12

Korea

Men were dying ahead. A battalion attack against a heavily fortified enemy position was in progress. This was war. All at the same time, I was excited, afraid of being afraid and, more than anything else, curious.

Peter Holmes¹

Peter Holmes was a national service second lieutenant with the Royal Leicestershire Regiment. He had arrived in Korea in October 1951. Having celebrated his nineteenth birthday a few weeks earlier, he was, just, old enough to be sent to war. He did not, however, expect to see much fighting. The regular officers told him that he was unlucky to have missed out on the regiment’s previous posting to Hong Kong. They thought that the conflict in Korea was pretty much over. On the night of 4 November, Holmes and his brother officers were called to a conference: ‘Anyone know Major W? … Well, he was killed an hour ago.’ The officers learned that the Chinese had begun an intensive bombardment and were obviously planning to attack; they did so before the conference was over. Holmes told his sergeant to get the platoon packed up and ready to move in half an hour. Suddenly, there was an explosion. A private in another platoon, fumbling in the dark as he attempted to pack his kit, had accidentally pulled the pin out of a grenade. He threw it away, but threw it uphill and it rolled back down to the platoon commander’s tent. It killed one man and mortally wounded another. The platoon commander, Holmes’s near contemporary at Eaton Hall, lost a leg.²

Holmes himself was ordered to mount an attack that he believed to be suicidal. He envied those men who were going in first because they would at least die quickly. The night before the attack was ‘the longest and most miserable that I have ever spent’.³ The attack was cancelled at the last moment, but fighting was still intense. The regiment had sent 550 men into action on 5 November; two weeks later, 339 were capable of walking out, the rest had been killed or wounded. Sixteen out of thirty-five men in Holmes’s platoon were still more or less unscathed.⁴

Holmes led thirty-three patrols as his regiment probed the enemy defences. On the first of these he was ordered to advance until he was shot at. Two men from his platoon refused to go and Holmes read them a formal warning that they would be considered in breach of King’s Regulations if they persisted in their defiance. They did persist and both got five years.⁵ Holmes himself had won the Military Cross – the citation spoke of ‘coolness, buoyancy and courage’ – by the time he went up to Cambridge. He later became a mountaineer, author and chairman of Shell, then the largest company in the world.

Private Saunders of the Royal Norfolk Regiment left less of a mark. His letters to his mother and ‘uncle’ (presumably stepfather) survive. He wrote from a troopship between Aden and Colombo:

I understand why you never came to see me off, I felt the same way as the ship started to pull away from Southampton, so in one way I was glad you didn’t come because it would have been harder for both of us when it came to saying goodbye.⁶

On 13 November, the War Office telegraphed his father to say that Saunders had been killed by a mine three days earlier. He was buried in Allied plot 23, row 5, grave 1607. His effects were divided between his parents. Each received £6 10s 2d from his back pay. An inventory of his personal effects, four in total, was sent to his mother and she was invited to chose two of them.⁷ Saunders had been nineteen.

The war that brought Holmes and Saunders to Korea began in 1950. At the end of the Second World War, Korea, which had been ruled by Japan for forty-five years, was effectively divided. Communist forces (supported by Russian soldiers coming through Manchuria) ruled north of the 38th parallel. In the south, authority was initially exercised by the United States Army Military Government in Korea, which ruled with the aid of local officials, some of whom had previously served the Japanese occupation. Syngman Rhee, who had spent much of his life in the United States, formed a right-wing Representative Democratic Council and called for a united and independent Korea. In 1948, the Americans allowed elections in the American zone. Syngman Rhee’s movement won these, promulgated a new constitution and installed Rhee himself as president. His rule was marked by brutal repression, corruption and further recourse to policemen and others who had collaborated with Japanese rule. Kim Il-Sung ruled the North with Russian and Chinese support.

In June 1950, the North Korean army invaded the South. The United Nations Security Council denounced this invasion and resolved to resist it – a resolution that was possible because the USSR was boycotting the UN in protest at the exclusion of Communist China. In practice, however, the US itself was the only power in a position to provide South Korea with immediate help. Forces from Japan, where General MacArthur ruled as pro-consul, were hastily shipped to Korea. However, American soldiers, poorly prepared for this kind of operation, and soldiers of the South Korean army (the ROK), often poorly prepared for any kind of fighting, were forced back. They abandoned Seoul, the capital city, and took refuge in a small area, about a tenth of Korea, in the Pusan peninsula in the south of the country. The Americans built up their forces and then counter-attacked. MacArthur organized a daring landing of troops at Inchon, some way behind what were then North Korean lines, in mid September 1950. American and South Korean forces retook Seoul, crossed the 38th parallel on 1 October and seemed for a moment poised to overrun the whole of North Korea. What stopped them was mobilization by Chinese forces, which began to fight with the North Koreans in an increasingly open fashion.

The British Cabinet first discussed United Nations action in Korea on 27 June 1950. It was a small item on the agenda, which came below measures to restore the white fish industry.⁸ British leaders believed that they should support the United States and the United Nations, and there was not much difference on this issue between Attlee’s Labour government, which took the initial decisions, and the Conservative party, which returned to government in October 1951. However, the British were reluctant to treat Korea as a general war against Communism. In any case, the British armed forces were already overstretched and in no position to provide great help.

