The Korean War (45 page)

‘Stop!’

Some do uncertainly. A few run on, never to be seen again, ever. He dismounts gingerly from his lonely chariot.

‘Lie down, face your front and return the fire.’

Good notion that, keep us occupied for a bit. Irregular spiritless bangs begin around him.

‘Get that bren gun going.’

‘There’s something wrong with it, Sorr.’

‘Mend it.’

Splendid stuff this. And will the First Cavalry, just in the nick, pennants a-flutter come riding riding . . . No. He wished he wasn’t there.

‘I can find nothing wrong with this bren, Sorr, known to God or to man.’

Oh, the Irish, the irresistible cadence, unresisted.
²

In the chaotic loneliness of the night, Kavanagh struggled to push a morphia syrette into a wounded man, scrambled alongside
Craig to restore some control to the ruin of the patrol after the Chinese ambush. They began to straggle back on foot towards the river, losing men as they went. A few hundred yards on, they paused for the survivors to regroup.

‘Sir, Leary’s got hurt on the way across. Can I go and get him, Sir?’

‘No.’

‘But he’s my mukker, Sir!’

Blank consternation. Greater love than this . . . Another face, contorted, is thrust into his –

‘Sir, there’s one of ’em moving about just down there. Shall I kill him? I’ll throw this at him.’

Brandishing a grenade, hopping up and down. You’d have his head in your knapsack, too, wouldn’t you, you blood-crazy little bastard. Takes people different ways, apparently.

‘Shall I kill-kill-kill um, Sir?’

‘No.’
³

The Ulsters’ survivors were bewildered that they were allowed to withdraw, when the Chinese seemed to have the patrol utterly at their mercy. Communist infantry were moving all around them. Lieutenant Craig and ten men covered the withdrawal of Kavanagh, wounded in the shoulder, with the remainder. Craig himself was briefly taken prisoner, but escaped to find his way back to the British lines two days later. Kavanagh rejoined the battalion in the early hours of the morning with five men. That brief, ferocious glimpse of battle was the young officer’s first and last. He was evacuated to hospital in Japan. He was one of the lucky ones, the men who escaped the carnage that now overtook 29 Brigade.

Lieutenants Bill Cooper and Jimmy Yeo of the Fusiliers’ W Company had taken a jeep down to Yongdungpo that Sunday, to visit the 8th Hussars. For Saint George’s Day, every Fusilier had already been issued with the regiment’s traditional red and white roses, specially flown in from Japan. Yeo, a regular in the East Lancashires who had volunteered for Korea to get in some active
service, met a friend from Sandhurst, with whom they shared a pleasant tea. They drove back to their own positions for evening stand-to, lying in silence in their slit trenches gazing out into the dusk. Nothing happened. Stand-down was called. Then, as they cooked the usual Sunday stew, they began to hear grenades and gunfire further west, towards the Gloucesters’ positions. Once more, the word was whispered down from trench to trench by running NCOs: ‘Stand to!’ They lay straining their ears, momentarily unnerved by the sound of many feet running near them. Yet even as they cocked their weapons, the alarm was dispelled: the feet were British. For two more hours they waited, passive. Flares erupted from time to time to their left, but strict standing orders specified that they should keep silent, and remain in their slits.

Then brief bursts of fire opened in front of them, and shuffling movements began in the darkness. The Chinese were probing towards them. There was an explosion, then the muffled thud of a mortar illuminant bursting before them. Cooper and Yeo’s neighbouring platoons began to fire across each other’s fronts, exactly as they had planned. But the Chinese did not throw their weight against W Company that night. They were fully occupied elsewhere. Throughout the hours of darkness, wave after wave of attackers threw themselves upon the Fusiliers’ X and Z Companies, and the Gloucesters’ A and D. The absolute unsuitability of the brigade deployment for meeting an all-out attack by large forces now made itself clear. Each company was compelled to meet the Chinese alone. X Company of the Northumberlands, nearest the river on the left, was impossibly exposed, and withdrew towards the battalion position before first light. To the alarm of the Fusiliers, however, at 6.10 a.m. on the 23rd, the Chinese gained a key hill position overlooking a major road junction held by Z Company. The enemy had been able to bypass Y Company, nearer the river, and strike at the positions behind it. Z Company’s commander, Major John Winn, won a DSO for his superbly courageous direction of the defence of his line that day. But the Northumberlands were compelled to fall back. Of all the actions at this period, that in
which the Northumberlands lost vital ground so early in the battle had most serious consequences, and is most open to criticism. The British were dismayed to find Chinese infantry now firing upon their artillery positions, and already establishing themselves upon the untenanted high ground of Kamak-san. Centurions of C Squadron, 8th Hussars, covered the retreat of the Fusiliers’ Y Company. The Ulsters, hastily moved forward from their reserve positions, were now committed to clearing and holding the high ground east of the vital road to the rear.

