A Forgotten British War: The Accounts of Korean War Veterans 3031100506, 9783031100505

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
A Note on Sources
Chapter 2: Lance Corporal Mike Mogridge
Chapter 3: Private Alan Maggs
Chapter 4: Sargent Alan Guy
Chapter 5: Private Arnold Schwartzman
Chapter 6: Private Christopher Garside
Chapter 7: Brigadier Brian Parritt
Chapter 8: Private Edgar Green
Chapter 9: Private Anthony James White
Chapter 10: Major John Lane
Chapter 11: Corporal Jim Tait
Chapter 12: Private Roy Painter
Chapter 13: Private William Shutt
Chapter 14: Private Jim Bridges
Chapter 15: Second Lieutenant Sir William Purves
Chapter 16: Private Walter Coote
Chapter 17: Sergeant Raymond Rogers
Works Consulted
Index

Citation preview

A Forgotten British War The Accounts of Korean War Veterans Edited by Michael Patrick Cullinane Iain Johnston-White

A Forgotten British War

Michael Patrick Cullinane Iain Johnston-White Editors

A Forgotten British War The Accounts of Korean War Veterans

Editors Michael Patrick Cullinane Lowman Walton Chair of Theodore Roosevelt Studies Dickinson State University Dickinson, ND, USA

Iain Johnston-White University of Groningen Groningen, The Netherlands

ISBN 978-3-031-10050-5    ISBN 978-3-031-10051-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the kind participation of many people. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Justin Maciejewski and Peter Johnston of the National Army Museum, who met with us in 2018 and put us in contact with Martin Uden of the British Korea Society. Together we conceptualised this project and began the process of contacting Britain’s surviving Korean War veterans. At the National Army Museum, Robert Fleming and Jasdeep Singh provided a wonderful oral history training session for the University of Roehampton students. Natasha Swainston assisted us with archiving the material in the National Army Museum’s collections. At the University of Roehampton, we are thankful for the colleagues and students who supported the project and the modules that facilitated it. Our interviewers did a fantastic job: Maximilian John Crichton, Oskar William George Duellberg-Webb, Taylor Charlie East, Jasmine Anne Haynes-Bell, Vlad Iordachescu, Sarah Ellen Newman, Isabella Rose Smith, Jakub Strzezek, and Fouzia Syed. We hope you enjoy seeing these interviews in published form! Our greatest thanks go to the veterans whose testimonies comprise this volume. It takes an enormous amount of bravery to participate in an interview about life-defining events, and even more so for that interview to be published with only light edits, despite the natural desire to correct the small imperfections of spoken language with writing’s more refined touch. We are ever thankful for your time and patience, and that of your loved ones, as we followed up across eighteen months with paperwork, chapter drafts, and further questions. We would also like to thank all the veterans v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

who volunteered for oral history interviews, including those whom we were later unable to interview or those whose accounts are not included in this manuscript. Your willingness to share your experiences with future generations is inspiring. This book is dedicated to all those who served in the Korean War. We hope it will be a small but lasting memorial that goes some way to remembering.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Michael Patrick Cullinane and Iain Johnston-White 2 Lance  Corporal Mike Mogridge 17 Mike Mogridge 3 Private Alan Maggs 33 Alan Maggs 4 Sargent Alan Guy 43 Alan Guy 5 Private Arnold Schwartzman 53 Arnold Schwartzman 6 Private Christopher Garside 69 Christopher Garside 7 Brigadier Brian Parritt 83 Brian Parritt 8 Private Edgar Green 97 Edgar Green

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Contents

9 Private  Anthony James White115 Anthony James White 10 Major John Lane127 John Lane 11 Corporal Jim Tait139 Jim Tait 12 Private Roy Painter153 Roy Painter 13 Private William Shutt167 William Shutt 14 Private Jim Bridges183 Jim Bridges 15 Second  Lieutenant Sir William Purves195 William Purves 16 Private Walter Coote209 Walter Coote 17 Sergeant Raymond Rogers223 Raymond Rogers Works Consulted237 Index239

List of Contributors

Jim Bridges  King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Croft, UK Walter Coote  Royal Fusiliers, Dublin, Ireland Michael  Patrick  Cullinane Lowman Walton Chair of Theodore Roosevelt Studies, Dickinson State University, Dickinson, ND, USA Christopher Garside  Durham Light Infantry, Solihull, UK Edgar Green  Middlesex Regiment, Aldermaston, UK Alan Guy  Royal Army Medical Corps, Surrey, UK Iain  Johnston-White University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands John Lane  Royal Artillery, Shrewsbury, UK Alan Maggs  Durham Light Infantry, Redcar, UK Mike Mogridge  Royal Fusiliers, City of London Regiment, Henley on Thames, UK Roy Painter  Royal Australia Regiment, Hertfordshire, UK Brian Parritt  Royal Artillery, Kent, UK William Purves  King’s Own Scottish Borderers, London, UK Raymond Rogers  South Staffordshire Regiment, Victoria, Australia

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List of Contributors

Arnold Schwartzman  Royal Sussex Regiment, Los Angeles, CA, USA William Shutt  Royal Artillery, West Midlands, UK Jim Tait  Royal Military Police, London, UK Anthony James White  Royal Ulster Rifles, Oxfordshire, UK

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 14.1 Fig. 15.1 Fig. 16.1 Fig. 17.1

Mike Mogridge holding the Korean Veterans’ standard at a memorial service in London Alan Maggs donning his summer attire Alan Guy at home in Byfleet Arnold Schwartzman on base in Korea (1956) and at the memorial he designed years later Royal Artillery 25-pound field gun in action in Korea, circa 1951 Brian Parritt in dress uniform Edgar Green outside his home (left) and on his return to Hong Kong from Korea in 1951 (right) Anthony James White at home Major John Lane in dress uniform Jim Tait with three Korean friends (1953) Roy Painter outside the signal office on base in Korea (1952) and at home (2021) William Shutt outside Woolwich Barracks (1951) before being sent to Korea Jim Bridges portrait in regimental glengarry during basic training at Fort George (left) and on the troopship en route to Korea (right) Willie Purves talking into an 88 radio set with his signaller Lance Corporal Allison Walter Coote in Korea, 1952 (left) and at a reunion event in Seoul, 2006 (right) Raymond Rogers before deployment, 1950 (left) and at 2015 reunion (right)

17 33 43 53 69 83 97 115 127 140 153 167 183 196 209 223

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Michael Patrick Cullinane and Iain Johnston-White

The seventieth anniversary of the Korean War, which began on 25 June 1950, passed prosaically. The global pandemic of 2020 and 2021 led to nationwide lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, suspending social gatherings of all kinds. No memorial or tribute to the surviving veterans could take place, and the inability to organize commemorative events has further dulled the public awareness of the war. Korean War veterans are used to being overshadowed. The conflict is commonly referred to as “forgotten,” a three-year clash obscured by the looming legacy of the Second World War. In the United Kingdom, the war hardly registers in popular memory despite the deployment of nearly 100,000 British and Irish soldiers to the peninsula. Veterans of the war have struggled to earn recognition for their sacrifice, and, most distressingly, successive UK governments have refused to fund memorials. Only with the help of Korean private enterprise and the South Korean government did

M. P. Cullinane (*) Lowman Walton Chair of Theodore Roosevelt Studies, Dickinson State University, Dickinson, ND, USA I. Johnston-White University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_1

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the United Kingdom erect a memorial in 2014, outside the Ministry of Defence headquarters in London. This oral history collection offers an alternative memorial as means to better observe the war, its veterans, and their service. As a published volume, the book provides a record of those who experienced the war and a platform for understanding the war’s significance from those best placed to describe the circumstances. As historian Megan Hutching points out, commemoration with parades, Cenotaphs, and tombs “is a simplistic way of looking at times of conflict,” designed to establish collective memories, whereas “contextualizing the individual experience” through oral histories “adds texture to those collective narratives.”1 It allows us to see the intricacy of a moment, the intimacy of action or inaction, and the emotional connections that extend from the war across a lifetime. Oral histories plumb the multitudes of human experience, revealing one person’s understanding as a unique and venerable perspective. No single veteran experienced the Korean War the same way. When the war began in June 1950, the North Korean Army attacked the South and put UN forces, including British and Commonwealth soldiers, on the back foot. The North Korean offensive pushed beyond the 38th Parallel, where the country had been divided since the Second World War. UN forces retreated to the southern city of Pusan and formed a 150-­ mile perimeter around it before regrouping and repelling the North Korean invasion. The UN counter-attack proved so effective that allied forces invaded North Korea in September 1950 and reached the Chinese border the following month. The proximity of UN forces prompted China to deploy the People’s Volunteer Army, and, by January 1951, the front had receded back toward the 38th Parallel. There, belligerents traded positions before the war settled into a stalemate. By July 1951, trench warfare replaced the dramatic offensives and counteroffensives.2 For soldiers that joined the war at its outset, they recall intense marching across the peninsula, makeshift engineering, and quick adaptation to new landscapes. Sergeant Raymond Rogers, a signalman in the South Staffordshire regiment, said, his war “was a very mobile action” that when compared to 1  Megan Hutching, “After Action: Oral History and War” in Donald A. Ritchie (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 241–2. 2  For a concise assessment of the military history, see Max Hastings, The Korean War (London: Simon and Schuster, 1987). For a comprehensive appraisal, see Allan Reed Millett, The War for Korea, 2 vols. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010–2015).

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his friend Private Walter Coote, a rifleman in the Royal Fusiliers, seemed completely different. Coote’s war, Rogers explains, “was, more or less, a stagnant one” because he arrived in 1952, after the fighting settled into the trenches. While Rogers remembers his boots wearing out from walking over mountains and through valleys, Coote talks about monotonous patrols and startling ambushes. In July 1953, the stalemate ended with an armistice, an agreement that created a demilitarized zone across the 38th Parallel. For British and Commonwealth soldiers still arriving in Korea in 1953, their war seemed different still. Landing after the fighting ceased, Arnold Schwartzman, an artist that did his national service with the Sussex regiment, recalls soldiers clearing a mine field so he could build a temporary memorial to the Gloucester regiment that defended against Chinese troops at the Imjin River. Each soldier’s experience was remarkably different, yet they can all agree that the significance of the Korean War for world history should be apparent. It was the first major conflict of the Cold War, and it represented the militarization of competing ideologies. After the Second World War, the United States adopted the policy of “containment” to restrict the spread of communism. Although the containment policy was originally conceived as a political and economic bulwark against the Soviet Union’s expansion in Eastern Europe, President Harry S. Truman viewed North Korean aggression and Chinese communism as an identical threat to American security and pursued the policy of containment in Asia. Truman’s successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, famously equated the spread of communism to falling dominos, a chain-reaction that would end with the collapse of democracy in Asia. The same metaphor existed in Truman’s day. Secretary of State Dean Acheson referred to the spread of communism as rotting apples infecting a bunch.3 Many Korean War veterans reprise this metaphor. Royal Fusilier and Lance Corporal Mike Mogridge told interviewers that he believed the war “stopped the march of 3  On the containment policy and the domino or apples metaphor, see Robert J. McMahon, Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2009), 53, 65. On the Korean War and early Cold War geopolitics, see William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3–46; William Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 11–60. On the legacy of the conflict for the remainder of the Cold War, see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library Chronicles Book, 2010), 205–21.

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communism” and that if the UN had not “combatted against the North Koreans and the Chinese, virtually half the Far East would have been under communist Chinese rule.” Regardless of the domino theory’s validity or the efficacy of the UN’s action in Korea, British and Irish veterans understand the war in this global Cold War context, and for good reason. Setting the war in a longer history helps derive meaning from the experience. It might, for some, give purpose to their actions. It can offer an explanation for involvement. For others, it allows them to transition from the violence of the front to the peaceful domain of home. As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton suggests, the stories that veterans tell can allow them “to feel he had performed a dirty, but necessary job.”4 Even those that eschew customary narratives or see the war as imprudent can countenance their deployment as a product of Cold War hubris, youthful ignorance, or national duty. As varied as their experiences could be, so are the veterans’ conception of the war in global history. Perhaps the only common belief they share is that the war played a crucial part in shaping our current condition, a conviction that makes the lack of public attention so frustrating. One group has not forgotten them: the Koreans. For Koreans, the war inflicted lasting devastation. Over three million civilians died; UN bombing campaigns levelled the North; and Seoul, the capital of South Korea, fell to communist forces four times, resulting in widespread destruction of the metropolis. The wider region suffered from a prolonged refugee crisis as displaced Koreans fled to safety. The war shattered hopes of reconstruction and peace after the trauma of the Second World War. Instead, the Korean War might be seen as the first of several Asian wars that pitted imperial American or European aspirations against indigenous nationalist and communist movements. The French and American wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia certainly fit that description. Insurgencies in Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia do, as well. “The Korean War was thus the occasion for recasting containment as an open-ended, global proposition,” according to historian Bruce Cumings.5 While many of the Cold War conflicts have since been resolved, the war in Korea endures. A force of 28,000 US soldiers under UN Command continues to patrol the 38th Parallel, as do thousands of North Korean 4  Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 39. 5  Cumings, The Korean War, 219.

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troops. Over the last seventy years, low-level skirmishes have erupted and faded from memory. War games annually simulate what a contemporary battle would look like.6 The peace remains tenuous. North Korea’s isolation and nuclear weapons program make it a dangerous state with unpredictable impulses. In 2017, North Korea successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and on several occasions, it has fired missiles into the Sea of Japan or beyond, into the Pacific Ocean. Paradoxically, signs of reconciliation sometimes follow these acts of intimidation. North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un signed declarations of peace in 2018 with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and even entertained nuclear disarmament in a summit with President Donald Trump.7 The partition of Korea serves as a constant reminder of the war, and while the British and Irish public has largely forgotten, the border remains a salient part of everyday life for Koreans. Partition has not been relegated to the history books, and the veterans of the war link the past to the present, a living connection to the endurance and survival of the South Korean state. Disregarded at home, British and Irish veterans of the Korean War are revered in Seoul. The Government of South Korea invites foreign veterans back to the nation they helped save. Visits are complementary, a token of gratitude. When Brigadier Brian Parritt was awarded the prestigious Korean Order of Civil Merit in 2018, he was surprised at the extravagance and pomp with which veterans were received: My American grandson was in Tokyo and they flew him out as well, they paid for his taxis, and they paid for his hotel and they had a big ceremony in Seoul and then the two of us—they invited him up as well onto the stage— in front of some 2,000 people and the prime minister of Korea hung this Order around my neck and gave me a very special watch. They gave my grandson a huge bunch of flowers which he was a bit embarrassed about, but he took a rose, I think, and brought it back to his mother in Boston.

6  On the second Korean War and episodic violence in the demilitarized zone, see Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 22–66. 7  “North Korea Conducts New Intercontinental Missile Test,” BBC News, 28 July 2017; “Koreas Make Nuclear Pledge after Historic Summit,” BBC News, 27 April 2018; “Trump-­ Kim Summit: US and North Korean Leaders Hold Historic Talks,” BBC News, 12 June 2018.

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Even those who had not received a distinguished medal felt the same deep appreciation from the Koreans. Corporal Jim Tait of the British Military Police returned in 2012, amazed at the “five-star” treatment: it’s “all paid for” by the Korean government, and “that’s not just for us; they do it for the different countries at different times in the year.” In Britain, Private William Shutt of the Royal Artillery says that Korean expats have the same regard for veterans of the war. “Nine times out of ten it’s a free meal,” when he goes to a Korean restaurant in London, “I couldn’t get that in a British restaurant.” We believe these oral histories demonstrate a contrast in the memories we have about the Korean War. We know that perspective changes our attitudes about the past. We also recognize that oral history is shaped by the interviewers and the questions they choose to ask. Our project attempted to capture some specific elements of the experience of the British armed forces in Korea. We addressed the central questions of day-­ to-­day life, including any interactions with Koreans, experiences of combat, and general duties. Some of these questions elicited answers that capture one’s imagination with unsettling effect: veterans tell us about patrolling in complete darkness at the dead of night to locate enemy forces, when wildlife quietened and silence would suddenly descend. Private Christopher Garside of the Durham Light Infantry was one of the veterans who had to do night patrols. He calls them “the worst possible things.” Beyond these foundational topics, we asked veterans about their journey to Korea. The veterans we spoke to did not know where Korea appeared on a map. When they found out they were being sent there, they had to look it up. They told us this was overwhelmingly the case for others, too. The journey could stand out for the events that occurred on ship, the entertainment, or the interactions along the way. For some, it was the preparation that proved memorable—training, or informational lectures about mosquitos and snakes. For Private Edgar Green of the Middlesex regiment, it was the inoculations that the soldiers received on the flight deck of the ship: You just formed up in two single lines with your hands on your hips and then there’s one medical chap one side, and one the other side. You got a jab in one arm, and a jab in the other arm, and a bit further along you got

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another jab and [then] another one. But in those days, we didn’t get a fresh needle for every man like it is today. The same needle was used for the majority of the chaps. First in you had a sharp one, but if you was quite a way down the list you got a nice, blunt needle in your arm.

We were as curious about the feelings the men had when they were told they were being shipped to Korea. Most of them did not volunteer for a post on the other side of the world. Private Anthony James White of the Royal Ulster Rifles described the news as “a bit of a shock,” explaining that “he didn’t particularly want to go, but he wouldn’t have said no.” Christopher Garside felt for the family he left behind, his parents and siblings who were unhappy about his posting, but for him it “was so unknown.” Others had a more positive approach. Private Jim Bridges of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers volunteered to serve in Korea because he was “fed up” of the routine at his Berlin posting. He remembers having the exuberance and arrogance of youth and a desire for excitement. At the officer level, there was less space for emotional reflection. Second Lieutenant Willie Purves of the same Scottish infantry regiment explains that his feeling was that he “had been trained to command thirty men, and that was what I was going to try and do.” We asked about their equipment, a line of questions that resulted in a material history of the war. The .303 Lee-Enfield rifle, veterans said, was accurate even if it had a slow rate of fire. The unreliable submachine Sten gun had a short range and was liable to jam. The veterans thought more highly of the Bren gun, a light machine gun of Eastern European design. Other weapons got less mention, such as the water-cooled Browning, a heavy machine gun. Strikingly, these were the same weapons that had been used in the Second World War battlefields, drawing a line of continuity with a previous generation’s experiences. These guns were the basis for formative stories in their upbringing before they used them in Korea. Other equipment, or lack thereof, stoked memories. Clothing could greatly differentiate. The soldiers present for the earliest phases of the conflict often found themselves poorly clad. Truly terrible winters tested the men. In the winter of 1950–1951, Korea experienced the coldest winter in recorded history to that date, a cold snap not matched until 2017. Temperatures dropped to −40°C. Tinned food and alcohol froze; handling equipment became difficult; and Major John Lane of the Royal Artillery told us he started his day with twenty minutes of calisthenics to warm his

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men from their frosty slumber. Conversely, the summer brought a tortuous heat. British soldiers ditched their wool jumpers, Private Alan Maggs of the Durham Light Infantry explains, and “you just wore a pair of PT shorts and socks and boots—bare-chested at the top.” As the war dragged on, the provision improved and soldiers adapted to the extreme weather. Almost all veterans compared their kit and provisions to that provided by other armed forces. The British did not serve in isolation; in this multinational UN force, there was a likelihood of some interaction with the service personnel of other countries. Given the substantial forces committed to the conflict, Americans understandably loomed large, whether as suppliers of key equipment, as the source of medical care, or the band that played for the arriving British troops. In the first winter, American forces supplied the ill-equipped British with insulated parkas. Raymond Rogers remembers eating fistfuls of American peanut butter—then a relatively unknown food product to British taste buds. The veterans framed their alliance in terms of mostly good relations, bolstered by a consistent awareness that they were shoulder to shoulder in a shared war. Nevertheless, there were a fair number of jocular interactions. Jim Bridges tells us that when his unit heard that US troops had eaten ice cream on the front line, he and his fellow Scots hollered to the next set of Americans replacements that they had managed to “rough it three days without ice cream!” British units also served within the Commonwealth Division comprised of Australians, Canadians, New Zealander artillery, and the Indian Field Ambulance. Private Roy Painter jealously remembered that the Australians he met got small boxes that could keep a fire lighted in their tents, and that Kiwis had a good sense of humour. Other nationalities crop up in memories, such as the Norwegian Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (M.A.S.H.) and a French battalion that drank wine with every meal. Korea was not the only location that the soldiers experienced during their service. Some spent significant periods of time in the New Territories in Hong Kong, as an initial posting before the conflict in Korea erupted or as a site for training until they reached nineteen years of age and could be deployed in the war zone. Some saw Hong Kong only as a point of transit in and out of Korea. Likewise, Japan was a common place they visited. In the interviews we asked the veterans about periods of leave, and after the initial period of fighting it was common for soldiers to receive a seven-day “rest and recuperation” break in Japan if they were fortunate (others were not able to leave Korea). Japan was also the site of some medical care for

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soldiers withdrawn from Korea with injuries. After the war, many soldiers travelled to Egypt to patrol the Suez Canal during the 1956 crisis. Our questions considered the longer-term views that veterans hold about their time as soldiers. We asked them how they felt when they left Korea and arrived back in Britain, in addition to how their views on the conflict changed over time (if at all). We were keen to probe their feelings on the ways in which Korea has been remembered or memorialiszd and whether they considered themselves to be “veterans”—all of these themes tying in with the image of the Korean War as a “forgotten war.” The general consensus was that the Korean War deserves that moniker, especially in Britain where commemoration has been inadequate. The question about being a veteran elicited a range of responses. For some, the term “veteran” is accepted without much consideration. For some, it does not feel appropriate. John Lane says that “it wasn’t a word [he] would use,” preferring instead an “old soldier, perhaps.” For a generation following so closely behind those involved in the Second World War, it could feel uncomfortable. Anthony James White explains: “one year in the front line didn’t compare much with what people in the Second World War” did, they “spent six years in that sort of situation. We really had no comparison with what they did.” Others wear the term as a badge of honour, seeing the designation as one they deserve or earned. Beyond the topics that arose from our set of questions, several other themes emerged extemporaneously. A notable example was the vast difference in experience and perspective between officers and regular soldiers. Comparative elements open up throughout the chapters, for example between the interviews of Christopher Garside, a private in the Durham Light Infantry, and Brian Parritt, a second lieutenant in the 20th Field Artillery. Both were there when the ceasefire took effect. Parritt explains how he witnessed the flares of the Chinese forces go up in a show of reds, blues, and yellows. A “huge cheer went up” around him, and he celebrated with a beer, along with the platoon commander. By contrast, Garside said the privates felt as if they “were in service one day and the next day someone said the war was over … It was all very quiet, and people were too shattered” to celebrate. When they arrived back in England, Garside was left at the port in Liverpool and had to find his way back to Durham. As a Royal Artillery officer, Parritt was returned directly to Woolwich, where his father met him from the train. Second Lieutenant Willie Purves noted of his journey aboard the ship to Korea that he had “a small cab[in], which you share with another officer or two other officers,

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but I don’t suppose it was much fun down in hammocks underneath.” Private Edgar Green, although he didn’t find it a hardship, confirms this, saying we “just slept where we were. A chap with me, we decided to sleep in one of the aircraft carrier’s workshops and we slept on top of a work bench.” Anthony James White explains why the experiences were so different: the British Army at the time “didn’t really treat normal soldiers as intelligent people; they thought they were just cannon fodder.” Another strand that runs through the interviews is British imperialism, which is fitting for one of the last conflicts in which Britain’s global empire formed a prominent backdrop. The British Empire affected how the conflict was experienced and the self-identification of the soldiers themselves. The journey to Korea represented a mini-tour of the British Empire. It was “all those red places on the map” as Arnold Schwartzman explains, the Suez Canal, Aden, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Singapore, and Hong Kong. The trip was infused with imperial encounters, including an Arab man in Aden who greeted Schwartzman with the Scottish expression “a wee deoch an doris.” Many of the veterans we interviewed served within the Commonwealth Division, alongside colonies and dominions of the British Empire. John Lane describes how the fighting force was a “nucleus of colonials” before laughing and adding “and us.” Lane explains the toughness of Australian soldiers as a legacy of empire: “You know, if you’re a settler … you’re bound to be tough.” The elements of imperialism could extend to understandings of the conflict itself. Raymond Rogers describes the conflict somewhat playfully as part of the “White Man’s Burden,” while Christopher Garside talks about the value of the conflict in terms of saving lives, questioning whether the war was “a bit Christian, isn’t it?” As these latter three examples show, the imperial dimension—perhaps more accepted as a fact at the time—is the source of gentle humour for veterans looking back from today’s vantage point, providing us with a window into how the British Empire is remembered by those who lived through its demise. And humour is central to the testimonies. There is a lot of laughter in the interviews, as the veterans recall a series of amusing anecdotes. Sometimes the laughter is wry, but often it is open and full. Indeed, humorous events punctuated the intense fear of potential, imminent, or live combat. Joking broke up the monotony of the soldier’s life. These moments of emotional release appear to have left an indelible mark on the memories of most of the veterans. Of course, one must also consider how humour can help a person deal with difficult circumstances, both at the

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time or in the process of recollecting. In post-interview correspondence with Jim Bridges, for example, he noted that occasional laughter was a response to his nervousness during the interview, and he hoped it had not come across as frivolity. Some of the stories, and responses to challenging circumstances, are likely to raise a smile from the reader. After John Lane recounts how he was almost killed, and left with permanent deafness by a 120mm shell that struck his observation post, the interviewer followed by asking whether Lane required medical care. Quick as a flash John responds, “Yes, half a bottle of whiskey!” Historian Joanna Bourke explains this particular function of humour: if “death could be construed as a joke,” then “the terror of death was diminished.”8 It would be impossible to discuss the war without reference to violence and death. Understandably, some veterans preferred not to discuss these aspects in any detail. Willie Purves, for example, is the only National Service Office to be awarded the Distinguished Service Order. He won this for managing an unlikely withdrawal of his own men and another platoon from a significant battle. The stranded group was without a commanding officer, making Purves’s rescue even more remarkable. When asked for specific details of the events, he responds that “one doesn’t like to talk” about combat. Some of the veterans are more at ease discussing the injuries they sustained than those suffered by friends or foe. Walter Coote, for example, tells us how he was flung down a slope by a fierce explosion and of his subsequent recovery in the M.A.S.H. unit. In other examples, Jim Bridges recounts how hearing air support targeting the enemy would make him cringe, knowing they would drop napalm on opposing forces. Anthony James White expresses his discomfort when his unit was commanded to fire on civilians potentially harbouring enemy forces, something he felt they should not do. There is also a tendency among veterans to bear witness to injuries acquired by fellow soldiers. However, one of the issues facing soldiers who saw their comrades fall is eloquently captured by Christopher Garside: “if we had somebody who was killed, it was almost impossible to grieve. Because there’s nowhere to grieve.” Sometimes grieving was only possible after a significant passage of time. The most emotional moments of the interviews come when veterans recount visiting South Korea decades later, 8  Joanna Bourke, “The Killing Frenzy: Wartime Narratives of Enemy Action” in Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod (eds.), No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), 122.

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often seeing the graves of fallen comrades. Edgar Green describes how those fallen were trapped in time. “We think, crikey, they was only 19, 20, ages like that,” he related, “You can’t consider them like we are ourselves today, but they all gave their lives in those circumstances.” We might also consider how the language of narrating war was changing. Joanna Bourke contends that 1939 marked the beginning of a shift in veterans describing war in terms of psychoanalysis and anxiety, moving away from understanding their experiences of combat in terms of instinct and fear. This process was not complete until the 1960s, putting the Korean War in the midst of this change.9 Roy Painter, in drawing comparisons with today’s generation in Iraq and Afghanistan, claims that not one soldier from Korea has post-­ traumatic stress resulting from their experiences. Then, in a seeming contradiction, Roy later admits to “two or three moments” of post-traumatic stress that overtook him on occasion. Others have similar scars: Christopher Garside tells us he has been treated for post-traumatic stress. Walter Coote’s wife suspects Walter has experienced nightmares about the war. Mike Mogridge admits to flashbacks in recent years. The experience and long-term impact of violence and death is not foregrounded in these interviews, but it runs throughout the chapters.

A Note on Sources The oral history project interviewed more than twenty British veterans of the Korean War. The work began through a collaboration between the University of Roehampton, the National Army Museum, and the British Korea Society, designed to mark the seventieth anniversary of the war. With the number of veterans in declining health the work felt urgent. The project would gather testimonies and allow veterans to have their say on the past. Originally, it was planned for students from the University of Roehampton to conduct interviews with the veterans, which in turn would feed into an exhibition at the National Army Museum, capped with an event commemorating the war organized by the British Korea Society and the National Army Museum. The process began in Autumn 2019, and students conducted more than a dozen interviews before the global pandemic delayed work, reshaped the way we collected testimony, and eventually cancelled plans for commemoration. In 2020, further interviews were conducted online with telecommunication software. On occasion, 9

 Bourke, “The Killing Frenzy,” 109.

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we returned to veterans to ask additional questions about their account. Many of them mentioned that they preferred face-to-face engagement, and we believe that in-person interviews might have generated deeper and more prolonged accounts. As editors, we created a list of interview questions, which were reviewed and, in some cases, redesigned in collaboration with Peter Johnston of the National Army Museum and Martin Uden of the British Korea Society. Peter Johnston, for example, suggested that veterans should be asked about the equipment that they used in the conflict, a topic that garnered responses covering weaponry, food, and clothing. The connection between these questions and the potential for a future museum exhibition is clear. Seeing the objects of war alongside the accounts could bring to life the experiences of the veterans for visitors to the museum. Likewise, Peter composed the question on whether the veterans considered themselves to be “veterans”—another query to which there were many fascinating answers. Martin Uden ensured that the wording of the initial communique to veterans and the interview questions were not unintentionally limiting, with references to the armed forces replacing those of the British Army, for example. His long experience of working closely with veterans was invaluable in reaching and engaging with the former soldiers. At the University of Roehampton, the project was incorporated into the second-year undergraduate work placement module, giving the students experience managing a project and collaboration with the culture and heritage industry. Students were invited to take part in the interview process, and received formal training from staff at the National Army Museum. They also transcribed many of the chapters. The invitation to participate extended to graduate students at Roehampton. In total, eight undergraduates and one postgraduate conducted the first round of interviews. We owe considerable thanks to this group: Maximilian John Crichton, Oskar William George Duellberg-Webb, Taylor Charlie East, Jasmine Anne Haynes-Bell, Vlad Iordachescu, Sarah Ellen Newman, Isabella Rose Smith, Jakub Strzezek, and Fouzia Syed. When the pandemic limited the students’ ability to reach the veterans, we as editors conducted the remaining interviews. The National Army Museum shared its vast expertise in oral history methods. A day-long training session, run by Robert Fleming and Jasdeep Singh, prepared students for interviewing the veterans. In addition to providing the students with a thorough oral interview preparation pack, the trainers from the National Army Museum gave students hands-on

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experience through mock interviews—some easier than others! Students were instructed in techniques to try to get beyond oft-recited stories and to find new ways of exploring familiar storytelling. This was not always entirely achievable. Some of the stories in the interviews come across as well-trodden, but at other times it is clear that a question or recollection comes unexpectedly and beyond the normal scope of retelling. The training session pushed students to adopt techniques for conversation and offered up other interviewing tips that extended to the latest methods in audio-visual capture. This visual instruction would have been of great use, but due to several limiting factors, it was not practical to interview all of the veterans in person. Besides the pandemic, issues such as logistics, equipment, and the diverse geographical spread of veterans (which extended beyond the United Kingdom) led to the decision to conduct the interviews remotely and primarily via audio—mainly telephone or digital telecommunications software like Skype and Zoom. Inevitably we lost touch with some veterans who had initially volunteered to take part. Some preferred not to participate in this manner or could not do so, due to health or difficulties with extended phone conversations or inability to access technology. Some interviews do not appear in the book because they repeat stories or offer a limited description of a veteran’s experience. Interviewing remotely increased the challenge. In training, we had discussed recognizing visual emotional cues of the veterans, which was no longer possible. In the original audio files, one can hear the inevitable compromises of a phone conversation, including the difficulty in judging gaps in speech (is an interviewer or interviewee pausing for thought or have they finished speaking?) and some talking over one another. We nevertheless gained such rich interviews—even greater in number than we could fit in this manuscript. That makes the project a testament to the efforts and enthusiasm of the students, veterans, the British Korea Society, and the training team from the National Army Museum. Without their commitment, this book would not have been possible. We have published the interviews—largely—as the veterans expressed them. There are, however, several edits, omissions, and alterations. In terms of editing, we have made some grammatical changes where appropriate. For the most part, we have kept the grammatical errors to give a sense of the vernacular, but, in some cases, it became necessary to change the grammar to make a sentence read logically. In the chapters, we have edited the order of questions when veterans jumped around in order to

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ensure a degree of consistency; however, this arises rarely. We have omitted “ums” and repeated words where they might distract. In all the chapters, we resisted alterations, especially those made by the veterans. In several cases, the veterans wanted to rephrase or rewrite their account so it would appear differently than it had in the interview. Their intention was to clarify and expand on their memory of the war; they had no intention of reimagining or whitewashing the past. In a few instances, we allowed for revisions that changed the content of the original recording; where that happens, we identify the changes in the introduction of a chapter. In all the chapters, we have endeavoured to present the recorded accounts as closely as possible to the original. For intrepid researchers, they can listen to the audio or video recordings to hear the interviews verbatim. In fact, we would encourage those interested in the war and the men who fought it to listen to these recordings. They convey the experiences of British and Irish soldiers far better than this book. They are the true memorial and will endure as a legacy of the war for time to come.

CHAPTER 2

Lance Corporal Mike Mogridge Mike Mogridge

Fig. 2.1  Mike Mogridge holding the Korean Veterans’ standard at a memorial service in London

M. Mogridge (*) Royal Fusiliers, City of London Regiment, Henley on Thames, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_2

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Four months in Korea, at the end of the war, can seem like more than a year. In the recollections of Lance Corporal Mike Mogridge, it is possible to lose track of how long he spent on the line. Stationed at the Hook for his first deployment, Mogridge arrived in 1953. After the Hook, he went to Hill 355 and then to the Samichon River escarpment where the Fusiliers witnessed the end of the hostilities. Mike spent the last four months of the Korean War patrolling the most dangerous stretch of the line. Like so many other national servicemen, he left Britain at the age of eighteen and arrived in Korea at nineteen, but his birthday did not magically change him. The war did. His experience at the front, and the unique terroir of Korea, he explains, “made him a man.” Like so many other boys growing up in London, Mike evacuated Peckham during the Blitz. He returned after the Second World War, attended secondary school, and noticed that his friends had returned to Peckham with strange accents. Some London evacuees retained their cockney or estuary inflection, but just as many returned with accents from where they had stayed during the war. Four formative years in Scotland or Wales had transformed the linguistic landscape, not to mention the physical environment and social scene. Mike came of age in post-war Britain. He began an apprenticeship in the printing industry, after school. He planned to work as a proofreader, but before he could take up full-time employment, he began national service. As a fit, young man, he had his choice of regiment and decided to stay close to home. He joined the Royal Fusiliers City of London regiment and departed for Hong Kong, where he trained before shipping out to Korea. The sights of the war come into vivid focus as Mike describes his experience. He explains how stacked piles of corpses surrounded his position on the Hook, and why the Fusiliers had difficulty clearing them. Rigor mortis made it almost impossible to lift them into body bags. Even more complicated was removing the bodies draped over barbed wire because it exposed the Fusiliers to sniper fire. The abundance of rats that fed off the bodies lived throughout the trenches, and while they crawled over the soldiers as they slept, the rodents had more interest in the dead than the living. Mike and others ignored the rats. Soldier instead paid attention to the sounds they heard in the night. The Hook became most traumatic at that time, when Mike patrolled the area. He credits luck as the only thing that kept him alive on his patrols into no-man’s land. One night, a mortar exploded between Mike and his two friends. Mike was thrown in one direction; one friend was thrown in the opposite direction. The third happened to be

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in-between and took the full force of the mortar, leaving him severely wounded. On another three-man patrol, his unit was assumed dead after confronting a much larger Chinese patrol in no-man’s land. Somehow Mike emerged from the fight unscathed. Mike returned home in 1954 and has since volunteered with SSAFA, formerly known as Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association. He works with returning veterans from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For those showing signs of post-traumatic stress, Mike became a kindred soul who the younger generation could comfortably discuss their experiences with. When asked if he had any flashbacks to his time in Korea, Mike tells them he only did so recently, long after he came home. It has helped him appreciate the value of his service, the sacrifice of his friends, and the importance of public service—in his case conscription. Mike wanted to finish his interview on that point, emphasising his pride as a national serviceman and the feeling of accomplishment in Korea. Mike also remains conscious of the long-term effect of the war. Because it never formally ended and fighting ceased in a stalemate, Mike sees the enduring tensions in Korea as a reminder of his service. The UN forces that kept the South Korean state free from communism had a long-term impact on the Korean people and the wider region. He laments the lack of memorialisation and recognition of the Korean veterans in the UK, comforted in the knowledge that Koreans remember. Mike returned to Korea in 2002 during anniversary commemorations and experienced immense gratitude from the Korean people who paid for his journey and applauded when veterans paraded through Seoul. He even returned to the Hook, a surreal and nostalgic moment on his trip. Visiting his old position, where he used to fire his machine gun across the small gorges, prompted him to think about his youth forever lost on the battlefield. After the war, like many other national servicemen, Mike went to Egypt to protect the Suez Canal Zone and then to Sudan, shortly before the UK would grant the African state its independence. He is keen to point out that over 300 British military personnel died in Egypt, at nearly the same time as the Korean War. While a Korean War memorial was erected in London in 2014—paid for by the Korean government and multinational South Korean businesses—Mike relates his frustration with the lack of remembrance for other servicemen that fought in conflicts like those in Egypt. That perspective comes after many decades of reflection and consideration. He displays great maturity and empathy for his fellow soldiers and the victims of war. Rather than a personal narrative, Mike seeks to

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place his experiences in a wider context from the war he fought to the long history and legacy of British intervention. Mike Mogridge was interviewed in autumn 2019. *** I went off to Korea in 1953. I was just eighteen at the time. What happened was, we were conscripted and you had to go into national service. So, I got an intended due date. I went for a medical and was passed A1 because I was very, very fit. I was interested in boxing. I went to see a delightful old colonel who told me I was eligible for the infantry and would I have any preference for regiment. He suggested the Black Watch, which he told me was in Scotland. So, I said, “Do you not have anything a bit nearer?” He said, “Well, there is the Royal Fusiliers which were over at the Tower of London.” So that’s the regiment I went to. He had the last laugh, really. Both the Black Watch and the Fusiliers were going to Korea. Just before I was due to go, my mother came in and put a newspaper on my bed. She said, “Look. You’re not very smart are you. The Black Watch and the Fusiliers are both going to the Korean War.” What was that like when you found out you were going to Korea? Did you know much about what was happening? I didn’t know an awful lot. I knew, like everybody else, from the newspapers that there had been a small country in South Korea that had been invaded by the North and that it was the communists against us, if you like. When I got there, I realised there was much more to it. It was quite a significant war to stop the march of communism, but it also made me realise the suffering of the Korean people which was quite horrendous. I was in Korea for, well actually what happened was, the battalion were in Korea for a year and I was one of the reinforcements that was sent out. We went to Hong Kong first, to acclimatise and practice running up and down hills, and when we went to join the battalion, they were in the rest area. So, I actually did four months on, actually in the front line with the Royal Fusiliers. I was the Bren gunner in the anti-tank platoon. At that time the Chinese didn’t have tanks, so the anti-tank platoon acted as another rifle platoon and we were attached to various companies, whichever position in the line we were needed.

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My experience is difficult to put in words. When you go into a front line, there’s one thing being in Korea and being in the country, but when you go into a front line, you step into a completely different world. When I joined the battalion, we were in the rest area. What used to happen was the battalion, all infantry battalions, would have maybe a month of the front line in a certain position, after a month they would come out and have maybe five days rest and then they would go to another position on the front line. So, it was more or less continuous frontline work because even when you were in reserve or what we called the rest area, there would’ve been Chinese and North Korean infiltrators that you had to watch out for. My first experience was that we were woken up late one evening and told to get everything ready because the Chinese were attacking the Hook. The Hook is a position in the front line in Korea, that suffered more soldiers killed than any other position. It was quite horrible place to go to because it had the Chinese on three sides. The Chinese were attacking the Duke of Wellington’s regiment on the Hook, and we were sent up to be reinforcements to get in their rear positions, so that if the Chinese did break through, we were then ready to push them back. What happened when the Chinese put through a mass attack, our artillery would start to shell them very heavily. Meanwhile, their artillery is shelling our position because they want us to keep our heads down so that we can’t fire on the invading soldiers. The Chinese got nearer and nearer to our positions and, eventually, they got into the Duke of Wellington’s trenches you had the Chinese and our artillery both shelling the same position. They said, and this is rumour, of course, that there had been more poundage dropped on the Hook that night than there had been during the Battle of El Alamein. So, it was quite an awakening experience to have to suffer that sort of shelling. The Duke of Wellington’s did hold the Chinese and push them out, so we weren’t needed to go into the front trenches. I came from a regiment which was the City of London regiment, so most of the people—the soldiers—were conscripts from East London or South East London, and we’d all been through the Blitz, so it wasn’t quite so dramatic for us as it had been for a lot of the other regiments. When the Chinese were forced back by the Duke of Wellington’s, we went back to our rest area, had our breakfast, and went up to take over on the Hook. The Duke of Wellington’s pulling out.

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Halfway up the Hook, on the way to the front trenches, there were two fellas: a man and one of our guys on a stretcher. They were trying to get him down; they couldn’t; he kept falling off. They said, “Give us a hand mate.” So, I grabbed hold of the other side. I looked down and all I could see was a small hole in his thigh, and I thought, well, that’s not much, he’ll probably have a couple of stitches, but he’ll be ok. When we got to the bottom of the hill, he was dead. He obviously had some internal bleeding, but it gives you a stark awakening that this isn’t a film where people get shot and get up and walk away afterwards. It’s real life. When I got to the top of the Hook, to our positions, in front of the Hook were masses and masses of dead Chinese who had been killed by our artillery fire and our small arms fire. The first job we had was to get rid of the bodies—to go out into no man’s land, pick them up, and bring them back. Though, when you’re in the front line what happens is that during the day you have look outs looking and watching the Chinese to make sure they’re not attacking you, and you all get some sleep. The war in Korea was a night-time war. It got near dark, and the Chinese came in the dark. We were waiting for an attack and would send out patrols into no man’s land. One of the patrols we had would go out and bring these bodies back. They had rigor mortis, and you couldn’t get them into the body bags. They would eventually just be riddled with bombs, and it wasn’t very pleasant trying to get them back. The smell of dead bodies you will never forget for the rest of your life. We had a pile of dead bodies outside our bumker where we slept—we call them the “hutchie.” We had a pile of Chinese dead bodies that was eight feet tall, and we got immune to it; we just didn’t bother about it. We just carried on eating our sandwich, and you get what we call battle-­ hardened. It’s almost careless to death. That was my first experience of warfare, and they say you go from a boy to man overnight; well, that’s just what happens. Further things that happened on the Hook: there was the time. Because all our trenches had been decimated by the shelling. I was sitting with two other guys and the Chinese saw us, and they launched five mortar shells, which blew me about ten-feet one side and one of the other guys ten-feet the other way. One of the three of us was Ronnie Carlson he had taken all the shrapnel, and we didn’t have anything just the ringing in our ears. We had to get Ronnie back to the medic tent. We put him on the jeep and the driver said to me, “You have to hold him on.” So, I got on the jeep and we went back to where our medical officer was looking after the wounded

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in a sort of makeshift tent. It was a very hot night. I remember because it was so hot, he was just performing in his underpants. As I went into the tent, there were a lot of people just laying there moaning and groaning. There was one young lad who looked quite young to me and was bleeding profusely from his stomach, and he said to the [medical officer], “Am I gonna to die; am I gonna die?” The [medical officer] said, “No, no. We’re patching you up. You’re going to Japan. Your war is over. You’ll have a good time.” And as he said that, the boy died. So, you can see the sort of transition it would make in a young nineteen-year-old guy who has never been outside of Britain. The other thing with this, which is quite amusing is the Chinese, before they attacked the Hook, used to get to a place called “Green Finger”, where there were some caves, and it was the end of the spur coming out from the Hook. One of the patrols there that I had to do one night, was with two others, and we had to go down in the Green Finger spur to get to the caves to see if the Chinese were there. Which we did. The Chinese were there, I don’t know whether they realised we were there or if they stumbled upon us by accident, but the Chinese located us and we could hear movement in the bushes just in front and whispering. The situation when you’re on a patrol area like that is that you would radio back to your own lines and your mortars then open up on the positions to kill the Chinese. But, before you do that, you say, “permission to retire,” and then they give you permission to pull out. Well, we didn’t get the permission to retire so we were still stuck there and then all of a sudden everybody started firing at each other and our mortars dropped shells on our position where we were and the Chinese. So, I was lying there on the ground with red hot shrapnel buring itself inches from my face. Eventually [the firing] stopped and there was deadly silence. From our lines, they sent out a fighting patrol to try and relieive us and ostensibly bring back our bodies because they were certain that the Chinese had killed us, which is why they opened up with our mortars. The first thing they said when they reached us was, “Look! They’re still alive, they’re still alive!” When I got back to our own lines, I went into our platoon hutchie and there was Sergeant Farrer. He looked up at me and he didn’t show any surprise at all. He just said, “Oh, we thought you were dead. Do you want a cuppa tea?” [laughter] I think it was the best cuppa tea I’ve ever had. That tells you about life on the Hook. It was constant patrols, and constant shelling all the time. If you ask any soldier that served on the Hook,

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they will remember, more than anything, the rats. The place was swarming with rats, which lived off the dead bodies. They weren’t like rats you get in this country. They were as big as cats and they were fearless, but we used to just lay down and they’d run all over us and you were never bothered. They were quite annoying items to your daily life. That is what life was like on the front line. Did you have any contact with people back home? We had letters but they took five weeks to reach us, but they were the best thing that ever happened even though they were five weeks old. It was what you looked forward too every day. It could be nothing [important]. I had a girlfriend at the time called Sadie and she wrote to me every week while I was away, for the two years I was abroad. What I didn’t know is, obviously she was probably my first girlfriend and just a passing relationship, but while I was away, she got engaged. She never told me. It didn’t mean anything to me because it wasn’t an attachment that good, but she wrote to me every day, every week for two years which was a wonderful thing to do. Are there any objects, items, or pieces that you strongly associate with your time there? We all fought with Lee-Enfield rifles. Lee-Enfield rifles were the rifles used in the First World War, and they had a bolt-action, in other words you had to do it with your right hand, put the next round in the breech. Whereas the Americans all had automatic weapons, they had a rifle where you could just pull the trigger and it would fire four or five bullets. We all wanted to have those sorts of rifles, but in the end, it turned out that we were much better off because the thing the soldier dreads more than anything else when you’re in a combat situation is running out of ammunition. If you’ve got a rifle that will let off three or four bullets and they’re going in the same direction, in other words shooting in the same range, you’ll soon run out of bullets. Whereas with our old Lee-Enfields we had to load a round, shoot at somebody, load a round, and then pick another target so it made the whole thing more effective. They were quite a good weapon. I was made a Bren gunner because when were in training back in England, I won a competition on the Bren gun. Because I was quite a good shot, they gave me a Bren gun, and it was one of the best weapons you could have. It was a super weapon; it was automatic and you could fire it from the hip. When we did patrols, we were given Sten guns. Sten guns they said used to cost in old money five shillings each to make, and they were grossly inadequate. They only had a range of about 100 yards, which

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was all they were designed to do. Because they were so cheap, they were constantly seizing up. So, you could never rely on a Sten gun the way you could a Bren gun or a standard rifle. The other thing that I remember in the way of equipment was we had bulletproof vests. These were the first bulletproof vests; now they have bulletproof vests that will stop a very heavy bullet. With these, they didn’t. The first thing I saw when I went up the Hook was a guy lying on one side, a Duke of Wellington soldier, his bulletproof vest had a big hole in it. They weren’t much good for head-on combat, but if you got hit by a ricochet or shrapnel, then they would deflect that. So, they were some help, but not as good as they are today. How long did you train in England and what was the training like? In England, we trained initially for six weeks. Most of our training as reinforcements was in Hong Kong. We went to Hong Kong in the New Territories and was stationed with the Duke of Wellington’s regiment. That was where we were training in a Far Eastern environment. There were very big hills there, and we could do bayonet charges up hills and go to the ranges there. We did quite a lot of training and preparation in Hong Kong. And we did patrols, of course. You mimic patrols where you go out at night, and the Black Watch were there and had their reinforcements, and they were stationed with the Ulster Rifles. We would do a lot of patrols against them and vice versa so that we got used to doing close combat fighting at night. Is there any aspects of people, food, or culture that stand out in your memory? We were on the front line the whole time. They say it takes ten soldiers to support one soldier on the line. If you were in one of the corps, the service  corps  or something like that, you would be further back. There you would have met the Korean people. But we were on the Hook and you didn’t get many civilians there. Occasionally when we came out for rest, you would see the occasional farmer but you didn’t have any conversation with them at all. I didn’t get any leave. The guys who had been out there for the year, they were entitled to a week’s leave in Japan. I was only there four months, so I didn’t get any leave to Japan. All I got, my contingent, they had an Australian sort of ENSA [Entertainments National Service Association] show come out. That was about five hours, and one evening we went and saw that, which was very nice. Did you encounter any personnel from the armed forces of any other countries, and did you form any relationships?

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We were part of the Commonwealth Division. The Commonwealth Division were the British regiments, like the Gloucesters, the Duke of Wellingtons, the Royal Fusiliers, the Northumberland Fusiliers, so there were several infantry regiments and there were Canadian infantry, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. There were Australians, the Royal Australian Regiment, and New Zealand artillery. The Commonwealth Division was a division, which supported itself and which we were all very proud of. When we came out of the front line the first thing we used to put up in our rest area was the beer tent and, as soon as the beer tent was put up, the Royal Australian regiment used to come in their jeeps and join us in our beer tent because we were quite close to them. So, it was tremendous rapport amongst the Commonwealth Division, and we were very proud of the fact that the American general in charge had put the Commonwealth Division on the “gateway to Seoul.” If the Chinese were going to invade, they had to come down a valley called the “gateway to Seoul,” and he put the Commonwealth Division there with the American Marine division on their left and another American division and Korean division on their right. One of the stories that is in fact true is that the general of the American Marine division on our left was asked by one of the radio commentators how he slept at night. Did he sleep well? He said, “Actually very well,” he said, “because I got the sea on one side and the Commonwealth Division on the other side and I know they’re gonna be there in the morning.” So, it was quite a responsible job and we were very proud of it. As far as personal contact is concerned, after we went on the Hook, we went out for another five- or six-days rest, and we were going to take up a position called [Hill] 355, which is nicknamed “Little Gibraltar.” I think the Americans called it “Heartbreak Ridge.” We were taken up to within a couple of miles of the line by the New Zealand service corps in their lorries, and they were all Maoris, and the night before we went up the line, they got out the ukuleles and we sang outside the beer tent and we played wonderful songs, one of which was the song called “Pokarekare Ana,” which is quite famous now and it’s called the soldier song. Well, the Maori who was singing it—[the song] was all in Maori—he started to have a little tear trickle down his face and I heard a sniffle. It was one of our guys, he also had a little tear down his face, and I slapped him round the head and said, “What are you crying for? You don’t understand it.” He just said, “I’m crying because he’s crying.”

