kim’s regime: ‘Under communism, we were not allowed to eat white rice – we had to cook it secretly!’ She detested the term ‘comrade’ and dreaded the thought of working in the provincial mines, where young people were encouraged to volunteer. The first indication that war had broken out was the destruction of a city centre bridge by air attack. Raids became frequent. ‘There were no underground shelters, people just hid under bridges and so on,’ she said. ‘When planes came over, we could not see them, we just heard the sounds – how can you look up? We could not stand and watch!’
Danger came closer. The house next door was flattened; lumps of shrapnel skittered into the Lims’ courtyard. The family evacuated the children to a farm in the countryside, where the men dug a bunker in the cemetery. When aircraft appeared, the children crawled underground, but it was not just the UNC air offensive Lim was hiding from. While men were dragged into the NKPA, women were press-ganged as nurses. Though the ground war was distant, the Lim family decided to escape North Korea should the opportunity arise.
On the southern front, the NKPA was forging southeast on its final offensive. A wavy line was starting to appear on UNC maps: ‘The Pusan Perimeter’, a rough 50–100 mile defensive rectangle, largely defined by the Naktong River, that enclosed the port city of Pusan, the funnel through which UNC reinforcements were being fed. Among those coming ashore were America’s elite. After answering ‘a few questions’ related to his English proficiency, Lee was assigned to these troops.
‘There was an older man with us, a teacher, and when he heard about joining them he disappeared – he’d read about them!’ Lee said. The new arrivals, US marines, made an immediate impression. ‘They were really tough, professional fighters, they talked and talked about fighting,’ he said. ‘I had attended missionary school, but when I joined up, I found marines don’t speak missionary English!’ Lee was assigned to the Marine Provisional Brigade as an interpreter; his given name, Jong-yun, was anglicised to ‘John’. He was accepted. ‘In 1950, there was still the white superiority complex, it was discriminatory, but for marines, you were a marine,’ he said. ‘I wore marine utilities, a lieutenant’s badge and became part of them culturally and psychologically.’ The crack brigade was committed almost immediately to combat.
* * *
In between digging trenches, patrolling hills and heading downtown for weekend entertainment, few men of 27th Brigade had been following the war: Korea was separated from Hong Kong by the vast breadth of China, and unlike locations west and south – Singapore, Malaya, Ceylon, India – the UK had no significant historical, political or commercial interest in Korea. Moreover, nobody had heard of such a thing as a UN multinational force, and media was limited.
‘There were no radios in Hong Kong in the camp, occasional newspapers, so we did not know a great deal that was going on,’ said Barrett. Officers were hardly better informed. ‘Once the war started, my company commander called the platoon commanders and said, “This has blown up, there is a faint possibility that some battalions will go to Korea, but not us,”’ said Owen Light, a National Service second-lieutenant in the Argylls. ‘I told my platoon this.’ The uncertainty as to whether British troops were being sent or not extended to official visits. ‘We had a visit from John Strachey, the Secretary of State for War, in early August, and the brigadier asked if we were likely to be sent to Korea,’ recalled Captain Reggie Jeffes, 27th Brigade’s REME officer. ‘He said, “No, we are forming a brigade in the UK to go to Korea in October, you will remain here.”’
In fact, members of Coad’s brigade had already been in action in – or rather, off – Korea.
At the end of June, Corporal Peter Jones and two fellow Argylls had their names drawn from a hat to join the Royal Navy in Kure, Japan, for the annual Naval Regatta. The three Jocks, along with representatives of other Hong Kong-based units who boarded the heavy cruiser HMS Jamaica and the sloop HMS Black Swan were delighted at this seaborne holiday. It did not turn out as expected: The ships diverted to Korea. The Royal Naval force, with the US cruiser USS Juneau, was tasked with bombarding North Korean coastal supply routes and military installations, and, if possible, convoys of trucks, tanks and guns heading south.
In their first action, the soldiers were locked below decks as guns thundered above; Jones considered it like being ‘enclosed in a steel tomb’. Immediately action stations ended and the hatches were flung open, the soldiers sought the Gunnery Officer and ‘begged to be on deck next time, to help in any way possible’. The soldiers were appointed to pass ammunition to the four-inch guns, the cruiser’s secondary armament, and the anti-aircraft batteries. On 2 July, the British men-of-war made a tempting target for a group of seaborne guerillas. From the rocky coastline, six black dots appeared, speeding toward the ships, throwing up impressive wakes: A squadron of North Korean motor torpedo boats, MTBs, sallying out of their coastal lair. If the attack craft could close to torpedo range, the big ships were vulnerable: It was a race to stop them before they could launch.
Klaxons blared, orders were shouted down the tannoy: ‘Alarm! Surface! Port!’ The great turrets swivelled. The guns depressed. Eardrums of soldiers on deck were almost blown in as the Jamaica opened up with all her six-inch batteries. The ship shuddered to her keel. Simultaneously, great columns of water spurted up ahead of the racing MTBs as the broadside smashed into the waves. More salvoes followed as turret crews reloaded and fired at will. Inside the hull, unable to see outside, sailors hung on every word coming over the tannoy: ‘Target stopped … possible hit … fire and smoke visible … target sinking’. Within minutes, the attackers had been wiped out. The only survivor turned tail and ran, beaching herself on the distant coast. The soldiers could just make out her crew abandoning ship and running for their lives as the naval guns found the target, blowing the beached MTB into splinters.* Then sudden silence as the Gunnery Officer commanded fire to cease. For the Argylls, the battle had been ‘great to watch’. The next action would not be so one-sided.
