Epilogue

I hope I never, never have to fight a battle like that again.

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL J. P. “FRED” CARNE, 1GLOS, 19531

When you achieve your objectives and you suffer very few casualties then you’ve fought a very fine battle and you’ve achieved a very great victory.

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL (RETD.) J. R . “BIG JIM” STONE, 2PPCLI, 1973²

Tom brodie, the commander of 29th brigade, was visibly distraught as he watched his torn and bloodied men stumble back to safety.³ In a letter to his parents written on 26 April, a bandaged Lieutenant Malcolm Cubiss of X Company reported that four-fifths of the Glosters, half the Fusiliers, and half the Rifles had been lost during the Imjin battle, an estimate that reflected the widespread sense that casualties had been very high indeed.⁴ Thankfully the initial tallies were a little off, as small numbers of stragglers from all three battalions made their way back to U.N. lines over the next few days. The final casualty figures, though, were shocking enough. The Belgians had gotten off comparatively lightly, with twelve of their number killed, six taken prisoner, and thirty wounded. The Ulsters had lost ten officers and 180 men killed, wounded, or captured; while the Northumberlands and attached personnel had suffered 32 killed, 96 wounded, and 38 officers and men captured. As for the unfortunate Glosters and those artillerymen and others with them, 63 had been killed, 106 wounded, and – because they had effectively run out of ammunition and were deep behind enemy lines – 610 captured in varying degrees of poor health. 29th Brigade as a whole had lost 1,091 men, about a quarter of its strength.⁵

Not surprisingly, in view of these figures, there was no shortage of behind-the-scenes finger-pointing in the aftermath of the Imjin battle, particularly with reference to the fate of the Glosters. Within the U.N. forces command structure there was a good deal of embarrassment and a consequent search for scapegoats.

As already noted, Tom Brodie thought the primary blame lay with the divisional commander, Major General Robert H. Soule, for ordering the Glosters to stand their ground despite repeated warnings from Brigade HQ about the deteriorating situation. Brodie did not, however, make his views public, confining himself by way of explanation to stressing that it was “a case of the Brigade being in the stickiest place” in the divisional line. Moreover, unlike some senior officers, the brigade commander knew that ultimately he was responsible for the fate of those under his command. When questioned by an American combat historian six months later, Brodie accepted half the blame for the destruction of the battalion on the grounds that he had not managed to effectively convey the seriousness of the battalion’s predicament to division HQ in time to allow for a successful extraction. Some of his subordinates agreed. Major Charles Mitchell of the Fusiliers was happy to see the brigade later being integrated into a new Commonwealth Division under the command of Major-General James “Gentleman Jim” Cassels, “a first class chap who can really handle Americans!” As he added in a letter to his mother, dated June 3rd, “Tom Brodie I often felt didn’t stand up to them enough – not really surprising as he was usually junior in rank – American Generals sometimes have a funny idea of what can and what cannot be done.”6

As commander-in-chief of U.N. operations in Korea, General Matthew B. Ridgway tended to suspect that the blame for the loss of the Glosters went higher than just brigade or divisional headquarters. “I cannot but feel a certain disquiet that down through the channel of command,” he wrote the Eighth Army commander on 9 May, “the full responsibility for realizing the danger to which this unit was exposed, then for extricating it when that danger became grave, was not recognized nor implemented.”

There are times, as I’m sure your experience in battle will bear out, when it is not sufficient to accept the judgment of a subordinate commander that a threatened unit can care for itself, or that a threat situation can be handled locally. The responsibility in each case goes straight up the command chain, through regiment, Div., Corps, to Army. Each commander should search his soul and by personal verification, satisfy himself that adequate action has been taken. It may be that such was the case with the Gloucesters. I have the feeling that it was not; that neither the Div., or Corps Commanders [Robert H. Soule of 3rd Division and Frank W. Milburn of I Corps] was fully aware by direct personal presence, as near the critical spot as he could have gotten, of what the actual situation was.

If that had in fact been the case, Ridgway added, “I feel sure that instant vigorous action would have been taken to extricate the unit.”7

To paraphrase a famous saying, while victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan, and those fingered by Ridgway from bottom to top proved keen to avoid taking any major responsibility for what had happened. The commander of one of the largest U.S. units involved in the affair, Lieutenant Colonel William W. Harris of the 65th RCT, though privately accepting that Brodie had every right to blame Soule, doubtless spoke for others in the U.S. chain of command when he explained that “I did not intend to become the fall guy, come what may.”⁸ Lieutenant General James A. Van Fleet therefore refused to accept the implied criticism made by Ridgway of his leadership and that of his corps and division commanders. Though emphasizing to Milburn and the other corps commanders that care should be taken to prevent allied units from being cut off – “Don’t use any U.N. forces that way” he had stressed with reference to what had happened to the Glosters in an afternoon meeting on 30 April⁹ – the Eighth Army commander disputed Ridgway’s analysis in a reply sent to Tokyo on 11 May. Having reviewed the situation, Van Fleet informed Ridgway that the primary blame lay with the British, and more specifically with Colonel J. P. Carne, who in the course of the battle “did not indicate the seriousness of his position and the need for either additional help or withdrawal.”¹⁰

