For the guns, now like an orchestra, their targets they engage, With a symphony of anger, a cacophony of rage.
Maurice Gasson, 16 FR, 20031
There’s dirt, there’s dust, there’s people hollering, there’s people dying on both sides, you can hear them. It was terrifying . . .
DON HIBBS, 2PPCLI, 19992
As daylight crept across the kapyong valley on Tuesday, the 24th of April, the Chinese found themselves exposed. Without the protection offered by darkness, infantry on the move could be seen at more than a few yards’ distance, which in turn opened up decent fields of fire for those Australians in range. There was no compunction about taking immediate and full advantage of this turn of events; as Major Ben O’Dowd of A Company 3RAR later explained, with those enemy soldiers caught in the open “the Diggers were having the time of their lives potting them all off all over the place.” Now that they could easily be seen, groups of Chinese forming up for assaults could also be broken up by artillery bursts.3
From their ridge positions just to the northeast the men of B Company played their part. “By this time it was dawn,” Major Darcy Laughlin recorded, “and in the growing light the enemy could be clearly seen in the valley between B coy across to A and C coys. This position was quite open and the area between [B and A plus C] coys was an excellent killing ground. This area was now subjected to intensive fire from t[an]ks and all other available weapons.” Those caught in the withering crossfire from machine-guns began to withdraw northeastward.4
Just how deadly the area between B Company and Hill 504 was became clear when Laughlin sent out a clearing patrol at 6 AM under CSM Eric Bradley during a pause in the firing. Along with the many dead and wounded it was revealed that there were between fifty and sixty healthy Chinese soldiers who had gone to ground in the paddy fields. Most seemed to be happy to surrender when ordered to stand up in pid-gin Chinese, but one threw a grenade. This was met with instant retaliation: Owen gunfire mowed down over thirty surrendering men before Bradley gave the ceasefire order. Forty-odd terrified and entirely docile prisoners were taken and distributed among the B Company platoons.5
The enemy, though, was not about to give up on achieving a key objective. If the Australians continued to hold Hill 504, then southwest movement would be hindered by directed enemy fire. To drive them all off, the Chinese would have to take the summit; once this position had been taken then all the lower-elevation defenses would become exposed, and as O’Dowd put it, “would fall like apples on the end of a branch.”6 This in turn put D Company, 3RAR, squarely in the enemy’s sights in the hours after dawn.
From 7 AM onward assaults were mounted from the north every half-hour or so, with 12 Platoon taking the brunt of the action. As the company commander, Captain Norm Gravener, later noted, a pattern quickly developed:
The attacks on this pos[itio]n were always launched in depth on a narrow frontage of 4–5 men and each series of attacks were supported by Pl[atoon-] size f[or]m[atio]n assisted by mor[tar] and grenade attacks in the initial stages. 12 Pl[atoon] met these attacks with LMG [Bren] SA [rifle] fire and 36 mm [sic] grenades in the final stages of the enemy as[sau]lt. The enemy suffered h[eav] y cas[ualties] in each of the 6 attacks launched thus far and estimated enemy Pl[atoon] destroyed. Our cas[ualties] at this stage were very light.7
In the aftermath of ranging shots arranged through Gravener’s 31 Set, shells from 16 Field Regiment made life even more difficult for the attackers.8
Meanwhile the withdrawal of the headquarters troops down the valley toward the Middlesex position had got under way starting before 6 AM. Conducted on a rather ad hoc basis, amid ongoing communication difficulties and under sporadic enemy fire, the movement nevertheless resulted in relatively few Australian casualties, thanks in part to fire support from the tanks of Company A, 72nd Tank Battalion which also carried out many of the wounded.9
At some point shortly before 8 AM the CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Bruce Ferguson, who had narrowly escaped death when a mortar round exploded by his jeep during the withdrawal, ordered B Company to join up with the other companies on Hill 504.10 Supported by a pair of 1st Platoon tanks and a smoke screen laid by 16 Field Regiment, one platoon after another moved off in good order with its quota of prisoners, B Company having accounted for around 200 dead and 40 captured Chinese at the cost of one wounded Australian.11
The relocation of B Company went smoothly, but not everyone was happy that the original position was being abandoned. It had not been on the verge of being overrun, and had allowed very effective enfilade fire to be directed at Chinese approaching Chuktun-ni down the valley from the northeast. Moreover, as the rather shocked commander of A Company observed, the enemy would quickly move in to the vacated high-ground positions, allowing the Chinese in turn to pour fire onto the western flank of Hill 504. Deciding that Colonel Ferguson, now many miles to the rear, did not grasp the implications of the B Company move, Major O’Dowd called up the CO on the radio and urged that the order be reversed. Ferguson – who may have been suffering from a concussion due to his earlier close encounter with a mortar bomb explosion12 – temporized, asking for a situation report and implying that as senior company commander O’Dowd knew best, but not formally handing over tactical command of Hill 504 or authorizing O’Dowd to send Laughlin and his men back the way they had come.13
