The Korean War (65 page)

Kershaw staggered back into the trench above, grabbed his platoon sergeant’s sten gun, and propped himself against the earth wall to remain upright. Fighting against spasms of blindness and unconsciousness, he tossed a few more grenades, then stumbled into a cave and fell down. When he came to, he found himself alongside four Korean ‘Katcoms’. His leg was useless and bleeding. Clumsily, he tied a tourniquet with a bootlace. Then they lay in silence, Kershaw drifting in and out of consciousness, while the British artillery bombardment hammered the hill above their heads. Communications between D Company’s forward positions and the rear had been shattered. Along the Dukes’ front, most of the defenders were now trapped in tunnels and bunkers by
earth-falls or shelling. After a time, Kershaw asked a Korean to look out and see if it was dawn. The man replied that he could see nothing, though Kershaw doubted that he had dared to put his head above ground level. A second man went, and returned to report that the Chinese were no longer on the position. An hour later, the company commander found them. Kershaw was dragged out on a ground-sheet, and transferred to a jeep at the foot of the Hook. His lower leg was amputated before he was put on a train to Seoul.

At first light on 29 May, the British surveyed the customary chaotic aftermath of battle on the Korean hills: positions painstakingly hacked out of the earth over months were flattened or caved in, the ground blackened and the scanty foliage stripped by bombardment. The forward area was littered with fragments of wire and shreds of sandbags, ammunition boxes and debris. The Dukes had suffered 149 casualties, including twenty-nine killed and sixteen taken prisoner. They estimated Chinese casualties at 250 dead and 800 wounded. It required hours of digging to extricate men buried by shelling. Soon after daybreak, communist artillery fire began again. Another battalion relieved the battered Dukes on the Hook, in expectation of another infantry attack. This never came. The Chinese had been too badly battered the previous night. The Dukes had mounted a fine defence for a battalion three-quarters composed of National Service conscripts, rewarded by a grateful country with the princely sum of £1.62 a week.

In the last months of the war, the names of the hills Carson, Vegas, and Reno became forever identified with the US Marine Corps, which fought so hard to retain them. Sergeant Tom Pentony was an artillery forward observer with the 5th Marines. He had found boot camp untroublesome after the rigours of a Catholic upbringing in New Jersey, ‘where the nuns taught you that you would die as a martyr if you went fighting communism’. On 26 March 1953, Pentony was with the 3/5th behind Vegas, when the Chinese overran the American ‘Combat Outposts’, and the Marines went in
to retake the position. Pentony watched, appalled, as the Americans fought their way up the hill under punishing Chinese fire: ‘I used to think officers were smart. Now I felt: “This is stupid. Do they have any plan?” They just seemed to think: “The Marines will take that hill, frontal assault, that’s it.” ’
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On the afternoon of 27 March, Pentony’s senior gunner officer, a major, was so appalled by the spectacle of infantry still struggling forward, having lost all their own officers, that he received special permission to go forward and lead them himself. His radio operator returned two days later with the dead major’s pistol and watch. The March battles for Carson, Reno and Vegas cost the Marine Corps 116 men killed out of a total of over a thousand casualties, and inspired some of the most remarkable feats of American courage to come out of the Korean War.

Pentony found that his own mood, his attitude to the war, vacillated greatly from day to day: ‘It was like indigestion: some days you felt very brave, nothing bothered you, sounds at night didn’t worry you. Then on other days, for no special reason you were scary, jumpy – the smallest thing bothered you.’ The atmosphere on the Marine positions was consciously ‘macho’ by comparison with that in the army lines. When the Chinese propaganda loudspeakers began to blare forth their raucous messages with their customary exhortation: ‘American soldiers and officers!’ the Marines at once interrupted to shout back: ‘We’re not soldiers! We’re Marines!’ Many men were reluctant to be switched out of the line into reserve, not only because they were earning fewer points towards their day of release, but because reserve units were nagged by training and inspections, and were still liable to be called forward to fill sandbags and dig trenches, often more dangerously exposed than the men on line.

