The Korean War (46 page)

The quality about the Gloucesters’ stand upon which all the survivors focused in their later accounts was the confidence: the serene conviction of most officers and men that they could cope, even as their casualties mounted, their perimeter shrank, and their ammunition dwindled. Infantrymen are often impressed by the magical fashion in which a gunner battery commander can use his telephone to drop fire within yards of their own positions. But Guy Ward and his officers from 70th Field Battery were acknowledged as supreme wizards. Ward was astonished to see Chinese cavalry in the valley below him. To a professional gunner, ‘they were magnificent targets’. 25-pounder shells poured down on them. The 4.2-inch heavy mortars of 170 Battery, RA, compounded the communists’ dreadful losses. Chinese infantry concentrations were shattered again and again by devastating British artillery fire: ‘The slaughter we did was absolutely tremendous,’ said Ward, although like most of his companions, he was astounded by the fashion in which the enemy still kept coming.

That day of the 24th, efforts were made to pass a column of the 8th Hussars’ Centurions down the narrow, winding valley road to the Gloucesters’ positions. Infantry cover was provided by a Filipino battalion, who were responsible for sweeping the high ground on either side. The operation failed. One of the three Filipino light tanks leading the column was knocked out, blocking the road; it could not be dislodged by its successor. There is little doubt that the infantry advanced too close to the road, and did not climb high enough to have any chance of keeping the armoured column out of range of the Chinese. But the track was anyway almost impassable by the big, heavy Centurions. And with the limited forces available, it is not unlikely that the relief column would itself have become trapped with the Gloucesters, even had it been successful in making contact.

Some of those most intimately concerned with the Imjin battle believed that it revealed the fatal disadvantages of committing an independent national brigade group in a major war. Brigadier Tom Brodie found himself bearing the brunt of an assault by two Chinese divisions, with important implications for the safety of Seoul. Yet as a British officer under temporary American command, he could not be expected to achieve the clear understanding with higher formations that would have been possible with his own fellow-countrymen. A British officer at Brigade HQ believed that the Americans did not understand until much too late how desperate was the predicament of 29 Brigade: ‘When Tom told Corps that his position was “a bit sticky”, they simply did not grasp that in British Army parlance, that meant “critical”.’ Brodie was twice told by American Corps headquarters that he could not withdraw his brigade, and he felt that he had no choice but to obey. Those around the brigadier said that he found the strain almost intolerable, commanding a brigade that was being shattered beneath his eyes. The Imjin battle confirmed the urgency of bringing into being the planned Commonwealth Division, commanded by a major-general with the rank and authority to safeguard the interests of his command.

It was not that Brodie blundered, but that his position was exceptionally difficult, as a British officer naturally anxious to ‘keep his end up’ with the Americans. 29 Brigade had dug and wired rear positions weeks earlier. On Gloucester Hill, the battalion adjutant Captain Tony Farrar-Hockley repeatedly asked himself why they had bothered to prepare such a fall-back line, if not for just such a situation as this. Knowing that his men were asking the same question, and demanding why they were receiving such limited air support, he told them that another big battle was being fought elsewhere. ‘Higher Sunray’ – higher command – ‘have insisted we stay.’ There were other difficulties: although 45 Field Regiment’s 25-pounders were fine guns, they possessed limited killing power. There was a desperate need for the support of heavier metal. Yet the Gloucesters’ American artillery liaison officer had
been withdrawn a few days before the battle, and they possessed no means of calling in 155mm fire. The British battalions’ establishment of automatic weapons was inadequate to face the sort of devastating attrition battle in which they were now engaged. Above all, perhaps, the brigade was able to call upon too little close air support, too late. That first bloody day, the Gloucesters received none whatever. Even in the days that followed, it was apparent that 29 Brigade was not being given high priority.

Once the assessment had been made that the British faced a major Chinese assault, which they could not possibly hope to overcome in the dispersed positions they held, rapid disengagement and withdrawal were by far the most prudent military options. This was a classic case for ‘rolling with the punches’. Like so many sacrificial actions which pass into military legend, that which was now unfolding on the Imjin should never have been allowed to take place.

