LATE IN JUNE 1951, several Dakota transport aircraft landed at K-16, the airport serving Seoul, South Korea. They contained a priority cargo for Canadian troops. When the freight doors were opened, an airport group known as Movement Control went into action. On a regular day, this Royal Canadian Army Service Corps (RCASC) crew could unload and process the paperwork for up to twenty DC-3s delivering military supplies to the front. This freight, however, simply identified as “welfare supplies,” was considered a rush shipment. It was nearly July 1, and members of the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade were to receive the contents of this shipment— 3,440 cases of Canadian beer—in time for Dominion Day celebrations.
The beer was a gift from John Labatt Brewery in London, Ontario. And no sooner were the skids of twelve-ounce beer tins off the Dakotas, than Movement Control loaded them into trucks for the trip north toward Ch’orwon and the Imjin River. When they arrived at “A” Echelon, a service terminus a few kilometres behind the front lines, the more than 40,000 quarts of Labatt 50 beer were distributed to all troops in the brigade on the basis of two tins per man. It happened to be hot that summer in central Korea, and correspondent Bill Boss noted that “cooled in a mountain freshet, the liquid was as ambrosia in the 80-degree sun.”
“That’s the first beer you can say is beer we’ve had since leaving Canada,” announced Pte. Bob Anthony of the PPCLI.
“Number One,” added Pte. Goldie Howard.
However, when Pte. Bob Lusty exclaimed, “With two beers a day like this, I’d gladly stay here six months longer,” his 2nd Battalion buddies, looking forward to the end of their eighteen-month enlistment in the Special Force, playfully booed down his overzealousness.
Like the safe conveyance of so many essentials—food, water, fuel and ammunition—the prompt delivery of that imported beer went virtually unrecognized and mostly unacknowledged by the front line troops. The rule was, “It takes seven people behind the lines to keep one man on the battlefield.” Whether it was the American C-Rations that fed Canadian soldiers or the boxes of shells that fed their weapons, everything came from offshore and came via Service Corps people.
Almost without stopping, RCASC troops battled the elements, red tape and the clock to get the necessary supplies through. Sometimes the freight was as inappropriate as greatcoats in the middle of summer. Some shipments were as quirky as shotgun shells for a skeet-shooting club the officers occasionally operated behind the lines. Other times the freight was as vital as boxes marked “Welfare Stores” consisting of books, magazines, cigarettes, mail and beer, or crates embossed with the red maple leaf or the Red Cross signifying urgent medical supplies. Whether freight was urgent or seemingly superfluous, however, the guiding principle of the Service Corps Movement Control was: “Delays are not permitted.” The work often seemed invisible and was rarely rewarded.
“That’s okay,” commented one RCASC member. “We managed to get a case or two of that [Dominion Day] beer . . . It was simply reported as ‘breakage,’ I think.”
Don Flieger was a Service Corps corporal. He’d begun his Korea service weeding out the medically unfit and AWLs at Petawawa when the Special Force was first announced. As advance party in Pusan, he’d supervised the depreserving of military equipment off the boats before the RCR and R22eR moved inland. At Kimpo Airfield it was back to the paperchase, living under canvas at the airport and joining the tarmac crews unloading freight for the front lines. Flieger, and hundreds of RCASC troops like him, did his tour keeping the army supply lines open and moving. While he was never “within the sound of battle, we constantly saw the wounded and the American coffins going out on Lodestar transports . . . sometimes up to a hundred coffins at a time. The Americans lost a hell of a lot of men.”
Other members of the Service Corps were closer to the fighting. During the time of the Ch’orwon patrols and the probing missions toward the Imjin River, the front line sometimes became remarkably fuzzy. It changed every day. As a result, in the spring of 1951, when everyone seemed to be on the move, even the service locations, known as “A” and “B” Echelon, found themselves in the middle of the action.
On the afternoon of May 28, as Canadian infantrymen advanced north of Uijongbu toward the 38th parallel, the brigade’s Mobile Laundry and Bath Unit (MLBU) was in hot pursuit. This elaborate assembly line of showers, washtubs and clothes dryers allowed a continuous stream of men to enter showers at one end and emerge from the other with a clean change of clothes in under thirty minutes. The MLBU could process hundreds of men each day and was euphemistically referred to as the “Chinese Hussars.” However, during this particular day’s action, the Canadian advance inadvertently bypassed some communist Chinese positions. Consequently, when the MLBU caught up to the fighting troops and set up facilities at a stream along the brigade’s centre line, it found itself outnumbering a small Chinese patrol and took two prisoners. They were the first POWs taken by the brigade in Korea.
The MLBUs and the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps’ (RCAMC) doctors and medics moved in close proximity behind the front lines. For field doctors, like Frank Cullen, the laundry and bath units were at least a temporary stopgap to infection and disease. In the summer of 1950, Cullen had been interning at Toronto Western Hospital, working eighteen-hour days and making $60 a month. Since Cullen also was in the RCAMC reserve, he suddenly became a prime candidate for Korea. By the spring of 1951, he was the medical officer in charge of No. 1 Section of the 25th Field Ambulance, dealing with Canadian wounded in the dust and heat near the 38th parallel.
“Nothing was ever really sterile there,” Cullen recalled. “Rats ate your soap, chewed your toothbrush and the only way to discourage them was not to organize your medical equipment on open tables, the way you’re supposed to.” Instead, Cullen insisted on keeping surgical tools and dressings in metal panniers only to be opened by his staff when actually administering first aid. What made matters worse, the battle lines were constantly changing, which meant that medical units were forever setting up camp and then breaking camp. “I remember at Ch’orwon . . . we set up this big bloody tent, got ready for the wounded . . . then nothing happened. Then we’re told we’re moving again. I think we set up and moved five times in one day.”