On the left flank, the battle began well for the Gloucesters. Their standing patrol on the river bank, commanded by Lieutenant Guy Temple, poured devastating small-arms fire into the first Chinese attempting the night river crossing. ‘Guido’ Temple, nicknamed for his swarthy Italian looks, had been considered a somewhat feckless young officer back in England, repeatedly in trouble for late return from nightclub outings. Yet now, in the words of a fellow-officer, he proved ‘a good man in a difficult time’, lying with his men over their weapons looking down on the moonlit river. Four times, the Chinese came, and on each occasion they were repulsed. Then, with their ammunition expended, Temple’s platoon withdrew into C Company’s perimeter on the hillside more than a mile to the rear.

The Chinese were now crossing the river in force at a dozen places. In the hours before dawn they launched repeated attacks on the Gloucesters’ A and D Companies. Lieutenant Philip Curtis won a posthumous Victoria Cross for leading a counter-attack to recover A Company’s Castle Hill position. Although wounded early in the action, he struggled on to the summit, wiping out a Chinese machine-gun team with grenades seconds before he fell dead from the effects of their fire. The company commander, Pat Angier, spoke by radio to Colonel Fred Carne, the Gloucesters’ CO: ‘I’m afraid we’ve lost Castle Site. I want to know whether I am to stay here indefinitely or not. If I am to stay, I must be reinforced as my numbers are getting very low.’ Flatly, Carne told him that the position must be held – at all costs. Angier signed off reassuringly:
‘Don’t worry about us; we’ll be all right.’ He was killed fifteen minutes later. By mid-morning only one officer of A Company remained in action. All the others were dead or wounded. Yet still Carne was compelled to order the survivors to hold on. If A Company’s ground was lost, the remaining battalion positions also became untenable. Again and again, with their customary indifference to casualties, the Chinese assault groups crawled to within yards of the British trenches under cover of withering long-range machine-gun fire, then threw themselves forward with their burp guns and grenades, their screams and bugle calls. Each party was eventually destroyed. But each assault knocked out a bren team here, killed the occupants of a slit trench there, removed an officer or NCO with grenade splinters. Major Pat Angier was one of the last Gloucester casualties whom a handful of his comrades and the padre could spare time to bury with the hasty rituals of the Church. His batman followed his body in tears.

Meanwhile, further east, Colonel Kingsley Foster of the Fusiliers concluded that he must counter-attack to recover Z Company’s lost hilltop, from which the Chinese were bringing down fire across the entire battalion area. W Company clambered doggedly up the hillside covered by heavy machine-gun and tank fire, taking pains to keep their line, hardly losing a man until they came within fifty yards of the crest, for the Chinese rounds were flying above their heads. Then, as they neared the objective, the enemy defenders began to hurl down grenades and satchel charges. Brian Millington, the mortar observation officer, was wounded in the back by a grenade exploding below him as the Fusiliers gained the crestline. There was a moment of exhilaration as the Chinese manning it turned and fled. Then, beyond them, another Chinese unit rose from the ground and charged at the British. W Company’s assault collapsed, men turned and ran back down the hill for their lives.

