The Korean War (19 page)

The 25th Division bore the brunt of the fighting in ‘the Bowling Alley’, as it became known, the sheer-sided valley in which a weeklong tank battle – one of the rare armoured encounters of the war – raged as the communists strove to break through. The defenders watched in awe as the glowing armour-piercing shells of the T-34s streaked down the valley through the night, searching out the American Pershings. Again and again the communists pushed forward, yet each time their assaults broke upon the barrier of American firepower. By 24 August, the north-western thrust had burnt itself out. The sector was left in ROK hands, while the 25th Division was withdrawn.

At the north-eastern end of the perimeter, the ROK 3rd Division was pushed back through Yongdok to Changsa-dong. On 10 August,
the North Koreans worked through the mountains to cut the road south behind the South Korean positions. The 3rd Division was successfully evacuated by sea, but the town of Pohang-dong was lost, and Walker’s resources were stretched to the limit to fill the hole in his line. Scratch American task forces were dispatched to support ROK units in the north-eastern sector. To their relief, they began to perceive that the communist effort and manpower in the area were almost spent. Pushing cautiously north again, by 20 August they had retaken Pohang-dong. Walker was confident that he faced no further serious threat in this quarter.

Most men’s first impression of Korea was of the stench, drifting out from the land to the sea: of human excrement and unidentifiable oriental exotica, mostly disagreeable. Replacements and new formations filed down the gangplanks at the pierside amid the disturbing spectacle of casualties being loaded alongside. There was no shortage of black jokes about the most likely fashion of leaving the country. Pusan was a grossly overcrowded shambles of corrugated iron, street markets, refugees, military convoys, beggars, prostitutes and organised crime. Most American units had been organised and reorganised, stripped of specialists and reinforced with drafts so often since early July that officers, NCOs and men scarcely knew each other. ‘We realised something was radically wrong the moment we arrived,’ said Lieutenant Clyde Fore of the 29th RCT. ‘We could see our advance party sitting on the quay, silent and unmoving. Our unit really was unfit to go at all. We had been told we would have three or four months in country to train before we were committed to combat. Instead, on the quayside we were just told to uncrate the weapons and get ready to go in the line.’
¹⁷

When Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Taplett, commanding the 3/5th Marines of the 1st Marine Provisional Brigade, landed on 1 August, ‘everything seemed in turmoil – there were too many people with a wild stare in their eyes. The whole story of the army
at this period is a very unsavoury one.’
¹⁸
The Marines were dismayed by meeting army units which had abandoned their dead, and even wounded, on the field; by units which, indeed, did not linger to fight at all. There were tales of officers who had found it convenient to make their own way back to Japan, and of the black battalion of the 9th Infantry which had failed to distinguish itself, to put the matter politely, by its determination in combat.

When Private James Waters reported with two other replacements to the 1/35th Infantry of the 25th Division on 28 August, his company commander welcomed them bluntly: ‘This isn’t a police action – it’s a war. You’d better get it into your heads that you can get killed at any second.’
¹⁹
Waters’ companions were indeed killed within weeks. The seventeen-year-old Missourian found the nervous strain of the night battles, the constant uncertainty about where and when the enemy would come, almost intolerable. He and his comrades came to hate even the cowbells tinkling in front of the positions, for the North Koreans sometimes used them to mask their movements. The low moment of the day came towards evening, when section by section they filed back down the hill to the chow jeep, knowing that night was approaching. The high moment broke at early morning, when once again they went to get their chow, knowing that they had survived the hours of darkness.

‘Everything I had read about Bataan, I felt in the first few hours after landing at Pusan,’ said Sergeant John Pearson of the 9th Infantry. ‘People were just completely demoralised. We were told right off that the front had collapsed. As we were taken forward on the train, we could see GIs on flatcars, without weapons, going the other way – stragglers getting out.’
²⁰
Pearson was dismayed to learn that his raw recruits would not even be given time to zero their weapons. They were dumped out in the countryside by trucks which turned and drove back towards the city at once, to fetch more men. They were filling their canteens in a stream when a furious officer drove up in a jeep, jumped out, and began demanding what they were doing. It was Walton Walker himself. They
said they were taking on water. ‘What are you thinking of?’ shouted the Eighth Army commander. ‘I want your asses forward.’