Cullen served at a Regimental Aid Post (RAP), the first point behind the front lines to which wounded were brought by stretcher-bearers for immediate first aid. Often working at night, Cullen packed wounds or tried to stop the bleeding by the light of a Coleman lantern or by directing a light he wore on a headband at his working area. From Cullen’s RAP, a litter jeep carried wounded to the Casualty Clearing Station (CCS), where another medical officer could remove dressings, perform minor surgery, administer splints and stabilize the men. Beyond the CCS, wounded went farther back in four-stretcher box ambulances to the bigger Advanced Dressing Station (ADS), where they could be attended until they were stable enough to move by helicopter to a sixty- to seventy-bed Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) or flown to a hospital in Japan.
One of Frank Cullen’s friends in Canada, Keith Besley, left his internship at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and came to Korea to establish the Casualty Clearing Station behind the Vandoos’ front lines. Like Cullen, Besley had to grapple with the mobility of the war. On one occasion, Capt. Besley found a dry riverbed where he and his crew set up their CCS for the night. They had just settled down to catch some sleep in anticipation of the night’s work, when a British mortar platoon moved in beside them and began firing at nearby Chinese positions. Before long, the communist artillery had zeroed in on the riverbed location and began returning fire. To stay in one piece, Besley’s medical station was forced to make a hasty retreat.
Sometimes, however, encounters with enemy soldiers couldn’t be avoided. At 6 o’clock one morning, Capt. Besley was up doing his daily ablutions. He’d placed a mirror on a tree to shave, when he sensed he was being watched. He turned and found himself facing a Chinese soldier armed with a rifle. The man began chattering at him, suddenly dropped his gun and threw his hands in the air. Interrogators soon arrived to take away “the first prisoner-of-war captured by the RCAMC!” On another occasion, Besley’s unit wasn’t so fortunate; Chinese snipers ambushed an ambulance and killed the driver before guards in the area were able to return fire.
The mortality rate during the Korean War was thirty-four per 1,000 wounded (it had been sixty-six per 1,000 in the Second World War.) A wounded soldier in Korea benefitted from greater accessibility to air-evacuation transportation, the advent of better drugs and antibiotics and quick access to surgical and medical treatment. No doubt the presence of a physician aboard HMCS Cayuga saved the life of at least one South Korean soldier. During her second tour in September, 1951, Cayuga supported units of the South Korean marines who were conducting raids along the west coast of North Korea. One such raid left about a dozen South Koreans wounded, including one with a bullet in his lung.
On the after-canopy deck aboard Cayuga, RCN Surgeon Lt. J. C. Cyr did a triage of the South Korean wounded and requested an operating area be readied for the soldier with the punctured lung. Capt. J. Plomer offered his cabin for the operation. With a gunnery officer acting as his assistant and an ordnance officer as his anesthetist, Dr. Cyr “opened up the marine’s chest, took out a bullet, held it up and said it had been a quarter of an inch away from his heart. He sewed the man up and proceeded to deal with all the other wounded on deck.
“Later, we all joked about Fred Little being the surgical assistant and Frank Boyle the anesthetist,” recalled the ship’s supply officer, Bill Davis. “It felt like just another event on board ship . . . Anyway, our public relations officer wrote up a piece for publication about Joe Cyr, that he had taken a bullet from next to this guy’s heart, that he had attended all the wounded and on another occasion had even removed the captain’s abscessed tooth.”
The newspaper in Joe Cyr’s hometown—Grand Falls, New Brunswick—printed the story. And among those who read it was the real Dr. Joseph Cyr. When he informed the RCMP of the coincidence, the extraordinary tale of Ferdinand Waldo Demara came to light. Born in Massachusetts in 1921, Fred ran away from home at sixteen and entered a monastery. As well as participation in a number of religious orders, Demara moved on to secular study of law and zoology; he became dean of philosophy at a college in Pennsylvania and even served as an assistant warden at a Texas prison, but he never became a doctor. Along the way, as a monk named Brother John, Demara met Dr. Cyr and disappeared with the physician’s credentials. In March of 1951, Demara presented himself to the RCN in Saint John, New Brunswick as Dr. Joseph Cyr, and was assigned to ship duty, arriving aboard Cayuga in time for her second tour to Korea.
On October 24, 1951, a month after the lung surgery, Cayuga received a message informing the captain he had an impostor aboard. When Capt. Plomer confronted his ship’s doctor with the information, Demara produced Joe Cyr’s notarized birth certificate and his physician’s sheepskin and then retreated to his cabin. Unmasked and accused of impersonating a doctor, Fred Demara took an overdose of barbiturates and slashed his wrists. He was given first aid at sea, transferred ashore, shipped home to Canada and discharged from the Navy. The real Dr. Cyr did not press charges because Demara hadn’t harmed anyone and another shipmate, Gil Hutton, claimed some RCN officers offered Demara funds to pay for a real medical education. Ultimately Fred Demara was deported to the United States, where he became a hospital chaplain and where, in 1960, Hollywood released its version of his story as The Great Imposter.
Even in the relative quiet and security behind “A” Echelon, away from the sharp end of the fighting on the front lines, the horror of the war could not be avoided. RCAMC medic Les Pike never forgot the sight of nine dead RCR soldiers lined up on stretchers outside his Regimental Aid Post following the battle of Chail-li and Kakhul-bong on May 30, 1951. Yet, in terms of raising his awareness of the realities of war, “the scariest time I remember was helping an ambulance get to the aid post . . . It was nighttime. We knew there were snipers, so the driver couldn’t use any lights . . . and couldn’t see where he was going. So I walked out in front of the vehicle about ten or fifteen feet ahead. He saw my outline in the darkness and followed me back.”
As valuable as Pike’s shepherding the ambulance through the darkness was to the Service Corps driver that night, the service of medics behind the lines was greatest to those wounded in the fighting. In fact, Pte. Don Leier, who served at an ADS, remembers that most soldiers didn’t think much of medics, “but as you got closer to the front lines, the fighting men suddenly got friendlier,” sensing their lives might depend on the concern and skill of a medic in an emergency.
