The Korean War (35 page)

As Captain Fred Ladd drove north to a divisional headquarters, against the endless stream of traffic fleeing southwards, to his astonishment he saw among the files of marching men a leathery NCO whose face was instantly familiar. Sergeant Davis had served with his father, half a lifetime ago in the 15th Infantry. Davis faced Ladd with tears in his eyes: ‘This just isn’t the goddam American Army – running away. We ought to be taking up positions.’ Ladd could find no words of comfort for the old NCO: ‘I know, I know,’ he nodded helplessly. Then he drove away, and Davis trudged on, shrunken, southwards.
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In ten days, the men of Eighth Army retreated 120 miles. By 15 December, they had crossed the 38th Parallel and the Imjin river, and still they were moving south. Since the destruction of 2nd Division south of Kunu-ri, they had scarcely even been in contact with the Chinese. Yet while the Marines conducted their measured, orderly retreat from Chosin despite acute difficulties of terrain, in the west Walker’s army astoundingly collapsed.

Few men ever forgot the sights of those days. They looted what they could carry from the vast supply dumps in Pyongyang – alcohol, tobacco, sugar – but acre upon acre of equipment was put to the torch. The great pillars of smoke from the fires were visible for miles to the retreating army. An officer of the 8th Royal Irish Hussars, a British Centurion tank regiment, recorded:

The march out of Pyongyang will be remembered mainly for the intense cold, the dust and the disappointment. Nothing appeared to have been attempted, let alone achieved. Millions of dollars worth of valuable equipment had been destroyed without a shot being fired or any attempt made to consider its possible evacuation. Seldom has a more demoralising picture been witnessed than the abandonment of this, the American forward base, before an unknown threat of Chinese soldiers – as it transpired, ill-armed and on their feet or horses.
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Yet everywhere they expected the Chinese to catch up with them. It was almost as if they were tiptoeing away. As the British armour clattered noisily across the bridge south of Pyongyang, Captain James Majury of the Ulsters found himself desperately wishing that the vehicles would make less noise. A young troop commander’s tank knocked over a ROK soldier in the long files trudging along the roadside. A track ran over the man’s leg. The horrified young officer jumped down to aid the Korean. But even as he knelt, the ROK platoon officer pulled the Englishman’s pistol from his holster, and put a bullet in the mangled man’s head.

On the road south of the North Korean capital, General Paek Sun Yup of the ROK 1st Division met the 27th Infantry’s commander, Colonel John Michaelis, whom he greatly admired. The Korean was deeply depressed by the loss of Pyongyang, his home city which he had entered in such triumph a few weeks earlier. Now, he asked the American what was happening. ‘I don’t know,’ said Michaelis. ‘I’m just a regimental commander. But we may not be able to stay in the peninsula.’
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A patrol from A Company of the British 1st Gloucesters came upon a huddled mass of Korean civilians lying in a river bed. Some were dying – of exposure, weakness, hunger, exhaustion. Others were merely too weak to climb out. The British soldiers formed a human chain to pull them up. ‘Thank you very much,’ said a woman, in perfect English. ‘I teach English at the university,’ she explained, answering their surprise. The Gloucesters asked if there was anything more they could do for her. ‘Haven’t you done enough already?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘Just all go away and leave us with what’s left of our country.’ She turned on her heel and walked away across the hill.
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As early as 5 December, Brigadier Basil Coad, commanding the British 27 Brigade, dispatched a signal to the British Commander-in-Chief, Far East, General Sir John Harding, painting a grim
picture of the state of his own brigade, and the difficulties of continuing to operate effectively with the Americans.
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‘This, I must say, rather shocked me,’ Harding told the War Office. He replied to Coad in the sharpest terms, making clear the absolute need for the British contingent to hold firm, whatever the difficulties:

It seems clear to me that the present situation in Korea is one in which everyone, whatever their difficulties or deficiencies, must continue to do their utmost with what they have . . . If you are given any specific task which, in your considered opinion, does risk your troops to an extent exceptional in war, and the peculiar circumstances in which the United Nations forces in Korea are now placed, you should make a formal written protest to your immediate superior commander . . . I need hardly impress upon you the grave importance of being absolutely certain of your ground before making any such formal written protest.
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In other words, for the solidarity of the UN and Anglo-American relations, 27 Brigade must somehow stick it out. Coad and his men did so.

