Kapyong: The Forgotten Battle of the Forgotten War – Cameron Forbes

Cameron Forbes was born in Rockhampton, Queensland. He has been foreign editor of The Age, European and Asia correspondent for The Age and Washington correspondent for The Australian. He has reported wars and civil wars in the Middle East, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Bougainville and is the author of The Korean War and Hellfire. On Wednesday 20 April,2011, Cameron Forbes joined documentary film maker John Lewis to discuss the Battle of Kapyong during the Korean War.

KAPYONG: THE FORGOTTEN BATTLE OF THE FORGOTTEN WAR (KOREA)

 

CAMERON FORBES

Welcome to the Battle of Kapyong. This evening I will talk about the battle and of the difficulties the Australians faced in the broader war. My friend John Lewis will talk about the challenge and dilemmas in turning the history of Kapyong into a documentary.

On this Sunday, 60 years ago, Reg Saunders, the first Aboriginal commissioned officer in the Australian Army, led his company of Diggers down from a bloody Korean battlefield. “At last,” Saunders later wrote, “I felt like an Anzac and I imagine there were 600 others like me”. The 3rd Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment, was in gallant retreat. It had played its part magnificently in the Battle of Kapyong. It had made its sacrifices: 32 Diggers were dead. On a hill across the Kapyong Valley, the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Light Canadian Infantry, was about to take up its role in defying a massive Chinese onslaught. The Australians and Canadians fought and survived with the vital support of the 25-pounders of the New Zealand 16th Field Regiment. Once a Canadian platoon commander, Lieutenant Mike Levy, even called down a storm of friendly fire on his own position as Chinese troops overran it. It was 24 April 1951. For eight months war had raged over much of the Korean Peninsula. Unhappy Korea had been cut in half by America and the Soviet Union at the end of World War II.

After a shock invasion on 25 June 1950, North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung came close to uniting Korea as a communist nation. The fighting did not stop until 27 July 1953, ending in stalemate, more or less where it had started along the 38th parallel. The country was in ruins, soaked with the blood of perhaps four million soldiers and civilians; the world had looked at the spectre of World War III and possibility that the doomsday weapon, the atomic bomb, might be used many times. Divided Korea would become, and still remains, a nuclear flashpoint. Yet the Korean War was relegated in twentieth century history, remembered only as the forgotten war.

After World War II, the victorious allies split to become bitter ideological enemies. The Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin declared that there was no possibility of a peaceful international order: either communism or capitalism would triumph. Winston Churchill, crafting another of his marvellous phrases, “the Iron Curtin”, urged America to lead the democratic world and accept “an awe-inspiring accountability to the future”. The Cold War had been joined.

Korea was the Cold War’s hot war. Australia would rush to be there, under United Nations auspices, but importantly, under American leadership. Korea was the prototype for Australian involvements in coalitions of the willing, the path into Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the early months of the war, the Australians had fought hard, often leading in advances and guarding the rear in retreats. On the eve of the Battle of Kapyong, 3RAR was in reserve 60 kilometres north-east of South Korea’s capital Seoul. It was a mild early spring. The blankets of snow had melted, the dwarf oaks were greening and wild azaleas speckled the hillsides. The Diggers called the pleasant place Sherwood Forest.

Some of them climbed up to harvest the flowers. They were expecting special guests on Anzac Day. They wove the azaleas into wreaths. They laid on extra beer. The Turks were coming. On 25 April, the sacred Australian day, the old enemy from Gallipoli would take part in a remembrance ceremony and then, as allies in a new war, celebrate what had become a warm friendship.

Five months before, Harry Gordon, a young war correspondent, had been with 3RAR at the village of Kunu-ri, deep in North Korea. Gripped by winter, it was a forlorn place of stick-and-mud huts in the shadow of stark mountains. Diggers were scrounging anything to burn – railway sleepers, telephone poles, rice sheaves. Gordon walked through a railway tunnel and saw a group of Turks on top of an embankment. A figure among them called out in that unmistakeable Australian accent: “Come and join us, mate. We’re all flamin’ Anzacs up here.” With the help of a Turkish lieutenant who had a smattering of English, field ambulance man Norm O’Neill had been telling the Turkish soldiers that his father had been a machine-gunner at Gallipoli.

Indeed many of both the Australians and Turks at Kunu-ri were sons of Gallipoli. But Turks in Korea?

