The Korean War (63 page)

The British considered it essential to keep men occupied, to fight off boredom and monotony. Some official expedients were merely mildly comical, such as firing red, white, and blue smoke at the Chinese lines on Queen Elizabeth’s coronation day. Others were more homicidal, such as maintaining an all-out artillery ‘hate’ on the enemy lines throughout May Day. Unit war diaries record a long procession of minor operations such as ‘Operation POLECAT, 16–23 February 1953: sweep divisional area for enemy guerrillas; only a few civilians were apprehended.’
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At night, men on line could see from miles away the barrage balloons floodlit by searchlights that marked the Panmunjom compound, where peace was being daily debated. These gave an added unreality to the little battles to the death in no-man’s-land. In Korea, even professional
soldiers encountered, for the first time in their lives, the pernicious difficulties of fighting in circumstances in which lives lost so often seemed wasted. Captain Peter Sibbald, a staff officer with the Commonwealth Division, reflected upon the sensation he and his colleagues encountered a decade later, fighting in the Radfan mountains in the last days of the British presence in Aden: ‘We felt then: “Nothing we can do here is worth a single guardsman’s life.” The beginning of that insidious doctrine was in Korea.’
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Yet because it was plainly indefensible to expend men’s lives except in pursuit of worthwhile objectives – whatever these might be – senior commanders in Korea also faced serious difficulty in checking the ambitions of professional soldiers who came to the country bent upon achieving a battlefield reputation. There were not a few American major-generals who arrived to take over divisions for a tour in the line, and had to be decisively checked in their determination to mount an attack in order to further their own careers. An officer came to assume command of a brigade of the Commonwealth Division, with an outstanding reputation for courage earned as a battalion commander in World War II: ‘brave as a lion’, as one of his colleagues said of him. Yet as a brigadier in Korea, his offensive instincts, his determination to carry the war to the enemy, appalled his subordinates. When he organised an attack on the Chinese positions which they believed would decimate their units, his battalion commanders protested strongly to the divisional commander. The brigadier was quietly relieved of his post. By the standards of conventional war, his enthusiasm was admirable. By those of Korea, it was merely foolish. Lieutenant Paul Sheehy of the US 7th Division reflected the feelings of many UN soldiers about over-zealous officers when he wrote to his parents in Maine in June 1952:

We have a new battalion commander who is a ‘son of a gun’. He came over to Korea in Sept 1950 when the division landed at Inchon, and he refuses to go home. He came over as a master sgt and is now a major. He is crazy for power and loves war. I believe he is actually crazy and should be sent home to a hospital. He talks with a gleam in his eyes about the killing of Chinks in the coming operation. He hasn’t any heart, and sent a brand-new 2nd lt., fresh from the States, out on a patrol the night he came to the battalion. And this crazy man is in charge. The high brass think he is No. 1 soldier. Boy will I be glad to get out of this outfit, I’ve sure had enough of Korea,

The British Commander-in-Chief in the Far East, General Sir Charles Keightley, visited Korea in April 1952 and reported to the War Office that ‘the views of commanders there from top to bottom are really all in line: that the Chinese communist policy is directed from Moscow, and a forecast as to what will happen is as unpredictable as the rest of their actions throughout the world. The majority guess that it will be a stalemate. This sort of war, where the enemy is prepared to launch attacks apparently quite regardless of whether the losses are worth the objective, is a new one to us, and produces some quite new lines of thought. I was much impressed by the fact that the Chinese was showing himself a very skilful as well as tough fighter.’
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Keightley described the main tactical problem as enemy infiltration at night, which was being met by ‘wiring on the 1914–18 standards, thickened up with mines’. He was impressed with the men’s morale, but dismayed by the extent of the chronic problem of venereal disease throughout the American and Commonwealth contingents. Keightley suggested making the cure more unpleasant, ‘reintroducing some of the pre-war methods instead of penicillin’. The UN Command was constantly preoccupied with the problem of staleness among the men on the line: ‘Ridgway says that if he had his way, he would change every man, divisional commanders included, every 90 days!’ Senior officers were exasperated by the number of gunshot accidents in formal areas: an army doctor visiting a hospital found fifty-nine cases resulting from enemy action, and
twenty-four accidental gunshot wounds, ‘the great majority of which were self-inflicted’.
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It was so in every war of this kind, that for every man who died facing the enemy, another was killed in some wretched truck accident, bar brawl behind the lines, mishap with munitions, or fatal step into an unmarked minefield. The static campaign in Korea was justly described as a platoon commander’s war, because so much of the fighting followed small unit encounters in no-man’s-land. Some units awarded seven days’ leave to any man who could bring in a prisoner, and patrols went to extraordinary lengths to achieve this ambition, cutting Chinese telephone wires and then laying ambushes for the wiring parties that came to repair them, spending night after night with coshes clutched in their hands, awaiting an opportunity. One night, Lieutenant John Bowler of the Welch Regiment was lying out on a forward slope with a four-man reconnaissance patrol when by the light of flares they saw a long file of twenty-five Chinese padding silently past them. Half went by before one enemy soldier glanced and saw them. The darkness exploded in a hail of machine-gun fire. All four of the British soldiers’ notoriously unreliable sten guns jammed. As they ran desperately for their own lines, three were hit and went down. The patrol lay mute, the wounded men struggling to keep silent in their pain, while the Chinese searched the surrounding area. They found one British soldier, and shot him. Bowler escaped, and was able to summon a stretcher party to recover the other two casualties.

