ASOLDIER’S SPIRIT is keenest in the morning. By noonday it has begun to flag. And in the evening, his mind is bent only on returning to camp. A clever commander, therefore, “ avoids an enemy army when its spirit is keen, but attacks it when it is sluggish . . .” This philosophy, dating to 500 BC and the Chinese military commander Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, shaped the strategies of Communist Chinese Forces in Korea. That tactical doctrine, combined with a natural north-south invasion route in the valley of the Kap’yong River, prompted the communist spring offensive back into South Korea in late April 1951.
At the time, the Princess Patricias had just completed operations into a range of hills code-named Kansas. After two weeks of chasing Chinese troops northward, not allowing them to break contact or regain strength, the PPCLI had crossed the 38th parallel for the first time. The Canadians had then turned over the job to the 6th South Korean (ROK) Division and had moved south to a rest area near the village of Kap’yong.
Among other things, while the battalion was in reserve, several members of “B” Company pulled together a poker game. Accustomed to living in the close quarters of slit trenches and small tents, in the rest area the floating poker game found a larger circular tent with enough room for five or six poker players and a handful of spectators.
“No money on the table,” somebody warned as the players sat down around the table. If anybody of authority came in, there should be no evidence.
“So who’ll be banker?” another player asked.
“I will,” Pte. Don Hibbs piped up. He tore up strips of different-coloured magazine paper, one colour worth a dollar, another worth five dollars, a third worth ten. The players bought the slips of paper from Hibbs and would cash them in at the end of the game.
One of the poker players, Pte. Wayne Mitchell, produced a bottle of rum, liberated from somewhere, to take the edge off the cool spring night and to inspire those who were dealt poor poker hands. The game and the rum lasted until nearly 3 in the morning, when a sergeant happened by.
“He storms into the tent,” Hibbs recalled, “throws over the table, grabs the booze and screams at everybody to get out.” It wasn’t until some time later that Hibbs reached into his pocket and realized he still had more than $100 of the poker players’ money. Likewise, when Mitchell reached into his pocket, he found $38 in uncashed coloured paper, his poker earnings for the night. He never did get to claim his winnings.
It was Easter Sunday, in the view of communist military leaders an opportune time to attack. Meanwhile, UN Command had learned that troops from the 2nd and 3rd Chinese Communist Field Armies were on the move southward from the North Korean capital, P’yongyang. Even Chinese and North Korean prisoners predicted an assault from the north. It was clear, UN forces would have to prepare to meet a renewed communist offensive.
As George Cook recalled, “We knew something was up.” A corporal in a pioneer platoon of explosive specialists in the PPCLI’s support company, Cook, like the rest of the battalion, was enjoying the rest behind the lines near Kap’yong. “The battalion padres were preparing for Easter Sunday church parades, when we were suddenly given orders to get our gear and move.” The Princess Patricias were headed back into the fighting.
Just before midnight on Sunday, April 22, more than 200,000 Chinese and North Korean soldiers began a massive assault on the western and west-central regions of the United Nations line, about twenty kilometres north of the PPCLI’s reserve area. The apparent objective was to recapture Seoul. In the west-central area—the Kap’yong valley—the offensive first concentrated attacks on troops of the US I and IX Corps. The Americans fell back south, leaving two regiments of the 6th South Korean (ROK) Division to hold the UN line. The shock of the attack sent thousands of ROK soldiers, South Korean civilians and Chinese communist infiltrators streaming down the valley. The front protecting the way to Seoul was collapsing.
To the south, where the Kap’yong River valley narrowed like a funnel from 3,000 metres in width to several hundred and passed through three natural elevations, was the spot where the men of the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade were ordered to halt the oncoming Chinese offensive. The Middlesex Regiment with three companies and the New Zealand 16th Field Regiment were sent to Hill 794 in the north to assist the ROK Army withdrawal. The 3rd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment (RAR), with support from the US 72nd Heavy Tank Battalion, was assigned the eastern side of the valley on Hill 504 to cover a ford in the river and block enemy action along the road from the northeast. Meanwhile, the Princess Patricias went to the western side of the valley to defend the two kilometres of steep, scrub-covered ground around Hill 677.
By 8 o’clock Monday evening, the Australians had set up their roadblock. Two hours later, the last of the retreating ROK Army troops came down the road with troops from the 3rd Chinese Field Army in hot pursuit. To add to the confusion, the Middlesex and New Zealand gunners were falling back with the ROKs, and the Australians found themselves facing Chinese forces on three sides. The Chinese probed Australian trenches and machine-gun positions all night. The RAR held its position. However, by Tuesday afternoon, the forward Australian rifle companies had been battling waves of Chinese soldiers for sixteen hours; they were now low on ammunition, and they were up to four kilometres behind the communists’ deepest advance. They were ordered to withdraw. Under cover of smoke laid down by the New Zealand artillery, and with American tanks ferrying out the wounded, the Australians—with nearly a hundred casualties—came off Hill 504 fighting their way south to reach the Middlesex Regiment’s new position to the rear of the Princess Patricias.
That left the Canadians alone on Hill 677 to stop the Chinese.