In the summer of 1950, British reservists were called up. The first British soldiers to arrive, however, did not come from the UK itself but from the garrison in Hong Kong. On 14 August, a national service lance corporal with the Middlesex Regiment wrote in his diary that one of his comrades had met a drunken naval officer who said that ships were being assembled to take troops to Korea: ‘At first we laugh at his story … The next question is “Who is going?” He tells us that it is the 1st Middlesex.’⁹

The lance corporal was better informed than his superiors. On 19 August, in the middle of an army swimming gala, Andrew Man, commander of the 1st Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, was summoned to be told that his regiment was to be sent to Korea. Alongside it would go the 1^st Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The two regiments were to be under Brigadier Basil Coad. The Middlesex were primarily national servicemen – Man reckoned that 55 per cent of his soldiers were conscripts. The Argylls were mainly regulars and seem to have been even less well informed than the Middlesex: ‘Word started to accumulate that we were going to Korea. We didn’t know what Korea was.’¹⁰ They were seen off with a speech by Lieutenant General John Harding (commander of British Far East Land Forces), who told them to ‘shoot straight and shoot to kill’.¹¹

The total number of British servicemen in Korea was small. At first, the British ‘Brigade’ amounted to two depleted battalions. In March 1951 there were 15,000 British soldiers in Korea – at a time when there were 35,000 in Malaya, 45,000 in the Middle East, 63,000 in Germany and 244,000 in the UK.¹² The authorities never released figures for the number of national servicemen who served in Korea. No one could be sent there until they were nineteen and it would have made little sense to send men who were close to the end of their service on such a long journey. These circumstances must presumably have restricted the number of conscripts who were sent. The Ministry of Defence claimed in 1953 that most soldiers in Korea and the Far East were regulars – though its statement on the matter was rather guarded.¹³

British casualties in Korea were higher than in any other theatre during the whole period of national service: 830 men were killed in action, three died from ‘terrorist action’ and seventy-five died of their wounds. Of those killed, 280 were national servicemen and a further 1,056 conscripts were wounded;¹⁴ almost all the casualties were soldiers.¹⁵ By the standards of fighting in Normandy in 1944, let alone that of the Somme in 1916, British losses in Korea were relatively small. Even those men unfortunate enough to be posted to front-line units were likely to survive. Thirty-three men of the 1^st Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment were killed in Korea and 108 were wounded, but there were 700 men in the battalion, most of whom survived without lasting physical damage.¹⁶

In spite of this, Korea was, in some ways, the national service war. It had a direct and malign effect on all conscripts because, as a result of Korea, the government extended the length of national service from eighteen months to two years. This changed the nature of conscription. Conscripts had been fighting in Malaya since 1948 but the extra six months made it easier to post men to areas of active conflict – particularly in the Far East. Men were no longer being called up just to train for a hypothetical war; from now on, a significant minority would fight in real wars.

Even those who would never go abroad felt the effects of the extension of the term of service. Robin Ollington was a clerk on a base in Warwickshire when the commanding officer told the men that national service had been extended by six months. All the regulars cheered, ‘like school’.¹⁷ The division between regular and conscript was slightly blurred by Korea. National servicemen were now to receive the same pay as regulars for the last six months of their service. A new three-year regular engagement was also created and some men signed on for three years because they had been given to understand that doing so was the price of avoiding transfer to a unit that was on its way to Korea.¹⁸

It was in Korea, more than anywhere else, that the idea of national service as an amusing or trivial experience was punctured. The national service officer in John Hollands’s autobiographical novel reflects on his posting to Korea at the end of officer training: ‘it was no longer a matter of taking three weeks’ leave, sewing two pips on his tunic and drifting about a depot saying, “Carry on, Sergeant” ’.¹⁹ Far from being a comic interlude in serious lives, Korea sometimes came to seem the only utterly serious part of some men’s lives. Houston Shaw-Stewart was a figure out of P. G. Wodehouse. As a boy at Eton, he was beaten for, among other things, donning a false beard to go to the cinema. His adult life revolved around shooting, sociability and riding to hounds. As a national service officer, he switched from the Coldstream Guards to the Royal Ulster Rifles because he hoped to go foxhunting in Northern Ireland. His plans were foiled when the regiment was sent to Korea. There, in January 1951, his company commander was shot dead standing next to him. Shaw-Stewart rallied the soldiers and led a counter-attack at great risk to his life. He received the last Military Cross to be awarded by George VI.²⁰

Many national servicemen saw Korea as the ‘real war’, against which their own experiences ought to be measured. Tom King, an acting captain in Kenya and later Secretary of State for Defence, recalled: ‘The “Koreans” were the ones who really had a hard war and had lost people. You could tell that; they were a bit wild, quite a lively lot.’²¹ Divisions of units into men who would, or would not, go to Korea came to assume huge importance in the memories of national servicemen. David Batterham believed that his incompetence at mathematics, which had prevented him from being made a ‘surveyor’ in the Royal Artillery, might have saved his life by preventing him from being sent.²² Brian Sewell was pulled out of a regiment going to Korea so that he could attend the War Office Selection Board. He was commissioned and spent the whole of his service in the UK but said later that he would rather have been a private in Korea.²³ John Boorman was taken out of a unit on its way to Korea and drafted into the Educational Corps. He recalled: ‘the atavistic death that comes from exclusion from the tribe’.²⁴ Neal Ascherson claimed that every officer to pass out of Eaton Hall with him (apart from his fellow marines) was sent to Korea.²⁵ Eaton Hall itself was changed by Korea. Veterans of the war arrived as instructors and brought a whiff of real violence to the lives of cadets – Major Leith-Macgregor, who had won an MC and provoked a mutiny in Korea, was a particularly stern disciplinarian.²⁶

British soldiers in 1951 knew little about Korea. It was not the kind of place that featured in the textbooks boys had read at school; it had never been part of the British empire and had not been an obvious battleground on the maps into which so many boys had stuck pins during the Second World War. Ordinary soldiers had only the haziest notions of where it might be – one fusilier, having spent six weeks on a troopship getting there, still thought that he might be able to go home by train for a one-week leave.²⁷ ‘Even the grammar school kids would have been hard pressed to locate Korea’, which was ‘a land only previously known to geography teachers’.²⁸

The military authorities made little attempt to explain to British troops what they were doing in Korea and few of them understood much of the political context of the war. Their information, such as it was, came from ‘Crown News’ – the newspaper produced by the army – or from the thick weekly editions of the Daily Mirror which families sometimes sent out, and which arrived weeks after the events they described. In any case, the lives of soldiers were dominated by their own struggle to survive in the small plot of land they were required to defend. Even the broader military details of the war meant little to them. Peter Holmes wrote: ‘Dates lost meaning. Life merely progressed from one incident to the next.’²⁹ Peter Farrar was an unusually well-informed conscript – he was an educated man who had been briefly assigned to the Russian course and who had an airmail edition of the Daily Telegraph sent out to his position on the front line. All the same, he responded to an interviewer’s question about the politics of the war with exasperated courtesy: ‘the people who ask, very rightly, these kinds of questions find it very difficult … to imagine how narrow and limited this little mental world is. The Royal Fusiliers stuck there on those bleak hillsides in Korea.’³⁰