Without reconnaissance, they were launched into a counter-attack to recover a lost position, advancing in skirmishing line across open paddy fields towards high ground held by the enemy. Their battalion commander was wounded within a few minutes, while men dropped right and left from the communist fire. But they reached their objective. In the early days that followed, Pearson began to marvel at the incompetence of the North Koreans, as much as at the shortcomings of his own side: ‘They just threw their tanks away, coming at us head on again and again.’

Pearson was twenty-seven, a veteran of the Pacific campaign who had found life in the post-war army an anticlimax – ‘I couldn’t stand all the peace and quiet.’ He had married a German girl while stationed in Frankfurt, and the very night after that first action in Korea, he received a letter reporting her safe arrival in New York. Pearson was the son of British immigrants, and a keen student of military history. On the wall at home, he cherished a sepia photograph of his uncle Charlie, a Lancashire Fusilier in the First World War. In Korea, he was dismayed to see how far the US Army had declined since 1945: ‘Somehow, the whole thing had come unglued.’ There were too few West Point officers, too few trained men. They became accustomed to the sudden appearance of North Korean infiltration parties behind the front, to sudden movements from position to position to meet communist night attacks, to the chronic shortage of tank and artillery support on their own side. One morning, Pearson was an awed spectator as the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade launched its legendary assault in the battle of No Name Hill. ‘They went up in column of companies. They came back on stretchers in column of platoons,’ he said. ‘It was a magnificent thing, but out of another era – a typical Marine frontal attack.’

That night, the 9th Infantry were committed to the battle. After fighting all through the hours of darkness, the men stood up on their positions and cheered as the Australian P-51 Mustangs came
in rocketing and machine-gunning the North Korean trenches at first light. Again and again as the infantry met communist attacks and approached their last reserves of ammunition, they were saved at the last moment by resupply from the patient files of Korean porters, trudging up the reverse slopes, their backs bent over their A-frames laden with ammunition. ‘We couldn’t have fought the war without those Korean litter-bearers,’ said Pearson. ‘There were a lot of complaints about them, but I guess there were a lot of complaints about Gunga Din, too.’

Sergeant Pearson was walking the line of his platoon’s positions when a new communist assault began, and he was slow jumping for a foxhole. A bullet entered his thigh, turned on his message book and stopped at the base of his spine. He suffered instant trauma, and lay thinking himself dead, wondering dimly what would happen to his wife. Then a man gave him a drink from his canteen, which made him feel even worse. Semi-conscious, he endured the agony of being bumped and jolted down the hill on a stretcher, along an endless track by jeep. At the aid station, the orderly who stripped off his boots asked if he could keep them: ‘You won’t be needing them.’ He made the first helicopter trip of his life to an operating table from which he looked up at an exhausted, blood-spattered surgeon who said: ‘This is not going to hurt. We’ll give you a spinal.’ Then he pulled Pearson’s bowels up, and the sergeant was torn by excruciating pain. They left the bullet and the scraps of his message pad inside him. Next he remembered a train, and hearing a grenade explosion and the hammer of quad .50 calibre machine guns. Was this the reality of a guerrilla attack, or a comatose fantasy? He never knew. In Pusan, a priest gave him the last rites. He murmured that he was an Anglican. ‘That’s all right,’ said his comforter reassuringly. ‘It all counts upstairs.’ A British hospital ship bore him to Japan. Thence, after almost six months of medical care, he was returned to the United States in March 1951.

It was only with the deepest reluctance that the British government and Chiefs of Staff at last agreed to send a token ground force to Korea. In response to Washington’s urgent pleas, 27 Brigade, part of the Hong Kong garrison, were dispatched post-haste to join the defenders of the Pusan Perimeter.