In the next twenty-four hours the men in the British trenches, and even their officers, possessed astonishingly little notion of what was happening beyond the knowledge of wave after wave of Chinese attacking their positions. Rumours filtered through that the brigade would soon be fetched out. The brigade-major told the Gloucesters’ adjutant on the radio that an American infantry-armour column in brigade strength would be moving to the battalion’s relief later that day. Lieutenant Bill Cooper’s company commander in the Northumberlands told him that ‘the idea is to make the Chinese deploy, then withdraw on to the Americans behind us, who need more time’. The Fusiliers had received a hasty reinforcement of National Servicemen, thrown overnight from a transit camp in Japan into the midst of the battle. Cooper’s quota of seven replacements were understandably appalled and bewildered by their new circumstances. In the darkness, the platoon commander was exasperated to see one of the new arrivals yet again defying the order to stay in his trench. ‘Bloxham!’ he called furiously. ‘Get back in your trench!’ Then he saw that the man was a Chinese. Cooper was not holding a weapon and found himself
thrashing on the ground, hand to hand with the communist soldier, until an NCO ran forward and shot the man in the head.

At dawn, nervous and uncertain, the Northumberlands were ordered to withdraw and redeploy, some eight hundred yards to the rear. To their immense relief, the Chinese did not interfere. That day, they lay in their positions, suffering little from the enemy, but listening to the fierce struggle further west, where the Gloucesters were under desperate pressure. They cursed the feebleness of their air support, the sluggishness of the reinforcements alleged to be preparing the blocking positions behind them. The tempo of battle was leavened by a moment of black comedy, when inquiries were made about charges against a Fusilier who had stopped dead in the midst of an assault, because he claimed that ‘the Lord Jesus had instructed him to take no part in the attack’. He was sent for court-martial.

Men were constantly asking their officers: ‘What happens next, sir?’ ‘When can we get out?’ They received repeated bland reassurances about help on the way. Ammunition was running short, above all grenades. The Fusiliers met one Chinese attack with a barrage of tins of compo cheese, to deceive the enemy into putting their heads down. The incoming mortaring intensified. The weariness showed above all in men’s eyes, red and raw and aching from their tiredness. Yet still they remained unaware of the huge risk that they would not get out at all.

During the night of 24/25 April, orders at last reached 29 Brigade to withdraw from the Imjin to new positions north of Seoul. Infiltration parties were now deep behind the British flanks. Chinese snipers were firing on transport four miles behind 29 Brigade’s front. Yet the Ulsters were bemused and dismayed by the order. Throughout the battle, their acting CO, Major Gerald Rickord, a highly experienced officer who ended World War II in command of an airborne battalion, felt less than happy with the level of information reaching him from Brigade HQ. He knew nothing of the Belgian withdrawal, of the exposure of the brigade’s right flank, of the increasingly desperately predicament of the
Gloucesters. His men had thus far repulsed the Chinese wherever they met them, and suffered very few casualties. Above all, Rickord was dismayed by the plan for the withdrawal, which called for his companies to leave their positions on high ground, and descend to the valley road. The Ulsters would have vastly preferred to walk out along the ridges, keeping the enemy below them. But Brigadier Brodie decreed otherwise. While the OC 29 Brigade had been given an impossible task, holding a difficult area of front with a small force against overwhelming odds, there was considerable criticism after the battle of his tactics, from some of those who survived.

At 8 a.m. on the 25th, the retreat began in a thick ground mist, commanded by Colonel Kingsley Foster of the Fusiliers. There is no more difficult operation of war than disengagement when closely pressed by the enemy. Chinese infantry were now deployed on high ground from which they could overlook every stage of the British movement. As soon as they understood what was taking place, they hastened forward to exploit their success in forcing 29 Brigade back.