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It was quite an emotional accord we had. They collected us after we had done our time on 355, and the first thing the Maoris said was, “How’s Jackal? How’s Brian?” You know, they got a rapport with us and they were worried [about] the fellas they had got to know. Are there any other events from your time in Korea that you remember or that stand out to you? There is an event every year. We have the Fusiliers church and we have a commemoration for the guys that died in Korea. Every year they ask a Korean veteran to read out some memories. I’m going to read out the memory next year. When we went from the Hook, as I said we went up to 355. 355 was a hill which is 355 feet high. Opposite, there’s a Chinese hill which is 244, which is 244 feet, and in-between there’s another little hill, which had been occupied by the American marines with 150 people. They’d had so many casualties that they’d just not bothered anymore, but we were a platoon of thirty sent up to occupy it. Well to get to that position you had to go down a long valley called the bowling alley. The bowling alley was called the bowling alley because the Chinese lines were at right angles to their end of the bowling alley so they could fire tracer bullets and tracer shells or machine gun bullets down it at regular intervals. It was quite a dangerous place to be. You didn’t want to go out having a stroll there. It certainly was dangerous in a lot of eyes and it wouldn’t be a surprise if you got blown up. We were there one night and it was in the monsoons. It was bucketing down—monsoons like you never see in this country. The trenches were filling up and they were collapsing. Then a jeep arrived with  our padre—Father Freddie Preston. And I asked him, “What are you doing here padre and how did you get here?” “When they weren’t looking,” he said “I sequestered a jeep and I’ve made my way here down the bowling alley. I said, “Well what did you come for?” He said, “I’ve come to hold communion.” We built an altar on sandbags—this was during the daylight. He brought a cross, which is now in the Fusiliers Museum in the Tower of London, and the people that went—it didn’t matter whether they were Protestant, Catholics, atheists—everybody, virtually everybody, went to that communion. Then we went out on patrols and manned our trenches, and when we came back in the morning, the padre had gone. I just thought: we had to be there because that was what we did. We were soldiers. He didn’t have to be there. A lot of padres wouldn’t had done that.

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He died last year [2018] so that’s why I’m going to be reading about this story at the next Fusiliers memorial. How did you feel when you left Korea? There were mixed feelings. I told you that we didn’t have much to do with the local population. This might be interesting to you: we came out of the 355 and went up to a position called the Samichon position when the ceasefire was declared. That was quite an experience because we were told, the rumour was that we were going back on the Hook because the Chinese had taken it over. We weren’t particularly happy about doing that. We were treating it with some foreboding. Our platoon commander Lt now Major General Brian Webster came up to us with a very sour face, and he got us round and said, “I have to tell you that the ceasefire has been declared. You will stop firing at 10 o’clock tonight.” We all just stopped firing, but that night the Chinese sent up coloured flares and we sent up coloured flares and it was a joyous feeling. In the morning we all woke up and the Chinese had put coloured flags all over their hills. They came out and one of their soldiers  waved to us, and one of our blokes waved to them. I just thought: bloody marvellous. Not long ago were killing each other. The other thing I remember: I’d never really experienced how badly it was for the civilian population. Seoul was just a shanty town. We went back to Seoul, to Inchon and back down south, and it was just full of kids, young children dying. I was sitting there with a sandwich and a little boy came up, and he couldn’t say anything but he was holding on to the carriage and holding his hand out. As I went to give him the sandwich, one of the other kids knocked him to the side, and he looked at me and said, “No give to me him pinishee. Him finish-e.” In other words, he’s saying he’s going to die anyway; you’re wasting your sandwich on him. I shall remember that little boy for the rest of my life. To go back to your original question, obviously we were quite happy to be leaving. We were going off to Egypt to the [Suez] Canal Zone, which was another combat area, but whatever combat was happening there, nothing could compare to the constant shelling, and night patrols, and suicide attacks that was in Korea. You mentioned Egypt; would you be able to tell me a little bit more about that? Egypt was the Suez Canal Zone, it was … run by the British and the French and the Egyptian government was trying to take it over, and we were there to try and protect it. It was a little bit like Iraq. You could be out in the Canal Zone, with the Egyptians, living in their towns and

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villages, and you’d never knew if you were going to be attacked or if they would fire on you. They were very good at sniping actually. If you went out in a jeep or Land Rover down the main road down the Canal, you would get individuals watch you; sometimes they would jump onto the lorry and throw acid in the drivers face or sometimes they would leave a bomb and that sort of thing. It was a completely different sort of combat situation. At least in Korea we could see a Chinese soldier and we knew he was a soldier. In Egypt, you never knew who it could be; it could be a young lad or a girl who would have a knife or a rifle. Korea lasted for three years. There were more soldiers killed in Korea in three years than all the other wars since the Second World War put together, so it was a very high attrition rate. Egypt went on for about eight years, I think. There were 300 British soldiers killed in the Canal Zone in eight years, so that was more than there was in the Falklands, yet no one ever mentions the Canal Zone. It’s not just Korea that can be called the forgotten war. We were in Egypt for about six months, and I was in the boxing team, so most of that six months I just used to train for boxing. We had a much better social life if you were into sports. We had other British troops and had sports competitions. The Fusiliers had just come out of Korea, so we hadn’t had a lot of time for training, but we won the first infantry divisional boxing championships. We were immensely proud. Did you go anywhere else after Egypt or did you come back home? We went to the Sudan. We went to Khartoum. It was a British protectorate then, and we always had a regiment in Khartoum. They had a lot of tribal war going on there—bandits—we were there to keep the peace. We used to go out on patrols, and Sudan is as big as Europe, I think. We never had a chance of finding anybody. I was only there for two months and then I came back to be demobbed. When you returned home, what was that like for you? Well, it comes back to what you were saying about the Korean War being a forgotten war. It’s always been the forgotten war. When I came back, I went out to the pub with my father and a guy I had known came in and said, “Hello son. I haven’t seen you for a couple of years. Where have you been?” I said, “Oh, I’ve been to Korea.” He said, “Oh! Did you have a good time?” He never even knew. That was what just after the war had finished. I think the problem was that we’d just been through the Second World War with big battles. Korea was a war and it was a big battle, but it was a small

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battle when you put in the time zone of the Second World War, and I just think it was overshadowed by the Second World War. People never knew its importance. The importance was that it was the first United Nations’ war and it stopped the march of communism. If we hadn’t confronted the North Koreans and the Chinese, virtually half the Far East would have been under communist Chinese rule. It doesn’t get the political recognition that it needs … The one thing that I want to mention is that people in this country don’t recognise it. They don’t teach it to their children. I’ve got grandchildren now and they’re never taught modern history. They are never taught about Korea especially. The one people that do remember are the Korean people. The Korean government are wonderful. The way we treat Chelsea pensioners they treat us. We get invited to Korean veterans’ associations [events]; we get taken out and invited. I was taken back to Korea on the anniversary in 2002 with all my expenses paid. I just had to pay for my wife. As our coach went through Seoul with the Korean veterans on it, everybody in the streets stopped and started clapping. The Korean military attaché [in the UK] and [Korean] ambassador [to the UK] are constantly inviting us to functions. As the Korean ambassador said at the last [event], to all the Korean veterans, that we have a blood tie between our country and your country and we will always be your friends. That is how we are treated. It’s just wonderful how much they appreciate what we did. What was it like for you returning back to Korea? It was very nostalgic. The American general who was the overall commander of the South Korean forces and the American forces was General Schwartz. He said, “I told my guys this: ‘I was in Vietnam,’ and I told my guys ‘Vietnam was a ball game compared to Korea.’” And he said, “I’m going to come round to each one of you and if there’s anything you want, you tell me.” Well, I was sitting with a guy from the Black Watch and the general came round and the fella from the Black Watch says, “The Fusiliers and the Black Watch used to occupy the Hook,” and he said, “We just wondered if there was any chance to go back there?” General Shwartz said, “I’ll see what I can do.” Two days afterwards, we were told, all Black Watch and Fusiliers veterans and their wives, go and get in the coaches. The coaches took us up to a position where we could actually look down on the Hook and I could see my old gun placement and that was really, really spooky. Your mind takes you, automatically, back to being a nineteen-year-old just sitting in

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that trench waiting for the next shell or bullet. Bear in mind—fifty years afterwards—looking down on it was just unbelievable. When we got in the coach to come back, I said to the American officer, “It was nice of the general to do that.” He said, “You didn’t realise how nice. He’s had to get permission from the North Korean government to go there.” It was another nice gesture. Is there anything else you want to share? Yeah, I think one thing that I just would like to leave you with is on, [is] about the ceasefire. The night before the ceasefire, one of our guys got killed on patrol, a guy called Teddy Dr by. He was really well liked. He was a corporal and he was one of the most popular guys in the battalion and he got killed just before the war finished. I knew him but I was not on this patrol but one of the chaps who was told me that his  last words were, “Don’t tell my mum.” That’s significant because it highlights that we were all nineteen-year-olds, maybe twenty-[year-old] national servicemen. I have worked for sixteen years at a military charity called SSAFA [formerly known as Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association]. I’ve met lots and lots of ex-soldiers, professional soldiers, and one thing that upsets us conscripted guys was when they talk about national servicemen in a derogatory way. Nearly all the soldiers, at least a very high percentage of the soldiers in our army, were nineteen-year-old/twenty-year-old national servicemen. I met General [Andrew] Farrar-Hockley afterwards and said, “I was only a national serviceman.” He said, “Don’t ever say that. National servicemen were some of the finest service soldiers we’ve ever had.” If anybody does feel a little bit disparaging about national service— don’t knock it. I have to admit that I’ve done a few interviews probably about four of them now … as I’ve done it more, it’s become easier. Sometimes it can be very emotional, but the more I’ve spoken about it, the easier it has become. So, that’s a lesson for the other guys. When I was working with SSAFA, we went to help veterans of Afghanistan and spoke about post-traumatic stress and all that. One thing I will emphasis is try and break that barrier and talk about it because it is better than just keeping your emotions pent up inside you.

CHAPTER 3

Private Alan Maggs Alan Maggs

Fig. 3.1  Alan Maggs donning his summer attire A. Maggs (*) Durham Light Infantry, Redcar, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_3

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Alan Maggs remembers the climate of Korea. The winter bit so hard that his thick string underpants and vests barely kept the cold out. The “bloody hot” summer forced him to shed his shirt and work in just shorts and boots. Korea’s seasonal extremes seem a far cry from the North East of England where Alan grew up. Born in 1934 at the Bishop Auckland Maternity Hospital, he lived in Durham City, where his parents owned a fish and chip shop. They earned a good living, and Alan had a happy childhood. When he was not helping out in the chip shop, he worked as a third projectionist at the Odeon cinema. With the exception of his father, who served in the Civil Defence and assisted rescue operations in London during the Blitz, the destruction and trauma of the Second World War bypassed Durham and Alan. Korea almost bypassed Alan, too. At the outset of the war, he was only sixteen. He took up national service two years later, and shipped out after the war settled into a stalemate. Alan first went to Hong Kong, and then Japan, where he spent several months. He even had a Japanese girlfriend and began a lifelong interest in Buddhism. When he turned nineteen—the age eligible for combat in Korea—the Army sent him to the front. In hindsight, we might see 1953 as the last year of the war with the worst fighting over. That impression conflicts with the reality. Alan’s deployment carried all the same risk as those that went before him. Interestingly, the British kit improved by that stage of the war. Alan remembers having paraffin for heaters. He relied less on the Americans for supplies, a memory much different from those soldiers who served in the earlier parts of the war. Other memories are remarkably consistent, however. Alan had near misses with enemy fire, picked up an injury that required a stint in a M.A.S.H. tent, and recollects the most vicious parts of the front like the Hook or Hill 355. And like many other national servicemen, Alan also spent time in Egypt after Korea. After his national service, Alan returned to the North East and back to his beloved cinema job. He moved to the Gaumont cinema when he was twenty-one and ran a projection room. The golden age of cinema had passed while Alan worked the projectors and when the cinemas began closing or reducing staff, Alan went back to school. He earned a bachelor’s of science degree and started a short-lived job as a radiographer, but feared the health risks that might arise from the gamma radiation used to scan underground pipes, so he moved to Rank Hovis McDougall as a supervisor in the food industry. He worked there for the next twenty-five years, until his retirement.

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Alan recorded his initial account in autumn 2019 and spoke to the interviewing team again in 2021 to further clarify his recollections. * * * What year did you go to Korea? 1953. I was only in the line twice. I was in the first battalion, Durham Light Infantry. They were there for a year but I came during that time. I was only there for about four months. Four months, when the actual war was on. How old were you when you went to Korea? Well, that’s why I was so late getting there. You had to be nineteen to go, and I spent my time in other places before I got there. I was only eighteen when I first signed up. What were you doing before being part of the armed forces? I was a cinema projectionist … I was at the Odeon cinemas when I was [working]. In our grades, I was third projectionist. I couldn’t go any higher until you’re twenty-one, then you could be a chief or a second. You had to be twenty-one to be in charge of a projection room. So, I was as high as I could go for my age. Did you volunteer for the armed forces or where you conscripted? I was national service. I got there by March/April time in ’53 and was there till after the ceasefire and must have come out in about September ’53, when it was after the ceasefire. Did you have an attitude towards the war? No, I was sent there. I had a job to do. I knew how to do it. I just got on with it, that’s all. I only had one object, come back out alive. What were the most memorable aspects of your journey to Korea? Well, my journey to Korea came in parts because when we sailed from Southampton, I was under nineteen, we got off at Hong Kong and I spent some time in the New Territories [area surrounding Hong Kong Island] at a place called Fanling and the Queen’s Hill Camp with the Royal Ulster Rifles. Like the marines and not like the guards, you march like the guards but different drill. So, you had to be with the light division; the light regiment and the Royal Ulster Rifles were a light regiment. They did the same drill as we did. What sort of things did you do in Hong Kong?

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Mainly operational patrols on the boarder, those sorts of things. We were supposed to, if any Chinese tried to get through to Hong Kong to send them back. Once you arrived in Korea what were your main duties? I was a trained signaller; I was on radio and telephones. There’s four of us: the signal platoon was in twos, threes, and fours all around the battalion. I was with one of the four with A company and we used to have a telephone exchange to radio sets. We had one radio, a thirty-watt set, and the battalion net[work], and we were a control with an 88-set with a company. We were the control with the 88-set. The 88-set works for four platoons, and we also had a telephone exchange. What do you remember most about day-to-day life in Korea? I remember quite a few things. The first thing I remember was when we came to the battalion. We came under orders to start down a road, and it turned off. The battalion HQ was in a dip just to the left. We just left the road, and a shell came on the spot where we just left. Around three seconds off, we would not be getting there alive at all. We were lucky. What was your impression of your equipment? It was adequate. It was all British equipment [was] all the regiment had. The only thing we had off the Americans was a 3.5 [inch] rocket launcher, the Americans call it a super bazooka. It’s the only thing that [was] hand held that you could use to knock out a T-34 tank. Did you have any contact with civilians in Korea? No, never saw any civilians. We did have contact with Koreans, the porters who were carrying everything about were Koreans, and we did have 200 of what we called KATCOMs [Korean Attached Commonwealth Division] attached to the battalion and they wore our kit; they were dressed the same as us … The South Koreans were pleased that we were there. They saw we were United Nations troops. We were held by the Koreans in high esteem. Did you see any combat during your time there? No, I wasn’t involved in the combat. I was a regimental signaller. The only thing I used to do was, I used to sometimes, we used to take turns, we used to go up in the “hutchie” [dugout in a trench] to the MMGs [Vickers .303 Medium Machine Gun], which was the biggest machine gun and used to sit up all night and play with the headset. We didn’t speak to the patrols out in no man’s land, but we used to listen all night, and if they radioed in for help, we could call it down for them. Because when

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they were out on patrol, they didn’t want any noise so we never spoke to them. Just used to sit and listen on the radio all night. Mainly they’d attack patrols if they’d come in contact with them, and most of all casualties were cross-over patrols in no man’s land. They’d come across and have a fire fight. So, you’d have four men go on patrol each place. The Chinese had thousands. What did you do while on leave? There’s no leave. The only thing I had was, I had twenty-four hours for rest and recuperation. Twenty-four hours that’s all I got … It’s about three miles behind the line. It’s different all together there. We were up in the line, and when you got back, there’s a cinema in a hut with a corrugated iron roof with the projector in. You had to sit on the ground while they were showing films. A different world there and just three miles behind [the line]. There were no air attacks or anything, no. I slept sixteen hours of the twenty-four hours when I got back [there]. Did you encounter many soldiers of the armed forces of other countries? We were in the Commonwealth division and we did encounter Australians and New Zealanders, New Zealand gunners, and Canadians. But you see the Commonwealth division was made up of three brigades. The 25th brigade was all Canadian and 27th brigade was all British. We were in 28th brigade, and, if you don’t mind the expression, we called it “the odds and sods brigade” because when we were in the Commonwealth, we had people from all over, we had New Zealand gunners, we had two British battalions; the D[urham] L[ight] I[nfantry], and the Royal Fusiliers which were on loan to the regiment. And one Royal Australian regiment. We were actually a Commonwealth brigade. We had good relations with them after we came back, after the Korean War. When we were there, we only saw them now and again. We all greeted each other… we were all doing the same thing. You used to have a few jokes with Americans. I remember at Pusan when we came over from Japan, the Americans were very good at putting up signs. They had a sign in Pusan Harbor under this arch that said, “Under this Arch March the Finest Soldiers in the World.” Some other nationality, it must have been English, New Zealand, or Australian, or Canadian—because it was in English—wrote graffiti. That sort of thing went on between the Americans. Are there any other events from your time in Korea that you found particularly memorable? I had two lucky escapes: one was when we had that three second difference. If we’d been three seconds later on the Chinese or North Koreans,

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whoever fired that shell, we wouldn’t have got out of there alive at all. The other time was when we were on our second position which was Yeongdong, which was next to the Hook. We had two centurion tanks with us, and I had to go past the tanks. I could have gone either side. I choose to go on the left, and as I was passing the tank on the left, a shell landed on the right, so if I’d went on the right, I’d have been killed dead. Luckily, I picked the right side to walk on. How did these close escapes make you feel? Lucky. Thankful they didn’t pick the same thing as me. [It was] lucky and that’s it. Did you have friends who received injuries in Korea? Well, I heard of them but I never saw them. I was injured myself, but I wasn’t injured by the enemy. I was injured by the Royal Artillery … As I said before, we used to spend all night up with the MMGs, and what usually happened was a corporal in the morning—they had to come back after dark at night—would stick his head through the door and say, “Go back now signaller.” Of course, at that time I was with A company, and they were just behind Hill 355, just behind it on another hill. I had to walk down 355 by myself to get some sleep. The artillery used to fire 4.2-inch mortars. But every now and then a pin would break off the bomb as they fired it, and it would spin in the air and you could hear it swishing in the air. And they always hit the back of 355. So, when I was walking down, I heard a swish, swish, swish. I knew what it was, I knew where it was coming [from], so I found a hole by the side of the hill and dived in it, but I couldn’t get my legs in. The mortar bomb went off quite close to me and wounded me in the legs. But it wasn’t the enemy, it was the Royal Artillery dropping shells. How was the medical care after this? Medical care was good because I was lucky that the only thing that could get up Hill 355—it was so high—was a jeep, and the jeep was coming down when this happened and he stopped. Between us we had two field dressings, we had one each. I was wounded on my right and left legs; he put his on one of my legs and my own on another leg. I went in the jeep with him. He never took me to our battalion medics; he took me down to the Indian field medics. And they sent me to a Nor[wegian] M.A.S.H. Not the American M.A.S.H., the Norwegian one. They fixed me up there … There was only one difference [with the Nor M.A.S.H.], the Americans had women who were nurses and things. The Norwegians didn’t; they were all men.

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What was your general feeling when you were there? Even when the men weren’t on patrol, they were frightened a lot, but they never let the other ones know that … You never knew when [the enemy] were coming. We weren’t on it, but the Commonwealth division had about seven miles of the line, covered about seven miles. Hill 355, where we were twice, is the east end of the seven miles. The western end of it was what the British called the Hook. That was on the main invasion route to Seoul, and they had many battles on there. Well, I know three at least where the British were attacked … the British held out and kept them from getting through. If they’d got through the Hook, there would have been enemy to the front and enemy to the rear. The British held them back. Loads of casualties, and I know a friend of mine who was on there who was badly wounded. He’s still alive today but he’s had trouble with his back all his life. What was the weather like in Korea? Well, two extremes: bloody cold in the winter and bloody hot in the summer. In the winter you had string vests, string underpants. In the winter we had rubber sole boots, trying to keep warm, had parkas on. You’re completely covered—from head to foot covered. In the summer, in the front line, you just wore a pair of PT shorts and socks and boots—bare-­ chested at the top. We were issued with steel helmets, but very few of us ever wore them. They were un-comfy on your head. We used to get in the “hutchies.” In the First World War they called them dugouts but we called them hutchies. In the winter time you had what you call “puffers,” they were a shell casing with holes drilled in, you used to set up a drip of paraffin, stick a bit of lighted paper in the bottom and it used to go puff, puff, puff. They used to heat the place up very well. A friend of mine once said to me, he got his puffer going and he was sweating; he couldn’t turn it off. [laughter] Were you attached to different companies at different times? Yes. First of all, on 355, I was with A company all the time. Then on Yeongdong, which is the second position after that, I was with C company when I started and then the other half of the time, I was with the anti-tank platoon. The anti-tank platoon didn’t use the anti-tank guns because there was nothing to shoot at. When we were on 355, I wasn’t with them then, but there was a little hill between 355 and the next hill east, I think [it was] 208 and a little hill between them. The anti-tank platoon was on the little hill, and they had American Browning machine guns—­half-inch/

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point fives. They were on that little hill. But I wasn’t with them then, I was with them on Yeongdong. How did you feel when you were leaving Korea? Well, pleased that you were leaving alive, a lot of men weren’t. When we left Korea, we didn’t know where we were going. And when we got to Port Said on the Suez Canal, we got off and served the rest of our time on the Canal Zone … [I didn’t do] much really as a signaller [at the Canal Zone], watch the telephone exchange for the battalion. We had to watch the Egyptians … we did some [patrols] by the Sweet Water Canal, which is the freshwater canal supposed to be coming from the Nile. The only drinking water in the whole of the Canal Zone that was drunk was the Sweet Water Canal. The cables that ran across it, you had to make sure the Egyptians never cut it or anything. Did you remain in the armed forces upon returning home? No, I just did the two years. Afterwards, I wished I had signed on for three because when I got back to the Odeon cinema, I was still only twenty, and all they could do was give me my job back that I had when I left. If I had done the three years, that would have taken me to twenty-­ one, and I could have been second or chief. I didn’t go back to the cinema because I was a third projectionist for two years before, and I was only on four bob a week … I managed a grocery store in Durham city for two years, but the job I loved was a projectionist and by that time I was after twenty-one and then I went to the Gaumont [cinema] where I was second projectionist. Actually, I did a few years in the territorial army, when you had to do training when you came out of national service. But as I moved to Middlesbrough, I had to leave the DLI 7th battalion TA, and I joined the Royal Signals TA in Middlesbrough. I used the money off the TA, summer camps, and weekends to put myself through study in spare time, [a correspondence course]. I got my BSc in science so as the cinemas started to close down, I went to work for the I[mperial] C[hemical] I[ndustries] as a radiologist … most of the things we did were X-raying wells and things, ensuring that the pipes weren’t leaking. We done destructive testing … making sure no air was getting through [the pipes]. We’re getting radiation all the time—gamma rays—when the X-rays scanned, dosing me. When I first started, they kept reducing the maximum [radiation levels]. There was only six of us in the labs. At the time I thought what’s the effect of this radiation going to have on me, so I left. I found out later on that, out of the six, I was the only one still alive. The wives of the other five had

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got good pensions off the ICI, but it’s no good if you’re dead so I got out of it. Do you feel that Korea has been forgotten? Yes, we call it the forgotten war. We’re the only ones who had to pay for our own war memorial in St. Paul’s Cathedral, but we didn’t have to pay for it because a Korean car company gave us a car in a raffle. And we raffled the car and raised the £35,000 to pay for the memorial that way. An MP once said to me, “The British government would not pay for our war memorial because we didn’t fight for Britain, we fought for the United Nations.” It was only five years after the Second World War. I mean I remember in 1950 when it started, it was on the news reels and the cinemas, in the papers, but there was very little reporting on it after that. There’s only one programme that the BBC did and that was it. Most of us had never heard of Korea when we found out … when we went there, we never knew where it was. How do you feel about your time in Korea? We did achieve things. We did. The problem is when the Korean War started, it was North Korea invading South Korea … If China hadn’t become involved, there wouldn’t have been two Koreas; there would have been just the one. The Chinese, when they attacked, they attacked in thousands. Their idea was what they used to call human wave attacks … We were told we were fighting mainly Chinese. We used to think they were on drugs at times because they were getting slaughtered every time, they attacked … When someone new joined us, the sergeant said, “Don’t bother aiming. Just point and shoot. You can’t miss.”

CHAPTER 4

Sargent Alan Guy Alan Guy

Fig. 4.1  Alan Guy at home in Byfleet

A. Guy (*) Royal Army Medical Corps, Surrey, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_4

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The geography of Korea posed significant risks to British troops. The long, bitter winters literally froze the skin of soldiers. Frostbite starts with numbing red skin before turning blue, then black. Ulcerations can, if untreated, lead to amputation. Conversely, the humid Korean summers welcomed malaria-carrying mosquitos. Even for those who only spent a few months in the intense heat, the infection rate was high. The British Army took preventative measures to protect soldiers and avoid stress on Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (M.A.S.H.s). Hygiene assistants like Alan Guy were critical to this task. They educated soldiers on the risks to their health and took appropriate actions to avert or manage field diseases. Alan was born in 1933, in Liverpool. He lived there for nearly nine years, until 1941. The seven-night May Blitz over Merseyside destroyed Alan’s home, and much of the city with it. “We were on the way to my grandmother’s house where we usually went to a large shelter, and during that time my house was bombed and as we were running down the roads, we were being machine gunned,” Alan recalls. He spent the week taking shelter under the stairs of his friend’s house. “I can remember the ceiling and the tiles, plaster coming down and then I was being carried to a brick shelter outside and my father appeared.” The extent of the damage rivalled that in London. The bombing of Liverpool was one of the most destructive and sustained attacks on Britain. For Alan, the Blitz forced his family to flee to North Wales, where he stayed with an aunt. Alan went to school in Wales, and took an unpaid internship with his local authority as a sanitation assistant. He assisted public health inspectors and, when he completed his schooling at sixteen, enlisted in the Army. Unquestionably, Alan’s internship with the public health inspectors prompted his appointment to the Tenth Field Hygiene section of the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he could put his training to use. In his testimony, Alan provides a different experience of the front. Rather than firing a rifle from the line, he observed the war from behind the front. He followed the Army from Pusan as it advanced north. He travelled to those places where dysentery broke out and visited troops who contracted sexually transmitted diseases. As the popular TV show M*A*S*H* made clear, the trauma of the Korean War extended well beyond the battlefield to the medical personnel who treated the wounds and maladies of the soldiers. Alan left the Army in 1953, shortly after the ceasefire. He took a job as an environmental health officer in London while studying to get a

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position in the local authority. Less than a year before his final exams were due to take place, Alan was recalled to the Army to serve in the Suez invasion. “Suez was a totally different kettle of fish to Korea,” he said, “we had taken over a bombed-out hospital … the conditions were absolutely horrendous.” After Suez, Alan returned to civilian life. He could not afford to complete the course he started before being recalled to the Army. Instead, he joined the ambulance service as a paramedic. Alan is the Korean liaison officer for the British Korean War Veterans’ Association and recorded his testimony in early 2020. * * * What year did you go to Korea? January 1952. I was just nineteen. I volunteered. I was bored, basically. In fact, I wanted to join the merchant navy but my father, who had been a merchant seaman and a soldier, refused to give me permission, I wasn’t old enough, but he did allow me to join the Army … At the time I went to Korea I was a private soldier. I remained there for about eighteen months. I didn’t leave until September 1953. I was with the 10th Field Hygiene section, which was part of the Royal Army Medical corps. How did you feel when you were going to Korea? Well, excited I suppose. It was something new, something you know you’d seen many films showing the exciting part of war but you don’t previously see the harsher side of it. I didn’t even know where it was … It was a job I was employed to do, and I just went where I was told … I’d left the Army after five years, and then I was recalled once again for the Suez invasion, but my attitude during the Korean War was, we were doing something useful and something that was quite important, and the Suez crisis was a different situation because I thought that was an absolute waste of life. On the journey to Korea, we went on a troop ship where I think there were about six or nine of us in a cabin. It was very relaxed, a lot of training, and, in my particular case, I was asked whether I would help the dentist on board which helped pass the time. It took us five weeks—five to six weeks—and as you can imagine it was quite boring and so helping the dentist helped to relieve the boredom. I was fully trained anyway but the infantry spent more time training. We went out with the Belgium commandos, and they were doing a lot of self-defence stuff, and there was rifle shooting off the rear of the ship at targets that were sort of towed along

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behind the ship. But a lot of it was quite entertaining. We had on board an on-deck cinema for the evening so there was something to relieve the boredom. And of course, we stopped at many exotic places on the way through. I stopped at Gibraltar, Algiers, Port Said, Aden, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan … The only time we anticipated or came across any real animosity was as we sailed through the Suez Canal, and there were people who were actually sniping at the ship, not that it affected us in any way, but apart from that wherever we went we were a source of income to the locals. They wanted to sell us souvenirs and so on. So, it’s safe to say that we didn’t come across any animosity whatsoever. Once you arrived in Korea, what were your main duties? Well, my main duties, I was what they call a hygiene assistant which is now environmental health assistant, and my job was to go round all the front-line troops and to give advice on any aspect of their health: how to prevent frostbite, malaria, how to sterilise water supplies and just general wellbeing really. Korea was three seasons. In the summer, you had blazing hot summers. In the winter, bitter cold and down to minus forty in places. And in between you would have a month of monsoon period. So, we had to be prepared for any type of disease or disability that was likely to occur due to these various seasons. In general, it was much better than it was in the First World War and the Second World War. In Korea itself, the main problems were frostbite. Malaria was quite prevalent, and, of course, you would have odd cases of dysentery, of course sexually transmitted diseases when people had been on leave over to Tokyo or various places in Japan. What do you remember most about your day-to-day life in Korea? Well, it was varied. We spent a lot of time [moving]. We’d moved from Pusan up North. I was on an advance party where three of us had to set up a base camp in an area right in the middle of nowhere; when we were told that there were guerrillas operating, and until the main unit camp up, that was rather unsettling shall we say for want of a better word. And, of course, we had no facilities apart from a little pup tent. We had to make a little fire to do any cooking. So, it was fairly primitive until the rest of the unit arrived and then we were able to set up. We were part of, I think, it was a thirty-strong section which operated independently of any other troops, and we had our own engineers, we had our own cook, we had our own drivers, and we had, let me see, there was one officer, a warrant officer class one, there was a warrant officer class two, and the rest of us were sergeants.

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Once when I was up at the front line, I witnessed a plane napalming the hill alongside us and that was really the sum total of the action that I personally saw. Although we were obviously aware, there was constant shellfire and gunfire all night and all day … It was quite unnerving at times. I can remember we had to do an all-night guard every three nights because there were only three of us, and, on one particular night, I saw these lights coming towards me and raised the rifle and said, “who goes there,” and there was no answer, and it kept closer and closer, and that was rather frightening, but expecting trouble only to find that it was a firefly who, it flew over my shoulder, and you can imagine the relief when that happened. The equipment, when I first went out there, we went out in basic battle dress and that wasn’t fit for the intense cold because bearing in mind I went out in January, and I saw two winters in Korea. But once we were established, we were issued with exceptionally good equipment that was ideal for the winter conditions. Medical supplies were adequate shall we say. There were Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals and there were field ambulances there who dealt with main casualties. I thought the medical facilities were pretty good. You had the regimental first aiders as it were, stretcher bearers, and so on; they would take them back to a regimental aid post and from there they were taken to a casualty clearing station. From the casualty clearing station, they would be sent to a field ambulance where the patients would be assessed, any that needed treatment in a major hospital would be taken by helicopter to Japan to the main hospital. Obviously, there were gunshot wounds, there were general wounds associated with battle, and, like I say, there were casualties with various illnesses, and so on. In fact, there was one particular case that I can remember where two of the guys had gone to a local Korean police hut, and they’d been drinking some homemade liquor, and they both went blind. So, as I say, the medical conditions were the same as you’d find in any walk of life really, apart from war injuries which were obviously more severe. You were issued with a twenty-four-hour ration packs which contained such things as tins of cold beef, hard tack biscuits, toilet paper, cigarettes, all the things that you’d need for a twenty-four-hour stay. Now, I was personally fed by the Americans, and we had exceptionally good food. I can remember on one occasion we had a fifteen-pound ham between six of us, so the food, as I say, once we were established up North, was particularly good … Other line troops suffered a great deal on the food side of things. What was the contact with the local people in Korea?

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Very little contact, if any. There was more or less what I would call an exclusion zone where you didn’t come across any locals apart from what they called KATCOMs, who were Koreans who were assisting the troops in various ways, you know carrying ammunition and supplies to the front-­ line troops, and you did have the occasional house boy: young Korean lads who made themselves known to a local unit, and they would assist in any way that they could. Assisting with any cooking or clearing up, and they were very useful, and you wonder what happened to a lot of them after the troops went home … I understand that there were lots of problems in the earlier years with refugees flooding from the north going south, but I never personally came across any of them. What did you do while on leave? On leave, I was lucky, I was sent over to Tokyo, and we were given complete change of clothing, showered, made to feel human once again as it were. We were given soft beds to sleep on. Most people slept on the floor because we were so used to sleeping on the harder equipment, and it was a case of being young lads, let your hair down, go and have a few drinks, meet a few of the local girls, and generally enjoy yourself while you were still alive. How were the relationships between different nations’ armed forces? Pretty good. On ship, as we were pulling into Japan, there was a few upset between I believe it was the Belgians and the British, and we were brought off early, but in general out in Korea I never found any problems. I met up with a lot of Americans and Canadians, and we got on exceptionally well. The Canadians were especially good particularly when you were on leave because British Army pay was abysmal. We had about £2.50 a week to live on, and we had to send some of that back home to our parents, whereas the Canadians would come out with maybe $100, and they would be very generous; they would buy drinks for the Brits, and they were exceptionally good. I was in a jeep with a couple of others, and we were going up to the front line; we were under enemy observation, and the jeep ran into a shell hole full of water, and we sat there up to our waists in this muddy water, expecting any minute to get shelled. An American truck with a tow-rope came along and towed us out. We spent the rest of the day wandering round in a uniform which was full of mud, which dried out, and, as you can imagine, with dried mud inside your uniform it didn’t feel like it wasn’t the funniest time, but in general, being young, you didn’t forecast what problems you could have come across if you hadn’t been lucky.

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Looking back on it, I wouldn’t have missed it. I think it was well worthwhile. I mean I’m very involved with the Koreans at the moment. I’m the Korean liaison officer liaising between all the veterans in the country and the embassy, and I’ve been back to Korea three times and seen the progress that’s been made by the Korean people. They’ve worked wonders, and we did our little bit towards giving them the opportunity to build such a wonderful country that they’ve got today. How did you feel about the opposing side, the North Koreans and the Chinese? Well, it’s the same how I feel about the Germans who destroyed my home. In every force there are people who are bound to be evil, but the average person, I wouldn’t mind betting that most of those Chinese and North Koreans, they were the same as us. They were doing a job that they had to do, and it’s usually the politicians and the people at the top who are responsible for wars. The average guy, he probably doesn’t want to be there. I think that we’ve got to appreciate the fact that they’re only doing their job, the same as we did. How did you feel to be leaving Korea? Glad to get out, obviously. I’d been away for eighteen months or more and little contact with your family, and the war had ceased when I left so my job was virtually done. I was just glad to get home and meet the family again. Bearing in mind, of course, I was still in the Army when I went home, I wasn’t going to go home for good, I would still be in the forces … I stayed in for five years, and I left after demobilisation—spent eleven months in civilian life and then was recalled for the invasion of Suez in 1956 … The only reason I left the Army was because I had got married, and in those days we didn’t have married accommodation like you do nowadays. If you were sent abroad, your wife and children would go into more or less a communal hostel, and I wasn’t going to have that for my family so that was the only reason I left, otherwise I’d probably have stayed on until I’d done my complete twenty-two years. In giving preventive medicine in Korea, what sort of medical treatments did you advise, or did you hand out drugs to the soldiers to use? No, we didn’t hand out drugs. They weren’t available in our day. We gave advice. One example, we’d find the dirtiest ditch we could find and take a container of water from that ditch and then we would filter it, and then sterilise it, and then get them to drink it to show that it was perfectly safe to drink providing that you treated it properly. And you would advise boiling and so on. And in the case of frostbite, you would advise people

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not to heat anybody, supposing they had frostbitten feet, you’d advise them don’t put your feet near the heat. Put them inside your mate’s shirt against his chest to warm it up at body temperature. Little things like that. And something basic like making sure that your feet were kept dry. You hopefully carried a pair of socks and you’d treat your feet with foot powder and so on. All little things, but these little things were so important at the end of the day and as I say the number of casualties, I don’t know how many there were with regards to disease-related injuries in Korea, but during the First and Second World War I believe there were more injuries or more hospitalisation due to disease than there were due to battle wounds. Did you form any close friendships in Korea? Not in Korea, in Japan I did. There was a particular little, not a nightclub, it was a little café where there were about seven hostesses; nothing untoward it was all above board; the girls sat with you and drank and made you feel human again. I still have a fan signed by the boss of the establishment and these girls just wishing me luck when I went home. I did actually go out there with two of my mates who had been in boy’s service, and we sort of we’d just luckily posted together in Korea and I formed a friendship with them, but after you get demobbed and get back to civilian life, you tend to lose track. I’ve obviously made an awful lot of comrades nowadays, veterans, rather than at the time. Because my job involved being an individual, I wasn’t part of a static unit in England. I was part of a tiny group of maybe two or three people, and we were sent to various places throughout the country as an individual. On one occasion, I was the only environmental health technician for the whole of North Wales. I didn’t have the chance to form any permanent relationships with mates as it were because I wasn’t part of a unit for all that long. You made friends at the time and then you went on your weary way to somewhere else in the country. How did soldiers respond to your medical advice? Pretty good actually; they realised, because I used to associate more with the commanding officers who would then make sure that the troops under their command followed whatever instructions we gave them … You had some [commanding officers] who were not so nice shall we say, to put it bluntly, and there were others who would have a good relationship with the troops. You would have some COs who wouldn’t give an order to do anything that they wouldn’t do themselves. And you had others who were just full of their own self-importance and treated troops quite abysmally in a way.

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My relationship with the soldiers was pretty good because I was one of those people who wouldn’t ask them to dig a ditch unless I jumped in the ditch with them and helped dig it. Obviously where discipline was needed, I would mete out discipline but in general I think I got on pretty well. In the Army, in those days if you were told to jump, you would jump because the penalties were quite severe for disobeying orders. Especially under war conditions. In Korea, was it mostly under American leadership? Yes, the Americans seemed to rule the roost, and even nowadays they claim that they sorted out the Korean War. In fact, we went to Washington on one occasion to meet some of the veterans, and they didn’t know that the Brits had been in Korea. How did you feel about that? Upset as you can imagine. We’re still thought of as the forgotten war. They forget that there were twenty-two other countries there as well but the Americans as they seem to do, win everything in their eyes. We didn’t have a great deal to do with them. But they were okay. In fact, on one occasion our supplies were pretty poor … one of the jobs we had to teach people were about rodents—of course, big carriers of disease. So, we used to teach them about the habits of rats and how to control them. And we used to be issued with arsenous oxide which were poisons. We had very small quantities of these; and I went to an American unit on one occasion, and I was offered a sack-full of what looked like sweets. It was poison wrapped in paper, and I walked into the office of the commanding officer and first thing he said to me was, “salute.” And I said to him, “we don’t salute when we’re not wearing head gear,” and we had a bit of a little argument about this, but anyway he accepted it and eventually he said, why don’t you join our Army? I can give you a commission straight away. With their equipment, if you wanted a jeep and offered them a crate of beer, you’d probably get yourself a jeep. They’d give any of their equipment away; they seemed to have more than they needed. Whereas we in Britain, you had to sign for everything and you can’t lose anything without finding yourself having to pay for it. Between the Americans and the Brits, there was a lot of trading. I can remember somebody wanting a jeep radio and came away with nine, I don’t know what he gave in exchange. Yes, they would swap anything that you wanted. You mentioned that you feel Korea has been forgotten, why do you think this is?

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After World War II, Korea came up about five years later, and people were fed up to the teeth of war, and Korea was so far away, and you didn’t have the television coverage or even the radio coverage that you get nowadays. Papers, the stories coming through, it takes about five weeks for something to come through by ship. I think it’s because we didn’t have the publicity. It was nothing like it is nowadays. Although the loss of life in Korea, we lost 1106, which is more than the Falklands and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars put together. The [Koreans] will never forget. You’ve only got to mention to a Korean stranger in the street that you were in the Korean War and they’ll be slapping you on the back. They’ll do anything for you. I go to a Korean restaurant and, invariably, every time I go there, there’s always a side dish extra which I don’t have to pay for. It’s always for the Korean War veteran. Are there any other experiences of your time in Korea that you would like to share? The only regret I have: there was a young hose boy who was with our unit for a while and for some unknown reason he treated me as a father figure. If I wanted mud cleaning off my boots, he would do it. Any odd little job he would always do it. He seemed to concentrate on doing things for me rather than the unit. And they decided that as a result of this he would have to go on his merry way. And I often wonder what happened to that young lad. And of course, I cannot remember his name, now. I’ve got seven grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. When you think back on it, he was like one of those grandchildren, in a way. Nice, young lad, and he was doing the job to get himself a few bob. I don’t know whether he had a family, but I don’t think he did, which makes it even more tragic. It’s just something that sticks with me. If you could choose to do it again, would you go to Korea? I’m glad I did, and I would go again for the experience because if I hadn’t gone to Korea, what would I be doing? I’d probably be sitting on the sofa watching the television with a blanket around my knees—typical old man. Whereas, at the moment, I’m still very active with the Koreans in my capacity as the Korean liaison officer. So, for me, it has been a positive experience. And, of course, I was very lucky. I didn’t come away with any serious injuries. I was quite lucky.

CHAPTER 5

Private Arnold Schwartzman Arnold Schwartzman

Fig. 5.1  Arnold Schwartzman on base in Korea (1956) and at the memorial he designed years later A. Schwartzman (*) Royal Sussex Regiment, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_5

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“It is the forgotten war,” Arnold Schwartzman says, “and we are the forgotten … veterans of the war.” Sent to Korea in 1956, after the hostilities subsided, Arnold was no stranger to conflict. He first experienced the devastation of war as a child in Wapping, London. He and his parents were dug out of the rubble of his bombed home. After that, he moved to the countryside as a child evacuee. When the war ended, Arnold went to Canterbury College of Art and graduated as a graphic designer. Conscripted at nineteen years old, national service delayed Arnold’s career. His parents made the round trip from Margate to Southampton to spend a mere twenty minutes with their son before he embarked for Asia. In truth, Arnold didn’t know where Korea was, and his mother was upset he was being sent. Yet, Schwartzman soberly remarks, “there’s always a war somewhere and … it’s a matter of luck where they send you, whether it’s peacetime or war.” Other servicemen on his troop ship went to fight communist guerrillas in the Malaysian jungle or the Mau Mau revolutionaries in Kenya’s forested mountains, or British Guiana, where the Army maintained peace after the British overthrew a democratically elected government. Getting stationed in Korea seemed a fluke, and Arnold also witnessed the aftermath of the conflict in the Suez region upon his return to Britain in 1956. “Had I stayed with that regiment,” which ventured to Kenya to suppress the Mau Mau, “I might have been killed there. Who knows?” Art shaped his experience of war and Korea. “Oh, you’re an artist?” an officer at basic training asked, “I have a job for you.” In Korea, his commanding officer ordered him to make a temporary memorial to the Gloucester Regiment. The Glorious Glousters had withstood a Chinese offensive despite being outnumbered. His art school credentials became a defining characteristic among his fellow soldiers. He first describes his time in Korea as “functioning as an artist and serving tea and donuts.” Yet his testimony of time in the camp brings the experience of post-ceasefire Korea vividly to life and covers all kinds of incidents, large and small. The enormous rat that hoarded donuts at the expense of hungry soldiers sticks out as a particularly humorous story, almost as funny as Arnold being left behind after visiting the American PX store in Seoul. Although art is his medium, Arnold is a natural storyteller. En route to Korea, he recalls passing through “all those red places on the map,” the Suez Canal, Aden, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Singapore, and Hong Kong. The influence of those who passed before him was evident—an Arab man greeting him with “a wee deoch an doris” in Aden and children in Ceylon

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following him and his mates all day to sell small, sweet bananas to the servicemen. Arnold can also claim to be the last soldier of the final regiment to depart from the Korean peninsula. When his service ended, Arnold went on to help others bring their own stories to wider audiences. His postwar career includes creating an Oscar-­ winning documentary in 1982 (Genocide) featuring the remarkable testimonies of Holocaust survivors. He was Director of Design for the 1984 Olympic Games when Los Angeles hosted. He designed monuments, as well, including the Peace Bell that stands outside the Korean National War Memorial Museum in Seoul and adorns the cover of this book. A Korean production crew has produced a documentary on his life as a filmmaker and designer, and he has been honoured in Britain with the Order of the British Empire (OBE). His first reaction upon returning home from Korea was that it was “a grim place” and that he didn’t want to go back. In fact, he has returned three times since then, remarking upon the incredible development of the city of Seoul as well as his admiration for Koreans. Arnold Schwartzman was interviewed in December 2019. He made several edits to the audio transcript to clarify his account. * * * What year did you go to Korea? 1956. It was the 6th of August. I think that’s when we embarked. It was a six-week journey and we returned in July [1957]. Before you went to Korea, what was training like? I was actually called up in the Royal Army Educational Corps because my National Diploma in Design was equivalent to a teaching degree. So, after my ten weeks of basic training, I was sent to the Army School of Education at Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, where after the stringent basic training, we were treated like we were going to university. We had a desk, bookshelves, next to our beds but after several weeks, I think they realized I wasn’t that well educated [laughs] and so they transferred me to the Royal West Kent Regiment in Maidstone. I was there for a short period. They didn’t quite know what to do with me. As the Royal Sussex Regiment was building up its strength to approximately a thousand men, they were taking men from other regiments. So, I was then sent to Minden in Germany. Shortly, we returned the UK, where I was given embarkation leave and then, finally, we left for Korea.

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We left very early in the morning from Warley Barracks in Essex, and put on a special chartered train to Southampton to board—I was going to say cruise ship—the troop ship. The train went very slowly all through the Kent countryside. The train stopped at a small station called East Malling, which was deserted except for one pretty young, like a teenage girl standing there—as you can imagine a thousand men’s heads sticking out the window whistling, trying to get her attention. Suddenly she spotted me exclaiming, “Oh, Arnold! Arnold!” waving. She happened to be one of my fellow students from art school. It was quite amazing! We finally got to Southampton, and going back to our days of basic training, and being an artist, they always called upon me for various artistic tasks. What I should mention is that the two skills I possessed, if you can call them skills, one was my liking to draw and the other one, I loved the cinema. I was posted to Shorncliffe on the Kent coast near Folkstone to attend a cinema projectionist’s course. As it happens, when I came out of the Army, the first job I acquired was as an assistant projectionist at a local cinema. Anyway, going back to being an artist, in basic training, they said, “you’re an artist? I have a job for you.” The job entailed stencilling the names and numbers of my fellow comrades on their kit bags, so that became my artistic endeavour in the Army. Moving onto the troopship once again, “Schwartzman, are you an artist? Report to the ship’s bosun.” On reporting to the bosun, he said, “I’ve got a task for you. I’d like you to retouch the lettering on these lifebelts.” The lettering was “RTS Empire Orwell.” Each day I was given several lifebelts and a pot of red and a pot of white paint—quite large pots—and I was shown to a deck above the captain’s bridge where nobody else was allowed. I used to take my time retouching the lettering. Being a—I suppose, hopefully, a perfectionist—I decided rather than just retouch the letters, which I didn’t think were particularly good, I covered each lifebelt totally with white paint and relettered the name of the ship. I did this for the whole six weeks, so I don’t know how many—maybe a hundred lifebelts by the end of the trip. Going through the Indian Ocean it was very hot out up there with no shelter. Anyway, just after leaving Hong Kong towards Korea, the bosun came to inspect my handiwork, in shock. “Oh, my goodness, what have you done?” I questioned, “you don’t like my lettering?” “Yes, your lettering looks beautiful, but you realize I didn’t tell you to repaint the lifebelt because you see that white paint is lead paint and the

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lifebelts will lose their buoyancy. We have to scrap them when we get back.” [laughs] So, I did a terrible thing, I didn’t realize that it needed minimum paint otherwise the lifebelt gets too heavy. Being an artist all the way through my career and now being in Korea, again, “Oh, you’re an artist?” And I had quite an easy life there. I shared with a corporal a small room in the back of the company canteen—our mess hall. The only duties I had was to paint the murals around the mess hall and at NAAFI [Navy, Army, and Air Force Institutes] break to serve the company with tea and cakes. I spent almost the whole year painting this mural, just like Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel! At the same time, being keen on photography, I bought an 8mm camera in the American PX [Postal Exchange] store. I should mention, our regiment—I think it was perhaps the first time ever—we were attached to the American 24th Infantry Division. We actually wore the 24th taro leaf patch on our uniforms. I remember one day, it was a Sunday, I was lying in late in my sleeping bag because it’s extremely cold in the winters, forty below zero. There was a loud knocking on the door, and I leaped out of my sleeping bag and went to the door. I shouted quite rudely, “Who is it?” In reply, “It’s your commanding officer.” I opened the door and there he was along with the brigadier from the Australian contingent who wished to see my murals. Holding up my sleeping bag with one hand and saluting smartly with the other, I actually hopped into the canteen like a kangaroo to show the officer’s my artwork. Just a few weeks prior to leaving Korea, I was summoned by my commanding officer; [he] said, “I want you to report to me immediately.” I thought: I wasn’t a very good soldier, and so in some kind of trouble. “What have I done this time?” I made my way up to his headquarters, where he said, “I have an important task for you, as we’re the last British regiment to serve in Korea, it falls upon us to erect a memorial to the Gloucester regiment—the ‘Glorious Glosters.’ The four marble tablets are being engraved in Hong Kong but will not be here in time for the scheduled unveiling ceremony. Can you produce a trompe l’oeil to look like the real thing so that nobody could detect they’re not the real tablets?” Meanwhile, our pioneer section having cleared the mines had built the surrounding brickwork for the placing of the plaques built at the foot of Gloucester Hill, where the famed Battle of the Imjin River took place. It was all kept very secret. I actually painted

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the plaques in a hut. I informed our commanding officer that I needed a smooth material to paint on, and he sent his driver down to Inchon bringing back some rusty sheet metal at which a whole company of men— mainly my company—had the task of buffing it down. They somehow knew I had something to do with it. Without sleep for about nine days, the four plaques, one of which was in Korean so our Korean barber helped me to make certain when I painted these characters that they didn’t say something other than what they’re supposed to be. For the plaques surface, I stippled a marbling effect with a kit bag stencil ink. I went to the site to find out the angle of the sun, in order that each letter and image I painted had shadows to look as though they were actually carved into the stone. On completing the task, I was given a well-deserved rest. On the day of the unveiling ceremony, the whole regiment was lined up from our camp to the foot of Gloucester Hill, which was about half a mile away. I was suddenly awakened and told to get into my number one uniform as a jeep was waiting outside to drive me to the memorial where I was lined up with the few Assault Pioneers. Following the unveiling of the plaques by the British Ambassador, he came to congratulate us. When he came to me, he winked and whispered, “Well done.” It turned out that when the final tablets arrived from Hong Kong, they were not marble, but granite. How did you feel about conscription? I think my mother was more upset about it than I was. It was something I knew I had to do. The area I lived in, maybe 80 percent of the men were semi-illiterate, and they never travelled before and perhaps since, never moving out of their area and so they loved to see the world. I have, as a film director and a designer, actually been to most countries in the world; however, to them it was quite an adventure. Today I look back on it quite fondly. The local newspaper where I lived reported on my return and quoted me: “Korea was a grim place.” I think I said, “I never want to go back.” But in fact, I’ve been back three times since. On the fiftieth anniversary of the unveiling of the Glorious Glosters memorial, the then British Ambassador invited my wife and I back to Korea. The Korea TV network suggested making a documentary about my life as a filmmaker and designer. They sent a crew over to Los Angeles to film me, as I recall, for two weeks and then flew my wife and myself back to Korea to retrace my steps. We went back to our former camp, Camp Kohima, which was difficult to recognize. It is now a Republic of Korea

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Army camp. From there, we went up to the memorial where the new tablets that replaced mine still remain. The director of the documentary later asked me, “If you had to design another United Nations memorial, what would you do?” So, for the film, I made some quick sketches for the camera. When the film was finally transmitted, a group approached me and said, “We liked one of your designs. And would like to build it.” The twenty-foot-high memorial now stands close to the National War Monument at the Korean National War Memorial Museum in Seoul. A few years later, they approached me once again and stated, “We wish to produce a duplicate memorial to be unveiled in 2023 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the armistice.” They planned to build the sculpture to be a similar height as London’s Nelson’s Column or the height of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. It would be enormous standing on a hilltop overlooking North Korea in a park with a visitor’s centre, but sadly, I don’t think it will ever be built. What is amazing, getting back to that 8mm camera that I had purchased, I had photographed Army life as well as the life of the villages, a document of very primitive peasant culture and of course Seoul, the Korean capital. The city then was mud roads and huts but now it’s these incredible skyscrapers. It’s unbelievable how in sixty-odd years the country has really picked itself up and blossomed. I always tell the Koreans today how much I admire them. About my days in Korea: I had from time to time to perform guard duty. The only Korean I learned was Korean for “Halt who goes there?” One night I confronted a shadowy figure, “It’s me! The padre! The padre!” On my recognizing him, I allowed him to continue. Recently, one of the international films entered into the Academy Awards was a Korean film, Parasite. I met the director and star on a couple of occasions. In conversation I asked, “Do you know what “Jungi Sunda” means?” I believed it represented, “Halt! Who goes there?” Their response was, “If you don’t stop, I’ll shoot you!” I suppose it does have more or less the same meaning! The bad-boy Arnold in Korea was due to my love of cinematography. When I was on guard duty one day at the ammunition dump, a helicopter flew over. As my hut was nearby, I dashed in to get my camera in order to film it. It must have been no more than five seconds at the most, but an NCO spotted my absence and reported me for leaving my post and gave

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three weeks detention. On my demob, my Army record reported, “Military Conduct, Very Good,” so I’m not that bad! How did you feel when you were going to be sent to Korea? Well, how did I feel? After being in Germany, it felt like another station. I knew it was a long way away and I was aware that there was no war at that moment—the ceasefire being in [19]53, we were post-ceasefire. In a way I was sort of looking forward to it. My mum was so upset that I was being sent there. Did you know much about Korea or the conflict before you left? To be honest, no, I didn’t. I didn’t even know where Korea was. I don’t think any of us did. Like, these days, a lot of people don’t know about Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on. Yes, we were totally unaware of it. What were the most memorable aspects of your journey to Korea? I suppose stopping at the various ports of call. That I found interesting. I realized that in those days all the stops were part of the British Empire. Our first port of call was going through the Suez Canal. In fact, our troopship was the very last ship through the canal before the Suez crisis. We then stopped at Aden, followed by Ceylon, now named Sri Lanka, which was also British. The next stop was Singapore, then Hong Kong, eventually arriving in South Korea. But the most memorable? I don’t know, all were fascinating to see how the natives lived in these places and how different they were from us. In Aden, I remember, one of the Arabs greeting me with “a wee deoch an doris,” which is a Scottish expression so obviously he must have learnt it from a Scottish regiment stationed there.1 In Ceylon, a couple of my mates and I were followed around all day long by two young kids with an enormous stalk of small sweet bananas. In the end, we bought the whole bunch, letting them take the rest back with them. During our period in Korea, we were allowed two weeks holiday leave in Hong Kong. I’ve visited since; it has changed enormously. Even then, there were lots of high-­ rise buildings. I recall seeing American aircraft carriers in the bay, and so it was quite an experience seeing all these countries on our six-week long voyage. I’m pleased that we weren’t there during the recent conflicts, which must have been terrible. We were provided with amazing winter clothing: layers and layers of underwear, jackets, outer parkas, special cold wet weather boots. We were 1  “Deoch an doris” means “one for the road” in Scots Gaelic, or, literally, “drink of the door.”