The three ships had worked out a routine for shore bombardments: Hit high ground, bringing it crashing down on roads and rails. When NKPA convoys, which routinely travelled at night for fear of the USAF, halted and cleared the roads, they would use lights. These lights would then become targets for the blacked-out warships lurking offshore in the darkness – so close that sailors aboard could sometimes hear North Korean voices carrying over the water. On 8 July, the enemy hit back with artillery. A shell hit the base of the Jamaica’s mast, doing little material damage, but showering those below with shrapnel. Six men were killed or mortally wounded. Under the tattered battle ensign of the cruiser, the fallen – the first British casualties of the Korean War – were buried at sea.
The brutality of events ashore soon became apparent. As the patrol continued, the crew of the Jamaica spotted scores of unidentifiable black lumps bobbing in the swell ahead. The ship closed. Curious crew on deck realised what they were: Between 100 and 200 bloated corpses, their hands tied behind their back and shot in the head. For one of the Jamaica’s marines, Corporal Raymond Todd, it was ‘a foretaste of atrocities to come’.12 The soldiers aboard subsequently disembarked at Nagasaki, from whence they returned to Hong Kong.13
* * *
While the UK had minimal historical connection to Korea, Whitehall had been in discussions with Washington over the crisis from the outset. As the United States’ closest ally, a founder member of the UN and a member of the UN Security Council, Britain was under pressure to act. Moreover, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, though a socialist, had a deep distrust of Moscow, and recognised that Britain had to stand alongside the US in facing down what he saw as ruthless communist expansionism. He recognised further that to strengthen the hand of those Americans who favoured a strong defence for Europe, London had to support Washington in Asia. The Royal Navy had already been deployed in a blockading role. What force could the Army provide?
Britain’s Imperial Strategic Reserve tasked with deployment outside the UK or Germany, had been 27th Brigade, until dispatched to Hong Kong in 1949. The duty had passed on to 29th Independent Infantry Brigade. On 28 July, Whitehall signalled 29th Brigade, ordering it to prepare for deployment to Korea – this was the brigade Jeffes had been told would do the job. But 29th Brigade was far from ready for immediate departure. Reflecting the strained status of the British Army of 1950, its units were under strength or completely detached. It would not be ready even to embark until 1 November. Though this timetable was subsequently accelerated to 1 October, the tactical situation in Korea continued to degrade.14
On 10 August, Air Vice-Marshall Cecil Bourchier, British liaison at MacArthur’s Tokyo HQ, reported that the supreme commander, having been informed that no British brigade would arrive until December, was stressing the urgency of getting troops into action, fast. The NKPA were grinding up ROK and US troops; 500 GIs per day were being flown in on chartered aircraft, and committed, piecemeal, to the line; no other UN ally had yet landed ground troops. The Imperial General Staff, unsure whether MacArthur – a general with a taste for melodrama – was to be trusted regarding the situation’s urgency, consulted with the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. The crisis was confirmed. On 17 August, the IGS decided to send to Korea, as a stop-gap, British forces from a location closer to Korea than the UK: 27th Brigade. Once 29th Brigade arrived in theatre, 27th Brigade would be withdrawn to Hong Kong.15
On Saturday, 19 August – the same evening Lieutenant Colonel Man was interrupted at the swimming gala – Jeffes was in Kowloon waiting to be picked up by Brigadier Basil Coad, 27th Brigade’s commander, for their customary weekend round of golf. ‘He did not arrive, so I rang [Coad’s] wife, and she said he had been called across to Land Forces, but he will be with you shortly,’ Jeffes recalled. ‘When he arrived, he said, “Reggie, no golf today: We go to Korea next Friday!’‘ ‘
Orders for the deployment of 27th Brigade had arrived from Singapore the previous day.16 The timetable was ridiculous: the departure date from Hong Kong was less than one week away.
* * *
Brigadier Basil Coad – he went by his middle name, Aubrey –was a highly experienced veteran of the Wiltshire Regiment. Tall, austere-looking, grey-haired with a lived-in visage, he was tough on senior officers, but was popular with junior officers and other ranks, for whom he flashed a frequent grin. He had led a battalion in Normandy and a brigade in Northwest Europe, winning a DSO, then briefly commanded a division, before returning to brigadier rank. He had the carefully cultivated commanders’ knack of remembering names. ‘He always knew you, he knew everybody,’ said Argyll adjutant, Captain John Slim. ‘He was very clear at commanding troops – English, Scottish or Australian.’ A realist, Coad was unwilling to risk men on forlorn hopes. Anglican Reverend William Jones, a self-described ‘brainless curate’ who had just been posted to the Middlesex, got a sense of Coad’s steady sense when he first met him. ‘He looked at me and welcomed me to 27th Brigade, then he said, “I don’t want any heroes in my brigade – heroes get killed!”’ 27th Brigade nicknamed their brigadier, ‘Daddy Coad’.17
A brigade customarily consists of three battalions, but so stretched were the British forces in 1950, that 27th Brigade was to enter combat with only two: 1st Argylls and 1st Middlesex. On 21 August, Canberra announced that an Australian battalion, 3rd Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment, would join the brigade in Korea.18
The two Hong Kong-based battalions boasted strong cadres of combat-hardened officers and senior NCOs, but their junior ranks were heavily composed of National Servicemen. Many regulars considered them nuisances and amateurs, but some saw their quality. ‘At that time about sixty per cent of the battalion were National Service, which, at that time, was eighteen months,’ said Argyll Private Jake Mutch, a regular himself. ‘Without them, the army would have been lost – there were lots of good tradesmen and sportsmen.’
Soldiers in any army look alike: They wear the same uniforms; are the same age; do the same job. How, then, is unit identity fostered? Infantry regiments were recruited from specific areas of the country, and ‘branding’– a strategy to differentiate and raise public perceptions of a product, service or entity above near-identical competition – had been in use by British regiments long before the concept was ‘invented’ and commercialised by marketers. The tools used to brand units were their unique traditions, histories, insignia and nicknames. Regimental identities were instilled in recruits, forming a key component of esprit de corps.