Major O’Dowd, it turned out, was not the only officer who wanted B Company to retrace its steps. With South Korean and a few U.S. units streaming southward toward Kapyong, Major General William M. Hoge was under the impression that a “great big hole” had opened up that needed plugging. Mindful of the warning he had received the previous day from Brigadier Brian Burke that the Commonwealth Brigade had not been expecting to be thrown back into action and worried that 3RAR had “gone off” since its headquarters had retired before dawn, the IX Corps commander decided to commit his main reserve formation. As he later explained, “I got hold of the 5th Cavalry [RCT] and threw them in there.”14
The 5th Cavalry – which included not only several infantry battalions but also the 61st Field Artillery Battalion and A Company of the 70th Tank Battalion15 – would move up the Kapyong Valley and occupy Hill 794, the key position once allocated to the Middlesex but never held. This would be made more difficult, however, if the Chinese continued to occupy the high ground near Chuktun-ni that B Company had just vacated. Burke therefore ordered Ferguson to send the company back and retake the abandoned feature. “Orders were received at 0930 hrs 24 Apr to the effect that as further t[roo]ps were expected to reinforce our position as soon as possible the ground that B coy had withdrawn from would be secured again if possible,” Major Laughlin later noted.16
Hoping that the Chinese had not sent in that many troops, since few had so far been observed on the old position, Laughlin ordered Lieutenant Ken McGregor, commanding 5 Platoon, which had barely reached C Company, to turn around and go back at once: “I want you to go back straight away.” McGregor, like Laughlin a veteran of the fighting in the Southwest Pacific, was not happy to hear this – “How expensive do you want this to be?” he asked rhetorically – but acted on the shared assumption that with enough speed his platoon could deal with what were thought to be limited numbers of Chinese.17
The first task was to secure a knoll on the valley floor known as the honeycomb which lay between Hill 504 and the old B Company position. Though there were plenty of trenches and bunkers on this little feature, no fire had come from it when B Company had moved across to Hill 504 earlier that morning. Therefore when movement was observed in the honeycomb, McGregor assumed the knoll was occupied by only a few enemy stragglers. At about 10:30 AM he therefore lined up number five section to assault the feature and drive them off. “We believed that the [forward] trench was occupied by eight to 10 Chinese,” Private Stan Connelly recalled. “When we got within 20 yards of it, it was occupied by a great deal more than 10.” It was too late to do anything other than charge forward. Eight men were cut down and the remainder forced to take what cover they could and return fire, McGregor himself lying stunned and bleeding after receiving a bullet to the jaw. The rest of the platoon swung round and came up in support, but they faced over eighty enemy soldiers. Miraculously everyone in this otherwise ill-starred section, including the nine wounded men, made it to safety. It was clear, though, that B Company was not going to have an easy time getting back to its original positions.18
Laughlin called up 4 Platoon under Lieutenant Len “Monty” Montgomerie to renew the assault on the honeycomb with 5 Platoon in support. At 11:45 AM, just as the attack was about to go in, further reinforcement arrived in the form of several Sherman tanks. This time, though the enemy responded with a fusillade of grenades along with rifle and light machine-gun fire, the Diggers succeeded in charging into the first trench at the point of the bayonet and then engaged in a fierce effort, using grenades and Owen guns, to clear the Chinese from their other positions on the honeycomb. After forty-five minutes of tough, aggressive, and mostly hand-to-hand combat, over eighty enemy soldiers had been killed and the honeycomb and another knoll secured at the cost of three Australians killed and two wounded. Lieutenant Montgomerie won an MC, and one of his section commanders, Corporal D. B. Davy, the MM, for the leadership and personal courage they displayed in this hard-fought but successful action. The old B Company position, though, had still to be assaulted.19
Bruce Ferguson, meanwhile, had decided that he needed to get a better sense of what was happening on and around Hill 504, and shortly before noon, accompanied by his intelligence officer, Lieutenant Alf Argent, and the MO, Captain Don Beard, hitched a ride aboard Lieutenant Wilfred Millar’s tank, which, with others, was ferrying forward ammunition and supplies to the beleaguered Australian rifle companies and evacuating their wounded. The fact that Hill 504 was well behind enemy lines was underlined by the fact that on the journey northward, as Don Beard remembered it, “all the time we were being fired upon.”20