Up to a point Ridgway accepted this evaluation, which was shared by other U.S. officers. Writing many years later, he remembered that those who knew Carne had stressed “his exceptional coolness under pressure and his dislike for asking for help until every resource at his disposal had been exhausted.” But in the aftermath of the battle he was not willing to assign all the blame to a single battalion commander. “With Carne’s well-known characteristics of understating his own problems and not seeking help except as a last resort,” he explained to the new I Corps commander, Major General John W. O’Daniel, “it should have been clear to higher commanders that his situation was much worse than his early reports indicated, and that earlier major efforts to break through to him should have been made.”¹¹

One of the things that many among the British and Americans involved in the Imjin battle did agree on was that the crisis with the Glosters had arisen because the brigade’s flank had been exposed to enemy infiltration through the withdrawal of the South Korean division on the left of the line. As Ridgway later put it, “the enemy drove the ROK 1st Division south of the Kansas Line in a sudden surge, leaving exposed the left flank of the British 29th Brigade,” thus allowing the Glosters to be encircled. This was also the explanation conveyed to London in an official post-mortem report drawn up by Lieutenant-General Sir Horace Robertson, the Australian officer in command of British Commonwealth forces in Japan, albeit using more qualified language, and it proved to be one that more junior officers eagerly grasped. “We always suffer from our allies the Koreans who run away and let the Chinese in behind us,” wrote Major Charles Mitchell, the commander of W Company, in a letter to his mother from the hospital in May. This was also the consensus view among surviving Rifles officers, as newly arrived Lieutenant Edmund Ions discovered. “During the next few weeks I heard about the April battle,” he later remembered, “and how the British Brigade had been quickly surrounded because the South Korean Division on the flank had ‘bugged out’ almost immediately.”12

This blame game, though, was mostly played in private. The public posture concerning what had happened on the Imjin was to avoid the assigning of any responsibility and emphasize the bravery and achievements of those units involved, especially the Glosters. The Americans did not wish it to appear as if U.S. formations had abandoned a small allied force to its fate, while the British did not wish to undermine what limited influence they still possessed on the conduct of operations in Korea.¹³

Within twenty-four hours of the brigade being withdrawn from operations a representative of the Reuters press agency was reporting from 29th Brigade HQ that its “refusal to give ground” had “saved the United Nations flank” and broken “the onrush of at least one Chinese army corps.” As for the Glosters, they had fought gallantly against overwhelming odds. Efforts by a column of Centurions to relieve them had failed due to enemy action, but a breakout had occurred on the last day in which – so the report suggested – the majority of the men had linked up with advancing British tanks. “Senior American officers described the British stand as ‘an object lesson in the way troops should fight.’” The next day, 27 April, the British United Press service was reporting from U.N. headquarters in Tokyo that until they had fought their way out of encirclement men of the 29th Brigade had borne the brunt of an attack by a grand total of 24,000 Chinese soldiers. “By blocking the Chinese drive southward for three days,” the report continued, “they are believed to have set back the Communist time-table by 48 hours.”14

Similar reports were filed by other Tokyo correspondents stressing, as Denis Warner put it in a piece published on the front page of the Daily Telegraph, that the “British stand upset the Chinese timetable” and that while losses among the Glosters “are officially described as very heavy,” there was still a fair chance that “a good many” would successfully make their way to U.N. lines. The casualty figures from the battle released by the War Office on the evening of the 1st of May, running into the hundreds, therefore came as something of a shock, especially with reference to the Glosters. The Express military reporter, Robert Jessel, wrote a front-page story in which he wondered how it was that the Glosters came to be isolated, speculating that perhaps orders had been misunderstood and wondering if the brigade commander was responsible. The answer, Jessel admitted, “might never be known,” but in pointing out that there was “no automatic court of inquiry after a loss of this kind” he seemed to be suggesting that there ought to be an official investigation.¹⁵

This was not, however, something that the authorities were at all keen to undertake. The British government was just as anxious as Ridgway and Van Fleet to avoid seeing what happened to the Glosters interpreted as a case of British troops left to their fate due to American orders. Cleared with the Prime Minister’s Office, the speech given by the Minister of Defence to the House of Commons on 2 May to explain what had occurred was clearly calculated to reinforce the idea that what had happened on the Imjin was a necessary and heroic sacrifice.¹⁶

After he rose to address the House, Emanuel Shinwell first explained the context of the battle and then emphasized that “the 29th Brigade faced the full flood of the Chinese advance south of the Imjin River.” Though all the details were not yet available, it was clear that “all the troops concerned . . . greatly distinguished themselves.” The heavy losses incurred were not in vain. “This magnificent action played a vital part in the operations in the west,” the Minister asserted, “since an enemy penetration at this point would have jeopardized the safety of the whole line.” Shinwell then gave a summary of the part played by the Glosters in the Imjin battle, stressing that repeated efforts had been made to relieve them once they were isolated, hinting that some might still be wandering free, and concluding that while it “may be some little time before full details of this remarkable action” became known, “it is already clear that it will rank as one of the most glorious in which this famous regiment has taken part.”17

