THE BATTLE OF KAPYONG: AUSTRALIA’S DECISIVE ROLE IN THE KOREAN WAR

April 1951. After ten months of fighting, the Korean War hung in the balance. A single Australian battalion, backed by Kiwi gunners and American tanks, had dug in on a hilltop overlooking the Kapyong Valley, north of Seoul. Together with a Canadian battalion on a nearby hill, they were all that stood between Mao’s army and the South Korean capital. The heavily out-numbered diggers would hold out and prove to be a decisive factor in turning the tide against the Chinese. Tom Gilling, author of The Battle of Kapyong, is an acclaimed novelist and non-fiction writer. On Tuesday 21 May 2024, Tom Gilling addressed The Sydney Institute to evaluate to action and outcome of the Battle of Kapyong.

THE BATTLE OF KAPYONG: AUSTRALIA’S DECISIVE ROLE IN THE KOREAN WAR

TOM GILLING

When the US journalist and author David Halberstam was researching The Coldest Winter, his monumental book on the Korean War, he visited a library in Florida where he found “eighty-eight books on Vietnam and only four on Korea” – a disparity, he wrote later, that “more or less sums up the war’s fate in American memory”.

Halberstam’s book, which he subtitled “America and the Korean War”, runs to more than 700 pages. Turning to the back, I couldn’t help noticing the 17-page index jumped from “Austin, John” to “Ayers, Eben” without a single reference to Australia’s involvement in the war. But it was not only in America that Australia’s role in the Korean War has been played down. Here in Australia the war began to be forgotten while it was still being fought.

I couldn’t help noticing the 17-page index jumped from “Austin, John” to “Ayers, Eben” without a single reference to Australia’s involvement in the war.

After being wounded in the Korean War, evacuated to Japan and then sent back to rejoin the fight, Signals Sergeant Jack Gallaway returned to Australia in February 1952. The war had been raging for more than 18 months and had more than a year to run. Gallaway recalled “walking into hotels where I met old friends who said, ‘Where have you been?’ And I said, ‘Korea.’ And they said, ‘What the hell were you doing over there?’” Some Korean War veterans remembered being rebuffed by RSL clubs because “that wasn’t a proper war”.

Inevitably overshadowed by the two world wars that preceded it, the Korean War was one of the landmark events of the twentieth century, a product of Cold War machinations whose outcome remains bitterly contested to this day. In January this year, more than 70 years after the war ended, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared South Korea his country’s “primary foe and invariable principal enemy”, telling the Supreme People’s Assembly that North Korea would no longer pursue reconciliation with South Korea and putting an end to the decades-long pursuit of a peaceful unification.

It was Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, who started the war, sending North Korean troops and tanks across the 38^th parallel on 25 June 1950. Within hours it was clear that the badly trained and poorly equipped South Korean army was facing catastrophe. With Russia boycotting the United Nations, North Korea ignored a UN resolution calling for an end to the fighting and the immediate withdrawal of its troops. When the UN called for contributions to an American-led multinational force to repel the communist invaders, Australia was among the first nations to respond.

The Americans were hopelessly unprepared for war. Since 1945, President Harry Truman’s priority had been paying off America’s US$250 billion wartime debt. In five years, he pruned the defence budget from 38 per cent of gross domestic product to less than 5 per cent. In that time, the number of American servicemen and women fell from 12 million to 1.5 million. Hardware was not modernised and munitions were left to run down. The armed forces were left undermanned, undertrained and underequipped. In just a few years they had become a shadow of the fighting machine that had defeated the Japanese in the Pacific and the Nazis in Europe.

In early 1946, Australia sent three battalions – around 10,000 soldiers – to join the US-led occupation force tasked with disarming and demilitarising post-war Japan. Much of the diggers’ time was spent on ceremonial duties and when war broke out in Korea the Australians were nowhere near combat ready. They lacked vital weapons and equipment and were desperately short of transport. During the first Korean winter the diggers were reduced to scrounging warm sleeping bags from dead American soldiers.