The Korean people were, of course, the principal victims of the Chinese winter offensive, as they were of every phase of the war. As Eighth Army straggled south in disarray, everywhere around them a great human tide of refugees surged and stumbled. When the army monopolised the road, the civilians fled along the railway line. Many scarcely knew where they were going, or why; only that they had lost whatever they had owned behind them, and sought to attain something fresh in front, if it was only shelter from the battle. But Moon Yun Seung and his family knew why they were on the railway embankment south from Pyongyang: to escape the communists. Moon was eighteen, and until 1945 his family had owned a silk mill in the north. When they lost that, they moved to Pyongyang and became silk traders. But in the autumn of 1950, as
the communists fled from their own capital, they left behind them an epidemic of grim rumours. Moon was assured that the Americans proposed to drop an atomic bomb on Pyongyang. He and his family moved hastily back to the village where once they had owned their mill, and it was there that they saw their first Americans, advancing north at the height of their triumph. Then, when the Chinese came and the retreat began, Moon and his family began walking. ‘There were too many people,’ he said. ‘We could not keep together. When the American fighters came, machine-gunning the roads, everyone scattered like beanshoots.’ He never saw his family again. For eighteen days, he walked towards Seoul, scavenging scraps of food from abandoned houses, pathetically waving a South Korean flag when the F-86s strafed the refugee columns, as he saw them do repeatedly. In Seoul, Moon had expected to find refuge with a friend of his father. But this man, like three-quarters of the population after their dreadful experience the previous summer, had fled. Moon kept walking south. He was picked up in one of the ROK army’s periodic round-ups of conscripts, but after three months rejected as unfit – this, despite the bleak United Nations joke that a ROK medical examination merely involved holding a mirror to a man’s mouth to check that he breathed. Moon was a scavenger in Pusan when he was run over and his leg broken by an American army truck. A Scandinavian medical team rescued him. He spent six months in a Swedish hospital, a year on crutches. Finally, he got a job as a longshoreman at the docks. He was merely another stray scrap of flotsam, amid a great sea of such private tragedies in the winter of 1950.
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Lieutenant Bill Cooper and a couple of brother officers of the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers left their positions guarding the Han bridges to drive into Seoul on Christmas Eve. It seemed fantastic to shake off the snow and refugees, the strong sense of imminent disaster outside, and walk into the brightly lit Chosan Hotel, where
a ferociously drunken party was in progress. Men of all ranks lurched around the corridors clutching their Korean bargirls. If there was no food to be had, everybody was helping themselves to drink. At last, the British walked out once more to their jeeps in the darkness, into the reality of Korean figures scuttling urgently through the snow, of acute desolation and apprehension. Cooper had spent much of the voyage out from England attempting to diminish the bloody-mindedness of his platoon, largely recalled reservists, about their commitment to Korea. He told them: ‘It’s going to be no good sitting on top of some mountain saying “I shouldn’t be here” while some bugger blows the top of your head off.’ For all his efforts, he felt that throughout their time in Korea, ‘there was still that undercurrent of resentment.’ Yet now Cooper’s men, like the rest of the British 29 Brigade, were warned to be ready to move.
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On New Year’s Day, as 29 Brigade moved forward to take up positions in support of 1st ROK Division, they were dismayed to encounter its commander and his staff ‘trotting briskly towards the rear’. Americans moving south shouted to the British tank crews as they drove forward to take up position: ‘You’re going the wrong way, buddy!’ On the night of 2 January, the British found themselves defending positions in ‘Happy Valley’, north of Seoul. It was their first major action since arriving in Korea a few weeks earlier. Unlike 27 ‘Woolworth’ Brigade, which had come from Hong Kong in the midst of the Pusan Perimeter crisis lacking the most elementary necessities, 29 Brigade was alleged to lack for nothing. Its three battalions and supporting armoured regiment possessed the best that the British army, in those days of austerity, could provide. Yet nothing diminished the shock of that first night of heavy action. A straggling stream of refugees had been coming through the British positions. Suddenly, the men in their hastily scraped foxholes and sangars heard an NCO’s cry: ‘Watch your front!’ Seconds later, the bugles and burp guns were upon them. The Chinese were driven out of the battalion headquarters of the
Northumberland Fusiliers only after hand-to-hand fighting. Both the Fusiliers and the neighbouring Ulster Rifles were compelled to give ground.

