The Korean War (64 page)

The last verse, of course, referred to a hill crest the Americans had allegedly abandoned without reasonable cause. From General Cassels downwards, the Commonwealth Division argued that it was more economical to hold a position under attack than to adopt the American tactic of maintaining only a light screen in forward
positions, which gave ground under pressure and demanded a set-piece counter-attack in strength to regain. A British company commander who found himself posted alongside the Turkish Brigade was exasperated to receive constant phone calls from its liaison officer, accustomed to take a sceptical view of American tactics, demanding: ‘You still there, Tommy? You still there?’ The Englishman assented crossly, adding ‘and let us be clear that we have not the slightest intention of going.’ Brigadier William Pike, Cassels’ CRA, said: ‘It is a paradox that the British like Americans very much, but do not have great respect for them as soldiers.’
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Pike and many of his British colleagues, with their reluctance to accept casualties in pursuit of objectives which seemed to lack any wider strategic value, much disliked the local attacks they were periodically called upon to mount:

If one had wanted to finish that campaign, it would have been perfectly possible to concentrate a corps and drive through. Instead, we would be asked merely to capture some hill. The Chinese would allow us to get on top, then retire into their bunkers while they called down mortar and artillery fire. These small attacks seemed to us singularly expensive. It would have been far more logical militarily to mount one good, big set-piece attack which could have taken us to the Yalu.
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But by 1952, the war in Korea was not an exercise of military logic, but of national will.

Spring came with dramatic suddenness to Korea. The thaw followed by the monsoon rains played havoc with the fabric of laboriously dug positions. Yet this was the most welcome, indeed perhaps the only really enjoyable, season in Korea. The hillsides burst forth in a riot of colours. Men were astonished by the speed with which vegetation grew, and by the variety and profusion of wild flowers. Then, with the coming of summer, the heat became crippling. Western soldiers toiling up the mountainsides under
loads envied the infinitely greater endurance and carrying power of the little Korean porters. Infection and disease prospered in the damp warmth of the bunkers. The insects proved marginally more endurable than the stink of the repellent issued to suppress them, which was principally employed to soak rifle patches and make night lights. Rats scurried among the garbage behind the positions, and often in the tunnels beneath them. Some fortunate units possessed streams near enough to hand, and sufficiently screened from hostile observation, to wash. Those who did not were periodically ferried to the rear for showers. But most men were coated in sweat-soaked dirt most of their time on line. NCOs checked feet and socks to guard against chronic foot infections. Dust coated weapons, vehicles, food, clothing. Men in the forward positions counted off the days until they were rotated into reserve. But when their turn came, and they found themselves facing the same discomforts a few miles to the rear, constantly employed on fatigue parties, yet earning only half as many points towards their release date, they began to feel that it was better to be on line. Even the hardiest Chinese soldiers in the opposing positions declared that the Korean summer was unbearable.

Until winter came, that is. Then, as men plodded between positions with the studied clumsiness of spacemen, movements muffled by innumerable layers of clothing, they gazed in awed disbelief as the thermometers plunged to new depths. Starting a vehicle engine became a major undertaking. Laying or clearing mines was a nightmare in the frozen earth. The British cursed their ridiculous 1939-vintage ‘Finnish pattern’ snowboots, their inadequate camouflaged windproofs. The gunners found that the range of their weapons could vary by as much as 2,000 yards, according to the air temperature. An hour of carelessness in exposing a corner of flesh to the naked air was punished by frostbite. They experimented with hand warmers, foot warmers, belts stuffed with body warmers. They relieved the monotony of the rations by shooting the quail, pheasants and ducks which populated the countryside in such profusion. They devised crude
practical jokes to make each other laugh – putting an electrical charge through a latrine seat by attaching it to a communication wire, lighting the ends of a screwed-up newspaper between a sleeping man’s toes. But there were pitifully few trees to chop for firewood, pathetically few diversions beyond lying on one’s back in a bunker listening to Hank Snow singing ‘Moving On’, Patti Page or Teresa Brewer, Connie Stevens or Eddie Fisher heart-throbbing across the air waves from a real world a planet away. All the UN forces observed a ‘one winter’ rule in Korea. No man, it was decreed, should be asked to endure more than one season of that terrible cold in the forward areas.