On arrival at Chuktun-ni the tanks moved into a reentrant between C and A companies and off- and on-loading began. The CO struck an impressive figure in the eyes of Lieutenant Millar. “Colonel Ferguson was calm, acted like he was in total command of the situation,” showing “great concern for his wounded and his encircled men and no apparent regard for his own personal safety.” Heedless of enemy fire, he walked about in the open, talking to his men “as if it was just a practice drill back in Australia.”21 Of necessity the stretcher cases and their volunteer American attendants would have to be carried away on the Sherman hulls. Happily, the Chinese, while constantly firing at the tanks on the way up the valley, refrained from firing when they twice made the return journey with wounded aboard. “They let us through,” Don Beard reflected in a television interview fifty years later, “for which, you know, I’ll always be grateful.”22
The care and safety of the wounded, though, was of necessity not the primary concern of the CO as he called an impromptu O Group of his company commanders.
What Ferguson needed to know from Ben O’Dowd, as senior officer on the spot, was whether Hill 504 could be held overnight until the cavalry arrived. “This put me in a rather invidious position,” O’Dowd later complained:
It was obviously an extremely important decision, one on which rested the next move of the Brigade and a Cavalry Regiment, and he was waiting for an answer. Many things went through my mind. The battered A Company would have to go into reserve and the untouched C Company brought forward. The forward positions would have to be thickened up with support from the Pioneer and Anti-Tank company platoons [now back with the Middlesex]. There was a mass of artillery available now, which could be employed to tremendous advantage. Also, if the Cavalry Regiment was able to blast its way on to Sudok San [Hill 794], the enemy would have plenty to occupy his mind.
O’Dowd decided in favor of holding on, but warned Ferguson that if B Company could not take and hold its former position and the cavalry did not come forward in a timely manner, then “an attempt had to be made to extract the rifle companies.” Ferguson then drove off aboard a tank to observe how B Company was getting along.23
Laughlin’s men had won the fight for the knolls but, unknown to O’Dowd, their primary task remained unfulfilled. “It was now evident that B Coy’s former position was occupied by the enemy,” the company commander later reported, “and that a major attack would have to be launched to reoccupy it.”24 O’Dowd also admitted later that he underestimated the pressure being exerted by the Chinese on Hill 504 itself. C Company was not in fact “untouched,” with lots of sniping going on and both the company HQ and 8 Platoon coming under attack in the course of the morning.25 A Company was also in difficulty because enemy machine-gun fire made it nearly impossible to retrieve the ammunition and other supplies delivered by the tanks below the position. At considerable risk Sergeant George Harris and two privates ran down and grabbed what they could, only to discover that though .303 in caliber, what they had recovered in belts was meant for Vickers guns and was liable to jam in the breeches of Lee Enfields and Bren guns.26
Nevertheless, most Chinese activity remained focused on D Company, against which a new series of assaults were launched between 11:30 AM and 1:30 PM. Despite “grand work” by 16 Field Regiment, the Chinese kept coming. “The main feature of this action from an enemy point of view,” Norm Gravener recorded, “was the rapidity with which each series of enemy attacks was prepared and launched” in spite of U.N. air and artillery efforts, “practiced drill” overcoming the disruption caused by bursting shells and bombs. Chinese mortaring was “quite effective,” light machine-guns were well placed to offer supporting crossfire, and attackers always seemed to have grenades to throw during infantry assaults. O’Dowd admitted that when he made his affirmative reply to Ferguson about holding out he did not realize that the fighting in front of D Company was in fact escalating rather than diminishing in intensity.27
The 12 Platoon, under the command of Lieutenant Johnny Ward and farthest forward on a wooded knoll, once more bore the brunt, with the left-forward section, led by Corporal Bill Rowlinson, invariably getting hit first. In the course of six hours this section was attacked heavily a dozen times, but despite the loss of six men to wounds, Rowlinson, himself hit in the leg, heroically led the remaining men and replacements sent forward by Ward throughout the fight, for which he was later awarded the DCM. “Corporal Rowlinson although wounded,” the citation read in part, “displayed leadership of a very high order and outstanding courage by holding the section together during the continuous attacks on his section position and thereby securing the company position vital to the successful conduct of the battalion defense.” It was estimated that his section had seen off around 150 attackers and definitely killed twenty-five of them.28