On his very first day behind “A” Echelon, medic Cosmo Kapita-niuk was assigned to a motor ambulance convoy transporting wounded PPCLI soldiers from the Advanced Dressing Station to the American 8055th MASH unit. Despite being twenty-eight and a Second World War veteran, Kapitaniuk remembers he was so nervous he lay down fully clothed in his blankets to wait for his first orders.
“The wounded are already in the ambulance,” a corporal told Kapitaniuk as he woke him. “Just watch for bleeding. And make sure the IVs don’t stop along the way.”
Kapitaniuk was shaking as he climbed into the back of the box ambulance. In fact, the Canadian private, a very religious man, prayed too.
The ambulance had hardly set out when a wounded soldier started moaning, “My eye is bleeding.”
Kapitaniuk thought, “What will I do?” He approached the wounded man and saw that both his eyes were bandaged. From the documentation, Kapitaniuk found that the soldier had already lost one eye and the other was injured. “Which eye is bleeding?” he asked.
The wounded soldier anxiously pointed to his good eye.
The medic looked and realized that perspiration was running down the soldier’s cheek in the heat of the ambulance. Kapitaniuk gently touched the drop of sweat beneath the soldier’s good eye and said, “Look, it’s sweat, not blood. It’s all right.”
The wounded man exhaled a deep sigh of relief and in seconds fell asleep. Pte. Kapitaniuk relaxed too. He had administered aid to his first patient in Korea and all it took were words of reassurance. Unlike many in the war, Kapitaniuk was there on a mission. Not just to provide medical assistance. Not just to assist South Korea, although his deep hatred of communism went back to his family’s mistreatment at the hands of the Bolsheviks in Ukraine after the Russian Revolution. In addition, Kapitaniuk felt instructed by God to join up and save souls. He volunteered for the medical corps again as he had done in the Second World War, and headed for the battlefields of Korea to be a nurse, a chaplain and a missionary, or as he described himself, a “bible puncher.”
Not long after he arrived in Korea, Kapitaniuk sent home for gospel tracts that he could hand out in his spare time. Within a few weeks, bundles containing 3,000 tracts arrived and Kapitaniuk wondered what he was going to do with them all. En route back to the front lines, his ambulance cab jam-packed with pamphlets, he stopped at a Norwegian MASH unit just as a South Korean Army unit was passing through. To Kapitaniuk this was a sign and he leapt out of the ambulance and began distributing the pamphlets to the ROK soldiers. Before long, Pte. Kapitaniuk caught the eye of a South Korean officer.
“Who’s handing out these tracts?” shouted the major.
“I am,” said Kapitaniuk, fearing a severe tongue-lashing from the senior officer.
The heavy-set South Korean soldier approached Kapitaniuk, grabbed the tracts from him, identified himself and said, “I’m a Christian doctor in the 1st ROK Division. I want these tracts.”
Kapitaniuk gladly gave the ROK officer almost 2,000 of them. He later learned that this same ROK unit had been mauled in a fierce battle with the Chinese. Hundreds of the South Koreans were killed. Kapitaniuk found some solace in the possibility that his pamphlets had brought “the gospel to many of those men for the first and last time before they died.”
Bible punchers aside, whenever a soldier felt he needed a sympathetic ear, he was generally told, “Tell your troubles to the padre.” Indeed, in Korea the army chaplain was officially responsible to the commander for the moral and spiritual welfare of the troops. Throughout the war, Protestant and Roman Catholic clergymen, six at a time, were assigned to Canadian military units. The chaplain’s (or padre’s) job was to take services with the men—to preach, conduct sermons, instruct and console—and to do so for every denomination in the force. The chaplain had a licence to go anywhere. He worked in uniform. Whatever the number of pips on his shoulder, however, tradition dictated that the chaplain was always the equivalent rank of the man to whom he was speaking. In a sense, the padre was the conscience of the entire unit. He helped men deal with fear and confusion, death and grieving. He listened to their problems and passed on their concerns, recognizing that it was his role to help hold civilized men together in an uncivilized situation.
“There are no atheists in foxholes,” said Rev. Bill Buxton, echoing the Second World War adage. An Anglican chaplain from Tisdale, Saskatchewan, Buxton, thirty-two, was university-educated, had been parish curate in Edmonton and Fort Saskatchewan and formerly the chaplain of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment reserve. In Korea, he was attached to a Casualty Clearing Station with the 38th Field Ambulance, located below the Imjin River, where “you’re dealing with the insanity of the whole thing. You’re constantly saying that these things which seem to be signs that God does not care, are not God made. They are human made. And you’re telling the soldier he’s under-appreciated . . . that he’s there to meet the enemy, to defeat him and to bring peace.”
In 186 days in Korea, Rev. Buxton conducted 183 services. He was constantly on the move, travelling just behind the front lines in a jeep that sported a brass crucifix his military parishioners had welded to the hood. He towed a small trailer that contained his books, robes, holy communion and even a small field organ “that unfolded and you had to pump like crazy during hymn singing.” Some soldiers appreciated the distraction of a service and the singing of “Onward Christian Soldiers” or “Abide With Me,” others the tobacco or note paper Buxton dispensed from his trailer. He claimed the trust he earned from men in the field came from “a little pastor psychology and just plain horse sense.”
In Korea, among the experiences a soldier dreaded most was receiving a Dear John letter from home. To some at home the Korean War seemed “pointless” and had “no glamour.” For whatever reason, this war had no less destructive impact on family ties than any other, but without batteries of military psychologists or counsellors, such personal problems fell to the army chaplain to resolve. This was entirely appropriate; when he encountered a soldier upset over a lost sweetheart or potential marriage break-up, Rev. Buxton had greater power to intercede than even the generals.