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in huts, American-built concept huts, whereas during the fighting I know the British were mainly under canvas and wearing, as far as I know, the regular battle dress. [They] didn’t have any winter clothing, having to fight thousands of Chinese who were sweeping over the hill. We were told we only had thirty-five hours of ammunition, and we were actually not far from the DMZ [Demilitarized Zone]. Had the Chinese come during our tour, we wouldn’t have stood a chance at all. What was the quality of the kit like? Oh, the weapons were extraordinary. We were still using the Lee-­ Enfield rifles that were used in the Second World War. We also had a number of Sten and Bren guns. Our latrines were big pits dug out of the hillside, quite deep, and at first when we arrived, we were all too shy and waited until it got dark to go to the toilet. It was just a plank with holes in it and you sat on it and below was the pit and there were snakes and all sorts of other creatures. When we left, we had to throw all our weapons down the pit, so if the Chinese did come, it would be rather messy for them to retrieve our weapons out of this pit! A couple of my comrades brought back, in pieces, some of the weapons and of course when they got to Southampton, the customs took them away from them. I brought back a Korean A-frame, the frame that the peasants wore to carry heavy loads on their back. I also brought a couple of straw hats from Kowloon, plus my camera and a projector. My parents came to meet me when the troop ship docked at Southampton. They had a small hotel, and it was during the height of their season, the summer. My father drove from Margate to Southampton— quite a distance—because we were allowed to have family and come off the ship at five o’clock in the morning. I spent maybe twenty minutes with my parents and then they drove all the way back again. I was invited to screen the film in Korea, where the British Ambassador attended and commented how Seoul had dramatically changed in that short period of time. My film later became a historic document. I had donated the original elements to London’s Imperial War Museum. When you arrived in Korea, what were your main duties? I’ll tell you about the arrival. At Incheon there was no proper landing place so from the troop ship we came by landing craft to the shore. As we got closer, we could hear the strains of the American Eighth Army Band. The landing craft had a small bridge on which our commanding officer stood. I believe that the CO thought they’d be playing our regimental march, “Sussex by The Sea,” but instead they were playing “When the

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Saints Come Marching In.” He appeared to be quite horrified by this, as he thought it was very disrespectful. I don’t know why. We were put on a train taking us north, and then onto trucks finally taking us to our new home for the next year. And my first duty? I supposed, you know, being an artist, again it was, “You’re an artist? I’ve a job for you.” It’s always good to be an artist in the Army. Most of the time, it was functioning as an artist and serving tea and donuts, in the mess. I can tell you a donuts story: at the end of the day, the money we had collected in the canteen, we took it to the guard room. But each day, we discovered when we added up the amount of donuts and buns that were sold, somehow, we ended up short of cash and having to pay out of our own pockets to make up for the loss. Anyway, this went on for some time until one day I saw this enormous rat appear. There was a bottom shelf under the canteen counter with a large hole which I watched the rat dive into. With hefty Cobbly Wobbly (Cold Wet Weather) boots, I kicked in the rest of the shelf. The rat had disappeared but there were three rows of donuts very neatly placed one on top of the other. Each doughnut had just one bite out of each. I don’t know why the rat wouldn’t eat all of them. Perhaps he was saving them up for the winter. We gathered them up and took them to the guard room where we received a rebate for the money for the loss of the donuts. In fact, if you read Michael Caine’s biography, What’s It All About, he had a very similar story about rats eating donuts while he was in serving in Korea. So, yeah, that was my duties. Serving tea and donuts. And painting murals. It paid off in the end. I would have never have thought that one day I would be invited to design another memorial for Korea and that they would make a documentary about my life and that I’d return thrice to the country. What do you remember most about day-to-day life? Well, mostly it was exercises. There wasn’t much to do other than prepare for a possible attack. There was quite a bit of drill. There wasn’t all that spit and polish that one had if you were stationed in England. We had to shave but there wasn’t much discipline. But there were all these exercises, and I remember on one occasion we went on a march right across to the east coast of Korea where there was this enormous dam. It appears I was pretty sick, so I was taken by jeep; all the regiment marched there and back which was quite a distance! Most of the daily life was trying to keep warm. I mean it was so cold in the winter. It was unbelievably cold. We had an enormous unheated hut,

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which was our cinema. You couldn’t really hear the films’ audio because everyone was stamping their feet on the on the floorboards in order to keep warm, also wearing our parkas. It’s very difficult to hear through them. On one occasion, I was in Incheon, this soldier came towards me, with a very unusual looking fur hat. And he stopped me and said, “Why didn’t you salute me?” I looked on his shoulder, but couldn’t see any insignia. He pointed where his chest was, and there it was on a tab and he was a colonel. He said, “I’m a Colonel from the Canadian Regiment.” I said, “Oh, I’m very sorry, I didn’t notice that.” I was unfamiliar with seeing some of the other members of the Commonwealth Contingent— the Australians and the Canadians and the New Zealanders. During the summer, we would visit the Turkish Brigade and they would perform their incredible wrestling and other events, so there were a lot of activities. Did you have much contact with people in the UK while you were in Korea? No. Today servicemen have their iPhones and they could probably Skype their family wherever they are. During that whole year, I had one phone call with my parents. I don’t know the duration of the call. We of course regularly exchanged letters, but it was that one phone call with my parents in the whole year. I didn’t know if they were allowed to call me, [or] I was to call them. But I remember it was just that once. So, from that point of view, communication with home has changed in an enormous way. Did you have much contact with Korean civilians? Only the KATCOMs, Koreans attached to the Commonwealth. Travelling through the Korean villages, we weren’t allowed to communicate with the locals. There were a lot of prostitutes in attendance; as you went through the villages, you’d see the signs for “VD [venereal disease] Clinic.” There was a lot of venereal disease. I remember once walking to an American camp and suddenly out of the monsoon ditches jumped these young girls causing me to run! What was your attitude towards the war before you went? Well, as I said, I didn’t know anything about it. I must say that I was totally entrenched in my art school studies and I wasn’t into politics or what was going on around me. What was interesting was that the regiment that I underwent my basic training with, they were sent to Africa to fight the Mau Mau. Had I stayed with that regiment, I may have been killed. Who knows? It’s interesting that depending on what regiment you were sent to, [it determined] what conflict you were involved in. For instance, I mentioned that going through the Suez Canal, during the Suez Crisis. I

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could have been sent to Suez, fighting there. On our troop ship were “Special Air” servicemen going to Malaya to fight in the jungle. There’s always war somewhere and, so, it’s a matter of luck where they send you, whether it’s during peace or war time. You mentioned meeting other Commonwealth soldiers. How did that go? Oh, very well. I’ll tell you an interesting story. I, being a trusted person in my company, we all collected together to buy a record player. I then obtained a lift in one of our jeeps to visit the main American PX store in Seoul. It was Christmas time, and unfortunately, they had sold out of record players. Anyway, I had arranged with the driver of the jeep that he’d pick me up and take me back to the camp, I don’t know to this day what happened but he wasn’t there. It was snowing and very cold and I was abandoned far from our camp. I went to the Honour Guard quarters, where I knew one or two of the men from my regiment. They recommended that I take the bus to Incheon and report to our base camp there. On my arrival at Incheon, I found my way to the camp, and reported to the friendly CO. He said, “Don’t worry. I’ll inform Kohima that you are here, and the next time we have transport going to your camp, you can go with it.” Time went by, and after a week I got very concerned and went back to the Major: “Don’t worry, don’t worry.” Finally, I was given a lift in a New Zealand truck full of supplies. The Major asked me to sign the receipt for the supplies. During our journey, the driver stopped, and said, “Fancy a Coke?” Going to the back of the truck, he opens a couple of boxes and gets a few bars of chocolate and a Coke out of the case, and I didn’t like to argue with him, but I felt rather guilty. I thought, “Oh, God. I’ll be in trouble as I had signed for all this stuff.” I didn’t have much contact with the Canadians at all, other than meeting their colonel once. What were interactions with Americans like? Oh, they were wonderful—always very friendly. There was one particular top sergeant [better known as a first sergeant, a senior non-­commissioned rank]; he was like Sergeant Bilko. He was amazing. One day, I was walking from our camp to the nearest American camp and an ambulance jeep came along. We weren’t allowed to thumb for ambulance jeeps so, to my surprise, it was Top Sergeant Immermann driving it. He said, “Hop aboard.” And then he showed me, instead of a watch on his wrist, he was wearing a British sergeant major’s crown on a strap. He said, “Oh, that was a gift from one of your guys.” We had taken over from the Cameron Highlanders,

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and the Americans sought to acquiring these sporrans, which were quite expensive pieces of uniform. I got on very well with the Americans. When we went to the American camps, their food was so much better than ours as we were allowed to join them to eat in their canteen. In their cinemas they had the latest cinemascope movies; it was amazing. I remember seeing in our camp, Richard III. I fell asleep as it was so cold. I was in the front row with two of my friends and suddenly the film stopped and the house lights went on. The projectionist opened the window from the projection booth and said, “I’m not running the film just for you three,” as the rest of the audience had already left. The American camps had great PX stores, wonderful, and there you could buy cartons of cigarettes. I didn’t smoke but on occasion we’d buy the cigarettes and then we’d only have to walk down the road a few hundred yards, and the Koreans would come out and buy them for much more money than we had paid for them. It was a real black market. The one black market which I couldn’t understand was Kiwi boot polish. The locals would heat the boot polish, distil the liquid into pure alcohol, and drink it. Often it would drive them insane, as it was really very dangerous. The Americans always liked buying up the harmonicas in our store; for some reason, they never sold them in the American PX stores. How did you find out about the boot polish alcohol? Well, it became quite common knowledge that they do that. There were lots of snakes. I was terrified of them; some were poisonous. Another thing that the Koreans liked was finding snakes that had died from having a mouse stuck in their throat. I don’t know if it was a delicacy; I do know that was something the Koreans sought after. But I’ll tell you a terrible story about our Korean house porters. Our meat rations came via the US—very nice steaks, which came from San Francisco. There were a number of stray dogs, which we were permitted to own as pets, providing they were vaccinated. From time to time, they went missing. We assumed that perhaps they had stood on a mine and that’s why we lost them. In fact, the Korean porters were killing our pets and exchanging them with our meat rations and so we were eating our pet dogs. This went on for about six months until it was discovered. And what was it like leaving Korea? Ah, well it was interesting. I claim to be the last of 60,000 British troops to leave Korea, the very last man. I’ll explain why: On our departure, our regiment’s adjutant asked me to assist him with the transportation of the regimental flagpole. I don’t recall its height, probably about

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five metres. Our regiment left on landing crafts one after the other from Incheon out to the Asturias, leaving the two of us to be the very last ones to catch the last craft out of Korea. On arrival, the ship’s adjutant, looking at our flagpole, said, “You’re not bringing that lump of wood onto my ship” and left, leaving our adjutant and myself left behind in Korea. And I thought, “Oh, God, I’m going to spend the rest of my life here.” About half an hour later, the landing craft returned to shore with the ship’s adjutant, “Very well, you can bring your lump of wood on the ship.” So, after our adjutant I was the last person to step onto the landing craft to leave Korea. There were perhaps a few men left to clear up after us, but officially I was the last person to leave! And how did it feel to finally leave Korea? Oh, wonderful. I couldn’t wait to get home. And what was interesting, that very day, believe it or not, the troopship’s captain had died. We still set sail under the ship’s second-in-command. We all attended the funeral on deck when with full honours the draped coffin was slid overboard into the China Sea; it was quite a memorable ceremony to watch. And what was it like returning home? Oh, it was wonderful. My parents meeting me there but also to actually wear a white cotton shirt again after wearing those fleecy Army woollen shirts. Regarding not having much communication with back home: I never saw any newspapers, I didn’t have a radio, I didn’t know what news was going on around the world. We were the first ship allowed to go back through the Suez Canal after the troubles. We had to stay below decks, but we could see through the port holes sunken ships all along the canal route. It was wonderful being home, [after] being away for a whole year with little communication. When we got off the troopship, we took the train back to the Royal Sussex regiment headquarters. In those days, the trains had separate carriages. Sitting opposite me were two young men, both had guitars, and they were playing music in a style which was totally alien to my ears. Also, their style of dress was new to me. The whole music scene had changed in that one year since I was away, and now we’re into “Jailhouse Rock” and so on. It was quite amazing, and it just shows you how we were totally cut off from the outside world. Totally unaware of what was going on back home. Did you remain in the armed forces when you returned home?

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No, only for another three weeks. Speaking to an Army reserve officer, I was told that I could serve another three years in the reserve. I replied, “Oh, I didn’t know about that.” He then said, “you don’t have to.” “I don’t have to? Thank you, goodbye.” I believe that one got paid for serving in the reserve, I think it was voluntary. I have my final report from the Army. It reads: “This soldier has shown himself to be reliable and well behaved. His standard of intelligence places him above his comrades. He’s a good artist and carried out all sign writing tasks. He would make an excellent member of a battalion intelligence section. He’s scrupulously honest and trustworthy and can be relied upon in the running of a canteen and in handling money. He does not show the marked powers of leadership and is doubtful if he would ever make a fighting section leader, but he’d probably make a useful NCO [Non-­ Commissioned Officer] in the intelligence section. He is reasonably tidy, and his hobby is photography, employed as a unit photographer. Military contact: Very good.” So, had I stayed, I’d probably would end up as a photographer or a projectionist or running a canteen. Instead of that, I moved to Hollywood. I won an Oscar for making a film, directing and producing a film. All down to the Army. Do you refer to yourself as a veteran? Yes, I do actually. I have a veteran’s badge and I’m the patron of the National Defence Medal Campaign. This campaign has been going on now for some eight years, by fellow veterans and national servicemen who had served under risk and rigour in many parts of the world and feel they deserve some form of medallic recognition. What we received was a small veteran’s badge from the government which many veterans feel is inadequate. What’s very strange about it is that Her Majesty has awarded a medal for post armistice service to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, but not to her UK veterans. I often wonder if Her Majesty is aware of this fact. I think the reason I was made the patron was because I was awarded the Order of the British Empire. It gives me some sort of recognition. I first met at the War Office with a senior member of the armed services who was arbitrating the situation when we discussed the review. After several years of debate, it was decided not to give us the medal. I’ve often wondered if America would recognize me as one of their veterans as I served with the 24th U.S. Infantry Division. Do you think the Korean War has been forgotten?

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Yes. It’s known as the “forgotten war,” and I think we men that served post-ceasefire are also the forgotten veterans. I’m a member of the British Korean War Veterans Association. They still embrace me as a member because, in fact, as officially the war is still on. I managed to persuade the association to replace on their banner “1953 to 1955” to “1957” in order to embrace our post armistice service. It is the forgotten war, and we are the forgotten post-[ceasefire] veterans of that war. And looking back now, what is your attitude towards the war? I think unlike some other wars, it was necessary. I’m not a warmonger. I’m a very peaceful person, but I believe that the aggressor had to be stopped. That’s why, thankfully, the South is doing so well now. Otherwise, they would have overrun the South.

CHAPTER 6

Private Christopher Garside Christopher Garside

Fig. 6.1  Royal Artillery 25-pound field gun in action in Korea, circa 1951

C. Garside (*) Durham Light Infantry, Solihull, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_6

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Christopher Garside went to Korea as a National Serviceman in 1953, at the age of nineteen. Before his service, he was training to be a nurseryman, and he retains the accent of his West Yorkshire upbringing. He spent five months in Korea and was there when hostilities ended. He describes how the ceasefire was met with a muted response amongst those who were serving in the country. “People were too shattered and too tired, [because of] all the stress they’ve had for so long.” There was no respite for Christopher, either. He was promptly dispatched to another war zone after Korea, this time in the Suez Canal. On national service, Christopher is clear: “No doubt about it, it was very hard.” His testimony has moments of dark humour, for instance, noting that he was nineteen upon deployment because “you weren’t allowed to be shot before you were nineteen.” There is also a caustic tone to parts of the testimony when he reflects upon the way national servicemen were sometimes treated before, during, and after their deployment. Whether it was being misled about the unit with which he would serve or the lack of attention to the needs of veterans upon returning home, his words reveal some of the more problematic elements of service. Nevertheless, he also says that conscription was “OK in some ways,” and he thinks the system brought some benefits to society. Christopher explains how the shock of leaving normal lives behind to travel 10,000 miles to a new culture, environment, and war zone rendered servicemen in Korea “bewildered.” For him, it was a varied experience. He tells us how training left him and his comrades unprepared for some duties. Night-time treks through the darkness of no man’s land, seeking out the enemy, was not on the recruitment prospectus. He recalls better times on guard duty at a Canadian hospital camp. And he relays how a simple duty, selling beer, could lead to unexpected disciplinary issues. These stories are punctuated by the grim reality of war, including terrible injuries and the death of friends. Worse still, in Korea, “it was almost impossible to grieve. Because there’s nowhere to grieve.” Those experiences have left enduring memories that surface today for Christopher. Leaving Korea, we find out that he and his fellow soldiers “were glad to be away. [We] couldn’t get away quick enough.” But, for Christopher, Korea was both a defining experience and a prelude to further service in Egypt. It would be two years, without any leave, before he got back to his family. Being home was “good and bad,” but “very different.” His parents and siblings, who had remained in contact with him via letters, had nevertheless managed without him, and it took time to return to a sense of

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normality. Upon leaving the armed forces, Christopher pursued further studies and picked up his pre-service profession. Christopher Garside was interviewed in November 2019. * * * Can you state your name and rank for the record? Yeah, it’s Christopher, middle name Askew, Garside. And I was a private. Lowest of the low. And what year did you go to Korea? I went to Korea in 1953. How old were you when you went there? Nineteen! Because in those days, you got to be nineteen. You weren’t allowed to be shot before you were nineteen, so I was nineteen. And before you went into the armed forces, what were you doing? I left school at sixteen, so I was two years before I went into the forces and I was training as a nurseryman. A nurseryman is somebody who’s involved in growing tomatoes, and shrubs, and trees. So, I did that for two years before I went into the forces. Did you volunteer to go to Korea? No, it was compulsory. It was two years compulsory. It was at one time eighteen months, but it was two years when I went. How do you feel about conscription? How do I feel about it? Well, it was okay in some ways. I’ll tell you one thing, they tried to blackmail us to do an extra year. They said if you sign on and do three years instead of the two, you’ll probably just stay in England or go to Germany. And I thought, well, I don’t want to do two years, so there we go. In some ways it was quite a good thing, it was, conscription. It made a lot of difference to the country: if we had it now, I don’t think there’d be as much crime. I think people would behave themselves. I think people would grow up a bit earlier. But it was hard. No doubt about it, it was very hard. What was hard about it? What was hard about it? Well, you’re leaving home. A lot of my friends went local, just down the road about four miles. I had to go thirty miles away. And they promised I could go in the medical corps and when I got there they said, “No, you’re going to go in the light infantry.” Now the light infantry is the group of men with six different regiments, and we

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were on the front line. Some of the people who were doing the bigger guns they were behind. But we light infantry were frontline men. The training was hard; we did six weeks training followed by another ten weeks. And in the second ten weeks we spent quite a bit of time at a place called Whitby, near the sea, and it rained the full week, every day. Every day it rained. So, that wasn’t particularly good. At the end of the sixteen weeks, they actually changed our regiments. Instead of being in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, I became Durham Light Infantry because they wanted a group of men to go to Korea. What did you think of training? Training? It was pretty hard, pretty hard. There were sixty of us, all joined at the same time, divide[d] into two groups of thirty, and the chap we had in charge—we couldn’t of had anybody worse. And we were, charging about. It was very, very, very keen discipline but I suppose it had to be for the training what we were doing. Did you know exactly where you were going, when you were doing training? No. We knew that we were probably going to go to either Korea or Malaya. And what was your reaction when you were sent to Korea? Well, I didn’t think a lot to it. [laughs] I felt for my family, I had a brother and sister at home and parents. And they certainly weren’t happy. It was just a case of happy go; it was so unknown. Absolutely unknown. I mean, we’d read about it in the press since 1950, what was happening in Korea and we saw how at the very start, it was Americans who were the main people in, and they got badly attacked and almost pushed into the sea at Pusan. And they were lucky to fight back, and they drove the North Koreans and Chinese right to the north, and then one night they were caught napping, and they were almost pushed all the way back down. We kept hearing about the injuries, and we kept hearing about the number of Chinese who were sort of half mad. They used to come and attack in waves, blowing bugles. And they’d no respect. They used to have the poorest soldiers in the front. And when they were killed off … You know, you’d hear about swarms of thousands coming. And they were just—they weren’t bothered. So, it wasn’t good. But before I got to Korea of course, we had the journey. We were then on this boat until the 15 December. So, we’re on a boat, getting on towards a month, and where we got off then, was at Hong Kong. And the idea was that we could do some more training and we could get towards the magical age of nineteen before we could move into Korea. We’re in

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Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong I’ll watch on television recently [is] not the Hong Kong that I knew. Hong Kong was quite a reasonably pleasant place. And we did a lot more training there, different activities, and then we left one day, and we went on a boat to Japan. We were in Japan for fourteen days. It rained every day. And then we arrived in Korea. How long were you posted in Korea? Right, I was actually in Korea for just five months. So, I was there when the fighting was on, and I was there when the armistice was declared. Who were you with in Korea? I was with the British Commonwealth Division. Which was made up of Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans. But the only people I really saw were basically the Canadians because when the war finished, I went to a Canadian hospital camp. Why was that? Well, it was quite unusual because we were going there as guards and we were protecting people who had been taken prisoner of war, when they were released. They were released at random … and we had to protect them from the press. They didn’t want the newspapers getting into these people, and digging up stories, making up stories. When we went, we were at this Canadian Hospital Camp and it was absolutely wonderful; facilities were the best that I had in Korea. There was no shortage of food. And we just had to do our watch, we had to go on guard for so many hours and then we had a rest period and then go back on guard. And we did that until we left Korea. And then we moved on, we thought we were going to come home: thought “that’s good!” But no, we went to the Canal Zone, which was another active service place. And in some ways, that was worse than Korea. It was at a place whereby we were defending the Canal Zone, and the people who were living there didn’t like us. And they would offer £100 to any of their people who could shoot one of our officers. It wasn’t the case of leaving Korea, ending the war, and going home; it was a case of going onto somewhere else. Where did you spend the most time? Well, if you look at my time I spent so long in England, nearly a month on the boat, and then in Hong Kong for several months, and then in Korea for five months and then onto the Canal Zone for the rest of the period. On your journey from England to Korea, what were some memorable aspects of that?

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Oh! It was good, really good geography. We stopped at certain places and had shore leave. One of the best places was Singapore. We were on a troop ship called the Asturias, and twenty-nine days it took us. We were all young men. There we were, on this boat. We did some training. We got some lectures about what we might be able to expect when we got there. And once we got to Hong Kong, we found out that we got to be very careful because of mosquitos there [and] snakes which we didn’t see in England. We had to take special tablets, so we didn’t get malaria. And one of the most unusual things about it was that the North Koreans had a camp about thirty miles away from us. As we went a southern route to South Korea, to Pusan, they went on the northern route. If they’d wanted, they could have wiped us out at a couple of days’ notice. We stayed with a regiment which [had] already been in Korea, and they’d lost a number of men, they’d had a lot injured, so they weren’t all that bothered about us. They were supposedly giving us an insight into Korea. What was interesting, while we was there, every Friday we used to have a seven-mile run across the patty rice fields and that was part of the deal. What was your day-to-day life like in Korea? Oh well, I was a bit exceptional. We landed in Pusan, and we did a fourteen-hour train journey up to the front line. And when we got there, they said, “Right this is where you can stay for the day.” And we left all our equipment there, we went away, we came back, and when we came back, our equipment had been damaged because they hadn’t realized we were in line of the Chinese and North Korean shells. What was it like? Well, I did some general service, light infantry work, and the worst possible things, which we hadn’t at all been prepared for, was going on patrol. You can imagine that sometimes the enemy was, oh, just a few hundred yards away from us. And we were in one line, and they were in another line and we all dug into different sorts of trenches. And at night-time, we went out on patrols. Now the patrol could consist of four men. If there were four of you, one person would have a radio so he could contact base and we would just go out into no man’s land, completely in the dark. You’d no idea exactly where you were; you knew that ahead of you somewhere were the enemy, and your aim was simply to listen. And if you heard any major movement or any happening, you just radio back. And I remember, on the first one we went on they gave me the radio to look after, and I picked up another group of our people and their radio

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had failed and they were trying to contact base. I had to act as an intermediary. That was the four-man patrol. Now we also had another type of patrol that was seven men, and they used to go out and the aim was to try and capture some of the enemy. No matter how you did it, if you could capture some enemy and bring them back, they could be interrogated, and we’d get to know some more about them. But while you were trying to capture them, they were trying to capture you. And this was in no man’s land—and [with] no training that you’d had previously could you be prepared for this. And then I got a little job, an interesting job. Every day all the troops were allowed a bottle of beer. The beer used to be brought up from the backwards somewhere by the Americans. And I got the job at one time of being responsible for some of it. So, the beer would come to me in the dugout, and sometime during the day, one man from each section of seven would come and collect the beer for his group. Sounds wonderful. I was in a little dugout all on my own and I heard a rustling behind, and this was our chief—the company commander. I had never seen him before, and he came and saw me. And the first thing he said to me, “Why aren’t you wearing your boots?” We had to [be on] stand by, which meant we got to be prepared to dash off at a few minutes’ notice. And the instructions were that you wore your boots, so you didn’t have the trouble of putting them on. So, I simply said to him, “Well, I’ve had eczema in my feet and if I take the boots off, I get some relief.” And he acknowledged that might have been a reasonable excuse and, then, the bomb dropped on me. He said, “Now we have two of our men on the very front line, undressed, and shouting out at the Chinese obscenities.” He said, “And that’s your fault.” So, there we are, 10,000  miles away from home, you get the most important chappy in our group to come in to tell you that you’re responsible for getting two men drunk, and in danger of creating havoc for the rest. So, I said “Why do you think I’m …?” And he said, “Well you sell the beer.” And I said, “I sell it, but I don’t drink it.” And what had happened, these two guys had stocked up with beer for the last few days, got themselves drunk, and that was it. So, when I explained this to him, he accepted it, and thank goodness for that. Or I could have probably ended up in jail. So, that was one of the things I did.

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I also [did] some of the company clerk duties; in other words, when it was time for them to go home, [people] got to get some of their documents up to date and I had spent some of the time doing that. And one of the days they said, “Right, tomorrow fifteen of you are going to go in a vehicle, and you’re going to go to the River Imjin. And you’re going to go there so you can have a wash, because you haven’t had a shower for several days.” And just before we were going to go, two of our people came to me and said, “Chris, could you just get our documents up to date?” So, I did. And I didn’t go on this trip. When they arrived back, I said to one of them, “How did you get on?’” He says, “Terrible.” He said: “Going out was alright but coming back we got shelled.” And one of my chaps, I got on very well [with], young fella, nineteen, was killed, direct. A number of the others were severely injured. The next day I was in trouble for disobeying an order and not going on the trip. So, I thought, that was nice. I could have gone; I could have been injured. Did events like that one—having your comrades fall next to you—did that change your perception of the war while you were there? No, no. Because people were dying all the time, you know. In different numbers, in different places. No, perception of the war was: okay, we were one of twenty-two countries who went to the aid of South Korea. And of course, at the time, the Americans were very much involved. It was all to do with making sure that communism didn’t run riot throughout the world. Although we just finished a war of our own, a terrible war where we’d lost millions, in 1950, they wanted some of our young folk to go from England to Korea. And I suppose twenty other countries went to their aid, and we saved the Koreans. And they’ve always been very thankful and they’re lovely people. When I went out there, lots of them were just farmers and fishermen, just carrying on with their work. All of a sudden, the North Koreans attack them and well thousands and millions killed. Was there anything about the Korean culture that you remember particularly? No, we had no contact—we’d no contact really! Very little contact. Because the civilians weren’t near to us; they were several miles away. And did you have much contact with people at home? Yeah, I got regular letters from my father, from my brother and sister, and one or two of my friends. I got good contact via letter; it often took

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several days to get out there but that was the only contact. I never got any contact by radio or anything. We’d no idea when the war finished and no idea it was going to because the night before we were called out because the enemy put in a big attack to gain some more land. We were with the Americans at the time, and the Americans were ahead of us, and we were in what we call reserve, if they needed us. I was with a group of about ten of us and we’re walking into the unknown and all of a sudden we heard a cry, and somebody said, “Yeah, one of our people have been hit.” Well, that was strange because we couldn’t see any enemy machines or anything, but what it was, we’d landed in a minefield. And a very close friend of mine stepped on a mine. He lost an arm; he lost a leg; he lost an eye. And fortunately, there’s some engineers close by, and one of their men came with a bayonet and went carefully over the area we were and was able to find out where the mines were. So, we got out, and this friend of ours, he was taken to a hospital in Japan, [a] place called Kure. He was about, or probably, the last member of the Commonwealth Division to be injured. How did you find the mines? Well, he found one because he trod on it. The others, the pattern of the display, were found by this officer from the engineers meticulously with a bayonet just going over the ground very carefully and [he] was able to just dig them out. Do you have any things, any objects from your time in Korea? Nope, not a thing. The only thing is I have the odd photograph. I’ve had something since, sent to me from Korea, but not while I was there. And what was sent to you? Well, what happened, the South Koreans are absolutely wonderful people, and about fifty years after the war, they sent a letter: 25 June 2000, we had a letter from a gentleman called Kim Dea jung.1 He was the prime minister at the time of South Korea, and he sent us a letter thanking us for the help that we gave them in the 1950s. So, it was a case of fifty years after. And then this year, out of the blue, I received a special medal called an ambassador’s medal, and this was for soldiers, those of us who are left. It was a really good medal and a really good letter thanking us for the help we gave their country. So, that was as recently as this year. And during your time in Korea, what was your impression of the kit that was given to you?  Kim Dae-jung was, in fact, president of South Korea, from 1998 to 2003.

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Well, it was pretty poor. Some of it was poor. I’ll give you an example, you’ll laugh at this. We had three pairs of socks, right? Three pairs of socks! You were lucky to get a shower. You’re supposed to shave every day and you’re shaving in cold water. So, equipment was very mediocre. The Canadians and Americans always had a lot better. Did the fact that the Americans and the Canadians had better equipment, did that create tensions between the countries? Well, it didn’t really matter in a way because we weren’t really in close contact with them. Not day-to-day. I mean I was with the Canadians when I went to a Canadian hospital and I knew that they had special rations. We could go on guard at midnight, and they’d say, “Do you want a drink or something?” or “Do you want some pineapple juice?” And they wouldn’t hesitate, but open a seven-pound tin. Well, we’d never seen anything like that in our groups. And how did you feel about leaving Korea? It was like saying I was a poor Catholic. Yeah, we were absolutely overwhelmed. We were glad to be away. Couldn’t get away quick enough. We went to a special service, commemorated all our people who had been killed, and this was in Pusan. A very big cemetery. And so, we’re saying cheerio to our people who’d been killed—standard practice for each individual regimental group. And what was interesting now, I could [go] on my computer [and] see the actual grave in that graveyard of the person who was killed the day that I should have gone with him to the River Imjin. That’s technology, isn’t it? And coming home, what was that like? What was the journey? Well, the journey, it seemed to pass pretty quickly coming home. It were coming home from the Canal Zone, so that was a much shorter journey than going out to Hong Kong at the start. We were relieved. We wonder[ed] how we’d feel when we got home. And I wanted to say one of the big criticisms of the whole thing was when we got home, we landed in Liverpool and we sort of just made our own way back. I had to make my way to Durham, which would be about fifty miles from home. I did it by train. But I would argue we’d never got any real physical or mental check-ups. That would be one of my criticisms. It was just like when we were in Korea—I mean you wouldn’t appreciate this but—if we had somebody who was killed, it was almost impossible to grieve. Because there’s nowhere to grieve. What was life like adjusting to coming home from that?

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Well, good and bad. I soon got back into work, [but] things were very different. Because you see, I’d been away from home. My parents were two years older; my brother and sister were two years older; they’d managed without me. I don’t mean they didn’t want me when I came back but it took quite a time to adjust because things were so, so different. It did take certainly some time before you got what I’d call “back to normal.” And I thought, “Well, what do I do? Where do I work? Do I carry on my original career? Do I go to college? What do I do?” And things did eventually turn out reasonably well. I did quite a lot of studying at different places. Life eventually came back to normal. I never met anybody I’d been in the forces with because I came from a different area than the others, which was quite bizarre. Did you try to meet with them after the war ended? No. I tried to contact the person who got lost in a minefield. I wanted to contact his family and the authorities wouldn’t let me have his name. But I did have some contact by writing. A group of them thirty miles away from me seemed to get together for a time. And, quite bizarre, they got a hold of my address and I did get some recent contact, yeah. And where did you find out about how the war ended? Well, they just told me. We were in service one day and the next day someone said the war was over. But no television or no radio, no flag flying or anything. It was all very quiet, and people were too shattered and too tired; all the stress they’ve had for so long. And looking back on the war now, all these years later, what do you think of the war? Well, I think it’s like all wars. I think we did a lot to save a group of people who would have been wiped out. The only thing was that at a later date, let me think, 2015, I went to one of our memorial centres. And there’s a big white wall, and it gives the names of all the people who were killed. And I was able to look at this wall and pick out people who had been with us. It had some effect after that, a bit of post-traumatic stress for a while. Quite a long time. And I saw the doctor and he put me on some special scheme, and it cleared up for a while. The thought of seeing all these people on the wall and seeing all the other activities of the cemetery, it threw me for a while. How long was it before you saw your first war memorial after coming back? Well, there were a number who did a little bit of adding on. We had war memorials for [the] 1914 and 1918 war [and] 1939 and 1945. A few years later, they would say, “And also in Korea were the following people who

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were killed.” But Korea wasn’t a big deal in the country really. They talk about it being a “forgotten war,” very much so. The reason? 10,000 miles away from home. The wars that they remember are those European wars. You would often hear them talk about the war on the Somme when say 20,000 people were killed in one action. But we were a long way away. Five years later, [even] two years later, and you pick up a newspaper, you would hardly ever see it mentioned. But we keep in touch with our Korean veterans’ group and we do send letters to each other and maintain contact. Do you think the Korean War has been forgotten? Yeah. Almost, almost. Yeah. Nothing like … there’s a lot more publicity to the D-Day landing and it was bigger, and it was closer. People knew where those places were. If you asked a lot of people in this country, years ago, “Where was Korea?” they’d say, “Well, I don’t know, it might be somewhere near Japan.” If you mention a town, “Do you know where Pusan was?” They’d have very rarely [known]. Because it wasn’t the subject taught in our history books. Korea was really miles away. And so, when people don’t know about the Korean War, or don’t know where Korea is, how does that make you feel? Well, I just, I mean, it’s—you feel, “Oh, okay.” You feel, well, “Were we wasting our time?” [wry laugh] Do you think you were wasting your time? No, I think, to a certain degree we did help. We saved the lives of a number of people, and that was … that’s a bit huge, that’s a bit Christian, isn’t it? Humanitarian. Do you personally refer to yourself as a veteran? Well, it depends who it is. I don’t go talking in the streets and say I’m a veteran, but if people say to me, “Oh, you were in Korea? That must have been terrible”, [then] you’re a Korean veteran. I am a member of the Korean veteran organization. So, are there any other stories from Korea that you’d like to share with me? Every day [on the journey to Korea] we had this, on the boat, we had this song played to Moulin Rouge, don’t know if you know it, but it was quite a popular tune at one time. And the words are, “Whenever we kiss, wherever we wander, you’re close to me now, but where is your heart?” And that was played to us about twice a day on the boat for, what was it, twenty-nine days going up. So, that was interesting, wasn’t it? What else did you do in your downtime in Korea?

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I didn’t have any downtime. I mean you’re either on guard or resting or sleeping or recovering. I never went on leave at all in two years, apart from when I was in England, and doing six weeks, coming home for a week, doing ten more weeks, coming home, and then we’re on the boat. I never saw any leave at all. Did you stay in the armed forces? No, no. The day I finished … we were supposed to do some training and go back for the next two years. But the group I was allocated to, I went once for a weekend several miles away and they associated with the paratroop[er] people, the people who jumped out of airplanes. They said to us, our group, “If you want, you can have a go.” And I said, “Well, if I go and jump out and I break my leg, it won’t recover, so” after that they sidelined me. [laughs] That was good!

CHAPTER 7

Brigadier Brian Parritt Brian Parritt

Fig. 7.1  Brian Parritt in dress uniform B. Parritt (*) Royal Artillery, Kent, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_7

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That Brian Parritt would see military service in his life seemed predetermined. The men in his family had long served in the armed forces, stretching back three generations. Indeed, Brian was born in a military camp. Members of the Parritt clan had served in many of the major actions of the Second World War, including Dunkirk, Normandy, and the crossing of the Rhine, so Brian felt that for his generation, service in Korea was “nothing really to shout about.” Still, the generations and experiences overlapped in some respects, as Brian notes how guns and vehicles used in Korea were previously employed in the Second World War. A decade after that conflict, using the same, now much older, equipment was not easy, and Brian stresses how important maintenance was to avoid incidents like premature explosions. Brian is well spoken, although the interview is quite reserved to begin. We get some snapshots into life in Korea, for example the extreme cold and the difficulties this created in everything from handling weapons to drinking tea. The conversation opens up when the topic turns to Brian’s injury in action during a night-time mission following the Battle of the Hook. Parritt is stoic about the realities of war and how he coped with seeing casualties around him, declaring that “one recognized that if you go to war, this is what happens.” The emotions of it are stronger now, upon looking back, and after surviving the blast of a jumping mine, his outlook when he returned to the action was altered. The experiences of war became “less of a great adventure and more a reality.” There exists a certain pragmatism in Brian’s account of the war, perhaps born from his military lineage, his long service, and his presence at the denouement of a major conflict in Korea. He recounts the remarkable experience of setting in chain a massive artillery barrage after spotting two Chinese soldiers in no man’s land, only to find himself and a platoon commander shaking hands and exchanging cigarettes with those same Chinese soldiers after the ceasefire ended. The two sides might have been trying to kill each other the day before, but in better circumstances they were able to exchange smiles and courtesies. As Brian notes, it is politicians who determine when “you are going to war,” or ceasing operations, not the soldiers. After the war ended, Brian remained in the British Army, moving from the Royal Artillery to the Intelligence Corps and going on to become a brigadier, as well as being awarded an MBE and CBE. In his post-military career, he worked in maritime security until his retirement. He remains

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involved in keeping the memory of the Korean War alive in his role as the president of the Kent branch of the Korean War Veterans Association. His experiences also formed the basis for his personal account of the war: Chinese Hordes and Human Waves, a title that captures the initially poor intelligence available on the Chinese military divisions, support lines, and overall capabilities.1 He has returned to Korea on occasion, always remarking on the country’s amazing development since the war. He was awarded the Korean Order of Merit (Moran) in 2018 in recognition of his service and subsequent histories of the war. Brian Parritt was interviewed in December 2019. * * * What year were you born and where were you born? 1931. In a small artillery camp in India, near Shimla. Were you conscripted into the national forces or did you volunteer? No, I was called up [for] national service like every other boy of eighteen. What were you doing prior to going to Korea? I was commissioned into the Royal Artillery, and I was posted to Hong Kong in 1952. I was with the 20th Field Regiment in Hong Kong until we left as a regiment to Korea in December 1952. What was training like before you left? The training was two years at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, then six months specific Royal Artillery training at Larkhill. When the regiment was told it was going to Korea, there was intensive training in Hong Kong before we left. How long were you posted in Korea? One year. December 1952 to December 1953. Which units were you with? 12th Minden Battery, part of 20th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery. How did you feel when you found out you were going to Korea? Excited and delighted! As a regular soldier, going into action was the ultimate aim. Did you know much about the country or the conflict before you went? Nothing. 1  Brian Parritt, Chinese Hordes and Human Waves: A Personal Perspective of the Korean War 1950–1953 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Military, 2011).

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What was your attitude towards the war? We all said that it was worthwhile in that the North Koreans had attacked the South and the United Nations had sent a force to liberate the South. What was your journey to Korea like? Only, I think, four days on the ship from Hong Kong to Pusan. What was your journey to Hong Kong like? Very pleasant. I think it was nearly six weeks. Good food, we made our own entertainment. We stopped at Aden and the Suez Canal and Ceylon and Singapore. A pleasant crew ship journey. What were the most memorable aspects of your journey? The gully-gully man in Egypt, who came on board and did magic tricks. Amazing. How old were you when you finally got to Korea? Twenty-one. Once you got to Korea, what were your main duties? I was in Baker Troop which had three officers—a captain, a lieutenant, and myself, a second lieutenant—and four 25-pounder wheeled artillery guns. And we were in close support of the infantry. What do you remember about day-to-day life? Initially, the extreme cold. [It was] bitterly, bitterly cold outside. You couldn’t have a cup of tea, but it was frozen. You couldn’t—your lips froze. Handling the guns was very difficult. So, the intensity of the cold was our first impression. While in Korea, did you have much contact with people in the UK? By airmail, yes. We had regular post with people in the UK. That worked alright. What was it like to receive letters from back home? Absolutely delightful. A main feature. The army has always recognized that mail is an important morale factor, and that is absolutely true. What did your kit and equipment include? By our stage we had better wearing kit. We had a parka and gloves and special boots, so we were better off than the people who came in 1950, but our equipment was all Second World War equipment. The guns had been in North Africa, the ammunition had been stored, the vehicles were Second World War, so there were a lot of premature explosions and maintenance of equipment was difficult. How did you learn to maintain the equipment?

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[We] had to be practical on the ground. Spares were rare to get so there was constant work by our technicians and our engineering guys in the troop to make sure that the things were right. Overall, was the equipment of good or bad quality? Middling. It wasn’t excellent and it wasn’t desperately poor. It was just not … in comparison to today’s guns, it was poor. But it did the job for us. Are there any objects, items, or pieces of your kit that you strongly associate with your time there? Yes, warm boots and the warm gloves, warm hat, and the parka overall jacket. Were there any aspects of the people, food, or culture of Korea that you remember? No, I don’t think I really spoke to a Korean person privately, one-to-­ one, in the whole of my time in Korea. Did you see any civilians during your time? I saw civilians after the war, when we went to Uijeongbu to collect rations, but basically, we lived as an entity in our own gun positions during the war and in the separate gun position after the war. During your time there, did you see combat? Yes. We were in combat every day of the war. What was it like to experience combat every day? It was what we expected to do in the artillery. The top three officers, we had the one captain who was with the infantry in the forward positions. Two others, the lieutenants, were at the gun end but, for example, [when] the captain of our troop was killed very early on [supporting] the Thailand Battalion, I had to go up and replace him in the OP [observation post]. Normally, we would be down in the gun end, apart from the OP work, supporting the infantry with close fire. Are there any memorable experiences about the combat? Well, the big event for myself was after the Battle of the Hook, where the guns fired—I think—it’s about 700 rounds per gun, for one night. Intense artillery bombardment using the VT shells which explode in the air, which are devastating for advancing infantry. The Chinese began to dig caves on the reverse side of the hills, close to the Hook position, which we could not reach with our mortars or the artillery.2 And so, it was decided to send out a company-level attack—a night attack—through no man’s land to blow up the caves. As well as the company of infantry, there 2

 Brian later wrote to note that the Chinese did this to reduce their time out in the open.

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was a Sapper Engineer Detachment who had [explosive] charges on poles which they were going to push into the caves and blow them up. I was the artillery representative from the FOO, Forward Observation Officer, who was to go with the company in the night attack, to make sure we had supporting artillery fire throughout the mission. How long did it take to complete the mission? It was one night; we left at dark from the Hook position through the Samichon Valley, but then unfortunately the infantry man next to me trod on a jumping mine—it’s a three-prong mine which when you take your foot off it, it jumps up.3 He was killed and another soldier next to him [lost his leg], and I was blown over with shrapnel in my leg. I wasn’t badly enough injured. I went up to the company commander, and the attack continued. The infantry got to the cave, entered the first cave, blew it up and was successful. And then we pulled back before dawn and armoured tanks came out to make sure we weren’t being followed.4 What was it like to get injured in the middle of a battle like that? It was somehow expected. I think we had grown up in the Second World War. There was an acceptance that there was a likelihood to being killed or wounded. It was painful, of course, but then it seemed to be part of what you expect to happen if you’re doing a company night attack. Did you have any family that were in previous wars? Yes, my father was in the army, my uncle was in the army, my grandfather was thirteen years in the army, and my great-grandfather was seventeen years in the army. So, it was very much an army family. While in Korea, did you have any contact with personnel from other countries? Yes, the British division went into reserve to have a rest and retrain, but as they were short of artillery, we—our regiment—stayed in the line and various other units rotated through the front line. So, I served with the Thailand Battalion, the Australian Battalion, and was part of the 2nd (Indianhead) American Division. I would sit in GOP [Ground Observer Post] with the various company commanders of these different nationalities. What were those interactions like? It always took a little bit of getting to know people. They had to trust the gunner support, and we had to recognize their individual characteristics … and their different food of course! But it was… because there was a 3 4

 After “jumping,” these mines typically explode at about waist height.  Brian later clarified in writing that these were Centurion tanks.

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threat, a joint universal shared threat. There soon became a bond of friendship. When you got hit by the shrapnel, did you go to the infirmary? No, I was taken first of all in a jeep to the regimental aid post, which was the regimental medical centre. The doctor there gave me morphine and so on, and then I was taken in another stretcher jeep to the M.A.S.H. [Mobile Army Surgical Hospital]. You’ve seen that television programme. There’s a joke there. I could tell you that the surgical treatment in the M.A.S.H. was absolutely excellent, everything one could wish for. If there was a drawback, as per the M.A.S.H. television thing, I never met nurse “Hot Lips”!5 What was it like meeting the medical side of the army? They were efficient. It was a Norwegian M.A.S.H., highly professional doctors and surgeons, highly professional. Very capable. And, of course, a lot [of] casualties of all sorts, very serious casualties to burns and so on, and so at the top of their game in expertise for war casualties. How did you deal with the constant casualties around you? I’d say it became … I think, as a young twenty-one-year-old with that army background, it was expected. It was what one recognized that if you go to war, this is what happens. It’s far more emotional now looking back at one’s friends who didn’t come back than it was at the time. Do you think your familial background in the military helped to prepare you? Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure. And also, we realized it was nothing really to shout about. Because my uncle and family had been in Dunkirk and in Tobruk and in Salerno and Cassino and Normandy and crossing the Rhine, so I think we all … our generation realized that we were pretty small in action compared to the great battles that our predecessors had had. What was your family’s reaction when you left to go to Korea? Routine. “You joined the army, boy? That’s what you’re expected to do.” Are there any other events from your time in Korea that are particularly memorable? Well after the M.A.S.H. I went to a convalescent place in Seoul and then to another convalescent place and [I] have to say the whole treatment of medical casualties was excellent. After many weeks, I was back in the

5   Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, from the television show M*A*S*H* (1972–1983).