The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were one of the British Army’s most famed regiments. After the battle of Culloden in 1746 ended the Jacobite dream of returning the Stuart kings to the throne, London decided to incorporate the Jacobites’ key fighting men – the Gaelic-speaking hill clansmen – into its own forces. Thus was born the legend of the Highland regiments. Hardy hill men, raised to revere courage in battle and proud of their distinct dress – jaunty headgear and kilts in clan tartan – weapons – the basket-hiltedclaymore (‘great broadsword’) and the skin dubh (‘red knife’) dirk – and music – the bagpipe – Highlanders became the shock troops of empire. The 91st Argyllshire Highlanders were raised in 1794 and the 93rd Sutherland Highlanders in 1799. In 1881, the two regiments were amalgamated into the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, usually shortened simply to ‘The Argylls’ or, more colloquially, ‘The Jocks’. The regiments had served in the Peninsula, at Waterloo, in the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny, South Africa and both World Wars. Headquartered in Stirling, the medieval fortress at the base of the highlands associated with Scottish warrior-patriot William Wallace, they boasted one of the most famed nicknames in military history. ‘The Thin Red Line’ referred to an incident when their slender, scarlet-coated ranks, deployed across the valley of Balaclava, halted a mass Russian cavalry charge.
In 1950, many men in 1st Battalion were Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, though all spoke fluent (albeit, accented) English. ‘They’re tough, the Argylls, they stand no nonsense,’ said Mutch, who reckoned the only unit which could face them down were the Cameronians, who recruited from the roughest districts of Glasgow and Hamilton. ‘The Middlesex were English so we would fight them,’ Mutch added. ‘And it was not only the soldiers, the sergeant majors got involved too – they were proud of us!’ The battalion adjutant agreed. ‘Scottish regiments are always aggressive – up and at ’em!– and it’s hard to stop them,’ said Slim. ‘Jocks are humane, but tough as they come.’
Due to its deployment to Hong Kong, the battalion had a solid core. ‘The battalion had come back from Palestine, all those who had been of any value moved to other appointments and a lot of people who really were pretty second-rate were back,’ said intelligence officer, Lieutenant Alexander ‘Sandy’ Boswell, speaking of the battalion as it had been in the UK. ‘The moment we got warned that we were going to defend Hong Kong against the Chinese, those kinds of chaps disappeared.’
The commander of the Argylls in Hong Kong was Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Neilson. ‘Fit but aging, determined, single minded, not a bundle of laughs, no great imagination but a thoroughly professional soldier’, was the verdict of one officer.19 ‘He was a good, steady CO, personally brave,’ added Slim. ‘He always got around the companies.’ A Highlander to the core, Neilson was usually accompanied by his pipe major and at least a couple of pipers, but there was a silent, contemplative side to him: Few knew him well.*
The battalion’s second-in-command was a different kettle of fish: A quiet and pleasant, but determined and often sprightly individual, Major Kenny Muir, whose father had commanded the battalion from 1923–27.20 Muir Junior had served on the Northwest Frontier and throughout the Second World War in North Africa, Sicily and Northwest Europe, winning a mention in dispatches. Slight but very fit, Muir had a whimsical side: He would make the junior officers follow him in doing back flips on mess nights.21‘He was a peppery little bugger!’ reckoned the adjutant.
The adjutant – responsible for administration and discipline in the battalion – was high-profile: John Slim was the son of the chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Bill Slim, arguably the UK’s finest Second World War general. A tall, tough-looking character, ‘Big John’ had commanded Gurkhas in Burma during the war, and still wore a kukri. After Indian independence, he joined the Argylls: ‘I exchanged one bunch of wild hillmen for another,’ he said. ‘The Jock is a bit like the Gurkha: He won’t tell you you’re any good until you prove it.’ No wilting flower, Slim told his CO, ‘If you won’t give me a company, I’ll stay with you – not in the rear area!’ Neilson consented. Though a formidable fighting man, there was a playful side to Slim. ‘He was a wonderful chap, a bit of a chancer, a bit wild in the night clubs,’ said Quartermaster Brown. ‘In Hong Kong, I played piano, and he played the drums. He was very energetic.’
Among the company commanders was Burma veteran Major Alastair Gordon-Ingram of B Company. ‘He was a gentleman,’ said Mutch. ‘I remember once when we had not been paid and it was a Friday and Ingram had a company of 120 men and he gave us all about ten shillings each out of his own pocket – the average weekly pay of a soldier. That was the kind of thing he did.’ Another high-profile officer was the aggressive, heavy-set Captain Colin Mitchell, a soldier who positively enjoyed combat: ‘You’d find him where the bullets were flying,’ said Slim. Mitchell had fought in Italy and after the war, been wounded in Palestine. ‘He was the best tactician in the battalion,’ said one of his soldiers, Adam MacKenzie. ‘Quite a character.’ Mitchell would later gain a more famous nickname, but in Korea, was known due to his stubby nose, as ‘Piggy’.
One of the biggest Argylls was Robin Fairrie, a giant mortar officer, who, his soldiers said, could carry two heavy mortar tubes up the Hong Kong hills. Fairrie’s rank yo-yoed – sometimes captain, sometimes lieutenant – due to the mischief he was constantly involved with. His latest demotion had come after a field exercise in the UK, when he had been questioned by police after the disappearance of a local pig. Fairrie had ordered his men to capture the beast, and they were planning to feed it on hardtack biscuits and slaughter it. Fairrie was denying any knowledge of the hoofed ration to the local constable and a gamekeeper when a terrified squealing erupted from a nearby trench.22 The men adored him. ‘He was a big, rough man, something of the same stamp as John Slim – no fear,’ said Mutch. ‘He treated men as men.’