The political context of the war was complicated. There were several occasions when the fighting seemed about to end. This was the case at the very beginning, when it looked as though the North Koreans would win and then, a few months later, when it looked as though MacArthur’s forces might take the whole of the peninsula. In July 1951, cease-fire negotiations began and it seemed possible that they would bring the conflict to an end within a few weeks. As it was, fighting continued until July 1953. The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment endured 126 casualties in May 1953, almost two years after negotiations between the two sides had started. There was no peace treaty. Fighting ended with an armistice, which fixed the frontier between North and South more or less where it had been before the war in which over a million people, mostly Koreans, had died. British soldiers often blamed their own allies for the continuation of a pointless struggle. Farrar was unsure whether most of his comrades knew who Kim Il Sung or Mao Tse Tung were but they did know the name of Syngman Rhee – they blamed him for the failure of armistice negotiations and sometimes sang an obscene song about him.³¹

Korea was an abjectly charmless place. Its landscape was bleak and its climate almost unbearable for soldiers who had little shelter. Spring and autumn were tolerable but the summer was very hot and winters were bitterly cold: tears froze on cheeks in the open air and toothpaste had to be thawed before use.³² The country was poor to start with. Japanese occupation, the Second World War, a corrupt government and foreign armies sweeping across the land in 1950 had done nothing to improve it. A national service officer wrote:

[D]riving about that inhumanly stark, clay-brown countryside was a strange experience. Ravaged by a sequence of advancing and retreating armies, it was nearly deserted … Sometimes you’d see white-robed figures picking hopelessly among ruins, or dead and neglected in a paddy field, but mostly the local population kept out of sight, waiting for this terrible thing to pass. Except for the hordes of orphaned children; they besieged you everywhere pleading for jobs.³³

Large military hospitals, battle training courses and centres for leave were all in Japan. Soldiers did not go to Korea for any purpose other than fighting. Men were horrified by the squalor of the place when they first arrived. One national service officer said that his dominant memory of arriving in February 1951 was ‘the deadly stench of corrugated iron gone rusty’.³⁴

Relations with the local population were poor. The language was impenetrable: one American soldier, attempting to extract information through an interpreter, complained that it took eight minutes to say ‘perhaps’. It was not, however, clear that being able to speak to each other would always have made things easier. Many Koreans had had enough of foreign occupation. Soldiers from the Gloucestershire Regiment encountered a woman who turned out to be a university professor and to speak fluent English. They asked whether there was anything that they could do for her. ‘Leave my country,’ she replied.³⁵

In cultural and racial terms, the North Koreans, against whom the British were fighting, seemed indistinguishable from the South Koreans, who were their allies, and some conscripts arrived in Korea not knowing whether they were fighting for the North or South.³⁶ Even the qualities that the British admired in their allies/enemies seemed inhuman ones. Soldiers spoke of the Korean stoicism and capacity to bear pain. A Conservative MP said in January 1951: ‘those of our men who were prisoners in Japanese hands during the last war all say that, of all the guards they most feared, none were worse than the Koreans.’³⁷ His remarks were designed to alert the British authorities to the prospect that British prisoners of war might be ill-treated, but the men who had collaborated with the Japanese were at least as likely to be in the South Korean forces as in those of the North, and some United Nations soldiers regarded North and South Koreans as pretty much the same.³⁸ British prisoners were often held by Chinese soldiers and sometimes recognized that there was an element of truth in the claim that their guards were there to protect them against the Koreans as much as to prevent them from escaping.³⁹ Most British soldiers saw Koreans, of both North and South, as being brutal and sometimes felt in retrospect that they themselves had been debased by association with the brutality of the latter. George Brown, a national serviceman with the King’s Liverpool Regiment, recalled seeing the porters who carried water being hit with a rope. He and his comrades thought it funny at the time but he looked back on it as shameful.⁴⁰

The poverty of the Koreans attracted pity rather than sympathy. Desmond Barnard was a national serviceman with the Royal Norfolk Regiment. He and his comrades threw what food they could to pleading children but felt that things were hopeless: ‘the whole country was devastated’.⁴¹ Occasionally, enterprising, or desperate, prostitutes managed to get close to the front line, but, generally, British soldiers did not even develop the relations of commercialized sex that marked their lives in Hong Kong or, when they went on leave, in Japan. Probably the only Koreans they saw as human beings were the boys who shared the quarters of British units – ‘every company had a sort of adopted boy’.⁴² Some of these boys were official soldiers of the ROK and some had simply attached themselves to allied armies to scavenge food; it says much about the state of Korea that English soldiers could often not tell the difference between these two categories.

The sense that Korea was a uniquely unattractive posting quickly took hold. A few men sought to stay with units that were being posted to Korea, even if it meant lying about their age or physical qualities. Mostly, though, men feared being sent there. Patrick Preston was enjoying a comparatively comfortable life as a national service sergeant in the Educational Corps in Singapore but he had heard enough of Korea to make him grateful that he would not have to go there:

Talking of warfare, the situation in Korea appears to be very serious again, apart from the possibilities of giving birth to general conflict. More and more troops, both United Nations and Communist, are killed in the senseless struggle for a heap of ruins and a smoking pile of typhus infested bodies.⁴³