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front line again, exactly facing the same thing though slightly, perhaps, more careful about moving and doing things than I had been before. What was it like adjusting to coming back to the front line? Much more prudent. Much more prudent. I mean if you’ve been hurt … it becomes less of a great adventure and more a reality. The other big fact, of course, [was that] I was there when the ceasefire happened. I was on the frontline that night and we were looking at the Chinese lines which were dark and sinister, and we had been told that a ceasefire was going to happen at ten o’clock. On that day, I had seen two Chinese soldiers in no man’s land; it was a quiet day; this was the day before the ceasefire, in fact. So, I ordered a troop target, just on these two linesmen and to my surprise over the air comes, “Battery target organize.” So, I add so many yards because our ammunition did, often as I say, fail and fell into our own lines. Then to my surprise over the air came, “Regimental target authorized.” Which was all guns of the regiment. And the company commander who has earphones in his little hut, he came running in to say, “What the hell is happening here in front of the company?” And I said, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” And then over the air comes, “Divisional target authorized.” My goodness, so I add another 400 yards behind so I’m about half a mile behind the two guys and then “Core target.” And they fired then every single gun in the United Nations force that was available to reach. All the American Persuaders and heavy artillery, everybody fired at these two guys. Next day I said, “What was that all about?” They said, “Well, tomorrow is going to be the ceasefire, but if we don’t have a ceasefire, we want to demonstrate to the Chinese that we’re still prepared to continue the war.” Well after that night, that night of the ceasefire, watching and ten o’clock came and there was a “plop-plop” of the mortars. We hated mortars, and we thought, “Oh bugger, you know, the war is not going to end.” But it was their flare lights, their lights, some reds and blues and yellows. There was a huge cheer went up with knowing that the war was actually going to finish. The next morning, the platoon commander and I went up and sat on the top of our hutchie and had a beer. We’d been like rats—so long in the ground—and he said, “Let’s go down into no man’s land.” Well, I was a bit reluctant. Anyway, we walked down into no man’s land and surprise, surprise, as we walked there, suddenly from behind a bush came the two Chinese guys in their white hats. We froze [and] went to

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look to see if either of us were armed, but none of the four of us were carrying small arms. So, great smiles, exchange of cigarettes, and shaking hands and it just shows that soldiers don’t start wars: politicians say, “You’re going to war.” And you go, but the minute it’s over, here’s a small cameo incident, I’ve never forgotten. He was trying to kill us the day before. I’m certainly trying to kill them. Twenty-four hours later we’re shaking hands and smoking cigarettes. It’s a funny old business, war. Was that a strange adjustment to make so suddenly? Yes. But again, I think … coming so quickly after the Second World War, it seems that’s what happened. You know, the guys who fought in Burma, and all those American guys who fought it through the Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, and so on, they accepted that “war’s finished. Thank God. We’re going home.” Are there any other stories from your time before Korea or in Korea that you’d like to share? Well, I did attend the Panmunjom release period, when the prisoners were being repatriated, and that was an emotional period. We would go up there and you would have to wait and wait because the Chinese would say, “Yeah, they’re coming out today” or “They’re coming out tomorrow. They’re coming out at eleven o’clock.” But then suddenly the door would open and then these guys, who had been prisoners of war for perhaps two or three years, suddenly emerged knowing they were free. And the first question they were always asked, “What do you want to eat?” The American guys always said, “Steak and chips!” and the Brits always said, “Fish and chips!” It was a very emotional, happy period when they finally realized they really were free. One other thing that’s in my mind, just after the war ended, I drove with a Korean guy, because we had Koreans attached to the regiment when we were short of people, and they became very much part of our unit. Driving down to Uijeongbu there was a big demonstration in the road, and we had to stop. All these people demonstrating in the road. I said to the Korean driver, you know, “What’s all that about?” And he said, “They’re protesting about the end of the war.” And I say, “What?!” “Yes, yes they are. Because the ceasefire—it’s a ceasefire, you’re going home but you’re leaving us with a divided country.” And I’ve never forgotten that little incident because it’s true to this day. We’ve left a divided country. Do you think the Korean War was just?

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Yes. If you look at Korea today—or South Korea—you see what a democratic country is. Economically, academically, innovative, they’re actually a country which is a donor country for aid to other countries. It’s a wonderful country, beautiful scenery, shrubbery, tremendous industrialization. And then look at the sad state north; I don’t think there’d be any veterans who don’t feel it was worthwhile, even though so many of our friends [remain] lying in graves in Pusan. What happened when you finally left Korea? Well in those days, the regular soldier, we did three years overseas. To get to the Far East you had to go by troop ship, so [I] came back in Christmas 1953 and then had a further year in Hong Kong before sailing home after three years away. I had met a girl who was a nurse, and we’d wait[ed] all the way through. I’d met her in [19]52 on my commissioning leave and we’ve now been married sixty-three years, three children, five grandchildren, and [two] great-grandchildren. What was the journey back to the UK like? Happy! No restrictions on alcohol. Good food. Good company. Relief to [be] going home. A very happy journey home. I think it was five weeks on the ship going home. When you got home, what did you do? Well, it was lucky because the regiment was going back to Woolwich, and my father who had been a Royal Artillery gunner as well was waiting at the railway station when we got off the train at Woolwich. So, it was a very happy reunion, and he was pleased to see his gunner son back again and so on. It was very nice. After you returned home, did you remain in the armed forces? For another thirty-seven years, yup. And what did you do during that time? Well, I decided that going to Sandhurst, I had not been to university, and the army offered university training if you did a long language. I applied to do Chinese Mandarin and therefore did a year in London University and then two years in Hong Kong University to get an interpretership, which [was] a very pleasant academic break from soldiering. After Hong Kong University, what did you do? I did a job, an intelligence job in Hong Kong and then I decided that I liked that sort of work, so I transferred from the Royal Artillery to the Intelligence Corps, and I did the rest of my service in the Intelligence Corps. Do you refer to yourself as a veteran?

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I think that’s the word—yes. I mean as far as the Koreans are concerned, we’re called veterans, and as I served with the American 2nd (Indianhead) Division, I’m accepted. I’ve got a card as a veteran of the American armed forces and that’s a very powerful and helpful organization. I get a lot of support from the Americans because my daughter lives in Boston and my grandchildren were brought up in Boston. So, whenever I go over there, I’ve had connections with the veterans of the United States. Do you think the veteran organization of the United States is different to the veteran organization of the UK? I think they’re more organized, more powerful, [and have] the stronger political voice, yes. And I feel genuinely that the American people are more proud and receptive to veterans and are more positive in their support of veterans than I think perhaps the UK is. Do you think the Korean War has been forgotten? Yes. I think it came so closely after the Second World War. In an American connection, people would remember Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq probably more than the Korean War. What do you think of Korean War memorials? Excellent. The Korean people themselves paid the money to put up a war memorial in the United Kingdom, in London, but the war memorials in the States to the Korean War are far more dramatic and powerful and emotive. The American side do it much better, no doubt about it. After you returned home, what were your reactions to the conflict? I think it was just that it was an episode that a regular soldier has. In some ways, I felt it was good because I’d seen operational service. If you served for thirty-seven years in the army and never hear a shot fired, it’s probably a lack of something, yes. I felt it was a correct thing and a good thing to be a soldier and to take part in combat, yes. What did you do after you left the army? I started my own company and then had employed some 200 people on cruise ship security and again I was helped because [of] the U.S. Coast Guard’s strong plan, at that time, for security following the Achille Lauro incident, if you remember.6 And I got approval from the U.S. Coast Guard to produce a plan which was then recognized by the United Nations and so it was a very good platform for a very pleasant job and worthwhile. Until I sold it to an American company and retired. 6

 The Achille Lauro was hijacked by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985.

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What was it like readjusting after the war? Bit of an anticlimax, that’s why I went to university. Are there any other experiences of Korea you’d like to share? I think the nice thing about it is still that the veterans in United States and—I’m sure—in Canada and in Australia and in the UK have a common link of memory. I’m president of the Kent branch of the Korean Veterans, and we meet monthly. And last week we had an annual dinner, which the Korean military attaché came and joined us with his wife. So, there’s still a memory of the veterans, although of course each year the numbers get less and less and less, because you have to be well in your eighties to have been a veteran. It finished in [19]53 and you had to be nineteen before you went, so the arithmetic is you’d have to be well into eighty if you’re living [and had been] serving in the war. How did you meet other veterans in the UK? Throughout the country, there was an organization called British Korean War Veterans Association and each district or county or area had their local branch, and I joined the local branch some twenty to thirty years ago. Do you think organizations like that one help to keep the memory of the Korean War alive? Definitely. Definitely. And we have a church service and we lay a wreath at the various war memorials, and, particularly, there’s going to be a lot more interest because 2020 is the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the war and I’m sure there will be a lot more highlighted about [it]. “Forgotten war” had a degree of correctness. Have you visited Korea since you’ve left? Yes, I was awarded a very prestigious Korean award, [the Order of Merit] and they flew me out to Seoul. My American grandson was in Tokyo and they flew him out as well; they paid for his taxis, and they paid for his hotel, and they had a big ceremony in Seoul, and then the two of us—they invited him up as well onto the stage—in front of some 2000 people and the president … of [South] Korea hung this order around my neck and gave me a very special watch. They gave my grandson a huge bunch of flowers which he was a bit embarrassed about, but he took a rose I think and brought it back to his mother in Boston. Visiting Korea now, what is it like returning? Is it much different? Amazing. Amazing. Unbelievable, amazing. I remember there was one bridge over the River Han when I was there which we had four anti-­ aircraft guns guarding. When I went back this time, I think he said there

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were thirty-two bridges over the Han, and they’re building a thirty-third. Amazing sense of vibrancy and optimism and perhaps it’s the same syndrome, you know, Japan burst out economically after suffering defeat as did Germany. So probably there’s a stimulus—if you get defeated in war, you can really get cracking and make things better. Do you think the war was worth it? Absolutely. No question. Has the tradition of the military continued in your family? Well, my eldest son—I said to him, he can do anything he likes, there’s no pressure [despite] the fact that your father, grandfather, great-­ grandfather, and great-great-grandfather were in the army. No pressure! No pressure, as long as you join the army. Which he did for five years and then he left!

CHAPTER 8

Private Edgar Green Edgar Green

Fig. 8.1  Edgar Green outside his home (left) and on his return to Hong Kong from Korea in 1951 (right) E. Green (*) Middlesex Regiment, Aldermaston, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_8

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Edgar Green’s childhood was dominated by the Second World War. During the early war years, Edgar like many others barely had any schooling because most of his time was spent in air raid shelters. At around nine years of age, his father would take him to a railway bridge that ran alongside their house to watch the sky ablaze during the Blitz, just fourteen miles away in London. In adulthood, his nascent career as a fireman in a locomotive yard was quickly cut short by conscription to national service. He was posted to Hong Kong, before sailing with the first British soldiers to join the conflict in Korea. Edgar’s experience of the war was somewhat different to those who arrived later. It was a mobile conflict in its earlier phases, and he recalls his brigade pushing forward over long distances and falling back the same way. His testimony captures some of the fear that accompanies life in a war zone. He, like many others, didn’t expect to leave Korea unscathed, or even at all, a confession that he shared with his parents by letter after leaving Britain. Once on the front, he remembers the lonely feeling of holding a position in the trench, with the nearest man on each side a couple of hundred yards away. Nevertheless, he considers himself very fortunate to have not experienced much combat and to have witnessed fewer injuries than some of his comrades. Edgar’s testimony captures some of the day-to-day struggles that soldiers faced. Cold, hunger, and discomfort predominated. On one occasion, men from his regiment had not eaten for several days and had to commandeer rations from vehicles abandoned during a retreat. Soldiers had no shelters to sleep in and resorted to creating makeshift heaters from tin cans, sand, and petrol to warm up abandoned buildings that became temporary sleeping holes. At other times, men packed straw into trenches to find some comfort and try to keep warm, only to be undone by rain. At one point, Green found himself waist-deep in a water-filled trench. Little wonder he was diagnosed with pneumonia on two occasions during his service in Korea, although in neither instance was he allowed to withdraw from the front for long. The testimony contains many snapshots of life for United Nations’ forces in the early years of the conflict, from race relations in American units to the contents of food rations. Edgar is forthright and does not hide his disappointment in how the Korean War has been remembered and commemorated in Britain. He feels that the participation of some units has been underappreciated, while the conflict as a whole has not received the attention that it deserves. He would like more to be done about this,

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one reason why he participates in interviews whenever he can. He wishes the legacy of all the “forgotten veterans” of this conflict be preserved for later generations to better understand the reasons they fought and the magnitude of their sacrifice. Edgar Green was interviewed in December 2019, and later clarified some of his account in spring 2021. * * * What year did you go to Korea? I went to Korea with the very first lot, which was the 27th Brigade. We sailed from Hong Kong on 25 August 1950, and we arrived in Pusan on 29 August 1950. We was the very first British land troops to go to Korea. How old were you when you went there? I was nineteen years of age and four months. Before you were part of the armed forces, what were you doing? I was employed as a locomotive fireman [at] one of the big marshal yards in the UK.1 Did you volunteer for the army or were you conscripted? No, no, I was one of thousands that was called up for national service. We were just called up, went for our medical before a medical board, and then we went into training and did whatever we was asked to do. Because the quicker we got through it … eighteen months at first, but after two weeks in Korea they added another six month[s] on to it. How long had you been in the army before going to Korea? I joined the army on August 4, 1949. So, I would have been in the army twelve months. And your rank was? My rank remained the same as a private right the way through. How long were you posted to Korea? I was in Korea from 29 August 1950 ‘til 24 April 1951 when I returned to Hong Kong on the advance party to prepare the camp ready for the rest of the battalion to come back to. How did you feel when you found out that you were going to Korea? I worked in the officers’ mess and I knew before a lot of people that we were bound for Korea. And at that time everybody was asking, even officers were asking, “Korea, where is Korea?” Nobody seemed to know 1

 Feltham Marshalling Yard.

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where Korea was. When we then left Hong Kong for Korea, we sailed upon the HMS Unicorn, which was an aircraft carrier. But on arrival in Korea, we moved up from Pusan to just below the Nakdong River, and we was there. I, like so many of them, thought we was never coming out of Korea. That’s how the situation was. It was very, very grim. Did you feel you or your fellow soldiers knew much about the country or the conflict? We didn’t know anything about Korea, at all. We were very thankful really because the regiment was 50 percent national service and 50 percent regular soldiers. And we have a lot to thank the regular soldiers for, for putting us right as regards digging in, and doing all the jobs that we should be doing. It was very good [for us to have] that because later on in the Korean War there were so many that were just national service; they didn’t have the advice from older ones. What was your time in Hong Kong like? Hong Kong was a posting out of the blue. It was one of those places; after coming up through the bad time of World War II where we was on rations and we went short of everything that you can think of. When we arrived in Hong Kong, we was in the New Territories, which was on the border of China. A lot of the men that had already been there before I arrived said to us, “Oh, you wait ‘til you get down into Hong Kong and you can go and get a steak, egg and chips and two slices of bread and butter, and a cup of tea, and it won’t cost you two shillings.” And we thought, “two shillings for a steak?” We didn’t even know what a steak was, but Hong Kong was very good. What was your attitude towards the Korean War? We knew that it was all to do with communism which was spreading right from after the end of the Second World War when it became East and West Berlin. And then the communists tried to take over the different countries in Europe. Then it spread to Malaya, Borneo, and then when the Chinese were coming down into Hong Kong, as they thought. I mean 40,000 troops were rushed out to protect Hong Kong itself, and we were mostly stationed up in the New Territories around the borders. It was a very similar thing; well it could have been, to what happened in Korea. But it never came about, thank goodness. Did your feeling towards Korea change over time? No, because the way that we were told, they thought it was only a matter of pushing the North Koreans back from around the Naktong, like the

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Pusan perimeter, back up to the 38th Parallel. And they thought that’s what they were going to do. It would be all over then. That was all we was going to do, go to the 38th Parallel. And that was what a lot of men thought because it was quite a big thing, “Oh, you’ll be home for Christmas”. But we never was home for Christmas. And we were supposed to have been relieved three times out in Korea, and the very last time we did get relieved, but that wasn’t ‘til 14 May 1941. What was the combat like in these initial months? Well, most of it was against the North Koreans; it was quite a bit different to when the Chinese come in. They was not quite so bad. The thing was, the 27th Brigade, we had very little transport for us. We relied on the Americans for everything that we had: transport and food. Our weapons were not up to [the standard of] the Americans’ [weapons]. We only had the .303, the Enfield Rifle, Sten guns, Bren guns, and light machine guns, MMGs. That was nothing to what the Chinese had. When the Chinese came in, they had a lot more automatic weapons then what we did. [In] the early part of it, we moved very, very quick. The 27th Brigade, if they couldn’t get transported by the Americans from one place to another, they walked. And believe you me, some of those men walked a long, long way. But it wasn’t until the cold weather came in … there we were, just in tropical gear, which was what they called “jungle green.” Light cotton trousers and light cotton shirts and then the temperature dropped overnight to twenty-two degrees of frost and later dropped to forty degrees below. And that is when the Americans came in again giving us all the winter clothing that we could wear: parka jackets and pile hats you put on, and you had a peak and you tied it under your chin. The only winter equipment that we got from the British was a string vest, and I don’t know what they expected we were supposed to do to keep out the cold. People have often said, “Well, what did you sleep in?” We didn’t sleep in anything; we slept on top of the ground, and a lot of the chaps, they were in trenches for a couple of days. They filled [them] with straw and they just kept warm by keeping in straw but then when it rained … I can remember being in a trench up to my waist in water.2 But there’s not much you could do about it. The cold was the main thing. Myself, I [got] 2  Green clarified in later correspondence some of the chronology around these events. “After only a couple of days when we were just below the Nakdong River we were ordered to take over from the Americans. It was here that I was one of four who took over a OP post from the Americans, this is where it poured with rain and we were up to our waist in water.”

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pneumonia twice in Korea and ended up in an American M.A.S.H. unit. That’s when penicillin was first introduced, and I had a dose of penicillin and within a week I was back up with the men. But it was a big struggle up there—when we landed in Pusan, we left our kit bags with all our heavy gear. And when winter visited us, all our equipment that we had left behind had been rifled [through], and the majority of us didn’t have anything else to put on. How was the journey to Korea? The journey from Hong Kong to Korea was on the HMS Unicorn. Now on board there, there was about a thousand-odd men with the Middlesex regiment and Brigade HQ. The first day out from Hong Kong we were all formed up on the flight deck, and it was time for all of us to get injections because [we were] going into a war zone. I can’t remember the name of the injections that we got, but I know we got four different types. You just formed up in two single lines with your hands on your hips and then there’s one medical chap one side, and one the other side. You got a jab in one arm, and a jab in the other arm, and a bit further along you got another jab and [then] another one. But in those days, we didn’t get a fresh needle for every man like it is today. The same needle was used for the majority of the chaps. First in you had a sharp one, but if you was quite a way down the list, you got a nice, blunt needle in your arm. We had training, rifle practice, and different other forms. We was getting information of what to expect when we got to Korea, but we just slept where we were. A chap with me, we decided to sleep in one of the aircraft carrier’s workshops and we slept on top of a work bench. It wasn’t until we were pulling in at Pusan that both of us said, “Oh, I wonder what was in these drawers under this bench,” and underneath that bench, believe it or not, was two mattresses. The men that normally used the workshop, that was their sleeping place as well. The mattresses would be put on top of the bench and that was it, but unfortunately, we didn’t know that. We just slept on the hard board. Would you say your journey then was rather harsh? No, we must thank the navy [personnel] who were on board: they were very, very good to us. I don’t think we went short of food. I can’t remember very much about the food, but we didn’t go short of food. That was a bit different when we landed in Korea. Once you landed what were your main duties? The first day, the Argylls came off their ship first and then we came off second. Then we had a train which was so filthy, it was a very, very, very

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old rolling stock. The navy came off the ship and cleaned the train out for us, knowing that we was going up to the front. Well after that was done, we boarded the train, and we went up just below the Nakdong River. That was that for a couple of days. Just as soon as we arrived, we dug in because we was just a couple of miles [behind the front] and even the second day we was there; we come under mortar attack and shell. It was a few days later that [the] brigadier was asked if we would move up into the front to take over from an American division. When we did so, we were covering a very wide front, a very wide front. And that was very scary, when you was positioned in a trench and the person, or chaps, alongside to the right, and to the left, were some couple of hundred yards away. [It was] quite a bit scary, really. With day-to-day life, was there a certain routine or was it constantly changing? It changed all the time. We came under the Americans for rationing, and we had what they called a C4 pack. In that pack there was six tins the size of a baked beans tin, and in one you would have ham and lima beans, another one would be corn beef hash, things like that. But there was just the three meals, and that was for your breakfast, when you wanted to eat it, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that’s all. And then [in] another tin you had toilet paper, chocolates, sweets … And cigarettes which we had never seen before. They was American cigarettes, not that I smoked. Then another tin had dry salt biscuits to eat. That was our food for twenty-four hours. We never saw bread until we got one slice of freshly baked bread on Christmas Day. Most of our stuff was just out of the tins, and as the weather got colder, it all froze. Quite a few men were told off for warming a tin around a little tiny fire. They put it on the sides, and when they opened it, it was burnt on the outside but still frozen solid in the middle. But there was many a chap got told off for wasting food. Even having a drink, the temperature was so low; some of them used to gather up snow and fill it up in a can, put it on the fire, and warm it up. They didn’t all have the army catering corps behind them. I was in “B” Echelon, and we was fortunate to have the army catering corps. You didn’t have tea because we was on American rations. All we had was coffee. They used to get big drums of coffee, and they used to put handfuls of coffee into the hot tin of water and that was it, with no milk or sugar. It was just raw coffee. The very first part of the Korean War, I must say, up until we come to April in 1951, was different to the second part after the Battle of Kapyong and the Battle of the Imjin River. We was always on the move. We was here

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one day and then going forwards the next. Then after we’d got right up as far as we could in North Korea, we started to come back and that was the same. Sometimes we was lucky enough to find one of the schools or a building that was still standing. Some sheltered in there, but we used to use our monsoon capes to make a bivvy tent to get into. [It] wasn’t very good [for our] health, [but] because there was no shortage of petrol, we would get one of our ration tins, and you would half fill it with sand or the dirt that you got and then soak it in petrol and light it. That’s what used to keep you warm, but in the morning, if you’d managed to be in an area where you could get some sleep, you’d come out as black as the ace of spades. And I’ve even seen chaps standing in the fire with their boots alight, but that was another tale, [the] shortage of boots there. We had the old-fashioned ammo-boots, as they was called, and they wore out. Myself, I couldn’t get a pair of ten and a half [or] elevens to wear, and I was given a pair that was a size small. That affected the shape of my feet in years to come, but trying to get a disability pension for it, I didn’t have any luck. I didn’t have any luck with my hearing [either], [the loss of] which most of us suffer from because of the volume of noise. Did you have much contact with people from England while in Korea? [Not] with the Americans supplying us with clothing. [When] we was right up the other side of Pyongyang and coming back from just below the Yalu River, there was a column of vehicles on the opposite side. We stopped just outside Pyongyang, and the first thing they said was, “What lot are you then?” And we said, “We’re the same damn lot as what you are, English!” They said, “You can’t be, not in all that clothing!!” because we had American-style clothing on where they had British stuff. But they were equipped with cold weather clothing, not like we were. They took over from us and we came back further down. Then we was engaged right the way down to Seoul. Did you have much contact with family and friends who were not in the army? No, my driver that I had on the railway, he used to write to me. Then one day in Korea I got a letter, which was very rare that we did get mail, but I didn’t recognise it, and it was my driver’s daughter, who later, when I came out the army, I married. But that was the only contact, most of the people back here in the UK didn’t know too much about Korea. We have always been called the “forgotten army” and the “forgotten veterans.” Why? One can never explain. All we get told was: “It wasn’t a British war;

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it was a United Nations war.” And [it is] very, very disappointing and sad for all the men that gave their lives for the freedom of the Korean people. But the Korean people are second to none; they always treat us with a lot of respect. What was your impression of the equipment that you had? The equipment that we had, for out there, was poor. The men that I spoke to that was up in the thick of it all the time, they only had rifles. Our battalion commander didn’t believe in giving awards out, and that is why when you look through the records, the Middlesex [regiment], they only had a few awards. There was only one private who was a medical aid. He got the military medal, and that was only because the Australian general who was in charge back in Japan read the report of this man who was asking to be mentioned in dispatches, and he said that this man deserved more than being mentioned in dispatches. How were your weapons? Weapons was just an ordinary single shot, the Enfield rifle. You fired one bullet, bolt action loaded another one up and you pushed another one up and fired. That’s all there was. Some had Sten guns, but they were for close encounters. And then we had the Bren gun, which was the best weapon. And I think it is still used today. Then we had the MMG, which is a Vickers machine gun, but other than that we didn’t have the automatic weapons like the Americans. And the Chinese had more automatic weapons when they came into it. Would you say that your weapons were inferior to the weapons of the Americans and the Chinese? Yes. If we’d have had more up-to-date weapons … Apparently, I don’t know what truth was in it, we didn’t have automatic weapons because it would have caused a lot of wastage of money and that’s what was said. But you hear so many different things. They can’t all be repeated. No, we could have done with better weapons out there. What about your own combat experience? I’ve had people say because we only lost, I am not actually sure, I think it was only forty-five men, they say, “Oh, you only lost 45 men whilst you was in Korea.” But what does that prove? That proves that we had bloody good company commanders and battalion commanders and a damn good brigadier. Our brigadier, and also our colonel, and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders’ CO, they were three damn good men that had come through the Second World War, and I don’t think, if it [wasn’t] for

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them, that we would have come out as light as we did. They were brilliant men. But I don’t think enough has ever been said about all of those that served in the Korean War. I’ve been back out to Korea eight times altogether, and when you see all those young men’s graves … When we look at them now, and we’re old, and we look at all them and we think, “Crikey they was only nineteen, twenty,” ages like that. You can’t consider them like we are ourselves today, but they all gave their lives in those circumstances. When you look at it and they say we’re the “forgotten war” veterans, there’s a thousand and seventy-eight men that lie there [interred] in the British sector. There’s also some that went to Japan badly wounded, and they are buried in the Yokohama Cemetery. How was it fighting against the Chinese and the North Korean soldiers? Well, when the Chinese came into it, it was just the volume of numbers, because as fast as they were firing and our side was killing one, or shooting one, then there was someone else taking his position. Sometimes they didn’t all have weapons, they picked up [the weapons of] those that had fell and carried on. So many of them when they came in. At Kapyong, they were dressed in American clothing. At one time there was an American sergeant in charge of a machine gun and coming under a tunnel towards them, under like a bridge; this officer in charge had noticed that some of those that were coming along were not civilians. They were soldiers, North Koreans, dressed in the white clothing like the Koreans. He gave the orders to shoot, and they shot them up and it badly affected, as you can imagine, the ones firing on those civilians and North Korean troops that was intermingled with them. That was one of the stories that came out about the Americans, but with all this that’s going on today as regards the IRA in Ireland, it’s a wonder they haven’t gone back to Korea. Because there was things like that that couldn’t be helped, but that was [the] Americans, that wasn’t us. What other combat experiences did you have in Korea? I didn’t see very much combat at all because I was in the Echelon, which was behind the front, that we used to bring all the food, and ammunition, and things like that. I was shotgun, as I recall it, riding with the driver on the ammunition lorry. And in those days, being young, we didn’t think nothing of riding on an ammunition lorry. But when you think of the amount of ammunition that was on there, if we’d had one shot in the ammunition vehicle that would have been it because it [would have been] blown up, sky high.

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Sometimes we were in difficult situations driving there. After we had come through the break-out at the Pusan perimeter, we had to drive up to Seoul by road. [It] took us five days to go from there to get to Seoul. We did come under some fire from North Korean troops that had got left behind, but [we] was lucky that we didn’t have any fatal ones. Not in our Echelon. The only trouble we had was one evening on the drive we had to stop occasionally for rest, and we’d parked overnight in a riverbed which was all dried up. Unbeknown to us, the North Koreans had buried their ammunition in the riverbeds. It was cold and [our soldiers] lit a fire. I was sleeping on the tail gate of this ammunition lorry and all of a sudden, the heat had got through to the ammunition, which was underneath this fire. It was a lesson that we learnt from there not to have fires in any dried-up riverbeds because that’s where they used to horde all their ammo. That was a lucky escape for us then because as soon as the first explosion happened, we drove out as quick as that. I think there was about six vehicles altogether. What sort of injuries did you see while you were there? No, I didn’t see too many. But being what I am for the Middlesex Regiment, I still keep my Middlesex mates in touch [with one another]. One man in Australia, a very, very good Middlesex bloke, he got affected by seeing the Argylls, when the Argylls got napalmed after they’d broke out from the Pusan perimeter.3 And there’s so many stories of how it happened that I don’t actually know what is the true story, but one was that the Argylls took this hill so quick that the Americans didn’t think that it was British troops, as it had taken Americans twice as long to get up this hill. But the Argylls suffered quite a lot of casualties there when they got napalmed. And one of the bad sights that this man saw was just the remains of two men sitting in a jeep burnt to a cinder and that affected him for about forty years, ‘til he sought help out. But that was only one, there’s so many things. I have to be careful what I’m saying because it affects me just the same because talking about it, you’ve still got it all up in your head. But I was very, very fortunate that I didn’t see too many. The only bad sight that I saw was not ours but North Koreans all along the road in a ditch, which was at the bottom of the road,

3  In correspondence, Green informed us this event occurred a few weeks after the breakout of the Pusan perimeter. This story was relayed to Green during a revisit to Korea around 2006, by a veteran of the Argylls who had suffered burns from the napalm all down his back.

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because the roads were higher up than the paddy fields. That was stretched for some way of dead Koreans that had got caught in the fire. You mentioned that you had pneumonia, how would you describe the medical care? The American M.A.S.H. units, I was taken into their unit shivering with pneumonia. I was soon diagnosed with pneumonia like other ones and was given an injection. I was cared for in there for almost a week, but by the end of the week they considered me all right to go back up and I had to make my own way back up there. But at that time, I didn’t know where my brigade was, and I had to try and find out off of different people. I just knew it was going up north and that’s how I was taken. Then it was only a matter of a few weeks that I got pneumonia again and thought I would be shipped out to Japan out of the way, but I didn’t [get shipped out]. I was once again in and out of there within a week. One man who got frostbitten feet, he was taken to Japan and they wanted to amputate both his feet and he said no you’re not taking my feet off. He’s still walking about today, so he did the right thing when he refused to agree for them to do that. This one, it’s in my army records, what I’ve wrote myself. We’d come back out of the line and we was in what they call the rest area, just for a couple of days. It was so cold, the Americans thought that we were mad playing football, having a kick around to keep warm. I took a kick from someone, they hit me in the side of my face and broke a tooth. Broke it right off and I was taken to a M.A.S.H. unit to see if someone could take this tooth out for me because it was just a jagged edge. This big American, he was a big, big man, and he said, “I can’t give you no aesthetic for that, but if you can sit in that chair, I can take it out.” So, I sat down on this chair and he put one hand on my head and with the other hand he pulled the remains of my tooth out. From that day on I’ve never been frightened of any dentist that I went to! What did you do while on leave? I didn’t have no leave in Korea. I was engaged in the Korean War from the day we arrived. We didn’t get leave. What they called “R and R.” Well, they did start taking men out to Japan, but it was at a time when we were really coming out of Korea. Some of the men in the Middlesex regiment got “R and R” and flew out to Japan, but it was very few of us. The only ones who got to Japan was those that got injured. They got treated, and when they was well enough, they put them on convalescence leave and

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they had another few weeks in Japan [before] they was ordered back again. The only leave I had was one week’s leave in Hong Kong; that was all. Did you have any contact with civilians in Korea? No, not really, no. We didn’t know their language, but a lot of the men did have [contact with] young lads, ten, eleven, twelve. You’d see them wandering around, and they was like orphans, I suppose. They looked after them. Years later, when the Middlesex regiment went back on a revisit to Korea, I think it was 1984. As they walked down the gang steps to get off the plane, there was a Korean at the bottom. He said [to a corporal], “I’m Kim, you used to look after me.” And that young man had grown up in those years from ‘51 to ‘84 and he was then the head of the Korean police force. And lo and behold, those Middlesex men that went out there on the revisit, they was picked up by that policeman, and a lot of other police cars, and they was taken around on their revisit by the police. So, they had a good revisit out there! How were the relationships with personnel from other countries? Well, I don’t think we ever had any trouble, but there’s so many stories. Like the Canadians, some of them were really mad if they couldn’t get a drink. One particular night there was Canadians that had come over. They would even melt blacking, boot polish, down to get alcohol. Anyhow, the next morning there was a bit of a shindig going on, and this Canadian battalion, which was the 2nd [Battalion] Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, were formed up. These men that had been involved in this elicit drinking were all dead, and they was laid out in front, and all the men were marched past to show what all this illegal drinking could do to you. We didn’t get any stuff like that. There was a rum ration [for] which only permission was given by the brigadier, and that was not very often. I think it was at Christmas time we did get a bottle of Japanese beer, sake beer, but that’s all. The 27th Brigade never drew money in Korea because what could you spend it on? There was nothing there to go and spend; there wasn’t shops that you could go walking round; that wasn’t the sort of country it was. There was nothing there. I drew my money when I got back to Hong Kong, after coming back out of Korea. How did you find the Americans? The Americans? Well in those days, it was a bit different to today. We couldn’t get over the American white population soldiers; they didn’t like the way that we used to talk to the coloured ones, because the coloured Americans out there only drove vehicles. They was big men and they was as mad as a March hare; you got in one of their vehicles and, wow! They

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went like a bat out of hell. They was mad drivers; they would drive along with their headlights on, but you wouldn’t get a British soldier’s vehicle [doing] that. You didn’t have no lights; you just had a little light at the back of the vehicle which kept you in touch with the one in front of you. But Americans was a bit different. They was badly treated, but we didn’t treat them like that. No. I mean in those days, they was called names that you can’t even use today. But, to me, they was always the same [as anyone else]. I never saw many others, Americans, Greeks, Indians, New Zealanders … and Canadians, and that’s about all. Are there any other events from Korea that you found particularly memorable? Things I couldn’t understand really. When we were right up almost to the Yalu River, I’d say we was about fourteen miles [away], a lot of our men hadn’t had food for three or four days.4 When—it was called “the big bug out”—when the Chinese come in with the heavy numbers, some said there was a million, some said there was 800, and some odd thousand men. The American generals ordered that we pull our vehicles off the road and just destroy them. Well, these men hadn’t eaten and coming past, the Americans had already pulled their vehicles off the road and had set them alight. Well, one lorry had loads and loads of C4 rations in. So, they pulled up by this vehicle and quickly unloaded C4 rations for the men who hadn’t eaten for days. Sometimes, it was the organisation. And our brigadier didn’t agree with everything the Americans done. And that is why he saved our time [there]. How did you feel when you were leaving Korea? I came back on the Montrose; it was an American troopship. The Argylls were going back to Hong Kong, and the advance party of the Middlesex, which was about 25 men, might be a little bit more; we were going back to Hong Kong to prepare a camp ready for the men coming back. As we all stood on deck as we pulled out of Korea, on that particular day, which was my birthday, 24 April 1951, they were all saying, “What on earth did we come to a godforsaken hole like this for?” To think all those men who got killed. But that’s how it looked. There was nothing there; it was a very, very poor country. Were you pleased to leave Korea? 4  Edgar added further context to this later, noting that he thought the reason the men hadn’t had food was because of the speed at which they took different positions.

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Yes, because I never ever thought … I wrote a letter to my parents. I found time to write a letter because the early part of the Korean War, you didn’t get charged for sending letters home. And I wrote a letter to my parents thanking them for the time that I’d had in my younger life and [saying] that if I didn’t get home, you know, they knew how I felt. When I got home in the August of [19]51, my family were there greeting me home and my father took me in the front room. He said, “Listen here lad, don’t you ever write a letter like that again.” And I said, “Why’s that?” He said, “If your mother had of received that letter instead of me, you’d have more or less told her that you weren’t coming home, and she would have had a heart attack.” He said, “Here’s the letter, do you want to show it to your mother?” I said, “No, not now.” My father said, “I know what you were doing, but if she’d have picked it up you know how she feels about you…,” and that was it. So many of us wrote those letters when we were on the Unicorn going to Korea. We were advised to write a letter home, and I ‘spect there was a lot of chaps that wrote the same sort of letters. I don’t know. I was very thankful for my parents for the life I’d had. About a shower … The whole time I was in Korea I had one shower in a mobile unit and as regards clothes, most of those would tell you that they only had the clothes that they went out there in. We didn’t have any change of clothes. When it was coming up to the winter, it was the Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex [who] asked the women around if they would knit scarves and mittens for the men in Korea. All of us in our regiment, we all got a package from an individual in Middlesex with a letter that we was asked to respond to. In there was a pair of mittens, a scarf, and cigarettes, and a bar of chocolate and things like that. And in it was an address. I did answer my letter like a lot of chaps did but never heard any more from the people. I suppose they were just grateful to get a letter of thanks for what they’d sent. But that was our own British people; that was the only time that we got anything. It was nice to have a pair of gloves, because we never had gloves. In certain cases, out there, when they were withdrawing very, very quick, some of the men were on top of these tanks getting a ride and the Chinese came at them. They jumped at them and they got frozen on the sides of the tanks. And then there was another case where they captured a lot of Chinese and they asked them to drop their

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weapons because they was holding weapons in their hands. They got shot, but they couldn’t drop their weapons because they were frozen to ‘em. What did you do after leaving the army? When I came out the army, I came back into civvy street and went back [to] my job on the railway.5 [I] stopped on there for a couple of years before packing up and meeting Australians like I did in Korea. I met up with one very good one and he wanted me to come out to Australia, and I told my family that I was going out to Australia. My dad took me aside and said, “Listen lad, you’ve been away for two years; don’t go and emigrate to Australia yet. You’ll break your mother’s heart by going to Australia.” Years later, in 1969, my wife and our two children did emigrate to Australia. [A job with a great pension] was the reason that I returned from Australia, but Australia in those days was a place for [a] man and his children and his wife. You couldn’t go wrong; there was everything for you. We just lived down on the beach most of the time; the beach was only five minutes in the car. Do you refer to yourself as a veteran? Yes, I do. I don’t go up to London on the marches anymore because this year, unfortunately, I had a stroke, in June, which knocked me back a bit. And the day I was taken into hospital, I didn’t think I was coming out. But I still do what I can for all my veterans that I know in the Middlesex Regiment. You said that you thought Korea has been forgotten? It was just like when our memorial was opened on the Embankment; it wasn’t opened by the Queen, like she did for the veterans of Bomber Command. We had the Duke of Gloucester. The Duke of Gloucester wasn’t involved in any service; he never served in the armed forces. With the sixtieth [anniversary], I got into a little bit of trouble. I wrote to [the Defence minister] and asked him what they had planned for that year. He said we don’t recognise the start of the Korean War. He said that, and so did another gentleman connected with an old association of veterans in this country. But they was the very first two people to accept the invitation to go to Korea. I suppose that’s all to do with protocol. And I am sorry, when I write and when I’m talking. I am talking as my body’s telling me. And some of what I’ve told you today, might not fit quite in line. Why do you feel that Korea has been forgotten? 5

 “Civvy street” is an informal British Army term for civilian life.

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I think it’s a disgrace that we’re forgotten. We only had one invitation. Going back to the fiftieth [anniversary], that was 2000. When it did take place, [it was] the officers of the Middlesex that led the parade. I noticed that they didn’t have bowler hats and rolled up umbrellas, like the majority of officers. And when I approached them, I said, “Gentlemen, you’re all improperly dressed today.” And they said, “Yes, we are, Green: we fought alongside you in Korea in the same clothing as you … and that is the way we are marching today. We are proud to walk alongside you, and we hope you are with us also.” And then after that parade, there was sixteen of us which was invited back to Wellington Barracks, to a Middlesex dinner. And as we got to the door, it’s the only time we have been received like [that], there was all the top brass of the Middlesex. They all stood up, and the band played the regimental march. We walked in, and they clapped us, and then beckoned us to sit down. And that was one of the proudest days that I can remember. That somebody did recognise us.

CHAPTER 9

Private Anthony James White Anthony James White

Fig. 9.1  Anthony James White at home A. J. White (*) Royal Ulster Rifles, Oxfordshire, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_9

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“It’s something that I did. I didn’t want to do it at the time, but I’m glad I did now.” This is how Anthony James White looks back upon the Korean War, and the description rings true throughout his account. There is a certain reluctance evident around his conscription and a disappointment in some aspects of how soldiers were treated at the time. Nevertheless, since the 1990s, Anthony has engaged with his own history and his relationship to the Korean War. Now, he feels he is a better person for having come through his experience of a country at war, because it helps him understand “what lots of the world goes through.” Plucked from a building apprenticeship, Anthony studied at John Brookes College in Oxford before national service. Like so many others, he knew little of Korea and was not even aware that he had “volunteered” to be part of operations there until a chance conversation six months into his service. Aspects like this did not improve much once he got to the front line, because his units rarely knew where they were in Korea, and the Army did not show much inclination to help them understand. As Anthony notes, “The British Army at that time didn’t really treat normal soldiers as intelligent people; they thought they were just cannon fodder.” Anthony’s interview is noteworthy for its insight into the soldier’s experience. He vividly recalls the trials of combat and one instance when he narrowly avoided serious injury or death from a mortar attack. He recounts successful and unsuccessful operations, as well as one that involved civilians that he felt his unit “didn’t ought to be doing.” There is a sense of powerlessness due to the conditions in which soldiers operated. They were caught in “limbo,” he says, unsure of the state of the war and at the mercy of the Korean weather. “You live day to day, and just hope,” Anthony tells us. Most intriguingly, he relays the difficulty for a soldier who has adjusted to these challenging circumstances on the front, to then return to the barracks. “You get used to the combat bit and then when you get back [to the barracks] you see it’s really not as pleasant [compared to life on the front],” he confesses, before adding “Almost!” followed by a wry laugh. Anthony speaks softly and reflects on difficult experiences with humour punctuated by a gentle laugh. There is emotion in his voice when he thinks back to the battlefields of Korea and when he considers his life after the war, particularly about revisiting Korea with his daughter over forty years later. He somewhat reluctantly accepts the title of veteran, feeling that a year on the front in Korea does not compare with the service of veterans of the Second World War. Nevertheless, he recognizes the

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importance of the Korean War to South Koreans and to the containment of communism in Asia. Anthony was interviewed in December 2019. * * * My name is Anthony James White. I am 91 years old. I’m a retired builder, and I served in the Korean War, 1951. And what did you do in the war? I was a rifleman in the Royal Ulster Rifles and also an Assault Pioneer. And when you went to Korea how old were you? I was twenty-one and four months. And before you went to Korea, what were you doing? I was apprenticed to a firm of builders, carpenters, and joiners, and for most of that time I was attending what is now John Brookes College in Oxford, one day a week. Did you volunteer for the war? Or were you conscripted? I did not … [laughs] I didn’t volunteer but after six months in Korea, I met a corporal of our regiment and I asked him why I hadn’t got an extra star which was due to me for the first six months I’d been in. And he said, “Well, you’re a volunteer, aren’t you?” I said, “No.” And he said, “Oh, yes. Had you down as a volunteer in my book.” So, I was volunteered by the drafting officer—originally, I think, without my knowledge. How did that happen? Well, he just said, “I’m putting you down for Korea, is that alright?” and the sergeant interrupted and said, “Quick march. Quick march. Right turn. You’re finished.” You know? That was that. No chance to make a comment. Before you went to Korea, how was training? Well, it was totally unexpected. The Korean War just really started when I had my call up papers. By the time I had finished basic training, they was sending British troops and three regiments went from England by troopship. They arrived in Korea sometime in November 1950, and I was one of the first line reinforcements that followed on. What was your journey like going to Korea? Well, first of all the troopship broke down in the Indian Ocean. We then had to swap to a P&O liner, which took us up to Hong Kong. We

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were expected to go to the Wiltshire regiment at that time, but the war changed. The Chinese were just about to enter the war and so they realized that they would need reinforcements very quickly. They moved us on to the base in Japan supplying the British Korean forces, where we stayed until just after Christmas. The Gloucester Rifles lost a company, and we arrived in Korea about the 7th of January 1951. And how long were you posted there? The regiment stayed there until the end of November 1951, and it was then transferred to Hong Kong. I had still got six months of my period to do in the Army and I went with them. And when you found out you were going to Korea, how did you feel about that? [laughs] Well, obviously it was a bit of a shock! We didn’t know much about it; we didn’t even know where Korea was at that first moment! [laughs] But, the Korean War varied so much in its early stages, it was difficult to form an opinion as to what we were likely to do. What was your attitude towards the war? Well, I accepted that I got to go. I didn’t particularly want to go but I wouldn’t have said no, in any case. Once you got to Korea, what were your main duties? Well, occupying the front line and carry out the war as it were. We started advancing about middle of February because the weather had deteriorated so much during early-January. Most of the operations were frozen to a stop. At that point in time, the Chinese had reoccupied Seoul for the second time and the front line was about twenty miles south of the Han River. They had overstretched their supply lines. The weather being very cold, sometimes minus forty degrees; it brought things to a stop, or almost a stop. Patrols were kept, both sides weren’t catering each other in on the patrols but mostly there was no fierce engagement at that point. And then we started to advance and reoccupy Seoul towards the end of February, I think. And then we’d go on up through North Korea until we’d reach the old dividing line which was roughly the 38th Parallel. At that point, it was decided to reinstate that line as a boundary, so we didn’t progress beyond that point but [the] war carried on. The Chinese still tried to break through. And they did in fact break through on 22 April and almost recaptured Seoul, but fortunately that was brought to a stop and the line was then reinstated on the 38th Parallel. What were the most memorable aspects about your journey to Korea?

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The final stage from Hong Kong to Japan we did in an aircraft carrier, during which time we had a typhoon which washed away some of the equipment from the decks. It was a very horrendous journey! [laughs] And what do you remember most about day-to-day life in Korea? Well, in the early stages it was bitterly cold. Every day started with a stand to at break [of] dawn. If there were no engagements in the night, we then would spend most of the time if we were stationary reinforcing the position—digging the holes deeper, setting up barbed wire barricades, and laying mine fields. Did you have much interaction with other military forces from other countries? Oh, no. We did see them. The Belgian regiment was in the same brigade, but we didn’t actually personally have much contact. Did you have much contact with people in the UK while you were over there? None at all really, only by post. There was no telephone system. What did you think of the kit the government gave you for the war? The equipment? Well, we were using the equipment, generally, which was used in the Second World War. Practically identical. What was that like? Pretty poor really. Nothing like the American equipment. The uniforms were very much the same and all we had was extra jerseys and long johns really, plus a wind suit which was a very thin material held up with tapes. How did you know about the American equipment? Well, we did see it. We were exchanging positions very often. They would come through us, and we would go through them. And what were those interactions like? Oh, there was always a good interaction; there was never any confrontation with it. They were a great help in many ways. Were there any aspects of the Korean culture or food that you remember strongly? Oh, yes. We had Korean porters. We had about thirty allocated to each regiment, all of which had to be fed with Korean food. I never actually had any Korean food myself. Most of our food was supplied directly from the Americans. How were your interactions with the Korean people? Well, the only Korean people we met were the porters. Because the Korean people, most of them had left that area. There was always a long stream of refugees coming from the North which had to be vetted because some of them were carrying arms for their guerrilla forces. We didn’t have

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much to do with the Korean people, just one or two porters and the interpreter. Did you ever meet any of the members of the guerrilla forces? Yeah, well, the guerrilla forces were left over, or soldiers of the North Korean Army who had disappeared into the hills and were kept by any of the indigenous population that wanted to look after them. So, if they were [there], we had to try to winkle them out. Did you have any interactions with prisoners of war? Not really. We didn’t take many prisoners of war actually. The British particularly. You said that you were a rifleman, are there any experiences from the front line that you’re willing to share? Well, it’s difficult to recall any actual ones, but I do know that on one occasion the North Korean forces were occupying a hill that was in the way of the advance to Seoul. It was decided that the main body of the Ulster Rifles would attack that hill from the west and the unit I was in would attack from the east to draw the fire, which would keep the North Koreans occupied while the main regiment climbed the hill. We travelled from our current position riding on the tanks to a start point, to the front, in what’s called no man’s land. We then had to advance towards this hill, but in the process we got bogged down by three-inch mortar fire from this hill. The ground in front of us was covered in snow and the sun was very bright and came up over the hill so that we couldn’t really look in that direction, or at least you couldn’t see what you were actually shooting at. They had a three-inch mortar, which was very accurate, [and] they brought down fire. One of the bombs landed within about three feet of me—I was filling a Bren gun with ammunition at the time. It resulted in two killed and injuring about six of the other members. But everything from that explosion, although I was so close, actually went over [the] top of me. [It] covered me with ice and snow and mud, but fortunately nothing hard enough to penetrate or give me a problem. [That was] the closest I came to a direct hit. How did you get out of that situation? The officer was loaded onto a tank—he’d got a head wound, from which he died on the way back to the medical camp—but we carried on moving forward until we ran out of ammunition and then we had to rapidly retreat because of that. It lasted all day and [it] ended [not] very well for our particular section of it. And towards the end of your time there, what was it like leaving Korea?

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Well, Korea is a land of many different climates really. Very cold in winter. In the spring it all warms up and everything turns green. And then the summer is quite hot, with the monsoon rain at times. Then you get the typhoon season again towards October, and it reverts back to winter. By then we’d become pretty much used to the situation, and I suppose you become somewhat of an animal. You live day to day, and just hope. How was your extraction from Korea? Oh, that went quite well actually. The position was occupied then by the Royal Norfolk regiment, and we had to hand over the equipment, all the vehicles and weapons and so on. On the last day, the final four of us had to go and occupy a hill which the brigadier general in charge wanted destroyed before the Norfolk Regiment took over. He felt it was a bit of a shock for them to have to do something like that on their first day. So, we had to go early morning. Four of us went with the four tanks, and the tanks climbed the hill and blew the top off, along with the occupiers. And so, we [weren’t] actually needed; we just sat and watched. But it meant that we didn’t go back until late at night [and] we had to catch up with the others. It was eight o’clock in the evening. From then on, it was just normal. We had to try to revert to being barrack room soldiers as it were, which is rather different from combat soldiers. You have to start dressing, and parades, and training, and all the rest of the things that soldiers have to do when they’re not actually in war. Really, you get used to the combat bit and then when you get back, you see it’s really not as pleasant [away from the front], almost! [laughs] Silly thing to say but it’s certainly … a different environment. How did that transition go? How long did it take you to transition back to home life? Well, you see, we were taken by crew ship from Pusan to Hong Kong and that was a period of rehabilitation almost, as the Korean War was almost forgotten about, by the time I left Hong Kong. And when I got home, no one wanted to know about the Korean War, and they don’t want to know now either. I don’t think I actually spoke to anyone about the Korean War really until about 1996 when my wife suggested I go back to Hong Kong to have a look because I talk about Hong Kong to her. Then in the process, I thought well I’ll perhaps have a look in Korea and see what it’s like. Then I joined the Korean Veterans Association, and I was treated like royalty when I did arrive in Korea. It was incredible. I have been again since, but that was with a group. The first time I just went with my daughter, and we were looked after by the Korean Embassy and the

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British military attaché. It was a brigadier and he insisted that we have his jeep for the day and tour the front—you know, all the positions that we used [to patrol] forty years earlier, and [he] took us in hand and showed us everything really. What was it like going back to that battlefield after so many years? Well, that was a bit emotional, and it still is. When you got home, did you remain in the armed forces? No, no. Originally, we were called up for eighteen months, and immediately [when] the Korean War started, they added six months and also three years in the Territorial Army. So, I still had to do the three years in the Territorial Army after doing two years in Korea. At least the two years includes the going up and getting there and back again. Because on a crew ship, [it] took us twenty-eight days to get back from Hong Kong and going out took us about eight weeks to get to Korea. And what was the journey on the way back like? Well, that was very pleasant because we didn’t have to do anything. We just sat on the deck and read a lot of books. Are there any memorable events from that journey? Not really. Only when we got back, a friend of mine who was a secretary to the Duke of Norfolk, he found out when the troopship was coming in, and he came down in a veteran car he got and drove along the dock. We docked about four o’clock in the afternoon, and most of the troops got off, but our particular bunch was coming from Hong Kong, so we had to wait until everybody else had gone and get off at ten o’clock the following morning. So, we just spent the evening lining the rail and watching what was going on. And then my friend turned up in his car, and he asked for me to go ashore. I had an hour ashore with him, which was quite a performance really because he drove up and down the dock in this veteran car and people were waving in all directions. It was [a] rather unusual situation. Do you think the Korean War has been forgotten? The Korean War, well, it has been a great thing for the Korean people, at least South Koreans. And it also prevented the spread of communism in the Far East which is what Russia and China wanted to happen. But Korea being joined onto China and also part of Russia; it was a sort of buffer between Japan and those three countries. And so, in actual fact, the Korean War was a very important war from a global point of view but that’s not appreciated in this country. What do you think of the war memorials made for fallen Korea veterans?