MPS did not query this presentation of events, and neither did the leader writers of the national press. The Telegraph, for example, opined the following day that “the story is one to arouse the nation’s pride and gratitude,” adding that “the Gloucestershire Regiment in particular has fought an heroic engagement.” Shinwell was clearly right to make the case that the Imjin engagement would “rank as one of the most glorious” in the regiment’s illustrious history. The Times was equally impressed, its own leader stressing that while the Glosters deserved honorable mention for their achievements on the Imjin so too did the Northumberland Fusiliers and Ulster Rifles. “The account given by Mr. Shinwell yesterday of the British part in the United Nations’ action must make everybody in these islands proud,” the Guardian stated. The Glosters in particular deserved acclaim; “they held a position whose loss would have jeopardized the corps responsible for that sector of the Imjin River front,” and thanks to their dogged tenacity other units had been able to make a successful withdrawal. The popular press was equally supportive, the Daily Herald, for instance, quoting facts and opinions voiced by Shinwell verbatim on the front page.¹⁸

In public, if not always in private, the U.S. authorities continued to praise the actions of the British on the Imjin. In the first week of May, General Milburn sent a congratulatory letter to Brigadier Brodie that was quickly made public. “I want to commend you and your officers and men for gallantry in action while defending the Imjin river line during the last days of April against the assault of greatly superior forces,” the I Corps commander explained. “Subject to exceedingly heavy pressure, you did not falter, and met his attacks with fighting will and courage beyond his belief as is attested by the hundreds of enemy dead in close proximity to your positions.” General Van Fleet in person presented a Presidential Unit Citation to the 1st Battalion, The Gloucestershire Regiment and 170 Mortar Battery, Royal Artillery, in front of the assembled troops of 29th Brigade and a host of press representatives – one “could hardly see him for the bloomin’ photographers” an Ulsterman reported in a letter home19 – during the afternoon of 8 May. “I have come to be in good company,” the Eighth Army commander announced to the assembled throng, “and to pay tribute to the wonderful British Commonwealth forces. I wanted to get better acquainted with and pay tribute and give honor to your gallant stand.”²⁰

The two units, the actual document read, “are cited for exceptionally outstanding performance of duty and heroism in action,” and after outlining the course of the battle the citation concluded that the units “displayed such gallantry, determination, and esprit de corps in accomplishing their mission under extremely difficult and hazardous conditions as to set them above other units participating in the same battle.” All in all the men’s “sustained brilliance in battle, their resoluteness, and extraordinary heroism” were such as to “reflect unsurpassed credit on those courageous soldiers and their homeland.”²¹

Not surprisingly the Presidential Unit Citation was approvingly reported in the British press under headlines such as “Gloucesters Given U.S. Honour” (Daily Herald) and “Gloucesters Win Highest U.S. Military Honour” (Daily Telegraph). When film of the event was shown in British newsreels, audiences cheered.²²

The fact that the Americans were publicly and effusively praising the British contribution to the Battle of the Imjin River seems to have subsumed any questions about how the casualty list came to be so long and why the Glosters had been left to their own devices. In the 16 May issue of The Times it was reported at some length that the previous day’s Washington Post had printed a leading article titled “heroism in Korea” praising the actions of the Glosters. Less than a week later The Times proudly noted under the heading “Tribute to Gloucesters” that the New York Times Magazine had published a piece on the contribution of U.N. contingents to the fighting in Korea in which the Last Stand of the Glosters was specifically praised. Fourteen days after that, a story from the Washington correspondent of The Times headed “Gallantry of the Gloucesters” appeared, in which remarks made by the U.S. Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, before a Senate committee about the Glosters were enthusiastically reproduced. Their actions were “very gallant” and “held up the entire advance of the Chinese in the western sector.” The fight was “one of the great stories in military history.” The correspondent also reported praise from the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times, and the New Yorker magazine.23

It was the article in the New Yorker, published on 26 May, which drew the most attention on the other side of the Atlantic. Written by the magazine’s correspondent in Korea, E. J. Kahn, Jr., the piece was a lengthy and detailed narrative account of the part played by 29th Brigade in the Battle of the Imjin in which it was asserted that “the steadfast resistance of the British to this massive assault was very likely the most influential single factor in the dashing of the Communists’ probable hope of celebrating May Day in the capital city of the Republic of Korea.” Emphasizing in detail the heroism of the Glosters and implying that no other outcome was possible, the piece was so uncritically positive that the Central Office of Information in London sought and obtained permission to reprint it as a special pamphlet bearing the title The Gloucesters: An Account of the Epic Stand of the First Battalion, The Gloucestershire Regiment, in Korea.²⁴