The American points system was regarded as one of the most pernicious innovations of the campaign: a man needed thirty-six to go home; on line, he earned four a month; in the combat zone, three; in country but beyond reach of enemy action, two. Thus, most men serving with an American combat formation might
expect to go home after about a year in Korea, while support personnel served eighteen months. It was a discipline which earned intense dislike among professional soldiers and commanders, because it caused men to become increasingly cautious and reluctant to accept risk as they grew ‘short’, and approached release date. It militated strongly against the unit cohesion the British achieved, by shipping men in and out of Korea by battalions, because each soldier focused upon the schedule of his own tour in country. Yet the system persisted in Vietnam throughout the sixties, with equally negative effects upon the US Army there.

Private James Stuhler was a New York high school drop-out who had run away to join the Marines at sixteen, been sent home again, and finally went to Korea for the last few months of the war with the 3rd Division, in the Kunwa Valley. An initial irony struck him on his way to the front, when the truck in which he and his draft of replacements were being carried forward was stopped and booked by the military police for speeding. Even at this late stage of the war, the routines and strains of life and death on the line were undiminished. They spent their first days in new positions digging incessantly, for the only contribution the unit they relieved had made to its own defence was to hang out a Chinese skull on a long pole. A squad leader in his platoon, obsessed with fear of being killed, deliberately put a bullet through his own hand. To pass the time, they fitted a telescopic sight on a .50 calibre machine gun, stabilised its tripod with sandbags, and sought to snipe at Chinese forward observers.

Then their company commander, an eager young first lieutenant, planned a raid to relieve the monotony. It went disastrously wrong. During their advance through the darkness, they walked into the American covering bombardment. Dankowski, their platoon leader, was killed almost immediately. ‘O’B, what the f– are we going to do?’ Stuhler cried desperately to O’Brien, their radio operator. The Chinese were now firing into them, hitting their
squad leader as he ran along a ridge line. Stuhler’s machine gun jammed. He pulled out a .45 pistol and fired in sheer fear and frustration. To his horror, he found that he had narrowly missed shooting an American lying in front of him. Then a rock splinter struck him on the finger, numbing his entire arm. A grenade exploded, horribly wounding his fellow machine-gunner in the face. Stuhler looked in horror at the man’s eye, hanging loose from its socket. ‘Pull back! Pull back!’ shouted O’Brien among the chaos of explosion and pyrotechnics now breaking up the night sky. Discipline collapsed as they stumbled away into the valley towards their own lines. Stuhler hastily wrapped a field dressing on his companion’s ragged face, and told the man to hold his collar while he guided him out. His helmet had fallen off, and a moment later he was stunned by a flying rock hitting him on the head. The New Yorker never knew how he got back. He and his companion waded chest-high through a creek, and were told later that they had walked through a minefield. Towards dawn, a sudden burst of machine-gun fire ripped over the exhausted men’s heads. They threw themselves flat, the wounded man groaning: ‘We’re gonna get killed! We’re gonna get killed!’ Stuhler yelled to the Americans in front of him to hold their fire. They dragged the casualty in. ‘Oh for Chrissake, will you look at this guy?’ said the shocked medical orderly who examined his face. The victim was still conscious, and Stuhler said furiously, ‘You’re not supposed to say things like that.’ Around half the platoon which had set out were dead or wounded. Stuhler received a Bronze Star for bringing back his buddy. To their fury, the company commander, who had never left the lines, was awarded a Silver Star. The battalion area was named Camp Dankowski, in memory of their squandered platoon commander. This pathetic little drama unfolded barely a month before the armistice was signed. Of such stuff was the armies’ weary disillusion with the Korean War made, by the summer of 1953.

17 » THE PURSUIT OF PEACE

1. Koje-do

No aspect of the Korean War was more grotesque than the manner in which the struggle was allowed to continue for a further sixteen months after the last substantial territorial obstacle to an armistice had been removed by negotiation, in February 1952. From that date until the end in July 1953, on the line men endured the miseries of summer heat and winter cold; were maimed by mines and crippled by napalm, small arms and high explosive; while at Panmunjom the combatants wrangled around one bitterly contentious issue: the post-armistice exchange of prisoners.