“I relied on ‘the purple net’ in these kinds of situations,” Buxton said, purple being the colour associated with clergy and part of their shoulder flashes. “A soldier from London, Ontario, gets a Dear John letter from his wife. I have a chaplain in London I can communicate with immediately. I can have that chaplain go see that man’s wife, child or parents. And it doesn’t have to go through the commanding officer, the adjutant, the signals office . . . I can probably have word back to me and advise the soldier the next day . . . The purple net was the chaplains’ communication network.”
Church services were celebrated wherever and whenever conditions allowed—outside a Regimental Aid Post after a battle, in a slit trench during a lull in enemy shelling, or on board the RCN destroyers at sea. On one occasion, says Father Walter Mann, “I celebrated mass one afternoon in the bottom of a mortar pit.” Though it was generally frowned upon, the thirty-five-year-old Roman Catholic priest kept a diary of his year as a chaplain with Canadian army units in Korea. A typical entry reads:
“Set out early this morning for forward positions. Vehicles cannot enter this Company area after first light . . . because of enemy observation. But now have been camouflaged by the engineers. Hats off to these boys.
“Visited the boys at the sharp end, on the front lines . . . Said mass in one of the mortar pits. Three shells landed not 100 yards back of me. And the shrapnel went whizzing over my head and about me. Debated about calling the mass off since the communion time had passed, but trusted to Divine Providence.
“We had just barely finished and two more shells came in. Came out of the bunker and learned that one of the boys was hit . . . two legs and an arm blown off.”
As conspicuous as medics and chaplains, carrying Canadian wounded off the battlefield, were the thousands of Korean civilians recruited (and in some cases simply rounded up) and put to work as porters. These were the latter-day “Gunga Dins” of the UN Command in Korea. With no pay, no uniforms and certainly no acknowledgement (save the generosity of their military employers), these Korean men, women and children were seen everywhere behind the lines acting as stretcher-bearers. They also hauled supplies of every shape and weight—food, water, ammunition and occasionally cases of Asahi beer—from the jeep-head (where roads ended behind the front) to the trenches. Korean porters, or “rice-burners” as they were euphemistically called by UN troops, routinely carried twenty-five kilograms of supplies on their backs, held there on an A-frame (three poles lashed together in a triangle with shoulder straps of woven straw). In return, the porters survived on whatever the troops behind the lines could offer them in leftover food, clothing and shelter.
What began as an ad hoc arrangement, by 1951 was established as the Korean Service Corps (KSC), with most units serving with the Republic of Korea Army, but with the 120th KSC Regiment assigned to the Commonwealth Division. Absolute loyalty was demanded from all KSC bearers. Discipline was strict and summary. One Canadian recalled that a razor was stolen from a soldier’s kit bag. An ROK officer soon appeared with the apparent guilty party, a Korean porter, and after giving the man a tongue-lashing, the officer pulled out a pistol and executed the porter on the spot. Others remember some mornings when a bridge over the Han River would have corpses hanging from its girders—porters and other civilians allegedly found guilty of spying or theft.
Despite the realities of the war zone, the KSC grew in strength to more than 100,000 people. In addition to providing a lifeline of supplies, many adult Koreans worked as interpreters or translators during interrogation of Chinese prisoners. Women, or mama-sans, served in rear echelon areas as laundresses. And then there were the Korean boys, ranging in age from mid-teens to mid-twenties, who served as houseboys for officers in intelligence sections or at the headquarters of the mortar, pioneer or machine-gun platoons. In return for subsistence, these boys polished boots, washed clothes, brewed coffee or tea, and cleaned officers’ tents or bunker living areas. Among the best-remembered houseboys, fourteen-year-old Cho Nam-Soum became attached to the Princess Patricias’ battalion headquarters and he “so endeared himself by his industry and willingness,” wrote correspondent Bill Boss, that the battalion “decided to make a little Canadian of him . . . with a suit of blue denim overalls, a scarlet neckerchief [and] Canadian running shoes.”
In August 1951, when the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment was patrolling north of the Imjin River, platoon commander Don Stickland recalled “a little boy of eight or ten, who had strayed away, perhaps from a family massacre . . . was found, wandering in what had recently been a rural village. Whatever the precise day and place, that’s when the small boy acquired a family, a name and a future. For almost two years he had no home other than the echelon camps behind the battle lines of the Royals.”
The 2nd Battalion RCR adopted the boy and named him Willie Royal. They dressed him in cut-down bush pants, a well-shrunk khaki-issue sweater and a pint-sized pair of combat boots. In return, the boy devoted himself to the soldiers, particularly those in the antitank platoon and the mechanics and drivers at the transport compound near “A” Echelon.
“Willie was the pet of the regiment,” recalled Lt. Scotty Martin. When the lieutenant and the 1st Battalion RCR arrived in Korea to take over for the 2nd Battalion, Martin and his fellow officers also took over responsibility for Willie. By now, RCR troops had instilled such pride in Willie that he too polished his combat boots and buffed up the RCR hat badge he wore on his issue field service cap. However, his soldier-fathers had also passed along a unique vocabulary, which Willie readily parroted back to whomever would listen. That’s when the C.O. and the chaplain made more formal arrangements to care for the boy. A trust fund of soldiers’ contributions—more than $1,000—helped place the boy in the charge of the bishop of Seoul.
Not so passive among the young Korean civilian recruits were Yong Sang-Rock, a twenty-four-year-old houseboy who was nicknamed Pete, and seventeen-year-old Moon Pyong-Hee, referred to as Joe. In addition to carrying out daily cleaning and maintenance responsibilities for the Princess Patricias, the two boys refused to be left behind. They equipped and armed themselves and regularly joined the battalion when it went into the line. During the battle at Kap’yong, Pete and Joe helped defend a “D” Company machine-gun position during some of the toughest fighting on Hill 677.