As spring gave way to summer in 1951 tributes to the Glosters continued to be reported, appearing everywhere from Australia to Canada as well as more from the United States. There was even one from President Harry S. Truman. Read out on 3 July by the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, W. S. Gifford, at a meeting of the English Speaking Union, the presidential message concluded: “The spirit which engendered this supreme sacrifice on the part of all but a handful of the 1st Battalion of The Gloucestershire Regiment, typifies our mutual determination that all who love freedom shall be protected and defended from aggression.”²⁵

The subjects of all this praise who were not either dead or in enemy hands were sometimes at first far from convinced that what came to be presented as a tragic but necessary sacrifice was anything other than a comprehensively awful experience. “We wanted to forget,” Lieutenant-Colonel Digby Grist, the new CO of the Glosters wrote a year later. “Particularly the Reservists wanted to forget; so many of their mates had been left behind – and, remember, we did not know what we know now, that so many had survived [as prisoners].” When BBC cameraman Ronnie Noble visited the brigade in the immediate aftermath of the battle after it had retired to the Kimpo area, a tired and angry Gloster private told him to “Fuck off with the fucking camera!” which, for the only time in his career, he did. “They’d taken so much that the very sight of the camera might have made them temporarily insane,” he later wrote. The situation was similar among the Ulsters, Major Gerald Rickord cautioning the cameraman with the words “please don’t upset them. They’ve had quite a time!” Noble agreed after observing the dazed men sitting about in small groups. “It was as though they had seen the horrors of a lifetime in those three days,” he observed. This was not just his own impression; a survivor from D Company of the Glosters noted how men after arriving at Yongdongpo “stood about in small groups in the hastily improvised cookhouse, discussing their experiences, their nerves still too taut for sleep, and their eyes unnaturally bright from fatigue and disbelief.” The Ulsters were at first no happier to see Noble than the Glosters had been. “Oi’ll smash yer fucking camera!” one of them threatened when it was pointed in his direction.26

There was a good deal of dejection and bafflement at the outcome of the battle. “I had the feeling that this should never happen,” Sergeant Frank Cottam of the Glosters remembered, noting ruefully in the moments after he surrendered that despite the best efforts of all concerned “we’d been cut off, carved up and captured” by an enemy whom they had previously despised. As one among them admitted much later, captured officers tended to assume a burden of guilt for having failed to stop the enemy assault at the Imjin, an attitude widely shared by those with commissions who remained free.²⁷

Among those who had avoided death or capture there were some who simply broke down once the adrenalin had ceased pumping. Denis Prout of the Fusiliers remembered how he “cried my eyes out” once it was all over. Officers too felt the strain. “It was very traumatic to see people, who have served you well and been really good soldiers, just die instantly,” Captain Mike Harvey of the Glosters remembered much later. “One moment they are full of life and personality, the next instant they are just nothing. It is very difficult to deal with that.” Second-Lieutenant Denys Whatmore thought “we were all in a fragile state” by the time Harvey and his group reached friendly lines. A platoon commander from A Company of the Rifles was so traumatized by his experiences that he had to be replaced, and at least one wounded Gloster eventually deserted rather than face the prospect of going back into the line. “We were pretty demoralized,” Lieutenant Gordon Potts, another officer from the Ulsters, later admitted.28

Luckily sleep, food, and some leave tended to work wonders with the majority, who according to many observers recovered quickly from the ordeal . . . though survivors might still have nightmares. Having been wounded in the battle and subsequently discharged, ex-subaltern P. J. Kavanagh must have thought he had put the war behind him when later that year he began studying for a degree in English at Merton College, Oxford. “On Guy Fawkes night [5 November] I went to sleep to the sound of fireworks and dreamt that Chinamen were climbing into my room from Merton street carrying machine guns, and I had to warn the porter at the lodge,” he later wrote. “I woke up in the quadrangle on my way to see him.”²⁹

Those who remained in Korea might superficially recover quite fully yet feel the effects of post-combat stress even in the comparatively quiet period that followed the Imjin fight. Major Tony Younger, in command of 55 Field Squadron, Royal Engineers, noticed how both he and some of his key officers began to show the unhealthy symptoms of what he later identified as “battle fatigue.”³⁰ Other ranks, meanwhile, including World War II veterans, occasionally broke down under fire, and were perhaps less willing to obey orders which went against their interests than in the past. It is worth noting that within two months of the Imjin battle six soldiers – two from each battalion – would be court-martialed for desertion and that a small-scale mutiny occurred within a section from the Fusiliers.³¹

The military authorities certainly did not want to leave either soldiers or the public with the impression that the brigade in general and the Glosters in particular had been so badly mauled that the men were no longer fit to fight. Once the brigade had been taken out of the line and placed in corps reserve and then moved to a quiet sector on the Kimpo peninsula west of Seoul, everything was done to bring units back up to operational strength as fast as possible. What one Fusilier company commander described as “a host of reinforcements” was immediately transported to Korea courtesy of the Royal Australian Air Force from the Commonwealth forces base at Kure in Japan, along with large amounts of communication and other equipment borrowed from American sources to replace what had been lost on the Imjin. “Reinforcements in men and material were flown in a continuous stream for at least three days from Iwakuni to airfields in Korea,” an officer from the Northamptons suddenly posted to the Glosters remembered. To replace the large number of company officers killed, captured, or wounded, volunteers were recruited from various home units and, despite the expense, airlifted rather than shipped by sea out to the Far East.32