Another character who always had a twinkle in his eye was the quartermaster, Andrew ‘Dodger’ Brown. An Aberdeen lad who had originally signed up in 1933 with the regimental band, he had served everywhere: Eritrea, the Sudan, the Western Desert, Sicily, Italy, Palestine. Returning to the battalion in Hong Kong from seven months combat in the jungle with the Royal Malay Regiment, he was impressed with the Jocks in Hong Kong: ‘They looked tremendous, very fit and tough from running up and down the mountains,’ he said. However, he was concerned when he took over the stores; there were a large number of missing items.
The regimental doctor was Lieutenant Douglas Haldane, a Paisley native and National Service officer. ‘Initially, I was probably a wee bit bolshie because it was a regular unit with regular features including 06:30 sick parades,’ he said. ‘I tended to take the side of younger National Service officers.’ His assistants were poorly trained, knowing only basic first aid; most pressingly, he did not have anyone trained to treat burns. Their inexperience placed a heavy burden on Haldane, who was inevitably nicknamed ‘Jock the Doc’.
The junior officers were a mixed bunch. Some, such as intelligence officer Sandy Boswell, were regular graduates of Sandhurst; others were National Service officers who had completed a four-month platoon commanders’ crash course at Eton Hall. James Stirling came from an illustrious family – his cousin, Scots Guardsman David Stirling had founded the SAS – but he was a less deadly soldier himself. ‘I was the one who always fell asleep after lunch,’ he recalled. Owen Light, a 19-year-old ‘half-Scots, half-English half-breed’ had joined the Argylls after Eton Hall and arrived in Hong Kong with two newly commissioned regular officers. The latter were greeted by the CO, ‘like long-lost friends’, but when Light was introduced, Neilson simply asked, ‘Who are you?’ Thus ended Light’s interview.
The senior man in the non-commissioned ranks was the giant Regimental Sergeant Major: Paddy Boyd. He was a mystery to the other ranks: ‘He would never tell us how he won the Distinguished Conduct Medal, even when we got him drunk in the mess,’ said MacKenzie. ‘I think he’d probably seen too much in the Second World War, and I don’t think he was that popular,’ said one officer.
Private Jake Mutch, a 22-year-old from Morayshire, had left school at thirteen to enter agriculture, which he had not taken to. Impressed by soldiers returning from the war, he had joined the Seaforth Highlanders, but bored with garrison duty at Fort George – ‘I had joined the army to see the world, but I was just 6 miles away from the farm I had worked at’ – volunteered for the Argylls and Hong Kong. ‘They were a real family clique,’ he said. ‘Everybody for the others.’
A particularly formidable soldier was Corporal Harry Young, a Black Watch man who had been called up in 1945 then, finding that ‘the services do something for you’, signed on for twenty-two years and volunteered for the Argylls in Hong Kong. ‘We had boys from the North and from London,’ he said. ‘We got together – it was a terrific team. Never knew of any problems – usually the punch-ups were Jocks and Paddies! A sense of humour helps.’
Roy Vincent was a 19-year-old Edinburgh lad who had served in the fire brigade during the war, but been unable to join the army at first try due to pneumonia scars on his lungs: ‘In the fire service, you were always soaking wet.’ He tried again and was accepted. He had wanted to join the Argylls after reading about the ‘Thin Red Line’ in a boy’s comic.
This most Scottish regiment had a strong foreign contingent: ‘A lot of Englishmen became good Scotsmen!’ said Brown. Robert Searle from New Malden had wanted to join a Highland regiment after his father had taken him to watch the Scottish Division beating retreat. Another Englishman was Lance Corporal Joseph Fairhurst. ‘They didn’t hold it against us, once you were in the regiment you were in it,’ he said. ‘You lose your accent, you talk just like a Scotsman.’
Coad’s second battalion was a London-recruited unit: 1st Middlesex.
The Middlesex, or Duke of Cambridge’s Own, was born in 1881, an amalgamation of two foot regiments, the 57th and 77th. The regiment’s nickname, ‘The Diehards’ dates to the battle of Albuerra on 16 May 1811. On that day, the dying CO of the 57th, Colonel Inglis, watching his battalion being shredded – twenty-two out of twenty-five officers were killed, along with 425 of 570 other ranks – shouted his last order: ‘Die hard, my men – die hard!’ The enemy commander, Marshal Soult, was astounded: ‘There is no beating these troops,’ he wrote. ‘The day was mine, yet they would not run.’ Prior to that action, the London-recruited regiment had a less illustrious brand, ‘The Steelbacks’, alluding to its soldiers’ unusual propensity for being flogged.23 1st Middlesex in 1950 was a youthful, London-recruited battalion with a strong emphasis on sport. Having arrived in Hong Kong after guard duties at Buckingham Palace, they ‘needed a bit more shaping’, in their CO’s words.
Unlike some officers, their CO, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Man, was not blessed with wealth. Though he hoped to follow his father, an Aldershot clergyman, to Cambridge, his family was cash-strapped – ‘there was no money!’ – forcing the young Man, ‘to look to see what I could do without costing my father.’ He failed to win a university scholarship, so joined the army as a private, hoping to be commissioned – which he was. In the Middlesex, he found an organisation which treated him fairly; he repaid it with life-long loyalty. In 1944, he demanded to be relieved of a staff appointment to return to regimental frontline duties, a move a superior officer called ‘professional suicide’.24 Landing on D-Day +2, he commanded the Middlesex’s 7th Battalion through France, Belgium and Holland, winning a French Croix de Guerre in the process. In 1949, he took command of 1st Middlesex for its Hong Kong deployment, where he shook up the battalion, gaining a reputation as a martinet: ‘We used to say, “Never has so much trouble been caused by so little a Man!’‘’ recalled Yerby, for Man stood just north of five feet. Yet he was a popular CO. ‘You did not see him, he moved too fast!’ said Private Ken Mankelow. ‘He took an interest right down to section level, he was right in with everybody.’ Mustachioed; fast-talking; waspish; no-nonsense; always smartly turned out in field cap; if Neilson was the stereotypical silent Scot, Man was the classic English officer.