On Sunday 20 August, the orderly room of the 1st Middlesex was roused by an unexpected telephone call. The CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Man, gave orders to begin rounding up his officers and men from ‘the Duchess of Richmond’s ball’ – the local water sports. The unit was badly under-strength. It was hastily reorganised into three companies, and reinforced within a few hours by volunteers from other garrison units. Company commanders sat with their sergeant-majors, hastily slotting new arrivals into sections: ‘Anybody who’s got a mucker – say so’; ‘Is there a man here who can fire a two-inch mortar?’ ‘Any bren-gunners?’ The men were rushed down to the range for a token musketry course before they embarked. But many had spent their time in Hong Kong on administrative or ceremonial duties: ‘As a fighting unit, we were virtually untrained,’ said Major John Willoughby, one of their company commanders.
²¹
They sailed on Friday morning, the 25th, aboard the carrier
Unicorn
, with all the trappings that Britain’s empire in the Far East could still muster. The brigade’s second battalion, the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, travelled aboard the graceful cruiser
Ceylon
.

This first British contingent became known as ‘the Woolworth Brigade’, because of the pathetic shortcomings of its equipment and clothing. They possessed not a scrap of specialist gear for warfare under extremes of cold and heat, no sleeping bags, only a handful of vehicles. Such winter clothing as they owned, and left on the dockside when they marched out from the port of Pusan for the Perimeter, was comprehensively looted before they saw it again. There was some tension in the Middlesex between their CO, an officer of administrative rather than combat experience, and Major Willoughby, who had at one stage been his senior officer. Willoughby himself was ‘terribly concerned about what
would happen when we went into action. I was also worried about fighting alongside the Americans – I had seen them in the Pacific, and I knew what a mess they could get themselves into.’ The officers began the uphill struggle to indoctrinate their men about the small routines of war: after years in barracks, where rifles were secured except on parade or on the range, soldiers must now be nagged and prodded into carrying their weapons everywhere – everywhere.

The brigade’s arrival at Pusan was not auspicious. Their brigadier, a sound, steady, competent professional named Basil Coad, was met by an American officer with the cheerful greeting: ‘Glad you British have arrived – you’re the real experts at retreating.’ When Coad and his staff were taken on an introductory tour of the line by an American general, the British were disconcerted to find that their movements were stage-managed for the benefit of the accompanying photographers. They were staggered by the lack of military security, above all by the freedom with which men could telephone on civilian circuits from the Perimeter to girlfriends in Japan. And the British had ample problems of their own. Many of their men were young conscripts, bewildered to find their service abruptly extended to go to war.

They seemed in a state of shock for many weeks after we arrived [said Major John Willoughby]. They accepted any order without hesitation. There was no question of imposing World War I discipline: if you found a man asleep on guard, you knew for certain that he was exhausted. When I found a sentry unconscious in his sleeping bag, I just picked it up and bumped him. What was the point in charging him? I simply said: ‘Wake up, you bugger! All your mates could get killed!’ When they marched, I had to go round with the sergeant-major to find the entrenching tools they had hidden to avoid carrying them. Yet you could only deal with these things on a fatherly basis.
²²

The British were rushed into the line west of Taegu for the first time on 12 September, in the face of a sudden communist push.
They spent their first night in a river bed under pouring rain. D Company of the Middlesex were detailed to hold some four and a half miles of front with a handful of tanks and AAA guns in support. They decided instead that the only sane course was to concentrate their men within reach of each other. They found themselves sharing the position with 230 Korean policemen whose commander appeared, reeking of brandy, and announced that his men would not remain unless they were given some weapons. The British reluctantly handed him a bren gun, and their own sanitary orderly as ‘liaison officer’, on the grounds that he could speak Japanese. In the days that followed, the British defended their sector by sending out parties at dawn to light fires at intervals along the ridge line, to deceive the communists. Their first patrol was fired on by their own men: ‘Baptism of fire my eye, it’s A Company!’, in the words of a disgusted NCO. A stray rifle shot at night was liable to panic the entire unit into opening fire. It became essential to reassure every position by telephone the moment an alarm was given.