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Well, there’s only one, and that’s on the bank of the Thames outside the Ministry of Defence—I think, almost opposite the London Eye. That was three years ago, that [it] was put into position. Korea paid for it; it wasn’t even paid for by the British, so it’s very much a forgotten war. Most people I talk to have no idea of what actually happened in the Korean War because the publicity was non-existent; television hadn’t come into its own at that point, so people didn’t really know. Have you kept in touch with other soldiers from the Korean War? Well, only since 1995 when I joined the Korean Veterans Association. I go to a monthly meeting, and we still do that but none of them were there at the same time as me. The Korean War went on for three years and so each regiment only did a year in the front line. I think in total sixteen UK regiments went. It was an Irish regiment that I was in; lots of them were Irish, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Irishman in our local branch of BKVA. Do you think organizations like that one help to keep the memory of the war alive? Yes, it does. That’s the only thing that does do that actually, [and] even that isn’t welcome. The British Legion didn’t want to recognize the Korean War. Because it was a war that was [not] really on behalf of this country, it was on behalf of the United Nations and it was twenty countries involved in the Korean War. Do you refer to yourself as a veteran? Well, I am. It didn’t seem like the right term for me when I first heard it, but they use that term for everybody who’s spent any time in a wartime campaign, so I presume I’m a veteran. Why did you not think it was the right term for you? Well because one year in the front line didn’t compare much with what people in the Second World War [did], who spent six years in that sort of situation. We really had no comparison with what they did. Looking back on the war now, what do you think of the conflict? Well, obviously, it was a very tough war. It was a very strange war in many ways because there were certain periods when they had peace talks going on, when things were supposed to be temporarily stopped, as it were. In fact, what happened was both sides carried on patrolling and fortifying their camps and the North were preparing an even greater offensive during those periods of time. It was all a bit strange really. As soldiers, we didn’t [know] very much about what was going on around us. You live in a sort of limbo really, because you’re in a unit which is in the front line.

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We never had radios to know what was going on in the outside world, and we never knew where we were in Korea. Sometimes because they wouldn’t tell you, you didn’t know the names of the different places. The British Army at that time didn’t really treat normal soldiers as intelligent people; they thought they were just cannon fodder. What was your attitude towards the war at the beginning and did that change over time? Well, we didn’t really know what we were going into at all until we flew from Japan into Korea in an American Skymaster. On the flight, we were told by the Americans that we were certainly outnumbered thirty-to-one. General MacArthur, once he got involved in the Korean War, instead of stopping at the 38th Parallel, where he was supposed to, he ignored his political masters, as it were, in America, and carried straight on up and went over the Yalu River into China. And that meant that the Chinese got very upset, and they then brought in 300,000 troops—or 400,000—suddenly and kept them hidden, virtually, in the hills, and ambushed the Americans completely. They had to suddenly retreat, leaving all their equipment, back down, and that’s when the Chinese took Seoul for the second time. Seoul changed hands four times during that war, three times in the first six months, almost. What is your attitude towards the war now? Well, it’s something that I did. I didn’t want to do it at the time, but I’m glad I did now. It was an experience which … I wouldn’t really want to go through again, but having done so, I’m probably the better for it. Why do you say that? I now know what lots of the world goes through, because I think most of the people in this country have no idea of what that sort of situation is like. People who were born—or grew up—since the Second World War have no real idea. And it annoys me, really. I once had the job of holding up traffic on remembrance morning, while a troop of soldiers were at the memorial in our village. The first car I stopped was occupied by a young chap, about twenty years old, I suppose, and he said, “Why are we stopped?” And I said, “Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to stop until this service is finished.” And he said, “Why is there one?” I said, “Well, it’s Remembrance Day service.” “What’s that all about?” he said.

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And I was amazed; he didn’t even know what Remembrance Day was and that was really about the Second World War! [laughs] It seems that history has missed out on the Korean War. At least, history lessons in school. Are there any other stories from your time in Korea that you’d like to share? Well, I have a hundred of them, but I can’t really relate them out of the blue. One of the patrols we had to do was on the east coast which is on the Yellow Sea, and there were a number of boats occupied by families who were fishermen and so on, and they were frozen in along the coast. It was said that they were harbouring Northern forces and also carrying weapons. So, we had to go and knock the bottoms out of these boats, which was a bit—I don’t know how to describe it. They were also occupied by women and children, and it was something it seemed we didn’t ought to be doing, but there we are.

CHAPTER 10

Major John Lane John Lane

Fig. 10.1  Major John Lane in dress uniform J. Lane (*) Royal Artillery, Shrewsbury, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_10

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John Lane joined the British Army as a national service conscript in 1947 and enjoyed it so much that he decided to remain a soldier. He was commissioned from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in 1949. In contrast to the shock experienced by some national servicemen, many regular soldiers greeted going to war in Korea with anticipation. When John’s commanding officer told his unit at a meeting in the mess hall that they would be going to Korea, the announcement was mainly met with cheers. For John, personally, after long periods of repetitive and monotonous training, he was keen to get some real action. The only exceptions to the celebratory mood were the veterans of the Second World War. “[T]hey knew what was coming,” he says. John was a gun position officer serving with the Royal Artillery, and, in that role, he often occupied forward observation posts, sometimes having to stand up to direct his unit’s fire even when the infantry kept their heads down. He recalls the intensity of combat in those battles and how it focused his mind on his immediate surroundings. “Your periphery of interest is as far as you can see … especially if somebody’s firing bullets at you.” He jettisons all reverence for war when thinking about the fear that stalked life on the front line. On one occasion, his observation post was hit with a 120mm shell, the blast reshaping his pistol to resemble a question mark. The experience was so intense that he was unable to speak for ten minutes, and he has been deaf ever since. His overwhelming emotion upon finishing service in Korea was relief. Aside from the experience of combat, John’s interview reveals that his abiding memories are of the types of people with whom he served. He describes the relationship between the officers and privates as intimate, even if spoken interactions retained a layer of military formality. He speaks fondly of the national servicemen drafted to fight in the conflict, describing them as “bloody good kids,” and notes that the reservists who had served in the Second World War were “very steady.” When his observation post was hit, his fellow soldiers dug him out; when others were injured, he describes the importance of providing succour while waiting for the support of the medical personnel. This human dimension underpins much of the testimony. For all the challenges of his time spent in Korea, John also recounts some lighter moments. He was able to trade four bottles of whisky for an American jeep and subsequently enjoyed his own personal vehicle for a time. Life on the front did not put him off spending the rest of his career in the British Army. His service took him to Germany, Scotland, and

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Northern Ireland, before he retired with the rank of major. After retiring, he worked with the SSAFA supporting military families. John was interviewed in December 2019. * * * For the record, please state your name Yes, John Murry Lane. That is my full name. I was born in Africa, in the Sudan, in 1929. Could you tell me a bit about growing up in the Sudan? Yes, yes. I mean, I never had a colour problem because from day one colour was all around me and I took it for granted that so did the rest of the world, but it never did. I had to come back in the end to a boarding school, because the education facilities were very limited. Port Sudan is on the Red Sea, about half-way down, and in the 1920s and 1930s it was a coaling station. My father was managing a very large organisation, which included an office in the Sudan, and he was concerned mainly with refuelling passenger ships going up and down the Red Sea on the way to or from India. Then I came to this country in about 1937 to go to boarding school. I went to boarding school at the King’s School, Ely, in Cambridgeshire. I was there for ten years. [After] having cried for about a week of homesickness, I had a very enjoyable ten years. What did you do after boarding school? Well, I didn’t get any choice because when you were eighteen you were called up for national service. I was called up in November of 1947. Nobody had the choice—if they were fit, they were in. I thoroughly enjoyed my national service. I certainly realised that I enjoyed being in the Army. So, I stayed, and I was commissioned from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in the winter of 1949. In 1950, I went by troopship to Hong Kong. There I joined a field regiment, the artillery, and we were stationed in tents in the New Territories of Hong Kong. It was delightful to get down to civilisation, having been in tents. At the weekend we [would] just truck ourselves down to Hong Kong and see the bright lights. Living in a tent, in those sort[s] of conditions, was fairly hairy, but still [we] survived that. And then, in the winter of 1951, we were dispatched by troopship—the regiment was called 14th Field Regiment Royal Artillery—to Pusan in Korea. Then we were there! And we were delighted ‘cause it was sort of very non-military and not “British Army” at all. On the quayside, where we landed, was an American military

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band. They were all Negro guys, and they played with tremendous flair. Boogie-woogie, you name [it], the lot. Of course, this [was] very unusual for us, noses in the air, rigid-type conservatives but we loved it. The first year … the North Koreans invaded South Korea and resistance was pretty poor. The South Korean Army wasn’t well equipped, and the American troops stationed there were not competent troops. They were administrative troops and so resistance was pretty limited. The North Korean forces got as far as Pusan and [the United Nations forces] defended, fortunately, a very good perimeter all around that area there and held their own. Then came reinforcements, fighting troops, and cleverly pushed them back. When we arrived to take over from the first regiment of artillery, which had been there for the first year, we were just almost on the original border, the 38th Parallel. It was the only sort of border in a complete straight line. I have a feeling it was too rushed. A Russian officer and an American officer met probably over too much vodka and decided they would have a straight line to divide the Koreas into North and South. So, we were about at the original border and we settled in then because it became very static. In some ways it wasn’t unlike the First World War in France: dug in position, barbed wire, up on high features, and generally bombarding each other, but that’s another story. How long were you posted to Korea? A tour of Korea was a year, and we were never out of the line. You were in the front line all the time and they decided—I think quite rightly—that a year of fairly strenuous and, at times, frightening experience was quite long enough. So, we went back to Hong Kong, which of course was amazing to go back [to] after the mud and the shells and the barbed wire and the horrible parts of Korea. Korea in those days was not backward but it was a peasant economy, certainly in South Korea. North Korea had what industries there were and that was just the state of things. And South Korea was more agricultural, but their roads were very poor, most of them were tracks and the peasants lived in huts and so on. Having said that, it was quite interesting because I met central heating for the first time. I went through a village, and a lot of the villages had small houses, huts if you like. They had a fire going via a tunnel which they’d bored under the floor of the hut. It was central heating and it worked. Of course, you needed central heating in winter. In summer you slept, or you could sleep, underneath a mosquito net and with very little on because it was hot as hell, and in winter [it was] minus twenty degrees. If they were static, we used to start the men with twenty

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minutes [exercise] to stop them all from freezing, that shows you something. God it was cold. How did you feel when you found out that you were going to Korea? Well, I can tell you exactly. You see, when the Army’s not fighting a war, it is usually training. And training gets quite monotonous when you’re good at what you are doing. It’s very repetitive. Of course, there’s lots of sport and lots of activities and fun and games but, by and large, you train for war and if you don’t have a war to fight—you don’t twiddle your thumbs, but it can be a little bit boring! So, I can remember quite vividly. One of the only huts we had in our tented camp was a mess hall and an officers’ and sergeants’ mess. They were the only permanent mess and hut, and there was a regimental gathering in the mess hall, and the CO got up and he said, “Gentlemen, we are going to Korea.” Everybody cheered, you know, all leapt to their feet. Not everybody. I noticed the people with medals who had survived the world war didn’t cheer, but they knew what was coming. Did you know much about the country or the conflict before you went? No, I didn’t; I had to get a map to find out where it was. What was your attitude towards the war? You know, [in] real active service, bullets are firing and there’s lots of noise and people are getting hurt and people are getting killed. Your periphery of interest is as far as you can see. In a dug-in position that can be 500 yards. And really that is your main concern and that’s what you know about. You’re not a planner. Tactics at the end is somebody telling you to do something and the way to do it. So, you don’t get involved in that sort of thing, of thinking if it’s right or wrong. It’s just a small area around you that holds your interest, especially if somebody’s firing bullets at you. Your journey to Korea from Hong Kong, what was that like? Oh, it was a troopship, and it took about two days, three days. I think people were a bit apprehensive, especially the national servicemen. They never thought … [laughs] they were going to be called up to fight a war. And maybe as a regular I took it for granted and indeed I was keen to get some active service in. No problems. What were your main duties once you arrived in Korea? I was a gun position officer. I was in a battery of artillery, of twenty-five pounder weapons. Each battery consists of four guns and at the gun position end [there is] the GPO and an assistant called a troop leader. They reported from the troop command post which carried out all the sums and

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things, and they reported to the battery command post, which coordinated battery fire, and when the regiment was required to fire on the same target, coordinated fire orders and that sort of thing. So, you’re very busy when you’re in action. Very busy. What was day-to-day life in Korea like? Well, you were either on duty or off duty. If you were on duty, you were fully occupied. The welfare of your men also mattered. But obviously, the [main] requirement [was] to respond to fire orders instantly, sometimes [to] stay at the guns [for long periods]. When the first Battle of the Hook [took place], which the Black Watch was involved, we were in action all night and we fired something like 450 rounds, which is a lot of artillery, in the support. So, you’re either fully committed to your artillery job or in the twenty-four hours off that you had, or twelve hours, you had been fed and watered yourself. And you washed and you shaved, and you looked after your soldiers. Did you have much contact with people or family from England in Korea? Very remotely. In those days, air mail was very doubtful. I used to write once a month or something, but there was no way you would telephone obviously. No, [my family] were in South Africa by the way, in Cape Town. How did you feel about your equipment? Well, it was old. A twenty-five-pounder gun, wonderful gun, and it was brought into service in the British Army in 1939. It was proven, it really was. It was a very robust weapon, easily handled, and we thought no more about it. The one sore point initially in our first winter was the lack of proper combat clothes to cope with the extremes of temperature and especially the winter—woah, it was cold! We scrounged a lot of American winter kit from the American soldiers. In the end our winter combat kit was as good as anything, and indeed the Americans were grateful to scrounge things from us. Could you tell me a bit more about the Battle of the Hook? Yes, well there were several Battles of the Hook. It was a very strange place to look at; you didn’t think it had any strategic significance at all. But it was well dug in, surrounded by barbed wire, with plenty of fox holes and communication trenches, and the Chinese began shelling. Don’t forget about North Koreans, don’t just assume that [it was] the Chinese [that] were there in force. The shelling became intense, and we responded with what we called defensive fire. This fire was pre-arranged and pre-recorded to go on lines of approach to the Hook that the Chinese were liable to take. The Chinese were very brave, stupidly so, I think. Not all of them

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had rifles, and in an attack we were told that the second line would pick up the rifles of the dead and wounded that had been dropped in the first line. On the other hand, they were very brave chaps—either under the influence of drugs or very brave. And invariably we had been listening to one of the very few radios that the Chinese Army employed in their battalion groups. We were told many times how many waves hadn’t reached the barbed wire because we had destroyed them, we must have killed thousands. Very sad. How much more combat did you see in Korea? In the observation post, which I did a spell quite often, you were up with the infantry directing fire, usually counter-fire and supporting fire in the event of an attack. An artillery man, the observer, is right up with the infantry. And he’s standing out directing fire when the infantry were essentially keeping their head down. But at the gun position you were on call every minute of every twenty-four hours. Did you have contact with the local people? None. Local people, sensibly, had disappeared. They didn’t stay around the battlefield. We saw, occasionally [when we] came back [from the front], you could see the refugee columns. Very, very sad. Especially at the beginning of the war when the South Koreans had to avert direction, there were lots and lots of refugees and lots and lots of civilians killed. But we didn’t see any. Did you have any leave during your time in Korea? Yes, I had four days “R and R”—rest and recuperation I think it was called—in Japan. All of a sudden you really wanted to [have your] fill of fun and games because you never knew if you would get another opportunity, so that was good. It was very good. Everybody rotated to do that sort of thing, but four days in a year is not particularly long, is it? Did you encounter many soldiers from other countries? We were closely integrated. I met all sorts: Canadians—the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery had a regiment out there—the Australians, the Royal Australian Regiment, bloody good soldiers they were too. I met the boys from the New Zealand artillery regiment and so in the end there was this nucleus of colonials [laughs] and us which was so integrated. It was great fun; they were great chaps and we got on like a house on fire. And, of course, Americans; they didn’t operate within our Commonwealth Division area, but they were alongside of us, and the Korean Army of course.

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You mentioned the Australians were good soldiers. What made them good soldiers? They were tough cookies. You know, if you’re a settler … Your background, [if] your family settled in a place like Australia, you’re bound to be tough. And they had a great sense of humour; they didn’t give a toss for badges of rank or anything like that; they were great boys. How were the relationships between officers and regular soldiers? Well, it was intimate actually. Almost intimate. I mean, you didn’t call on each other; it was still a “yes sir, no sir” [situation], but it was intimate. Don’t forget, when you were at war, you were watching somebody’s back and then you hoped somebody was watching yours, and it could be a private soldier, the chap behind you. So, you rely on each other. I don’t think a pompous officer would last long. Are there any events from your time in Korea that you found particularly memorable? Yes, I was in an observation post with the forward company, with the Royal Leicesters. And, needless to say, when your company position is being shelled, it’s the responsibility of the forward observation officer, who is the artillery man, and I was one of those at one time, to send in shell reps, shell reports. This is your indication of where the shells were coming from, so that we could arrange counter-battery. If you are being shelled and you’re not sending a shout out, you keep your head down. I was in this observation post and it was hit by a 120mm shell. I didn’t actually wet my pants, but I was speechless. I didn’t speak for about ten minutes, I couldn’t. One hell of a bang and I’ve been deaf ever since. And I was very frightened. But the soldiers were jolly good, they came, helped me out, and dug me out and all the rest of it. Did you require medical care? Yes, half a bottle of whisky! [laughs] No, I didn’t have a scratch on me. It was funny, my pistol was hanging on a rock in the roof of this dugout, and it had finished up with a bow and bent like a question mark, but they drew no blood. Did you see any injuries while you were there? Oh, dear me, yes, well of course. People get killed and maimed. It’s not very nice. Do you want any particular details? I think the best thing of all is if you can provide succour to a wounded chap who is probably in pain. He’s a young national serviceman, he’s eighteen and a half years of age, and he’s been wounded. It was very difficult to determine when a chap was wounded, because you’re not medically trained to know how serious

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or superficial it is. But you had to comfort the chap, and the regimental aid post [that was] up with the infantry, they provided some sort of comfort, but they used to take ages to get people back to proper medical facilities. Each regiment, each battalion of infantry, had a medical officer who was a junior doctor, and he had some staff. He had a Land Rover and he had two stretchers attached to it, and if a chap was wounded, he was taken to the regimental aid post, which is just behind the front line. [From] there he was taken via an ambulance to a military hospital. Now all that could take, and over very rugged roads as you can imagine, some time. When you compare it with facilities nowadays, with a Hercules helicopter [that] will land with a highly trained surgical team and start doing advanced surgery on the chap as he is lying where he was wounded, that’s why of course you find a lot of disabled guys surviving that didn’t survive if you were badly wounded in Korea. How did you feel when you left Korea? Relieved, you know. You stop shitting bricks [laughs]. No, I mean it was a huge relief, a huge relief. We went back to Hong Kong where things were entirely different. Fun and games. We still kept our eye in and did lots of continuous training. It was nice to not have the strain of possibly being under fire every day of the month in Korea. Relieved I think is the word. How much longer did you remain in the armed forces? I had a full career. I retired when I was sixty. Could you tell me more about your career? It was varied. I travelled elsewhere. I finished up commanding a battery in Germany, an eighteen-inch nuclear howitzer. I became the senior personnel selection officer in Scotland. I served as the adjutant of a TA regiment in Northern Ireland. I was second in command of the recruit training regiment, just down the road from me. So, there we are, quite a variety. After you left the army and retired, what did you do then? I became a welfare case worker with SSAFA, the Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen and Families Association. You look after, you find out and help, either financially or with words or actions, military families and people who have had a bit of bad luck. Do you refer to yourself as a veteran now? Hmmm … I suppose so. After a lifetime, it begins to show. I’m never quite sure what a veteran is. I mean a veteran can be in the army for two days nowadays and be called a veteran. No, no, I didn’t … it wasn’t a word that I would use. An old soldier perhaps.

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Do you think Korea has been forgotten? Oh yes. When we got back to the UK there were no brass bands; there were no cheering crowds. Why? I think people were fed up and didn’t want to think of war anymore. They’d just survived a world war and it didn’t improve morale. However, we did feel forgotten. I think we’re still called the “forgotten army,” but it didn’t matter. It was the way things were and it was the way people felt. What did you think of the Chinese and North Korean forces? I think the North Koreans were okay when they were winning, but they weren’t very much use and that was why the Chinese [had to enter the war]. The Chinese were brave, and they used the tactics of massed force. Rumour has it that the second wave or the third wave didn’t have any rifles; they’d pick up the rifles of the dead of the first wave. But I don’t know, perhaps that was just rumour. But they were very brave and tenacious. I mean time and time again they came in, and we must have killed thousands of them with our defensive fire and, so, it’s not really for discussion, but they were brave. Was there a rivalry between different units and different nationalities? It was friendly rivalry. The Americans could never imagine how we could engage a target so quickly, under a minute and fifteen seconds. They sent teams to our artillery command post to see how we did it. We didn’t think, we just did it according to our custom. And they never did … they were a bit casual. However, when you’re on the same side, it’s friendly rivalry and no more, no less. How much did you rely on the Americans for equipment and food? None. All the equipment we had was British home-made and well proven in World War II. So, we didn’t rely on them at all. Saying that, perhaps as an aside, I was quite envious of this American sergeant that I met behind the lines and he was driving a good Ford Willys Jeep. I’d always hankered after driving one. So, I said “Do you mind if I drive it?” It was lovely to see it, with the hood down, a good old-fashioned jeep, a carbine in a holster across the windscreen, and I just thought, “God, this is the bees’ knees.” And he sold it to me, for four bottles of whisky, and I had a jeep. Don’t forget, America of course provided all—not all, the RAF would kill me—the air support. What did you do with the jeep after you bought it? I used it as my personal vehicle. It was wonderful! [laughs] I think I probably crashed it in the end, but I didn’t mean to.

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During your time in Hong Kong, how was the relationship between the soldiers and the locals? Well, there was a problem; there was one of communication obviously, when it came to the language. Hong Kong, for us, was our tented camp up in the New Territories, and being flooded with the monsoons and that sort of thing. It was quite a relief for the boys to get in the back of the lorry and go down the road and live it up. But I mean they went to the social service clubs and things. I shouldn’t think there was a huge amount of interrelationship that mattered. I mean language clearly [was] never going to work. Is there anything else about your time in Korea that you found particularly memorable? Yes, I can always remember and you never forget. You just take it for granted in the end. You look after each other. You maintain a sense of humour most of the time and you will survive, but some didn’t. Even they, I’m sure, at one time thought they would survive. So, it was good to go there; it was an experience. I thought the soldiers were first rate. Don’t forget we still had national service in those days. I know they had to be eighteen years plus before they could go. They were well trained, but they were impressed as soldiers, and they suddenly realised they could be killed doing it. So, they were bloody good kids. I can always remember the reservists, experienced World War II chaps; they were very steady, and they were very good with the national servicemen. Those are the things that I remember most, about the type of people. What did you think of the reasons why you were fighting in Korea? You mean the “good cause” shit?! Well, you know, you leave that to the politicians. You don’t analyse foreign policy when you’re in the front line. You’re busy keeping alive and doing what you’re told. I don’t think anybody thought of whether it was right or wrong.

CHAPTER 11

Corporal Jim Tait Jim Tait

J. Tait (*) Royal Military Police, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_11

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Fig. 11.1  Jim Tait with three Korean friends (1953)

On route to Korea, Jim Tait got the news: the war was over. He arrived in 1953, after the armistice. His account sounds distinctly different from those that arrived before the armistice. It was a “good posting,” he says. He avoided the combat or harsh weather of the tropical postings. As a military policeman, Jim investigated incidents involving servicemen, but in Korea he admits they had little trouble. Combat had ended, and the trauma of war had passed for the foreign soldiers, even if the Koreans had the wound of partition. Jim came as the South Koreans began to reconstruct and heal. Many of Jim’s stories provide a glimpse into the life of British forces at ease. He played bingo and gambled with cigarettes as currency. He remembers the smells of Pusan, and the black markets of the cities. He taught himself Latin in his spare time. Without the literal

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bombardment, he could relish the resplendent Korean landscape, and take in the fawning poverty, makeshift housing, and countless orphans. He watched the Americans and Commonwealth soldiers board ships and depart Korea. Jim watched the war end. Jim’s personality lends itself to this ultimate moment of the Korean War. He has a curiosity about people and places. During his deployment in Japan, he even wandered to Mt Fuji without permission in order to steal a photograph of the snow-capped peak. He laughs frequently, in low bursts, and mostly when he remembers seemingly trifling moments that stand out. He can vividly recall the food, hobbies that soldiers kept, the comforts or lack thereof, and even the trinkets that defined his time there. He laughs at our humanity and how soldiers passed the day. The work of a soldier interests him less. He mentions parades, uniforms, and the assignments of a military policeman, but these episodes seem to shrink in scale when compared for his affection for the people he meets. He remembers American generosity, Australian bonhomie, and the hospitality of the Japanese. Jim has a special place in his heart for the Koreans. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that after the war Jim trained as a nurse and worked with the National Health Service for thirty-seven years because his curiosity and interest in people is so often found in carers like Jim. Despite a whirlwind tour around the world at nineteen and being recalled to the Army in 1956, Jim has lived almost exclusively in south-­ west London. He was born in Balham in 1934, grew up in Wimbledon, went to university, and worked for the NHS in Kingston, and has retired to New Malden. He never relinquished his interest in caring for others. He stays busy in retirement as secretary of his local Korean Veterans Association. Even with sixty members, a dwindling number, it keeps him connected to the veteran community. Jim has also managed to return to Korea for revisits. Jim was interviewed in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic forced the world into isolation, and he invited the interviewers to dinner at the Union Jack Club in London, simply to hear more about the oral history project. * * * What year did you go to Korea? 1953. I left England on the 10 July 1953, and, of course, the armistice was drawn up on the 27 July. So, I was halfway there because all the troop

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ships took at least four weeks to get there. And I was on a good ship, the HMS Asturias, and it came out we must have been in the Red Sea or somewhere, and it came over the ship’s tannoy that the armistice had been drawn up and everybody on board cheered because most of them were infantrymen and were going to go up the front. By the time I got to Korea, it was about the 10 August, so I was never there when the war was on but just after it. I was nineteen. No soldiers were allowed to go into a military zone even now until they reach nineteen. So, if you weren’t nineteen, you may get held up and stopped at Hong Kong until you reached the age of nineteen in the Army. But I was nineteen, strutting around with a pistol and ammunition. I volunteered for three years because I wanted to pick my regiment, as you could do, because you may know that in the military services—Army, Navy, Air Force—as a national serviceman, whatever you asked for you got the opposite. So, I signed on for three years, and before I joined the Army at eighteen, I was making clinical thermometers in a factory; as was usual in those days, to get into a factory it was quite easy. There was almost full employment in 1950, and I got trained into making clinical thermometers for two years, and like most national servicemen and others we didn’t go back after our military service to the trade we’d learnt. I’m saying these things because you might not know that fact but a lot learned very good trades in the Army such as engineering and signals and radio and all those sorts of things. They actually came back to a different job. How long had you been in the armed forces and what was your rank? Three years. And then I was on reserve for four years. In that four years, I got recalled to the Army in 1956 for the Suez crisis. So, you may know a bit about that: Sir Anthony Eden the PM at the time and Colonel Nassar involved. [Eden] decided he was going to get it back for England—the Suez Canal—and there was a bit of connivery, trickery, and they didn’t tell the Americans they were going to do what they did. That war only lasted two days; it started on the 5 of November 1956 and finished on the 7 of November 1956. So, I was back in the Army for five months. My rank was on leaving a corporal, and I was in the Royal Military Police. I signed on for the Royal Military Police, not knowing they’re not a very popular regiment in the Army but I’m still here! I’m still here despite it, and I didn’t get into a lot of difficulties in the military police. Maybe it’s because of where I was stationed in Korea, there weren’t a lot of problems in the Army.

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I was there for nine months. Most people that went to Korea did a twelve-month stint; even if they got there in 1951, they’d do until 1952. I was there for nine months, and I had some wonderful postings afterwards because I had nine months in Japan, nine months in Hong Kong. They were good postings in the Army because there were some bad postings, difficult postings. Egypt wasn’t very popular due to the heat, the sand, and other local restrictions. They was trying to get the British Army out of Egypt, but I had good postings. How did you feel when you found out you were going to Korea and did you know where it was? I volunteered! I volunteered to go to Korea because they wanted six people to go in about May 1953, and some of my friends put their name down and they said to go, “Come on Tait how about you putting your name down?” I didn’t know anything about Korea. We weren’t told anything in the Army about Korea, I’d been working in a factory from 1950 to 1952 when the war was on in full swing. Honestly, as teenagers we didn’t know about Korea. Even in the Army we weren’t told before we went there what it was about. You’ll generally hear from most veterans that they didn’t know where Korea was. Quite common to hear that. We didn’t even look we were just soldiers; we went where we were told. It was the other side of the world. What was your attitude towards the war and did it change over time? I didn’t really have an attitude towards it. When I got there, it was virtually over. It had been at a standstill for about twelve months, and although British servicemen were still getting killed and there were minor skirmishes, but for the last twelve months they had come to a sort of halt at the 38th parallel. That’s another story about the division of Korea because that was being discussed in the conferences in the Second World War in Potsdam and Yalta between President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Stalin. They were talking about what they were going to do with Korea because I’ve read it up! I’ve read really good history books about before the war and the politics of it … you will know that they decided Russia would manage the North and America would occupy and manage the South of Korea … it was decided in 1943 or ’44. What were the most memorable aspects of the journey to Korea? [Laughter] Playing bingo! Every night on deck, the crew had bought all the books on to play organised bingo—very low stakes. On the way there, of course it was very hot on the way there; we were in cabins on the boat. We weren’t on troop decks. We stopped at the usual places like

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Aden, Singapore. I don’t think we stopped at Hong Kong. I was in the police; there was no real trouble on board the boat. You couldn’t go anywhere! And the amount of cigarettes that were around at that time! People used to, soldiers used to, play cards for cigarettes. I, strangely enough, had started learning Latin before I left England, and in those days you could get “teach yourself” books. We learnt most things from “teach yourself” books. It might be about astronomy or mathematics or whatever. I spent some time in the quiet room perhaps in the little library there on board the ship, but there was nothing very memorable. There was some things memorable when we arrived at Pusan. Well nearly every time people talk about Pusan, they talk about the smell of Pusan before they ever reach it! From about four miles out at sea they say, because in those days the Koreans used to use human excreter for fertiliser on the land. There was such poverty in Pusan because at one time there had been about a million refugees that had moved down to Pusan because they were getting away from the war in the North. When I got to Pusan, there weren’t a million there but there might’ve been half a million. When we actually got into Pusan, which was a lot of shacks, buildings made of Coca-Cola tins which somehow made into corrugated iron or cardboard. There were lots of refugees living in great poverty there, and it’s such a wonderful city now, and I have been there since. In Pusan, there was a very big transit camp because that’s where all the soldiers that were going home would be housed. They’d been waiting for their ship to take them home and really, they behaved very well because they wanted to get home without any difficulties. There was nothing for the troops to do really in Pusan, there were no bars, no dance halls; there were a few brothels if you knew where to find them! There was black markets galore. Loads of goods, you could buy drugs there! I don’t mean you know the drugs of dependence but antibiotics you could buy. They’d been stolen or got there somehow, but Pusan was just a few buildings; not a lot of buildings. It is the biggest port in Korea, which they now call Busan. I spent my nine months in Pusan. We were based inside the transit camp, and there wasn’t a lot of trouble. It was all Commonwealth troops we dealt with, so British, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian troops. Where we were based was very near the military cemetery there … It is the most beautifully cared-for cemetery probably in the world now. The South Koreans and the British services have people that look after the war graves all round the world. You’ve only got to look at what goes on in France when they go to the cemeteries; they’re all beautifully looked after. When I got to Korea, it was

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just the poverty. We soon found out there were quite a few orphanages as well. These had been very much looked after by the Americans, built by the Americans, out of their generosity. They generally looked after the orphanages for food and medical help. There would’ve been lots of orphans there, you can imagine, little children of all ages three years old, four years old, not in very good health, always seemed to have runny noses, sores on their heads which the Americans would treat … you might not have been aware of all the orphanages but I certainly was. There was one right near our camp near the entrance of our camp, and those kids, well, they’d be grown parents or that sort of age, won’t they? What were your main duties when you arrived there? Ah! On the ports, on the docks: our main duties was on the docks because all the goods that came over from Japan for the Commonwealth troops came in through that port, and all the soldiers coming and leaving came to that port. So, we would always be on duty down there. The other big area was traffic accidents because there were quite a few involving military vehicles. And, of course, the military police dealt with that, whereas up North up in the north of South Korea and in North Korea when the servicemen were in that area, they would have a lot to do with traffic control, route marking. I don’t know the jobs they had up north but they were much different to down south. Our main job was on the docks. There were no bars to bother about—for the soldiers to use. There was a bar in the transit camp but that was run by the NAAFI [Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes], and they were usually well behaved at those places. So, that was our main duties, on the docks, supervising watching goods being unloaded. A ship used to go backwards and forwards between Kure in Japan and Pusan. Every week it would come in, and they used to call them “tramp-steamers.” They were really rust buckets that they used, and they had to be unloaded, and when the ship came in, a crew of Korean porters would come on board, and, I must say, they worked very, very hard until that ship was empty. If a ship arrived at eleven am, they’d be there until two am unloading it, and we had to be down there as well. What do you remember most about day-to-day life over there? The food. [laughter] Our duties. We were always pretty active around the camp, maintaining the vehicles, doing patrols, liaising with the American military police. What did we get up to? [laughter] Hobbies! There was quite a bit of drinking done in our camp. And some of the Americans used to come up to our camp. I’m talking about the military police; we had our own little bar there. The Americans were dry. They

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didn’t have alcohol on-site at all, but some of them who we knew well from an airbase used to come up in a jeep, get quite drunk, get back in the jeep, and drive off back to their camp. We had contact with the American airmen, and you know they had hobbies and interests and I can remember them. Do you know these little car with like little, we had a little racetrack we built for model cars, but they had hobbies and I can remember going into an American engineers camp and in the front of it was a sign stating the cost of items that they used. Like say a big length of pipe, it would have marked on there, “Remember this cost $10 or $15.” Strange, just a little point, but day-to-day life was military. We had parades. We had to keep ourselves very smart. We slept in what’s called Nissen huts, which probably housed about twelve people. We used to make a bedside table out of a beer crate to put our things in! [laughter] We didn’t have lockers you know; you’d have a bed, blankets, and sheets. Oh! For food apart from our own supplies, our cook used to go out with a couple bottles of beer, go to the American camp, and come back with a truckload of food for us! We did pretty well. You know they’d have breakfast cereals, fruit juice. They didn’t have butter, the Americans, and they liked it, so you’d probably go out with a couple of tins of butter and get a supply. We had plenty of food there. I had a Christmas there. Going a long way back to 1953, we had the Coronation in England, and I’ve gone back a bit here. I’d just joined the Army. I’d been in about nine months definitely on parade Coronation Day 1953, May ’53. Okay, my day-to-day life there was military. You know parades, eating, sleeping, no sessions of physical training or anything. The day we arrived in Korea, in Pusan, that day we had a big hill behind us, and we were all for fitness and we said we’re all run up there every day; I think we did it once! It was all good fun and comradeship with the chaps. We were given fifty cigarettes a week free—talk about killing us off! I didn’t smoke anyway, I’d given up. So, we got an allowance of fifty cigarettes a week, so I probably gave mine away. I didn’t do anything else with them. Did you have much contact with people in the UK while in Korea? Yes! Right. I wrote a letter home practically every week. Every week I wrote a letter home. It wasn’t censored, although when I was recalled to the Army for the Suez crisis, our letters were read through, and the Army, they would censor letters and check you’re not saying things that were secret. Yeah, I wrote home. There was no telephoning. No laptops! We’d write home and tell our mums we were okay. I did keep a lot of letters at home, but I’ve probably gotten rid of them all now. The Army had its own

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newspaper—I’ve forgotten the name of it—but the Army did produce its own newspaper, and we used to get films shown in the camp. The NAAFI organised that. Not that I remember seeing any, but we certainly wrote home each week. We got mail. It wasn’t regularly delivered but we got the mail alright, yeah. Are there any objects/items/pieces of kit that you most strongly associate with your time in Korea? I’ve still got a tin opener! [laughter] I’ve got a lot of other things to do with Korea because we’ve still got the veterans association, and I’ve had a lot of contacts with the Koreans, and several times a year I meet or go to an event organised by the Koreans in England. But I haven’t got any kit or any Army kit now. I say, that’s all I’ve got a little tin opener. They were so small; they were only two inches in length, but you could open a tin! Everyone had them, they probably came in every pack of food so plenty of them about, but that’s all I’ve got. I’ve got my memories. That’s all I’ve got. So, what was your impression of your equipment at the time? Was it good or bad? Ours was good at 1953, but in 1950 it was not at all good. 1950 was the coldest winter they’ve ever had in Korea, and you’ll hear that the temperature was −30/−40 [°C] up in the North. At that time, the Americans supplied parkas and a lot of gear for our soldiers. We had standard British Army battle dress gear, and it wasn’t so cold in the south as it was in the north. When I say north, I mean the north of South Korea, not North Korea, although in 1950 they were well up in North Korea in the very cold, and I presume in the summer we wore tropical kit because it was hot in South Korea in the summer so we would have had that. That’s all we needed you know? Just standard, we didn’t need what they needed up north at all. We had standard Army gear, which was always battle dress; there was no such thing as number one dress as soldiers have now. You might have two sets of battle dress with one very much kept for parade, but we had ordinary Army boots and Army clothing. The Korean people are very hardworking. And they’ve been hardworking, not in recent years, because they’ve got a very long history going back 5000 years. They are naturally very hardworking people. Their methods of cultivation, they’re labour-intensive and they’re very caring for their plants. Then the farming was rather primitive, and I’ve only learnt in more recent years that Korean cooking involves a lot of work. It maybe didn’t then because there was such poverty, but traditional Korean cooking is

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hard, hard work. They have their fast-food outlets, of course; up in Seoul they have fast methods but the Koreans will spend hours preparing a meal. They’re very hardworking. And you hear that Korea is such a wonderful country now, and it’s a donator of aid not a receiver—it actually donates aid. They rebuilt the country after the war because of their very hard work. I have seen this for myself, and it impressed me. Especially when we went back on a revisit up in Seoul and we saw; we travelled around quite a bit and we saw how they looked after things. After the war, there was hardly any trees on any of the hills because of all the bombing … and one of their prime ministers said, “We’ve got to do something about this,” so they set about planting trees everywhere so now of course it’s covered. I can’t impress enough on you that fact that they’re fast workers and they’re very hard workers and they’ve worked very long hours. The country is very competitive … their children work tremendously hard at school and at college. They’re literally there from eight in the morning studying till eight at night before they stop and go home, do their homework, and go to bed. The children I’m talking about … they are tremendously hardworking. I’m not saying it’s a good country for that because you know they’re under a lot of stress, the Koreans. It gets to the menfolk, the pressure of work. It probably leads to them drinking to try and get over this pressure. The fact that Korea is such a wonderful country now—South Korea—is because since 1953, and after 1960/70, their prime ministers said, they’ve got to get into heavy industry, ship-building, the motors, the motor industry, the television industry. That’s how they pulled their socks up and got going, but they are such hard workers and such fast workers, the women and the men! What did you do while on leave? We had leave in Tokyo for one week. It was called R&R: rest and recuperation. We were looked after—when I say looked after in Tokyo, we were taken to several of the wonderful, the sights, like the temples you know. I can remember being taken to the top establishment for jujutsu out there! Yeah, I can remember that, and I’m sitting in a room now and looking at one right across the road from me, where they do all the training for those things. But we were taken there and while I was in Tokyo and I did something that not many soldiers did: we had a day free; I got a train down to Mt Fuji! [laughter] I wouldn’t do anything like that now! I got a train down from Tokyo station on my own down to Mt Fuji, which was about 100 km away. I got photos of Mt Fuji which were pretty good, very good, with the snow on the top which is traditional. And I got back safely

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that day. I wasn’t one for bars and women [laughter] which most chaps on R&R got involved in. And I think it was there I used to like playing billiards and snooker. I went into a snooker hall there I found in Tokyo, and I had been just knocking a few balls around on my own because I had no one to play with, and someone came up to me and said, “Do you want woman?” [laughter] I said “No, I don’t!” There were all the pimps around and prostitutes. In Tokyo, we were very well looked after for the week with good food, a good camp—interesting place where the camp was because it was linked with the midget submarines of the Japanese Navy during the wartime. So, that’s my memorable thing: going down to Mt Fuji. When my daughter-­ in-­law went down to see it, it was covered in clouds! I had to give her my pictures that I had taken. Of course, we all had cameras out there, Japanese cameras. Even in Korea we had cameras, but the developing and printing was very poorly done, so anything we took then is pretty faded now. Did you have any contact with civilians? I didn’t. I would see the farmers. We might be passing a farm building, and they’d be doing something. When I say we, we used to walk around outside the camp, and it was very traditional farming there and we’d like our photos taken with them pretending we were doing what they were doing. We had Korean cooks on our site, and we had a waitress in our camp, and we had Korean, and interpreters. We had two interpreters with us, and one day I had my photo taken with them. I’ve got a copy of it still somewhere here. They were dressed very smartly, the interpreters; you know they had suit on white shirt and tie. We were in our relaxed, working clothes. I had my photo taken with them, and my head was leaning against theirs in friendship. And that photo was used by someone over here for a Christmas card because it signified the friendship. They’re the only people we had contact with. I was a good boy out there. I never got involved with the ladies, they were there! [laughter] Did you encounter many personnel from the armed forces of other countries and how were those relationships? In our camp, we had a New Zealand military policeman; we had an Australian military policeman. I can remember his face to this day. We had contact with the Commonwealth troops as military police. We did, and I’ve got a lovely photo. An Australian came into my house and said, “Who’s that with the bush hat on?” The Australians wore a bush hat. I

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don’t know if you know the Australian uniform; it was a slouch hat. So, our Australian military policeman, we all wanted to borrow his and have our photo taken with it! Oh, we got on well with them. I can remember his name to this day; it was Darcy. I don’t know what his surname was, but his first name was Darcy, and they were characters, the Australians. They had their own way of doing things, the Aussies. In the transit camp, you could walk round there sometimes and they’d chuck most of their kit away outside the tents before they went back, if they were going back to Australia. It was pretty loose. We got on well with some of the Americans. You’d always get on with the Americans out there if you went to an American camp. Straight away they’d ask, “Do you want coffee?” They always had coffee. “Do you want coffee? Do you want doughnuts?” Yeah, we got on well with them down there. Are there any other stories of your time in Korea that you would like to share with me? Only one: I was on duty on the weekend and I had to investigate when four Koreans got run over by a British military vehicle. That was difficult. I don’t know how they were compensated, but I had to go out to this accident and interview the driver of the vehicle and the officer that was in the vehicle and deal with that. That was not easy. I’ll tell you this: if you got venereal disease in the military police, you were transferred out into another service because a lot of soldiers got venereal disease in the Army, what you call sexually transmitted diseases, now. And I went down with this chap who got it to the black market, and he bought penicillin there, and he found a Korean doctor, paid him of course, and had his injections. [laughter] We did get up to naughty tricks a bit; we were the military police! You had to survive. I have done a lot of reading about prisoners of war, and they do need a buddy to survive as a prisoner of war; they do need somebody to relate to. But I thought that was a bit naughty going down the black market as military policemen. I used to get church there! Yeah! I used to go to church on a Sunday in the American Air Force camp. I went to midnight mass there on Christmas. I was a bit knackered the next day! But that didn’t matter we didn’t do much the next day, Christmas day. I’m a Catholic so I used to get church there. Not every Sunday, but I didn’t get into any difficult scrapes or fights with anyone which did happen in bars. How did you feel when you were leaving Korea? Well, we knew we were going to Japan. I had no relationships with any of them to bother about, so we just left. It was just another posting you

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went to. It wasn’t that I was glad to get away from there because we weren’t having a difficult time in the Army. No, I had no great feelings. I went over to Japan and had a nice time there. I even visited Hiroshima because it was near our camp; it wasn’t far from our camp. Where we were based in Japan, there were lots of bars, dance halls, etcetera. That was a different job in Japan because we were waited on by the Japanese for food. We were very, very well fed there. But no, I had no great feelings leaving Korea. I’ve had more feelings with the Koreans since, in recent years, with the Koreans yeah. Every year, the Korean Veterans and Patriots Association—it is government funded—invite servicemen from each of the countries that took part in the Korean war, back to Korea for a revisit which is all planned and organised down to the last minute. I went back in 2012, and it lasted about 10 days, the revisit. We were based in Seoul. We went up to the demilitarised zone for a tour one day. We had banquets there, we had visits, we had a visit to the ambassador’s house; the British ambassador to South Korea, we had dinner in his house. We went to all the memorials, not quite, but all of the Commonwealth countries, they had their own different memorials. We went up to the Imjin River, where the Gloucestershire Regiment got either all taken prisoner or wiped out while they were doing a very good job holding up the North Koreans and delaying their advance. There is a revisit this coming year [2020]; it may be the last one and because we’re all eighty-five years of age or over now, they want you to take a carer with them. All we have to pay is half the air fare. The people revisiting. All the rest is paid for. The hotel accommodation which is five stars, all the coaches to take you to around, visit to the theatre, that’s all paid for by them. And that’s not just for us they do it for the different countries at different times in the year. What did you do after leaving the Army? I became a nurse! [laughter] I started my training on 8 November 1955, and in 1956 I was recalled to the Army for Suez. After that, I went back to my nurse training. I did thirty-seven years in the National Health Service, and then was made redundant because I was teaching; and, as you know now, a lot of nurse training is done at the university. Kingston University took over a lot of the work we had been doing at Tooting and Epsom and Kingston and Croydon … We all had schools of nursing those days in every big hospital. And those schools got pretty much wound down … some of us got made early retirement and redundancy. I mean, I was glad to get out because I was having a lot of problems with my feet and my standing. Even in teaching, you can’t sit down in teaching. You

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have to supervise the nurses on the ward; you have to work with them. So, it was getting difficult for me. I got out, and believe it or not that was 1993 they made me retired and I’m still here! And I haven’t really stopped medical things since because after coming out of the National Health, I worked as a carer in the community for ten years. Then my wife got ill with cancer, and I looked after her for eight years; so, although it’s a long while, you know, I’ve not stopped! Do you refer to yourself as a veteran? Yes! Proud of it! And do you think Korea has been forgotten? And why? I think the Korean War has been forgotten. It’s just such a lot has happened since in those seventy years.

CHAPTER 12

Private Roy Painter Roy Painter

Fig. 12.1  Roy Painter outside the signal office on base in Korea (1952) and at home (2021) R. Painter (*) Royal Australia Regiment, Hertfordshire, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_12

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Roy Painter calls his childhood “Dickensian poverty.” Born in 1933 at the City of London Maternity Hospital—better known as the “Poor Hospital” because it had a child welfare department for deprived families—Roy lived in the Finsbury Park area of north London for most of his life. His father worked as a window cleaner and general labourer, and Roy remembers his father waiting for work, sometimes going days without a job. Their home was small—six people in two rooms—not unlike the rest of their north Islington neighbourhood. When the Second World War erupted, the family evacuated. Six-year-old Roy and his three brothers returned after the war, and while his brothers went to school, young Roy “stuttered badly” and attended three years of elementary school before joining the workforce at fifteen. At eighteen, he began his national service. He arrived in Korea shortly after his nineteenth birthday, although Roy recalls how fellow soldiers mocked him for looking so young. “About twelve-years-old,” he estimates. Roy worked as a signalman, dictating messages from commanders, sending reports to headquarters, and testing the strength of the signal through the cables. Unlike signalmen like Ray Rogers, who served at the outset of the war and marched with a heavy wireless radio, Roy’s position stayed largely fixed. He spent most of his time behind the line at Hill 355 where a radio headquarters had been established. There the British Army assigned him to the Royal Australian regiment, and Roy radioed for the commanding officer, an interesting position. While many British soldiers recall meeting Australians and Americans, Roy spent the duration of his deployment with British allies. In conversation, Roy talks breezily about traumatic episodes during the war. He mentions his friend dying and relates how scared he felt in some situations, but he prefers to delve into humorous episodes in great depth and vivid description. He fondly remembers the American jazz band that welcomed him to Korea playing “If We Knew You Were Coming, We’d Have Baked a Cake.” He relays the silly jokes he heard on the line. He talks about getting leave and the distractions that awaited soldiers with money to spend. Focusing on these stories obscures the unpleasant aspects of the war. Roy says he has never met a British soldier from Korea with post-traumatic stress. Of course, they probably did, he says, they just did not get that diagnosis in the 1950s. Roy’s take on mental health and his inclination to remember the moments of levity offer some insight into his methods of reconciling with the past.

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Interestingly, Roy recalls the events of the war without chronological scope in an uninterrupted stream of consciousness he calls “verbal diarrhoea.” Actually, it is entirely coherent. Roy might jump from one recollection to another, but it follows a narrative of development. He left London a poor, undereducated window cleaner and returned mature and experienced. He lost the stutter and filled out; the war “made me grow up,” he says. He wants us to know that he started his own business, that he employed hundreds of people, and that he drives a Bentley, in part, because his life before Korea was so different from his life after the war. Roy also became politically active after the war. He joined the Conservative Party, but left in 1974 to join the National Front to oppose immigration and white flight from his Tottenham neighbourhood. He ran for Parliament in 1974, and in the two general elections that year. He has since returned to the Conservative Party and is an outspoken advocate of Brexit. The Korean War, Roy says, had a certain effect on his political thinking. Watching refugees flee south from the communist North Korean state convinced him that communism and socialism were incompatible with the rights and liberties he celebrated as “British.” Roy recorded his testimony in 2019 when he was eighty-six, and a second, shorter interview occurred in 2021 to clarify aspects of the first interview. * * * My name is Roy Painter, I’m eighty-six going on eighty-seven. I served a year in Korea under national service from 1952 to 1953, and I was a radio operator. Most of the time I spent with the First and Third Australian regiments behind the hill called 355 at Battalion HQ. I was a CO’s operator most of the time … I’d say I was 90% bored and 10% scared witless. And how old were you when you went there? I was just nineteen because my mother complained to the local MP that I was too young but the way that we got over that was that you were 18 on the boat they posted you to Hong Kong by the time you got there you were 19 and eligible for active service. I was conscripted in the June [1951], no it was July, and I was sent to Korea the following April [1952]. What was your rank? At the beginning I was a signalman when I went, and a signalman when I came out. Lowest of the low, a private. Although when I did come out, I was a five-star soldier because I was a trained radio op[erator]. I did

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Morse Code, and I can still do it. It’s drummed into you. One thing that was drummed into you was Best Bent Wire, which was [rhythmically recites the dots and dashes for “Best Bent Wire.”] [laughter] How’s that? I was a signalman, and we were there with the 28th British Commonwealth [Infantry] Brigade. We got to Korea, and I went up and was posted to the command signals. I was then in the post of the King Troop, which was communications for four regiments. At the time, I think it was the Australians [the Royal Australian Regiment], the Shropshires [Shropshire Light Infantry], Royal Fusiliers, and the Durham Light Infantry. All that we was taught, we were told to forget and to learn the American way. I was six weeks at what they call King Troop, which handled [the communications for all these regiments] and then because of the circumstances where one of the men supposedly was pulled back, [I replaced him]. He got on the radio and went, “get me out of here there’s f-ing thousands of the bastards coming up the hill.” Which is not what you say. Well, he used other phrases with curse words and that. What you should do was say they was under heavy attack and explain the situation; not say “there’s f-ing millions of the bastards coming up the hill.” [laughter] And so, I replaced him at the First Australian Regiment. I must tell you I looked about twelve when I arrived there. The Aussie sergeant who had been in the Philippines in the war fighting the Japanese said, “Come and meet the CO.” We got there, and he said, “I hope you don’t mind,” in the Aussie accent, straight-talking, “I hope you don’t mine me saying so but I think the Poms [British] are sending us kids who should be home with their mother’s tit.” [laughter] That was one introduction to the Australians who I liked. They were free and easy—didn’t take any prisoners you know. It wasn’t like the stiff things we had to do. It was relaxed. You can’t have the kind of discipline you have with boot shining and parades every day when you’re a working unit can you? Most of my mates that did national service were clerks or polishing floors and boring jobs. At least I contributed something, didn’t I? And the journey out there, I thought was marvellous. It took us six weeks to get there. We went through the Bay of Biscay, the Suez Canal, and the Red Sea, went to Sri Lanka, which was Ceylon then. I saw all these places I never would have seen, would I, as a nineteen-year-old? I thought it was great! Slept on the deck under the stars; I had no problems with that at all. I thought it was wonderful what we did, all down to the British taxpayer.