Unfortunately it was not only the Chinese that members of the company had to worry about. Those atop Hill 504 not directly engaged with the enemy during the morning had periodically noticed a spotter aircraft accompanied by three USMC Corsair fighter-bombers in the vicinity. At some point in the first half of the afternoon, despite prominently displayed “friendly” fluorescent identification panels, the spotter plane loosed a target marker into the forward position held by 10 Platoon – 12 Platoon having pulled back – and a Corsair rolled in and dropped a napalm bomb. Frantic radio signaling from American tanks and Australian radio men caused a second Corsair to peel away, but two men were killed and several others horribly injured. The Chinese took advantage of the confusion to attack 11 Platoon, but without success.29
“Every man on that hill knew fear,” reflected Private John Hawkins of 12 Platoon many years later, adding: “I never thought I was going to make it out alive.”30 For a few, the strain of pitched battle proved too much. Don Beard recalled that during the withdrawal of battalion HQ during the night his driver broke down in terror.31 Rather more seriously, a Bren gunner in 11 Platoon left the slit trench he was occupying with Private K.R. Gwyther, promising to return but never doing so. This man did not let anyone know that Gwyther – knocked out by a mortar burst – was missing when the company withdrew later in the day, so that when Gwyther woke up he found himself alone among the Chinese and had to surrender.32 Most of the Australians present at Kapyong nevertheless overcame or held their fears at bay. “We were not going to retreat,” Sergeant Ray Parry remembered forty years later of the handful of men he led while successfully defending an isolated but important knoll in the original B Company position around 4 AM on Monday: “We were going to stay there and engage the Chinese and, if they overran us, well then we were finished.”33
It was the danger of this eventuality for those on Hill 504 that prompted Brigadier Burke to intervene once more at about noon on Tuesday. Having confirmed that owing to congested roads the 5th Cavalry would not arrive before nightfall, Burke contacted Ferguson once he had returned to the Middlesex area and ordered him to withdraw from Hill 504.34
Ferguson, having decided that he was not in a position to lead a breakout himself, contacted O’Dowd and told him “that the cavalry regiment would not be coming through, and I had authority to withdraw the rifle companies.”35 The news did not come entirely as a surprise to O’Dowd, who was getting a better sense of the strain certain companies were under and had just had an unsettling radio exchange with the 1st USMC Division on the right flank of the brigade. As one observer recalled:
During the previous night all our radios had been damaged, but after a few hours frantic work they managed to get one going. Major O’Dowd then directed the radio operator to contact anyone. The American 1st Marine Division answered but [when] their operator refused to believe who our operator was speaking for, Major O’Dowd took the phone and demanded to speak to the commanding officer. The General in charge of the Division came on the phone and told O’Dowd we [3RAR] didn’t exist as we had been wiped out the night before [presumably a reference to reports of 3RAR HQ being overrun36]. Major O’Dowd said “I’ve got news for you, we are still here and we are staying here.” O’Dowd then asked for assistance. The General replied that he couldn’t help, as his Division was about to do a Strategic withdrawal. O’Dowd blew his cool and said that if they withdrew we could be out flanked. The General then agreed to keep his Division in place as long as we stayed. Major O’Dowd put down the phone, turned to the Company [A] and said in a loud voice “Cop on to this. The mighty 1st American Marine Division has agreed to stay as long as we do.”37
As it was clear that a general withdrawal was in the air, O’Dowd had already begun to think about how best to break out and make a successful fighting retreat. “I had to decide the route, the timing and the method,” O’Dowd remembered. “From my point of view there were two ways out: one was to fight straight back down the road the way we had come the night before; the other way was to get in behind Don [D] Company and beat our way down the long ridge line that led to where the Middlesex were, some two miles away.”38