Behind the lines, duty above and beyond came in all shapes and from all units. During the frigid winter of 1952, at the British Commonwealth medical unit in Seoul, nurses, under Canadian matron Capt. B. Pense, managed to equip each hospital cubicle with its own heating stove while some of the medical staff went without. Wherever there were wounded soldiers—at forward stations in Korea or at the British Commonwealth Hospital in Kyoto—members of the Canadian Red Cross Welfare Team helped out; Muriel White recalls writing letters home, providing handicrafts as therapy and “sometimes just offering a female voice in a man’s world.”
Another unsung unit in Korea was the road-building crew of the 57th Independent Field Squadron of the Royal Canadian Engineers (RCE). In the summer of 1951, when the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade was operating in the Ch’orwon Valley, Maj. Don Rochester’s sappers were suddenly ordered to build an airstrip just behind the front lines for Brig. John Rockingham’s observer aircraft. The Canadian engineers quickly chose a barley field, bulldozed and graded it flat, then cleared the surface of stones by hand. It took “the Rochester General Construction Company,” as they became known, only four hours to complete a single airstrip 1,350 feet long and 60-feet wide.
One week later, on July 6, the Supreme Commander of the Far East, Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, suddenly chose that day and Rock-ingham’s airstrip for a hasty fact-finding rendezvous with UN commanders in the Ch’orwon area. Rochester’s crew was told that the airfield would have to be expanded to accommodate not one aircraft, but a dozen, and not in four hours, but in one. Called into extraordinary action were Spr. Ed Rollheiser operating a bulldozer, Spr. Hec Gravel manning a grader, L/Cpl. Glyn Nott driving a truck as a roller and Sprs. F. A. W. Jones and Bill Milson hauling water trailers to tamp down the new airstrip surface. Total construction time: forty-seven minutes.
Less than an hour later, Gen. Ridgway’s personal aircraft, complete with its four-star insignia, landed on the strip, as well as that of Lt.-Gen. James Van Fleet, commander of the Eighth US Army, and ten other taxi aircraft belonging to corps, divisional and regimental brass of the United Nations Command. Each of the dozen planes was guided onto the strip by a seventy-foot-tall mast complete with brand-new airport windsock. Of course, little or no fuss was made over the impromptu runway and tarmac area, let alone the Canadian sapper crew that had built it in record time. Besides, “the Rochester General Construction Company” was probably already off building another new road or rebuilding one that the weather or Chinese artillery had destroyed—all before most people behind the lines even noticed.
Nobody in UN Command travelled behind the front lines in Korea very quickly. The closest that politicians, diplomats and generals got to rapid transit was in a single-engine airplane—the Beaver. Built in 1947 by Canadian manufacturer de Havilland, the Beaver was designed for use in the bush. In 1950, the aircraft caught the eye of those equipping the US Army, who were “looking for a tough short-take-off-and-landing, utility aircraft capable of carrying six people for a radius of 200 miles and able to land anywhere.” In other words, they needed “a flying jeep.” Instead of such competing American aircraft as the Beechcraft Bonanza, Aero Commander, Republic Seabee amphibian or Cessna 185 and 195, officials of the US Army Test Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, chose the Beaver. They bought more than 200 Beavers, 50 of which were packed and sent to Korea under the supervision of de Havilland field representative Bruce Best.
“They gave me officer status in the American army,” Capt. Best recalled. A civilian aircraft mechanic during the Second World War and later chief engineer with the Toronto Flying Club, Best also had his commercial pilot’s licence. He joined de Havilland to assist in the US Army testing of the Beaver and in 1952 was shipped to “a base called Ascom City, between Seoul and Inch’on . . . about sixteen miles from the front . . . I was my own boss . . . I got hold of my Beavers and maintained them there for a year.”
Best’s Beavers fanned out across the front. Most were equipped with underwing bomb shackles, not used for bombing but for dropping food and ammunition in tight spots, or for running communication wires from one position to another. When a Beaver was rigged with litter straps, it could carry twice as many wounded soldiers, in greater comfort, than the Bell Sioux evacuation helicopters. Other Beavers earned the moniker “the general’s jeep” by flying military VIPs (including Dwight Eisenhower) on their appointed rounds in Korea. One even had its doors removed so that a piano could be transported to an officers’ mess behind the lines.
“This might seem crazy,” Best explained, “but in Korea booze was cheaper than water. Mix was expensive as hell. So I’d fly over and give the Brits some soda water to mix with their booze. And they’d give me gallon jugs of Pusser rum to bring back to Ascom City.”
The Korean War turned out to be a perfect testing ground for the Beaver and for its first wartime field representative. Pilots flew the aircraft roughly, and Capt. Best regularly had to deal with broken undercarriage legs, missing rear wheels, buckled fuselages and burned-out engines. He eventually requested and got twenty-one modifications to the Beaver’s design. Based on his experience at the Ascom City repair and maintenance depot, Best recommended they double the plane’s skin, strengthen its wings and change the location of its air intakes to reduce the damage from airborne dust.
“I was a bit of a doctor,” Best said. “I was there for the airplane and it did a superb job . . . When other tech reps got back to the States, they were given a diploma for making history . . . for being part of the first battalion under combat conditions to do this type of work in the US Army. But I left in a hurry and never got mine . . . I was hired for one job and did it.”
Best wasn’t alone. Technical expertise in Korea generally went unnoticed.
In spring of 1951, Bill Tigges, an instrument technician in the RCAF No. 426 Transport Squadron, was reassigned from McChord Air Force Base at Tacoma, Washington, overseas to the Tokyo instrument section at Haneda Airport in Japan. Almost from the very day Canada joined the UN mission to Korea, in July 1950, Tigges had found himself crawling in and out of North Star transport aircraft maintaining cockpit gauges and meters and patching oxygen lines and joints, “because the vibration of the aircraft kept breaking them all the time. And the repair could take hours and hours of straight bull work.”