As with the Argyll’s mid-level officers, the Middlesex company commanders had had active wars between 1939 and 1945. D Company’s leader was Major John Willoughby, who had fought in France, and been evacuated through Dunkirk before serving in the Far East – where, as a liaison officer, he met a number of the personalities running MacArthur’s war machine – before finishing the war commanding a battalion in Northwest Europe. A big, fair-haired major, Willoughby did not always get along with his CO and was a man of considerable bonhomie with a well-crafted – though often irreverent – turn of phrase. On operations, he was popular with pressmen, a species Man had little time for. Willoughby was also respected by the junior ranks. Edgar Green, the 19-year-old private, became a mess barman, where he got to see the officers up close: ‘Some were very nice people, some were like a load of schoolboys,’ he said. Willoughby was one officer who stood the barmen a drink.
Then there was Major John Shipster, who had commanded Punjabis in some of the very worst combat in Burma, before joining the Middlesex after Indian independence. As a professional soldier, he found life in Hong Kong ‘pretty dull’ but his wife and their young child had just arrived in the colony, so he was preparing to settle in for the long haul – a process that meant finding better accommodation than the Chinese hotel room they were put up in.
Major Dennis Rendell, who led A Company, was a dashing-looking, mustachioed blade with a matching upper-class accent. He had served in the Parachute Regiment during the war, been captured and escaped in North Africa. In 1946 he had shipped out to the Far East, with 5 Parachute Brigade, sent to restore order in Indonesia pending the return of Dutch forces. Among his exploits there was the capture of an independence activist in a dawn raid: he was ‘in bed with the most beautiful woman,’ Rendell recalled. ‘He behaved perfectly well, he was perfectly amenable; there were about 20 of us in the room!’ The target Rendell had bagged was – he believed – Sukarno, soon-to-be president of Indonesia.* Rendell moved on to Palestine and Malaya before returning to his parent unit, the Middlesex in Hong Kong.
Among the platoon officers was a tall young man, Chris Lawrence, who greatly impressed a number of the men under his command, 4 Platoon, B Company ‘You could not get past him,’ said one of his soldiers, Private Ken ‘Ted’ Mankelow. ‘He was very good at looking after the men, he was always calm and collected, I never saw him looking flustered, it was if he were born to it.’
Mankelow was a Croydon boy whose elder brother had served in the Middlesex; with the regiment comprised of a lot of South London faces he ‘couldn’t wait to join’. Corporal Harry Spicer from Tottenham was another volunteer, who had enjoyed the Army Cadets, so signed up for ‘five and seven’ (five years in the regulars, seven on the reserves.)
Private Edgar Green, the Herne Hill boy who so enjoyed the Hong Kong shopping, had been a railway fireman, when, called up for National Service, had asked to join the Middlesex as his uncle had served in the regiment: ‘I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for,’ he said. ‘I could have gone into the Royal Engineers, there was no need to go into the infantry.’
Private James Beverly, a Bermondsey man with the Cockney’s typical disrespect for authority, was unimpressed upon arriving for basic training, but to his surprise, after going through the ten-week basic course, found himself buying into the Diehard esprit. ‘I was not one who had a lot of respect for a regiment,’ he said. ‘But I did for that regiment.’
Lance-Corporal Bob Yerby was from Kingsbury. He had originally wanted to join the cavalry for five and seven, but was told he would have to sign up for twenty-two years. Instead, he joined the Middlesex. In Hong Kong, he realised that the Cockneys were different to the Scottish: ‘The Jocks would fight anyone, they would fight among themselves, but we were a sporting battalion,’ he said. ‘We played a lot of cricket, rugby and hockey.’
Indeed, one of the battalion’s sporting achievements had been beating Hong Kong’s seven-a-side rugby team, but when Man went to collect the trophy, was told he would not be allowed to take it. It was the wrong approach to take with the feisty little colonel. ‘You can be assured it returned with me!’ he said.
Not all the Middlesex were Londoners. Sergeant Paddy Redmond was a Dubliner who came from a family with a strong British military tradition. He volunteered in 1944, joined the elite commandos, and was en route to the invasion of Malaya when the war ended. ‘In a way, it was a sigh of relief, in a way it was disappointing,’ he said. ‘We were geared up for action.’ Post-war, Redmond was posted to the Middlesex. ‘They were great blokes, you know what Cockneys are like, there was none of this, “He’s a Paddy bastard” – everyone was the same.’
* * *
Every military unit is hardwired with an acutely sensitive, if unofficial, intelligence antenna. 27th Brigade was no exception: Its rumour service anticipated deployment orders by seven days. ‘A week earlier, a corporal came and said, “A ship is in harbour waiting to transport us to Korea!”’ recalled Middlesex Lance Corporal Don Barrett, originally a National Serviceman who subsequently volunteered. ‘Forty eight hours later, nothing had happened, the corporal had gone into hiding and we were all saying, “lying sod!”’
