This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  1 army brigade of 3 infantry battalions; 1 artillery regiment; 1 armored regiment. 3 destroyers, 1 air transport squadron.

  Turkey

  1 army brigade of 6,000 men.

  Australia

  2 infantry battalions; 1 fighter squadron; 1 air transport squadron; 1 carrier, 2 destroyers, 1 frigate.

  Thailand

  1 regimental combat team of 4,000 men; 2 corvettes, 1 air transport squadron.

  Philippines

  1 regimental combat team.

  France

  1 infantry battalion; 1 gunboat.

  Greece

  1 infantry battalion; 1 air transport squadron.

  New Zealand

  1 artillery regiment; 2 frigates.

  Netherlands

  1 infantry battalion; 1 destroyer.

  Colombia

  1 infantry battalion; 1 frigate.

  Belgium

  1 infantry battalion.

  Ethiopia

  1 infantry battalion.

  South Africa

  1 fighter squadron.

  Luxembourg

  1 infantry company.

  In addition the Scandinavian nations, with Italy, furnished hospital units. India, conspicuously neutral, sent a field ambulance unit. Other nations furnished food, or money, in limited amounts.

  The United States' contribution was ten times that of all other nations combined, excepting the Republic of Korea. The Taehan Minkuk received wholesale American aid, of course—but it suffered the devastation of most of its territory; its cities were destroyed, and it lost 1,312,836 men, women, and children, soldier and civilian alike, during the course of the war, more than one in twenty of its total population.

  But while the troops sent by U.N. members were small in number, they were usually high in courage and effectiveness. Most of them, from the six-foot Imperial Guardsmen of Haile Selassie, to the half-wild Algerians of the French battalion, were professional soldiers. Some, like the British, were recalled reservists. Almost all came from units of long history and proud tradition in their native armies.

  Most of them, from the bayonet-wielding Turks to the knife-swinging Thais, earned the admiration of American troops.

  A few of them wrote proud history.

  At the first of April 1951, the U.N. forces, now half a million strong, had crossed the parallel in most places. The CCF, bleeding badly from multiple wounds inflicted by air, sea, and ground action, were hurrying more and more troops into North Korea, until their strength reached three-quarters of a million.

  The Chinese still had numerical superiority, and they thought they had the initiative, too. They began to plan what they called First Step, Fifth Phase Offensive. This offensive would concentrate on the western portion of the battle line, and its objective was the Korean capital of Seoul, thirty-five miles to the south.

  In the meantime, the Eighth Army kept making limited attacks, until in the third week of April its forces were ten miles above the parallel everywhere except at Kaesong. In the center of the line U.N forces were striking toward the Ch'orwon-Kumwha-P'yonggang complex, an important communication and supply area called the Iron Triangle.

  The original Iron Triangle—so called because the steel rails connecting the cities formed a rough triangle on the map—had had Hwach'on as one base, but when Hwach'on fell to the Eighth Army, the correspondents so liked the phrase that the town of P'yonggang, farther north, was put in Hwach'on's place.

  The U.N. probe was confident, but cautious. Ridgway planned no sweeping attack, but he was determined to see how far the Eighth Army could go.

  Spring had come to Korea, with spring rains, and the countryside was briefly beautiful with grass and flowers. But the skulls of men killed during the winter snows, loosened by the thaw, rolled down the hillsides to rest among the azalea and forsythia just bursting into bloom.

  With spring there came to Korea not rebirth but further death.

  The United States 3rd Infantry Division struck toward Ch'orwon, up the road running from Seoul, and on 21 April was some ten miles below the city, and ten miles north of the Imjin River. On its right, IX Corps, consisting of the Marine Division and one ROK division, prepared to attack along the line running from Kumwha to the Hwach'on Reservoir. On the 3rd Division's left stood the British 29th Brigade, with a front-line strength of four thousand, and the 1st ROK Division.

  The British Brigade was just south of the Imjin, and had sent exploratory patrols across. Crossing an area of flinty two-hundred-foot cliffs and rocky gorges, the patrols reported nothing much to bar the way.