Going down into the valley presented the greatest hazard, since it was clear that the Chinese had infiltrated quite some way down and would have ample time to prepare to meet the Australians as they climbed down the left flank of Hill 504. That meant taking the ridgeline running southwest. O’Dowd planned to start moving in the latter part of the afternoon; daylight would make it easier to engage beyond close quarters any Chinese who attempted to block or follow up the move and bring down observed artillery fire, while the onset of darkness would aid the last company in making a clean break. The first step would be to neutralize the Chinese who occupied the old B Company position and could most easily see what was going on atop Hill 504 through concentrated smoke and high-explosive artillery fire; the second stage involved sending B Company ahead to clear the ridge; the third step would mean moving A and C companies behind D Company in preparation for their own move; the penultimate move, once the other companies were in motion, involved extracting D Company; and the final stage would witness the companies leapfrogging their way down the ridge toward the checkpoint manned by men from Support Company under Captain Jack Gerke that Ferguson had agreed to set up at a ford near the lower end of the ridge.39
It was a good plan, but there were plenty of things that could turn a fighting withdrawal into something far less orderly and potentially quite bloody, as elements of 29th Brigade would discover the following day farther west. Things got off to a shaky start in the late afternoon when the promised smoke and high-explosive shelling of the old B Company position failed to materialize. O’Dowd waited with mounting impatience for something to happen, eventually calling the CO to find out what had gone wrong. After the CO had contacted 16 Field Regiment it emerged that because the wind had shifted the guns would have to re-register their targets before laying down a barrage. With B Company and its POW contingent already on the move, O’Dowd decided not to wait, and ordered C Company to take up position behind D Company. By the time this move was nearing completion a couple of Shermans had trundled up the road and started blasting the old B Company position with their 76-mm guns. “I had not been informed that they would come to our assistance,” O’Dowd later wrote, “but could not have been more grateful for such timely intervention.” Shortly thereafter the Kiwi gunners finally opened up as well, “with a tremendous thump.”40
There was a further delay due to the fact that D Company, the last to move, was too heavily engaged to withdraw immediately. Eventually, though, the Chinese drew back. “I led it back and located it behind A Company,” O’Dowd later wrote, “then withdrew C Company and sited it behind D Company, and in this way we rolled back, always one company in a blocking position and one in movement.” Once D Company had vacated its overnight position 16 Field Regiment was informed and made up for the earlier delay with a very impressive barrage on the former positions – aided by the big 155-mm self-propelled howitzers of 213 Armored Field Artillery Battalion and a battery of even bigger 8-inch howitzers as well as 105-mm field pieces from 61st Field Artillery Battalion, making up a total force of 64 guns – that deterred the Chinese and allowed the rifle companies to make a clean break.41
B Company reached the checkpoint at the ford shortly after dark without having had to break through any enemy blocking force, and the withdrawal as a whole proved to be a success. It was not, however, without incident. O’Dowd, who moved back and forth along the column as the companies leapfrogged one another, experienced a nasty shock at one point in the darkness:
I was horrified to find myself in the midst of a group of armed Chinese soldiers but very relieved to identify them as prisoners assisting the stretcher-bearers. I stopped the first escort to come my way and rather brusquely demanded to know why prisoners were bearing arms. The soldier responded immediately with the curt reply, “Well, you don’t expect the bloody wounded to carry them, do you?” While I was digesting this piece of logic, the group disappeared into the gloom.42
Another anxious moment occurred later that night when B, C, and D companies had all safely crossed the ford and only A Company remained to be accounted for. Over the radio O’Dowd learned from his second-in-command Captain Bob Murdoch that the company was coming under fire. O’Dowd stressed to him that he had to break contact and make a break for the river; “otherwise you will get shot up getting across this ford in the moonlight.” Eventually Lieutenant Lou Brumfield and 2 Platoon appeared down the escape route, but it quickly became apparent that the rest of A Company was no longer behind them. Machine-gun fire from across the valley made O’Dowd worry that the Canadians were firing on the missing Australians, but over the radio Ferguson confirmed that their targets were Chinese. The remaining three platoons suddenly appeared, moving south down the riverbank rather than the designated path from the east. It emerged that Murdoch had got lost, and, realizing his error, had made for the river and made a sharp left turn. The pursuing Chinese assumed the Australians had crossed the river, and had plunged into the water, thereby attracting the attention of 2PPCLI. By 11 PM everyone had passed within the Middlesex perimeter.43
The Australians were now safe. “The Chinese were quite happy to just stay on 504,” Corporal Len Opie of 11 Platoon recalled; “there was no follow up.”44 But having driven away the enemy from the east side of the Kapyong Valley, the Chinese People’s Volunteers could now turn their full attention to the Canadians dug in on Hill 677 on the west side.