The PPCLI was deployed across the north face of the hill: “D” Company positioned to the left; “C” Company in the centre; “A” Company to the right; and “B” Company occupying a salient trench-line in front of “D” Company. Colonel Stone’s specific orders were: “Be steady, kill and don’t give way!” The Patricias had some sense of the overwhelming numbers of Chinese soldiers they faced, but didn’t know they were outnumbered eight-to-one.
Wayne Mitchell recognized the odds early. It was during the daylight hours of April 24. From his position in “B” Company on the west side of Hill 677, he could see “there must have been hundreds of thousands of people, mostly refugees” racing south through the valley toward their position. “Orders were to stop them, because the enemy was in there among them. I felt horrible, but I set up . . . and fired low.”
The eighteen-year-old Pte. Mitchell hadn’t fired more than a few bursts from his Bren gun, when three American fighter aircraft swooped down over his position and began strafing and bombing the people in the valley. Mitchell didn’t have time to think about what was happening in the valley. His platoon commander, Sgt. Roy Yalmer, told Mitchell they were moving to the eastern side of Hill 677 to protect the “back door” to the battalion area. Mitchell trusted Yalmer implicitly. The sergeant was experienced; he’d fought the Germans in Italy during the Second World War.
“Just before dark [April 24] we saw them coming out of the hills to the north,” Yalmer said. It was about 10 o’clock when Chinese mortar bombs began falling on the Patricias’ positions. “B” Company commander Maj. C. V. Lilley estimated there were 400 Chinese on the flat ground in front of his position, but as Yalmer remembered, “They were well on top of us (with those rubber shoes of theirs) before we knew it.”
On a hump of land at the forward corner of “B” Company’s position, Cpl. G. R. Evans and his section were among the first to hear piercing whistles and bugle blasts only metres in front of their slit trenches. This was the Chinese call to attack. They tossed grenades into the Patricias’ position. Then the first wave of Chinese infantry stormed out of the darkness. In minutes Evans was wounded in the leg and chest. Only the continuous firing of Bren-gunner Ken Marsh saved the section from being wiped out in the first attack. However, Lt. Harold Ross, the platoon commander, ordered a pull-back from the position. Though they got Evans out, he later died of his wounds.
Noiselessly and almost invisibly, the next “human wave” of Chinese soldiers moved into position. One wave came close to knocking out the battalion’s tactical headquarters in “a well organized and well executed attack in strength . . . between one and two companies, which ‘B’ Company was powerless to stop as it came through our back door.”
“The Chinese fought extremely well at night,” Col. Stone noted. “They lived in the dark. We lived in the light . . . Luckily we had these half-tracks with a .50 calibre and a .30 calibre machine-gun. When they fired it was four balls and then a tracer [to light the direction of gunfire]. Suddenly these grey shapes came out of the dark. And all these machine-guns opened up,” and eventually the Canadians drove off the attack.
It was only midnight. The waves of Chinese Communist Forces kept coming. One assembly of Chinese troops gathered at the Kap’yong River across from the Canadian position and began fording the current. This time, however, the Patricias were aided by weather conditions. Bright moonlight silhouetted the Chinese and “they made wonderful targets,” said Pte. Carl Deschamps, who watched as machine guns mounted on half-track vehicles opened up. The respite was temporary. Very early on the morning of Wednesday, April 25—the beginning of the second day in defence of Hill 677—every weapon in “B” Company was firing at advancing Chinese troops.
“We just fired at everybody,” recalled Don Hibbs from “B” Company. On the way into the hills, Pte. Hibbs imagined being shot at, so when he walked, he got into the habit of stepping then bobbing his whole body one direction and then the other, like a boxer. In his slit trench he kept moving too, firing, ducking into the trench, reloading and firing again. “There was so much confusion, so much firing and the smell of weapons . . . the dust, the dirt and the fear. You’re sweating. Your mouth is dry . . . You’re terrified.”
In Wayne Mitchell’s No. 6 Platoon area, there were few able-bodied soldiers left. A clerk, who’d been brought up to replace Mitchell’s No. 2 on the Bren gun, had been hit in the face with shrapnel. During a lull, Mitchell removed him and another wounded rifleman from the line and returned to his slit trench.
“I’m all alone out there,” recalled Mitchell, who by now had shrapnel wounds in his back, his chest and on his face. He could only see through his left eye. “And suddenly they were in on top of me. I remember being hit in the back with a shovel or something. But I had the Bren gun in my hands. And as I fell I landed on my back firing. The bodies were falling on top of me. It was fight, or be buried there.”
Fortunately, his section leader, Roy Yalmer, was nearby, heard his shouts for help and joined Mitchell in the trench. By this time, neither Mitchell nor his sergeant had much ammunition left. Still, the Chinese infantrymen kept charging up the hillside until “I yelled at Roy to look to his left. He wheeled around and just pitched his rifle, bayonet first like a spear. Then he grabbed Hayes [another wounded rifleman] and dragged him out and we came back down the hill.” Unfortunately, their friend Pte. C. A. Hayes was dead by the time they reached tactical headquarters. Mitchell, too, could hardly stand for loss of blood.