27th Brigade’s movement orders were shrouded in secrecy. Over the weekend of 19–20 August only commanding officers and seconds-in-command were informed. Among them was Jeffes, the REME officer who had to check transport; his arrival at battalions over the weekend was greeted with great suspicion as to why an officer was examining equipment on a Saturday afternoon. ‘Everyone was highly excited about this, and of course, no one could tell them why.’
On Monday morning, Barrett’s rumour was confirmed: 27th Brigade was to deploy. ‘Officers were dashing around, parties were being taken off to do various jobs,’ said Barrett, who found himself excited at the prospect of action. ‘We’d just had six years of war, we all expected to go to war.’
In the first flurry of orders, it was unclear which two of the brigade’s three battalions would go. On 19 August, it was the Leicesters; on 20 August, they were replaced by the Middlesex.25 Quite why the Argylls and Middlesex were chosen remains unclear; it seems likely that the Leicesters had too heavy a National Service component, though theories abound. ‘My theory is that the Argylls and Middlesex were troublesome,’ said Barrett. ‘It was going to be the Argylls and the Leicesters, and I think it was because we had this little ‘to do’ on Albuerra Day on 16 May. It was a jolly good do, then it got a bit nasty: I went to sleep and when I woke up, the camp had been wrecked: windows broken, the RSM had a suspected skull fracture, the CO went into the corporals’ mess and supposedly someone threw a mug at him. So probably somebody said, ‘Look, if these Middlesex want to fight, change ’em for the Leicesters.’ And of course, the Jocks always want to fight!’
Combat is a military unit’s raison d’etre. The word was passed down from company commanders to platoon commanders, from platoon commanders to the men. ‘When I told them, “We are going”, I think they all looked forward to it,’ said Light, the Argyll subaltern. ‘An infantry soldier is trained to want to get to grips with the enemy, you join the infantry for this – you join the Royal Army Service Corps if you want to drive lorries!’ One of the brigade’s least bloodthirsty men was the Argyll MO, but even ‘Jock the Doc’ Haldane shared the general enthusiasm. ‘My reaction was, “I quite fancy this,”’ Haldane said. ‘It was an adventure, an opportunity to do something useful.’
More reluctant was Second Lieutenant James Stirling. ‘I was horrified – this was not what I had intended – but it was what you had to do,’ he said. ‘Most of my men were like me, National Servicemen who had only done eight weeks training. But some wanted to get into it.’
Many men were out of camp when orders came down. ‘I was in the China Fleet Club having a few drinks when the MPs came and told all Argylls and Middlesex to get back to their units, the bus was waiting, the “balloon” had gone up,’ said Mankelow. ‘We didn’t know which “balloon” it was – all we were worried about was if someone else would drink your beer!’
Ignorant of what awaited in Korea, some veterans were unworried at the prospect. Among them was Yerby, the Middlesex lance corporal, who had served in counter-insurgency operations. ‘What wars had we seen?’ he said. ‘Palestine gave me a whiff.’
Soldiers under nineteen were not to be sent and the Middlesex was fifty-five per cent composed of youthful National Servicemen, but such was the CO’s rhetoric – ‘he had a wonderful knack of talking to people,’ said Yerby – that Man was ‘besieged’ by under-aged soldiers begging to go to Korea. ‘We all wanted to go, we had trained together, we were young, fit and confident,’ said Mankelow. ‘You are trained to be a soldier and when a war is on, you have to go with your mates and the regiment does its job.’26
While professionals and fire-eaters had their own reasons for fighting, in assessing why ordinary soldiers were keen to deploy, Mankelow had put his finger on the lure of war. Some very effective armies are ideological; not the British. Politicians speak of patriotism and duty to country, and that is certainly an element, but in the British Army, soldiers are inculcated in the cult of the unit. War means battle honours, the chance for the regiment to add to its history and so elevate itself among its peers. This is a motivation; some officers consider it the key motivation: ‘Everything for the regiment’.
But moving down through the unit – from 650-man battalion, to 120-man company to 30-man platoon or 8-man section – the human factor is more critical. Military subunits are groups of young men, and powerful bonds are forged between men who train, work, talk, eat, sleep, share and fight together, for months or years. It is little wonder that so many soldiers borrow Shakespeare’s ‘band of brothers’ quote from Henry V, to describe intra-unit relationship ties that are, in many cases, closer than those of family. The critical motivational factor, then, is peer pressure: The determination to prove oneself to, and not to let down, one’s friends in the most extreme human experience, mortal combat. This makes effective infantry units deadly fraternities, forged of bonds of friendship, led by men whose loyalties are as much to regiment as they are to their cause.
Still, if war was an exciting prospect, the battlefield and the enemy were completely unknown to most of 27th Brigade.
The limit of Man’s knowledge of the country was a couple of Korean stamps he had collected as a child. That was more than many of his men, who knew absolutely nothing. ‘Chris Lawrence called the platoon together and said, “We are going to Korea!” and we said, “Where is Korea?” and he said, “How the hell do I know?”’ Mankelow recalled. ‘We were trying to find info, it was pretty sketchy. All we knew was we were going.’
Unlike most officers, Shipster had been following Korea closely as American naval reinforcements came through Hong Kong on their way to the war. Yet his ignorance was apparent when it came to equipment, an issue he sought his CO’s advice on. ‘I remember asking Colonel Man if I should take my golf club and tennis raquets,’ Shipster recalled. ‘And he said, “By all means, John, take them.”’
The war was not going well. The NKPA had exposed serious shortcomings in the training and motivation of US troops. North Koreans were fighting to drive the Americans and ROKs into the sea before reinforcements – 27th Brigade among them – transformed the strategic balance.
The ironic potential of the situation – British troops coming to the aid of pressured Americans – was not lost on the Diehard CO. ‘We knew the Americans had been caught with their trousers down and there was a certain amount of banter which we thoroughly enjoyed,’ Man said. ‘Hitherto the Americans had come in late and said, “We won” and this time we came in late and were able to have some pretty good backchat at them – my troops particularly!’
