There were many familiar faces in the dug-out: of the Gunners, Ronnie, Carl (who was wounded), and—surprisingly—Frank, whom I had mistakenly believed dead, and his Sergeant-Major, Askew; of the Glosters, Bob, Spike, Jumbo, Geoff, Mr. Hobbs and Sergeant-Majors Gallagher, Strong, and Ridlington. It seemed that I had only just missed Henry and Guido, who had escaped from the column two days before. And there were many others, made captive in the severe fighting that had gone on to the east of us: John and Sid, of the Fifth Fusiliers; from the Rifles, Paul, Max, Bert, and Peter—the latter wounded in the legs—and Doug, the Doctor of the Eight Hussars, whose half-track had been knocked into a ditch, at an inopportune moment, while he was driving it through an area already occupied by the enemy. With this band of British, were two other officers: Thomas, a young Filipino lieutenant, a veteran of the World War II campaign amongst his own islands; and Byron, an American Marine Air Force Captain. This officer was suffering terribly from burns; his entire face covered by suppurating scab, his hands, one arm, and part of his right leg raw from the burning fuel which had been thrown back into his cockpit after his Corsair was hit by anti-aircraft fire. Bob’s few dressings were almost exhausted and the Chinese had provided him with nothing since the march began. Yet, never once did Byron cry out, either at rest or on the march, as he was led—blind—along the rough hill tracks and rutted roads. I never heard him make a single complaint.
That morning was a happy one for me, although it rained frequently and we were all very hungry. It was happy because I was amongst comrades and, too, because I was able to get medical attention from two doctors in whom I had the greatest confidence. Bob and Doug examined my foot, released a little of the pus that had gathered, and dressed it with clean rags contributed by the members of our group. What worried me most was the fact that they said I must not walk on it. I knew that if I did not resume the march with my friends, my foot would either not get well at all, or keep me out of action for a very long time. In either case, I should not be in a position to escape again. As Bob, Spike, and I were anxious to go together on the next attempt, they decided to help me along as best they could.
We spent two more days in the village—principally, I think, because the Chinese, who had become tired of the slow pace imposed upon the march by the many sick and wounded, expected that a few days rest would refresh the latter sufficiently to continue at greater speed. What we needed, of course, as much, if not more than rest, was proper food and medical attention.
The march became increasingly difficult for me: after forty-eight hours, Bob and Doug decided that they must operate. As usual, we were marching by night and resting by day. At noon on this particular day, Bob gave me what little morphia he had been able to conceal from our captors and made ready the patient by getting Denis to hold me down at the top, Spike in the middle, while he held on to my ankles. The Colonel got up, remarking:
“I’m going outside, so you can swear as much as you like!”
Doug got to work with a Schick razor blade; and I regret to say I swore a great deal.
From then on, Bob and Spike half-carried me throughout the night marches, until we reached the staging area known as the Mining Camp—a little North Korean gold-mining town, whose industry had been utterly destroyed by our aircraft. We arrived about an hour before dawn, to find that the room selected for our stay was so small that only the sick and wounded could he down, while the remainder had to sit in an upright posture. Jammed into this dark chamber, we spent an unpleasant four hours until breakfast time, when the guards opened the doors to permit us to reach the can of kaoliang outside.
At the Mining Camp, Bob had his first and only real success in persuading the guard Company Commander to see reason in respect of the sick and wounded, who had managed to keep up so far, but were now becoming too sick to maintain the pace. His endeavours secured a promise to send us along by transport to the next major halting point; a promise that was kept. With a tall, effeminate Chinese named Su, I set off with one of the two parties of invalids. We lost our way at almost every conceivable point. Kinne, now suffering from dysentery, was almost put in a local prison, when he was caught looking for wireless parts in the rail centre at Sunchon; and Yates, the scout-car driver, ended the march by carrying me over two miles on his shoulders. It was an eventful journey.
The day came, finally, when we limped over a hill into a white-walled village, on the banks of the upper Taedong River, to find the remainder of the column resting again; a rest they really needed, now that the insufficient and poor quality of their diet was beginning to make itself felt. The Chinese told us that we had accomplished half of our journey; we called the village “Half-way House”.
They took a group photograph of our dirty, bearded faces in this village and, later, removed the valuables—rings, watches, pens, and so on—from those who had not lost them at the front. I had been stripped by the North Koreans, except for some money I had hidden in my clothing, so the Chinese removed nothing of mine. They promised they would return the articles on our arrival at the northern prison-camps—a promise they kept with few exceptions—but so many of us had had our property stolen from us at one time or another after capture that we doubted this. Sergeant Sykes of the Machine Guns stamped his watch into the ground, only to find that he was not permitted to do this with his own property. He was bound and placed in solitary confinement, until he agreed to read a self-criticism in front of the entire column concerning his action. It was full of cockney wit, which the Chinese were quite unable to appreciate—they listened very gravely, the interpreters asking various prisoners why they were smiling. I left this peculiar performance with a feeling of distaste; hearing Sergeant Sykes read a criticism of himself aroused in me a feeling of revulsion for the mentality of the authorities who had ordered it—a strange mentality that seemed alien and, in a sense, abnormal. An outlook which, sooner or later, we should clash with inevitably.