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When we arrived, by the way, we had to have a transit cabin. It was the Women’s Voluntary Service, and one of the ladies, when I arrived, she grabbed me by the hand and said, “Does your mother know you’re here?” [laughter] Seriously! All the girls wanted to kiss me because, as I said, I looked about twelve years old and they were all making baby sounds you know. So, you know it was okay, actually. It was a bit rough going through from there up to Seoul—took us thirty-two hours … We had a tin of corn beef, there was some cold tea, our water bottles, and a tin of suet pudding, and that was to last us thirty hours. We went by train to Seoul and then we disembarked and then the roads took us up, and the funny thing was that nearer the line you got and the gunfire got louder, everyone was of course making silly jokes, but that was just to hide their nervousness, I suppose. So, we got there and then, gradually, you get used to it. And of course, remember when you’re nineteen, you’re immortal. No one is going to kill you, but I’ll tell you later on about my mate who, at six in the morning we were talking, and at twelve o’clock he was dead. He was an orphan, engaged to be married, I mean what a shit life he had. At twenty years old, you’re an orphan, you live with your Nan, engaged to be married, and gone … Brian was one of them guys; you know some people can look smart in anything, can’t they? And he had a moustache, and it was like [the actor] Robert Taylor. I was so envious of his moustache because I didn’t even shave, and he always looked smart. [On the day he died] I woke up and I said, “Brian, you haven’t woken me.” He said, “I didn’t want to wake you because the rats have been running around you eating the chocolate.” I had a bar of chocolate which was really stupid as the place was overrun with rats everywhere because the Koreans used human waste on the fields as fertilizer. He said, “I was scared of waking you as the rats would have jumped all over you.” Now that was at six in the morning, and by twelve o’clock poor sod was dead. So that’s what war is all about isn’t it? I also remember watching the American jets dropping napalm on the hill opposite and it bouncing. And I thought to myself, “Christ, somewhere in the chain I am responsible for this,” but nevertheless that’s still someone’s husband, brother, son. You know, they’re still relatives, aren’t they? They still feel the pain of it. And I remember looking and thinking, “Bloody hell, I’m glad the jets are on our side not on the other side.”

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So, they’re the memories I have. I also remember that when we pulled out the line, that we had Korean cooks and we had bacon in these big tins. They got these tins and got the bacon out, and I remember saying, “These guys after seeing how we live and how the Americans live they’re never going to go back to fish-heads and rice.” And, of course, they never did! They’ve seen how the West live. I compare it with the wall in [Berlin] coming down. Once you get television and young people see how someone else lives, they’re not going to accept what they’ve got, are they? Although I’m a staunch Conservative, I do think we should have a more equal society. And look what they have now. They give aid; Korea gives aid. How did you feel when you found out you were going to Korea? Did you know much about the country or the conflict? Nope! Most of us never knew where Korea was, we just didn’t know. I looked it up and I found out where it was. I had fourteen days leave [before deployment], and I came back home and said, “Dad I’ve been posted to Korea.” He said, “Oh, don’t tell your mum; I will.” I got home in fourteen days embarkation leave—remember I was only getting twenty-five shillings a week—and he said, “You got any money son?” I said, “No,” and he offered me a week’s work. So, I spent my fourteen days of embarkation working with my Dad! I got about four quid. That’s the way life was wasn’t it? We lived in a council flat by then. We had a bath, we had a fridge, we had a new couch, and life was perfect. After that we went to … Norfolk to do something called PTA, which was “Practical Training Area.” Like you were playing a wargame, we did a fortnight there playing wargames and airplanes coming down pretending they were bombing us. But, of course, there’s no comparison of that and the real thing. Because you suddenly realize that someone’s trying to kill you. And they’re all aiming at me. When I say scared witless, I mean my stomach was turning over, shaking … no amount of training can prepare you for all the bombs dropping and being scared. There’s nothing that people can do. The human body is fight or flight, isn’t it? But strangely enough the only shot, well couple of shots, I fired in anger, I wasn’t scared. Going back, it was almost exhilaration. What happened was where we were with the Aussies, they didn’t fill our food or water up so someone suggested we go and get some fish. I said, “Yeah go on,” and it suddenly dawned on me that he didn’t have a fishing rod. Instead, he held out a hand grenade, said to pull the pin, which I did, and he threw it in the river killed all the fish and you picked them up! Very

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efficient way of fishing! So, he grabbed a half dozen fish and we walked up about half a mile, and there was a bend in the river [with an] American Halftrack [personnel carrier] which had a Browning machinegun [and], so I thought we’ll go in there, and I took my jacket off and pants and I went in the river. Suddenly, I saw these splashes in the water, and I thought someone was skimming stones. And I heard the Browning open up and heard, “Come on you silly Pommy bastard; it’s the chinks!” You mustn’t say chinks anymore, but he said, “The chinks shooting at us!” And, of course, my training kicked in, and I just started firing back. I heard the Browning and the Halftrack started up. I picked all my clothes up and slug me up on the back of the Halftrack about two minutes after. I wasn’t scared, I felt exhilaration … I just did something naturally, and that was the only time I fired a shot in anger. I couldn’t even see the people I just knew [to shoot]. In the Army, you get the training, when fired upon, get down, ascertain where the enemy is, and return fire. And it does kick in, believe it or not. Because it was so cold—I mean we’re talking about thirty below and take my word that’s cold—I didn’t change my clothes from about November to I think February because it was literally so cold. This Aussie next door had a little fire, put his tent up, and had a fire that went in a box. We didn’t get a fire. The Americans next door were given space heaters. We didn’t get that! And [the Aussie] knocked over a can of [fuel for the fire], and I can remember them—I can see it now—pulling this charred body out. It was all black. This poor young bloke; he was only about twenty and burnt himself to death. Poor bloke. When the Americans took over, we had to stay because the idea was that the Chinese wouldn’t know the difference in the voices. Of course, they did know. They used to have loudspeakers they would play for the Royal Fusiliers about lovely ladies with big breasts and they want you to come and fondle them! The Americans offered us some chow. Now remember we had to cook our own in the kitchen tents. By the time you took your breakfast back with you to your bunker, it was frozen solid, and that was only like twenty-five yards. Overnight they had put up almost like a McDonald’s kitchen. They asked, do you want your eggs scrambled? Fried? Poached? Remember everyone [in Britain] was still on rationing, and I couldn’t believe the food we were getting. Lunchtime it was steak. They loaded us down with sweets and cigarettes. I didn’t smoke the cigarettes. I said, “We can’t afford all this!” The bloke said, “Don’t worry

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buddy Uncle Sam is picking up the cheque!” Then believe it or not, a week later they brought up showers! When I got there to Korea and I got in the signal office, the first message I took was, “Someone wounded, severity severe.” I sat next to him at school! I took the message, and they said, “Here’s his address.” I said, “I knew his address. I sat next to him at school!” What a coincidence that is. What he did: he got in his sleeping bag—we were given two sleeping bags and put one inside the other—he went to sleep and a mortar bomb landed on his trench. He got covered in shrapnel. The last thing he remembered was going to sleep. And he woke up in an American M.A.S.H. hospital. We all got called up together; we all went to the same school; and most of my mates were in the Fusiliers, and I wanted to go to the Fusiliers, but I was too small. I’d got my Army paybook. I was five foot [tall] and seven stone. So, I couldn’t get in the Fusiliers because they thought I wasn’t big enough. A rifle was nearly as tall as me. Remember we had old Army 303 bolt-action rifles, and the Americans wanted to give us automatics, but the British government said no, we’ll look after our own troops. So, the American “BAR,” was the Browning automatic rifle, could get off about thirty bullets a minute; we could only get about nine. The only good thing was that our parkas and our boots were better than most. The boots had a little fibre insole that as you walked kept your feet warm. I mean you’ve got to imagine: you took your boots and your sleeping bag with you so the rats never got in them and you had to wrap them up. People can’t imagine what thirty or thirty-­ five below zero is. You can’t touch anything without a glove on or you’ll stick to it. Like all the others I was no different, we just took it in our stride. You know there was two famous battles? The battle of Imjin River? It was the key to the front, and the Gloucestershire regiment was there, and they were coming through and it was like 30,000 Chinese troops to the one regiment. The Americans phoned up the CO of the Gloucester Regiment and said, “How are things?” He said, “Things are rather sticky.” Of course, in American terms it wasn’t too bad but in our interpretation of “rather sticky” and the Americans is two different things, isn’t it? [laughter] So, [the American CO] never bothered to send [reinforcements]. Of course, he never realized the situation they was in. Against 1000 troops, they walked out with 200. It was easy to defend as they had to come through these two hills, and you can only get through this valley at one time but they held out for,

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I think, three days. So just imagine—“I think it’s rather sticky here old chap”—and the Americans didn’t think it was too bad! The other one which I remember very, very seriously was the Battle of the Hook. They had to call down fire on themselves. Just remember when the Chinese attacked, the first lot would carry “burp” guns. Reason they’re called burp guns is because they were automatic, and when they fired, it would sound like, “brrrrrip.” The second lot would have rifles, and the third lot would have hand grenades. And because the Chinese would get mowed down, those without arms would have to pick up arms from those that had been killed. There was just so many of them. But the Battle of the Hook—it was a key position—about two miles to my left, and when the radio traffic started, I thought, “It’s all kicking off there.” The person I spoke to after said the radio traffic was so bad, they couldn’t [name] everyone that was killed or injured in all the messages. We weren’t treated badly, but the Americans made sure that they got their food and we lived on what’s called C rations. This was packages of food with four cigarettes, toilet paper, matches, chicken or beef, and you lived on that because they just couldn’t get the food up because there were too many hills and it was frozen. And there was a lack of water as well. Water was so scarce that we took it in turns to wash! So, on Monday there’d be three of you, you’d be first on a Monday to wash, and Tuesday you’d be the second to wash in the same water, and Wednesday you’d be the third to wash in that same water. It sounds bad, and take my word it was. Like bloody washing in soup! [laughter] I’ve got another story to tell you: when I was seventeen, when I was a window cleaner, I treated myself back then to Imperial Leather soap. I put it in the bathroom and my dad said, “Who’s poncey soap is that in the bathroom?” [When I was in Korea] the only thing that kept me sane was that I would get my mum to send me a bar of Imperial Leather soap, and two years ago I thought of that, and I wrote to Imperial Leather just telling them this little story of how it kept me sane to wash my clothes in. Two weeks later, a knock on the door and a bloody great parcel, and now I have enough Imperial Leather soap to last the rest of my life! [The staff at Imperial Leather] all cried in the office when the letter was read out to the board. When I came home, and this is important, I’d been home about five days and my mate I’d known as a kid from the same street, he was still in the Army doing national service in Hounslow, he arranged a blind date. This girl—he introduced her—I remember her name was Jean and asked

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what I do and I said, “Well I’ve only been out the Army four or five days. I don’t know what I want to do yet!” She asked whether I went abroad and, I said, “Yeah. Korea.” And she said, “Oh Korea, hasn’t there been some trouble there?” I just didn’t know what to say. Imagine if we had TV back then; we’d have all been heroes, wouldn’t we? What was your attitude towards the war, and did it change over time? My parents were the mainstay of the Islington North Labour Party, which is where Jeremy Corbyn stands, but I know why because my Dad was out of work between jobs. [The Jarrow marchers] walked from Jarrow to the Houses of Parliament which goes through North Islington, where my parents were, and they all got sandwiches and tea [for] the Jarrow marchers. And I know why my parents were socialists: they were out of work and my Dad used to line up for a day’s work in the pouring rain. “You, you, and you; piss off the rest of you.” My Dad would sit out for a day’s work for three hours with nothing from it sometimes. People can’t imagine the poverty that we lived in. So, I fully understood why my parents were socialist, and so this was a war against communism, which is a stronger version of socialism, isn’t it? My first thoughts were well why are all these refugees coming North to South not the other way round? And that tells you the story. When the North Koreans got to a village, they shot everybody—we’re talking about babies and toddlers. They shot everybody. Can you imagine a couple of roads near where you live and they kill everybody? It’s beyond our comprehension, isn’t it? Like being bombed out. Can you imagine going home tonight and seeing your house is gone? That’s what happened! … People can’t begin to even think what it was like; so, what I’m trying to say is that we lived in a different generation. Going into the Army for us London kids, it wasn’t such a wretch. We already knew what hardship was. I didn’t know we were poor because, where we lived, I thought everyone else lived like that. It was only when I had my first job as a pageboy at Grosvenor House Hotel—and I saw an actress called Patricia Roc eating sandwiches. I took those [leftover] sandwiches home and I said to my Dad, “Dad, I’m not going to fight these people, I’m going to join them!” Which I did. I mean I’ve lived in nice areas and drive a Bentley so I’ve been reasonably successful, and it was only then that I discovered that not everyone lived like us. And so, going to do national service in Korea, well, let’s put it this way, I didn’t like doing it at the time, but I’m glad I did it. It had a profound effect on my life … national service was a bastard the

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first couple of weeks you was in. Shouting at you … the first morning at one minute to six [a.m.] we were in wooden huts built in 1928, the door smashed open, “heads up; cocks out; socks off; get out that wanking now!” We had twenty-eight days of that. To my utter surprise, I could take a Bren gun apart blindfolded. I could fire a rifle. I learnt the drills. I could change my uniform in two minutes. Imagine you get twenty-eight lads: one was a vicar’s son, we had farmers, you had boys who worked in the steel mills. I remember they lined us up all in our silly clothes and the sergeant or corporal there would go through the same script. They walk around you and “Tsssk. Oh, bloody hell. Thank God we have the Navy and the Air Force. What have we got here? Look at them.” And they go through this routine, “We’ve got no chance with this lot, have we Sarg?” Then they did inspections, and the last inspections you had to lay everything out on your bed. I was second in as they come along, and the guy [next to me] from Liverpool, they turned his [bed] over and everything fell on the floor. “What’d you think of this Corporal,” they’d say, “Absolute crap, Corporal.” Then they came to me and they picked up my boots. You spend twenty-eight days [polishing] the skullcaps of the boots and the heels … so they’re like glass. My boots were no worse nor better than anyone else. They picked up my boots said, “What’d you think of these Corporal?” “Absolute crap Sergeant,” and he threw my boots out the window. Strangely enough the Americans admired it and … it worked! And now when we go to the “Old Boys” parade, we still do the drill! Without thinking about it. We still know the timing … we never forget. Somewhere or other, it worked! I was fortunate that my national service had some meaning behind it is not just polishing floors. As I’m talking, the memories are coming back. One memory when we went back, I spent my twentieth birthday in a place called “Yong-dong-po” [Yeongdeungpo]. I had become friends with … a war reporter called Alan Whicker … we stopped in this place on my twentieth birthday and there was a ladies’ train. I still looked about fourteen years old … all these ladies got told that it was my twentieth birthday. Three of the ladies decided they wanted to give this twenty-year-old the best birthday present he ever had in his life! [laughter] That’s a delicate way of putting it. The other thing is I met Michael Caine. He was Michael Micklewhite, and you know he had a restaurant [Langan’s Brasserie]. Well, I was in his restaurant one day and I went to go to the loo and there he was. I said, “My mum just bought me your book.” We chatted for about ten minutes, totally relaxed, and he put his arm round me and said, “Roy, we went out

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there boys and came back fucking men didn’t we?” [laughter] All these little things have happened in my life because I went to Korea! They never would have occurred. I only spoke to Michael Caine because we were both in Korea, and he really wanted to talk. I think all troops laugh because by laughing you make light of the subject. I can’t convey to you the situation. Everyone is scared; some men admit it, some men don’t. I have no problem admitting it. This is the other thing that we all talk about: PTSD. I don’t know one Korean veteran that has ever suffered from it. I’ve only had two or three moments myself; one was when I went to the tank museum. Imagine, they have an imitation of the trenches with recordings of the shells coming over. That really turned my stomach, and the noise brought it all back. It’s fight or flight; your body gets rid of the useless things. That’s when your stomach turns over. That’s the one time I’ve felt it. Not one Korean veteran has said he suffered from PTSD.  I’m not taking anything away from these guys in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re brave men, but why is it we never experienced it? Different era? Different thinking? What were the most memorable aspects of the journey to Korea? Enjoying it—like a six-week cruise except there were 2000 of us crowded round basically a Thames Barge. The other thing was that when you arrived in Korea, they had a black American Jazz band playing cheery songs like “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake,” and when you left, they played “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You.” That was a nice touch, wasn’t it? I actually liked the cruise. I never would have gone through the Suez Canal, never would have gone to Hong Kong or Singapore. I didn’t object to it one little bit, but it was so hot and cramped. Can you imagine 2000 blokes stuffed in a room no bigger than a dance hall? I had a little job taking the food up to the other guys, and it was okay. What were your main duties once you arrived there? I worked in the signal office to start with and do what I was trained to do, which was take messages, hourly reports; when the shit kicked up, you had to be there ready … We did an hourly signal—you radio them, they radio you every hour. I was the CO’s operator mainly, and the other two guys would be sending messages back to HQ. So, I was the CO’s operator and I’d get artillery on the line and they would directly fire. I’d sit in the back of the jeep with headphones on and be his radio operator. What do you remember most about day-to-day life over there? The shit way that they treated the English troops, the lack of water coming up, lack of food, lack of heating, lack of proper firepower

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compared to the American carbines, stupid British hierarchy, the way we were treated like shit when we got back, shouted and screamed. One thing I do remember [coming back], a young boy just joined the Army … called me “sir” because I had medal and ribbons. I’d never seen myself as a returning hero, and I said, “Don’t you call me sir, I’m just a signalman like you. I’m no better than you, I’ve just been abroad.” It suddenly dawned on me that people would be looking at us with great respect. We were returning heroes and a lot of people, our own mates, treated us with a bit of respect. And that became nice. And when I came home, I got off the bus and the lady down below who always used to bollock me for playing football and making a noise or coming over on my bike. Anyway, she’d come out and down the steps and she said, “Welcome home Roy,” put her arms round me and kissed me. There was a sign up saying, “Welcome Home, Roy,” and all the men shaking me by the hand and so for a couple of weeks, it was a bit of notoriety! My dad was the least emotional person. I knocked on the door, and he answered with his glasses on holding the paper and said, “Oh, hello son!” He shook me by the hand, never gave me a hug, and said, “Dolly,” that’s my mum, “it’s Roy!” And then he sat down and continued reading the paper! [laughter] One day he did ask about it, and I said it was “a bit shitty Dad really.” He said, “Alright.” And it was never mentioned again. What did you do while on leave? You got five days of rest and recuperation; you were supposed to have one every three months and guys down the line were getting a leave every three months. Because of where I was, they couldn’t replace us. I only got one during the whole time. I went to Japan. I went out and bought presents for my family, and I did what everyone did: got drunk and found a beautiful girl. I spent five days with her. Oh, and I actually went ice skating. As a kid I used to skate quite a lot and so to her surprise I could skate. I had nine months wages to spend because when you’re in Korea in the middle of a field, it doesn’t matter how much money you’re getting; there’s nothing to buy … I bought my dad a shaving kit; I bought my nan a Japanese silk scarf; we all bought these cups, saucers, and plates that were transparent. And they packed them in wet sawdust, and it took six weeks to get home. They were the equivalent of £2.14, and I sent them home to my mum and I’ve still got some of them. She left them to me after she died. If you look through the bottom of them you can see a geisha girl … I remember on the flight back we flew past Mt Fuji, and we had to turn

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back as something is wrong with the plane, so we had to do it again and I got to see it twice. Did you encounter many personnel from other countries and how were those relationships? When I went back to Korea, there was an American Marine. “Band of Brothers” we called ourselves and we’d sing this Japanese song we knew, but I can’t sing so I won’t sing this song. I went into the hotel and there was six Turkish soldiers. We all shook hands; there was a doctor from the Norwegian M.A.S.H., he was a surgeon there; there was a Swedish one. So yeah, there were the Australians, the Kiwis, the Americans, we all used to take the piss out of each other, but it was all good humour. Are there any other stories or events that you’d like to share? We went back to Korea, which I never thought I would. When we left Korea [in 1953], the colonel came to see us saying, “Right lads you’re all going home.” “Yay!” “You’ll be talking about these old comrades in fifty years.” “Bollocks we won’t, I’m gone. Join? I won’t even join two pieces of string together if I get out of this Army,” and things like that is what we said. Yet lo and behold, we are no different to anybody else … I’m eighty-­ seven this year, [and] my son isn’t even aware of [the Korean War] … he takes the old veterans to Normandy, so I asked, “What about the Korean vets?” He replied, “I don’t know much about that.” I said, “But I was there!” Quite honestly, I never knew what I’d done. It’s only lately that I realize what we did. I just thought it was part of the job, get on the boat. I just thought I’m going home, what am I going to do. Imagine if I hadn’t gone in the Army, what would I have done with those two years? It would’ve been wasted. Because then you could walk from one job into another back then. I never would have had the adventure I’ve had and seeing all the other old soldiers at the Cenotaph parades and then seeing my old mates. And so at least my national service, I achieved something. National service was designed specifically for what we did.

CHAPTER 13

Private William Shutt William Shutt

Fig. 13.1  William Shutt outside Woolwich Barracks (1951) before being sent to Korea

W. Shutt (*) Royal Artillery, West Midlands, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_13

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When asked about his childhood outside Dudley in the English midlands, William Shutt says with candour, “I didn’t have much of a good life at home.” Born in 1932, he was orphaned four years later when his parents died. He describes his youth as being “just off the streets.” Rather than being fostered or adopted, Shutt had a legal guardian. She kept a roof over his head, but he remembers no toys or comforts that doting parents would instinctively provide. “I didn’t know what a mother was like,” he relates, but very much disliked others knowing that fact. He referred to his guardian as “the old lady” or “the old girl” to throw friends off. He idolized his father. Although he has no conscious memories of him, Shutt admired his father’s service in the Army and sought to follow in his footsteps. He tried to enlist in 1950, but his guardian refused to sign off, a decision that extended the rift between them. In 1951, his national service allowed Shutt to bypass “the old girl,” and he went to Korea in 1952. He served for a year, at first with the Third and Fourteenth Artillery regiments before settling with the Twentieth Artillery—the field regiment that fired the last artillery round in the war. Shutt witnessed the war from behind the front line, where the artillery fired on the enemy from a distance. That position did not keep him from the tragedies of the war. He saw dead babies floating down the Imjin River after battles ended. He watched helplessly as injured Korean civilians were shuttled to Army hospitals. Unexploded bombs, strafe, or accidents with military vehicles plagued Korean villages. Shutt also met many orphaned children. Naturally, his upbringing led him to sympathize with them. “I’ve always been a sucker for the kiddies,” he said. When it came to military hierarchy, Shutt disliked most of the officers because he felt they sought to exalt their rank. The exception was Colonel Thomas Brennan, who Shutt saw as a father figure. Brennan, an Australian serving with the Royal Artillery, commanded the Twentieth Field regiment during the last years of the war and had accepted that tactics had descended into attrition. The colonel commanded the regiment throughout the final Battle of the Hook in 1953, and Shutt admired his frankness. It broke down barriers between career officers and national servicemen. Shutt was a signalman. The job has been explained in greater detail by Ray Rogers and Roy Painter. It seems somewhat peripheral in Shutt’s memory. He did patrols. He checked cables. He relayed messages. But what sticks out in Shutt’s account, much more than the work, is the wider experience. He explains how it was possible to get drunk on most days by bartering services for rum. Shutt drank and smoked upward of forty

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cigarettes a day to calm his nerves. He talks about fellow Commonwealth soldiers in stereotypes: the Aussies were arrogant; the Kiwis were friendly; the Canadians were polite. He enjoyed the time spent on the transport boats, and he got used to Korean food, so much so that he frequented Korean restaurants when he returned to Britain. The landscape fascinated him: the hills and vales dotted with trees and song birds. After nearly seventy years, Shutt’s highlights of the war include the emotional connections he made, the culture he learned about, and the scenery. The violence and trauma of the war lurks in his testimony as a necessary component of his time spent in Korea, but Shutt prefers to take a wide lens. The most popular question people ask him is if he killed anyone. That myopic perspective of war as merely shooting and killing diminishes Shutt’s experience—and those of other veterans. After the war, Shutt went back to work at a sanatorium as a groundskeeper. When he met his future wife, he looked for a better job and “started drifting” from one position to another. He worked in demolition; he worked for a safe manufacturer; he worked in a foundry; he worked in a steel mill; he worked as a bus conductor and driver. He finally settled back at the sanatorium, not as a groundskeeper, but as an engineer. He fixed the boilers, made repairs, and did plumbing. He learned on the job and took classes, eventually becoming the hospital’s chief engineer. He had three children with his wife. “A good life that was,” he said. Shutt has returned to Korea on several occasions. His admiration for the Korean people grows each time he returns. The industrialization of the economy leaves him in awe of their accomplishments, and he tells how pleased it makes him to think he played some role in bringing prosperity to South Korea. Shutt recorded his remembrances in 2019. Some passages of conversation between Shutt and the interviewer have been rearranged to maintain consistency in the topic. In fact, the original account tends to jump around from subject to subject. Still, the editing makes no changes to the substance of Shutt’s recollections. * * * How did you feel when you found out that you were going to Korea? I was determined to get away, see a little bit of the world so I volunteered. I wasn’t unhappy. I was quite looking forward to it, in actual fact.

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Plus, the fact that I had friends who had preceded me into Korea on another unit. It was a troop ship, a gang of blokes—you laugh and walk about, play cards. It was like a pleasure cruise. I mean, six weeks I was on a troop ship going to Hong Kong. I’ve been to Malaya, Hong Kong … went to the Chinese mainland. Now if you say you’ve been in China, it don’t mean to say you’ve been to Hong Kong. If you’ve been to Hong Kong, it don’t mean to say you’ve been in China. It’s very complicated. What was your attitude towards the war? Looking back then, I wasn’t very keen on the North Koreans. We were protecting the South Koreans, and I quite enjoyed the Koreans working with us, members of the Republic of Korea Army. At the same time there were a lot of orphans in Korea. And, being an orphan myself, I had a bit of sympathy towards them. We had young lads attach themselves to our regiment. They used to do little things like cleaning your boots and wash your shirts, things like that. We used to pay them. We sort of adopted them. Yes, I liked the Koreans, the South not the North. I’m not very keen on North Korea. Did you see a lot of combat in Korea? Yes, I was a line signalman. I used to have to go out at night to repair the line that had been sabotaged by the North Koreans. They used to lie in wait, cut the wire, and lie in wait. Signalmen were the eyes and ears of the artillery. If they could wipe out one or two signallers, they were very happy about it. I took a bit of gunfire. I never actually came into hand-to-­ hand contact. I used to mind what I was doing and keep me head well down, but there were one or two signallers who were killed. I think I know four or five. When you consider it, they were only a minor part of the artillery, the signallers. It’s hard to explain to someone if you’ve never been in the Army. I’m talking to you like I would talk to a schoolboy. The first question a schoolboy always asks you is, how many people have you killed, or have you ever killed anybody? You don’t answer questions like that; you just taught to ignore them. Change the subject. Once you arrived in Korea, what were your main duties? I was in an advance party for my regiment so the unit that I was attached to was the senior battery of the Royal Artillery of the first battery of the Fourteenth Field regiment. And I had to go round with the chief signaller. He had two stripes or three stripes as sergeants or bombardiers. And I had to go down with him and find out the lie of the land. I mean, you could

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be going through paddy fields and over hills, and, regardless what people say, there was no jungle in Korea. It was mainly little bits of scrubby bushes, but the hills were the main thing. If you can imagine Wales, that’s like Korea was. I enjoyed it. I was always being outdoors. I don’t like working in offices. I don’t like working on my backside. I got to go out and about. That was my idea of soldering, anyway, keeping active. I’ll give you an example: we had an OP, you know, an observation post. You was always with an officer. Now I never used to get along with the officers. They made you feel kind of an inferior feeling. Lots were [the] stuck-up type. I got lucky in that respect, the officers I was with. I still think a lot of my old colonel. He was a gentleman, but one or two of the young ones you know, joined up the same as me, national service, and just because they got into a school with a name behind it, they used to look down a little bit on the secondary school and even the grammar school [soldiers]. They were a different class of young officers, but the older officers, I got on all right with them. I didn’t like working with them, so any time I was due to go up to the OP, I used to change with a young feller who was a bit weak and sickly, who didn’t like the outdoors. I used to change places with him so I could do his turns on the line, and he’d do my turn in the OP. We used to meet the officers on the regimental reunions. We were all lads together in that respect. But like I say, the colonel, he was a man of God a real gentleman. He didn’t used to say, “my troops”; he used to say, “my boys” or “my lads.” We were his lads. He was our dad if you know what I mean, a substitute dad. A great fella. Colonel [Thomas Geoffrey] Brennan, I always remember him. I think he was a brewery representative, and when we were talking, he [mentioned that he had] been to some of the public houses where I was born. He used to get on well with [us], but the little lieutenants, the first lieutenants you know, the ones with just one chip on their shoulder, they used to think it was a crown instead of a chip. What do you remember most about day-to-day life in Korea? Daily life was mixed. There wasn’t any morning parades and that sort of thing. We lived in dug-outs in the hills. We used to dig a hut. If somebody in a house had a place for their car, they’d dig part of their garden away, right. If you can imagine that on the side of a hill, that’s where we used to live. We used to dig these shelters like that cover them over with wood and whatever we could get, logs, a layer of turf on the top, or sandbags. And we lived inside them; they were quite comfortable inside. You’d get up in the morning and go down to the cookhouse, get our meals. Then the duties: you got battery charging, checking the radios, lay

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the line, or check the line. When I say line, I mean telephone cable. When you’d done those jobs, you could wait around. It would all depend if you were on a duty and you weren’t on duty all the time. You’d get time off to yourself … In fact, some of the officers we were told we weren’t to salute them. We weren’t to call them sir. You could call them “mister,” and a lot of the time you used to call them like, we had one officer we used to call Bill, like myself. It was a very unofficial Army in that respect. During my Army service, I [drank] and I used to smoke forty to fifty cigarettes a day. That’d keep my nerves steady because it does a number on your nerves. We had a free rum issue when we were in Korea. We had an Irishman who wouldn’t drink and so out of consideration I used to have his rum ration. I let him have some of my books sent from home and I used to let him having the first chance of reading them. I’d have his rum ration and he’d have the first read of these books. And then another one didn’t like the taste of it, so I had his rum ration as well. It’s a kind of bartering. I used to have the rum and I used to do services for them. One bloke, he was no good at Blanco-ing [cleaning] his equipment and I was always good at it, so I’d Blanco his equipment or clean his equipment and I used to have his rum ration. By the time I’d had the rum rations off various ones, I’d had half a pint of rum or maybe a little bit more. I used to have that every day. And at nights you’d get a crate of beer from the NAAFI [Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes], and between us we’d all buy as much beer as we could. When you drink in the Army, you have your glass, and if you put your glass down on the table half-empty, another bloke would top you up. You didn’t know how much beer you’d drunk and that was near enough every day. If you were on duty, you wouldn’t drink the beer at night. Funny enough, in those days nine times out of ten you’d used to have your beer and it would come in a bottle and it was frozen. Put the iced beer in a tin and warm it on the stove. Do you think that you had good equipment? The equipment was all right. The first troops to Korea were pretty badly off and they’d had lots of American equipment. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have survived the first winter in Korea. The Americans were very good in that respect until we had our own special equipment, which was as good, if not better, in some cases than the Americans. We had winterproof and waterproof clothing, and I was told that the cost of clothing for a soldier in Korea exceeded 300 pounds, and that’s way back in those days. It was string vests and special Denison smocks. They were windproof [and] waterproof, and on top of that we had big parkas. Parkas were like

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hoodies of today but thick and heavy, windproof, waterproof. You could sleep out in them. I didn’t have a rifle myself. I was allowed to have a revolver, which was unofficial mind. My main weapon was a Sten gun. The Sten gun was like a semiautomatic. The later issue was called a Sterling. It had a magazine about eighteen rounds, something like that. It would take two to get it back to front, and you could double your ammunition load. As soon as you’d finished one magazine, you’d knock the catch, took the magazine out, reversed it, and put another one in. That was unofficial that was. We weren’t supposed to do it but we did do it. If you was close enough [it was accurate], but if you were anywhere like forty or fifty feet away, you’d have to spray them like a hose pipe to get a hit. We were trained on rifles and Bren guns, and I liked the rifle. You’d have to carry a lot of equipment when you were a signaller. In fact, we used to go out on a jeep, and of the three blokes on the jeep, only one was a signaller. The others were guards for you, like you might say apprentice signallers. There’re signallers, and then there’s regimental signallers, and then there’s Royal Signallers [Royal Corps of Signals], which you know are different position. A signaller is just a dog’s body. A regimental signaller is responsible for all the communication equipment to a regiment. And the Royal Signallers of course is a law unto themselves. We used to call them “Jimmys” because of their cap badge [which has a figure of the Roman God Mercury on it]. What do you remember about the people in Korea and their culture? They’d had a culture long before we had. It’s very beautiful. They’ve got a beautiful country in parts, and they’ve got some very interesting temples. I used to get on all right with the Koreans. They were always very friendly towards us. Matter of fact, we have more respect off the South Koreans then we get off our own countrymen. If there’s any Koreans around here, you know, if I went to a Korean restaurant and I got a Korean meal, nine times out of ten it’s a free meal. I couldn’t get that in a British restaurant. It’s one of these unexplainable things. We’ve got great respect for them; they’ve got respect for me. I mean there’s a hell of a lot of stuff that we have now from Korea, like Samsung. I’ve been to a Samsung factory and Hyundai. They’re all Korean things that we’re having now and we take for granted. When we first got to Korea, when the war first started, it was mainly rural. Rice paddies that sort of thing. And one place where [General of the Army, Douglas] MacArthur landed—where the Inchon invasion began—that place now is all factories. The great long stretch of the coastline is all factories. When

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MacArthur got there first, it was mudflats. They’ve made fantastic progress, the Koreans have. You might say American money and British intellectuals—our ideas and American money—in combination really [made that happen]. What was the food like in Korea? If you’re prepared to take the chance on eating anything, you could be eating anything from dog to monkey. And their favourite is kimchi, which is fermented cabbage. Not very pleasant, but you get a taste for it. I eat a lot of rice food. I eat quite a lot of that regularly, now. Obviously, we didn’t have that in the Army, but now I quite enjoy a curry. British Army food was more of beef and biscuit. We didn’t have any bread or very rarely. We had lots of tinned stuff. One good thing was we had self-heating soup. You just pulled a tag on the top, had a chemical reaction heated the soup inside the tin. Then we had American K-rations. They were all right. You had cigarettes and chocolate in them, ham and beans. We didn’t do too bad with food really. We had enough anyway. What we were short of was water. Hygiene was relaxed quite a lot. I can remember I went—I think it was three weeks—without having a wash. And then we had a shower unit that came round and we all had a good shower, and clean clothes. That was one of the main problems. You’ve got to consider in Korea, if you wanted a wash, you had to get your tin helmet, fill it with snow, melt it and have a wash in that. You couldn’t have bath. Shaving was a bit of a problem. If you had a shave your skin was exposed to the cold and your face got sore in the wind and the cold. A lot of people got lackadaisical with the shaving. I’ll admit a lot of us used to stink. But then again people were worse off, like those in the First World War were up to their neck in mud most of the times. The worst part of Korea was the winter. They were diabolical; the cold was really chilling. That was then, but after six or seven years I went back to Korea on a visit and we went to Pusan and, in Pusan, at the same time [of year] as I got there originally [in 1952 and], it was quite mild. I saw people plying their trade in streets, or peddling a little cart with gadgets on it. I said to him, “When I came here in ’51 in November or December it was completely cold. There was snow on the ground.” He said, “Those days all gone now.” They must have had global warming in Korea before we did. Did you experience combat in Korea? Luckily, the nearest I ever got to combat was when they [changed] our positions. I was never in hand-to-hand combat because there’s the front

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line and the [artillery] are behind the front line, so I used to be between the guns and the front line, sometimes along the active front line itself. I’ve seen at a distance, but I’ve never been really up close to a North Korean soldier. At Panmunjom, just before they signed the peace treaty, I went there as a signaller for one of our NCOs, and I got taken to every conference in Panmunjom. We used to face each other across this line you know—North Koreans on the one side and us on the other. And we used to try and stare each other out, but that was frowned on. Our officer said it was provoking incidents so we weren’t allowed to do it. That was the nearest I came to North Korean soldiers. I tell you one thing, I don’t think I would have liked to have faced them in combat because they all seemed wiry, very athletic, and their main sport was Taekwondo. They’d tie you up in knots in no time. So, I was lucky in that respect, but then again, an infantry regiment got wounded pretty badly towards the end of the Korean War. The Korean troops actually tunnelled into trenches where the infantry were. It was a sneak attack, and they did quite a lot of damage before they were beaten back. That was when the gunners really came into their own. The amount of fire they put down brought the Chinese 9th Army to retire completely, and it was never a success after that … The North Koreans used to attack the South Koreans on sight, and I have seen the bodies of babies flowing down the Imjin. I think some of those were as a result of Korean ladies cohabitating with Americans you know. The Koreans, they don’t like impurities in their race. I mean, a black child was [seen] as terrible, that was. I don’t think the mothers had much chance of saving the children. The village elders or their own family would take that child and dispose of it … And there were the usual things like the strafe from the bombs or getting knocked down by military vehicles or maybe they’d find an un-exploded bomb. It happens. Their injuries, you see them, and there isn’t anything you can do about it at the time. You can’t cure them; you can’t do first aid on them. We took them to a Korean hospital or to an English or American hospital. They did the treatment. Never judge Korea from the programme M.A.S.H. That was a light-touch on Korea. It weren’t like that at all … You’re very upset [seeing the injuries] but you say to yourself … thank God it was not me. [I] saw some bad [injuries]. I knew of an artillery sergeant on a gun and he had a misfire—that’s where the shell explodes before it leaves the gun— and it blew the breach block off the gun and took half of his chest away. And another one lost his eyesight; it went through his eyeball and out the

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back of his skull. The usual ones were barbed wire cuts, and if you had any injuries, you were shipped out of Korea, because injuries didn’t heal in Korea. The Medical help was good. I didn’t go to an American M.A.S.H. I went to a Norwegian M.A.S.H. because I got caught by a mortar bomb. It wasn’t deliberate; it was just a case of stupidity. A couple of my friends had found this mortar bomb, unexploded, and they started throwing it around, and it exploded not close to us, but near enough for us to have the blast, and I got my arms and face peppered with little bits of cordite. I went to the Nor-M.A.S.H. for a day and a night; it wasn’t serious. Some of us got badly injured playing about, accidental discharges and the like. A lot tried to get out of the Army by shooting themselves in the foot. I never met anybody who actually did it in Korea. I did know somebody who did it in training to get out the Army, but he didn’t get out the Army. He ended up in a military prison. You still miss your friends and that you know. You’ve always got a sneaking feeling, I mean I’ve been back to the graves of a couple of my friends who were killed, and I blubbered like a schoolboy then, like a child. I’m not the only one; you see quite a few with tears running down their face, they’ve gone to see where their friends have got laid to rest. You mentioned you had contact with some of the Korean children. What was that like? I’ve always been a sucker for kiddies. I used to make friends with them, and, funny enough, every time we went back to Korea, we’d be walking around one of their museums or one of their temples, and as soon as they knew we were British soldiers or Commonwealth soldiers, they’d all cluster round us. A big friend of mine, Charlie Bogart, was a piper, and as soon as they saw him, they’d all cluster round him with his full regalia, you know kilt and bagpipes. He’d play, and you’d see kids six or seven deep in a circle around him. They used to come talk to us, and they’d ask us things about England and we used to ask things about Korea. We used to get on well especially with the kiddies, and, even today, I was in touch with a school child. She wrote me a letter and I wrote back to her, and then she wrote to say thank you … I got on all right with the kids. I got on all right with a lot of grown-ups as well. I spent quite a bit of time in Korean houses. The thing about Korean houses, they’ve got no fire places. The fires are outside, and they have underground heating like the Romans. I’ve known Chinese in Hong Kong and Kowloon. They were all right. They used to do a lot of work for us around the camps. One of the blokes

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I used to get on quite well with, I used to call him Popsicle Pete. He was like an ice cream man. He got a tricycle with ice popsicles and ice creams and you’d used to have them on credit. You’d pay him off on pay day for what you owned him. He used to have a bit of an argument with some of us. I’d say, “I didn’t have that.” He’d pull his little book out and say, “Yes, Johnny, you have two of these and three of these and you only paid me for one.” Mainly it was a bit of leg pull. At the time I had a monkey in China, and I was well respected for having a monkey that used to ride on my shoulders. The Chinese used to bow as we went past. That was China. Hong Kong was totally different. We rubbed shoulders on a good many occasions with [other soldiers, too]. The Aussies and Kiwis, I’m still attached to [them]. I’ve been back to New Zealand a couple of times. The Aussies: I always thought they were a little bit arrogant and they weren’t as friendly as the New Zealanders. I’ll tell you one thing, they were some of the biggest bloody thieves in the world, the Aussies. You’d turn your back and you’d lose your braces. And there was Canadians. Canadians were very, very polite, all right. Americans, they’d used to come round. They got bags of money, and if they couldn’t get whisky for some reason or other, and we could get whisky from the NAAFI, you could sell it to the Americans for twice what you’d paid for it. They’d flash their money around, and they’d do their utmost to buy English rifles, the Lee-Enfield. They reckoned they were the best sporting rifles in the world. I believe there were some cases of soldiers who found or acquired an English Lee-Enfield and sold it to the Americans. They were more gun happy then we were. We had to account for every round of ammunition we got, whereas the Yanks used to blaze away at target practice. They could have as many guns as they wanted. One American would have a Luger, and he’d be carrying a Chinese burp gun plus his own issued rifle. Nobody used to take a bit of notice. The officers didn’t. The Australians, their officers was just like their troops. They used to call each other “bastards.” In the English Army that would have been considered an insult, but with them it was just a friendly kind of good morning mate. Would you say there was a rivalry between the different groups? There’s always going to be rivalry between different groups. Most kept together until there’s females on the scene and then those same friends will be at each other’s throats. But for some reason, the Australians always looked down on the New Zealanders. They didn’t like to be beaten and, nine times out of ten the New Zealanders used to beat them. [At]

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anything. There were friendly inter-unit rugby matches. The New Zealanders had one of the finest rugby teams in the world in Korea. And the Canadians, they’ve got ice hockey. They used to play ice on the frozen Imjin River. They’d used to have ice-skating matches, and ice hockey sticks used to come into contact with shins and arms. That would start a row. It was serious at the actual time of the argument, but the rest of the time they all used to get on well together … we used to take the mick out of each other. Things never got too far. Inter-regimental was the worst. Two blokes from two different infantry regiments, say like the Paratroopers meeting the Guards. They used to try and pinch each other’s cap badges as trophies. They’d fight, but the MPs were always quick on the scene. You never got a drawn-out conclusion. All fun. As I say, we were young and foolish in them days. What did you do when you were on leave? I was in Tokyo. Every boy’s dream that was. That’s a mixed conversation, I’ll put it that way. They called it “R and R” but we called it something totally different. We were nineteen or twenty years old, young sprouts as it were. After being cooped up like that—you know we were in a battle situation—it’s like turning us loose. We did a lot of things that we were not exactly ashamed of, but we regretted. We ran roughshod, but I mean we had strict discipline. You were envoys for your country. That’s what we were told and you were to behave respectably. If you got into trouble, you would suffer for it. We had some very enjoyable experiences. I met a young Japanese lady that I still have very fond memories of, and she took me out shopping and showed me various sites. Going down to where you could get bargains. If one of the traders told you a price, she’d turn round on him and say, “This is too much, too extravagant. You must lower your price.” And that was it. She arranged for me to go to Hiroshima and that was in the days when very few people went there. They say you used to come back from there glowing like a torch. It was a sobering experience seeing the ruins, and I told my friends when I got back to the regiment what it was like. The Japanese couldn’t travel there, and we weren’t supposed to. I think if I had been caught out, I should have suffered some sort of military punishment. But I wasn’t caught out, thanks to her. With the greatest reluctance I had to leave her and go back to the battlefield. I couldn’t keep in touch because there was a strict fraternization order at the time. There were ways and means round it, but I couldn’t keep in touch. I still remember her name to this very day. It was Hiroko. I’ve still

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got a photograph and my wife used to look at it and she would say, “Do you think that she’s prettier than me?” I’d say, “I wouldn’t like to have to choose between the two of you, but I did and I chose you.” And that was it, averted a nasty argument between me and my beloved. I’m afraid to say that she died twenty-four years ago now. Are there any other experiences of Korea that you have that you would like to share? They do come back: going through a frosty paddy field trudging through the water. They used to call it the Land of the Morning Calm. Early morning in Korea is a funny experience because it’s like the world has suddenly come awake: utter silence and then suddenly you hear birds singing, and you can hear voices of the Korean population in the distance and smell their cooking fires and that sort of thing. I’ve got a lot of memories like that. Korea is a very beautiful place, and not just regards to the scenery … The first time I went back to Korea, I was surprised. It was 1984. Seoul had been rebuilt. I went to one place, I forget the names now, but there was a tank in the town gate. All the Korean villages had a little wall round them and they had a big gate, and I remember in this one gate there was a bombed-out tank and half of the gate arch had been blown away. In [19]84, it had all been restored and there was buildings around there—not little mud-huts like we were used to—stone buildings. You could see how much progress they were making, all the factories they built. Good lord, they’ve left us standing as regards to manufacturing things … I was glad to think that I was part of that expansion, and that if it hadn’t had been for me and thousands others like me, I reckon they would have still been a rural economy and still living in their little shacks and going to work on bikes and growing their own food in a paddy field. Now it’s all different. You go to Seoul and there are big universities and schools. Funny things about all their schools: they’ve got a baseball pitch. It’s the American influence. As I say, American money and English intellect is what built Korea. Or rebuilt Korea. How did you feel when you were leaving Korea? You feel like when you come back off a place where you’ve had a holiday. You’re going back to England. You’ll be glad to get back home but at the same time you’re sorry to leave your friends and that you’ve got accustomed to over the last two years you know. When did you leave the Army?

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In 1953—by the end of November 1953. The truce had been signed and things were going back to normal. The military authorities took over again and … I wasn’t sorry to say goodbye, but I was sorry to be leaving the old carefree life I’d had before as a fighting soldier. I’ll put it that way, on active service … I enjoyed Korea. I’ve enjoyed going back [with the Korean Veterans groups] … I always miss the Army. It was a big part of my life. If you liked the Army when you joined, you never forgot the Army when you left. And even today I’m still strict regimental … I still have close associations. Do you think that the Korean War has been forgotten? Yes, by a good many. We were respected more in Korea than we are in England or Ireland or Scotland. While I was in Korea, somebody said to my old lady, “I haven’t seen your lad lately.” “Oh, he’s in the army.” “Doesn’t he come home on leave?” “No, he’s in Korea.” And they say, “Where’s Korea?” Folk around here didn’t know where Korea was. There are a lot of folks today who couldn’t tell you where Korea is. They think it’s somewhere in the Far East but they don’t know exactly where … We’re getting a bit more recognition now. We even get a place on the Remembrance Day parades. Not a lot of folks had a television [at that time] so they wouldn’t see Korea on the news. They might read a bit in the papers, but not very much. The Battle of the Imjin was described in half a column in the Daily Mirror or the Daily Sun or something like that. Half a paragraph. And it’s a bloodbath. They took it for granted. They’ve got their own lives to live. You’ll find that eventually Afghan[istan] will be forgotten. The Falklands won’t be remembered. Unless there’s been some spectacular event. These days it’s on the news a lot … They’ve made a couple films about Korea—nothing like the real thing. It might not have an impact on us [in Britain], but it did have an impact on the Koreans. It stopped the rise of communism and it showed that one nation couldn’t put out another nation without respect for other nations. The United Nations stepped in and protected the bullied nation.

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I’ve been back to Korea six times so far—with the veterans. Wish I could go back regularly. I can’t travel now, unfortunately. Got to know quite a few [Koreans]. Some of those who served us in Korea were there to meet us when we landed on revisits. And we struck up quite an acquaintance. One of the defence attaches, I got to know him pretty well; we used to invite him to our regimental reunions. That’s been some years back … I’m one of the few people left now who’s actually been on combat duty in Korea. The rest of them, the Korean veterans now some of them weren’t fighting men, they were support, they came after the finish, after the peace treaty was signed. They stayed on. They weren’t actually on active service, if you know what I mean. There’s very few now left. I’ll give you an example: at one time, my branch of the Korean veterans at Wolverhampton, they got a membership of about fifty and now we’re lucky, if we have a meeting, if we’ve got four or maybe eight left at a maximum. We’re a dying breed.