Bill Cooper was shocked to hear clearly the ‘thwack!’ as bullets slammed into his own men. He saw his radio operator collapse to his knees, mortally wounded, as the set on his back disintegrated. Halfway down the hill, he saw that Millington was missing, and
scrambled up again until he found him lying in the scrub. Urgently, he asked if the young officer could move. ‘No, I think I’m dead,’ muttered Millington. ‘It’s no good. You’d better leave me.’ Cooper picked him up in a fireman’s lift, and staggered down the hill, pursued by desultory Chinese fire. Back at the start-line, the doctor examined Millington for a moment, then shook his head: ‘He’s moribund.’ About half the men who had taken part in the counter-attack had failed to return. Deeply despondent about their failure, the survivors of W Company trudged back to their old positions. Cooper became even angrier later, when somebody told him that they had never been expected to gain the hill. Their attack was chiefly a diversion, to keep the Chinese busy while the Belgians withdrew from the north bank of the Imjin. That evening, with some American tank support, the Belgian battalion successfully disengaged from its positions, crossed the bridges at the junction of the Imjin and Hantan rivers, and began moving to take up new positions alongside Kamak-san, to the rear of the Gloucesters and Northumberlands. The British liked the men of their attached unit, a tough, swashbuckling bunch with a proud ‘
Vive La Belgique
’ banner displayed behind their positions. On the Imjin, the Belgians fought as hard as any battalion in 29 Brigade.

That afternoon, Padre Sam Davies of the Gloucesters listened grimly to the news over the radio that Chinese elements were already attacking the brigade’s rear echelon: ‘Standing in the sunny hollow where main Headquarters lay, I tried to realise the position. We were isolated by Chinese hordes intent on the kill. It was simply a matter of hours before darkness fell, and the lonely battalion would be assaulted on all sides in the nightmarish moonlight. Gloucester was 11,000 miles away. I longed to be able to say “Stop” to the rushing minutes: to prolong this quiet, sunny afternoon indefinitely.’
⁴

By evening on 23 April, it was apparent that the forward battalions of 29 Brigade must concentrate, or be wiped out piecemeal. Around 8.30 p.m., the survivors of the Gloucesters’ A and D Companies withdrew from their positions, and filed through the
darkness into the battalion headquarters area to redeploy, Korean porters moving their heavy equipment. During a lull in the renewed Chinese attacks that night, Major Paul Mitchell’s C Company was also pulled back. But it proved impossible to disengage Major Denis Harding’s B Company. Between 11 p.m. that night and dawn the following morning, Harding’s men faced seven major assaults.

The company commander himself was a thirty-six-year-old veteran with great experience in World War II. That morning, one of his NCOs had led a patrol to explore the ground around the company positions, and returned to report bleakly: ‘There’s not just dozens of them down there – there’s thousands.’ Yet Harding still felt confident of his company’s ability to hold its ground. He had spent much of the day with his artillery observation officer, calling down fire on enemy concentrations whenever they could see them. Then he fell asleep for a time, and while he rested ammunition and food were brought up to the company area from the battalion echelon. The officer who brought them, Captain Bill Morris, should then have returned to the rear with the carrying party. But he was reluctant to wake Harding, and stayed to cover for him. By evening, it was too late for him to go anywhere. Morris remained, to share the fate of the battalion.

All that night, amid the cries and orders and bugles from the darkness, B Company grenaded and poured fire into the Chinese with rifle, bren and sten. By dawn, one platoon’s positions had been entirely overrun. Sheer weight of numbers had driven in Harding’s perimeter. At first light, the survivors withdrew to join the rest of Carne’s men on Hill 235 – the height that was to become known to the British Army as Gloucester Hill. There were only Harding himself, his sergeant-major, and fifteen others. Their ammunition was virtually exhausted. The remains of B and C were merged to form a single weak company. The Gloucesters had begun the battle with some seven hundred infantrymen holding a front of over 12,000 yards. Now, both their numbers and their perimeter had shrunk dramatically. Yet one of Support Company, hearing from the colonel that they were to concentrate on the
higher ridge for the last round, declared cheerfully: ‘We shall be all right, sir, ’twill be like the Rock of Gibraltar up here.’