It was a night of confusion. Some Chinese worked to within a few yards of the Ulsters’ position, advancing led by a man with a white flag shouting ‘South Korean – we surrender!’ Private Albert Varley of the Ulsters was a regular veteran of half a dozen World War II campaigns, recalled as a reservist for Korea. Now, he found himself lost on a hillside with his nineteen-year-old platoon commander and platoon sergeant. A voice shouted out of the darkness in English: ‘I’m wounded! I’m wounded!’ Varley went to investigate, and found a Chinese lying groaning among the rocks. He shot him. Then the three men walked a lonely two miles until they were challenged by their own sentries. ‘It was a proper shambles, a right cock-up,’ in Private Varley’s estimation. Like many men, Private Henry O’Kane was dismayed by lying all night listening to the cries and groans of the wounded of both sides.

All next morning, Cromwell and Churchill tanks of ‘Cooper-force’, led by Captain Donald Astley-Cooper, were firing in support of 29 Brigade’s counter-attack. Lieutenant Bill Cooper and W Company of the Northumberland Fusiliers advanced from their start-line around midday. Cooper was without his platoon sergeant, York, a dour, solid, grizzled regular, a simple man with high standards and six children who had been borrowed by the mortar platoon of Support Company. It was Support Company that had borne the brunt of the previous night’s casualties. When W Company reached their positions, they found them littered with British dead. Sergeant York was sitting against a rock, looking surprised. He had been hit six times in the chest and stomach, and was quite dead. Lieutenant Cooper had lost eight of his platoon in his first battle: ‘I was shaken by the speed at which it all happened: the red in a stream with bodies in it, the great trails of blood in the snow as if a snail had crawled across it.’

Yet that evening, soon after the British battalions had painfully recovered their lost ground, they learned belatedly of a general
withdrawal south of the Han. A liaison officer from the neighbouring American unit arrived at the Ulsters’ battalion headquarters to announce graphically: ‘Colonel, we are buggered. We’ve gone.’ The British were on their own. There was no time to lose. To the open dismay of Astley-Cooper, brigade decreed that the tanks were to form a rearguard, moving out in darkness with a single platoon of infantry for close protection.

Twenty-year-old Lance-Corporal Robert Erricker, co-driver of Lieutenant Godfrey Alexander’s Cromwell, thought of his mother and father at home in Surrey. In England, it was lunchtime on early closing day. They would be pulling down the shutters on their little shop. The track down the valley through which they departed was barely wide enough to carry a tank. Even as the infantry withdrew in front of them, they came under fire from the hills overlooking the road. Astley-Cooper saw to his dismay that a village along his line of retreat was already ablaze. He sought a detour by a river bed to the right. The tanks ground and battered their path along it, cutting up the darkness with their tracer in every direction, infantry clinging to the hulls and being shot off as they drove. Alexander’s tank found itself blocked. It could go no further, and hastily turned round, in search of another escape route. A wounded Ulster Rifleman threw himself aboard. Then Chinese mortar bombs began to fall on the hull. Johnnie Healey, the Besa gunner, shouted: ‘The guvnor’s hit.’ They pulled their officer down into the turret, and found that he had been killed by a mortar fragment in the head. The tank swerved off the road. They had thrown a track. Another tank halted alongside. ‘All right, spike your gun and get out of it!’ shouted the commander. He hastened on, while the crew climbed on the back of their own hull to remove the wounded Rifleman. Then there were Chinese soldiers all around them, motioning them down. They were put against a wall, hands in the air. ‘This is it,’ muttered Erricker miserably. ‘Don’t worry, Bob, we’ll be all right,’ Bob Healey, the driver, said sturdily. Suddenly, another tank was upon them, spraying tracer. Captors and captives dived for cover. When the
firing stopped and the Chinese began reassembling their prisoners, Healey and Bates, the wireless-operator, had vanished. They made good their escape to the British lines. Erricker found himself among a hundred unhappy British prisoners.
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The most fortunate man of the night was the mortar platoon storeman of the Ulsters. He was in an Oxford carrier which ran into a haystack and was at once overrun by the Chinese. The man was bayoneted, and made to kneel with the rest of the carrier crew. When the prisoners were herded away, they carried the mortarman until the Chinese ordered them to abandon him. The next morning, an American helicopter pilot found him. He survived.