It was the Glosters, of course, who had suffered the highest number of casualties and who required the greatest number of reinforcements. Keen to make sure that the battalion not be considered so heavily damaged as to be broken up – there was a rumor that the remnants might be shipped to garrison duty in the Falklands – the then acting CO took matters into his own hands. Even with all those members of the regiment who had not taken part in the battle accounted for, the battalion barely exceeded 200 officers and men, so Digby Grist sent transport down to Kimpo airfield, those aboard equipped with the following instructions: “If any new arrival looks lost, pop him into a Gloucester truck and drive him to a good hot meal. After that it will be the easiest thing in the world to badge him ‘Gloucester.’” Brigade HQ, if they knew about such unorthodox recruiting methods, did not interfere. Within three days the battalion Grist commanded could field three rifle companies, a skeletal Support Company, and a complete HQ Company. A signal was proudly sent: “We are operational again.”³³

Participants in the concurrent Kapyong battle were necessarily cast into shadow by the spotlight directed at the Imjin battle and the Glosters. In the days after the fight there was, to be sure, front-page coverage in the press in Australia and Canada. The third battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, an editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald commented, “has once again won itself battle honours far out of proportion to its size,” while a report on the front page of the Melbourne Age asserted that “Australian infantry and New Zealand artillerymen grimly upheld the Anzac traditions.” Similar sentiments were expressed in the pages of Canadian newspapers. “It was known that the Princess Patricias would prove worthy of Canada,” an editorial in the Toronto Telegram argued, “and recent dispatches which tell of their heroic stand against waves of attacking Chinese, show that they are making a name for themselves among the men of the United Nations, and that they are soldiers of whom Canada may be proud.”34 There was, however, comparatively little coverage of Kapyong in the British press, and it was symptomatic of the relative profile of the two battles that a famous cartoon immortalizing the heroic qualities of the Glosters actually first appeared in a Toronto paper.³⁵

It is also notable that the U.S. military authorities did not announce unit citations for the Kapyong battle until seven weeks after the Glosters and 170 Mortar Battery had been valorized. In the third week of June 1951, General Van Fleet stated that 3RAR and 2PPCLI, along with A Company, 72nd Tank Battalion, would each receive a Presidential Unit Citation for their actions. All three units “displayed such gallantry, determination and esprit de corps in accomplishing their mission under extremely difficult and hazardous conditions as to set them apart from other units participating in the campaign.”³⁶ There was, not surprisingly, good coverage of this award back home, but in contrast to the unit citation given to the Glosters, no mention of the award to the Patricias and Diggers appeared in the British or American press.³⁷

On the other hand the battalions that had fought at Kapyong had not been as badly knocked about as those involved in the Imjin battle. 3RAR, to be sure, had suffered 31 killed, three captured, and 58 wounded; but though desperately tired and glad to find their part in the battle over, the Diggers were not downhearted.³⁸ As for 2PPCLI, it had sustained only ten dead and 23 wounded. As Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Stone later commented, “Canadian casualties had been light”; indeed, he was arguing within a few weeks that the withdrawal had been unnecessary.³⁹ Among the rank-and-file Patricias, there was initially little sense of having done anything that much out of the ordinary, even after the awarding of the Presidential Unit Citation. “I don’t think most of us felt that Kapyong was the high point of our service in Korea,” one veteran reflected; “I don’t think that we at our level realized the significance of it.”⁴⁰ Only decades later did it become commonplace for those who had fought at Kapyong to state that they had saved Seoul.⁴¹

Neither brigade was needed to fight again during the final, climactic days of the ultimately successful U.N. effort to stop the Chinese thrusts. By the end of April 1951 the enemy advance had ground to a halt and Chinese units were once again breaking contact and retreating northward. The enemy offensive was renewed in the east in mid-May, but again, after some southward movement and extremely bloody fighting, failed to achieve any decisive results. The initiative now lay once again with the Eighth Army, which began a general advance to regain the ground lost during the Fifth Phase offensive. By the end of May, therefore, 29th Brigade found itself once more on the line of the Imjin. By this time the Middlesex had departed for Hong Kong and 2PPCLI had transferred to the newly arrived 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade.