Most of the Northumberland Fusiliers got away intact down the road south, past a vital defile held by B Company of the Ulsters and a troop of 55 Squadron Royal Engineers. Their worst enemy was now their own exhaustion: ‘. . . the infantry, after seventy-two hours of fighting, were in no state to do more than walk out, fate being willing, on their own feet’, in the words of a Hussars officer.
⁵
The British began their descent from the high ground in textbook fashion, counting their men through checkpoints, moving by bounds. But as the Chinese swarmed forward in their wake, the Ulsters and the Belgians became engaged in a desperate piecemeal scramble for safety. In the words of Major Henry Huth of the 8th Hussars, it was ‘one long bloody ambush’. After so many months in which the tanks had languished idle, without a role in impassable country, along the valley road from the Imjin to Uijongbu they found their moment. They fought in troops and half-troops: some tanks
providing direct fire support for infantry defending stretches of hillside, others crashing down the road to safety laden with exhausted and wounded survivors, others again covering their departure. Their 20-pounders and Besa machine guns raked the hillsides. When Chinese infantry began to scramble on to the hulls, Captain Peter Ormrod and Gavin Murray resorted to machine-gunning each other’s Centurions to sweep them off. Sergeant Jack Cadman drove his tank through a Korean house, to dislodge a Chinese battering on his turret hatch. All that day, the Centurions fought along the road with a continuous rain of small-arms fire splattering against their armour, driving off periodic rushes of Chinese seeking to dash near enough to ram pole charges through their track guards. Major Huth, C Squadron commander, won a DSO for his direction of the tank actions during the retreat, and for the personal example he set: his own was the last Centurion out of the valley.

A runner reached Bill Cooper’s platoon of the Fusiliers around 11 a.m., with news of the withdrawal. They were told to ‘leave the heavy stuff, but bring all the ammunition you can’. There were believed to be enemy across their line of retreat, and they must be prepared to cut their way through. The Gloucesters would be moving independently. Cooper and his weary men reached the pass held by the Ulsters and Engineers, to see Colonel Foster standing among a clutch of Centurions and a half-track ambulance clustered by the roadside under increasingly heavy fire. Foster stopped him: ‘I can’t order you to do this,’ he said, ‘but I would be very grateful if you would stay and see the wounded out on the half-track.’ Cooper’s subsequent memories were a confused blur of grenades and mortaring, of a boy named Angus screaming after a tank ran over his legs, of a Chinese grenade that blew him off his feet and knocked him out. He awoke to find a Chinese searching his body. He sat up, causing the astounded enemy soldier to spring backwards. It was dusk. His elbow was shattered, he had splinter wounds from his knee to the top of his thigh. He was led to join a group of fellow-prisoners, lying and sitting by the roadside. Suddenly, an American aircraft swung low past them, and a napalm
tank fell away from its belly, to land by the crippled Centurion it had been sent to destroy. For the watching British captives, this was the last glimpse of friendly forces for many months to come.

Colonel Foster followed his Fusiliers down the road in his jeep. At the pass held by the Ulsters, their company commander urged him to take to his feet – the route was under heavy fire, and a jeep was instantly vulnerable. Foster declined, and was killed a few moments later by a Chinese mortar bomb, which destroyed his vehicle. The commanding officer of the Belgian battalion was terribly burned by phosphorus, pouring from a tank grenade discharger as he stood alongside it when it was hit by a chance Chinese bullet.

Private Albert Varley of the Ulsters had been slightly wounded by fragments in the eye early in the battle, when a bullet struck his bren. The Regimental Aid Post sent him back to his company, as they lacked means to evacuate him. His platoon was one of those on the high ground, swarming with Chinese, which received the order: ‘Every man for himself!’ He and his ‘oppo’, a National Serviceman from Bristol named Ronnie Robinson, stumbled down the hill towards the road. Robinson was supporting a man with a shattered arm, who kept pleading to be allowed to stop and give himself up. Varley paused every few moments to turn and fire a brief burst towards their pursuers. He was convinced that they would never make it. But at last, they staggered thankfully on to the road, and clambered on to a Centurion, Varley casting away the pieces of his bren. They bucketed off down the road, Ulsters clinging desperately to every hull projection, the tank crew firing their Besa continuously until its ammunition was exhausted, then bouncing high-explosive shells off the road in front of them. A clutch of Americans appeared from somewhere, who also boarded the Centurion. One fired his bazooka at a hut surrounded by Chinese, who were also overrunning a stranded Centurion by the roadside. The surrounding hillsides now seemed infested with running, standing, crouching Chinese, firing down upon the hapless British below.