As savage as the fighting had been on the eastern side of the ridge, it was only a diversion for a larger assault that was coming. For most of the preceding day, “D” Company, at the west end of the north face of Hill 677, had been spectators to the battle. That changed for No. 10 and No. 12 Platoons of “D” Company just after 1 o’clock in the morning, April 25, when suddenly the hillside exploded with light. Flares, triggered by tripwires laid the previous day by George Cook’s pioneer platoon, lit up the sky. Again “there was the [Chinese] bugle call, then the sound of the beating of sticks,” said Jim Waniandy, a lance corporal in “D” Company. “That was followed by the blowing of shrill whistles. They came in with a shout like a screaming jabber.”
Hundreds of Chinese troops were now silhouetted as they climbed the hillside toward the Patricias’ positions. The flare light gave Sgt. Tommy Prince and his Vickers machine-gun partner, Pte. McGillivray, early advantage against the Chinese offensive. Some distance away, at a second Vickers position, gunners Maurice Carr and Bruce Mac-Donald were aided by two Korean houseboys armed with US army carbines. However, it was clear by the persistence of the attack that the defenders were heavily outnumbered. The Chinese focused the assault on that Vickers position and soon overran it, killing both Carr and MacDonald. The western reaches of the battalion position were now falling into Chinese hands and there was a distinct danger the invading troops would turn the Vickers machine gun on the Patricias’ vulnerable left flank.
“At 0300 hours, 10 Platoon was cut off and 12 Platoon was completely overrun,” Mel Canfield wrote in the regimental war diary. “Lt. Mike Levy [10 Platoon commander] asked for close in mortar and artillery support,” that is, for friendly fire to be brought down on “D” Company’s position while the defenders hunkered down in their trenches. The company commander, Capt. Wally Mills, endorsed the plan and ordered the New Zealand artillery to commence firing on “D” Company’s sector. “The stratagem was successful in driving off the attacking Chinese, although the Chinese continued to engage ‘D’ Company until 0700 hours.”
Equally important to the successful outcome in “D” Company’s sector was the action of Pte. Kenneth Barwise, a tall sawmill worker from Vancouver. Immediately following the bombardment that drove the Chinese from the area, the twenty-two-year-old Barwise dashed over from “C” Company sector and single-handedly recaptured the Vickers machine-gun position lost at the beginning of the assault. In the course of the assault, the six-foot four-inch Barwise killed six Chinese soldiers before picking up the Vickers barrel, lock and tripod (about 200 pounds), and packing it back up the hill to his platoon headquarters. Barwise’s only comment to war correspondent Bill Boss after the battle was: “There sure were a lot of strangers in hell that morning.”
When dawn finally broke on April 25, the sky was clear and bright. The sounds of the night—the continuous booming of the New Zealand 25-pounder guns from behind Hill 677, the thumping of exploding grenades, the chatter of Bren guns, the bursts of the Chinese burp-guns and even the whistle and bugle calls—all died down. The Patricias’ situation, however, was no less precarious. Even though the waves of Chinese infantry had stopped swarming the hilltops, the communist forces had nearly encircled the Patricias. Their supply route was cut off. Col. Stone called for a re-supply of the battalion by air.
As they waited, PPCLI patrols began moving through trenches in search of Chinese and Canadian wounded. At about 7 o’clock, a reconnaissance (or recce) patrol from “C” Company blundered into some booby-trap grenades (a defensive line laid by a Patricias’ pioneer platoon). Cpl. Smiley Douglas and Cpl. George Cook ran to the top of the ridge to help. Moments later, Douglas found an unexploded grenade. He shouted a warning. Cook hit the dirt to protect one of the wounded patrol members, and Douglas tried to throw the grenade away from the patrol. It went off in his hand.
The battalion was in desperate need of re-supply and relief.
At 11 o’clock that morning, Cpl. Cook saw the four US Army Air Force C-119s coming in low over the battlefield. “The four Flying Boxcars roared overhead at about 200 feet altitude. Then they made a second pass and we could see the crews pushing the boxes of ammunition, rations and water out of the hatches. They must have dropped a hundred packages of supplies to us,” and only four landed outside the battalion-held position.
“The supply pallets under the parachutes came down really fast,” Harley Welsh recalled. Originally working at “B” Company tactical headquarters behind Hill 677, Welsh and an intelligence section officer, Lt. Peter Mackenzie, had been reassigned to defensive position manning American .30-calibre machine guns. For nearly two days the two had sat back-to-back looking at the hillside through gun-sights. On this morning, however, Mackenzie was keeping watch while Welsh caught up on lost sleep, when the air drop occurred. (In fact, it was Mackenzie who had suggested the air-drop idea to Col. Stone.) “One pallet bounced three feet from me,” Welsh said. “God, if it had hit me I’d have been a pancake.”
By Wednesday afternoon, April 25, American air strikes and patrols from the Middlesex Regiment had cleared Chinese snipers along the road from the town of Kap’yong north to Hill 677. The US 5th Cavalry had arrived from Seoul to reinforce. Meanwhile, with their forward momentum halted, the Chinese Communist Forces withdrew north.
UN Command began to take stock. Sixty kilometres to the west, in a similar defensive action against the Chinese spring offensive, the Royal Gloucester Regiment had nearly been wiped out; of 1,000 men in the regiment, only 100 survived the battle. New Zealand gunners had fired 14,500 artillery shells during the battle at Kap’yong. Coincidentally, April 25 was ANZAC Day, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the disastrous assault New Zealand and Australian troops had made at Gallipoli, Turkey, during the First World War; at Kap’yong, they’d sustained 31 killed, 59 wounded and 3 captured. Together, the Canadians and Australians—about 700 men—had held off two Chinese regiments, more than 6,000 troops. The Princess Patricias had suffered 10 killed and 23 wounded, testament to the skilful way they had defended Hill 677.