Before arriving in Korea, Jack Gallaway – like many of his mates – thought of the war as a sideshow to what seemed like an unavoidable confrontation with the Soviet Union. He was right about Australians going into battle against a communist superpower, but the adversary would be Mao’s China, not Stalin’s Russia.

The Royal Australian Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force both played significant roles in the Korean War, but during the most intense period of the conflict most of the hard fighting was done on the ground by soldiers of the 3^rd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment.

Of the handful of fierce battles fought by 3RAR during the Korean War, none was more crucial to the war’s outcome than the Battle of Kapyong. It was here, in a rugged valley north of Seoul, that 3RAR and a battalion of Canadian infantry, supported by New Zealand artillery and American tanks – perhaps 3,000 men in all – were given the job of halting the Chinese Spring offensive.

For the diggers, it would be the defining battle of the war – the ultimate expression of Australian military skill, determination and courage. That it happened on the eve of Anzac Day only added to its significance. After the Battle of Kapyong, 3RAR would be awarded the rare honour of a Presidential Unit Citation by US President Harry Truman in recognition of its “extraordinary heroism and outstanding performance”. But the battle’s importance went far beyond the bravery and skill of the diggers who fought it.

The seven-kilometre-wide Kapyong Valley was a traditional invasion route for armies marching south towards Seoul. “It would have been difficult for a brigade to hold, which is three battalions,” Gallaway recalled later. “[If] the Chinese had poured through Kapyong … they would have been behind the capital of Seoul … behind all of the major headquarters of the United Nations army. And the result probably would have been … a withdrawal of the United Nations army from Korea.”

Before the battle, 3RAR had been in reserve in a picturesque  part of the Kapyong Valley the Australians called Sherwood Forest, more than 30 kilometres from the front. The diggers were badly in need of a rest. They had spearheaded General MacArthur’s advance up the peninsula and fought as rearguard for the Americans when the UN army was driven back. The 23 April, the battalion’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant Alf Argent, recalled, was a “beautiful warm day with clear blue skies. War seemed a long way off.”

But for the disintegration of the 6^th South Korean Division above them, the diggers would never have been called upon to make a stand at Kapyong. As terrified South Korean soldiers poured south to escape the communist army, the Australians were ordered to occupy high ground overlooking the north-south road. Private Keith Langdon, in a forward foxhole on Hill 504, described seeing “South Korean soldiers, a mob of them, throwing their guns and rifles and even uniforms to buggery”. Pursuing the South Koreans were 10,000 Chinese soldiers belonging to the 60^th Infantry Division.

Two companies, a few hundred men in total, were posted astride the road – Major Ben O’Dowd’s A Company on Hill 504 commanding the road from the east and Captain Darcy Laughlin’s B Company on a ridge dominating it from the west. Two more companies were position further back on Hill 504. Holding the summit of Hill 504 was crucial, since losing it would enable the Chinese to fire down on the Australians occupying its western slope and jeopardise the diggers’ ability to control the road.

While the ground held by B Company, on the western side of the road, was suitable for digging, other areas were too rocky. Some men were able to squeeze into crevices or take cover between rock formations. O’Dowd’s company had to make do with piling up loose stones for protection from enemy fire. The low heather scrub covering the slope was tinder-dry from the bitter Korean winter.

There was little sense of urgency or impending danger among the diggers as they took up their positions on the evening of 23 April. The information they had received from their commanders was that they should “settle in for a quiet night” before either developing defensive positions where they were or moving forward. They had done this many times before without firing a shot. Private John Beresford recalled being told, “There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll be moving first thing in the morning so just dig your pit and have tea and that’ll be it.”

One of those missing from the battalion was Jack Gallaway, who had had a lucky escape after the three-tonne truck he was travelling in broke down. The damaged truck was towed away by an American Sherman tank with a crane on the back. “We tore off down the road … until we came to a bridge that wouldn’t take the weight of a Sherman tank,” Gallaway recalled. “The Sherman didn’t hesitate; he went straight down over the side of the road …  with the [truck] trailing behind him on its side and all of us out on the deck.” When the truck overturned, Gallaway was crushed under a heap of signal wire, suffering suffered serious damage to his back. Evacuated to a Swedish hospital in Korea, and then to a British hospital in Japan, he would miss the Battle of Kapyong – but not its aftermath.