Americans arrived to demonstrate new weapons – notably the 3.5-inch ‘bazooka’ anti-tank rocket launcher, essential against the NKPA T34s. Their briefings were not encouraging. ‘This American intelligence officer came out and said, “It’s a grave situation out there and we are thankful that you are going out there to help us, but we doubt if you will come home again,”’ Green recalled. ‘I thought, “Cor!”’
* * *
The deployment order blew a tornado of activity through the brigade.
‘The orders were a hell of a shock,’ said Brown. ‘I worked all week and got something from the doctor to keep me awake so I could work all night.’ Orders were delivered, then countermanded. ‘It was pack this, you won’t need this, you would get told one thing, then ten minutes later, told the opposite,’ said Mutch. ‘It was hell for leather for a few days.’
Fortunately, a brigade movement exercise had recently been completed. ‘The adjutant and the quartermaster are the keys,’ said Slim. ‘We had rehearsed the whole business of being ready to move suddenly and had worked out what we needed if there was a battle with the Chinese in Hong Kong. It was frantic, but not a panic.’ The deployment solved the problem worrying the Argyll Quartermaster: the many non-existent stores he had ‘inherited’ from his predecessor. ‘I took all my deficiencies with me to Korea and “lost” them,’ said Brown. ‘That was that!’
Medical officers faced specific challenges. ‘When we got orders to go to Korea I had to inoculate the battalion, so I went with a sergeant to get needles,’ said Dr Stanley Boydell, the Middlesex MO. ‘We had 3,000–4,000 inoculations to do and we only got about twenty needles!’ Boydell sterilised and re-sterilised the needles, but it was painful for men being punctured by increasingly blunt instruments.
The most critical task was to beef up the infantry. Each battalion’s fourth rifle company was disbanded to provide three up-to-strength companies. Still, the battalions would not be up to their full, on-paper war-strength of 38 officers and 948 other ranks; a minimum strength of 28 officers and 618 other ranks was set.27 The Argylls and Middlesex absorbed volunteers from other battalions in Hong Kong.
The brigade was heading to Korea seriously under strength. It would depend totally upon the Americans for rations, heavy vehicular transport, engineering and hospitals. In ‘teeth’ terms it was equally lightweight. An infantry brigade should contain three battalions, an artillery regiment, a mobile/armoured force and a transport pool. 27th Brigade would have only two infantry battalions until it was joined by the Royal Australians; when that would be was unclear. It totally lacked armour – the spearhead in attack and the rearguard in retreat – and artillery – the arm that causes the most battlefield casualties – meaning that 27th Brigade lacked critical punch. In action, Coad would be heavily reliant upon his bayonets.
The scratch nature of the deployment worried thoughtful officers. ‘Dwelling momentarily on our almost total un-preparedness, my blood runs cold,’ wrote Middlesex Major John Willoughby. Brigade HQ, he thought, had the air of ‘fairyland’.28 Due to the ad hocnature of their deployment, 27th Brigade’s soldiers began to refer to themselves as ‘The Woolworth’s Brigade’ or ‘The Cinderella Brigade’. Others, reflecting the urgency with which they were being sent east, coined a new nickname: ‘The For-God’s-Sake-Send-Something Brigade’.
Yet the frenzied preparations paid off. Orders had been passed down on 18 August. Exactly one week later, the UK’s Korean War expeditionary force, its first ever contribution to a multinational UN force was – somehow – good to go. For those responsible for getting the units ready, relief was tremendous. ‘John Slim and I went out that last night and got rather pissed!’ Brown said.
Pre-battle anticipation was, however, a false high. ‘There was an undercurrent of excitement – we were going to kick arses! – when you are twenty, you feel invincible,’ said Private Ray Rogers, a volunteer to the Middlesex from the South Staffords. ‘That feeling lasted until the first action.’
Some were subconsciously roiled. On the night before the soldiers boarded their transport for the war zone, one of the Diehard barracks was awoken by a sudden uproar. ‘At night-time, all hell broke lose – one of our people, Sharpe, was crying his eyes out, he didn’t want to go,’ said Frank Whitehouse, another South Stafford volunteer. ‘He was going berserk – I had to slap his face.’ Eventually, Sharpe was calmed. The barrack returned to uneasy sleep.
The day before departure, the brigade paraded for a special address by General Sir John Harding, Commander-in-Chief, British Forces Far East, who had arrived from Singapore. The Diehards’ aggressive little CO was satisfied with the message. ‘“Shoot straight and shoot to kill”, that was the essence of it,’ Man said. ‘He was very inspiring.’ The brigade would travel by sea from the Kowloon dockside, and it was there that a second pep talk was delivered to the bare-chested young men, formed up in ranks, by Malcolm MacDonald, British High Commissioner for the Far East. ‘The enemy you are fighting are North Koreans, but the weapons they are using are Russian, their training is Russian,’ he told the soldiers. ‘You will be fighting as if on the soil of France or on the beaches of Britain.’29 Then it was time to board.
At approximately 18:30, the Argylls trooped up the gangplanks of the heavy cruiser HMS Ceylon; the Middlesex and Brigade HQ boarded the fleet support carrier HMS Unicorn. The pipes of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers wailed from the dock, answered by the band of the Royal Marines and the pipes of the Argylls from the quarterdeck of the Ceylon. Families and friends waved furiously from the quays as pipers played, ‘Will ye nae came back again?’30 With the sun setting behind the Hong Kong hills, the two men-of-war slipped their moorings and set their bows toward the darkening east. It was 25 August, 1950.