Perhaps once in a tour, most men were granted a week’s ‘R & R’ – ‘Rest & Recuperation’ – which almost all of them spent in Japan. The memory of Japan in the early fifties is the most lyrical that most veterans brought back from Korea. ‘At that time,’ said Brigadier William Pike, ‘it really did still have something of the romance of the Orient.’ Men who sought a civilised release from the barbarities of the line found it in Japan, together with a real friendliness and kindness from the Japanese. For the British, it was a little painful to see recent enemies already in possession of consumer goods that were unobtainable in their own country, food beyond the dreams of rationed families in London or Glasgow.

But most men went to Japan seeking, above all, a woman and a drink. Many retained, until the end of their lives, memories of the bargirls they met there. A man stepped off the transport from Seoul, took the truck into town, and made a bargain with a girl for the three, four, five days he was at liberty: ‘It was the land of the big PX,’ said Private Warren Avery of the 29th Infantry. ‘You drove to the Hotel Sun, got a girl, a room, and all the beer you could drink for five days for sixty dollars. I fell in love with Japan.’
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So did hundreds of thousands of UN servicemen who fought in Korea. And for Japan itself, the war provided a staggering economic opportunity. The first, critical phase in the creation of Japan Inc. was made possible by the wealth the Korean War poured into the country, when it served as aircraft carrier, repair base, store depot,
commissariat, hospital, headquarters and recreation centre for the United Nations force in the Far East.

In February 1953, Van Fleet handed over command of Eighth Army in Korea to the veteran paratrooper Maxwell Taylor. The outgoing general disappeared into retirement with bitter complaints that he had been prevented from launching an all-out offensive to drive the Chinese out of Korea once and for all. His frustration was widely shared by other senior officers. It seemed profoundly unsoldierlike, to that generation which had come to maturity during World War II in which defeat and victory were absolutes, to allow an army to stagnate upon the mountains of Korea, restricted to patrolling. Van Fleet was probably correct in believing that, with the vast firepower at his disposal, the Chinese line could have been breached and eventually rolled up. But such a campaign would have cost many thousands of UN casualties. There was never the remotest possibility that Washington or the Allied capitals would entertain the plan. Yet the last months of the war saw some of the fiercest fighting since the 1951 spring offensive. The Chinese made a series of determined attempts to test the UN’s will on the battlefield, as negotiations at Panmunjom reached a critical stage. On each occasion, they were thrown back; but only after bitter struggles.

‘Old Baldy’, a hilltop in the midst of the peninsula that possessed no special strategic significance, nonetheless became the focus of intense Chinese offensive effort in the summer and autumn of 1952. In March 1953, at last they gained possession of it after the collapse of a Colombian regiment rashly entrusted with its defence. Taylor was reluctant to lavish lives upon its recapture. But the communists quickly made it clear that they proposed to make use of the advantage that they had gained, to advance another bound: Old Baldy overlooked a feature named Pork Chop Hill, garrisoned by two under-strength platoons of the 31st Infantry of 7th Division. Soon after 10 p.m. on the night of 16 April 1953,
an American patrol moving into the valley between Pork Chop and the enemy positions opposite encountered two companies of Chinese sweeping forward to assault the hill. Within minutes, the ninety-six Americans on Pork Chop found themselves isolated under furious attack. The lieutenant in command lost radio and telephone contact with the rear, and summoned emergency artillery cover by flare. But when the barrage at last lifted, the Chinese stormed forward again. By 2 a.m., they held most of the hill. Two hours later, an American counter-attack managed to link with the surviving defenders on the high ground, but was not strong enough to recapture the lost positions.