For his actions, Pte. Kenneth Barwise was awarded the Military Medal. For calling down fire on his own position, Capt. Wally Mills won the Military Cross (although diary records show that Mike Levy made the original call, but no honours were awarded to the lieutenant). L/Cpl. Smiley Douglas had to be flown out by evacuation helicopter (he’d lost his hand and a lot of blood), but was later awarded the Military Medal for his selfless act of bravery. Pte. Wayne Mitchell, also severely wounded and evacuated, was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
Two weeks after Kap’yong, the entire 2nd Battalion of the PPCLI was assembled in a field behind the front lines. A VIP helicopter arrived and American general James Van Fleet emerged. The new commander of the Eighth US Army inspected the battalion and read out the United States Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation. In the opinion of the senior commander in field, the PPCLI deserved public recognition in the name of the President of the United States, the only Canadian unit ever to be so honoured. Gen. Van Fleet was not aware that awards to Commonwealth troops had to be approved first by the British monarch. The breach of protocol didn’t seem to matter to either British or Australian authorities, but it would take almost five years before the Canadian government formally permitted the 2nd Battalion PPCLI—whom some media and politicians back home had labelled “soldiers of fortune” and whose colonel had once described as “scruff”—to wear its Kap’yong citation ribbon.
Pte. Ron Trider, of the 2nd Battalion RCR, and his seagoing companions found out about Kap’yong in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The RCR troops, as well as other units of the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade, had finally set sail from Seattle aboard the troopship General Edwin P. Patrick and its sister Liberty ships, the Marine Adder and the President Jackson, on April 19, 20 and 21, 1951. While at sea, their only link with the outside world was a daily news sheet called the Patrick Press. Amid news of the day—including the successful opening of The King and I on Broadway and the results of a new Canadian census reporting a population of just over 14 million—the Canadian soldiers “greeted reports of the Patricias’ epic stand at Kap’yong . . . with a mixture of quiet pride and resentment. With half of an eighteen-month contract expired, the other members of the Special Force were bitterly disappointed because they were not sent with the Patricias earlier to fight as a brigade.” The truth was, there was plenty of fighting ahead, enough for every eager volunteer.
Among the other bits of news that the Royal Canadian Regiment, the Royal 22e Régiment, the Royal Canadian Engineers, the Royal Canadian Dragoons and the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery learned en route to Korea was that President Truman had fired the UN commander-in-chief, Douglas MacArthur.
Having witnessed the failure of two separate phases of UN action in Korea—the “war for containment” and the “war for rollback”— Truman and most members of the UN Command now desired “stabilization,” or re-establishing the 38th parallel as the front or stalemate line in hopes that UN peace negotiations might then end the conflict. Gen. MacArthur still openly advocated extending the war to China, on the ground and in the air, in a second bid for complete victory. In fact, he had concocted a plan to use Nationalist Chinese troops in an all-out land invasion of China and to drop between thirty and fifty atomic bombs across the neck of Manchuria, effectively rendering China’s border lands with Korea a radioactive no-man’s-land for sixty years. On April 11, Truman recalled MacArthur and stated in a radio broadcast: “By fighting a limited war in Korea, we have prevented aggression from succeeding and bringing on a general war . . . We are trying to prevent a world war, not start one.”
With that announcement, MacArthur lost all his command titles, but not his public voice. Despite criticism, even from fellow generals Omar Bradley and George Marshall, MacArthur continued to speak out against US policy in Korea, and on April 9 he addressed a joint session of Congress. He reiterated his tough approach to “neutralizing” Chinese influence in the Far East and concluded with his famous “I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-bye.”
As abhorrent as MacArthur’s speech was to the Truman administration, it began to shift public opinion against the war. Casualties were mounting. Winning the war was now questionable. And while a Gallup poll showed a majority of Americans supported MacArthur’s policy in Korea, only 30 percent favoured all-out war with China.
The MacArthur firing left many Canadian Special Force troops bewildered. In 1950, Larry Moore had jumped on his motorcycle and raced to Chorley Park in Toronto to join up when he heard the call. He felt that joining the UN action in Korea was important, but “I was disillusioned [by the firing]. I thought I was part of the United Nations force. And here was the President of the United States firing my boss, General MacArthur. It made me wonder.”
The Liberty ships carrying the rest of the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade arrived at their Far East destinations during the first week of May. The administrative, signals, movement control, postal and dental units were offloaded at Kure, Japan; the fighting troops at Pusan, where they were immediately transported to an empty prisoner-of-war camp outside the city.
“I didn’t know if the compound was to protect us or to protect the people from us,” admitted Ken McOrmond. An advance party had transformed the prison into a staging area, where the soldiers drew stores and “de-preserved” 1,500 vehicles and about 2,000 tons of stores and equipment, because “anything metal had been covered in this thick petroleum jelly preservative, to keep it from corroding from salt water during the Pacific crossing,” recalled Don Flieger, who was part of the Service Corps advance party. “To remove it we had to wash everything in hot water. Or sometimes we cheated and used gasoline, but that was pretty dangerous.”
