The Korean War (18 page)

A few men were quite keen: ‘We thought it would be like Europe – lots of looting and women,’ said one of their number sheepishly, long after. For ambitious professional soldiers like Captain Anthony Farrar-Hockley, adjutant of the Gloucesters, a war – any war – promised the chance of distinction – ‘the chance to sort out the soldiers from the time-servers.’ Captains James Majury and Bill Anderson of the Ulsters went out and made themselves gloriously drunk to celebrate the thrilling news of their departure, only to receive a stony welcome home from their wives, both of whom were nursing newly born babies. Even among the recalled reservists, there were enthusiasts. Some were anyway fed up with civilian life, or had failed to readjust after World War II. Some simply liked fighting.

But most did not. Each morning at Colchester, welfare clerks interviewed a long procession of compassionate cases, demanding release. Bill Cooper was a twenty-three-year-old management trainee in Leicester when the recall letter came. He had only been out of the army two years, and was married just a month. A friend who was also summoned fled to France to escape duty. But reluctantly, Cooper himself reported to Bury St Edmunds, driven by the thought: ‘What would people say if I didn’t go?’
¹²
The call-up was generally chaotic, with many men’s pay and allowances adrift for weeks.

In Cooper’s battalion, the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers, there
was a mutiny. One evening, the men returned from training to be confronted by a mess of corned beef which they declared to be ‘off’. Cooper, as Orderly Officer, was summoned to taste it. He agreed. The men in the mess hall then staged a sit-in. All their resentments and bitterness about their predicament were boiling over. The adjutant arrived to rebuke Cooper for condemning the corned beef without first consulting the medical officer. As weightier and weightier ‘brass’ arrived to attempt to control the situation, some regulars slipped away, to escape involvement in the escalating situation. But even after repeated appeals and orders from senior officers, a dozen recalcitrant mutineers remained, who defied all orders to move. They were eventually removed for court-martial. The atmosphere in the battalion remained poor, with a succession of chaotic training exercises, and a feeling among reservist and National Service officers that the regulars lacked sensitivity in handling the men in their unwelcome predicament. ‘Haven’t you got a sword?’ demanded a fellow-subaltern when Lieutenant Stan Muir abandoned his labours as a traveller in ladies’ underwear to report to 45 Field Regiment. ‘No? Oh my God. You know we do ceremonial guard-mounting here?’ But at least Muir and his colleagues found little difficulty in readjusting to the ways of their 25-pounder guns after a two or three years’ absence: ‘It’s like riding a bicycle or playing a musical instrument. You never really forget.’
¹³

One British group went eagerly. Early in August, the Royal Marines were ordered to mobilise as rapidly as possible a group of commando volunteers for service in Korea. The Americans urgently needed some coastal raiding specialists. Major Douglas Drysdale, a highly experienced officer who had led a Commando in the Far East in World War II, was hastily restored to his old rank, and ordered to put together ‘41 Independent Commando, RM’, and take off for Japan. Drysdale had the pick of Marines eager to see some war service. Within three weeks, he had assembled some 150 officers and men, including contingents of swimming, demolition and heavy weapons specialists. Then, under melodramatic and
wholly ineffective security restrictions which compelled them to travel in civilian clothes, they flew by BOAC Argonaut to the Far East. Here, they were joined by a further 150 men ‘kidnapped’ from a draft in transit to 3 Commando Brigade in Malaya. At a base camp in Japan, they were issued with arms and equipment, American in everything except their cherished green berets, and began three weeks’ intensive training before they started operations. Yet even among the Marines, it was necessary to qualify the press reports of their enthusiasm for Korean service. A certain Sergeant Molony found himself in deep trouble with his wife in England, when she picked up her newspaper to discover that he was being described as ‘an eager volunteer’ for the war. 41 Commando spent the early autumn conducting a series of modest hit-and-run raids on the coast of North Korea, where parties landed by the US Navy blew up sections of coastal railway and caused some alarm to communist outposts, with considerable satisfaction to themselves, and only one man killed.

Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Jumbo’ Phillips of the 8th Hussars preserved every cliché of the British cavalry going to war. While his unit prepared their Centurion tanks for embarkation, Phillips issued his own hints to officers about their preparation. He suggested taking fishing gear; four rolls of lavatory paper; and a shotgun – ‘though not your
best
gun’ – and ammunition, ‘because Eley cartridges may be difficult to obtain’. The CO himself embarked with a vast load of personal equipment – ‘them’s Jumbo’s fooking handkerchieves,’ a disgusted trooper explained, sweating to load the boxes aboard. Meanwhile, his officers struggled to deal with their huge draft of disgruntled reservists. ‘They were very angry – it really was quite a tricky situation,’ in the words of Captain St Clair Tisdall. ‘Come to that, I think we were all fairly horrified. Most of us were heavily married, with young children.’
¹⁴

Above all, many men remained uncertain why they were going to Korea, or why they should be expected to fight for the United Nations. Bill Cooper said: ‘The general feeling was that we
shouldn’t be going, that it was nothing to do with us. There was an undercurrent that the Yanks had got themselves in a mess again, and we were being sent to bail them out.’ But at last, like so many soldiers that summer wailing
I’m going to take you on a slow boat to China
, they boarded the trucks for the docks, to take the troopship to Korea. Major Gerald Rickord of the Ulsters, like most of his fellow-officers, ‘knew no more about Korea than I read in the
Daily Telegraph
’. A bachelor, he was embarrassed to be presented by an aunt before he departed with two pairs of long Johns. He took them rather crossly. Before a month was gone, he was desperately grateful.
¹⁵

The voyage out, for most of the British, was an idyllic exercise in nostalgia, cruising comfortably from waystation to waystation on the great imperial route to the East. At Port Said, Lieutenant Patrick Kavanagh of the Ulsters was astonished to be frustrated in his quest for Egypt’s legendary dirty postcards: ‘No, sir! No good, sir! King Farouk very clean man!’ A young National Serviceman on the bank of the Suez Canal shouted up to the deck of the troopship the immortal veterans’ cry: ‘Get your knees brown!’ Private Albert Varley of the Ulsters, who had served through five campaigns in World War II, and for whom recall for Korea had been a most unwelcome shock, shouted back: ‘We got them brown in 1941!’
¹⁶

There was already considerable cynicism about their equipment. Newspapers briefed by the War Office declared 29 Brigade to be ‘the best-equipped military force ever to leave Britain’. This was rubbish. On their arrival in Korea, the British contingent found themselves at a lamentable disadvantage to the Americans in the quality and quantity of their equipment and transport – above all, their clothing. The British in Korea in the first year of the war suffered privations of almost Crimean proportions. It would have been comic, were it not so wretched, that just five years after the end of World War II, herculean efforts were required to demothball sufficient transport from the army’s vast stocks to give them roadworthy vehicles.

And beyond equipment, what were men to be told that they
were going to Korea to do? The names of Kim Il Sung or Syngman Rhee meant nothing to them. The 38th Parallel possessed no more reality than the rings of Saturn. Malcolm McDonald, the British Commissioner-General in South-East Asia, made the best of an almost impossible task when he addressed 27 Brigade as they embarked for Pusan:

When you get to South Korea [he told the men crowding the flight deck of the carrier
Unicorn
], the troops opposing you will be North Koreans. But their weapons, strategy and training were supplied by the Russians. The aggression in Korea is part of the attempt by Russian Communism to conquer the world. In Korea you will be fighting in defence not only of Asia and of Europe, but also of Britain, as surely as if you were fighting on the fields of France or the beaches of England itself . . . The enemy has committed an act of unprovoked aggression. That aggression is being resisted by the United Nations. The Americans and South Koreans fighting there are fighting not only as Americans and Koreans, but also as soldiers of the United Nations – that fraternal association of peoples set up to banish military aggression and establish the rule of law in international affairs. It is the first time in history that the peoples of the world have been mustered in arms under the auspices of the United Nations . . . May good fortune attend you and victory be yours.

On the other side of the Pacific, thousands of young Americans were embarking for Korea, taking with them similar ringing declarations of purpose, based upon the best efforts of their government to make a faraway country and a confused cause relate to their own land and experience. Yet on the hills of Korea, survival, fear of personal disgrace, loyalty to the man in the next foxhole – the most powerful motivations of soldiers throughout the ages – would mean far more than the strange new concept of fighting for the cause of world order.