Those soldiers who did go to Korea were quickly and painfully disabused of any illusions they might have had about the power and importance of their own country – the sense of British control that marked the wars of decolonization was conspicuous by its absence in Korea. Even the film that the British government made to justify national service recognized that Britain’s contribution in Korea had been relatively modest. The United Nations assembled a coalition of sixteen countries to fight in Korea, but the resources of the United States dwarfed those of its allies. Men got off the troopships to be greeted by military bands made up of African-Americans (themselves an object of curiosity for British soldiers) and sometimes passed under banners saying ‘Through this gateway pass the best godammed fighting men in the world: the United States Army’⁴⁴ or ‘welcome to the sector of the rough, tough, rugged, American Marines’.⁴⁵ Rations were often issued by Americans so that, from the moment of their arrival, British soldiers were eating American food, which seemed plentiful to men who had been brought up in wartime Britain.⁴⁶ They also came up against a cavalier disregard for British military hierarchies. Black American drivers ignored officers and asked privates: ‘Say, are you guys for the war?’⁴⁷

Americans could be contemptuous in their attitude to British troops. When Basil Coad, in command of 27 Brigade, arrived, an American officer said: ‘Glad you British have arrived – you’re the real experts at retreating.’⁴⁸ Most shocking to ordinary national servicemen, however, was the fact that so many Americans did not realize that there were any British soldiers in Korea. A conscript there was told by his girlfriend, studying in America, that the people she met did not know about the British presence.⁴⁹ The fact that MacArthur had praised the valour of the French force, which was even smaller than the British, was particularly galling and British soldiers were sometimes asked whether they were French.⁵⁰

British equipment and clothing was so poor that the British contingent was sometimes known as the ‘Woolworth’s Brigade’. Soldiers resorted to black-market dealings to obtain American material. American soldiers valued alcohol, which was hard for them to obtain by legal means. Some British soldiers bought carbines for liquor and one officer claimed that a jeep could be acquired for a bottle of gin.⁵¹

At the highest level, there was a difference of opinion between American and British strategists. The Americans, MacArthur in particular, were more aggressive and more inclined to widen the war. British officers resented what they took to be the high-handed American approach. They believed that British lives were sometimes squandered in pursuit of relatively unimportant objectives. Andrew Man, commander of the 1st Middlesex, believed that the Americans were too prone to stick to valleys – which made movement, especially for motor vehicles, relatively easy – and too hesitant about tackling more difficult objectives in the hills.⁵² Much of this thinking filtered down to national service subalterns and even to ordinary privates. Benjamin Whitchurch recalled that ‘that stupid man MacArthur’ had decided to ‘chase Commies’ thus bringing the Chinese into the war and prolonging it – a prolongation that meant, among other things, that Whitchurch himself was taken prisoner.⁵³

For older soldiers, the Far East was almost synonymous with the British empire. Brigadier William Pike said: ‘You must remember that when we started soldiering, we just assumed the Empire would go on and on.’⁵⁴ National servicemen learned the realities of British imperial decline at an earlier age. From the end of July 1951, British soldiers fought as part of a ‘Commonwealth Division’. They were thus part of an international entity, which was fighting as part of another international entity (the United Nations), which was in turn subordinated to the realities of American power. British soldiers did not feel like the senior partners in this arrangement. Australian, New Zealand and Canadian soldiers were usually older than their British comrades, and a British national service officer believed that ‘the lowliest gunner’ in the New Zealand forces earned more than himself.⁵⁵

Most of all, the life of a British soldier in Korea was dominated by fighting. At first, men were sometimes sent into battle almost as soon as they got there. D. F. Barrett arrived at the front line less than a month after he had first heard the rumour in Hong Kong that his regiment was being posted to Korea:

At full light, the source of the strong smell of rotting flesh is self-evident, coming as it does from bodies buried in shallow graves all over our hill, some of which have been partly exposed by the heavy rains. Hands, feet and the occasional head are springing up like corn all over the hillside, coupled with lumps of rotting flesh that was once a man.⁵⁶

Some were caught up in dramatic retreats before they had even reached the front. William Purves arrived in Pusan with the Bren gun carriers for his regiment. Within a few days, they had all been burned to prevent them from falling into North Korean hands as British forces pulled back.

Both sides dug in, so that the conflict began to resemble the First World War. The extreme cold of the Korean winter created special hazards. Many men improvised petrol heaters out of empty shell cases and these frequently exploded; British military hospitals in Japan devoted much of their energy to treating burns.⁵⁷ Uniforms were full of lice, which were dormant in the cold but would wake up and torment soldiers during a forced march. Summer produced different kinds of problems. Trenches became infested with insects, snakes and vermin. Some soldiers lay on their bunks and took pot shots at rats with their sten guns.⁵⁸

Face-to-face conflict came when one side or the other attacked and this could be terrifying. Dennis Matthews was a national serviceman operating a Vickers machine gun with the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers at the Imjin River in April 1951. The Chinese attacked in such numbers and with such determination that all his training was undermined. Usually, a Vickers machine gun was set up to give a 180 degree angle of fire, but, at the Imjin, the machine gunners needed a 360 degree angle of fire because they realized that the Chinese were as likely to be behind them as in front of them. Even a rate of fire of 450 rounds per minute did not stop the attacking forces. The regiment headquarters pulled back and Matthews thought that the men operating the Vickers guns were being sacrificed to cover a retreat. Eventually, the machine gunners were allowed to withdraw. Matthews was not quite sure how the order had originally been given but it was passed down to him as ‘every man for himself’. Matthews and three other men survived by avoiding the most obvious track, which was under fire, and going into the hills.⁵⁹

The Gloucestershire Regiment (the Glosters) had an even harder time than the Ulster Rifles. They tried to defend their positions as other troops behind them were pulled out and as tanks, which might have provided some relief, failed to get through the narrow passes that led to the front line. The Glosters ran low on ammunition, sustained heavy casualties and eventually faced the certainty that they would be overrun. A national service private recalled the terrifying sequence of events. The ostentatious calm of their commanding officer as it became increasingly obvious that they would not be relieved, the destruction of equipment to prevent it falling into enemy hands, the order to fix bayonets and Anthony Farrar-Hockley – the adjutant of the regiment – shouting: ‘if you want to live, smash your weapons; if you want to die, go on fighting’.⁶⁰