There were other dangers the newly arrived RCR and Vandoos troops were warned about, including which bars and “hooches” were out-of-bounds and which laundry establishments (or “washy-washy” women) could be trusted. The advance party even suggested that the RCR assign an armed escort to its canine mascot Major in case he was innocently “coaxed home for dinner.” At any rate, Major and the rest of Canada’s Special Force survived their stay at Pusan, and on May 11 began a training exercise—Charley Horse—to harden the troops, acquaint them with battle tactics in hilly country and get them used to some additional American weapons. After four days of climbing the hills around Pusan’s airport, the brigade followed the 2nd Royal Canadian Horse Artillery group north toward the front.
As a “tech able,” Sgt. Bob Somers served at a command post with the 2nd RCHA; he worked at a battery plotting board, converting map locations and distances to gunnery instructions. The trouble was, his unit barely stood still long enough for him to do the conversions. No sooner had Somers set up on the back of a half-track vehicle, when it would be time to move. Artillery gunners were nicknamed “the seven-mile snipers” because they were generally located well behind the lines, but “once we got going, between the Han River and the 38th parallel, we moved our guns thirty-one times in thirty days.”
If nothing else, the early experience of Canadian infantrymen in Korea had taught those who followed that the land was master of everything. In particular, the Patricias had learned that only a thin layer of topsoil covered the hills, ridges and spurs of the landscape. In the wartime circumstances of 1951, that meant precious little from which to build protection against small arms, mortar or artillery fire. And so, Canadian soldiers became inveterate diggers in Korea. Whenever he and his RCR platoon moved toward the front, Ron Trider knew that meant the renewed digging of every manner of army hole: “There were trenches, slit; trenches, communications; posts, command; posts, observation; pits, ammunition; pits, garbage; pits, weapons; bunkers, living in, for the purpose of; latrines, hygienic; [and] graves, enemy.”
The one night 2nd Battalion RCR soldiers didn’t have to dig in was the night before their first brush with Chinese Communist Forces. It was May 24, 1951. When the last troops arrived at the battalion concentration area near the village of Kumyangjang-ni, they were told their overnight campsite was a graveyard, so there would definitely be no digging-in on this occasion. By now, the communists’ spring offensive had collapsed and the Chinese had mostly withdrawn north of the 38th parallel, attacking only when their strength was replenished. The UN operation—its third advance to the 38th parallel and just beyond—consisted of “a movement forward of regimental groups in line abreast against opposition.”
No. 9 Platoon was part of the 2nd Battalion RCR’s “C” Company advance toward Hill 407 on May 25. During a short stop en route, platoon commander Dave Renwick had his men rest and change their socks. The lieutenant knew that his men would soon be climbing a series of ridges to engage the Chinese, so dry, unblistered feet would be a must. It was a distraction too; broken field guns and bullet-riddled, burned-out vehicles along a pockmarked road gave graphic evidence that the territory they were passing through had been fought over before. Next, Renwick had his men fix bayonets. This was no longer an exercise. It was their first charge into action, except that “when we got to the crest of the first hill,” Pte. Ken McOrmond said, “there was another hill just beyond it, and another.”
At the top of the first hill, Renwick positioned McOrmond on his .303 rifle and Pte. Gerry Beaudry on a Bren gun to cover the platoon’s next advance. Beaudry and McOrmond were friends from Sudbury, Ontario. They’d both joined the Special Force the previous August.
As “C” Company climbed a second ridge on Hill 407, the Chinese began tossing down grenades and firing at the RCR attackers. McOrmond and Beaudry answered by raking the top of the ridge with gunfire to force the Chinese defenders below the crest. Miraculously, Renwick led his No. 9 Platoon to the top of the second ridge and took it without losing any of his party. When they returned to the first ridge, however, they found that Beaudry had been killed by a single sniper’s shot through the head. Eventually, the RCR troops came down off Hill 407 with the body of their fallen Bren-gunner. That night, Pte. McOrmond took out a 1,000-won Korean banknote he’d kept since Pusan. On it were the signatures of every man in his section, including that of his friend, Gerry Beaudry, the first RCR casualty in Korea.
For Pte. David Graham, “losing Gerry didn’t hit me until later in the day, but we’d been friends in Sudbury, and it hurt.” And that’s all the emotion Graham allowed himself to feel. There was neither time nor room in this war to grieve, only distractions to help make it through. Because he had left a job as fireman on CPR locomotives, Graham fantasized about trains a lot. Once, out on patrol, “we came across this old steam engine in a little Korean railroad yard. I thought, ‘Boy, if I could get this thing going, I’d take her all the way to North Korea.’”
Pte. Pat O’Connor was a little older than the others. He was a company stretcher-bearer. At age twenty-seven, he had a wife and two young children at home in Sarnia, Ontario, where he’d left his job delivering bread from a horse-drawn wagon. “Paddy” O’Connor carried a notepad with him, and in quiet moments wrote poems and rebus stories (stories with drawings) to his three-year-old daughter, Terri, and his infant son, Michael. Sometimes the rebus showed stick men or trees or the sun, but every note or story signed off “Love and kisses. Pat.”