CHAPTER FOUR
ON the day that the main column marched north again, forty of us were taken out and sent to a village called Munha-ri, two miles to the south. Our party was a mixture of fairly fit men and invalids, so that with dysentery an ever-present danger to every one of us, to say nothing of all the other diseases with which Korea abounds, we were delighted to find Bob among us when we formed up to leave the the Half-way House. To my great disappointment, I was separated from Spike.
Munha-ri was quite a small village of no more than forty houses, lying below and up the side of a hill standing a quarter of a mile back from the Taedong River. To our great surprise, We found the remnant of Sam’s column was in the village—mostly sick men, but including the Padre, our Gunner Battery Commander, Guy, and an American Air Force pilot, Duncan. Another reunion took place.
A new schoolhouse had been partly built near the river, the walls still unplastered, the windows unglazed, and the doors unhung. We were all crammed on to the dirt floor in a concentration which just left us room to He down at night. A new routine commenced. Before dawn, our guards would begin to scream orders through the window in an effort to get us out of bed. Eventually, the fit would rise and form up outside for a check, preparatory to marching off. The hours of daylight would be spent on a hill about a mile away where, in the shelter of a pinewood, we received our breakfast of kaoliang—on three wonderful days, we had rice, as a treat—and half-cooked bean shoots. The two Chinese doctors in the village occasionally came to the schoolhouse to examine the sick and, now and again, gave Bob a few drugs to dispense. As the number of sick increased, we were told that it was due to our neglect of “personal sanitation”—for which they held no responsibility. They were quite unabashed when Bob pointed out that we were rarely allowed even to wash our hands and faces. Eventually he was permitted to remain behind each day to care for the sick, though the issue of drugs remained irregular, infrequent and inadequate.
On our first evening in the village we had been addressed by the guard company commander, a small, dapper, young Chinese, who c
alled himself Tien Han. Through a pudding-faced female interpreter, he pointed out to us that though we had been spared death at the hands of the Chinese, we must not mistake this leniency for weakness. We were war-criminals who would now be given an opportunity to make recompense for our past misdeeds; absolute obedience to his authority would be the first way in which we must show that they had been justified in sparing us from death. Those who disobeyed the regulations must expect, at least, severe punishment in the form of rigorous imprisonment.
This little address was followed a few days later by a military interrogation. The only officer who was questioned seriously was Carl, whose identity as a technical expert they suspected, though, by good fortune, they never discovered that he had commanded a radar unit. Carl was brought up before the principal interrogators three times, and, remaining obdurate in the face of their threats, was bound and marched away to a small underground bunker where he remained night and day for a considerable period. He was not the first to be placed in this foul, deep hole. One of Frank’s young Gunners, Ross, had already served a sentence in it, becoming so ill from the damp that he had contracted severe bronchitis. Sergeant Sharp, the Intelligence Sergeant of the Fifth Fusiliers, soon joined Carl and we began to wonder which of us would be next.
I became convinced that the fact that I had argued politics with Chen had been reported to the headquarters controlling Munha-ri. On the first occasion that I was taken out, I was asked:
“Where did you receive your political training? Are you a political officer with your Army? Did you give political instruction to your unit?”
And when I made no reply to this, they said:
“What is it that you misunderstand about Marxism that makes you reject it?”
These questions were asked me by a very ugly, lisping Chinese called T’ang, who spoke English with a heavy accent. He was an unpleasant and dangerous character, ambitious to a degree; a man who boasted that, as the son of a landowner before the revolution, he had subsequently delivered both his parents into the hands of the authorities for execution as “enemies of the people”. I was taken out twice, about this time, for an interview with T’ang, and spent most of the time listening to his opinions on international affairs and the change that might be expected in these now that China was becoming the most powerful nation in the world. They soon became tired of military interrogation and began to select small groups of prisoners to attend lectures on the Chinese Revolution and its significance. As an alternative, we had further addresses reminding us of our good fortune in having our lives spared; of the debt we owed to our Chinese captors for their “lenient treatment.” They cannot have realized how bored we were at hearing the same nonsense repeated over and over again.
My foot was now healing fast, thanks to Bob. We made up a new escape party consisting of Bob, Thomas, the Filipino, Sid of the Fifth Fusiliers, and myself. Byron, the Marine, was also a member, as soon as Bob pronounced his burns sufficiently healed. Unquestionably, bis former health had pulled him round, in spite of the absence of drugs and surgical treatment It was only later, after our strength had been sapped by long imprisonment, that we were to find it impossible to recover fully after sickness.
We went over our plans as we sat on the hillside each day, making what preparations we could from our limited resources. Just as we reached the point of being ready to go, Bob had to withdraw. It was at this time that he was allowed to look after the sick and wounded in what he called the “mediaeval pest-house” and he felt that he could not leave them to the mercy of the Chinese. It was a bitter disappointment to him—indeed, to us all. We prepared to go without him. Then the final blow fell.