As darkness fell on the night of 23 April, the road was crowded with fleeing South Korean troops, refugees and a growing number of Chinese infiltrators, whose aim was to isolate the diggers on the western side of the road from the three companies on Hill 504 before circling behind to attack the battalion HQ area. The sight of a South Korean division in headlong retreat, casting off brand new American weapons, clothing and equipment as it went, was nothing new to the diggers: they had seen the same thing happen on New Year’s Day in response to an earlier Chinese offensive.

Following a well-practised routine, the Australians checked their weapons, laid out spare ammunition and grenades, and waited. Before long, a full moon rose in the sky, flooding the valley with white light that enabled the diggers to see for hundreds of metres. At around 9.30 p.m. the Chinese launched their first attack against five American tanks on the valley floor. Despite the lack of infantry protection, the tanks beat off their attackers before withdrawing to prearranged positions in front of Laughlin’s company.

By now heavy fighting had broken out in the battalion HQ area. This coincided with a second and much more determined Chinese attack against the American tanks. Once again, tank commanders had to direct fire from open hatches, with their heads and upper bodies exposed to sniper fire. Within minutes the commander of each tank was hit by rifle fire; the platoon leader was shot between the eyes and killed. The only way to get the Chinese infantry off the tanks was for the tanks to close their hatches and hose each other with machine-gun fire. An initial assault on Laughlin’s position was driven off with heavy losses to the enemy, the diggers able to pick off targets easily in the bright moonlight.

These encounters were clearly the prelude for a full-scale attack aimed at throwing the Australians off the high ground on both sides of the road. Failure to achieve this before daylight would leave the Chinese troops on the valley floor exposed not only to a deadly barrage by US tanks and artillery, Australian mortars and Kiwi gunners, but also to bomb, rocket and napalm attack from the air.

The attack on O’Dowd’s company followed a pattern the Australians recognised all too well after their ten months in Korea: a flurry of bugles and whistles as enemy commanders assembled and organised their men, followed by silence as the Chinese soldiers crept up the hill in their noiseless rubber shoes; the clatter of grenades hitting the rocky ground before exploding, and finally the infantry assault as Chinese soldiers rose up in the moonlight, machine guns blazing.

A single-shot rifle was not much use in close-range fighting like this, and the diggers’ preferred weapon was the Australian-made Owen submachine gun. Though sturdy and reliable, the Owen fired low-velocity 9-millimetre bullets that did not always penetrate the thickly padded uniforms worn by the Chinese. After each attack wounded diggers were removed to the reverse slope, where the medic, Corporal Nobby Clark, and his stretcher-bearers did what they could for them, while fit men rushed to occupy the vacant weapon pits. Casualties did not seem to concern the Chinese, who surged forward over the bodies of their own dead and wounded.

A steady Chinese mortar barrage of both high explosive and incendiary bombs continued throughout the night, the latter setting fire to the dry heather. The combination of thick smoke, burning heather and exploding ammunition caused further misery for the wounded Australian soldiers lying out in the open.

The next attack against Laughlin’s company came at 3.30 am, when Chinese soldiers struck from three sides. Despite the presence of two Sherman tanks, the Chinese succeeded in penetrating the company’s perimeter and attacking the company headquarters with rifle and machine-gun fire before being driven off with the loss of as many as half their strength killed.

O’Dowd’s position on the eastern side of the road remained precarious. His company suffered 50 casualties that night holding its ground against wave after wave of Chinese attackers. As he did the rounds of the hill, Corporal Pat Knowles was “amazed at the drag marks, blood, cotton wool and bandages where the Chinese had dragged their dead and wounded away during the night”.