Denys Whatmore, a national service second lieutenant with the Hampshire Regiment, who fought with the Glosters, left an extraordinary account of how he and a few comrades evaded capture. The platoon under his command was sent to try to hold an advance position. His first battle was strange because the tracer bullets were ‘very beautiful’. The Chinese began to blow bugles ‘and that was a bit nerve wracking because they got closer and closer’. He called up supporting mortar fire but two men in his own platoon were wounded by bombs that dropped short of their target. There was ‘quite a fight’ for half an hour. A Chinese machine gun got on their right flank and began to fire with deadly effect. Whatmore’s batman was killed. Whatmore fired his own sten gun until it jammed, then used his dead batman’s rifle and then his own pistol until he ran out of ammunition. Finally, he fired a flare gun. Chinese soldiers came close enough to throw a grenade but it fell short of its target. Whatmore threw a grenade of his own, which seemed more effective. By this time, all his soldiers were shouting that they were out of ammunition and the telephone line to company HQ was cut.

Whatmore pulled his platoon back – a dangerous exercise because it meant moving into fire from the machine guns of his own side.⁶¹ By the time he got back to a more secure position, he had only thirteen of his original thirty-six-man platoon. Some of the others were wounded and had been evacuated but many were dead: the remnants were ‘sombre but not downhearted’. The platoon were sent to the top of a hill – later known as ‘Gloster Hill’ – on which the battalion would make its last stand. Large numbers of Chinese troops went past them so they were surrounded. British and Filipino tanks tried to reach them but one was destroyed thus blocking the way for the others. American jets dropped napalm on the Chinese – the British were so close that they could feel its heat. It became clear that the Glosters were in a ‘tight fix’. Whatmore heard the regiment’s bugler play behind him and the surviving members of the battalion cheered.

Eventually, the Glosters were given permission to try to fight their way out and the commanding officer devolved decisions about how to do so to company commanders. Captain Mike Harvey, commanding Whatmore’s company, asked his officers whether they wanted to surrender or fight. They all wanted to fight. Harvey then decided that they would go forward into the enemy lines rather than back towards their own. As it turned out, this was a wise move because the Chinese forces had encircled their position and, in doing so, left relatively few men in front of the British. Escape was not easy, though. The Glosters had to leave their wounded behind. Whatmore borrowed a jagged tin to drink from a puddle. The few Chinese they encountered were curiously slow to react – it may have been that they did not realize that these unkempt, desperate-looking men were British soldiers

Whatmore and his comrades now had to return to their own lines by doubling back and going through a steep gorge with fire coming from both sides. They crawled along a stream bed. Many men were hit. A tracer bullet passed six inches in front of Whatmore’s face and burned in the mud. Men shouted from behind that ‘they are coming for us with knives’, but Whatmore had no means of knowing whether this was true. They reached their own lines as American tanks supported a retreat by South Korean troops and at first the tanks fired on them. Eventually they made contact with the tank crews and managed to climb on to their vehicles. By this stage, there were forty-six men left of the ninety-six who had first sought to fight their way out. Whatmore’s own platoon had now dropped from the thirteen men who survived the first part of the battle to three. Whatmore had lost one of his boots and his shirt in the scramble. The survivors of the battle were reunited with members of their regiment who had been held in the rear. Some of the soldiers were in tears. They all slept in their muddy clothes. The following day Whatmore and his men got new uniforms and a bath but ‘some Korean pinched my watch’. Recovering from the battle, Whatmore celebrated his birthday: he was twenty. Later he went back to find the bodies of some of his men. They were badly decomposed and a swarm of bees was nesting inside a nearly severed head. He also found his own beret.⁶²

Men who were captured went through the hours of uncertainty about whether they would be killed as their private possessions – watches, wallets, photographs – were pillaged. Eventually they endured weeks of marching that took them from the front line to the camps in which they were to be confined. Men suffered badly from the meagre and unfamiliar diet, which often gave them dysentery. Sometimes American planes attacked the columns in which they marched. A total of about 1,000 British servicemen were captured in Korea – most of them belonged to either the Royal Ulster Rifles, many of whom had been captured in January 1951, or the Glosters, captured in April 1951.⁶³ Captivity was relatively short – prisoners were released with the armistice of July 1953, so no one was imprisoned for more than three years. Most captured British soldiers seem to have displayed great courage. They often met attempts to give them political ‘education’ with derision.⁶⁴ There are no complete figures for the proportion of national servicemen among prisoners but, by the end of September 1952, 119 conscripts had been captured and six were known to have died in captivity.⁶⁵

Men recalled Korea in horribly graphic terms. John Hollands, a national service officer who won the Military Cross, wrote an autobiographical novel, The Dead, the Dying and the Damned. He explained its title thus:

The Dead are those who died well and cleanly, through one swift stroke of a bullet or a piece of shrapnel; the Dying are those unfortunate enough to join their comrades only after minutes or perhaps hours of hopeless agony; and the Damned are those who survived, the men who did the killing and who have yet to be judged for it.

Peter Holmes recalled deaths that were ‘sad and macabre’ but, from the point of view of the victim, ‘easy’. An officer was decapitated by shrapnel so that his ‘body seemed to stand up for ages with blood spouting out’. Many, however, did not have ‘easy’ deaths. Holmes watched the ‘six hour death of Corporal F … whose stomach had been blown away by a grenade’.⁶⁶ Soldiers remembered men who were wounded in the groin or who had their skin burned off by the explosion of their own phosphorus grenades.