Pencil and paper also helped Lt. Don Stickland cope. In Korea as a platoon commander, Stickland began documenting on his sketch pad what he called “a most important time in my life.” Sometimes he captured the smallest details of landscape—a graveyard or truck tracks on a dirt road—but more often he depicted army life in single-frame cartoons. The characters were quickly drawn and one-dimensional, but they covered every aspect of army life—recruitment, training, needle parade, R & R leave and life in the line. Sometimes these drawings afforded him a much-needed release from the stresses of battle.
“On May 30, the major [Harry Boates] told us we were moving north toward this huge Gibraltar-of-a-hill,” remembered Stickland. “And he says, ‘You’ll be covered first of all by artillery and then by aircraft. Nothing to it, just go to the top of the hill and occupy it.’”
Easier said than done. The “Gibraltar-of-a-hill” was actually a topographic feature called Kakhul-bong, or Hill 467. Its peak offered a clear view northward some thirty kilometres up the Hantan River valley to the strategically vital staging area of the Ch’orwon Plain and communist stronghold known as the Iron Triangle. To the south one could see all the way to the 38th parallel, and though the Royal Canadian Regiment and Royal 22e Régiment didn’t know it, Chinese troops on top of Hill 467 had been doing exactly that. They had been observing the Canadians’ advance and had dug in for the impending attack.
On their fifth day in the line, the move up Kakhul-bong and into the adjacent village of Chail-li was to be the RCR’s first full-scale battalion action of the war. “A” Company had orders to push quickly up the road to the west of Hill 467 and capture Chail-li. “B” Company would protect the left flank by occupying positions on Hill 162. “C” Company was to skirt the base of Hill 467 and take the lower Hill 269, which lay between Chail-li and Hill 467. Meanwhile, “D” Company would tackle the twin peaks of Kakhul-bong. That’s the way Brigadier Rockingham and his senior officers saw the day’s operation going. What the men at the front experienced, however, was vastly different.
The morning dawned grey, misty and drizzly. With small packs and web-belt pouches loaded with rations and ammunition, RCR soldiers moved through the Vandoos, who had been holding slit trenches at the start line of the day’s action. By 0600 hours, as “B” Company headed northwest toward Hill 162, the weather had changed to driving rain. Skin quickly numbed with the damp cold and boots had no traction in the sloppy mud. As Pte. Reg McIlvenna slogged toward the objective, he thought he heard . . . music. He did. “It was unbelievable, but heart-warming. Everyone recognized it as the rollicking air of our regimental march. Then through the rain we saw the man whose melody was inspiring us. Sitting on the side of his anti-tank platoon half-track was Stan Lopez, puffing on his harmonica in the rain. In our minds we were all singing ‘The RCR have gone to war . . .’”
Meanwhile, “A” Company dashed up the road on armoured half-tracks and reached its objective—the village of Chail-li—well ahead of schedule. However, as company sergeant major George Fuller recorded, “The Chinese were welcoming us to Chail-li with ever increasing machine-gun and mortar fire.” Soon No. 1 Platoon reported Chinese approaching from the north in company strength; No. 2 Platoon found enemy infiltrating through rice paddies on the left flank, and by 1 o’clock the right flank was under fire. “A” Company suddenly found itself nearly surrounded and cut off from the rest of the battalion.
Just as quickly as the others, “C” Company reached its objective— the low sprawling rise of Hill 269—and established its position to defend “A” Company’s right flank and “D” Company’s left. Before long, through the fog and rain, Ken McOrmond recalled seeing soldiers dressed in ponchos moving around the eastern edge of Chailli. Who were they? There were Puerto Rican soldiers nearby and they wore American-style ponchos. Canadian soldiers wore them. It wasn’t clear until somebody peering through field glasses realized that under their ponchos these soldiers wore tight-fitting pants and puttee leggings. They were Chinese! Somebody fired a single shot, and in an instant, the Chinese had taken cover and had “C” Company pinned down with return gunfire. The RCR’s two forward actions— to Chail-li and Hill 269—were in position, but were pinned down.
The scene up Kakhul-bong was worse still.
As a young lieutenant, Don Stickland had just been put in charge of No. 12 Platoon in “D” Company, and it was a real cross-section of men—from air force vets to a barber to a baker to some ex-convicts. “Our guys were pretty gung-ho when we started. I had one platoon ahead of me and a couple more behind . . . And there was no problem. Half way up the hill, approaching a small plateau, there was a sudden burst of firing.”
Stickland first heard moaning ahead of him. Then another machine-gun burst. More shouts. A bunch of reactions he’d learned in training rushed through his head—“smeacs”—situation, mission, execution, administration, command and signals. None of those textbook responses seemed appropriate. One man had been hit in the stomach, another nicked in the head. A third was hysterical and screaming, “I’m hit! I’m hit! Save me!” To his left, Stickland’s corporal, R. A. Edmonds, was crumpled over with his Sten gun slung awkwardly around his neck.
“Where are you hit?” Stickland asked Edmonds.
“I can’t move,” whispered the corporal. Bullets through his spine had paralyzed him. “Take the Sten gun off.”
Stickland reached to remove the gun and it came off just as Edmonds died in the lieutenant’s arms.