With PRC troops infiltrating behind his position, O’Dowd was unable to evacuate his casualties. The medics could only treat wounded men with what they carried in their bags. “[T]hey had nothing to relieve pain, no morphia, no effective means for averting shock except for a few blankets and sleeping bags,” O’Dowd recalled. Most of the wounded had to lie all night on the frozen hillside without shelter. Dressings for wounds ran out and there was no water. While lying there, some of the injured men were burnt by fires started by Chinese incendiary rounds. O’Dowd was not alone in believing that if it had been possible to keep the wounded warm and treat them for shock and pain, some who died might have survived.

By daylight it was clear that the Chinese had failed in their efforts to push the Australians off the ridge. But O’Dowd knew that if the diggers could be dislodged from the summit of Hill 504, his own depleted troops would be unable to hold. This time the Chinese would not wait for darkness. Every digger on that hill knew what was coming. “It was my 24^th birthday on the 24 April, which was the second day of Kapyong, and I didn’t think I would see another one,” Sergeant Ron Perkins recalled.

At around 7 am, the Chinese launched their first assault against the summit. The same pattern of attack was repeated by the Chinese every 30 minutes until 10.30 am, each assault beaten off with machine-gun fire and grenades at heavy cost to the enemy.

With dozens of wounded soldiers awaiting evacuation, 3RAR’s New Zealand-born commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Ferguson, called the medic, Captain Don Beard. “He said, ‘I’ve arranged with an American tank regiment for a squadron of tanks. We’ll go up there with ammunition and see if we can get the casualties out. Will you come with me?’” Beard recalled. “I didn’t want to go because I had only just got out of the battle. However, of course I said, ‘Yes, sir.’”

As soon as they spotted the tanks moving up the valley, the Chinese started firing. Inside the tanks, Ferguson and Beard listened to the clatter of bullets striking the turret as they trundled towards the battalion’s position. But on the return trip a remarkable thing happened: the Chinese guns fell silent. The tanks made several trips with wounded diggers strapped to their sides, and each time the Chinese held their fire.

O’Dowd’s men had been hoping the tanks would bring grenades and ammunition for their Owen submachine guns; what they received instead was high-velocity ammunition for the heavier Vickers machine guns, which soon stripped the barrels of their rifles and Bren guns. As for food, water and medical supplies, the diggers on the hill would have to do without.

Only the promised arrival of the 5^th US Cavalry Regiment convinced O’Dowd that his men could hang on, but by early afternoon on 24 April news reached Brigade HQ that the Americans would not be coming after all. The diggers had been abandoned to their fate. Convinced that 3RAR would not be able to survive another night of Chinese attacks, the commander of the 27^th British Commonwealth Brigade, Brigadier Brian Burke, decided to withdraw the Australian battalion. Aware that he was responsible to the Australian Government for the safety of its battalion, Burke knew that “searching questions” would be asked if the only Australian ground force in Korea were wiped out at Kapyong.

“Sometime after midday,” Ben O’Dowd recalled, “the commanding officer came on the air to advise me that there was no relief coming our way and I had approval to take a shot at getting the rifle companies out.”

While Norm Gravener’s D Company clung to its position on the summit, O’Dowd got to work planning a fighting withdrawal along a route that – for all he knew – might already have been blocked by the Chinese. Timing was critical. The enemy had had all day to observe the battalion’s actions and O’Dowd considered it an “absolute certainty” that they would renew their assault after dark.

The likelihood of being pursued along the ridge by the Chinese led O’Dowd to adopt a leapfrog-style withdrawal, in which one company stood its ground while another prepared to fall back and the third moved. New Zealand gunners were to keep the Chinese at bay with a barrage of smoke and high explosive. Some of the diggers were reluctant to abandon their positions. A few members of D Company felt they were holding on alright and demanded to know why they were being ordered to pull out. But with ammunition running short, staying on was impossible.

Just before 4 pm, O’Dowd told B Company to begin its withdrawal. The other companies were waiting for the Kiwi gunners to open up. Four o’clock came and went with no guns firing: the wind had changed direction, meaning the smoke shells had to land on a different spot to be effective. Unwilling to wait while the New Zealanders re-targeted their guns, O’Dowd instructed Reg Saunders’ C Company to get moving.