That 2PPCLI would become a target had been evident for some time. In the first six hours of Tuesday, 24 April, the Canadians had not only seen and heard the signs of fierce battle across the valley but had also continued to encounter fleeing ROK troops. As one Canadian remembered, “they came back through our position, and they were coming in bunches, they were scared to death, they just dropped everything and ran.”45 In B Company, on the northwest flank of Hill 677, there was a strong sense that these military refugees “were pretty well infiltrated with Chinese soldiers,”46 and when it was possible to see into the valley orders were issued to open fire. Shortly after, the company received a new set of orders, following which they not only ceased fire but also pulled back.47
By first light it was clear that, in addition to attacking Hill 504, the Chinese had infiltrated down the Kapyong Valley, thereby presenting a threat to the right flank of the Hill 677 position and cutting off the Canadians’ road link to the rear. At about 6 AM Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Stone decided that he would have to reposition B Company, moving it southeast across Hill 677 to a point where it could protect the right flank and rear of the 2PPCLI position. Within ninety minutes the company was on the move and within three or four hours the men had arrived. In the meantime Stone had also ordered up as much ammunition as he could and prepared his HQ for a battle that the Patricias would have to fight while essentially surrounded by the enemy.48
As B Company once more tried to dig in through the afternoon, this time above the village of Neachon, enemy soldiers carrying pine branches could be seen in the valley below. This puzzled some Canadian observers – “they’d go right down the middle of the road carrying this stupid tree”49 – but a FOO from 16 Field Regiment with C Company noted that every time a plane flew over they would freeze and try to become invisible to passing aerial spotters.50
The sheer number of Chinese determinedly trotting down beside and around Hill 677 made it even more obvious that, as another Patricia later commented, “we were in for a good fight before the night was out.” He added: “I think I was scared shitless looking at them.”51 As another soldier put it, “Well, I was really scared; everybody was; anybody who says they were not scared, they’re lying.” But this Patricia also noted that he and his friends “would’ve never turned and run.”52
One way of coping with the strain of waiting was to seize the initiative. One officer took his batman’s rifle and, at extreme range, felled a “white-clad figure at a cross-roads,” much to his satisfaction and “the amazement of all ranks.”53 A private admitted that “we’d take a shot at ’em [in the valley] every once in a while to keep ’em on their toes.”54 And when 6 Platoon came under small-arms fire from a knoll below them, the B Company commander, Major Vince Lilley, led down a bayonet charge. The Chinese had gone by the time the Patricias arrived, and, rather unfortunately, Sherman tanks operating in support of 3RAR assumed they were Chinese and opened fire, slightly injuring Private Wayne Mitchell.55
Aware that 2PPCLI was next on the Chinese target list, Brigadier Burke decided to address the men of the battalion through a loudspeaker attached to an American cargo plane.56 According to one version:
He states that he knows the Patricias will do their duty [and] that we will fight and be a credit to our Regiment. Rather than a harsh order, it is delivered as a confident expectation, extended between trusted friends. It is a warmly reassuring and inspiring gesture; the troops are impressed that their Brigadier, responsible for so many decisions, would take time to personally address them.57
According to another version, soldiers reacted negatively to a call for stiff-upper-lip courage from a senior British officer who was both literally and figuratively far above the battle; “it is highly unlikely that Burke’s fly-by did much to steel the nerves of the men on the ground, and his well-meaning words of encouragement probably only served to reinforce their apprehension about the coming battle.”58