* * *
The brigade steamed east. Argylls found the Ceylon cramped. ‘We were living on decks, turrets, gangways, on the floors of mess decks,’ said Argyll Ralph Horsfield. ‘But it was a happy ship.’ Army-Navy relations soared when the Ceylon’s commander flew the Argyll regimental flag alongside his battle ensign. The Middlesex had more space in the cavernous hangers of the carrier HMS Unicorn.
Tactical adjustments were made to peace-time kit. In Hong Kong the troops’ webbing had been scrubbed parade-ground clean, almost white; with combat approaching, this had to be dirtied down. All brasses were removed or blackened.31 Sterns crackled with firing as musketry training was prioritised. Anything in the ship’s wake was used as a target: boxes heaved over the side, seagulls – even surf. With no peacetime ammunition restrictions, soldiers joyfully blazed away. ‘Everyone fired more than they have ever been able to before,’ noted Willoughby.32
The big major had had a thoughtful moment as the ships left Hong Kong: An RAF overflight had dipped wings, reminding him of the last time he had seen a Royal Naval vessel with Spitfires overhead: Dunkirk.33 A different airborne incident had some men hoping for mischief. ‘The tannoy went and it was the captain, saying, “The plane going over is your commanding officer and intelligence officer,”’ recalled Second Lieutenant James Stirling. ‘All the guns on the ships tracked it and we all hoped someone would let off a shot, but they did not, sadly!’
A brisk lecture circuit was underway. ‘We were being called together and given updates on what was going on in Korea,’ Mutch said. ‘The part we listened to was the casualties: We thought if this week it is the Americans, next week it could be Argylls. It was no party.’ The two best-informed men aboard however, were not military. A pair of embarked reporters told Willoughby that if the war dragged on, winter would be harsh.34 With the brigade attired in lightweight jungle greens, staff officers seemed not to have realised that Korea, in distant Northeast Asia, suffered more extreme climates than sub-tropical Hong Kong and steamy Southeast Asia.
A necessary formality of active service focused minds. ‘It was bought home to you when they gave you the “next-of-kin” form; that was scary, some of the fellas, the tough guys, were in tears,’ said Mutch. Green found himself a quiet nook. ‘I have been told we are going into a bad situation and if I don’t get home, I want to thank you for the life I have had,’ he wrote to his parents.
The Ceylon and Unicorn were joined by a jaunty escort: two Australian destroyers, HMAS Warramunga and HMAS Bataan. ‘One came in that fast, I thought “Bloody hell it’s going to hit us!”’ said Argyll Roy Vincent. ‘But it came alongside it in a curve – neat work.’ Due to fears of Chinese submarines off Formosa the ships blacked out and closed bulkhead doors.35 As they approached Korea, gun crews closed up against air attack. The high-angle 4.7-inch gun turrets swivelled in search of targets, but no threat appeared in the summer skies.
* * *
The advance parties – including Coad, Man and Neilson, adjutants and quartermasters – had already landed. On boarding the aircraft in Hong Kong, Man was immediately critical of the US flight crews. ‘The Americans were very casual, they flew off when they wanted to,’ he said. ‘We heard later that [the crews on the ships] manned the guns, the American [pilots] had no idea of the countersign. I wasn’t impressed.’
First port of call was Japan, where the advance party was installed at a US Air Force base. In an era when British officers sported an understated style, Major John Shipster was take aback by an inscription in the mess hall: ‘The greatest, fightingest pilots in the world go down this chow line!’ He was more impressed with the pilots. ‘It is one of the strange things about war: You don’t find people tense in the front line, you find them tense a wee bit further back,’ he said. ‘Fighting elements, like pilots who will be flying missions the next day, are quite relaxed; it’s part of the business to adapt this sort of pose.’ Base females were shocked to be told that when the Argylls paraded in kilts they ‘went regimental’ – i.e. without underpants – and were soon fraternising. ‘We were dancing with our birds,’ said Brown. ‘But the CO was keeping an eye on us like a hen, so we never got anywhere!’
Unbeknownst to Brown, senior officers enjoyed certain privileges. ‘A very attractive little Jap girl with long black hair came to my room and wanted to know if she could get me a bath,’ Man recalled. ‘It was very civilised after the unpleasant conditions we lived in among the snakes, smells and night soil of Hong Kong.’
The following morning, the party landed at Taegu in Korea. ‘I got out of the plane and much to my amazement found the airfield under shellfire,’ said Shipster, armed to the teeth with sporting equipment. ‘I was carrying my golf clubs and tennis racquet, so I threw them in a ditch and never saw them again.’
This was the ‘Pusan Perimeter’.
* In 2005, the author, on a visit to Pyongyang, asked a staffer at the capital’s impressive war museum what the most heroic North Korean action of the war had been. She replied, ‘The sinking of the cruiser USS Baltimore by our MTBs!’ This sounded impressive, but I had not heard of it. Upon return to Seoul, I checked the literature. No mention. Intrigued, I contacted the Pentagon’s PR department. They came back, stating that not only was the Baltimore not sunk, it was not assigned to Korea. And no, no other US cruisers had been sunk off Korea. I have wondered since if the ‘heroic action’ referred to was the raid on Jamaica and Juneau – which might, perhaps, have been reported up the chain of command as a success.
* Half a century after the Korean War, Neilson’s son – an Argyll officer himself – joined a group of regiment veterans on a visit to the Crimean War battlefields. During the trip, he asked some of the Korea veterans if they could tell him a little about his father, who he felt he had never really got to know. None could.
* The author has been unable to find any mention of this incident in the literature, indicating that Rendell was mistaken in his identification – unless he was posted to the Dutch paratroops who captured Sukarno, briefly, in 1948.