All through the next day, some fifty-five Americans clung to their precarious foothold on Pork Chop, pinned down by the Chinese. At Eighth Army, the decision was made that at all costs, American dominance of the position must be re-established. It was essential that the communist delegation at Panmunjom should be denied the opportunity to claim a victory on the battlefield. At 9.30 p.m. on the night of 17 April, two companies of the 17th Infantry struck the western end of the feature from both sides. The battle continued all through the following day, with a stream of reinforcements being thrown in by both sides. By the night of 18 April, the Chinese had conceded tactical defeat. They withdrew their surviving elements from Pork Chop, while the Americans began an intensive struggle to rebuild the defences before the next assault came.

The battle for Pork Chop continued at bitter intensity deep into the summer of 1953. The US garrison on its blasted slopes grew to five battalions, under incessant communist mortar and artillery fire. On 10 July, a fortnight before the armistice was signed, Taylor and his commanders concluded that the cost of maintaining it, still under constant surveillance from Old Baldy, outweighed even the moral benefits. It was evacuated. The struggle for Pork Chop became part of the legend of the US Army in Korea, reflecting the courage of the defenders and the tactical futility of so many small unit actions of the kind that dominated the last two years of the
war. It was said that there were eleven stars’ worth of American generals at the regimental headquarters behind Pork Chop at the height of the battle. The divisional commander, Arthur Trudeau, won a Silver Star for personally leading a counter-attack battalion reconnaissance party on to Pork Chop under fire, after switching helmets with his driver. Some of the Allies were deeply sceptical about the price the Americans paid to regain the position. General Mike West, who succeeded Cassels in command of the Commonwealth Division, was asked what he would have done to recapture it, and answered: ‘Nothing. It was only an outpost.’ But this view reflected, yet again, the interminable conflict between military reason and political interest.

A succession of almost equally bitter battles was conducted for possession of a ridge within a few miles of the western coast of Korea, named ‘The Hook’. On the night of 26 October 1952, the US 7th Marines fought a successful defensive action under the most unfavourable conditions. Thereafter, the Hook passed into the hands of the Commonwealth Division. The British lost more casualties on its steep flanks than on any other single battlefield in Korea. The 1st Black Watch fought the second Hook battle on 18 November 1952. The third battle, in late May 1953, was a much more protracted affair, of which the brunt fell on the 1st Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. On each occasion, the Hook was the object of a set-piece Chinese night attack. ‘It was a sore thumb, bang in the middle of Genghis Khan’s old route into Korea,’ said Major Lewis Kershaw of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, one of the men who defended the position, ‘it commanded an enormous amount of ground.’
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Kershaw was a quiet-spoken forty-year-old Yorkshireman, who much regretted having spent World War II in inactivity, garrisoning Iceland and suchlike. He was commanding the Support Company of his battalion, which arrived in Korea in October 1952. Every platoon’s establishment of weapons was dramatically increased when manning a sensitive sector like the Hook. Each man on the position knew that at any time, the Chinese could come.

On the night of 28 May 1953, Kershaw and his comrades were warned by the intense mortar and artillery bombardment that an attack was imminent. At 7.50 p.m., he himself had just come forward from the Battalion Command Post to D Company’s positions, where it had been decided to send out a patrol, which he would control. Suddenly, the screams and bugles in the darkness told them the Chinese were coming. The defenders began to pour small-arms fire forward down the hill. Kershaw and the others in the forward platoon headquarters had to stumble out of the bunker into the trenches as it began to collapse under a succession of direct hits. Chinese soldiers were dropping in amongst them. There was a fierce short-range exchange of grenades. Alongside Kershaw, a conscientious, fresh-faced little National Service subaltern named Ernest Kirk was hit by a burst of burp-gun fire as he threw a grenade, and fell dead at Kershaw’s feet. Kirk was twenty-one, a few weeks short of demob. He was planning to leave the army and become a school sports master. The defenders had been warned that if their position was overrun, British DF artillery fire would be called down upon it. When the shells began to land among the trenches, Kershaw swung himself down a ladder into an ammunition store as a Chinese stun grenade landed beside him. His legs and buttocks were peppered with fragments, his helmet blown off, his sten gun blasted out of his hands.