As night drew on the Chinese began to gather below B Company. At 9:30 PM Major Lilley reported that he was coming under machine-gun and mortar fire and 400-odd enemy troops were assembling below his lowest position, occupied by 6 Platoon, and called for mortar and artillery support.59 Within half an hour 6 Platoon was heavily engaged. “They were on top of us before we knew it,” Sergeant Roy Ulmer explained to a war correspondent after the battle. “They’re quiet as mice with those rubber shoes of theirs and then there’s a whistle. They get up with a shout about [ten] feet from our positions and they come in. The first wave throws its grenades, fires it weapons and goes to ground. It is followed by a second wave which does the same, and then a third comes up.”60 Large numbers of the attackers were cut down, and the first attack failed, but as Ulmer and others observed, the Chinese “just keep coming.”61 They enemy was not always well armed. “I got at one guy with a big satchel of grenades and no rifle,” recalled Del Reaume, adding that a fair number of the Chinese did not have firearms. “Some had rifles or burp guns and others just had grenades.”62 But they were brave and there were a lot of them. Within the hour Lieutenant Harold Ross had to report to Company HQ that his position had been partially overrun, and Lilley decided that the platoon would have to pull back to the main B Company position. By around midnight and in the wake of three successive attacks several men had been killed or sustained wounds from everything from grenade blasts to bayonet thrusts in confused close-quarter fighting.63
B Company, though, was not the only enemy target in the hours before midnight. The Chinese had infiltrated farther south, and by 11 PM were also moving in to attack the battalion headquarters area. The first word of this attack led officers at IX Corps to assume the Canadians were now done for.64 In fact they were about to inflict a devastating reverse on the Chinese. Warned by Lilley that the enemy was heading his way – “there are about three hundred Chinamen moving up the valley toward your entrant, towards battalion headquarters”65 – Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Stone decided to use the considerable firepower at his immediate disposal to break up the impending assault. As he later wrote:
The mortar platoon, located with HQ [but in a reentrant between the headquarters and B Company], was mounted for traveling on twelve half-tracks. Each vehicle was equipped with one .50 and one .30 caliber machine gun. Ammunition belts for these guns were loaded with one tracer bullet to four ball, or ordinary bullets. Fire was held until the Chinese had broken through the trees about two hundred meters away. Twenty-four machine guns cut loose together. Only those who have experienced being under the fire of a heavy concentration of tracer bullets can appreciate the terror induced by this volume of fire. With the crack of the machine guns and the 81 mm mortars firing at their shortest range, the enemy never had a chance.66
Inside twelve minutes the Chinese attack had completely disintegrated.67 Having disposed of one threat, and able to see some distance in the bright moonlight, the machine-gunners then turned their attention to over a hundred Chinese who could be seen fording the Kapyong River several hundred yards away. The result once more was entirely one-sided.68
In the hours after midnight B Company continued to be attacked, a sense of the fierceness of what was at times very much a hand-to-hand engagement made evident by the fact that Bren-gunner Private Wayne Mitchell – who was awarded a DCM for his actions – was wounded twice but felt he could not afford to stop moving and firing while the battle raged.69 Yet without the element of surprise and in the context of set-piece attacks the enemy’s vast numerical advantage melted away. “The Chinese telegraphed the direction and timing of their attacks by using medium machine-gun tracer ammunition for direction,” Lilley reported, “and by sounding bugles as signals to form up on their start lines to begin the assault.” This was a godsend for the defenders, the men being able to predict in which direction to roll their grenades downhill or fire their bazookas and the officers and NCOs having the time “to bring down accurate artillery, mortar, and machine-gun fire.”70 At around 1 AM on Wednesday the 25th, by which time the moon had risen enough to significantly extend vision range, “a fourth assault party was detected forming up in the valley about 500 yards to our front,” Lilley recalled. “The enemy was dispersed by quick and accurate mortar fire.”71
In retrospect, though, it seemed clear that these attacks on the rear-right flank of the battalion were at least in part diversionary, designed to distract attention from an impending assault on the front-left flank.72 About an hour after midnight, movement was heard to the left of D Company, and thirty minutes later the acting company commander, Captain Wally Mills, called battalion HQ requesting artillery and mortar fire. By 2 AM it was clear that several hundred Chinese were approaching 10 Platoon to the west accompanied by a large amount of supporting mortar and machine-gun fire.73