Thankfully the Chinese had not contested the reoccupation of the old Imjin line. “When the battalion moved up again it was just a clean move up to the Imjin itself,” recalled Corporal Norman Sweetlove of the Ulsters. “The Gloucesters and the Northumberlands were there also. We were static there and we sent patrols periodically over the river . . . but, as far as fighting was concerned, there was no more fighting, only patrols going out.” Still, it was a grim business cleaning up the battlefield, especially with reference to the identification of the decomposing corpses of fallen comrades.42

Even without such visual reminders, though, there was now a strong sense within 29th Brigade that the Chinese needed to be treated with extreme caution. No longer were the enemy dismissed as an ignorant peasant militia. “We were told to expect a well-trained, clever, cunning opponent who was used to the terrain,” Keith Taylor, a replacement subaltern assigned to the Northumberlands, recalled, “and not to underestimate them.”⁴³ The enemy was evidently once again in retreat, but survivors of the previous month’s fighting were determined to ensure that history did not repeat itself. In the future, no matter how distant the enemy might appear, defensive preparations by infantry units of the brigade would never be pro forma. As Captain Andrew Scott of the Fusiliers noted, once the brigade was back on the Imjin the men “set about digging, wiring, laying mines against any future attacks or incursions by the Chinese hordes.” Lieutenant Sam Phillips, another Fusiliers officer, confirmed that this was now standard policy; “whenever we stopped, we immediately dug as deep and as fast as we could, put out wire, put out mines.”⁴⁴ When the author Eric Linklater toured the Imjin in the summer he found that the “rifle companies lived on hill tops which they had carved into redoubts and encircled with barbed wire,” adding that “from a distance the thick entanglements that closed the narrow valleys between the hills shone like fields of bluebells.”45 Fire support was also increased; Keith Taylor noted that after the battle “it was realised that everything had to be beefed up – and it was.”⁴⁶

Battle reports from Centurion crews made it clear to the War Office that “there is an urgent operational requirement to fit a machine gun to the commander’s cupola.” Arrangements were made to manufacture a hundred special mountings and send them “as soon as possible” to Korea.⁴⁷ Prior to the arrival of the official fix, officers of the 8th Hussars sought to make up for the lack of a swing-mount machine-gun on the Centurion by trading whisky rations for .300 Browning machine-guns which could be placed on ad hoc turret roof mountings.⁴⁸

It was telling that infantry officers increasingly sought to supplement or replace their personal firepower by trading for U.S. semi-automatic carbines. By the time Lieutenant Ions arrived as a replacement officer destined for the Ulsters, most junior officers had acquired them. As he explained, this was:

a much more useful weapon than the officer’s pistol with which we were supposed to attack enemy bunkers. The American carbine could fire automatically, had a slightly smaller bore [.300] than the British .303 rifle, and above all was lighter, handier, and almost as accurate. Ammunition was easy to come by, and there seemed to be plenty of it with any battalion in the line.⁴⁹

Since U.S. units were officially dry, the beer and spirits issued to British troops could easily be exchanged for semi-automatics. When Major Dare Wilson arrived some months later to take over command of Z Company from Major John Winn, the new second-in-command of the Northumberlands stressed to Wilson that the Chinese could advance very quickly indeed, and that an ample supply of grenades should be kept at hand. Wilson decided eight per soldier would be enough; some of his men thought ten would be better. Photographs and testimony suggest that steel helmets were now commonly worn anywhere near the front line.⁵⁰

The sector occupied by 29th Brigade remained relatively quiet through the summer, with plans being laid to replace each of the veteran battalions in turn with fresh units during the autumn. The front, however, began to move northward once more in the late summer and autumn, culminating for the Commonwealth Division in early October with Operation Commando. Though it was thought prudent not to involve the Glosters, the Fusiliers and the Rifles were temporarily attached to the 28th Commonwealth and 25th Canadian brigades, respectively, to reinforce the Australian, British, and Canadian infantry battalions detailed to take various tactically important hills and ridgelines. The Diggers once again did very well, but going into another full-scale battle was rough on the men of 1RUR and 1RNF who knew that they were due to leave Korea within a couple of weeks. Happily for the Ulsters, their part in Operation Commando turned out to involve almost no fighting. The Northumberlands, however, were not so lucky in their efforts to secure Hill 217. Thanks to strong enemy defenses the fighting on 217 was very fierce, and casualties among the Fusiliers numbered over a hundred. “It has been a nightmare,” one subaltern wrote feelingly in a letter home.51

That, however, was it for the infantry battalions that had fought at the Imjin and Kapyong. In the second week of October the Ulster Rifles were relieved by the Royal Norfolks, in the third week the Northumberlands were replaced by the Leicesters, and in early November the Glosters gave way to the Welch Regiment. 2PPCLI was also relieved by 1PPCLI toward the end of the year, and while 3RAR remained, most of the veterans were rotated back to Australia and replaced by new men. It did not escape notice among the British soldiers concerned that while the Rifles, Fusiliers, Argylls, and Middlesex were sent by troopship to Hong Kong to complete their overseas tours, the Glosters – still very much in the public eye – went directly home to England.⁵²

So too did Brigadier Tom Brodie, turning over command of 29th Brigade after almost a year in Korea to Brigadier A. H. G. Ricketts. This move was, it should be stressed, not because of any doubts in the War Office about his conduct of operations during the Imjin battle. Lack of confidence would lead to the premature withdrawal of Brigadier George Taylor from command of 28th Brigade in the aftermath of Operation Commando (he had replaced the competent Brian Burke, the latter posted after leading 27th Brigade in its final weeks to command 99th Gurkha Brigade on operational service in Malaya). On the other hand the career of Tom Brodie, an officer several months after the battle still “highly respected by staff and men,” as an American observer noted, continued to prosper through the mid-1950s, culminating in promotion to major-general and service as GOC 1st Division, Middle East Land Forces, prior to retirement.53