Long after both sides had forsaken any hope of achieving decisive territorial gains on the battlefield, the impulse towards gaining a moral victory – or at least, avoiding a moral defeat – persisted. In the matter of the prisoners, there were two vital objectives for the UN Command: first, to gain the return to freedom of every man of their own held by the communists; and second, among Chinese and Korean prisoners held in the South, to ensure that only willing prisoners were returned to communist hands. The memory of Yalta, of hundreds of thousands of doomed, desperate Russians being herded by the Western Allies back into the bloody maw of Stalin in 1945, hung heavy over the governments of the West.

The first list of prisoners in communist hands given to the UN Command on 18 December 1951 contained just 11,559 names. Yet in March 1951, Peking and Pyongyang had claimed to be holding
65,000 captives. Even by communist standards, this was a huge discrepancy. Apart from South Korean captives, it left more than 8,000 missing Americans unaccounted for. The Chinese claimed that thousands of ROK army prisoners had been allowed to go home, and that the unlisted foreigners had died, escaped, been killed in air raids or released at the front. But Peking can never have supposed that this explanation would be acceptable in South Korea or the United States.

Even more contentious and complex, however, was the fate of the communist prisoners in UN hands. From the standpoint of Peking and Pyongyang, it was a matter of immense importance that all these should be seen to return to the bosom of the peoples’ republics. The propaganda cost of many thousands being seen to ‘choose freedom’, to decline repatriation, appeared intolerable. On 2 April 1951, the communist delegation at Panmunjom demanded that the UN Command should prepare lists of prisoners willing to return north. To the astonishment of both delegations, only 70,000 of the total of 132,000 signified acceptance of repatriation. There was no possibility that such a situation could be accepted by the communist governments. A long, wretched struggle of wills began, in which the attention of the world became focused upon the vast UN prison compounds on the offshore islands of South Korea.

Until the war was well advanced, Koje-do remained one of the prettiest possessions of South Korea. A little fishing community, a few miles across the sea from the port of Pusan, went untroubled by the dramas and horrors that befell the mainland until a POW camp was established there in 1951. Communist prisoners were shipped in batches to Pusan by truck or train. At a compound on the edge of the city, the bewildered and demoralised men spent an average of two days while joint American and South Korean CIC teams interrogated them. They were given old American-style fatigues to replace their tattered uniforms, segregated by rank and
ethnic group, and housed in big tents from which they were brought forth, one by one, to be questioned.

Millions of words have been written about the plight of UN prisoners in the hands of the communists in Korea. Much less has been said about the treatment of communist prisoners in the hands of the UN. Under the UN, nothing remotely resembling the indoctrination programme carried out in the Yalu camps took place. It may justly be claimed that the North Korean and Chinese prisoners in the southern camps were confined, for the most part, in conditions little worse, and with more and better food, than most would have enjoyed at home. Yet amid the profound humanitarian concern for the British, Americans, Turks being maltreated in the North, little has been said about the casual brutality to which thousands of communist prisoners were subjected. A host of UN veterans of Korea testify to the hostility and contempt in which most soldiers held ‘the gooks’, whether North or South Korean.

Western treatment of the Koreans and the Chinese was dictated by a deeply rooted conviction that these were not people like themselves, but near-animals who could be held at bay only by employing the kind of brutality they were wont to use upon each other. At the front prisoners were better treated, indeed greatly valued for intelligence purposes, from the spring of 1951 onwards. But in the camps of South Korea, many suffered as severely as their counterparts on the Yalu. ‘The compounds at Pusan were run by military police who were very rough on the prisoners, often beat them up very badly,’ said Private Alan Maggio, who served among the PoWs as a medical orderly for ten months from May 1951. ‘Those MPs were just waiting for trouble. They wanted something to happen. The enlisted men ran the system. There were no officers who bothered to walk round or check what was going on.’
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From the Pusan compounds, the prisoners were herded into landing craft at the dockside, and ferried for three hours across
the sea to Koje-do. Here beneath the shadow of the high hills that dominated the island, thirty-seven vast, adjoining, wired compounds had been constructed. Within these were confined, early in 1952, some 70,000 Chinese and North Korean prisoners. They were held at a density four times greater than that tolerated in US federal penitentiaries. A further 100,000, including 38,000 born in South Korea and conscripted into the North Korean army during the communist occupation, had already been screened and removed from the island.