Just before going out on patrol, Holmes told his men briskly that ‘the morphine was in my top left pocket and it was to be used’.⁶⁷ P. J. Kavanagh, another national service officer, was haunted by the memory of a time when his own nerve had failed as he tried to inject morphine into a dying man – ‘his scream a white wall of cold fire’. The moments during which Kavanagh fumbled with the needle before handing it to a medical orderly were ‘an eternity of agony for the dying man’.⁶⁸ Often the most horrible injuries were the results of battlefield accidents rather than enemy fire. D. F. Barrett watched American planes accidentally drop napalm on soldiers from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He once saw a man who had been travelling perched on a tank and had become trapped under the revolving turret. The tank was driving along a potholed road with the injured man still attached, as the crew sought someone who could relieve him, presumably by amputating a limb.⁶⁹ Not surprisingly, his comrades came to take comfort from their belief that army doctors would finish off badly wounded men,⁷⁰ though there is no evidence that the medical officer of his own regiment, himself a national serviceman, ever did such a thing.⁷¹

When the lines were more or less static – which they mainly were in the two years after the summer of 1951 – soldiers would emerge from their trenches at night. They repaired the wire in front of their positions – wire that might give them a few vital minutes if they were attacked. They also patrolled in no man’s land. Sometimes these were ‘listening patrols’, designed to find out what was happening on the other side; sometimes they were ‘fighting patrols’ to engage the enemy. Taking prisoners, who could be interrogated, was particularly prized, though soldiers were under no illusion about the need for violence. They hoped that their prey would come quietly; ‘if not, well obviously the other thing happens’, as one national serviceman put it.⁷²

Robert Gomme, a national service corporal with the Royal Norfolk Regiment, was on such a patrol. He and a few conscripts explored a ruined village on a freezing night in the winter of 1951–2: ‘alone in a lunar landscape, only the squeak of snow under our boots broke the silence’. They came across a group of enemy soldiers and waited silently. Gomme had assumed that they would try to grab a prisoner but other members of the patrol opened fire. They killed two men and carried one of the bodies back. The following morning, a burial party managed to dig a grave for their victim in the frozen ground. The corpse had yielded no information – the dead man had no regimental badges or documents and carried nothing but a mud-stained Chinese atlas, which Gomme still had forty years later.⁷³

Soldiers had disconcertingly close encounters in no man’s land. Francis Cheesman was a conscript in the Royal Fusiliers who was mentioned in dispatches and who attributed his success on patrols to the fact that he came from a long line of poachers. Like many British soldiers, he respected the Chinese, who ‘were doing the same job as we were’. Interviewed in 2000 – ‘I can see it as if it were yesterday’ – he recalled how a ‘Chink’ stood up suddenly in no man’s land and raised his hand ‘like a Red Indian’. Cheesman could not shoot because one of his own comrades was in the line of fire. The Chinese soldier waved and the British soldiers let him go. For a time, they wondered whether the single soldier was a scout for some larger force and whether they were about to be attacked. As they waited, Cheesman felt oddly calm and wrote his name and number in the sand before his patrol moved back to their lines.⁷⁴

On 23 November 1952, the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment sent a two-man ‘lying up patrol’ to investigate digging conducted by the Chinese. As was often the case in Korea, the patrol brought together men from very different backgrounds. Ian Orr was a nineteen-year-old national service second lieutenant; Thomas Nowell was a sergeant and about ten years older than Orr. Nowell had been kept out of the forces during the war because he was a miner but he joined up as a regular soldier as soon as he was allowed to do so – presumably, like many men, he thought that almost any life was better than working in a pit. He was a tough professional soldier who became a sniper. Nowell and Orr left their own lines in darkness and made their way to what Nowell described as ‘Chinaman’s land’ and hid themselves near the area in which they believed the Chinese were constructing a tunnel. It was very cold and neither man could move much, even to eat their rations, for fear of the crackling noise that their frozen clothes would make. They were so close to their enemy that, at one point, a Chinese labourer relieved himself on top of Nowell. The two men lay still all day and, when darkness fell again, they made their way back to their own lines – a delicate operation because no one had told them the new passwords that had been issued to their comrades. When they got back, Orr and Nowell had breakfast and then separated – they came from different companies and do not seem to have known each other well. Nowell stayed in the army and served at Suez. Orr, having won the Military Cross, went up to Cambridge.⁷⁵

William Purves, a national service officer, led a patrol of men from the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. He climbed up into the attic of an apparently empty house and saw a girl asleep. He had not seen a woman for a ‘year or so’ and thought her very beautiful. He also realized that his patrol must be much further behind enemy lines than he had previously thought and that it would be better not to let ‘the jocks’ know that they were so close to a young woman. He went downstairs and ordered his men to return. He did not rate very highly their chances of getting back, and in retrospect believed that the Chinese had probably seen his patrol but held their fire in order not to expose their own position.⁷⁶

Other patrols did not escape so lightly. Thomas Henson, a national service officer with the Norfolk Regiment, was leading one through no man’s land at night when they were attacked at such close quarters that it was impossible to use their weapons. For a time they grappled in the dark – gripped, as Henson recalled it, by ‘blind rage’ rather than ‘fear’ or ‘exhilaration’. Henson himself managed to shake a Chinese soldier off his back and one of his men was bitten on the hand. At some point, the two sides drew far enough apart for weapons to be used and the British threw grenades into a field in which the Chinese were hiding – setting the millet on fire. At the end of the encounter, only four of the Norfolks were ‘capable’: three were dead and ‘five or six’ were wounded. The radio operator had lost his aerial. He wept as he scrabbled for it in the dirt, but managed eventually to transmit a call for help. Henson won the Military Cross. The language in which he described the incident sixty years later – ‘terrific full marks to the Bren gunner there’ – evoked the school boy that he had been just a year before this incident.⁷⁷

Divisions of rank, and the divisions of social class that often went with rank, changed in Korea. The stiff formality of the parade ground was a long way away. Everyone was frequently dirty and bedraggled. Men lived rough and ready lives. When Barry Reed was about to be discharged from his national service as a second lieutenant in the Middlesex Regiment, he realized that he had no idea about the etiquette of an officers’ mess – he had spent most of his time in Korea, where he had been decorated for gallantry but rarely had to worry about which way to pass the port.⁷⁸

Some national service second lieutenants in Korea appreciated the oddity of their position. As boys of nineteen or twenty, they were making decisions that might mean life or death to thirty men. Peter Holmes commanded a platoon that was mainly made up of working-class national servicemen. His sergeant – a former paratrooper who had won the Military Medal in the Second World War – was often ‘the real leader of the platoon in those early days’.