  But here, some thirty miles northwest of the ROK capital, was fought the fourth battle for Seoul.

  On 22 April the Chinese struck the 17,000-yard front of the British Brigade with six divisions, more than fifty thousand men.

  On the eve of St. George's Day, the 29th Infantry Brigade consisted of the 1st Battalion, Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, just south of the Imjin, an attached battalion of Belgians, the 1st Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment, on the brigade left, and the 1st Battalion, Royal Ulster Rifles, in reserve. In brigade support were the 45th Field, Royal Artillery, equipped with 25-pounders, and the 8th King's Royal Hussars, who had once charged on horseback at Balaclava but who now rode fifty-ton Centurion tanks.

  Each of these was a unit long known to history, and steeped in glory.

  The Fusiliers began in 1674, and wear the badge of St. George and his dragon on their berets. The Gloucestershire Regiment—"Glosters"—dates to 1694, and their battle standards stream with the names of Waterloo, Quebec, and Gallipoli, on 22 April 1951 forty-four in all, more than any regiment of the British Army.

  Since the time English bowmen wore red crosses on their breasts, the day of their patron, St. George, has been sacred to English arms. For 23 April the British Brigade planned festivities, both gay and solemn. The Ulsters, who had lost more than two hundred dead along the Imjin in January, planned to dedicate a monument. The Fusiliers had readied a turkey dinner, and had made from colored paper the red and white St. George's Day roses for their caps. The Royal Artillery, not to be outdone, had even flown in real roses from Japan.

  There would be no festivities this St. George's Day, but the men of the 29th Brigade would wear their roses all the same. They would wear them into battle as desperate as any their forefathers had seen, from Acre to Agincourt.

  For on the eve of St. George's Day, at 6:00 PM. the Chinese struck.

  The Belgians, across the Imjin, were surrounded first. Then, the Northumberland Fusiliers were brought to battle, but without concern at Brigade HQ. Efforts were made to relieve the Belgians; first a column of the Ulsters tried, then a patrol of tanks, without success.

  While concern for the Belgians mounted during the night, they went relatively unscathed, though cut off. On the 23rd they were able to sideslip across the Chinese lines on their right, and withdraw.

  It was on the brigade left, where the Glosters held four miles of rugged front, that the main blow fell, when St. George's Day was one hour old.

  The Chinese, their horns and bugles raucous in the clear cool night, came across the Imjin in wide, massive waves. The very first washed screaming into A Company, in front, and swamped it. The Able Company commander went down, with two of his officers. The company command post was overrun.

  The company radio operator fired his rifle until it went dry, then used it as a club to beat off the Chinese swarming out of the dark. Then, as the Chinese split around him in the fire-prickled night, he crawled to his radio.

  "We are overrun. We've had it. Cheerio."

  The other companies held, while the entire brigade, from one end of the 17,000-yard front to the other, was now locked in close combat. By dawn the 1st ROK Division, on their left, had been forced back, and by midmorning Chinese crawled over the flinty hills on the Glosters' flank and rear.

  The battalion supply offices were overrun, and the battalion split away from the brigade, while a full regiment of Chinese fi
xed them from the front.

  By radio, the Glosters were told to hold their high ground, where they were, and this they did.

  The 45th Field fired in their support until gun tubes shimmered. In all, the 25-pounders fired more than a thousand rounds per tube, more even than the average at Alamein. They fired until almost every round of British ammunition in Korea had been exhausted, and at times they fired into Chinese riflemen less than one hundred yards away.

  They protected the guns, and continued the mission. More than that cannot be expected, or said, of any artillery.

  But as 23 April lengthened, then waned, the Glosters, fighting on, began to run out of supply. They needed ammunition, fresh guns, medicines. They had no food, except some bread and a few hard-boiled eggs.

  American air tried to drop supply to them, but the battle was too close about the beleaguered hills. The air drops had poor success.

  But all the air power that could be thrown into the battle swarmed down from the sky, rocketing, blasting, searing the Chinese-dotted hills with napalm.