3. The Pusan Perimeter

The six-week series of actions that came to be known as the battle of the Pusan Perimeter began on the night of 31 July, when the last of Walker’s retreating army crossed the Naktong eastwards. ‘There will be no more retreating, withdrawal, readjustment of lines or whatever you call it,’ Eighth Army’s commander declared, in a ringing order of the day following the fall of Chinju. ‘There are no lines behind which we can retreat. This is not going to be a Dunkirk or Bataan. A retreat to Pusan would result in one of the greatest butcheries in history. We must fight to the end. We must fight as a team. If some of us die, we will die fighting together.’ If it was corn, this was an hour when corn, as well as courage, was called for.

The Naktong river itself created an obstacle between a quarter and half a mile wide in its lower reaches defended by Eighth Army, but was shallow enough to be forded in many places. More important for Walker, it was commanded by steep hill ranges on both banks. Half the length of the UN perimeter lay along the river line. On the south side, the Americans were now dug into positions of great natural strength. Armour, heavy artillery and support equipment was being unloaded in quantity at Pusan. As the fighting stabilised, forward air control and clearer identification of positions made fighter-bomber strikes increasingly effective against communist concentrations. Walker’s most serious problems, his chronic difficulties throughout the Perimeter battle, were the poor morale and training of many of his men; together with the shortage of manpower which made it impossible for him to hold his entire 130-mile front in strength. At the end of July, Walker disposed of a paper strength of some 95,000 men. Most of
his 47,000 American combat troops were deployed in three infantry divisions of the Japan occupation army, some of whose units were already badly mauled. Week by week, this number was increasing as reinforcements reached Korea – the Marine Brigade, the British 27 Brigade. Walker could also call upon 45,000 South Koreans, though the combat value of these men was very limited indeed. Most were entirely untrained levies, dragged at gunpoint from their villages days before being sent to the front.

In August 1950, the men on the Pusan Perimeter saw themselves as a beleaguered army, clinging to the United Nations’ last toehold in Korea, amid the onslaught of massed ranks of communist fanatics. Walker’s army indeed was beleaguered. But it is a measure of the psychological dominance the communists had achieved at this time that most Americans would have been frankly disbelieving had they been told that the UN forces by now outnumbered the North Koreans significantly, and outgunned them overwhelmingly. The ferocity and suicidal recklessness of the massed attacks of Kim Il Sung’s units, night after night through those weeks, gave the defenders the impression of an Asian horde with limitless supplies of manpower. In reality, the North Koreans were squandering their dwindling reserves of armour, ammunition, and trained men. But again and again, the communist gamble came close to success. Enemy attackers broke through Walker’s line, began pushing forward to open a chasm in the front, and were halted only by the last-ditch movement of one of his handful of reliable ‘fire-brigade’ units to stop the gap.

The battle for the Pusan Perimeter was marked by an almost daily succession of crises for Eighth Army, in which disaster was averted by the narrowest of margins. Kim Il Sung and his commanders fully grasped the urgency of smashing through to Pusan before the UN build-up made their task impossible. The North Korean 4th Division mounted one of the first big attacks against the US 24th: the battle of the ‘Naktong Bulge’. On the night of 5 August, they successfully pushed forward across the river with
tanks and guns, overrunning American outpost positions. In the days that followed, they built up strength on the east bank, gaining ground steadily.

On 17 August, the Marine Provisional Brigade was committed to counter-attack. Two days later, after bitter fighting, the communists were driven back across the Naktong. And even as the 24th Division was being hard pressed, further north the 1st Cavalry and ROK 1st and 6th Divisions faced a succession of thrusts aimed to break through to Taegu, where Eighth Army headquarters was sited. By 15 August, they had come within fifteen miles of the town. Three communist divisions were poised for the assault. But when two further enemy formations, the 3rd and 10th Divisions, sought to force the Naktong eastwards to link up with the assault, in a week of intense action between 8 and 15 August, they were thrown back with massive losses. American air and artillery concentrations hammered their crossing points by day and night. The Naktong’s defensive value was diminishing, as the river fell to its lowest summer level. Some of the 1st Cavalry’s forward positions east of the river were overrun. But the North Koreans proved unable to reinforce their leading elements. The attack was repulsed. Walker could turn his attention to the north-western threat to Taegu.