With different commanders and different units rotating through every twelve months or so, 28th and 29th brigades continued to operate as part of the Commonwealth Division until after an armistice was signed and the fighting ended in the summer of 1953. The war fought by the successor battalions was a relatively static one. Though there occasionally would be significant efforts by both sides to retake tactically important ground in Korea, the front had essentially congealed into a series of opposing and increasingly well-fortified trench lines and bunkers located on hills stretching across the peninsula from just below the 38th Parallel on the west coast to well above it on the east coast. With notable exceptions, the final two years of the conflict were a matter of artillery duels and nighttime infantry patrols into no-man’s-land. There were of course casualties, but these were spread out in time compared to the Imjin, a three-day battle which accounted for roughly a combined quarter of those officers and men of the British Army killed, missing, captured, and wounded in the course of the entire Korean War.⁵⁴ In comparison, less then ten percent of the Australian fatalities and under two percent of the Canadians killed in the conflict occurred at Kapyong.⁵⁵

Meanwhile the version of the Battle of the Imjin River in which the “Glorious Glosters” had made a necessary and selfless sacrifice continued to be propagated for the rest of the war. Heroism, rather than accountability, would continue to be the dominant theme.

The Glosters received a hero’s welcome when they arrived by troopship at Southampton on 20 December 1951, with relatives waiting to meet them on the quay, the Colonel of the regiment, Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Wetherall, coming aboard the Empire Fowey to greet the men, a civic reception and inspection put on the following day, and special arrangements made to make sure men were safely home on leave for Christmas. “The magnitude of the welcome was utterly bewildering,” Lieutenant-Colonel Digby Grist recalled, adding that everyone was “stunned” by the enthusiasm of the dockside crowds.⁵⁶

Messages of congratulation were conveyed from a variety of senior military and other figures, including Ridgway and the CIGS, Field-Marshal Sir William Slim. “I am extremely proud to have had the 1st Battalion, The Gloucestershire Regiment as a unit in the United Nations Command,” Ridgway concluded his quite lengthy message, “and I personally commend it for its brilliant record.” The missive from Slim was brief but to the point: “On behalf of all ranks of the British Army I welcome you home and congratulate you on the honours you have added to the glorious traditions of your famous regiment. The Army is justly proud of you. Well done.” The king also sent a message welcoming the Glosters home.57

The first anniversary of the Battle of the Imjin was marked both at the front and at home. General Ridgway himself took the opportunity to thank the Glosters once more in a radio address:

When our thoughts go back to the darkest and gravest days of this historic United Nations venture, to the enemy’s spring offensive of 1951, the Gloster battle of last April stands forth in bold outline. It was an unforgettable action, executed in the best traditions of sheer doggedness and personal courage. The blackened hills and rocks of Gloster valley are silent these days, many miles behind our lines. They look very different from the green fields and hedges of the county to which this far away place in Korea is forever linked. Yet that lonely dark valley will be eternally illuminated by the memory of how the Glosters stood and fought there, against the human wave from the north. There is no need for me to recount the detailed story of that battle. It is well known in Gloucestershire, in England, indeed everywhere in the free world. The memory of it is more than just one additional battle honor added to the history of a famous regiment. The bravery of the Glosters has demonstrated, to a world plagued with conflicts and tension with which we live today, the power of collective security; a power recruited in farms, in villages, and an ancient cathedral city.⁵⁸

The commander of the Commonwealth Division, Jim Cassels, attempted to be both briefer and more inclusive in his own message celebrating those who “played their part in breaking up one of the great offensives” of the war thus far. “I do not propose to single out any individual unit,” he explained. “Each fought magnificently and in the best traditions of the British and Commonwealth forces.” In England, though, the focus was still very much on the Glosters. Members of the regiment were given a special civic luncheon, presented with new colors, and sent marching past cheering crowds. Though still a prisoner of war, Colonel Carne was presented in absentia with the honorary freedom of the City of Gloucester.⁵⁹

Meanwhile the military authorities were engaged in the production of an official booklet that they had sponsored on the British part in the war thus far. Our Men in Korea, written by Eric Linklater and published in the spring of 1952, dwelt at some length of the Battle of the Imjin. No fingers were pointed, of course, though the importance of what had been achieved was stressed: “Brigadier Brodie’s stubborn fighters had spoiled the Chinese plan, and for three vital days had held the road to the south.” Kapyong was also mentioned, but much more briefly.60

The second anniversary of the Imjin battle went mostly unremarked in the press, but when the war ended and prisoners were exchanged in the summer of 1953 much of the focus was on the returning Glosters, particularly Colonel Carne. Honored and feted on his return to the U.K. in October, he was at once awarded the VC for his valorous actions during the Imjin battle. “Lieutenant-Colonel Carne showed powers of leadership which can seldom have been surpassed in the history of our Army,” the latter part of the VC citation read. “He inspired his officers and men to fight beyond the normal limits of human endurance, in spite of overwhelming odds and ever-increasing casualties, shortages of ammunition and water.” The following month Carne was also presented with the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross, the highest military decoration that the U.S. government could award to a foreigner.⁶¹