Bowler was one of many young conscript officers who found the experience of National Service, even on the Korean battlefield, intensely challenging and rewarding. Like most British soldiers, he scarcely troubled himself about the great issues for which the war was being fought, but focused his thoughts overwhelmingly on his unit. The regiment and its totems meant much. When the Welch arrived in Hong Kong en route to Korea, halfway through an acclimatisation route march, the goat that was the unit mascot collapsed. For superstitious soldiers, the prospect of its death when the battalion was on its way to war was unbearable. The beast was
carried home on a stretcher, and the goat-major nursed it night and day for four days until at last, to the vast relief of the whole unit, it staggered to its feet again.

The biggest action in which the nineteen-year-old Bowler participated during his service in Korea was a platoon-strength local attack. But amid so many weeks of tedium and inactivity, such miniature battles took on a significance far beyond their size, and attracted the attention of generals. The Commonwealth Division was constantly on its mettle, keen to demonstrate its professionalism. Bowler’s thirty-man fighting patrol spent three days rehearsing their little operation behind the lines. On the afternoon of D-Day, the Chinese position they were to raid was softened up by an air strike, while the guns ranged in. At H-Hour, the platoon advanced across no-man’s-land and up the enemy ridge in textbook extended arrowhead formation, two sections forward. They ran into the Chinese positions grenading as they went. A swarm of enemy soldiers scuttled out of the bunkers to meet them, and the British retired to their firm base, from whence they called down artillery fire. They went home having suffered one minor casualty, and had a radio operator blown off his feet by a grenade. The next morning, on the far side of the 400-yard-deep belt of wire fronting their own position, they saw a Chinese officer, demanding attention and indeed asylum. It emerged that he was the commander of the position the British had attacked, and his performance had attracted sufficient unfavourable attention from his superiors to make captivity an attractive alternative.

Yet even when a unit was not committed to offensive action, the strain of life on the line, and above all of patrolling, was considerable. John Bowler found one of his corporals, a married man with two children, sitting one day in a corner sobbing. The man said he would prefer to fight a battle and get it over, than sit each day under shellfire, wondering when an attack might come. The corporal, like most other such cases, was generously treated, and dispatched to become an instructor at a battle school in Japan. There was only one period, of intense cold and boredom, when the
whole platoon’s morale seemed dangerously low. The young subaltern’s platoon sergeant, a veteran of the Burma campaign, said to him: ‘Mr Bowler, sir. We’ve got a problem. The men have stopped grousing. We’ve got to get them grousing again.’ They gradually restored the situation by summoning the men into their biggest bunker for a daily ‘bellyache’.
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Relations between the British and their American comrades were generally cordial, encouraged by the characteristic, almost embarrassing generosity of the US soldiers. ‘Somebody said something one day to an American officer about liking their fruit juice and behold, the next day a truckload of the stuff arrived,’ said a British sapper. The British liked to do things their own way, preferring cap comforters or berets to helmets unless under direct fire, unenthusiastic about American food. Some families in rationed Britain were bemused to receive letters from their sons amidst the privations of the Korean battlefield, complaining about the surfeit of turkey at meals. As late as September 1951, in England the butter ration was three ounces a week, bacon three ounces, cheese one and a half ounces. Royal Marines of 41 Commando, gorging themselves on steaks aboard US assault ships on their way to coastal raids on North Korea, astonished their American hosts by telling them that at every meal, they were eating a British family’s meat ration for a week. The British possessed the belief in their own superiority which is a reasonable measure of professional pride in any national army. But to this was added a half-conscious, unhappy awareness of how far Britain had fallen in the world by the early fifties. The generation of British soldiers that fought in Korea had grown up amid their nation’s possession of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Britain had borne a far greater share of World War II’s casualties than the United States. Yet young British soldiers, now venturing overseas for the first time in their lives, sadly perceived their shrunken greatness. ‘You must remember that when we started soldiering, we assumed the Empire would just go on and on,’ said Brigadier William Pike of the Commonwealth Division.
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Yet now, men on leave in Japan
saw brand-new British cars that were unobtainable in rationed, austerity Britain being driven by their recent enemies. Major Gerald Rickord of the Royal Ulster Rifles was superintending the erection of tent lines one day, above which the British had hoisted a sign, ‘BRITANNIA CAMP’. A GI lolling nearby poked his cigar towards it, and demanded of Rickord: ‘Britannia? What’s that?’ ‘Haven’t you ever heard of “Britannia Rules the Waves”?’ said the Ulsterman in astonishment. ‘That’s a bit out of date, isn’t it?’ said the American. Rickord was dismayed by the little encounter: ‘I was saddened by how far we had come down in the world.’
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Many of the British of his generation, serving as infinitely junior partners to the Americans in Korea, found the experience of decline too recent not to gaze somewhat sidelong at the new dominant force on the globe, and cherish unworthy thoughts about how much better the old team had done it. An American unit in the Commonwealth Division area posted a sign over its camp entrance, proclaiming itself ‘SECOND TO NONE’. The Australian radio relay station a few hundred yards further down posted a sign proclaiming itself ‘NONE’.

If there are any two things that I can’t stand

ran a characteristic little ditty in the Commonwealth Division news-sheet,
Crown News
,

It’s a North Korean and a Chinaman.

We’re moving on, we’re moving on.

See the Chinks coming up 355,

The Yanks pulling out in overdrive,

They’re moving on, they’re moving on.