One evening, after the second meal of the day, T’ang came into the schoolhouse and read out a long list of names, telling each man to move outside with his few possessions for a night march. When he had finished, we discovered that five of us were to remain in the village with a group of very sick men and the occupants of the bunker: Sergeant Sharp and Carl. This was a new Chinese puzzle which we were to spend many weeks in trying to solve.
Our little group returned to a house at the river end of the village, in which we were allotted a small room. Now, instead of leaving the village entirely for the hours of daylight, we were merely taken to the hill at the back of our hut where we lay under the trees. Each one of us had lost friends in the departure of the other column and I had lost all my escape associates. Our group consisted of Guy, the Padre, Duncan, Sergeant Fitzgerald of the Gunners, and me; and what we were all doing there was a mystery.
A possible solution to our retention in the village occurred on the fifth day after the column had left. On the afternoon of this day, we were bidden to the quarters of the guard company’s officers and sat down to afternoon tea. This consisted of bowls of hot water being passed round, each of which contained about three green tea leaves which left the water lightly coloured but tasteless. Still, we were not even used to hot water at this time of day, and we were most curious to know what had occasioned this move. A packet of cigarettes was produced and passed round. We all smoked. Smiling, showing his perfect teeth in an affected way that he had, Tien Han, the company commander, addressed us through T’ang.
“All the others have gone except for the five of you and some very sick men. Undoubtedly, you are asking yourselves, why has this happened?”
The EDGE of
the SWORD
PICTURE SECTION
1. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff visiting the Glosters at Colchester immediately before their departure for Korea. From left to right: Field Marshal Sir William Slim, Lieutenant-Colonel J.P. Carne, Captain A. H. Farrar-Hockley, Major P. W. Weiler.
2. The Glosters embark for Korea, September 1950. They are boarding the Empire Windrush at Southampton.
3. Major P.A. Angier, killed in action commanding A Company.
4. Captain Anthony Farrar-Hockley, D.S.O., M.C.
5. Drum-Major P.E. Buss at battalion headquarters with CSMI Strong (back to camera), Colonel Carne’s escort, and Sergeant Baxter RAMC.
6. Padre ‘Sam’ Davies at battalion headquarters, April 1951. The peak behind is Kamaksan.
7. A Glosters patrol on the Imjin approaches.
8. Imjin crossing – taken after the sortie by the Battalion and 8th Hussars across the river, 18 April 1951. The C Company ambush on the night of 22 April was mounted on the cliff tops on either side of the track.
9. The Imjin river and surrounding area.
10.View from Hill 235 towards the Imjin River.
11. (Left to right): Captain R.P. Hickey, Regimental Medical Officer; Major P. Mitchell, commanding C Company; and Major D.B.A. Grist, Second-in-Command, just before battle.
12. Bringing down the wounded. Four, sometimes six, men were required to carry a stretcher down the steep slopes of Korea.
13. The ascent to Hill 235, on which the final stand was made by the Battalion.
14. After the Imjin River battle, the few Glosters who escaped entrenched themselves in new positions.
15. A picture of Glosters prisoners taken on the line of march to prison camps. It was produced by the Chinese as a token of response to demands by the United Nations for names and details of circumstances of those captured. A number were identified by relatives.
16. Those who got away: survivors of the Battalion muster for a roll call, 26 April 1951
17. Before his capture –‘Spike’ (Captain H.J. Pike), who later helped to carry the author on long night marches.
18. After twenty-eight months of captivity – the author at home with his wife.
19. Homecoming – the ‘Glorious Glosters,’ led by Lieutenant-Colonel Carne, V.C., march through the streets of Gloucester.
We waited expectantly, wondering what was coming.
“We Chinese do not wish to be your enemies; we are your friends. It is your own leaders who are your enemies but you do not understand that yet. In time, you will come to have a full understanding of this problem. Y
ou require a great deal of education. In the meantime, if you have any doubts or worries, come to us to solve them. You may approach us at any time.”
That was all, except to ask us to sing a national song of ours to them; an invitation we declined, though Guy was pressed so much towards the end that I felt sure he was going to oblige with “Screw Guns”. We never attempted to follow up the proposal that we should approach them to discuss our “problems”, whatever they might be; and, equally, for some time, they made no effort to contact us, except for the normal daily routine.
Then T’ang began lecturing us—the five fit as well as the sick men—on the subject of what he called “The New China”. Each morning, he would appear, lisping and smiling, a changed personality from the scowling Chinese he had been less than a fortnight before. His scowl returned only once, in fact. One warm afternoon, we were sitting in the June sunshine on the hill, drowsing, as I recall it, when he suddenly appeared from nowhere like the Genie that materialized from Aladdin’s wonderful lamp. In a shaking voice, his face twisted with rage, he pointed to the bound figures of Bob, Byron, and Thomas, who had been brought up the hillside.
The Edge of the Sword Page 13