Near the end of one eighteen-hour stint repairing an oxygen system aboard a North Star, Leading Aircraftman Tigges refused to let the aircraft go until it was fixed. When the LAC emerged in his overalls, covered in grease and mud, he suddenly found himself facing his spick-and-span commanding officer, Wing Commander C. H. Mussells (whose nickname, ironically, was “Muss”). The C.O. chewed out Tigges for his appearance and “conduct unbecoming.” However, when Muss found out why Tigges was so dishevelled, he returned and commended him for the effort and held up the bus to the barracks until Tigges had finished the job.
In the early days of the war, when three Canadian destroyers maintained a blockade in seas off the coast of Korea, the vessels regularly encountered floating mines. UN sailors safely detonated 1,535 Russian-made “contact” mines during the war. On one occasion, when it was too dangerous to take HMCS Athabaskan close enough to fire on the inshore mines, one of the ship’s dinghies was rowed into the minefield. There the ship’s gunnery officer, David Hurl, a petty officer and two able seamen, including sonar operator Ed Dalton, set to work. The group rowed close enough to the mines to allow Dalton to hold each one steady and Hurl to attach charges. The party blew up four mines this way, and while Hurl received a Mention In Dispatches honour for displaying iron nerves, Dalton was rewarded with a welcome but ephemeral “extra tot of rum.”
Equally dirty work was carried out by teams of the Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. Among their missions was the recovery of vehicles overturned on steep embankments, bogged down in mud or shot up by the enemy. Their recoveries were often conducted at night, with repaired equipment back in operation by morning. Ironically, these units served in Korea longer than any other. During twenty-three months of duty these troops piled up an incredible record of 21,983 field repairs on everything from radio equipment to armoured vehicles. The record of Sgt. T. “Trapper” Allen, a recovery specialist attached to the Lord Strathcona’s Horse armoured regiment, was typical.
In the spring of 1952, when the tank regiment got bogged down in the Korean countryside just behind the front lines, Allen, the driver of an Armoured Recovery Vehicle (ARV), was dispatched forward to recover a dozer tank that had broken down while attempting to build a road for the PPCLI across a rice paddy dike. The location was in plain view of North Korean gunners and it wasn’t long before they found the range. First mortar, then 120-mm artillery shells began falling closer and exploding all around the recovery scene.
Canadian engineering officer F. W. Chapman watched Allen continue the recovery operation in spite of the shelling. “Disaster was imminent, I thought . . . [but] Sgt. Allen, standing in the open and using hand signals, was oblivious to the enemy shells as he directed the ARV and crew into relative safety . . . No one was injured nor was equipment damaged . . . There’s no doubt in my mind that Sgt. Allen, through his personal efforts, dedication to the job and knowledge of recovery, had made the operation a complete success.” Ten days later, Sgt. Allen’s heroism was recognized when he was awarded a Military Medal.
During a tour of duty in Korea, Canadian fighting troops left the front lines in only one of three ways: as a medical evacuee, as a fatal casualty, or on rest and recreation. Soldiers were regularly rotated out of forward positions for R & R at “B” Echelon locations, where they could sit down to a hot meal and take advantage of the Mobile Laundry and Bath Unit. Better still was an R & R leave, which meant five days and five nights in Tokyo, plus several days travelling to and from Japan. There were few more welcome words from the sergeant or platoon commander than, “Get cleaned up! You’re going on R & R!”
“You’d get down on your hands and knees and crawl out of a trench,” said one Korea veteran, “just to get R & R in Tokyo!”
As inviting as the sound of that was, a vacation from the war required a substantial readjustment. Ron Trider, a private in the Royal Canadian Regiment, aptly assessed the anticipation and anxiety in his own diary of a soldier’s R & R experience: “For many months there had been no privacy. He was never alone. It had been a long time since he had slept in a bed or sat on a chair for a meal served on a table. Far too long had it been since he had opened a door, switched on a light, or had even seen sheets, or a building lit up at night. Too many months had passed since he had made choices as to when and what and where he would eat and drink, since he had strolled down a street, and since he had looked in shop windows, or enjoyed the privacy of an indoor toilet . . .”
Between his Spartan existence at the front and the Utopian one he expected in Japan lay a number of hurdles. The first was inspection. Somehow, his badly scuffed and worn boots, his threadbare trousers and tunic sans elbows, all of which smelled of stove smoke, stale sweat and his visits to the latrine, would have to pass. His packs and pouches containing a hand towel, socks, underwear and extra shirt, a sewing kit of needle and thread, a small flannel patch he used to clean his weapon, part of a C-Ration chocolate bar or cigarettes would be surveyed. Meanwhile, the soldier attempted superficial repairs: 9-mm ammunition rounds to weight his pant legs at the cuff to give the impression of being pressed, cleaning solvent to spruce up webbing and Kiwi polish to shine boots.
At “B” Echelon, some distance back of the lines, kit bags in storage were reclaimed, parade-square boots retrieved and new bush uniforms issued. Then it was on to Seoul for the night at the British holding barracks. Next morning, there was time for breakfast, another inspection and then on to the parade square, where “the soldier rather naively assumed he would board an aircraft in Korea and somehow, through an absurd leap in logic, land on the Ginza with a beautiful Geisha on each arm and a bottle of Asahi beer in each hand.”
Not so. At the other end of the DC-7 flight to the Japanese island of Honshu was Ebisu Camp, the Tokyo Commonwealth leave centre. Again, despite anticipating early freedom, the soldier on leave had to endure more of the army’s routines, rules and regulations. At Ebisu, all troops received their third shower in two days, an inspection (from a medic with a flashlight and a magnifying glass), another issue of bush uniform, socks and underwear, another trip to a mess hall, assignment to another barracks and yet another parade, this time for pay—some British pounds sterling, some US dollars and the rest in Japanese yen. The penultimate stop was the mandatory speech from a supervising officer, who “droned on, tantalizing his captive audience with references to lust, drunkenness, over-indulgence and fleshpots.” Finally, the men were marched to the front gate area. Here was a room with a little blue light on the outside, where all Commonwealth troops passing out the gates of Ebisu Camp had to draw stores. This place ensured that all the men delivered forth onto the streets of Tokyo were protected against the perils that might ambush the careless soldier. “Only then,” wrote Pte. Trider, “could the frantic troops explode through the gates for five days and nights of FREEDOM!”