The end of the fighting and the return of the last prisoners in 1953 did not mean that the Battle of the Imjin immediately became yesterday’s news. In the mid-1950s a number of those who had fought and been captured there wrote and saw published to considerable acclaim their memoirs of rigorous captivity in Chinese hands, prefaced by accounts of their part in the battle.⁶² The first postwar history of the Commonwealth forces in action also came out in Britain the year after the armistice was signed, predictably with twice the space devoted to the Imjin fighting as compared to events at Kapyong, though this was offset at least in part a couple of years later when the latter engagement took pride of place in a booklet issued by the Canadian Army.⁶³

As the decades rolled by, to be sure, Korea would become for most people “the forgotten war,” much to the chagrin of veterans.⁶⁴ Yet as noted at the start of this book, on those sporadic occasions when the Korean War generated newspaper articles and mass-market books, the Battle of the Imjin and the “Glorious Glosters” continued to dominate the collective consciousness in Britain while the stand at Kapyong of the Patricias and 3RAR took center stage in Canada and Australia. An unparalleled feat of arms (that depending on the origin of the commentator concerned had either occurred at the Imjin or at Kapyong) had kept the South Korean capital out of enemy hands.65

In point of fact the defeat of the huge Chinese Fifth Phase offensive and the saving of Seoul was a collective U.N. effort that involved hard fighting by many units large and small, above all those of the United States, and which reached a crescendo in the days after the Imjin and Kapyong fights ended. The figure of 10,000–11,000 casualties inflicted on the enemy widely cited in reference to 29th Brigade – in marked contrast to more cautious reckonings of about 1,000 Chinese killed at Kapyong⁶⁶ – was in fact an allied estimate for the entire 3rd Division, of which the brigade was only a part.⁶⁷ It was an estimate, furthermore, based on a certain amount of guesswork by the authorities, as the Chinese often tended to carry away their dead precisely in order to make it difficult to judge their losses.⁶⁸ A more realistic approximation, which journalist Andrew Salmon arrived at a few years ago through correlating and making extrapolations from the body counts of the units involved, lowered the number of enemy casualties generated by 29th Brigade to between six and seven thousand.⁶⁹

The patriotic portrayal of the Imjin as a particularly glorious and significant moment in the history of British arms, while something of a patriotic myth, had a significant impact on the future of the infantry units concerned, especially the Glosters. The battalion’s place of honor in official and popular accounts of the action meant that the regiment’s amalgamation as a result of successive rounds of army consolidation was deferred for more than half a century. The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers and Royal Ulster Rifles, unlike the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, escaped the first round of amalgamation in the latter 1950s, but were both merged with other regiments in 1968. The Gloucestershire Regiment, on the other hand, was only subsumed into a new infantry unit more than fifty years after the return of the 1st Battalion from Korea.⁷⁰

Even if the Glosters garnered a disproportionate share of the limelight, all the British and Commonwealth units involved unquestionably fought hard on the Imjin and at Kapyong. However, the reality of what happened between 22 and 25 April 1951 is rather more complicated than the established legend suggests. Courage was on occasion matched by fear, mistakes were made, and above all an entire battalion was destroyed when it might have been saved. In the established narrative of events the loss of the Glosters has been portrayed as a more or less unavoidable and ultimately necessary sacrifice. Yet nobody at the time had actually intended to offer up the Glosters for destruction in the name of stopping the Chinese, and both British and American commanders were united after the battle in wanting to preclude such an outcome in the future. In order to avoid public embarrassment and inter-allied friction at the time, and later because the popular story constructed during the war had become the authorized and accepted version of events, those who spoke or wrote about the battle in public afterward tended to stress narrative over analysis, especially in relation to assigning responsibility for the fate of the Glosters. Moreover, in making the case for the necessity of what had occurred during the battle, both in relation to the Glosters and to the other units involved, some of those who sang the praises of 29th Brigade second- or thirdhand ended up presenting its stand as the decisive element in the defeat of the Chinese offensive. Now that we know about as much about what actually happened from the Western perspective as we are ever likely to, the Battle of the Imjin River, when shorn of accumulated exaggeration and mythmaking, appears as a “severe setback” for 29th Brigade, highlighting the extent to which 27th Brigade in the Battle of Kapyong, though its performance was far from flawless, emerged from what the War Office classified as separate but concurrent engagements comparatively unscathed.71

Having chronicled each fight in detail, it is time to compare and contrast the situations the two brigades found themselves in, and consequently speculate as to how events could have unfolded differently. After all, as Big Jim Stone himself reflected afterwards, there was nothing inevitable about the Patricias at Kapyong escaping the fate of the Glosters on the Imjin on 24/25 April 1951.⁷²