Meanwhile, the same light machine-gun fire from the Chinese had pinned down the two platoons that were following Lt. Stickland up the slope. They too had sustained wounded, and stretcher-bearer Paddy O’Connor had successfully removed several of the fallen. Stickland knew the machine gun had to be silenced. He called to his sergeant and two section leaders to lay down covering fire and he began a flanking move to the right. When gunfire from the Chinese position stopped momentarily, Stickland turned to see his stretcher-bearer, O’Connor, dashing up toward him to assist in removing the wounded. There was another burst from the machine gun. It caught O’Connor in the body. He stumbled over his stretcher and rolled over dead.
It was about this time that Stickland also realized that none of the air strikes nor any of the artillery cover promised by Maj. Boates had ever materialized. To add to the discomfort and confusion, the farther up the western peak Stickland’s platoon moved, the heavier the rain and the muddier the ground became. All the while, Stickland’s radio operator, Pte. Mancuso, kept sending messages and information over his 88 set to the rear, where company headquarters was located. In spite of Mancuso’s excited tone, the only response heard was the calm voice of the company commander, Maj. Boates, saying, “Move on. Move on. They’re not firing now!”
Again Stickland moved forward with three of his remaining platoon privates—Digger O’Dell, Red Trott and Vern Roy. On its right flank, the western peak of Kakhul-bong was steep and muddy. Still, the four soldiers slopped as best they could toward the top. Stickland took a grenade, pulled the pin, shouted and heaved it up the hill toward the Chinese machine-gun position, angling his throw so that the grenade didn’t roll back down the hill and explode on his men. After a few minutes, he crawled to the top of the ridge, peered over the edge and saw his own mortar officer, Lt. John Barrett, and some other members of his platoon right where the enemy was supposed to be. He called “Hold your fire!” Barrett and a sergeant were standing over a narrow trench that contained the bodies of two Chinese machine-gunners. The skirmish for the western peak had been won, but not the battle.
Fighting for the eastern peak of Kakhul-bong continued into the afternoon. Repeated attempts to take out the Chinese positions there failed. In fact, returning Chinese mortar fire had scored a direct hit on RCR company headquarters at the base of the hill, where Maj. Boates had been commanding “D” Company’s operations. At the nearby regimental-aid post, the padre attached to the RCR, Rev. George Bickley, saw the hit. A sergeant was dispatched in an armoured ambulance to retrieve Boates.
“Padre, will you help me with Major Boates’s body?” the sergeant asked Bickley when he returned.
“Of course,” answered the padre, and the two took hold of the stretcher and slowly pulled it from the ambulance.
Maj. Boates lay still and white as a sheet. He’d been hit by shrapnel, had lost a lot of blood and looked dead, but then he slowly raised himself up in front of Bickley and said, “Hello, Padre . . .”
At brigade headquarters, Brig. Rockingham found the entire day’s operation stalling badly. “D” Company was stuck on the western peak of Kakhul-bong. “A” Company was nearly surrounded in Chail-li. Meanwhile, “B” and “C” Companies were becoming increasingly isolated from the two main battle areas. Rockingham ordered all companies of the 2nd Battalion to begin a fighting withdrawal. By 1900 hours, with the 2nd RCHA artillery laying down a screen of fire, the last company had pulled clear of the hills. The twin peaks of Kakhul-bong would be wrested from the Chinese on another day. For now, the Royal Canadian Regiment had endured its first test in battle. Military Medals were awarded to RCHA gunner K. W. Wishart and RCR Bren-gunner J. A. Sargent for service in the battle, but the cost at Hill 467 was high. The brigade had sustained 6 killed and 54 wounded.
A week after the battle for Chail-li and Kakhul-bong, when he was behind the lines, Don Stickland drew a cartoon of RCR soldiers crawling up Hill 467. Bullets from the Chinese machine guns are ricocheting everywhere, including off the radio set from which the major’s words were still ringing: “Move on. Move on. They’re not firing now!”
Then Stickland faced the tough task of writing to Pat O’Connor’s widow, Vera, in Sarnia, Ontario. Stickland tried to console the woman and her family by explaining that the stretcher-bearer “came running up the hill, ignoring the danger to himself in his desire to get to the wounded. A burst of fire hit Pat . . . He lived only long enough to reach for his missal . . . He died as he had lived, trying to aid others with unselfishness.” A short time later, O’Connor’s personal effects arrived at the family home in Sarnia, including that prayer book, a wallet, a bracelet, a comb, some snapshots, a tobacco pouch and a writing pad. Vera hid them from her children because they were splotched with his blood. In December, a letter arrived from the parents of Howard Root, a wounded soldier O’Connor had brought away from the battle for Hill 467. Enclosed was a slip of paper and a poem that the stretcher-bearer had written and given to Pte. Root before the day’s action.
There is blood on the hills of Korea.
’Tis blood of the brave and true
Where the 25th Brigade battled together
Under the banner of the Red, White and Blue
As they marched over the fields of Korea
To the hills where the enemy lay
They remembered the Brigadier’s order
These hills must be taken today
Forward they marched into battle
With faces unsmiling and stern
They knew as they charged the hillside
There were some who would never return
Some thought of their wives and their mothers
Some thought of their sweethearts so fair
And some as they plodded and stumbled
Were reverently whispering a prayer
There is blood on the hills of Korea
It’s the gift of freedom they love
May their names live in glory forever
And their souls rest in Heaven above.