Next to go was A Company, led by O’Dowd’s second-in-command, Captain Bob Murdoch. As Murdoch prepared to move out, a platoon of American tanks lurched into position in the valley and started firing at the Chinese across the road. Shortly afterwards, the New Zealanders began their barrage, some shells landing dangerously close to the American tanks and forcing at least one to back off.

With C Company and A Company positioned behind D Company to discourage follow-up by the enemy, Gravener was ordered to pull out. The Chinese, however, had chosen this moment to launch another attack on the summit, making it too risky for D Company to break contact. After beating off the attack, Gravener began thinning out his troops, helped by accurate fire from the New Zealanders, whose shells at times exploded no more than 150 metres forward of the diggers. According to Gravener’s battle report, this ferocious barrage “completely frustrated [enemy] attempts to follow-up further”, enabling D Company to get away.

“As [the Chinese] . . . started to stream down the hill, the New Zealand artillery got the lot of them,” Private Ron Dunque recalled. “Bang, bang, bang. I saw the whole front row . . . disappear.” By 11.30 pm, the withdrawal – described in the official history as “difficult and brilliantly executed” – was complete at a cost of just one man captured. Australian casualties for the two-day battle were 32 men killed and 59 wounded. The text of the Presidential Unit Citation made clear the significance of 3RAR’s achievement: “The seriousness of the breakthrough on the central front,” it said, “had been changed from defeat to victory by the gallant stand of these heroic and courageous soldiers.”

With the Australians gone, it was the turn of the 2^nd Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, four kilometres to the west on Hill 677, to face the advancing Chinese. Shortly after midnight on 25 April, the Chinese attacked the battalion’s left flank. Like the diggers the previous day, the Canadians were isolated and exposed to enemy attack from all sides. In danger of being overrun, the Canadians had no choice but to call down artillery fire on their own position. This action, together with a counterattack by American tanks, eventually caused the Chinese attack to falter and enabled the Canadians to hold on.

The next day, the US 5^th Cavalry Regiment made its belated counterattack, but the Americans were driven back. It would be several weeks before United Nations forces were back in control of the Kapyong Valley. Between them, 3RAR and the Canadians had fought an entire enemy division to a standstill, buying time for General Van Fleet to reorganise his army and halt the Chinese advance north of Seoul, at what became known as the “No-name Line”.

A nearly simultaneous battle between the advancing Chinese and the British 29^th Brigade demonstrated what might have happened to the diggers if the battle had played out differently. Like Brigadier Burke at Kapyong, the commander of the British 29^th Brigade had been assigned a sector too broad to cover with the manpower he had available. The Chinese attacked across the Imjin River around midnight on 22 April, exploiting a gap between the 1^st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment and the 1^st Battalion of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers.

Over two days and three nights, the encircled and outnumbered Gloucesters fought off waves of Chinese attackers. Efforts to relieve them failed. When it proved impossible to resupply the Gloucesters and evacuate their wounded by air, they were given permission to break out if they could. Just 39 soldiers rejoined the brigade; the rest were either killed or captured. The battalion’s total casualties were more than 600. The Gloucesters’ doomed but courageous stand was credited with enabling the rest of the 29^th Brigade to make an orderly withdrawal to a new line above Seoul. By then, the Chinese spring offensive had stalled and the capital was safe.

Jack Gallaway rejoined 3RAR in time to bury the dead at Kapyong. After the war he wrote a history of the battalion’s Korean campaign. Although he had missed the battle, Gallaway knew how it had been fought: “It wasn’t a battle where influence could have been brought to bear by great tactics or by brilliant officers,” he said years later. “It was simply a matter of digging in, holding on by your teeth and fighting literally to the last man and the last round. And that’s what they did.”