As for Holmes himself:

At Eaton Hall we had been given the following instructions on ‘the Officer and Men relationship’. We were told ‘not to seek popularity or relax discipline, to be efficient ourselves, to give our men a sense of unity, to put their interests before our own, to explain things to them, to do things with them, to share their hardships, to be their champion but also their chief critic, to know their names and use them, to set a good example … to devote all our energy and resource to attaining the highest possible state of morale in our men’, in summary to strike a mean between the severity of Frederick the Great and the subtle approach of Lawrence of Arabia … On the whole I felt it would be easier just to get to know them as well as I could.⁷⁹

Sometimes, in the heat of action, distinctions might almost disappear. When a signaller – Bailey – brought him the order to launch what seemed to be a suicidal attack, Holmes had just made some cocoa. He shared the half-filled cup with Bailey ‘fifty/fifty’ and said that he regarded this as ‘the most generous act of my life’.⁸⁰ The two men would have come from very different classes, but they experienced briefly the absolute equality of young men who thought that they had only a few hours to live. Holmes formed some lasting friendships with other national service officers who served in Korea. While he was on the battlefield, however, he was closest to the other ranks in his own platoon. He came to have particular regard for his sergeant, his signaller and Private Abrahart, a ‘hard-boiled reprobate’ who had seen ‘every gaol in the empire’ but who was good on patrol.⁸¹

Some officers, often the most conservative and military minded, remained in touch with men that they had commanded in Korea – usually through regimental associations. For many officers, however, their own departure from the front line marked the end of their contact with their troops. John Whybrow was a second lieutenant in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. A grammar school boy waiting to take up a scholarship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he was himself on a social frontier – culturally a member of the upper-middle class but socially a little below the level of men who would usually have been commissioned into a respectable regiment of the line. In his diary, Whybrow mocked himself as the ‘KYO’ (Keen Young Officer). He recalled exchanges with his soldiers – some of them men from the north east who had been transferred from the Durham Light Infantry:

KEEN YOUNG OFFICER: Well chaps, nice morning, any complaints?

CHORUS: Ay, when do we get out of this f… hole!

KYO: Sleep all right?

CHORUS: What – with awnly wun f… camp bed in the f… tent!

KYO: Right-ho, we’ll see what we can do for you.

Whybrow was wounded in action – his commanding officer drily remarked that his ‘dash and bravery’ had ‘outweighed his common sense’ – and sent to Japan for treatment. He returned to the front line, at his own insistence, and led an attack on a Chinese bunker. The attack was a disaster and he was badly wounded – one of his legs would be amputated. His men, at great risk to themselves, got him back to their own lines.⁸² Whybrow was evacuated to Japan for treatment. His father sent a penknife to each of the men who had saved his son’s life. Writing a brief memoir decades later, Whybrow was able to give the name, rank, number and status (regular or national service) of all the soldiers who had saved him. He saw the corporal who had rallied the platoon and organized his rescue at Buckingham Palace when they were both decorated – the corporal got the Military Medal, awarded to other ranks, and Whybrow got the Military Cross, given to officers. After this, however, Whybrow did not meet his soldiers again.⁸³

Some veterans of Korea recalled a solidarity that had transcended social class and that was felt with a poignancy made all the more intense by the sense that it would not survive away from the front line. P. J. Kavanagh wrote that he valued:

Above all the sense of experience shared and a kind of equality, even in the rigid British army, most of all that. There isn’t any room for the old class fear, at least for a while. In spite of the schoolboy rubbish, comradeship existed … Once you’ve had a glimpse of that, whatever the circumstances, and felt how it made your bones lie easy, the absence of it worries you, you’ve got a sense of deprivation.⁸⁴

Jim Jacobs remembered the egalitarianism of life in Korea: ‘Life was hard, but equally so for all … The majority of our officers and NCOs appeared to be fellow members of the human race, and, for the most part, treated us as men not boys.’⁸⁵ In The Dead, the Dying and the Damned, John Hollands attributed the following thoughts to a conscript private:

on the second morning [after leaving the front] there was a very distinct difference in the attitude of the officers and NCOs. Before, while in the line, most of the officers had been friendly, always ready to exchange a joke or two, but now they had suddenly become snobbish, demanding that every second word spoken to them should be ‘sir’, and swaggering around the company lines criticizing every little point as though they owned the place.⁸⁶

In a curious sense, the experience of soldiers in Korea fitted in with the image that the British army had of itself. After the upheavals of the Second World War, many officers had been keen to restore and strengthen the regimental system, and it was probably in Korea that regiments counted for most: ‘The loyalty of the soldiers is first to their platoon (pretty strong) but above all to their Battalion, which carries a name and a flag.’⁸⁷

Each battalion held a particular plot of ground and, given that all strategic decisions were ultimately taken by the Americans, British officers could not expect to exercise authority much above regimental level. The names associated with Korea – the Durham Light Infantry, the Middlesex, the Northumberland Fusiliers, the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment – were those of ordinary county regiments. The cult of the Glosters epitomized a certain view of the British regimental system, and the fact that the cult annoyed men from other regiments showed, perhaps, that regimental loyalty really meant something in Korea.⁸⁸ The Glosters were a family regiment, closely associated with a particular area. Their commanding officer – John Carne – was a ‘good regimental officer’. He was a dutiful and, when the occasion demanded it, heroically brave man but he seems to have had no ambition beyond commanding a battalion of his own regiment.

Ordinary soldiers seem to have felt that the regiment was a real presence in their lives. Regimental solidarity mattered and some men attributed the relatively high survival rates of British soldiers in captivity to the fact that men from the same regiment stuck together – they contrasted themselves with the American soldiers, for whom the regiment was an administrative formality that bore no relation to geographical origins.