  In spite of the continuous rumble of the artillery, in spite of air power, the CCF trickled behind the two other battalions. The Ulsters and Fusiliers were cut off, too. The Brigade HQ was under small-arms fire. A number of green replacements just in from England for the Fusiliers were fired on, and some were killed before they could join.

  All day the 23rd, and all that night, the Glosters beat off swarming infantry attacks, holding their precious high ground. At dawn of the 24th, the Glosters' situation was serious.

  Able Company had been swamped by the first wave, and insistent pressure had worn Baker Company down to an effective strength of one officer and fifteen other ranks. The remaining men fought back from deep foxholes, into which sleeted unceasing machine-gun fire. It was impossible to move without being hit.

  Commanding the original 622 officers and men of the Glosters was Lieutenant Colonel J. P. Carne, a tall, normally reticent officer who had been with the regiment twenty-six years. Carne, calm and pipe-smoking, drew the companies back onto the hill on which he had placed his own CP. Despite the heavy fire, the maneuver succeeded; now the Gloster line had shrunk from four miles to a few hundred yards, but the line still held.

  Carne, in weak radio communication with Brigade, asked only for helicopters to carry away his desperately wounded. But the fire was too close and too intense for the copters to come in. Carne was asked if he thought a relief column through the hills could reach him.

  "No," he said, with complete honesty.

  But on the afternoon of 24 April a battalion of Filipinos led by American tanks was ordered toward Gloster Hill. The column ground to within less than two thousand yards of the British before the lead tank caught fire and blocked a defile. Lashed by unbearable fire, the column retreated.

  Later, the Filipinos tried again, now accompanied by Belgians, some Puerto Rican infantrymen, and tanks from the 8th Hussars. They ran into thousands of Chinese in the hills and gorges, and fell back.

  The American 3rd Division, which had fallen back south of the Imjin now and which was not yet under heavy pressure, abandoning its own probe toward Ch'orwon, tried to break through with tanks and infantry.

  They were not able even to get close.

  On the hill, the Glosters held fast, as the sun sank. By now a gap of seven miles had been opened between them and the other units of the 29th Brigade.

  All night they fought off Chinese, now coming at their hill in desperation. The Glosters were spoiling the First Step, Fifth Phase Offensive, at its very start. Before them already lay several thousands of dead Chinese, and they still had teeth.

  But at dawn they had only some three hundred men fit to hold a gun, and ammunition was so low that officers whispered to hold fire until the assaulting infantry was fifteen yards away.

  And at dawn of the 25th, the brigadier commanding the 29th received new orders: fall back. The Fusiliers and Ulsters were badly hurt, and with the front holding solidly elsewhere, and supporting units behind them, it was senseless slaughter to keep the decimated British on line.

  Those Fusiliers and Ulsters who were on their feet came out in good order. Their wounded, two hundred of them, were loaded onto tanks. Coming out, the tanks were brought under fire. The decks and sponsons ran slick with blood, and the dead and dying lay so thickly across the tanks the gunners could not traverse the tubes. But the hurt and dying were brought out, and the 29th Brigade, two-thirds of it, fell back.

  Miles deep in Chinese territory now, the Glosters were on their own.

  And they were almost done, this 25th of April.

  At Alexandria, Egypt, during the battle for the Nile, the Gloucestershire Regiment had approached the French in two long ranks, one to kneel and fire, one to hold off the enemy with the bayonet while the second row reloaded. They were surrounded.

  Their officers shouted, "Rear rank—right-about-face! Fire!"

  Back to back, the Glosters fired and repelled charges until the French retired.

  Ever since, the Glosters, alone in the British service, have been entitled to wear two cap ornaments, one in front, one in back.

  On Gloster Hill, Korea, one hundred and fifty years later, the Glosters fought back to back again. These were no longer the mindless automatons of Wellington's legions; many of them were reservists called to the colors upon the Korean emergency. Most of them were past the age of thirty; a great many of them had left wives and children behind in Britain.

  But whatever else they might be, they were men of the Gloucestershire Regiment.