After the Battle of Kapyong the Korean War lapsed into stalemate. While the front lines remained relatively stable during the final two years of the war, Australian soldiers continued to fight and die. In October 1951, 3RAR lost twenty men killed and 89 wounded at the Battle of Maryang San, part of a United Nations offensive against a Chinese salient. Over five days of heavy fighting, the diggers pushed a larger enemy force from a strongly held position on Hill 317. After the Australians were withdrawn, the Chinese retook the hill and kept it for the remainder of the war.

The killing stopped when the armistice came into effect at 10 pm on 27 July 1953, but the war did not end. It left behind a legacy of mutual antipathy, distrust and fear between North Korea and South Korea, marked by periodic border skirmishes, kidnappings, espionage and other provocations. The number of military incidents across the peninsula jumped from 42 in 1965 to nearly 300 in the first half of 1967. In January 1968, with war raging in Vietnam, 31 North Korean special forces soldiers infiltrated the South with orders to kill the South Korean president. The plot was uncovered and all but two members of the assassination squad either committed suicide or were killed.

After one of the North Koreans surrendered, he was deemed a defector by Pyongyang and his parents and siblings were executed. In the same month as the botched assassination raid, an American spy ship, the Pueblo, was attacked and boarded off the North Korean coast. The crew were captured and held in North Korean prison camps for nearly a year, where they were subjected to various kinds of torture and abuse before being released. Two decades later, North Korean agents detonated a bomb aboard a civilian airliner bound for Seoul, killing more than 100 passengers and crew, most of them South Korean. The motive for the bombing was allegedly to discourage visitors from attending the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.

In 2010 a South Korean naval ship was sunk by a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine. More recently, after years of diplomacy aimed at reducing tensions on the peninsula, the outlaw regime in Pyongyang revived its nuclear and ballistic missile program, ramping up its anti-Western rhetoric and demolishing the inter-Korean liaison office in the border town of Kaesong.

As the 70^th anniversary of the armistice approached in July 2023, a senior UN official lamented the fact that the tensions left by the Korean War “persist and remain unresolved, even after seven decades”. During the previous eighteen months, North Korea had test-fired 90 ballistic missiles, making a mockery of a UN resolution prohibiting it from conducting any launches using ballistic-missile technology. Russia and China, the regime’s long-term friends on the Security Council, ensured there were no repercussions. Since then, the bellicose rhetoric from Pyongyang has escalated still further. Kim Jong Un’s recent assertion of perpetual enmity with South Korea was a stark reminder that while North Korea signed an armistice with its neighbour, it has never made peace, which now seems further away than ever.

Anna Fifield, Asia-Pacific editor at the Washington Post and author of The Great Successor: The Secret Rise and Rule of Kim Jong Un, believes we should all be concerned by the legacy of an unfinished war that has led to the creation of an impoverished totalitarian state with a credible nuclear weapons program. While the two Koreas have existed in an easy standoff for the past 70 years, Fifield argues that Kim Jong Un’s latest comments are “more than the usual bluster. [His] calculations seem to have changed and he’s taken a whole bunch of unprecedented steps – not just changing the constitution but destroying monuments to unification and testing new nuclear-capable weapons.”

With the US distracted by the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts, Fifield warns that Kim Jong Un could sense an opportunity to launch some kind of attack. “That might be shelling outer South Korean islands, as his military has done before, or something more provocative,” she says. “He appears to almost be girding for a fight.”

So where does that leave Australia?

Fifield believes that the instability caused to our region by the unfinished Korean War, and the prospect for conflict, intentional or otherwise, remains tangible and that this could have real economic and security implications for Australia. “If South Korea, a big economy and major trading partner, is embroiled in a war, that will affect our trade routes and supply chains,” she argues. “Australia, as a security partner of both the United States and South Korea, could once again be called to fight on the Korean Peninsula. And as a country that believes in democracy, Australia has an interest in defending a democratic nation against an authoritarian one – just as it’s doing in Ukraine against Russia.”

If that were ever to happen, Australia’s political and military leaders would be well advised to look to some of the lessons of the so-called “forgotten war” we took part in more than seven decades ago.