The 10 Platoon, led by Lieutenant Mike Levy, took the brunt of the initial attack on three sides. Medium machine-gun fire from 12 Platoon initially held off the enemy, but the Chinese pressed on. Within the hour the Vickers gunners had been killed – possibly by friendly fire74 – 10 Platoon cut off, and 12 Platoon, overrun, forced to retreat back to the company HQ area.75 The acting company commander, with no clear idea of what was happening at the platoon level and perhaps a little overwhelmed by his first crisis of command in battle, at first wanted to pull back the entire company. This did not go down well with the more experienced Levy, who knew that no contingency plans had been made for a fighting withdrawal and guessed that such an unplanned move with the enemy in close contact would invite disaster. He requested more specific instructions, at which point Mills thought to check with Stone concerning withdrawing D Company. The CO was adamantly opposed, recognizing that this would open up the other companies on lower ground to downward enemy fire and essentially mean the loss of Hill 677. “Big Jim” was determined to fight it out, his signals officer recalling the CO sitting by the radio set with a rifle across his knees and growling “let the bastards come!” while almost shaking with anticipation. “Mills wanted to pull out,” Stone recalled; “I told him to stay there, that nobody could pull out!”76
If the troops were going to hold out, though, they would need support. Cut off as it was, the battalion was running short of food, water, emergency medical supplies, and most importantly, mortar and small-arms ammunition. Stone therefore requested through brigade that an air drop be made.77 This, however, would take hours to arrange, and in the meantime parts of D Company seemed on the verge of being overrun. To try to redeploy elements of either of the two companies that had not yet been attacked was not really an option, since even in moonlight the chances of platoons losing their way or engaging in fratricide were high, and Stone had from the start operated on the assumption that each company had to stay in the comparative safety of its island of all-round defense. The only alternative – as the officer in the forefront of the action well understood – was heavy shelling.78
Confident that his men could survive if they kept low enough down, Levy called up Company HQ asking several times for massed artillery fire to be brought down on the vacated 12 Platoon location as well as on the 10 Platoon position. These requests were passed on by Mills to Battalion HQ, where after some initial consternation they were acted on; indeed, upgraded from “mike” targets (the twenty-four 25-pounders of 16 Field Regiment) to “uncle” targets (16 Field Regiment plus the forty heavier U.S. weapons now also under brigade control).79 Requests from other quarters for support were peremptorily dismissed. “I called for DF fire,” one supplicant recalled, “and was told to get off the [expletive deleted] air. D Company was being overrun.”80 In one forty-minute period the New Zealanders alone fired 2,300 rounds; 16 Field Regiment expending 10,000 shells in total through the night.81 Corporal Ken Campbell, a section leader, recalled the effect of concentrated barrage fire:
Our slit trenches were within hollering distance; when we got the word, we all crouched down in the trench. The artillery dropped a ten minute barrage on top of us. It stopped that attack, but the Chinese came at us again. They were about to overrun us, when another ten minute barrage came in. Later, we were hard pressed and called in a third ten minute barrage. We were convinced the artillery would kill us all, but there were no direct hits on any of the slit trenches. The Chinese, caught out in the open, were stopped cold.82
Adding to the enemy’s problems was the surprise intervention of two platoons of Shermans from Company A, 72nd Tank Battalion, further disrupting the infantry assaults.83 This did not mean that no enemy soldiers got close enough to pose a danger, as Campbell himself discovered when he received three burp gun rounds in the shoulder after he incautiously leaned out of his slit trench to try to use his Thompson submachine-gun against a Chinese soldier who had taken cover. “It felt like I had been hit by a plank,” he recalled. “It knocked me face down on the parapet of the trench.” He was shot twice more, but survived.84 By about 8 AM the enemy had finally had enough and withdrew, allowing 12 Platoon to reestablish its old position. The situation, as the brigade war diarist recorded, was now “under control.”85
The Patricias, somewhat to their surprise, had survived the night; “come daybreak we were still there,” a soldier in the mortar platoon remembered.86 Yet 2PPCLI was still cut off, and D and B companies were running low on ammunition and there was a shortage of food and water everywhere. “As stand-to began that morning,” a corporal in A Company recalled, “it didn’t take much knowledge of the big picture from where I sat to guess that the battalion’s situation looked precarious.”87 As before, much would depend that Wednesday on what the Chinese decided to do next.