  Just before daylight, the Chinese bugles made the rocky hills eerie with music, as they marshaled to charge again. There were three hundred Glosters on the hill, and a bugler. The bugler put his own horn to mouth and blew long reveille.

  The sound of the Chinese horns died away.

  Then, as the Chinese listened in amazement, the Gloster bugler sounded short reveille, half-hour dress, and cookhouse. While the brassy music died, in the still before the firing began again, the Glosters cheered.

  At 0605, by radio, their brigadier told them they had his permission to leave Gloster Hill.

  Lieutenant Colonel Carne said he was surrounded and could not break out. He asked for air support.

  He got it. Dive bombers shrieked down upon their hill, blasting the ground only thirty-five yards beyond their holes. Individual Gloucesters threw smoke grenades to mark the spots they wanted hit. It was close, desperate work, but it sent the CCF reeling back.

  At 0755, after fighting continuously for almost sixty hours, Carne reported to Brigade that his radio batteries were almost gone. He asked for the air and artillery to continue pounding in close.

  Then Carne talked to his acting company commanders, sheltered by a fold of ground near the CP where the wounded litter patients, some five dozen of them, lay about. He told them the battalion was done. They had a choice of surrendering or trying to fight their way out in small groups.

  The commanders of Able, Baker, Charlie, and Dog said they would try to fight their way through.

  There was no hope of taking the seriously wounded through. With these volunteered to stay Colonel Carne, Regimental Sergeant Major Hobbs, the doctor and chaplain.

  Hobbs and Carne had lived their entire adult lives within the Glosters; it was unthinkable to them to desert their own. The surgeon and chaplain, brave men each, could in no other way fulfill their callings.

  The remnants of A, B, and C companies started off the hill in the respite the savage air attacks had given them. On the hill Colonel Carne and the leader of the fourth party, Captain Michael Harvey of Dog Company, watched these dirty, hungry, unkempt, staggering, proud men march away into oblivion.

  Harvey got his own party, about a hundred, ready to move out.

  As they started down the hill, Carne asked quietly, "Any of you chaps happen to have a spare twist of tobacco?"

  Captain Harvey, not yet thirty, was a reserve officer and a veteran of the Hampshire
Regiment. Until this moment, he had considered himself a Hampshire man strayed from the fold. On the 25th of April, Michael Harvey, with no discredit to the Hampshires, became a Gloster.

  A somewhat untidy man wearing large horn-rimmed glasses, Harvey ordered his group not to follow the three other parties moving south toward friendly lines, but to do the unexpected—head due north for at least a mile then bear west and south toward the Americans.

  He told all hands, "We must travel fast. There can be no stopping to aid anyone who is wounded."

  Amazingly, for several miles, moving north and then west, they neither saw nor encountered Chinese. Harvey, knowing the CCF liked to run the ridges, crept cautiously down the deep gorges. When they turned to head south again, they bumped into a CCC patrol; they killed these men, and kept on.

  Mile after mile the exhausted, stumbling Glosters crept along the rocky corridors.

  At last they entered a valley, almost a canyon, with clifflike sides and a stony floor almost a quarter-mile wide. A stream flowed through the valley, and Harvey's men proceeded down this for nearly a mile.

  And then, suddenly, the cliffsides swarmed with the black dots of Chinese, and automatic weapons ripped at them from right and left. Harvey estimated forty guns opened up on them. Some Glosters fell, but the others leaped into a narrow ditch that ran along the valley. Under heavy fire, leaving men behind, they crawled along the rocky, foot-deep ditch on bleeding hands and knees.

  The ditch disappeared in places, and more men were hit running to new cover. American planes came over them, recognized them, and poured fire into the surrounding cliffs, without much effect.

  Desperately, they crawled on, moving south.

  At last, more than five hundred yards ahead, Harvey saw tanks he recognized as American spread across the valley, firing. Still under heavy fire, but joyous now, the Glosters crawled rapidly toward the American Shermans.

  The tanks were receiving fire from the Chinese, and the American lieutenant in command had no inkling that any friendly troops could be to the north. As the first Glosters rushed forward, he gave the order to open fire.