Two lieutenant colonels, Andrew Man, of the Middlesex Regiment, and Peter Jeffreys, of the Durham Light Infantry, wrote accounts of how the men in their battalions had performed. Both officers thought highly of the national servicemen who had made up more than half the men under their command. Jeffreys wrote: ‘Before going into action I was apprehensive that the qualities of toughness and self-assurance would be lacking in the very young men that we had brought.’ The fact that conscripts had proved good soldiers, however, raised awkward questions about regulars: Jeffreys admitted that he had been disappointed by the behaviour of regular sergeants and corporals.⁸⁹

The opinions of national service officers who served in Korea are also revealing. Sometimes they respected the regular NCOs who served under them – especially when such men were veterans of the Second World War or when those men, like the corporal whose action saved Whybrow’s life, proved themselves in battle. Sometimes, though, they saw regular soldiers as too rooted in the routines of peacetime soldiering. A former national service officer who had served in Korea wrote newspaper articles suggesting that his own regiment had laid excessive emphasis on drill and not enough on fitness, fieldcraft, shooting and signals – the things that mattered on the battlefield. He believed that casualties could have been averted ‘if old soldiers like Sergeant X had spent less time on the drill square in Germany bullying and shouting at the men they were to let down in action’.⁹⁰

National service officers were not always very favourable about regular officers either. Peter Holmes wrote that one of his fellow officers was ‘a man with much better than average intellect for a regular officer’. Another, who had attended the same public school as Holmes himself, was ‘typical Sandhurst’ and ‘stupid in a pleasing sort of way’.⁹¹ In spite of all this, Holmes had a higher opinion of his own regiment than most others – partly because so many of its officers had done serious fighting between 1939 and 1945. He reported the view of another national service officer that most majors in other regiments were ‘imbued with an odious mixture of stupidity, arrogance and out-dated social views’.⁹²

Two national service officers – both, like Holmes, decorated for gallantry – had more favourable views of the army. William Purves was admired by regular officers – at least one of them believed that Purves had saved his life – but Purves himself remarked that the national service officers ‘flourished’ in Korea but that the regulars ‘did not do so well – it must have been a blow’.⁹³ Barry Reed, who rose to the rank of major in the Territorial Army, said that a regular commission was seen as a career for men who ‘can’t do anything else’, but that ‘national service people on the whole were all going to do other things’.⁹⁴

What scars did men bring back from Korea? Some were physical. Peter Holmes carried nothing but a sliver of shrapnel in his hand.⁹⁵ He gave no outward sign of having been troubled by his brushes with death in Korea. John Whybrow bore the physical consequences of the war (he had lost a leg) with stoicism, but he remained physically frail until his death in 2007. He appears to have made a conscious decision not to let his injuries overshadow his life.⁹⁶ He travelled around Europe before going to Cambridge. Barry Reed gave up his place at Cambridge and went straight into business – he seems, in retrospect, to have felt that this was the only result of his service in Korea that he regretted.⁹⁷ William Purves was wounded while leading a fighting retreat. He was taken to an American field hospital because the British medical staff were overwhelmed with the casualties and eventually evacuated to Japan. He woke up on a train still in his blood-soaked uniform and with his pistol strapped to his waist. He had shrapnel in his arm for the rest of his life. He claimed to feel sorry for those who had had less exciting experiences: ‘sadly a lot of people hated their national service’.⁹⁸

The psychological effects of service in Korea were hard to measure. Many veterans, looking back from the 1980s or later, commented on the fact that the cultural expectations around men who might have been damaged by combat were different in the 1950s. Whybrow wrote: ‘I did not, at any time, at least not consciously, suffer from post-combat trauma or stress symptoms.’⁹⁹ His contemporaries at university commented on his cheerfulness.¹⁰⁰ However, for all his considerable courage and optimism, Whybrow also suffered from severe, sometimes crippling, bouts of depression and anxiety for the rest of his life.¹⁰¹

Denys Whatmore said that there was no offer of counselling and that he had not the slightest need of it – ‘that may not be true for those who were taken prisoner. I wondered after the Gulf War [of 1991], I truly wondered has the army changed or have people changed’. Whatmore recalled having nightmares for ‘one, two or three weeks. I distinctly heard bugles and woke up saying here they come, this was the only effect for me.’ He never had nightmares again, though he found it hard to settle back into his civilian life as a minor civil servant and he eventually rejoined the army.¹⁰² Dennis Matthews, a survivor of the Battle of the Imjin River, said that ‘I used to grind my teeth in my sleep, I think it was maybe some form of nightmare.’¹⁰³ Edwin Haywood talked of nightmares and lack of sleep that lasted for two years after his return from Korea.¹⁰⁴ Some men found life unbearable. Joseph Roberts, who served in the Black Watch, kept his composure for some years and then, when he was married and his eldest daughter was about to be born, ‘I came home one evening and went to pieces, ended up caked out for about three years.’¹⁰⁵ Benjamin Whitchurch had endured battle and captivity but, most of all, he seems to have been haunted by the fate of his comrades. He met the mothers of Blondy Martin and Ginger Bishop but did not want to describe the circumstances in which their sons had died.¹⁰⁶

Stephen Martin interviewed national service veterans of Korea in the mid 1990s and found that some of them were only just beginning to seek treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder:

A lot of people say they’re nightmares: I say they’re not nightmares. They’re like I’m there and I’m back. Most of the time I’m getting chased, mind, I’m in a crouched position and I’m getting chased, and that’s when I’m not reliving the minefield thing, you know, sommat like that. All I’m trying to do in me mind I think is justify. I’m just trying to work it out and get it clear in me mind so’s I can tell people you know. So it’s not hurt us any that way; it must have hurt us a little bit, but I can’t, unless I tell them nobody knows about it like, you know.¹⁰⁷

Maynard Winspear presented a relatively benign account of his national service. He joined the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment specifically because he wanted to go to Korea. He was thrown out of a potential officers’ platoon for playing a practical joke. He repeatedly laughed during the taped interview in which he describes his experiences. He left the army in December 1952 and returned to find work in his home area, but his landlady eventually asked him to leave her house: his propensity to shout in his sleep was disturbing the other tenants.¹⁰⁸