Voices of the Korean War

“I remember asking my Colonel, Colonel Andrew Man, whether or not we would be possibly going into action fairly soon, or going to merely show the flag in Japan for propaganda purposes i.e., that British troops are on the way etc. 

And I remember asking him if it would be an order for me to take my golf clubs and my tennis racket. And he said, ‘by all means, John, take your golf clubs and tennis racket’. And I departed from the airfield, armed with my golf clubs and my tennis racket. It all sounds slightly blimpish, doesn’t it? 

I got out of the plane on arrival, much to my amazement found the airfield was under shell fire. I was then carrying my golf clubs and tennis racket and I remember a large black Sergeant came along and said, ‘we’ve got a right lot of Charlies here’, or words to that effect. I wasn’t ashamed but I just threw them in a ditch and I never saw them again.”

“We lined up on the 23rd of September, it was, I’ll never forget that day. We decided to attack this hill. So we got in an extended line and we started climbing 282. I think we got about halfway up and we came under fire from small arms fire from some trees.

The first section went in and cleared the trees. And we started climbing again, we got a bit farther and then we came under small arms fire again, which was almost like another section of these North Korean troops.

I assume they were in section strength where they'd be sent to get their forward slopes.

We got going again and then suddenly, we came under pretty heavy fire. Joe first got wounded, he got shot in the tummy, and I put him against a tree and put a cigarette in his mouth and left him for the first aid people to pick him up.

We just went a bit further on and the Platoon Commander went down, he was shot in his feet. And by this time it was constant fire, and then it stopped. We kept going to the top of the hill, when we got to the top of the hill, it had like a double top. When we got to the top there was a small valley like that and it went up again to another small hill. And the strange thing was in the valley, there was a North Korean platoon having their breakfast. They were eating rice out of baskets. All that noise and fire that had been going on, they were calmly eating their breakfast.

So, Paddy O’Sullivan, he set up on our command. We went down into this valley and Paddy went down with two bullets in his groin. Big Bob Sweeney took command and we followed Bob up to the second hill where a number of that Korean platoon had been eliminated. They’d retreated back up to the second little hill and we were climbing up that toward, and they were throwing grenades down at us, shooting small arms fire. Eventually, we captured the top of the hill. Because of that action, Corporal Sweeney won a military medal.

Then suddenly, two aircraft appeared. They went over the top of our heads. We thought at the time, in that minute, that they were going to attack this gully where the North Korean Army was coming up, and four platoon and five platoon were trying to hold them back. And as I sat there watching this aeroplane, it dropped this thing, I didn’t know what it was and it was a napalm bomb. And it dropped on the top of four platoon and five platoon, it just went like that. I were later led to believe we had sixty casualties in two minutes. The end of the day we had ninety casualties and it just decimated them two platoons.” 

“They mortared one of the tracks up ahead and they mortared one or two trucks at the back, effectively blocking the road at both ends. And then they just gradually closed in and quite a considerable number of our people got through. At the end it was the last, I don’t know, the last twenty trucks or so, or something like that got caught. At first, we just stayed on the trucks and, well, there were a few bullets fizzing around and I presume there was a number of people hit. When the trucks finally ground to a halt we were ordered off the trucks and at both sides of this little road we were on was a small kind of monsoon ditch running up on both sides. So, we just got into this little ditch or trench on either side. You couldn’t always see the enemy on a hillside. You occasionally saw them ducking from foxhole to foxhole, but there weren’t, sort of, masses of them, it was all, it was a very confused and chaotic situation.”

“I think it was about ten o’clock we were told that we had been selected to stay and give cover and fire to the rest of them as they went out and we were to stay with the wounded. So, we took up our positions in front and round the wounded but we didn’t have much to go. And then when everybody had gone off, the Intelligence Officer, Henry Cabral said, ‘Come on lads, what have you got?' Well, I had about three rounds, I think. And the others were in a very similar state, you know. So, I said well, what we’ll do is, we’ll just loose off one here and then move and then loose off one there, just move around to make them think there were more of us here than there was. And then when we finished what we had left he said ‘Right, you can smash up your rifles,' so we took it to pieces and smashed it up. I got my bugle. I was the only one that still had the bugle because I had taken it down to Pusan. And Tom in fact had played it in the early hours. The Colonel said to him, ‘Have you got your bugle with you?’, and he said, ‘Well, yes,' he knew I had one. He said, ‘Would you play it? Play anything you like bar a retreat.’ So Tom Major was a very beautiful bugler, lovely to listen to and he excelled himself that night playing. And it stopped the Chinese bugles in their tracks.”

“They give you a stretcher and there’s a blanket over the entire stretcher. And they said now, ‘hold onto the handles and the blankets as hard as you can’, which we did. This guy said to me, ‘please give me a drink of water, mate’, and I said, ‘look, we’ve got no water and secondly, we’ve been instructed not to give you any water.’ After a few minutes he repeats this. A few minutes later the blanket is torn right out of my hands and there I’m looking at a man that’s been fully barbequed. His nose, his ears, his lips, his hair, his eyebrows, they’re all gone. He’s really barbequed. And he said to me, ‘please, for Christ’s sake mate, give me a drink.’ And I said, ‘well, I told you before, we’ve got no water and if we did, we’re not allowed to give you any.’ So, with that he accepted that, so we carried him the rest of the way. Anyway, although two of the other napalm victims died, he lived alright, he survived alright. And I learnt many years later they did a first-class job reconstructing his face.”

“It was really terribly, terribly cold, and I remember being out on patrol and we went to ground for just twenty minutes. And in that time, we froze to the ground and our light machine guns and our moving parts of automatic weapons all froze. And you had to keep sliding them quietly for your own circulation of your body and also to keep your weapons circulated, otherwise they simply froze stiff. And as you tired to get up off the ground all your clothes would be sticking to the ground with that kind of white, dry ice because it was 20 degrees below zero or something and it could be terribly cold. We had space heaters which were in the living hutchies and things, which were essentially a large open space like a huge saucepan, one of those pressure cookers, into which one dripped naked petrol. And that burned away inside and got these things glowing and it just burned a straight petrol at a drip speed. And they were fine in a way if they worked, but they didn’t always work and some of them went up in flames and then you would suddenly see in the middle of sort of a serious bit, when you knew patrols were around, you would see a living hutchie going up in flames and people running out and rescuing their sleeping bags and all the rest, which were perhaps on fire. And that was not quite amusing always. And people sometimes did get properly burned on those occasions with accidents with petrol like that. But as a system it seemed to be the perfect answer.”