The Tokyo that Canadians on R & R found outside the Ebisu camp in 1951 was a strange blend of cultures. It looked and felt like a collision between East and West. It was a picture of pop-North Americana superimposed on a scroll painting. Canadian soldiers were entering a world of Buddhist temples and beer halls, of mama-sans and military police, of speeding taxicabs, bicycles and rickshaw carriages. Affluence and poverty resided side by side. All the energy and excitement of the city circulated around the famous shopping and entertainment centre of Tokyo, the Ginza.
Ernie Banks and an RCR buddy on leave emerged from Ebisu Camp with a personal card, provided by a previous draft of R & R troops; the card offered directions to and assessments of various bars, hotels and bathhouses. Ultimately, however, the two neophyte visitors left their fates to the “ex-Kamikaze pilot-type” taxicab drivers lined up outside Ebisu. In downtown Tokyo, the Canadians encountered women almost immediately. Some were geishas. Others described themselves as either “tenderly hostesses” or “heavenly hostesses,” hired by some hotels to engage and direct newcomers to “proper cultural exchanges.” The soldiers also saw corpses in the street, apparently victims of a sleeping-sickness epidemic that struck the city that year.
Eventually, a cab deposited the two at a hotel, where a hostess passed out paper slippers, motioned them to remove their boots and led them through tiny hallways to select “their [female] cultural guides.” When arrangements were made, kimonos were issued and uniforms shed; the tunics and pants would eventually reappear completely cleaned and pressed and with pockets still containing cash and personal belongings. The soldiers’ “guides” then “introduced the men to the Japanese ritual of the bath . . . If the military authorities were shower-parade crazy, the tenderly hostesses proved absolutely mad . . . the baths were hot enough to boil the bloody hide off a rhino . . . Following each cultural exchange between soldier and hostess, it was back to the tub!”
“We called them pompom houses,” remembered RCN Leading Seaman Glenn Wilberforce, who did two tours aboard the HMCS Huron. The navy also enjoyed R & R in Japan. “They weren’t normal brothels. They were clean and respectable.”
“You’d pick out a woman you liked,” agreed Huron stoker John Rigo. “And once you came to a deal with the mama-san, you paid her and then you had that girl for the night . . . You’d go into her room, take off all your clothes and put on a kimono. You’d dance. And if you felt a little amorous, you’d go into the room and then come out and dance some more. It was all night for 500 yen . . . about two dollars.”
How far a draft of R & R soldiers or seamen explored the nightlife along the Ginza varied, often depending on the personality of the vacationing serviceman, or more likely how much alcohol was consumed. One night, Pte. Don Hibbs and a fellow Princess Patricia, Pte. White from P.E.I., managed to crash an American Officers’ Club in Tokyo. The two indulged a while at the club bar. Before long, Whitey had disappeared, only to re-emerge playing a violin he’d “borrowed” from a Japanese chamber orchestra on the premises. His enthusiastic performance à la Don Messer, complete with hoots and hollers, wild fiddle-scratching and loud foot-stomping, wasn’t what the club patrons expected and the two Canadians were soon shown the door.
Elsewhere, a group of Australians on leave teamed up with some Canadians on a Tokyo hotel balcony one morning. The senior-ranking soldier in the group—an Aussie corporal—ordered the combined unit to strip to the buff and, with their backs to the street, to perform a series of calisthenics to astonished Japanese passersby on the street below. On another occasion, a R22eR soldier, on R & R leave over Christmas in 1951, was particularly attracted to a huge Christmas tree erected by the proprietor of a beer hall on the Ginza. Deciding the tree was too tall (and inspired by liquid courage), the Vandoos soldier scaled the evergreen like a lumberjack and quickly sawed off the top. The toppling limb sparked a riot for no other reason than it seemed like a good idea at the time. It took American MPs and two buses most of the night to clear the hall of hundreds of brawling troops.
R & R changed most who ventured to Japan. The soldiers who returned to Ebisu Camp following leave were not nearly as parade-square sharp as the ones who had left there five days before. Indeed, few even looked like uniformed soldiers. Roll call at the Commonwealth leave centre revealed many of them wearing smoking jackets or kimonos instead of tunics, paper sandals not boots, and all manner of headgear, including US Navy caps, forage caps, wedgies, Irish tam-o’-shanters or Australian Stetsons, not to mention the various non-military accoutrements, such as pool cues, fishing rods and ceremonial swords.
The greater impact on servicemen such as Banks, Hibbs, White, Wilberforce, Rigo and the thousands who went on leave to Tokyo before and after, was re-entry, the return to the business of warfare. As Ron Trider put it, “their leave expired, they returned flat broke, dead tired and emotionally drained. In camp they stood meekly in line for whatever food was tossed on their plates. They moved to the left, or shifted to the right on command, while resigning themselves again to the grand order of things and events that belong to the military. They again parked their imaginations and individuality on hold, and glumly boarded the aircraft for Korea to re-enter the world of reality.”
Parading naked on a hotel balcony, chopping down Christmas trees in beer halls or engaging in “cultural exchanges” with heavenly hostesses seemed permissible on R & R leave in Tokyo. In Korea, however, there was very little tolerance for such things as theft, drunkenness, desertion, rape or black marketeering. Such actions generally led to court martial, but often meant imprisonment at the military prison in Seoul.
A number of Nissen huts surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by provosts comprised the Commonwealth detention barracks, or DB. Depending on the crime, a soldier sent to the DB in Seoul got seven, fourteen or twenty-eight days’ detention. Upon entry, the soldier serving a sentence had every badge, button and military insignia ripped from his uniform by the prison C.O. From that moment on, the prisoner was ordered to do everything on-the-double. No matter what activity—eating, shaving or urinating—he had to keep his eyes skyward and his feet pounding out the rhythm of a quick march. Additional punishment included no rations but bread and water, or “piss and pump,” for three days, solitary confinement in “the box” or, finally, running a ninety-pound pack up and down a hill within the compound night and day.