CHAPTER 14

Private Jim Bridges Jim Bridges

Fig. 14.1  Jim Bridges portrait in regimental glengarry during basic training at Fort George (left) and on the troopship en route to Korea (right)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_14

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Jim Bridges volunteered to serve in Korea. While completing his national service in Berlin, he found life in the British Army mundane and boring. In his own words, “a lot of spit and polish.” When the opportunity was presented, he, like a couple of dozen others in his regiment, seized the opportunity to serve in another theatre. Jim chalks this up to youthful exuberance and arrogance. He was excited about the change at the time, but in retrospect admits that this was because he and the others who volunteered “really didn’t understand what we were going to.” By the time he departed Korea after suffering a serious combat wound, his main emotion was relief. Jim’s testimony is noteworthy for its juxtaposition of light-hearted vignettes about life on the front line alongside serious recollections of fear, combat, and death. He is quick to share amusing anecdotes and laughs freely at the more humorous experiences, like when his unit scattered in panic under attack, only to discover the attacker was a wild boar they had disturbed. He tells us how “humorous incidents … broke the ice at times, [it] wasn’t all doom and gloom.” This contrasts sharply with the nerve-­ shredding recollections of patrolling in the total darkness of Korean nights. The wildlife sounds could quickly cease, and in the sudden silence Jim would find his mind imagining all kinds of things. Worse still was the reality of combat, for both sides. Among his scariest memories was the sound of a low-flying plane offering air support, and watching it drop napalm on the enemy. “Aw, it was dreadful,” remembers Jim. What has stuck with Jim the most were some small details. The general monotony of life on the front and the physical effort of soldiering, for example: the routine of most days was digging trenches, laying barbed wire, and manually carrying equipment and supplies up and down hills. Of Korea, the enduring first impressions were the extent of the poverty, a shock even to somebody from a modest background and socialist household on the east coast of Scotland, and the smell of manure comprised of human excrement. The subsequent development of South Korea, which he was able to visit in 2000, he found “quite remarkable.” Jim left Korea on a hospital bed, having sustained a serious injury to his left arm. Numerous hospitals later, he completed his tour in Edinburgh,

J. Bridges (*) King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Croft, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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convalescing in another hospital room. It took several years to fully recover from his injury and rejoin the trade he had left when he was conscripted. On war, Jim describes himself as “more pacifist now than anything” and reflects on how similar the division between North and South Korea was at the end of the conflict compared to the beginning, in addition to various modern conflicts that have left countries “all in a mess.” Jim Bridges was interviewed in December 2019. * * * What year were you born and where did you grow up? I was born in October 1930, in Stirling, Scotland. When I was an infant, my family settled down on [the] east coast in Arbroath, and I spent my formative years there until I went in the forces in 1950. When I was called up, after initial training, I was posted to the Black Watch in Berlin. That was my first posting. What year was it that you went to Korea? 1951. How old were you when you went? I was 20 then. What were you doing prior to being a part of the armed forces? I served an apprenticeship as a decorator. Had you volunteered or were you conscripted? No, I was initially conscripted, and the initial period was eighteen months, then that was extended to two years. How long were you posted to Korea and with which units? I had been a part of the Army for ten months before I was posted to Korea. I actually volunteered [to be posted in Korea] after the big Chinese offensive in April 1951, the Spring offensive. We suffered a lot of casualties, and they were increasing the manpower in the depleted regiments, so they asked for volunteers. I volunteered and I was posted to the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. How did you feel when you found out that you were going to Korea? Well, I volunteered so … I suppose it [was] the arrogance of youth. I was sort of looking forward to the excitement and all that. Did you know much about the country or the conflict before you went? No, I had read about it and heard about it, but the first we heard after the initial start was [that] a couple of our platoon officers were drafted out to the Argylls, one of the first regiments out there. I can’t remember

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whether they volunteered or were sent out involuntary, but I remember there was a couple of platoon officers went out in June 1950. I knew where it was. I knew it was in Asia. I was brought up in quite a socialist household, so I was aware of the problems out there in the Far East, the same as there was in Berlin, with the Russian threat and all that. I was aware of the political situation. And what was your attitude towards the war? I had no strong feelings about it. Did your attitude towards the war change over time? Oh yes it did [laughs], very much so. I had no strong views at the time, I realized it was a conflict between East and West; I was aware of that situation. But later on, I debated the reasoning of the campaign, particularly in later years. The country was divided roughly along the same lines as [when] the war started so it seemed a tremendous waste of life and resources, with very little achievement. That’s how I felt afterwards. But then again, subsequently, I have been back to Korea. I went on a revisit to see how South Korea has developed over the years, which is quite remarkable, in a comparatively short time. What were the most memorable aspects of your journey to Korea? Well, there was several! [laughs] I think one of the first reactions we had when we got there was the poverty of the people and the poor infrastructure. Although I came from a fairly modest background, it was quite surprising to see how really poor [Koreans were] and the terrible situations some of the civilians were in. I remember one of the first things that struck me when we arrived there was the permeating smell of the rice paddy fields. They had been using human excrement as manure and the smell permeated everywhere [laughs]. That was one of the particular things that brought the country to mind. What were your main duties when you arrived there? When we arrived, we stayed in Pusan for a few weeks. There was a big base camp there, and we were basically employed on loading trains with munitions and food and so on. Then we moved up the line, we were [taken] by rail up to the front lines. When we got there, it was a fairly quiet period, not much going on at all. We [were] basically digging in, digging trenches, making yourself comfortable, and maintaining yourself. Then periodically we would go out on patrols, trying to make contact with the enemy. That was the main functions at that time, during the early summer. What do you remember most about day-to-day life over there?

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Just the general monotony. [laughs] Everything had to be carried up the hills manually—you couldn’t get trucks and that up the hills. It was a very hilly terrain. You dug your trench; you made it comfortable and then everything you had to carry up—your water and ammunition. Then when you’re moving you had quite a heavy weight of kit to carry, and it was quite strenuous going up and down these hills. One of the main things was the physical effort, apart from the general monotony. Did you have much contact with people in the UK while you were in Korea? No, not a great deal, apart from letters home to my parents. I had a couple of male friends that had joined the Army about the same time as me, [who] I’d palled about with prior to that, and I kept in contact with them. That was about all the contact I had with people at home. Are there any objects, items, or pieces of kit that you would most strongly associate with your time over there? No, I got wounded in November 1951, and I lost all my kit. All the photographs and that was left in my small pack in the trench and when I was evacuated, I left all that behind, so I had no items at all. I know a lot of people who brought photographs back and propaganda leaflets and that sort of thing. But no, unfortunately I have nothing to remind me in that sense. You say you got wounded, may I ask how? I got hit with a machine gun down the left-hand side. I had major problems. I got hit in the arm with a dum-dum bullet.1 Were there any aspects of the people, food, or culture that you found especially memorable? No, apart from as I say the general poverty, that’s the main thing that sticks in my mind. And the fertilizing of the fields. [laughs] We didn’t have much contact with the local population apart from when we were loading up the trains in Pusan, we’d some civilian workers there. We had a curfew, we weren’t allowed out [of the camp] after eight o’clock in the evening, so we had little contact with the local population. We used to go down to the little shops and buy a few trinkets, [but] the language was also another problem. Very few people spoke English, so we had very little contact with the local population. And even less when we were up the line; you didn’t see many of them about then. They seemed to keep out your way then, quite understandably, in the small villages and that. We did see evidence of

1

 A bullet designed to expand upon impact to inflict more damage.

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them being there, but generally they just disappear out the fields when they saw you in the region. Did you see a lot of combat during your time there? I saw quite a bit in the latter end of my period, yeah. Is there anything in particular that you would be willing to share? Yeah. [laughs] Well, apart from the day I got wounded, on my twenty-­ first birthday, we had suffered a mortar attack. I was on a medium machine gun, a water-cooled machine gun. It was a bright Sunday morning; I remember I took my tunic off. I’d laid that on the parapet, and I was cleaning the weapon and stood that down. And suddenly there was three mortar bombs landed. One hit my trench and smashed the gun and my tunic. That was shredded [and it] was hanging on the bushes on the front of the trench. I was totally unmarked. And next door there was another observation trench on my right and that got hit with two mortars. One had exploded a box of grenades and there was three killed in there. So, you know, that was a hairy moment, and it was a miracle really that I wasn’t hit. Then subsequently the following month, that’s when we had the major battle that I was involved in and we were attacked by about 6000 Chinese. After the bombardment, they attacked up the hill and that’s when I got hit. That was me out of commission. [laughs] So, I got pulled out and stuck in a trench at the back of the hill. I could hear the battle going on around me, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Was this your first proper experience of witnessing combat? No, we had several experiences before that. In September, we moved up the front. We attacked the Chinese to try and capture the main position there, which was Hill 355. It was called Operation Commando, and the object was to straighten up the defence line. They put in several attacks trying to straighten this line out, which weren’t successful. But the first time we attacked this hill, we got pinned down with machine guns and we were trapped in this crawl trench halfway up the hill. Then we were ordered to pull out, so we just got out of the trench and ran as fast as we could down the hill to safety. The following day, they put another attack in, and they were successful in capturing this position. What would you do when you were on leave? We didn’t get leave in Korea. Well, we did actually. There was a rotational leave in Tokyo in Japan while we were there. I didn’t get a leave in Tokyo. I had five days in “B” Echelon, which was down the country; you know there was a camp where there were sports facilities and showers and

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so on. So, I had five days there, that was as much as you got while we were there anyway, and you couldn’t get home. Generally, most that were there for the twelve-month period, they would get a seven-day what they called “R and R”: rest and recuperation [laughs], in Tokyo. Did you encounter many personnel from the armed forces of other countries? Oh yeah … mainly Commonwealth troops. I was in a brigade with the Canadian regiment that initially our Commonwealth brigade contained: there was our battalion, a battalion of Canadians, and a battalion of Australians. There were New Zealand gunners; we were supported by New Zealand artillery. The medical unit was Indian, [the] field ambulance unit, so yeah we had quite a lot of contact with Commonwealth people. And then of course, Americans, they were by far the major contributors to the war. So yes, we had quite a bit of contact with Americans. And how were your relationships with them? Generally, pretty good yeah. There was a lot of envy of the Americans [laughs], because they always seem[ed] to be better paid, and better looked after than we were. I suppose there was a wee bit of jealousy there. And then of course a bit of bantering went on you know, ‘cause you used to hear rumours that when they were up the front that they used to get supplied with ice cream and all that. We used to tease them a bit. I remember one occasion when they relieved us, and we were shouting to them [in an American accent] “Hi guys, didn’t we rough it three days without ice-­ cream?” [laughs] It was humorous banter, you know. Are there any other events from your time in Korea that were particularly memorable? Yeah, there were some humorous items actually that I bring to mind. I remember one occasion we were on patrol, and we were going through this undergrowth. Suddenly there was such a commotion, crashing, and of course we thought we were under attack or something, and we all scattered. What it was was a wild boar we had disturbed, and it was crashing through the underground. [laughs] Of course, we all panicked! And then another humorous occasion when my buddy, he went back into his trench and he lifted his small pack which we generally used as a pillow and coiled underneath was this snake. [laughs] So, he panicked and actually shot it! We had Korean porters, young men that did most of the carrying and lifting for us, very tough little guys they were. [A Korean porter] come in and had a look at it and in broken English told us, you know, “what were we frightened of, it was a harmless snake!” [laughs]

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Apparently, there were some snakes that were quite poisonous. Yeah, there were some little sagas like that, humorous incidents that sort of broke the ice at times; [it] wasn’t all doom and gloom. I remember one occasion when we had taken over a position that the Chinese had rigged up; they were quite adept at rigging up booby traps. One of the guys with me, he had taken the booby trap that had been hanging in this tree. It was six hand grenades tied together and they exploded, and it didn’t hurt any of us, you know, it just subdued us. Another occasion, well the same chap, he was a very frightened guy, and I can understand in retrospect. I believe he had been previously mildly wounded, been into Japan in hospital and come back. And any time we were under attack and we were out, he used to panic and say: “Oy, it’s coming straight for us!” You know, “this shell is coming straight for us!” I remember we were out laying barbed wire in front of the position. We had taken this position over and that was one of the first things [you did], when it was quiet you laid out a carpet of barbed wire about eighteen inches high which slowed any attack down when they were coming up the hill. We had been laying this carpet and suddenly we were under attack with mortars. Of course, he ran up the hill and got tangled up in the barbed wire! [laughs] We dashed to get him from the barbed wire carpet. It was little items like that … that sort of relieved the trauma here and there. Are there any other stories of your time in Korea that you’d like to share with me at all? I can’t think of any … well, apart from some of the actions. One of the most frightening things for me [was] when we were on duty at night, we used to do two hours on, two hours off, through the dark, in case there was any attacks from the Chinese. And that was quite frightening because you got the crickets and the frogs … the tree frogs chirping away and then suddenly it would all go quiet. Because it was totally dark, you would start imagining all sorts of things, you hear noises, [it was] quite frightening. One of the other things that used to scare me, I don’t know how the Chinese felt about it, but when we were under attack, we used to call in air strikes. These planes used to fly in dropping napalm bombs and phosphorous. Aw, it was dreadful. The napalm hit the hill, it was like jelly petrol and it used to run into the trenches. I don’t know how the Chinese must have coped with that; it was frightening just to watch it. The noise of the planes coming in, that used to make me cringe as well, flying in low and attacking the hills opposite. How did you feel when you were leaving Korea?

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Relieved. [laughs] I got sent to hospital in Japan. Yeah, I must admit I felt relieved to get a wound to get me out of there. And also [I] felt a bit of guilt to be honest; you felt that you were leaving your buddies there. Funny enough, the brigadier’s come round the hospital after we had been wounded, talking to some of the guys and I remember him stopping at my bed. I said “Hello.” And he said, “Right, get well and get back as soon as you can.” He says, “the guys back there need you.” [I thought,] “It’s the last thing I want!” [laughs] How long were you in hospital for? In total it was about two years, with the recuperation and rehabilitation and that. I was in Japan for about four months and then I got flown home in stages, stopping at hospitals I don’t know where. Then I finished up in Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot and had several operations there. Then as I was approaching my date for completion of service, I was sent up to a military hospital just outside of Edinburgh, Musselburgh, and that’s where I finished my tour of duty. I was invalided out there. Did you ever feel that you would have wanted to return even if you weren’t wounded? No, I don’t think so. I think I was quite happy to get back home to civvy street. What did you do once you had left the Army? Well, after I spent a time in rehab, then I had various light jobs that were mainly clerical, in engineering establishments. And then after a few years when I felt fit enough, I went back to my trade. You said that you had been back to Korea since then, could you tell me a bit more about that? The Korean Veteran’s Association, the Korean government agency for veterans’ affairs, they have a programme going for returning veterans that want to go back. They sponsor them; [it is] partly funded by them. That takes place every year. It is a five-day trip. You go down to the Commonwealth cemetery and Pusan, and they take you up to the demilitarized zone. It’s quite a hectic five-day period. Then I got a trip back there in 2000. It was quite amazing to see the radical change [compared to how] I remembered it, how it progressed in sixty years, [a] comparatively short time. It was quite remarkable. It was good, I enjoyed that. It was nice to see that the country had recovered to that extent. How did you feel returning to Korea?

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It was a bit emotional obviously, particularly when we went to the Commonwealth cemetery in Pusan. I saw a lot of the graves of my buddies, and I can remember … Prior to the main attack, I had been with another two guys, in another dugout. In the meantime, they decided that the platoon didn’t have enough firepower, so I was allocated for a short spell of training on this water-cooled Browning machine gun. So, I got moved to another position, and during the next attack these two guys were buried alive as far as I can understand it ‘cause they had on the war memorial in Pusan, [their status] listed as unknown graves. One of them was a good mate of mine and the other guy he had just been with us a couple of weeks, probably his first action actually. That was sad, you know, he just come out there and then he got killed. So, that was quite emotional going round the graves and seeing a lot of your buddies that you had been quite close with. That was very emotional. Would you refer to yourself as a veteran? Yeah, I would … I would say I’m qualified to count myself a veteran. Do you think that Korea has been forgotten? Well, it’s strange, I think it did … immediately after the war, I don’t think there was much attention paid to it. I mean, you got to bear in mind, the Korean War, when that was on, we [in Britain] were undergoing such a traumatic time after the [Second World] War. There was still rationing; in fact, it was more severe then, than what it was during the war. And I think people were disillusioned with war and the austerity. So, I don’t think it was the fact that it was ignored; I think people were just fed up of war and it was far away in the Far East. People had little knowledge of where Korea was, never mind anything else. I should suggest that it’s comparable to how it was in the Second World War with the campaign in Burma. I mean they always maintained that they were largely forgotten. We call them the “forgotten army,” so I suppose that was partly the reason because of the distance and the close proximity to the end of the Second World War. It seems that there is more interest in the recent times than there was immediately after the war. Why do you think there is more of an interest now than there was after the war was finished? I have no idea, it seems strange really, but it appears that way anyway. It appears that there’s more interest now. Certainly personally, I mean I’ve been contacted over the past few years to give some information and some interviews. But to be honest, it’s something I wouldn’t have done earlier.

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It’s strange because I remember when I came home, the local press kept bugging me for interviews and that, and I wouldn’t say anything, I didn’t want to get involved. And it’s only since I retired and I got involved with the Korean Veteran’s Organization. It’s only subsequently that these things have been discussed. How important do you think it is to be telling your story? I think the history of the conflict is important. I mean it was a major event in the Cold War, so yeah, I think it is very important. I mean it’s a shame that the situation … I had some knowledge of it, because I was stationed in Berlin, which was the same sort of situation, [a] split country—Germany was split in two. So, I think it’s important to remember that, and hopefully in time the nation will be joined together again. What was it like being stationed in Berlin? Well … [laughs] I didn’t like it to be honest. I mean most of our duties were garrison duties and guard duties and a lot of spit and polish ‘cause Berlin was split into four powers, because of the Four Power Agreement, they all had their representation there. There were always big guards going on when you had visitors from the different nations coming to the British sector, and they used to put on big posh guards. You were dressed up in all your best equipment and you had to be cleaned up, spit, and polished. And I didn’t get much on that. Then the general duties were guard duty and patrolling round the perimeter. Our camp was next to the Russian zone, so you would patrol round the exclusion zone there. All pretty mundane stuff, and pretty boring. That was one of the reasons I volunteered for Korea. I was a bit fed up of the routine. I mean other than that, the posting was fine. [The] sport and that was excellent; there were great facilities there. But the general routine, I wasn’t too happy with. That was partly the reason I volunteered. How many people did volunteer to go to Korea from Berlin? In our draft there was probably about twenty or thirty from our regiment. Then we got posted to Inverness Barracks and then there were several groups from other regiments joined us and we all went out together. And how did you feel? I was quite excited about it to be honest, at the time. Well, I mean our experience of combat was nil, so we really didn’t understand what we were going to. It was the exuberance of youth, the excitement. I suppose we were looking forward to it in that sense; our overall image of war was what we saw in the movies! [laughs] Weren’t quite the reality of course. Is there anything else that you would like to share?

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No, I can’t think of anything. Other than the situation as it is in Korea at the present time. I honestly hope that’s resolved and I’m more pacifist now than anything. I mean I abhor war now … I can’t see the purpose of it. When you look into all these conflicts, it hasn’t improved the situation, particularly in Korea, where the conflict’s finished at roughly the lines it started, makes you wonder what the purpose was. And subsequent wars, Iraq and so on, Syria, Libya. They’re all in a mess. So, what’s the answer? It’s like I think Churchill quoted: “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”

CHAPTER 15

Second Lieutenant Sir William Purves William Purves

W. Purves (*) King’s Own Scottish Borderers, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_15

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Fig. 15.1  Willie Purves talking into an 88 radio set with his signaller Lance Corporal Allison

It was a surprise for William Purves to end up in Korea. Conscripted for national service at eighteen years of age, he was first posted in Hong Kong with his territorial regiment, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Willie, as he likes to be known, was looking forward to getting to know Hong Kong but got to spend less than one month there before he and his fellow “jocks” were shipped to Korea to join the conflict there. He didn’t know much about the country or the war, but he understood his role in military terms: He “had been trained to command thirty men, and that was what I was going to try and do.” Willie’s testimony captures elements of the camaraderie and humour of the soldiers he led. Passing through Egypt on the way to Hong Kong, men

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on his troopship directed calls of “when are you chaps going to get an overseas posting?” towards Canal Zone soldiers. Some humour and goading occurred along national lines, just one element of the dynamic but highly effective multinational working relationships. It is perhaps unsurprising that Willie recalls these lighter moments of the soldiers’ experience, as he demonstrates a lively sense of humour throughout the interview. Leadership is a central theme in this account. It is clear that Willie recognised the feelings and temperaments of the men around him. In day-to-­ day life on the front, leadership could involve tasks such as checking the feet of his men for frostbite in the freezing cold Korean winter. Before long, he could tell each of his men apart by looking at the state of their feet! Leadership was expressed too in small gestures, like sharing the sweet rations sent by his mother and her friends with his platoon. On the front, leadership could mean the difference between life and death. Willie recounts the incident that led to him becoming the only national service officer to ever receive the Distinguished Service Order, a remarkable testament to his ability to lead men under the most serious pressure. When pushed on how he coped in such circumstances, Willie reveals that it was a combination of first-class training and learning on the job. “[A]s a nineteen-­year-old, seeing the first dead body was a bit of a shock. You learn quickly,” he explains. Upon completing national service, Willie finally had the opportunity to get to know Hong Kong. He returned there after the Korean War to reignite a highly successful career in banking, which led to a knighthood in the Queen’s 1993 honours and receiving the Grand Bauhinia Medal from Hong Kong in 1999. Willie was interviewed in March 2020. On one occasion, a question and answer has been moved to keep the content consistent, but otherwise the account is reproduced here as recorded. * * * Where did you grow up? Kelso, Scotland. [The] Borders. What year did you go to Korea? 1951. How old were you when you went there? Nineteen.

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What were you doing prior to being a part of the armed forces? Did you volunteer? Or were you conscripted for national service? I was conscripted for national service at eighteen, as everybody was. [Prior to that] I was an apprentice banker in the National Bank of Scotland in Kelso. And how long had you been in the armed forces before you went to Korea? Well, I was called up in May, [19]50. I was badged into the Black Watch and did my training at Fort George, but then went onto cadet school at Eaton Hall in October and was then commissioned into my territorial regiment, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, who happened to be in Hong Kong. I went out on a troopship to join the battalion in Hong Kong, arriving early March 1951. Within a few weeks, things were rather serious in Korea and the regiment, together with the KSLI [the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry], were mobilised and sent to Korea, arriving there [at the] end of April. As my service came to an end, I actually did more than two years I think, but I was demobbed in [19]52. [I] did a number of years with the Territorial Army, until I went back to Hong Kong to start my banking career What was your rank at the point you went to Korea? Second lieutenant. How did you feel when you found out that you were going to Korea? Did you know much about the country or the conflict? I knew very little about it, [except that] there were many national servicemen involved. Well, I knew where it was, but did I know anything about the history and the dispute? Very little. I had been trained to command thirty men and that was what I was going to try and do. I guess, those days, just after the Second World War, we were still a very disciplined country, disciplined people. And we did what we were told. What was your own personal attitude towards the war? Well, we were part of the United Nations forces there, and I just saw it as my duty to try to help the South Korean people. Do you recall much from the troopship journey from the UK out to Asia? Or vice versa? I mean as an officer one had, it’s true to say, a small cab[in] which you share with another officer or two other officers, but I don’t suppose it was much fun down in hammocks underneath. Well, we went through the Suez Canal, and it was quite fun going down. There were troops lined up

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the troopship, and of course there were at that time British forces on the canal and there was a lot of cheer[ing] and racket going on. The British troops on the troopship would shout: “when are you chaps going to get an overseas posting?” And things like that. There would be quite a lot of things organised, Scottish regiment dancing etc. You were out on deck, trying to keep fit. And it was very interesting calling at the different places; one didn’t go straight through. You called in India, Malaysia, all the way up to Hong Kong. Some places you’d see there were troops, in Aden, so that some people got off at Aden; others got on and so forth and so on. That was the way you travelled though; you didn’t travel by air until much later. What were the most memorable aspects of departing [for] Asia and your actual journey to Hong Kong, and then Korea? Well, I was going out expecting to serve in Hong Kong and didn’t know we were going to Korea until after I got there. I was looking forward to getting to know Hong Kong and serving there. We were out on the border with China, and it was a time with a great inrush of refugees into Hong Kong, because of what had been going on in ’49–’51. Nobody knew whether China was going to attack Hong Kong at the time. It was still recovering from the war; it was a pretty desolate place in some respects. The population was under 900,000, and over 1.1 million refugees poured in. They were living in cardboard boxes on the side of the hills and on the side of the streets. That mobilised the Hong Kong government into not only having to build accommodation, but it was— because these people wanted to work—the beginning of Hong Kong as an industrial centre. The spinning and weaving of cotton into garments and then all the other things that followed in the next few years, from toys to transistors, to wigs, and Hong Kong became a very successful trading nation. But coming back to ’51, I took up the rear party of the regiment to Korea and landed just after the Inchon landing. I took a bunch of Bren Gun carriers up there, but they were quite useless in Korea, so they were destroyed soon after. But the war became more static; there were two lines formed in the middle of ’51. After a late sort of bug out under MacArthur, who went against orders up to the Yalu River, that’s where China came in. We were not fighting Koreans, North Koreans; we were fighting China, Chinese, who were very much fiercer and efficient, although perhaps ill-­ equipped. They were in large numbers and were really a fine fighting force. What were your main duties once you got to Korea?

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I was commanding a platoon of thirty men, and around that time we started digging in on the hillside. There were standing positions in which one patrolled, and from time to time there was a battle, either where the Chinese tried to knock us off our hill or we tried to make some progress. We crossed the Imjin River at one stage and took up a new offensive line. What do you remember most about day-to-day life there? The weather. Minus forty in the winter, with a howling gale coming down from Siberia, and plus forty in the summer with much rain. Only two months of the year, in April and May, was [it] very pleasant with the flowers springing out, azaleas, and the like. And I suppose the month of October was not too bad when the rains would stop. But the weather was the biggest, the main one to remember. Of course, there were unfortunately too many people killed, including people in my own platoon. I think there were 1086 British deaths. Many, many wounded; there was some very fierce battles. The biggest one I was involved in was 5 November 1951, and during that I suffered some shrapnel wounds and was sent to Japan to be repaired and get fit again and go back to the regiment. So, I was in Japan itself, a rather poor country after the war, for about eight weeks recovering, and went back early January to Korea. While you were in Korea, did you have much contact with people in the UK? Did you have a sense of public feeling in the UK? Well, it was known as the “forgotten war.” Very occasionally, news correspondents were sent out to cover it; we saw them infrequently. The war was not reported at all, unless there was a skirmish with quite a lot of casualties, or if there were one or two decorations granted—that got the headlines in the UK for a bit. My mother was a widow and a school mistress, and she and her friends used to bag up their sweet rations in those days, pack up some chocolate and things like that. Occasionally it arrived and [it was] very welcomed; it was handed out among the platoon. One got correspondence. Of course, there was no such thing as email or telephone; it was all by British Army Post Office, quite a regular service [although] it took some time. So, the communications were quite good but there wasn’t much publicity. Subsequent wars, like Malaysia and the Middle East, got more publicity. Were there any objects or items or pieces of kit that you most strongly associate with your time there? One has one’s arms of course, [I] carried a pistol etc. The best weapon was the Bren gun, a machine gun. The platoon had one of those, and I carried a Sten gun, which was pretty useless because it kept jamming. And

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the troops had .303 rifles. We had some support from the New Zealand Artillery, twenty-five pounder gunners from a New Zealand unit. About October ’51, instead of being an independent brigade, we were formed into the Commonwealth Division. Apart from KOSB, and KLSI, we had the 3rd Royal Australian Regiment as part of our brigade in the division. There was a Canadian brigade, and then eventually an independent UK brigade which were made up mainly of reservists, many of whom were called up just before their reserve [ended]; shall we say, these were not terribly pleased to be there. In our case, most of the platoon were national service, and the national service officer had been trained for the job, whereas regular reserves [were] under the regular officers, trained at Sandhurst, [who] had been trained for the bigger picture and weren’t necessarily quite so successful as some of the young national service lieutenants. And what was your overall impression of the equipment that you were given? Well, the first two regiments there were the Middlesex and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. They were equipped in battle dress which was totally inadequate for the weather. When it came to my winter, we had American uniforms and a very successful American parka which was fur-­ lined in places and you had a hood with a wire so even the wind wouldn’t blow it off. We were better equipped to withstand the weather. The food was generally American, a C7 box that most of the jocks got tired of. In it there were twenty cigarettes each day, and there would be [a] can of fruit. But one got quickly fed up of crackers and frankfurters and things like that. Very occasionally we were able to go back to B Echelon to have a shower and have British food, which was a great delight. But that was not more than once a month. Generally, you got a new uniform when you went back because there were no washing facilities in the line. During the winter, you had to be so careful. You had to wear gloves, and if you forgot and picked up something metal with your hand, it froze immediately and just tore the skin off your hand. The other thing I had to do during the worst winter months [was] inspect the feet of everybody. [The] platoon sergeant inspected my feet. I inspected everybody else’s feet, to try to avoid frostbite, because in those days it was an offence to allow yourself to have frostbite. One went round and tried to do it in the warmest part of the day, which meant you had to take your boots and socks off. One could tell everybody, you didn’t have to look at their face, you could always tell them from the state of their feet! Did you feel like the equipment was good?

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The wireless equipment was inadequate; the 88 wireless was totally inadequate for the hills and you lost contact at lower levels and at county level.1 Of course, [there were] three platoons to each company. The company level, they probably had a 31 machine which was quite good. But the platoon radio … frequently one was on a feature, just one platoon or two platoons, and communication during a battle was very poor. One of the other pluses [was that] eventually there was an armoured brigade came out, and they had Centurion tanks, one of the finest guns that’s ever been produced in Britain. They were dug down about 2000 yards, maybe more, 3000 yards behind the front line, with only their top showing. There would be a Forward Observation Officer sometimes come down to the platoon and if you could identify movement of troops on the other side of the valley—they were rationed because of the cost of the shells—but if they properly saw a good target, they would put across a shell on instructions. And these Centurion tank guns were accurate up to about 8000 yards and very effective. We had also spotter planes attached to the division, above the division at the Army level, and these were little biplanes flying across to see if there was any build-up of troops etc. We became quite efficient by the second year, end of ’51, beginning of ’52. The Commonwealth Division was a crack outfit and recognised as such. The Australians had all fought in the Second World War, so they were exceptional. But to begin with, they had no discipline at all. Every three or four men had a jeep which they’d purloined. The US Army was dry, and the Commonwealth troops got a ration occasionally of a bottle of gin or some beer, which they’d love. For a bottle of gin, you could get a fully loaded jeep. When the division was formed, one of the first duties was to get the Australians back to proper numbers, because otherwise they were driving uphill [and therefore stretched out] for miles, driving these jeeps. But they were very effective soldiers; they were much more experienced than the British national serviceman obviously. In Korea itself, was there any aspect of the people, the food or the culture, that was especially memorable? Well, there was nobody there. Seoul was virtually destroyed, the capital. We went through Seoul; there were a couple of burnt-out bridges that had been put down; there wasn’t a bridge left in Seoul. One got up into the hills, you very occasionally saw a farmer in his white dress and top hat, when he wasn’t actually ploughing, but I mean they had all gone south; 1

 This sentence was clarified in later correspondence.

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they had already fled. You occasionally came to a village, small hamlets, that hadn’t been destroyed with some roofs attached and you very occasionally found somebody there. I went on a long patrol during the day once and came across a very attractive girl among the straw on top of one of these houses and realised that this was perhaps keeping some of the Chinese officers happy, and I made as quick a withdrawal as I could, because I knew I was being watched all around. You occasionally came across generally older people in the houses, but I mean we were in the frontline, we were infantry; we were not on backroads with any local activity. It was a very mountainous country, so you spent most of your time on the hillside; there was no use being down on the tracks. I mean the roads were just muddy tracks and whatnot. You mentioned that you did see combat during your time there; are there any experiences of this that you’re willing to share? Well, one doesn’t like to talk [about combat]. I suppose I should tell you, in case you don’t know, that I eventually was given a pretty high decoration. I was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, the DSO, and I was the only national service officer who has been so decorated. I think they must have made a mistake, because frankly it’s a decoration that goes to brigadiers and generals, not to second lieutenants! But there it is, I thought I better tell you. Do you mind sharing for what that was awarded? It was surviving a pretty big battle and extracting when told to withdraw. Extracting all my platoon and another platoon who had lost their lieutenant and the equipment etc. And I suppose it was a bit of relief because the regiment had taken quite a bashing on 5 November, and when I eventually got out a day later, it probably was a relief to see each other, [to have] some chance of not being wounded etc. Although we had some walking wounded and we had some stretchers we had to carry out. But anyway, I got them all out. How did you find command under such pressurised circumstances? How did you manage that? Well, you learned very quickly, and as a nineteen-year-old, seeing the first dead body was a bit of a shock. You learn quickly, you began to know when to keep your head down etc. I mean the Chinese had quite good artillery and they had a Burp gun, which is the equivalent of a Sten gun, which was much faster and much more reliable than ours. It became… at times when there was a real battle going on, it was hand-to-hand stuff, and the Chinese attacked in huge numbers and tended to almost overrun the

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position. It’s fair to say it was the last war in my view, as opposed to [the] Falkland Islands, [that] was like the Second World War. But it became static, except there was attack and counterattack and so on, and, of course, casualties took place. But you learn very quickly, and by the time one had been there six months, all of you, all the jocks out there, had learned the ropes. So, it was a self-learning thing to some degree. I had been trained to command thirty men and fight a war. Nobody knew about Korea at the time, nobody thought I’d be going to Korea, but you soon began to remember the training that had been over many days sort of forced into you. It came back, and I must say all training was first class. When you were given periods of leave, how did you spend that time? What did you do? Well, there was very little leave, but they eventually took people out to Japan for seven days’ rest and recuperation—some people would say rack and ruin! You were flown out to Tokyo or to Kure, where the divisional piece (HQ) was in southern Japan, and you had seven days. Japan was just recovering from the war and we were put into NAAFI quarters which had been commandeered; the one I stayed in on my few days’ leave was run by the Royal Australian NAAFI.  You wore [your] uniform all the time in Japan and you didn’t really fraternise. But of course, as you could imagine, the Asian girls were in some demand. Did you have much contact personally with civilians at all? Any interactions that you recall? None at all in Korea and very little in [Japan]; the older Japanese we were still the enemy in ’50–’51. The only thing that you could buy was little Japanese funny toys, and there were no toys in the UK when we left in ’50–’51. Things were still rationed and so you found that some of these mechanical toys were extremely well made and really quite amusing. You found during your seven days’ leave you probably bought two of these things and wound them up and had a bit of fun with them. That’s about the only memory I have of that; of course, one did a bit of sightseeing. I was in Tokyo, saw the Imperial Palace and walked around it etc. The place was just recovering from the war, food was very scarce, so you know no restaurants that troops could go to at that stage. What about personnel from the armed forces of other countries? Did you encounter many of those? Well, we had the Australians, the Koreans, some New Zealanders, and occasionally we met the Canadians. And, of course, you met—sometimes you were relieved by—an American Marine unit, and they had their soup

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kitchens, and the marines were really good. But the rest of [the] Americans were really untidy and left positions in a terrible state. The first thing you had to do was to clean the place up! How were the relationships between the different national forces? Oh, very good. There was a lot of jocular stuff about how useless the Americans [were] and so forth and so on, and you can imagine jocks goading the likes of the English and the Australians and vice versa! But no mixing, there were no Koreans that I talked to while I was there. Apart from we had two Korean porters attached to the platoon, and they were very hard working and could carry huge loads. They used these bamboo poles to carry a load at each end and they were very helpful. They were known, sadly, as “gooks.” It wasn’t a very nice name for them, but that’s how they were known. Each platoon had a couple attached, and there were a number out in the [company] headquarters. That was the only contact you had, otherwise you were in a foreign country fighting for the United Nations. Twenty countries responded to the United Nations appeal, and there were Belgians [and] all sorts of nationalities, Fijians. We didn’t come across these other nationalities very much, but there were all sorts of people there. Even the [Indian] field ambulance was very good; I was evacuated through an American field station. Do any of these people that you met stand out in your memory? Some of your senior people were more efficient [and] up to the mark than others, but I wouldn’t want to mention names. We were all in the same boat together, and some people swam well, and some people didn’t swim so well.2 Are there any other events from your time in Korea that are particularly memorable for you? Of course, one arrives and when we arrive, we were met by [President] Syngman Rhee and he would send a band to welcome us, but when we left there was no band. I actually managed to get out not on a troopship. I thought I’d try to get away a few days early, although I’d actually completed my service, and I managed to get on the last Sunderland flying boat that left Korea for Hong Kong. I had seven days in Hong Kong before the troopship arrived from Pusan to Hong Kong, and I got on the troopship there. I got to know Hong Kong a little better, I’d only been there three weeks, maybe four weeks, before I went to Korea. I had seven days getting to know it and I never expected to go back, but then three years later I 2

 In later correspondence, Willie did mention General Jim Cassels as “a great leader.”

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went back and restarted my banking career in Hong Kong and that went on until I retired in 1998. What were your feelings when you left Korea, as you departed the country? Well, I think one wonders whether it was all worth it or not. South Korea was a ruined country, and it is amazing how quickly the Korean industry grew up. They [are] very far advanced in many things, and they remain the biggest shipbuilders in the world. Now this couldn’t have happened unless they bested North Korea. So, I think it’s fair to say that South Korea and the government of South Korea are very thankful for the efforts of the Americans in particular [and] with the United Nations in general. And eventually a memorial was put up on the Embankment in London, not paid for by the British, but paid for by the Korean government. I suppose to begin with, one wondered if it was all worth it or not, and as I said, too many lives were lost on both sides. The Koreans lost very many more from the Army and from bombings and one thing or another. But no, I look back on it and I was glad there was a very small way to help and eventually we visited a number of times. My bank opened branches in Korea, and the Korean government paid for revisits. I think they’re still doing it in a small way, but they used to take three or four hundred veterans out to Seoul and then down to Pusan and looked after them and gave them quite a nice few days. So, the Korean government have been generous towards veterans generally. For how long did you remain in the armed forces upon your return home? I’d served a week or two over my two years for some reason, troopship movement I suppose. I was demobbed immediately, but then we had to serve in the Territorial Army, and you had to do four years in the Territorial Army. There I joined the fourth battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. I only served for just over two years because I left the country in 1954. How did you find the transition from life in the Army to launching your career? Well, I’d learned my initial banking in Scotland—I had passed my bank exams before I left Scotland, so I was a bit ahead of the game. I enjoyed banking and travel, and soon I was visiting other countries and serving not just in Hong Kong but all over the Far East, which was fascinating. Do you refer to yourself as a veteran? Hmmm … well, I suppose I am a veteran yes, I’m a Korean War veteran. But I don’t sign myself up as a Korean War veteran!

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Do you feel like Korea is still a forgotten war today? Why do you think that is? Oh, it’s still known as the “forgotten war” and you can’t bring it back to life. There [have been] many other skirmishes since, but out of all the skirmishes and battles and whatnot that Britain has served in, if you add them all together, there were probably less casualties than there were in Korea. The Korean government has not forgotten, though I think the British government more or less has. It was after the Second World War; it was the first thing of any size, the only thing of any size, you know? The Second World War was the war which added after the First World War, the war to end all wars. The forming of the European Union and whatnot, [they thought] that there would be no more skirmishes but of course there were. I think everybody was so tired in 1950, ’51, ’52. I mean the fighting stopped in ’53. There was no armistice; they’re still at war and [they have] huge armies on both sides. But as far as the UK is concerned, people were tired of war; they didn’t want to talk about war. Korea was miles away, on the other side of the world and “so what” [that] there were… there were five British battalions there: “so what?” Five thousand men, I mean one didn’t think too much about what was going on there, and there were many days, many weeks, when I believe the people at home never saw the mention of Korea. It was all snail mail, so you know there was no up-to-date communication that would excite people. I think that’s why it was forgotten because it was a long way away and everybody was fed up with war and they were trying to re-establish life at home. After all, we were still rationing on most things. And so, a few regiments away in Korea was not going to hit the headlines.

CHAPTER 16

Private Walter Coote Walter Coote

Fig. 16.1  Walter Coote in Korea, 1952 (left) and at a reunion event in Seoul, 2006 (right)

W. Coote (*) Royal Fusiliers, Dublin, Ireland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_16

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Elizabeth recalls comforting her husband at night. “He’d jump up from bed and I’d say, ‘Are you alright, Walter?’ He would say, ‘I saw all the lads from Korea that were killed.’” Today Walter Coote talks about the Korean War with ease, but he avoided doing so for decades. Only when his grandchildren asked about his experience did he open up. He never talked about the war with his kids. Walter’s wife believes he had a mild form of post-­ traumatic stress disorder that manifested as long-term silence. Other than the occasional nightmare, Elizabeth describes her husband as the “calmest, coolest character” she’s ever met. In conversation, Walter lives up to that reputation. He waits for the questions about the war—prepared and patient. His east London accent makes him sound like acting legend Michael Caine who, coincidentally, served in the same battalion. Walter is precise, pointing out that he served thirteen months in Korea, from August 1952 to August 1953. It was not a year; it was a year and one month. The extra month matters because it was thirty more days in the firing line. When he talks about getting hit by an artillery shell and unable to move, he laughs. The years between the event and the memory occlude the trauma and make his experiences— astonishing as they are—seem comically surreal. The shock remains, however, and his testimony treads a fine line between the seriousness of war and the resilient spirit of human endurance. Walter arrived in Korea at nineteen, unaware of the politics, the people, or the reasons for the war. He volunteered for the Army in 1951 and had spent a year in Germany, which effectively isolated him from the news of the world. As a teenaged private, he kept his head down, did what was asked of him by superiors, and shipped out to Korea when ordered by the Army. Walter took it all in stride, and when confronted with the war, he did the same. Unlike the early years of the conflict that saw troops move across the breadth of the peninsula, Walter experienced the drudgery of trench warfare. By 1952, the UN Command and the communist forces had dug in on opposite sides of the 38th Parallel. Walter rotated along the frontline from spots like the “Hook” near Panmunjom and the treacherous Hill 355. After three weeks, his platoon moved behind the line as reinforcements and to recuperate from the intensity of the “line” before returning again. His time on the line seems to linger in Walter’s memory. The mortality of the soldiers there undoubtedly feature in his testimony, as does the relief of that constant contemplation. After being injured on two occasions, Walter spent a good deal of time in Army hospitals, including the famous Mobile Army Surgical Units

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(M.A.S.H.s). The hospitals often saw soldiers from international forces mix with the British. He recalls the American soldiers’ generosity with food and cigarettes, not to mention the quality of the American rations. During one stint in the hospital, an American general presented Walter with a Purple Heart medal for sustaining an injury in combat, an amusing mistake as such medals were only intended for American soldiers. Likewise, he tells of the Army’s daily allowance of one Asahi beer that, if it was not consumed, would freeze and turn into a beer lollypop. From his testimony, we see the sights, hear the sounds, taste the flavours, and smell the odors of the Korean War. After the war, Walter was demobilized only to be recalled for the Suez Crisis in 1956 and demobilized again after a short campaign in Egypt. He left London in 1973 with his wife Elizabeth to her native Dublin across the Irish Sea. Their move came after grim news. Two years previously, Elizabeth’s brother died, and in 1972 her brother’s wife died leaving an eleven-month-old baby orphaned. Elizabeth and Walter moved to Dublin with their three children to care for the orphaned baby. For the next twenty years, Walter worked at University College Dublin as a security officer. In 2016, he returned to Korea for commemoration ceremonies and found the trip cathartic. Walter stumbled upon the graves of his two closest friends who perished. Noticing that they were buried alongside each other, he said the sight gave him solace and a degree of closure. Walter recorded his testimony in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. His wife Elizabeth assisted with the technology. * * * You went to Korea in 1952, how old were you when you went? Nineteen. I volunteered for the Army in 1951. I signed on for twelve years, five with the colors [City of London regiment] and seven on reserve. At that particular time, there was a slump in England and there was very, very little work. And I had some mates who joined the Army, and they said to me, “Wally, you know, you are never going to get a job, so you might as well join the army.” You joined in 1951. The Korean War had already begun in 1950, almost a year earlier, so you must have expected that you would probably be deployed to Korea. Yeah, you see, because I was in Germany at that time in the Army of the Rhine, then we got alerted and we were told that we were going to

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Korea—we were going back to England and then we were going on to Korea. I was in the Army, and as far as I was concerned, wherever the regiment went, I was willing to go. I wonder if you could tell me if you knew anything about the country before you went? I tell you, no. I did not even know there was such a place as Korea. To tell you the truth, I did not even know or did not even think [about the Cold War] because we never got any papers. We did not know from outside where we were in Germany. We did not know nothing about anything. What were the most memorable aspects about the journey to Korea? Well, I will tell you, before we went to Korea, we had to have injections and just before we was going to go abroad, we had those injections, and I was actually taken on the train on a stretcher and also taken on the boat on a stretcher because what had happened was one of the injections in my arm had gone poisoned. So, I kind of collapsed. I did not know until I was actually on the boat. The journey was on an old German troop ship, and it took us six weeks to get to Korea. We left from Liverpool, and I think we left sometime like, June, you know, as I say, it took us six weeks to get out there. I think it was maybe the first or second week in August when we arrived. And the journey must have been somewhat of a fog if you were kept in the infirmary for the whole time. Well, no, no, because I was only in there, say, a couple of weeks. And then another funny thing: I come out of the hospital and was allowed to go on the ship and was allowed to go up on deck. And I took a book up, and I was sitting on the hatch cover, and I sat there, I do not know, it could have been an hour, maybe two hours I was reading. And all of a sudden it is lunchtime now, and I kind of got up to go. I literally walked about three paces and, bam, I went down. I just collapsed. I didn’t realize it. I had sunstroke. So back into the hospital, you know, down into the hospital I went again. I mean, after that, I was only in there maybe a few days and then we were firing over the side and different things and, you know, assembling weapons and different things and lectures and discussing what we do when we get there in this kind of thing. Well, you know, when the ship pulled in, there was a big American band and they played us in. And we didn’t actually know what conditions would be or anything, you know? And I remember getting off the boat and I’m not sure whether we walked up the country or whether we were loaded up

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or whether we went on the train. I’m not sure of that part. I can’t remember. I didn’t have any fear at all. But I tell you, when we arrived for the first, I think, maybe two weeks, we were doing a kind of training. And then after that two weeks, we would go into the first position in the line. It was kind of, what they said was a kind of a quiet sector of the line. So, it was reinforcing the front from well behind the line. Yeah, because, see, that front was around about fifty-four miles across Korea, and it was battalions of all nationalities on each position. Because at that time [1952] things were stable. We dug in on all the different issues, and we stayed, you know, for the whole time. You mentioned the Americans are welcoming you ashore; what were your interactions with the various nationalities? I’ll tell you, after the first position there, you don’t really come into contact because you’re in the line for maybe three or four weeks, maybe longer, on that one position. And on that first position, I got wounded there. I was maybe about two or three weeks after we arrived on that [position], I come out of my bunker and walked down the hill and it was a great big bang and it just slung me down the slope. They reckon if it has been on the flat, they wouldn’t have found the pieces. It’s artillery. It would’ve been a bigger shell than just a mortar then. So, tell me a little bit about that then obviously you’re flung from down the slope, how did you recover? Well, I lay there for a little while. I was shocked. I didn’t know what happened. I laid there, and all of a sudden, I thought, “Blimey, I can’t move. I can’t get up.” So, I shouted for my mate, Tony. I said, “Tony, Tony, I’m hit. I can’t get up.” And he said to me, “If you think I’m coming out there to pick you up, you got another thing coming.” [laughter] But then he kind of came out, he literally grabbed a hold of my leg and pulled me into the edges of the bunker. When it happened, as my mate pulled me into the bunker. I was wounded in the leg and in the shoulder, and they just put the field dressings on and they carried me by a stretcher across the pathway and then put me on a stretcher jeep and I tell you it was no [fun] journey going down the side of the hill, down the pathway. I was being bounced all over the place on the stretcher, but they took me down into an Indian M.A.S.H. They just kind of redressed me, and I was lying on the floor on a stretcher and they gave me something to eat. And after a while, they put me in an ambulance, and then I was in the ambulance there down the road, and there was

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an Australian in the ambulance with me and he had shot himself in the leg. He said to me, “Hey, Tommie, do you want a cigarette?” I said, “Oh, yeah, lovely.” Because I had got stuff that day and I got nothing [left]. So, he gave me a tin of fifty cigarettes. And then we went to a Norwegian place, a M.A.S.H. hospital there. We were taken into a tent there, and there was surgeons and that there. We were just taken in there and we were operated on and then put into one of the tents there. There were more [M.A.S.H. visits] because after I was in the Norwegian place it was, for a while, I’m not sure. It could have been a week, it could have been a couple of weeks, and they shipped us on to Seoul into an English hospital there and there I stayed until I was well again and then shipped back to my company again, to the frontline. The M.A.S.H. hospitals are very famous now obviously because of the TV show. I wonder if you could tell me just a little bit more about the experience in the M.A.S.H. hospitals; what were they like? It was just a great big tent, and the tent I was in, I don’t know, that could have been, maybe it’s a good ten or twenty of us. And we were really treated well, you know. I don’t know so much about what we ate, and that kind of thing, but we all stayed [there]. The Australian fellow, he was in the same tent as me. Then there was some American fellow come in and he was walking around the tent because there was some Americans in there, and he gave out some purple hearts and he gave me one, would you believe? He must have thought I was an American. Over the course of time, I lost it. [laughter] It’s funny because you know it was given the medals out to anyone. You said you were in your first week of being in that first position; did you take up another position after you were healed? When I returned, I was kept in for about another couple of weeks in the rear echelon with the company, where my company’s stores was. They kept me there for a few weeks, and I used to go to Seoul in that and take the company laundry and stuff into Seoul, and then after that I was told I would have to go back. So, I went back in the line again and it was just one position after another. We went to the main points—the 355 was the main feature of the line. That was the main feature. If that falls, the whole line would have to go back. We was on there for three, four weeks, and that was the position where I lost my first mate, one of the mates in my platoon, Freddie Rhodes, he was killed, and just after him, there was my friend Alton. He was killed and all. He tread on a trick flare on patrol, and it went up through his leg and he died from loss of blood. And then after

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that, we would move again to another position and I lost two of my mates. My two mates, [Ronald G.] Cooper and [Brian M. Tull] “Tulley,” and my officer, [Lt. Battalion Commander] Harmon. They went out on the listing patrol, which was just down through a minefield in a little pathway into the valley below. And there, they would stay there as a listening post for a warning if we were going to be attacked but they never got through. They were killed. The Chinese had come up into the minefield; how they got in there, we don’t know. But they shot that patrol up and then a couple of other patrols they shot up. And my two mates were killed. Who is Freddie Rhodes and how did he pass away? Well, see, it was all night time, all night work. We slept during the days, but over the night time, we went out on to patrols, fighting patrols, ambush patrols, and listening patrols. Night after night, every night. Some nights, you wouldn’t be out because we had a certain amount of men on the position to hold the position when the other men were out in the valley. Except for hospitals and things like that, we’ll be a month to six weeks on each position, and during that time, you was either out of patrol or on the position. Well, I tell you. We used to have SOPs [standard operating procedures] and we used to watch if the Chinese were using a certain path or something like that. This particular night was about a dozen of us, and we went out and we laid out on that pathway and we waited to see if the Chinese came by, but they didn’t. On all the patrols that we went out, we never actually bumped into the Chinese or the North Koreans. It was lucky. When my mate got killed on that mine gap, another patrol went out on there and they go down and all. Then another patrol would [get ordered] out and they wouldn’t go out. They said, “No, we haven’t got a fighting chance to go down there and get caught because we can’t go nowhere because we go through the gap.” There is only literally about four or eight inches wide, and each side of that gap is mines so you just kind of thread your way through the minefield down into the valley. So, this particular night, they refused to go out. They were going to be court-martialed. I don’t actually know what happened to them but they were warned. They didn’t send any more patrols, though. They made a new mine gap. They closed that one. That saved the rest of our lives. When you said you were on the 355, which was that main feature? You said you were there for three weeks or four weeks; where did you move after that? We moved after that, as I say, from one position after another. When we were on the 355, after we’d done maybe three weeks or a month, we were

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taken out, you go back in reserve, you go back to the reserve for maybe about a week for a rest and that, and then you go back in again and you’ll be on another of positions. The only ones that I really remember names of was 355 and just a little feature off the 355, which they called the “sausage.” And that’s where we were on 355. The chain of hill, 355 was the main kind of feature. Alongside of them, actually joining 355, there was four hills and it was “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John,” and these were where the Chinese were, actually on these positions. They usually try to take 355, but they never succeeded. Why was it called the sausage? When you come down from 355 and it was part of the range of hills but it was like a little lump and that was where my platoon was, we was there for the next three or four weeks … when we done that three or four weeks, we was taken off of there, back into reserve for a week, maybe even a fortnight, and then we went back in again and then it was on another position but there were so many, you think of that great long line. The only other feature I remember was the “Hook” and that was a very, very dodgy position because there you kept low. You didn’t put your head up out of there because the Chinese was literally only about a hundred yards away from you. When you’re at these various features, what did they have you doing besides the patrols? For example, if you were working on communications or logistics, what was the day-to-day activities that you personally were tasked to do? Well, see, during the time, you have to keep down, you never went out near the skyline because they had observers there, and if they see anything, they’ll shell you or open fire on you. We kind of just make sure all the ammunition was right. We, literally, the whole day until the nighttime, was kind of hanging around and that. Were there any aspects about the Korean people or the food or the culture or any of your engagement with the Koreans that was particularly memorable? No. Because when we was out of the line, we usually get all the mamas and the little kiddies coming up to where we was, and we used to be giving them our rations and giving things and that because they were starving. The Korean porters used to bring up our wounded, bring up our ammunition and water and the stuff like that and food. But we must’ve been filthy because we never had a lot, we weren’t really clean at all. Only when we come out of the line, we might go and swim in the Imjin [River]. One of the things that you mentioned there was about your own personal hygiene. I mean, how often did you shower?