In the weeks that followed May 30, 1951, Don Stickland’s No. 12 Platoon in “D” Company of the 2nd Battalion RCR and the rest of the brigade continued to advance. The 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade now consisted of the RCR, the Royal 22e Régiment and the Princess Patricias all fighting together for the first time in the war. North of the Canadians lay territory that, according to the UN Command, had to be cleared of Chinese occupation because it left the capital, Seoul, vulnerable to attack. Ahead lay the Ch’orwon Plain and the Imjin River valley. Through the month of June, UN forces would move the front line in North Korea (just above the 38th parallel) almost to the position it would occupy for the rest of the war.
Tactics changed during this period. Perhaps because of the experiences at Kap’yong and Kakhul-bong, large frontal engagements, either offensive or defensive, were avoided. The advance consisted of establishing patrol bases that could be defended, then sending deep patrols ahead to reconnoitre, probe and seek out new defensive bases. Each new defensive position was dug in deeper, protected with more barbed wire and defended by more entrenched artillery and wider minefields than the last.
Each day groups of soldiers, usually platoon-strength, would go forward as a “deep patrol.” The patrol would proceed a distance down the road by truck, dismount and then walk through its appointed patrol area searching for Chinese patrols doing much the same thing. One of the Vandoos platoon commanders, Phil Plouffe, preferred to call these missions “scout and sniper patrols,” consisting of men he had trained specially to protect the left and right flanks of any larger company-size advances by penetrating deep into the “no-man’s-land” of the Ch’orwon plain. Fellow Vandoos section commander Leo Gallant remembers these operations as mopping up actions, although, in his case, he came within one step of disaster. One day, he was leading about ten men along a path through a rice paddy, where a Korean child jumped out of the brush and began waving frantically at him. The lance corporal stopped in his tracks as the girl pointed to a tripwire directly in front of him. The wire was scarcely above the ground and attached to an American pineapple grenade on a stick a few metres away. Had Gallant tripped the booby trap, the grenade would have killed or maimed his entire section.
Regardless of the setting, no soldier could forget that he was in hostile territory. L/Cpl. John Dalrymple of the PPCLI made a habit of documenting his Korea experiences on paper. He recorded the tale of one Ch’orwon village, where “bearded farmers stood ankle deep in the paddies, poking patiently with wooden sticks to cultivate the crops . . . [where] women carried bundles of washing down to the clear flowing stream,” and where a Princess Patricias patrol had been ambushed. In response, the Canadians brought down artillery fire on the paddies and village, followed by an even larger infantry patrol, which retrieved the bodies of dead comrades and hustled the civilian population down the road away from the village.
“As we withdrew,” Dalrymple continued, “a pair of Wasp flamethrower carriers clattered from hut to hut. They would pause in front of each dwelling, swing in to face the primitive mud and wood structure, then spit with vengeful snarl a savage hundred-foot blast of flame. The little mountain rimmed valley was filled and overflowing with thick white smoke from the burning straw roofs. Not a home was left standing, not a cattle shelter, nor a chicken coop.
“As for the quiet, noble peasant who had lived out his strange idyll of peace in the midst of war, waste no useless tears. For as that thick gray smoke floated upward, it was streaked with flashes of red that should not have been there . . . Beneath the thatched roofs sheltering these gentle people, under the protecting straw, each hut was jammed to the eaves with thousands of rounds of enemy ammunition, mortar bombs and hand grenades.”
During the United Nations advance along the Imjin River, countless roads were built and rebuilt in order to ensure plentiful supplies for front-line soldiers. Day in and day out that spring, hundreds of UN vehicles churned up the dirt along the roadway that led to the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade command post north of Seoul. Unknowingly, they also passed over unexploded landmines.
Rev. George Bickley was doing his rounds near the Canadian command post one morning, when there was an explosion over a nearby hill. He looked up in time to see dust and pieces of paper cascading to earth.
“Must be one of those propaganda shells,” suggested one observer.
“I’m not so sure,” Bickley said.
Moments later, the call came up the road for stretcher-bearers. A jeep containing Reuters-Australian Associated Press correspondent Derek Pearcy, Canadian Army public relations officer Joe Levison and their British driver had set off a landmine. Both Levison and Pearcy were killed; the driver was seriously wounded. Levison had come to Korea with the Princess Patricias; he was the first Canadian P.R. officer killed in Korea. Pearcy was celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday that day; he was the fourteenth war correspondent to die in the war.
“Picking up their body parts,” Chaplain Bickley said, “was the most horrific experience.”
Anti-personnel landmines, booby traps, sniper attacks, deep penetration patrols and skirmishes in no-man’s-land—these were the new tactics that evolved in mid-1951. As combat looked less and less like its predecessors in the two world wars, the idea of the same type of decisive outcome for Korea also began to fade.
Diplomacy also entered the picture. July 5 marked the first time since the North Korean army crossed the 38th parallel on June 26 the previous year that the Chinese communist government in Peking responded to American invitations to discuss cessation of hostilities and an armistice. It agreed to “the dispatching of three liaison officers by each side to hold a preparatory conference in the Kaesong area.” The so-called peace talks began at the 38th parallel three days later. They would consume more than two years.