“You didn’t ever want to go to the DB in Seoul. It was like a dog kennel,” recalls Cpl. Bob Douglas. During the Second World War he’d served in Farnham, Quebec, guarding Luftwaffe aircrew brought to Canada as POWs. When the Korean War broke out, he was transferred to the Canadian Provost Corps, whose members were stationed behind the front lines to handle security matters. He relished every aspect of his service job, “except escorting prisoners down to the DB in Seoul . . . Once while a bunch of performers were visiting behind the lines, this one corporal tried to take one of the young ladies off into the woods. But he got caught and was given twenty-eight days’ detention . . . Being a provost himself, this corporal knew what was coming, so he put his leg across a foxhole and dropped a hundred-pound bag on himself. Broke his leg, so that he’d get shipped back to Canada instead. But he did ninety days when he got back to Borden.”
Not unlike the Service Corps, members of the Provost Corps slogged through the muck, dust and military red tape behind “A” Echelon, unnoticed by the generals, the fighting troops and the war correspondents. After the front-line soldiers captured a Chinese prisoner (and generally enjoyed congratulations from commanding officers and a photo opportunity), it was up to the provost to escort the POW away. Once artillerymen or infantrymen installed a new hill position and camouflaged it, the job of guarding the installation during the heat of the day and the loneliness of the night fell to a couple of provosts in bunkers. Or when a convoy of vehicles planned to use a bridge, it was up to the provosts to secure it before, during and after its use.
“It was damn hard and dirty work,” Gerry Emon remembered. After enlisting with an armoured corps and finding himself sidelined at Petawawa instructing, Cpl. Emon transferred to the Canadian Provost Corps hoping he’d get to Korea sooner. Once there, “I did a lot of guard duty . . . stuck in a bunker at the bottom of a hill by yourself for nine hours . . . And every once in a while [the Chinese] would try to hit the hill, so you’d grab your ass and duck until the bombardment let up.”
Whenever troops and equipment moved en masse behind the lines, it was under provost supervision. One night, in a buffer zone along the Imjin River, the Princess Patricias were moving out of a front-line position as Royal Australian Regiment troops moved in. Five provosts, Cpl. Bob Douglas among them, were ordered to provide security for the move along a single-lane road. Throughout the night, Douglas and the rest of his platoon directed traffic both ways. In the middle of it all, a convoy of two-and-a-half-ton trucks full of American troops suddenly appeared on the road. Douglas radioed to his superior, who responded without sympathy.
“I’m sorry,” Douglas reported to the American lieutenant, “but your six trucks are in the middle of our move.”
“So, what am I supposed to do?” asked the US officer.
“I’ve got orders, sir. They’ll have to go into the ditch.”
“You can’t do that!” protested the lieutenant. “I’ll get killed when I get back!”
“You should never have got lost,” said Douglas. And he supervised the lieutenant’s men as they disembarked and pushed all six trucks into the ditch. It was not work the military recognized with medals or even Mention In Dispatches, but if the rest of the night’s troop movement went smoothly, there was at least satisfaction in a job well done (and perhaps a little pleasure at an officer’s expense).
Even without the threat of direct bombardment or hand-to-hand combat, work behind the front lines could still be deadly. On a chilly December day, provost Gerry Emon joined his buddy, Pte. Benny Larson, for a trip in Larson’s carry-all truck. The private from Edmonton always took great pride in maintaining his three-quarter-ton, army-issue truck, but especially for the few days’ leave he and Emon had been allotted in Seoul, Larson seemed to have the vehicle in tiptop shape. In good spirits, as usual, the two friends sped along the dirt supply road south from Uijongbu away from the battle lines. It wasn’t long until Christmas, and Emon carried in his pocket a sterling-silver cigarette case that he planned to have engraved for his girlfriend back in Wainwright.
Not far into the trip, Larson slowed the carry-all as he steered it onto a short wooden bridge. As the truck bounced onto the flat of the bridge, Emon was suddenly engulfed in a blinding light and catapulted from the passenger seat through the truck door and down toward the creek below the bridge. An explosion inside the carryall forced it off the bridge. It came down on its front end in the creek bed and nosed over, crushing Benny Larson beneath it. Even though Emon was thrown clear, the explosion lacerated his face, hands and stomach, and the impact of being driven through the door and smashed into the creek bed shattered his shoulders and nearly severed his legs at the knees. Luckily, a jeep ambulance was travelling in the opposite direction along the same road and raced to the scene. The attendants found Emon with his leg stumps driven into the mud.
“I tried to get up,” remembers Emon. “But I couldn’t find my feet because they were back behind me. What saved me, I guess, was that it was the first of December. The water was ice-cold, so it slowed down the bleeding.”
When he came to, on a six-foot folding table at an Advanced Dressing Station, the next morning, Emon was told that Chinese or North Korean infiltrators had probably set a mine—booby-trapped to explode when the truck hit a bump in transit—in the glove compartment of the carry-all. The four tires were all that was left of the truck. Nearly all of Emon’s clothes and his boots had been blown or burned off. The only belonging that survived the bombing was the twisted and singed sterling-silver cigarette case, which he eventually presented to his girlfriend in Canada.
Quick work behind the lines at the ADS saved Emon’s life in Korea; two years of orthopaedic and plastic surgery at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto eventually put him back on his feet.
“God keep me from heroes,” Gerry Emon had often said. “They draw fire.” As a Korea volunteer, he had never expressed a need to be at the sharp end of the fighting to feel he was contributing. Nor did he regret not being there. Still, it hadn’t been fire from fighting on the front lines that killed his friend Benny Larson and maimed him so severely. It had been wartime duty behind the lines, away from heroes.