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I tell you the truth, when I was in the hospital, I had to shower in there, and I think only, literally, one time, a shower unit came in, we was out the line at the time, and we was taken to this place and there was this shower unit place, and we could have a proper wash and that. Other than that, we just done what we could. As I say, we used to swim in the Imjin River. There is an episode there where we was there one day, and my mate said to me, “Wally, let’s go over the other side.” And I was not what you would call a very good swimmer. We swam about three-quarters of the way across, and I felt tired. So, I thought to myself, “I must be near the shore and that.” So, I kind of let myself go and went down. Well, I did not realize, I went down, and I came straight up, and I grabbed my mate and hung on to him. And he turned around, and all of a sudden, crunch, I was on the beach. He had knocked me out, and he had towed me back into the beach. I was terrified. I was sick. I spent another week, I think, in the hospital. I have asked you a little bit about your senses, and the sights and the smells and the sounds. I wonder if I can ask you about some of the things, and particularly, objects. Are there any objects that you associate with your time in Korea? No, not really. See, because when we wasn’t in the line, we was only just outside [it]. We never… I mean, I loved the countryside, but trouble is, it is all hills and little valleys. There were rice fields and all this kind of thing and that. We never mixed with anyone. What about your kit? In terms of objects and material stuff, what about your kit? Well, when we was in Korea for the full year, you had the spring, and then you had the summer. During that summer, you had the rainy season, and you have never seen rain like it. It rained, and it rained. You would get soaking wet, and the clothes used to dry on you. And then the winter came and, boy, was it a winter. It was ten, twenty, or thirty below zero. We did get some extra gear and that. We got big parkas and fleece-lined trousers and things like that. What about some of the other kit that you had? I mean, was the weaponry good? Was the equipment good? Well, I tell you, all we had was the 1939–1945 [gear]; we had the rifle, the Sten gun, a Bren gun. Except for the Bren gun, was the only kind of automatic weapon you had with the Sten gun. But the Americans, they gave us heavier weapons: the fifty cal. and the thirty cal. machine guns to give us more firepower.

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Being in the regs, I was on four-pound fifty a week. And the Americans wanted to pay us the same as they were getting, but the British government says no. They go about two to three hundred dollars a week. They were fabulous, them and the Canadians, fabulous wages. Walter, when you were there, you surely got periods of leave, right? I got five days. I got five days’ rest in a place called Inchon. There was a big camp there, and there was Americans—oh no, there was no Americans there. There were Canadians, British, and Australians, and that went to this camp. And New Zealanders and that there. And they stuffed us up, and we could sleep all day and things like that for five days. And then we would come back into the front again. Is that what you did when you took leave, you just slept? Yeah. You slept and ate and that. You could not really go anywhere, because we was right on the coast there in Inchon. It was Inchon Bay where the Americans came in. When they done the surprise landings on Inchon to get behind the Chinese. There is a famous scene from the television show M.A.S.H., which of course is about the American Army doctors in Korea. But they create a distillery in their tent, and they make martinis. Did you have any alcohol or any home comforts, things that would have been luxuries when you were there? Well, when we was actually in the line, we used to get a bottle of beer. And it was called Asahi beer, and I think it was from Japan, and we was allowed one bottle of a night time … But during the wintertime there, if you did not drink it and, say, you left it, you would come back, and you would have to break the glass and suck it like a lollipop because it would be frozen … But during the winter, we used to get a little flask and have it full of rum. Because you would take that cup of rum before you went out, but you could not stay out too long because the temperatures were so low. And to try and lay on the hillside to ambush them, we only spent about two or three hours out there at the most because you would freeze to death. The Americans at the time there, they had chicken. I used to get chicken and ice cream and everything in the line. And we was actually living on their rations. So, we had a pack we used to get from them, and it was breakfast, dinner, tea, and there was cigarettes in it. There was a little burner in it where you could put a little tin on and heat it up in that. … The one I used to like most of all was beans and frankfurter sausages. Yeah, and also the Hershey bars … And then, as I say, when we went into one position where the Americans was on, in the bunker we went there was a

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sack there, and it was literally full of cigarettes. So, we could literally smoke ourselves to death. Is there anything else from the war that you think is worth mentioning? The poverty there was something wicked. All the poor people was literally starving to death. But it didn’t really enter your mind, that kind of thing. You was in there to do a job, and you just done what you was told. You did not really think about anything else out above that. You kind of kept alive. You think to yourself, “Well, it will not happen to me.” I suppose each one of us was an individual, but without each other, we would never have survived. How did you feel when you were leaving Korea? Oh, I will tell you. Because we was actually in the line, on the night of the ceasefire, we was actually in the frontline. And twelve o’clock that night, it just went silent. There wasn’t a sound. And as soon as it got daylight, you looked into the valley, and there was the Chinese. There was thousands in the valley, and they would put all tents up and everything all in the valley during the night. And one spectacular thing was the Chinese used to play us records, Bing Crosby, White Christmas. “I don’t know why you are fighting us, fighting for the imperialists. Come over to us. We have got lovely bunkers, and we have women, and we have drinks,” and all this kind of thing … They reckon on the position where we were, they reckon there was something like about a quarter-million Chinese on them positions in front of us. As I say, in the ceasefire and the next morning, they was all in the valley. We was at orders now to come off the position. We pulled off the position, taking our ammunition and stuff all off the hill, and then we started the demarcation line. For a stretch of about half a mile, we put Dannert wire up, which was the start of the demarcation line. When we was there in 2016 is electric minefields and massive walls and massive great bunkers and everything there. Did that make you think that this was somehow a bit futile, the war? Well, not really, no, because we knew that if we failed, the North Koreans and the Chinese would have had the whole of Korea. You can’t abandon them, you know. Did you stay in the armed forces upon your return home, and for how long if you did? When we pulled out of Korea, the battalion went to Egypt, and we was in Egypt then for I would say about six months or more, and then from Suez they sent my battalion; we went down to the Sudan. It was in Sudan

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there for the rest of my overseas service. And then I was sent back to England, and I went into the Tower, the Tower of London, and I got a nice job in there, a ration storeman there. And then I was demobbed, and then, as I said a while ago, I was only literally out a few months, and the Suez came up, and being a regular soldier, I was taken back in. We had to come back in again. For Nasser, closing the canal. Because we landed in Egypt and the Egyptians had run upcountry, and we followed to a certain extent and then just dug in there and waited, but we was only there for about three weeks at the most. Three weeks to a month. And then the governments and that said [to evacuate], so we was pulled out of there. Would you believe we got back into England on a Friday night, no, on a Saturday? And the train took us out to our camp, and Sunday morning, the next morning, we was all demobbed that day and slung out of the Army again. So, I have heard there that you have had a nightmare about the war, and I am just wondering if you could tell me a little bit, in your own words, about what you saw or what the nightmare was like? Well, it was kind of the reoccurrence of, as I say, when I got wounded in being blown up in the air and different things and that. And then I suppose it meant of seeing my mates, seeing their bodies. But except for Freddy Rhodes and the man Hutton that was brought in on stretchers dead. It is just things that stayed in your mind, and I suppose, you think, “That could have happened to me,” or something like that, you know? Korea stays in my mind even now. Would you believe I am sitting in my back room and incidents come up in my mind at certain times and certain things that happened in that? But it comes to my mind all the time, you know? … After coming back … I’d be walking around and a car would backfire or something like that and I used to jump nearly six foot in the air! … I suppose a lot of it played on your mind because you did not know. You literally did not know at any time—because I mean, we was forever being shelled and things like that. So, you never knew when it would be your lot there. As I said, my two friends that died there. Then when I see Freddie and then I see poor Hutton brought in on the stretcher wounded with a flare-up through his leg and dying. You think to yourself, “Could that happen to me?” But with a bit of luck, it did not happen there. I mean even Tully and Cooper when they died, that played on a lot of our minds because I mean they were personal mates and that. I mean and the officer, Mr. Harmon, he was one hell of a guy. Officers we got after

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him were, I mean, there were only just out of training and that. So, I mean this, Mr. Harmon, he was a real gentleman, and he was very good to us. And what, what happened to Mr. Harmon? I remember we mentioned him briefly, but he died in service as well? That is one thing I do not know, and I never found out. Because at that time, we were trying the new bulletproof vests out, which was American. Was kind of plate steel, a coat kind of thing, a jacket. We used to wear that. Mr. Harmon, when they brought them in, he said that the bulletproof vest was a kind of ray of holes across his chest. As luck would have it, the armor stopped it from penetrating. He must have got wounded in other places and that, you know? He went to a hospital. And we never see him again after that. And you said Tully and Cooper were your two closest friends? Yeah. Well, see, because they were in my platoon. I think they was even in the same section as me. Because the platoon was split up into, say, three sections. There was about eight or ten men in a section and that, you know? I tell you what, though. When we was at the line, at the valley some, another place there, and we was out for about a week. And when we had to go, you know, we was called back in for some emergency, well, me and the corporal, we had to stay behind to look after ammunition and stuff that was there. But would you believe that I was there for a week because they forgot all about us there? But as luck would have it, a French battalion, an infantry battalion, came in and was resting in the same place. Because otherwise, we would have starved to death, you know? Then we asked them, and they fed us there. And you ought to see, there was big barrels of wine. They had wine for breakfast, wine for dinner, wine for tea. And they were very good. You know, we actually ate with them all the time. There was one time there when we was out there; I think it was [Matthew B.] Ridgway. He was the general there, the American general. He came and the whole battalion was out of the line. So, we had to go to this certain spot. Then he came up in a great, big Jeep and that, you know, got out there. And he was congratulating us for the work we were doing. It was really nice. Did you have any entertainment? Because when I got wounded there, and I was in Seoul hospital, you know ENSA [Entertainments National Service Association] used to come. There was only one time when I was there. I came in there, and there was a woman, an English girl. She was singing and that. And then another day when we was out on the line, we saw the film Quo Vadis. They set it up in

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part of the valley there. And we were sitting there watching the film, and all the time you could hear the big bangs and guns firing and everything. It never stopped firing. There was shells going off, and you could hear the gunfire and that. You were talking about the 2016 trip that you made to Korea. What that 2016 trip was like, why you went out there, and what your memories of that trip are? One of the days I was there, we was taken from Seoul, which was a two-­ and-­a-half-hour journey on the train, down to the cemetery. There was a ceremony. Because [the fallen are buried by nationality] Australians, Canadians, and all that, was kind of, each area, there was a ceremony on each one. And the last one was the British cemetery, was the British part there. We didn’t know where we was, because a lot of people said we can go to the different areas, and if you know where they are buried, you can visit them. Because they gave us a, rose each, to put on the graves of the fellows we knew, but of course, we did not know where my two mates were. But we kind of stood. We started along the [line of graves]—it was actually the last line of the cemetery there. And we just kind of walked along, and I got over to the side there, and I was looking in the next line. Elizabeth was walking down on this line, and she goes to me, “Walter, look.” She said, “You will never believe it.” And there she stood, and there, the two greys were side by side, Cooper and Tull.

CHAPTER 17

Sergeant Raymond Rogers Raymond Rogers

Fig. 17.1  Raymond Rogers before deployment, 1950 (left) and at 2015 reunion (right)

R. Rogers (*) South Staffordshire Regiment, Victoria, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_17

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Raymond Rogers has a unique accent, a mix of his childhood Black Country dialect blended with an Australian inflection as a consequence of decades down under. Sandwiched between his youth in England and adulthood in Oz, Rogers fought as part of a contingent of the South Staffordshire regiment sent to reinforce the Middlesex regiment. It seemed a pivotal moment and one that transformed him in many ways. Before leaving for Korea, Rogers took a temporary job as a metal pattern maker. Like many in the Midlands, he gravitated to the manufacturing industry that employed so many of his friends and family. But Rogers knew his time in the factory would be short-lived. Having watched all four of his brothers go to war against the Nazis, he planned to join the Army. The Army called first, coincidently, and conscripted Rogers. Following basic training and a short deployment to Hong Kong, the twenty-one-year-old volunteered to fight in Korea. Rogers joined the Middlesex regiment along with sixty other Staffordshire national servicemen and a handful of regulars. The Middlesex regiment had trained together and bonded, while the small number of “Staffords” were dropped into the mix. The Staffords felt like strangers. What made matters worse was the nature of the war in those early days. “It was a very mobile action,” Rogers recalls. The United Nations’ force withdrew to a small perimeter around Pusan in the south before breaking out and attacking North Korean forces as far north as the Yalu River, only to retreat another 200 miles when the Chinese entered the war. The 27th Brigade marched or found transport across the breadth of the peninsula, and Rogers carried a no. 31 radio—a wireless communications device, strapped to his back. The massive battery and steel radio weighed 31 pounds, and the aerial antenna made him a target, as did the fact that signal-men often kept close to the commanding officer who relayed messages. The frantic nature of the war emerges from his testimony. Close calls, getting lost from his company, brushes with Chinese machine gunners, and the boredom between battles becomes evident. Ray, as he prefers to be called, also has a knack for storytelling. He remembers beyond the trauma of war, and his descriptions are vivid. The transport train was like “Stevenson’s rocket.” The welcome by Koreans was a Hollywood production, despite the poverty and despair. The sensory experience of eating or drinking becomes real in his telling. Because the Americans had the greater resources and personnel in Korea, they supplied rations to many of the first British soldiers in Korea. Peanut butter— an American staple—was a curiosity to British soldiers. Ray ate it by the

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handful. The coffee was terrible, and he doesn’t drink it anymore. American beer and whiskey made a certain impression: Ray had too much one night and wandered off base. By June 1951, the war had settled into a stalemate around the 38th parallel near the middle of the peninsula, and, near that time, Rogers got an unknown virus—he believes it was scrub typhus—and left Korea to recuperate in Japan. He did not return when offered another tour. He returned to South Staffordshire and briefly took up a job, but rekindled his ambition to travel to Australia. Like joining the Army, he always intended to move down under. It’s long been an adopted home, and where he raised his six kids. Ray has visited Korea since with reunion parties, and recorded his testimony in early 2020. * * * How old were you when you went to Korea? I think it was a couple of nights after my twenty-first birthday … I grew up in the war years, obviously from the date of birth. I had four brothers in the services. They told me that if I transferred to the regular army, they’d kill me, but I did it anyway. I had one [brother] in the submarine service. We had a large family—nine kids. The eldest brother was a Redcap military policeman, not very popular with the others. A brother in the Marines, the Royal Marines, taken prisoner on Crete. He was a prisoner for four years. The other brother, Jack, went—about the fourth day of D-Day—into France and he got blown up by German mortars. They got caught out and held. He was shell-shocked, actually. He was jumping into the trench and a mortar exploded and the blast and the shrapnel went down into the trench and decapitated his trench-mate. My eldest brother Tom was a military policeman in Burma. When he was nineteen, he fought the World’s Featherweight Champion, Freddie Miller an American. Miller rated him as the best boxer he met in England. “Best boxer this side of Herring-pond,” was his phrase. I think there were two Rogers on the cenotaph in the Memoriam in the middle of the town, and I believe they were cousins. But as for military background, my father was a brass moulder during the war. His was a reserved occupation making ammunitions so he didn’t have to go. Were you ready to go when you were called up? Were you prepared?

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Yes, I was going to join up anyway … I volunteered for Korea, by the way. Because they wouldn’t take any of the regular soldiers. I mean, the battalion—the South Staffordshire Regiment—volunteered almost all men to go, and they wouldn’t [take them] because we were in Hong Kong at the time and on the other side of the border were the Chinese. No CO would want all of his regular soldiers unavailable when there’s another force on the borders that could have come across overnight. We wouldn’t have stopped them anyway, but we might just slow them up for twenty-four hours. Which, I think, was the idea, so they could get the VIPs out of there. I was in Hong Kong from the 10 August 1949. So, the first time I was in Korea was on 26 August 1950 to 19 June 1951 … I think it was 267 days, much longer than we intended to be, which was only until the British Army had mobilised a properly equipped fighting force raised in the UK … It was a very mobile action. You talked to Walter [Coote]. His war was, more or less, a stagnant one. They were dug in and had their guns, and the Chinese were dug in and had their guns. It were just constant bombardment … Ours was bad because we moved around quite a bit and had inferior weapons, inferior clothes. They had given up on us virtually because [our kit] was wearing out. We lost all our small artillery carriers because the tracks wouldn’t stay on the road and our boots, they ripped. We were dependent on the Americans for the clothing and the rations and we’re supposed to be returning twice but they called us back because we’ve got a very good name out there. Until the Chinese come across the border, we never took a step backwards. When we landed, the Americans were building a toehold—trying to build a perimeter [in Pusan] … We dropped in under the neck, and everything all the mobile constructions—everything were the Americans, and we had to rely on those. I mean, you can’t take anything away from the Americans. They fought well, but it was a lot of untrained blokes here, like the South Koreans, young blokes, fourteen or fifteen [years old] shoved into the Army without any training or very little training and left to do battle. I think it got better when [General Matthew Bunker] Ridgeway took over command from the pipe-smoking general—[Douglas] MacArthur. How did you feel when you volunteered to go to Korea? When you decided to volunteer to go to Korea, what moved you to do that? Well, I was a professional soldier. And that’s what I was trained for. It’s pointless if you don’t take advantage of your training. You know like a

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stupid thing to do, but that was my thinking at that time. Plus, the fact that I had four brothers fighting in the war. So, I wouldn’t want to be left out. I wasn’t old enough for [World War II]. And when you got to Korea, how much did you know about the conflict? Nothing. Korea was Korea. I mean, we didn’t even know it was a place. Can I read you something? This is something I wrote some time ago: “There was war. And inevitably there were rumours of war. And for days these rocketed around the camp at the speed of light. They mentioned invasion across the border from mainland China and into the new territories. We will be the proverbial sacrificial lambs, tasked to hold up the yellow hoards long enough to allow the evacuation of essential civilian dignitaries.” Korea had no significance for us. Few could have pointed it out on the map. And even less ever heard of it. But we knew that the Americans were in trouble there. They asked for the support from the United Nations. Then the blow fell. It is not to be the pride of the Midlands who would shoulder the attack of this particular part of the White Man’s Burden, but the bonny-wee jocks from the Northern orders [Argylls and Sutherland Highlanders] along with our immediate neighbours, that cockney mob, the Middlesex Regiment. The despondency in the battalion was palpable and in no way helped by learning that the sixty or so Staffordshire that had been selected were national servicemen with six months extra added on their time as an added bonus. We regulars could scarcely look them in the eyes. Then the light dropped through the clouds. It almost hadn’t added up and from the HQ come the call for volunteers. I rushed to be first in the queue only to be pushed into second place by Private Larry Church. No matter. I was on the list and all that was left was to convince my good mate, Sergeant Jock Strachan, to let me go. To be quite honest, I’ve got a book, The Leadership of Korea. It’s written by an American. If I have read that before I volunteered for Korea, you wouldn’t have seen me there for dust. Because during the Japanese occupation, and during the Korean War that came after between North and South, they were equally as evil as each other. They buried the prisoners alive, and, you know, it was absolutely horrible. But I read that after coming back. The only thing is, looking back, we left the place in a much better state than we found it. That’s one reason to say I’m glad I went. How did you find it when you went there? What was it like? Well to use a vulgar phrase, a shithole. We pulled in the docks there and there was a band playing, an American band—you know, all the Hollywood jazz, beautiful musicians in the uniform sparkling. And there was a choir

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of Korean school girls, about eleven to twelve, and despite all the poverty and all the buildings falling into disrepair, and the smell, they wore white blouses and blue skirts and were immaculate. It just really lifted you to see them. I mean the food supply was short. That train that took us up to the front again, I think it was made of plans from Robert Stevenson’s workshop—you know the old “Rocket” and wood burner … One hill was very much like another, small mountains and you weren’t in them very long because we were moving forward; we were shifting the North Koreans at the right a notch. Once I started moving, once we crossed the Yalu, there was just a makeshift track across that was mainly rocks and sandbags. I carried with me what the Americans call 77 set [PRC-77].1 It was the set they carried on the back. The Americans had a slightly smaller set, I think. Ours was the “31” [wireless] set. We have the headsets and the phone for the officer. I was with the officer commanding the A company—where he were, or if you could keep up with him. Sometimes we had to march for a couple of days. You know, if we couldn’t get transport. If you were ordered somewhere, and the transport were supposed to turn up and didn’t, you’d have to get transport from somewhere. We were a Cinderella brigade. I think that’s what they called us. The “for God’s sake” brigade because it was a desperate situation on the perimeter at that stage and they wanted anyone they could. So, they got us. How reliable was the equipment on your back? Were you able to communicate freely? Yeah, it was fairly reliable. I mean there were other things that made it unreliable. I wasn’t too enamoured of the Americans, network procedure. If they were on the air, they were on the air. Network discipline they call it. You know, you’re trying to fight a battle and you got the Americans fighting a battle. Their battle takes precedence, which is the truth as I see it anyway. And nighttime was a murder. Shannon Airport used to come and blast us all off the air. Frustrating moments trying to get a message yet … It was always dangerous in the nighttime. We’d take two hourly shifts, and in the morning before the sun comes up is when everybody is up on their feet in waiting because that’s a dangerous time when the sun’s

1  Upon reflection, Ray believes the PRC77 came into use nearer the end of the war, and the no. 31 radio set he used was actually a modified version of the American SCR300. It weighed approximately 38 pounds.

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coming up because they tried to attack with the sun behind them when the sun is in your eyes. Actually, I was in the trench with a bloke Ted Moss, a real character. Just when the Chinese come across the board, we thought we were supposed to be shipped to Hong Kong and they called us back to the line to help stop the Chinese. We were on this roadblock and we dug in on the lower part of the hill and I think he had taken the first sleep. I was up late and he was lying in on his sleeping bag on the trench floor, and I was watching out there and I woke him up to stand to [attention], and you know it’s very eerie; you get flashes of light everywhere from shell bursts or flares and you see the bushes move you know, men run across there. It’s a pretty tense and stressed at a breaking point, virtually. [Ted] was at one end of the trench, and I [at the other, each covering an arc of fire]. I normally wore glasses at that time. I broke my glasses. Actually, I broke my glasses scrapping with him. We we’re having a bit of a fight because we’re going home—we were only playing anyway, but he stepped on my glasses he said now you have to go back and get some new ones. And I said, “No, bugger that.” So, I broke the rein—one rein was already broken—so I broke the other one off and I reversed them and tied them up with string because there’s only one lens in it was the left lens and I needed the right for the rifle vision. It wasn’t good but it was serviceable. And I dug the trench and he was at the other end of the trench. And for some reason, it was getting near dawn, for some reason I just turned and looked at him. I was looking at his back probably for about three or four seconds, and he whirled around and said, “What are you looking at me like that for?” I said, “What do you mean?” I was a bit flabbergasted. He buggered off, and in the words of Bruce Bairnsfather’s “Old Bill” he went off to find a better hole.2 Unfortunately, I never got to meet him again. I did go back to England to a reunion and they told me he died. I’d have love to known what he felt that his nerves were that tense. He could feel someone staring at him. You might have heard some other blokes about it. Every sense is geared to that potential danger. What were your experiences where you dug in?

2  Bruce Bairnsfather of the Royal Warwickshire regiment was a humourist and cartoonist famous for a character, named “Old Bill.” Bairnsfather was hospitalized with shell shock and hearing loss after the second battle of Ypres in 1915. His best-known cartoon had the catchphrase, “If you knows of a better ole, go to it!”

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I was blown up with a mortar but I was fortunate because we’d been under attack in this hill and because the transport had delivered us up to the spot on the hill; we ended up fighting the enemy off and got out of the positions light. Digging in was murder. It was permafrost, like trying to get through concrete with a teaspoon. [The worst experience was in the Killing Fields at Kunu-ri]. We’re supposed to be going up into the hills to help the Americans. I think it was twenty-fourth division, I think it was. And they were coming through the pass when the Chinese has been pushed out, but the Chinese attacked, and they had taken the hills before them and instead of coming out trying to come out over the hills coming after the transports. The Chinese were shooting the drivers and trucks were going off the road. It was murder. And we were going up the hills, and I was walking with this officer. I’ve got one earphone on and the other off. And I suddenly noticed all these dust spots around my feet. Then I realized I was on my own. The A company HQ I was with, they had pulled back. Well they had run back actually when they were being fired at, but I was concentrating on the radio traffic coming through. I haven’t really noticed it, and I suddenly realized it was a bit more dangerous and I ran slightly forward and about six yards to the left and threw myself over the lip of a quarry. It was shale and with water in the bottom. And I thought I was covered when I looked up, because with the radio pushed up, it was forcing my head down into the shale. You can see the bullets were still coming down. And I thought, God, I’m got to run, run, run, and go because I was starting to slip … While I was down there and I heard someone said, “Stay down, stay down.” And I shouted, “I’m slipping, I’m slipping.” I was starting to slide down and there’s water in there. And I said, “I’m slipping, I’m slipping.” In the book that Andrew Simon wrote, heard of Andrew Simon? In the book, he wrote, he said, “I’m sleeping” instead of “slipping.” I’m sleeping instead of slipping. He said he was going to put it right in the paperback edition. Whether he has done … I don’t think anyone cares … But the bloke [the CO], next thing I know there was this rifle popping down, I thought I was a prisoner or I’m dead. And it was an acting company commander [Sergeant Major] Danny Cranfield … They pulled me out and we ran back to where the company was going. I didn’t see him after that; apparently, he got wounded. I did see him years later. I went down to see him in England. He’s a lovely bloke. When he died, I wrote to his wife as well, and now

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she’s gone, too. She did have a daughter out there that I spoke to a couple of times.3 I can give you about another three incidents that happened. I was on the back of a tank going up to Pyongyang, I think it was, on a fighting patrol. And I was talking to this chap, he’s an ex-KSLI [King’s Shropshire Light Infantry] member, an old soldier, he was. I mean he wasn’t that old, but you know he’d been in the Second World War. I told him my brother, the one that got mortared in France, was in the KSLI and you may have known him. I was talking to him and he just gave a little grunt and slid down to our feet. There was just one shot. Now I’m next to him with the [wireless] set—a prime target—I’m not saying it was aimed at me. It could have been a random shot, an accidental shot, could be from one of our own blokes. He was shot right through the heart. I remember we buried him and we hadn’t got a blanket to bury him in, or tools, and I pulled his cap comforter over his face before we threw the dirt on. And that other place [Chaum-ni], I was telling you where we we’re digging into the permafrost, the trench I was in wasn’t my own trench, it was a deeper one than that because the Chinese have overrun the position and so I was at the fallback position. They sent this little bloke there— [Titch May] the company runner—and we’re in this trench … and this figure came out of the gloom and we both got our rifles ready. I said, “don’t fire, yet.” I thought it was one of our blokes coming back in. And 3  Rogers had a further recollection on the matter that he related via email: We made it in to the foothills at the start of the pass but completely outgunned we had to withdraw, I was still trying to locate my OC, but as our numbers were getting less and less, I guessed that he had already moved back and so I decided that it was time for me to go as well. It was when I was passing the ruins of a Korean cottage and a voice spoke to me was my first meeting with Titch May, who was lying at the foot of its picket fence. I asked him why he wasn’t moving back, because the Chinese couldn’t have been far behind us. He replied that he hadn’t seen Corporal Miller and Charley Barnes, the Bren gun team, and he was not going to leave until he knew they were OK. In all conscience, I couldn’t leave him on his own and so I settled down beside him at the foot of the fence. We hadn’t been there long when a mighty roar coming from behind us and heading towards the pass was an American fighter plane obviously looking to get revenge on the Chinese. Flying low he opened up his machine guns and showered us with splinters as he blasted the tops off the fence, frightening the hell out of us. Obviously, he had mistaken us for the enemy, but that was enough for us to decide it was time to leave. We made it back to the others in time to regroup for a fresh attack the next day; without our efforts in keeping the pass open, the carnage would have been far worse. Something else that I learned that day: as far as trench-mates went, I couldn’t do any better than that little gutsy bugger, Titch May. As the Australian phrase goes, “He was as game as Ned Kelly,” and I never knew his Christian name!

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just about that time, a Chinese machine gunner opened up. They couldn’t see us because we were all on the front of the trench. We bolted up for counter-firing. I don’t know, I don’t think we got him. They did drag the wounded and dead away. And then there was the mortar on the same hill, and after it was all over, we cleaned up after that; then somebody called me for a cup of coffee. So, I went to have a cup of coffee. It was foul stuff: soluble coffee and national all-American tea. I don’t like coffee anymore. I never drink it. As I was walking away, I heard this crump behind me and I dived, still holding the cup of coffee, and I felt something hit me on the back of the head with a thump. And I lay there a few minutes trying to feel the back of my head, you know, very gingerly, afraid of what I was going to find. What it was, it was ice off the permafrost. The water had dislodged, and because of the heat, it was trickling down [my neck]. So that could have been another occasion. Let me put it like this. I was fired at more than I fired at anybody. My job was to handle the set … but I did have one or two shots. I was more sinned against than sinned. How much contact did you have with other soldiers there? I volunteered to go with the Middlesex because my regiment wasn’t going. Like I said, the only ones that went from the Staff[ordshire] was sixty-five—actually there’s more than that because I met a mate of mine out there. He was in the brigade, as a driver. When I met him, I had a poisoned finger, probably from a bit of [contaminated telephone] wire. You know, sometimes you jab your fingers and it just swelled up like a sausage. From the 60th Indian Field Ambulance is where he came. I think they got their new anaesthetic equipment they wanted to try it out. I must have been in a M.A.S.H. unit but I never went to hospital. I did come out of Korea not wounded. It was at the end of the fighting for us was at Kapyong. It was a big battle for the Canadians and the Australians. We were with them to stiffen the numbers, I suppose. I got the flu for two or three weeks as we were withdrawing. I could have gone on the sick record, but I’ve seen the looks they give a bloke who’s trying to shoot his trigger finger, and I wouldn’t have any of that. And what about the Koreans? How much contact did you have with the Korean people? Very little, really. A few of the porters, they were good humoured, always willing to do what I was supposed to be doing. Our porters brought the stuff up, took it back down, and the rubbish and everything else. The

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wounded were taken back down. I never saw many of the helicopters like that in [the TV show] M.A.S.H., but they were there. What are the things that you remember as the objects of the war? There’s the [radio] set, of course, which is the prime thing I carried. I carried ammunition. I carried a rifle. I carried grenades. I carried rations and a blanket-roll on the back. And a steel helmet which I threw away very early in the war. I can remember [it made a noise rapping against the radio set] as we went across this paddy field, so I just throws it between the little shoots of rice sticking out, and I was skipping it across, and I can see the steel hat dancing now until it hit the paddy wall and got stuck it there. I never missed it. Mind you, I did feel that one time it would have been handy when a trench was being watered and I was on my own, which I very often was, strangely enough, because nobody wanted to be near this radio set. We had C-rations, combat rations. C3s, I think it was. I think it was because of three tins of meat. One for the morning, one for lunchtime, and one for your dinner … They were palatable, but the ham and lima beans I didn’t care for. I liked the corn beef hash. Strangely not many liked that. I was a bit finicky … also a small tin with the biscuit crackers they called them, and tin of jam. That was a deadly weapon. No, it’s true. We remember we had this one chap; when they dug a trench, and they were burning all the rubbish, all the cardboard and stuff, he threw in his ration box. It still had the jam in it and the heat expanded that, slit it open, and ripped him from his lips to his ear. He was scalded on jam and he was cut across the face [from the tin]. So, it wasn’t always the weapons that did the job. All the rations were American. I remember they gave us tins—it must have been in a jar—the nutty stuff. Peanut butter. We were eating it by the handful. It’s a wonder we weren’t sick as a dog. It was a great thing to keep the cold out. I think a couple of festive times we got beer. Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon, whatever was the beer that made Milwaukee famous. I remember one time we went into this Korean village. They’ve actually pinched an American jeep and I went into this village. They just moved back, that is, the Koreans or the Chinese. It would have been the Koreans I think we moved out. And this brewery has been set up in probably about two to three days to a week and they were producing this very old whiskey or brandy; it’s like water going down but it’s like battery acid coming up. I noticed another time we had an American heavy mortar team with us that had Canadian Club Whiskey, a fifth per man, a bottle for every five

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men. And they were sharing it with us, and we got this huge fire going into this beautiful night stars. I’m about 5′4″. If I were 5′6″, I could have scooped down all these stalls. And we’re drinking and having a laugh and a joke. I remember going for a leak, actually, and being of a shier nature, I wandered away a little bit, and after I finished, I was looking at the sky. I thought what a wonderful night. It’s a lovely night for everyone. And I started to run. I must’ve run for miles. I don’t know but, fortunately, I got an American jacket on. It must have been made for a bloke about seven foot because it’s around my ankles. And there’s frost ice on the ground, snow on the ground. And I ran and I ran. And I remember coming to on this bank of snow. I hadn’t got a clue where I was. And I thought, if I’ve hit this [bank of snow] and this has stopped me, I’ll go back directly the way I’ve come. Anyway, I must’ve been out for a while because as I got back, I can smell the smoke and the embers from the firewood around, but there’s nobody there. But there was still enough heat to thaw out; I could have frozen to death. Nobody would have found me; I have been classed as a deserter. And I got back to where the bivouacs were. They’re shelters. They have two men in the shelters; half is used as a cape, and you connect it to the other so that you have a tent for two men. I think I got one of them out. Also, I felt like I made myself, but I’d never tell anybody. I never did. The Chinese were probably four or five miles out but they could have been anywhere. They could have been trying to probe where we were. It was the booze. Let’s put it like that. I’m not going to make any excuses. That’s the only time we had any decent drink. There are two things I’d like to talk about. One is the legacy of the war and how you’ve thought about it later on, and a broader question is whether there are any other stories that you really wanted to share. There is one and I can’t remember where we were. It must have been earlier in the war. We took over this monastery. The walls were about twoor three-foot thick. And I can remember we have to knock the breach out to put the machine gun in there, put the Bren gun in there. And some of the blokes were taking objects out of the temple—the monastery temple—Buddhist, I presume it was. And I couldn’t do it. There’s two or three blokes and they were killed. I don’t know whether I was superstitious, or what, but I couldn’t do it. I did scrounge; there were silver cowbells in one of the Korean houses—a hovel. I presume they were silver. They were certainly heavy. It had been left out, probably when [the owners were] fleeing when the North Koreans. They’d been overlooked. I had them in the backpack. I had an American carbine bayonet, a pair of

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American boots, and I lost a lot when I came out. I came out after or just after Kapyong, which struck the Chinese. They were digging in. And this is where I have that virus, and I went into hospital, and I was unconscious. We’re digging the trench; I was in the trenches, I think we just finished digging it, and I said, “Look, I’m a free man.” I was feeling absolutely lousy, and I asked [another man], “Would you take the first watch?” And all I can remember he’s looking at me, and then jumping out the trench, and then the next thing I know I was being lifted out by four blokes and put on the stretcher. And I went to the regimental first-aid post. They looked at the small wounds, giving out the tablets, etcetera. It’s the last thing I remember until I come around on the plane going to Japan. And that was four days after the Middlesex Regiment left Korea. I always said that I didn’t leave them, they left me. And then, when I was in Japan, I nearly pulled another tour of Korea, and I said to the sergeant major, “my regiment was [already] there. I wouldn’t mind going back, but I have done one spell with a strange regiment and it takes a lot of time.” You see, I was late. I was a late addition to the blokes from the Staffordshire who went there. And all the Middlesex had trained together, got all the mates there. And when I got there, I wasn’t with the blokes that I’d known in the Staff-ers. I was sent to a different company and I was a stranger. I was a bit bloody-minded, too. I was a proud Black Countryman. And I thought I’m done with that until the sergeant major said to me, “Rogers, he said, are you a member of this company?” I say, “Well, I’m on attachment, sir. I’m a Staff-er.” He said, “Don’t be so precious. They’re not going to come and ask you if you want in. If you want in, you get stuck in.” He said, “Get your mug and get your tea! You’re done.” And I realized then I was just being stupid. And after that, I started making friends. Do you think Korea, the war, has been forgotten? Well, I’ve got a different view because when I came from hospital in Japan and went back to Hong Kong, everyone that have been to Korea from the Staff-ers had gone home, except for about three or four regular soldiers. And because they’d all volunteer and been knocked back, they weren’t particularly interested. So, I never thought about Korea really; it shifted it behind me. I did a signal instructors course and started getting my tags back again and finally made sergeant. And I came down to Australia, and I never had any contact with anyone. It’s not so much pushing it behind me; it’s just that I got so much to do in front of me.

Works Consulted

Bourke, Joanna. “The Killing Frenzy: Wartime Narratives of Enemy Action” in Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod (eds.), No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century. Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 2006. Cumings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History. New  York: Modern Library Chronicles Book, 2010. Hastings, Max. The Korean War. London: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Hutching, Megan. “After Action: Oral History and War” in Donald A.  Ritchie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Huxford, Grace. The Korean War in Britain: Citizenship, Selfhood, and Forgetting. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. ———. “The Korean War Never Happened: Forgetting a Conflict in British Culture and Society,” Twentieth Century British History 27, no. 2 (June 2016): 195–219. Lifton, Robert Jay. Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans. New York: Basic Books, 1985. McMahon, Robert J. Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2009. Millett, Allan Reed. The War for Korea. 2 vols. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010–2015. Oberdorfer, Don and Robert Carlin. The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Parritt, Brian. Chinese Hordes and Human Waves: A Personal Perspective of the Korean War 1950–1953. Barnsley: Pen and Sword Military, 2011.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2

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Stueck, William. The Korean War: An International History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. ———. Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Vinen, Richard. National Service: Conscription in Britain, 1945–1963. London: Penguin Books, 2015.

Index1

A Acheson, Dean, 3 Aden, 10, 46, 54, 60, 86, 144, 199 Afghanistan, 12, 19, 31, 52, 60, 93, 164 Aldershot, 191 Algiers, 46 Arbortech, 185 Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 105, 201, 227 Armistice, 3, 59, 67, 68, 73, 140–142, 207 Australia, 67, 94, 107, 112, 134, 150, 225, 235 B Balham, 141 Battle of Imjin River, 160 Battle of Inchon, 28, 58, 173, 199, 218 Bay of Biscay, 156

Bazooka, 36 Beaconsfield, 55 Belgium, 45 Berlin, 7, 158, 184–186, 193 Black Watch, 20, 25, 30, 132, 185, 198 Blitz, 18, 21, 34, 44, 98 Bomber Command, 112 Borneo, 100 Boston (Mass.), 5, 93, 94 Bren gun, 7, 24, 25, 61, 101, 105, 120, 163, 173, 199, 200, 217, 231n3, 234 Britain, see United Kingdom (UK) British Army, 10, 13, 44, 48, 84, 112n5, 116, 124, 128, 129, 132, 143, 147, 154, 174, 184, 226 British Army of the Rhine, 211 British Guiana, 54 British Korean War Veterans Association, 45, 68, 94, 121, 123, 141

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. P. Cullinane, I. Johnston-White (eds.), A Forgotten British War, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2

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INDEX

British Korea Society, 12–14 British Legion, 123 British Military Police, 6 Browning automatic rifle, 160 Browning machine gun, 39, 192 Buddhism, 34 Burma, 4, 91, 192, 225 Byfleet, 43 C Caine, Sir Michael, 62, 163, 164, 210 Cambodia, 4 Cambridge, 129 Cambridge Military Hospital, 191 Camp Kohima, 58, 64 Canada, 67, 94 Centurion tank, 38, 88n4, 202 Ceylon, see Sri Lanka Chaum-ni, 231 China, 2, 41, 100, 122, 124, 170, 177, 199, 227 People’s Volunteer Army, 2 Churchill, Sir Winston, 143, 194 City of London Maternity Hospital, 154 City of London regiment, 18, 21, 211 Cold War, 3, 4, 193, 212 Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE), 84 Commonwealth Division, 8, 10, 26, 37, 39, 77, 133, 201, 202 Communism, 3–4, 19, 20, 30, 76, 100, 117, 122, 155, 162, 180 Conscription, see National service Corbyn, Jeremy, 162 Croydon, 151 D Daily Mirror, 180 Daily Sun, 180 Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), 3, 61, 191

Demobilisation, 49 Distinguished Service Order (DSO), 11, 197, 203 Douglas C-54 Skymaster, 124 Duke of Gloucester, 112 Duke of Norfolk, 122 Duke of Wellington regiment, 25, 26 Durham, 9, 34, 40, 78 Durham Light Infantry, 6, 8, 9, 35, 72, 156 Dysentery, 44, 46 E East Malling, 56 Eaton Hall, 198 Eden, Sir Anthony, 142 Edinburgh, 184, 191 Egypt, 9, 19, 28, 29, 34, 70, 86, 143, 196, 211, 219, 220 88 wireless radio, 196, 202 Eisenhower, Dwight D. (President), 3 Elizabeth II, Her Majesty the Queen, 112, 197 Embankment, 112, 206 England, 9, 24, 25, 50, 62, 71, 73, 74, 76, 81, 104, 117, 132, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147, 176, 179, 180, 211, 212, 220, 224, 225, 229, 230 Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), 25, 221 Epsom, 151 Essex, 56 F Falklands War, 29, 52, 180 Fiji, 205 First World War, 24, 39, 46, 50, 130, 174, 207 Folkstone, 56 Fort George, 183, 198

 INDEX 

Four Power Agreement on Berlin, 193 14th Field Regiment Royal Artillery, 129 France, 130, 144, 225, 231 Frostbite, 44, 46, 49, 197, 201 Fusiliers Museum London, 27 G Gibraltar, 46 Gloucester Hill, 57, 58 Gloucestershire Regiment, 151, 160 Grand Bauhinia Medal, 197 Greece, 110 Grosvenor House Hotel, 162 Guadalcanal, 91 H Han River, 118 Hercules helicopter, 135 Hill 355, 18, 26, 34, 38, 39, 154, 188, 210 Hiroshima, 151, 178 HMS Unicorn, 100, 102 Hong Kong, 8, 10, 18, 20, 25, 34–36, 46, 54, 56–58, 60, 72–74, 78, 85, 86, 92, 97–100, 102, 109, 110, 117–119, 121, 122, 129–131, 135, 137, 142–144, 155, 164, 170, 176, 177, 196–199, 205, 206, 224, 226, 229, 235 Hook, 18, 19, 21–23, 25–28, 30, 34, 38, 39, 84, 87, 88, 132, 161, 168, 210, 216 Hounslow, 161 Houses of Parliament (UK), 162 I Imjin River, 3, 57, 103, 151, 160, 168, 178, 200, 217 Imperial Palace Tokyo, 204

241

Imperial War Museum, 61 Incheon, 61, 63, 64, 66 India, 85, 129, 199 Indian Field Ambulance, 8 Indian Ocean, 56, 117 Indonesia, 4 Intelligence Corps, 84, 92 Inverness, 193 Iraq, 12, 19, 28, 52, 60, 93, 164, 194 Ireland, 106, 180 Iwo Jima, 91 J Jae-in, Moon (President), 5 Japan, 8, 23, 25, 34, 37, 46–48, 50, 73, 77, 80, 95, 105, 106, 108, 109, 118, 119, 122, 124, 133, 141, 143, 145, 150, 151, 165, 188, 190, 191, 200, 204, 218, 225, 235 Jarrow, 162 Jong-un, Kim (Supreme Leader), 5 K Kapyong, 103, 106, 232, 235 Kelso, 197, 198 Kent, 56, 85, 94 Kenya, 54 Khartoum, 29 King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB), 7, 185, 196, 198, 201, 206 King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, 72 King’s Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI), 198, 231 Kingston, 141, 151 Korean Attached Commonwealth Division (KATCOM), 36, 48, 63

242 

INDEX

Korean National War Memorial Museum, 59 Kowloon, 61, 176 Kunu-ri, 230 Kure, 77, 145, 204 L Labour Party (UK), 162 Laos, 4 Larkhill, 85 Lee-Enfield rifle, 7, 24, 61, 177 Libya, 194 Liverpool, 9, 44, 78, 163, 212 London, 2, 6, 17–19, 34, 44, 54, 59, 61, 93, 98, 112, 141, 154, 155, 162, 206, 210, 211 Los Angeles, 55, 58 Luger pistol, 177 M MacArthur, General Douglas, 124, 173, 174, 199, 226 Maidstone, 55 Malaria, 46, 74 Malaya, 4, 64, 72, 100, 170, 199, 200 Malaysia, see Malaya Margate, 54, 61 Mau Mau, 54, 63 Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE), 84 Memorials, 1–3, 15, 17, 19, 28, 41, 54, 57–59, 62, 79, 93, 94, 112, 122, 124, 151, 192, 206 Middlesbrough, 40 Middlesex Regiment, 6, 102, 105, 107–109, 112, 201, 224, 227, 232, 235 Minden, 55

Ministry of Defence (UK), 2, 123 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (M.A.S.H.), 8, 11, 34, 38, 44, 47, 89, 102, 108, 160, 166, 175, 176, 211, 213, 214, 218, 232, 233 Mt. Fuji, 141, 148, 149, 165 Musselburgh, 191 N Nakdong River, 100, 101n2, 103 Napalm, 11, 107n3, 157, 184, 190 Nasser, Colonel Gamal Abdel, 220 National Army Museum, 12–14 National Bank of Scotland, 198 National Defence Medal Campaign, 67 National Health Service (NHS), 141, 151 National service, 3, 18–20, 31, 34, 35, 40, 54, 58, 70, 71, 85, 98–100, 116, 128, 129, 137, 154–156, 161–163, 166, 168, 171, 184, 196–198, 201, 203 Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI), 57, 145, 147, 172, 177, 204 New Malden, 141 New Territories, 8, 25, 35, 100, 129, 137, 227 New Zealand, 26, 37, 64, 67, 133, 144, 149, 177, 189, 201 Maori, 26, 27 No man’s land, 19, 22, 36, 37, 70, 74, 75, 84, 87, 90, 120 North Korea, 2, 5, 41, 59, 104, 118, 130, 145, 147, 170, 206 Northern Ireland, 129, 135 Norway, 8, 38, 89, 166, 176, 214 No. 31 radio, 224, 228n1

 INDEX 

O Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE), 55 Operation Commando, 188 Ordnance QF 25-pounder, 86 P Pacific Ocean, 5 Panmunjom, 91, 175, 210 Partition, 5, 140 Peckham, 18 Port Said, 40, 46 Port Sudan, 129 Post-traumatic stress, 12, 19, 31, 79, 154, 210 Potsdam conference, 143 PRC-77 radio, 228, 228n1 Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, 26 Pusan, 2, 37, 44, 46, 72, 74, 78, 80, 86, 92, 99–102, 107, 107n3, 121, 129, 130, 140, 144–146, 174, 186, 187, 191, 192, 205, 206, 224, 226 Pyongyang, 104, 231 Q Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, 64 R Red Sea, 129, 142, 156 Remembrance Day, 124, 125, 180 Republic of Korea Army, 58–59 Rest and recuperation, 8, 37, 108, 133, 148, 149, 165, 178, 189, 204 Rhee, Syngman (President), 205

243

Ridgway, Matthew B. (General), 221 Roosevelt, Franklin D. (President), 143 Royal Army Educational Corps, 55 Royal Army Medical Corps, 44, 45 Royal Artillery, 6, 7, 9, 38, 69, 84, 85, 92, 128, 168, 170 Royal Australian Regiment, 26, 37, 133, 154, 156, 201 Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, 133 Royal Corps of Signals, 173 Royal Fusiliers, 3, 18, 20, 26, 37, 156, 159 Royal Leicestershire regiment, 134 Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, 85, 128, 129 Royal Military Police, 142 Royal New Zealand Artillery, 8, 26, 37, 63, 64, 67, 73, 110, 133, 144, 149, 166, 169, 177, 189, 201, 204, 218 Royal Norfolk regiment, 121 Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, 26 Royal Sussex Regiment, 55, 66 Royal Ulster Rifles, 7, 25, 35, 117, 120 S St. Paul’s Cathedral, 41 Samichon River, 18 Scotland, 18, 20, 128, 135, 180, 184, 185, 197, 206 SCR300 radio, 228n1 Sea of Japan, 5 Second World War, 1–4, 7, 9, 18, 29, 30, 34, 41, 46, 50, 52, 61, 84, 86, 88, 91, 93, 98, 100, 116, 119, 123–125, 128, 136, 137, 143, 154, 192, 198, 202, 204, 207, 227, 231

244 

INDEX

Seoul, 4, 5, 19, 26, 28, 30, 39, 54, 55, 59, 61, 64, 89, 94, 104, 107, 118, 120, 124, 148, 151, 157, 179, 202, 206, 209, 214, 221, 222 Shimla, 85 Siberia, 200 Singapore, 10, 46, 54, 60, 74, 86, 144, 164 60th Indian Field Ambulance, 232 Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association (SSAFA), 19, 31, 129, 135 South Africa, 132 Southampton, 35, 54, 56, 61 South Korea, Republic of Korean Order of Civil Merit, 5 Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs, 191 South Staffordshire Regiment, 2, 224, 226 Soviet Union, 3 Sri Lanka, 10, 54, 60, 86, 156 SS Asturias, 66, 74, 142 Stalin, Premier Joseph, 143 Sten gun, 7, 24, 25, 101, 105, 173, 200, 203, 217 Sterling submachine gun, 173 Stevenson, Robert, 228 Stirling, 185 Sudan, 19, 29, 129, 219 Sunderland flying boat, 205 Sweden, 166 Syria, 194 T Territorial Army (TA), 40, 122, 135, 198, 206 Thailand, 4 Thames River, 123, 164

38th parallel, 2–4, 101, 118, 124, 130, 143, 210, 225 Tokyo, 5, 46, 48, 94, 148, 149, 178, 188, 189, 204 Tooting, 151 Tottenham, 155 Tower of London, 20, 27, 220 Truman, Harry S. (President), 3 Trump, Donald (President), 5 T-34 tank, 36 Turkey, 63, 166 20th Field Artillery, 9 28th Commonwealth Brigade, 37, 156 25th infantry brigade, 37 27th infantry brigade, 37, 99, 101, 109, 224 Type 50 submachine gun (“burp” gun), 161, 177, 203 U Uijeongbu, 87, 91 United Kingdom (UK), 1, 2, 6, 9, 10, 14, 18, 19, 23, 30, 41, 44, 51, 54, 55, 63, 67, 86, 92–94, 98, 99, 104, 119, 123, 136, 146, 159, 169, 180, 187, 192, 198, 200–202, 204, 207, 226 United Nations (UN), 2, 4, 8, 19, 30, 36, 41, 59, 86, 90, 93, 98, 105, 123, 130, 180, 198, 205, 206, 224, 227 United States of America, 4, 8, 65 University of Roehampton, 12, 13 U.S. Coast Guard, 93 US Eighth Army, 61 US 2nd (Indianhead) Division, 88, 93 USS Montrose, 110 US 24th Infantry Division, 57, 67

 INDEX 

V Vickers medium machine gun, 36, 105 Vietnam war, 4, 93 W Wales, 18, 44, 171 Warley Barracks, 56 War Office (UK), 67 Wellington Barracks, 113 Whitby, 72 Wiltshire regiment, 118 Wimbledon, 141

245

Wolverhampton, 181 Women’s Voluntary Service, 157 Woolwich, 9, 92 World War Two, see Second World War Y Yalta conference, 143 Yalu River, 104, 110, 124, 199, 224 Yellow Sea, 125 Yeongdeungpo, 163 Yeongdong, 38–40 Yokohama, 106