All the giants involved in the Korean War – the Soviet Union, China and the United States – had their own agendas. So did the smaller nations which followed America– a polyglot group, including, for instance, Columbia and Ethiopia. Both Australia and Turkey were fighting aggression but both wanted a security umbrella. Threatened by an expansionist Soviet empire, Turkey, which had remained neutral in World War II, sought membership of NATO. Australia, feeling isolated in its region and fearing a resurgent Japan, wanted an American alliance.  Turkey got what it wanted. A Turkish newspaper wrote: “There has been a great and honourable share of the blood of our Korean heroes in the signatories’ ink used … for the invitation extended to Turkey for her entry into the Atlantic community”.

Australia got what it wanted. In February 1951, when the draft of the ANZUS Treaty was initialled, Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who had been a doubter about the alliance, toasted Minister for External Affairs, Percy Spender, the prime mover, in his best cognac. Menzies realised that in the security treaty he also had a powerful political weapon.

There was Digger blood in the ink too. In the Korean War, 340 Australians would die.

First into action were the pilots of the RAAF 77 Squadron, possibly a little shaky at the controls of their Mustangs as they had just had their sayonara party to celebrate their withdrawal from the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan. The squadron later fought mismatched battles with MiG-15s. It lost 41 men. 3RAR was also under notice to return to Australia from its pampered Japanese existence.

When the Diggers landed in September 1950, some were concerned that they would not get to fire a shot. America’s imperious General Douglas MacArthur, hero of the Pacific War, waving away the doubts of the Joint Chiefs and naval commanders – of anyone who dared question him – had turned the war around with a daring invasion of Seoul’s port, Inchon, halfway up the peninsula, to cut North Korea’s extended supply line. So far so good. But MacArthur over-reached, driving the UN troops to the border between North Korea and China, this time waving away warnings from the Chinese that they would intervene if foreign troops came too close.

MacArthur assured President Harry Truman at a conference on Wake Island in October 1950 that China would not dare and, if it did, the Chinese army would be slaughtered. As Truman smiled at this assessment, 300,000 battle-hardened Chinese troops were poised in the mountain spine of North Korea. The UN forces were thrown back. For America, it was humiliation and the longest retreat in its military history. An Australian sergeant, Jack Gallaway, was on the last vehicle to cross the Han River as Seoul was again abandoned to the communists. When 3RAR was resting in Sherwood Forest in April 1951, it was a different war again.

Truman had sacked MacArthur for insubordination. General Mathew Ridgway had reshaped the American army. Some of the problems of shoddy leadership and shabby communications between the Americans and the other forces had been overcome. The problem of the different military cultures of giant America and it small allies remained. There was also, throughout the war, the problem of intelligence gathering, particularly in the MacArthur period when his acolytes mostly told him what he wanted to here. Collection and dissemination was faulty still when the Australians were resting in Sherwood Forest.

Korea is crumpled into mountains and hills, 70 per cent of it. The Kapyong River has cut a valley which is one of the traditional invasion routes to Seoul to the south-west. In April 1951, it was guarded by the Republic of Korea 6th Division. As a precaution, the Australians and Canadians were assigned blocking positions on hills further down, militarily unsatisfactory positions.

The battalions were too far apart and the Australians were thinly spread, B Company on a knoll on one side of the valley road and A and D companies even more thinly-stretched on the other side on ridge lines running to the summit of Hill 504.

As dusk was falling on 23 April the Australians looked up the valley and saw the harbingers of an assault, refugees fleeing, carrying what little they could. Soon there were South Korean soldiers crashing through the civilians, moaning and throwing away their weapons. And then a Chinese division, perhaps 10,000 men, came sweeping down on not much more than 1000 Australians and Canadians. The Chinese commander, General Pen Dehaui, had launched his Fifth Offensive.

It was a long and desperate night, short lulls broken by the bugles and whistles of the Chinese as they prepared mass attacks. Ben O’Dowd, commander of A Company, recalled: “When the bugles and whistles stopped we knew they were on their way. Some of the soldiers did not carry weapons – just bucketfuls of grenades.” Ground was lost. Men were killed. Men were wounded. Ammunition food and water was running out. There was, as always, the fog of war.

B Company was withdrawn from its knoll strongpoint on the morning of 24 April. They had held it without loss during the night and counted 173 Chinese dead in front of their positions. It is unclear who ordered the pull-back, but a B company platoon was told to retake the knoll. In bayonet charges, the men cleared out Chinese outposts, killing 78 Chinese but at the cost of three men. Attacking the knoll itself would have been too bloody.

When a promised reinforcement by the American 5th Cavalry failed to materialise, 3RAR was told to withdraw. In the absence of the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Ferguson, O’Dowd, senior rifle company commander, took charge.

D Company, on the crown of Hill 504, having suffered under furious Chinese attacks, suffered one last, sad blow. Keith Langdon, in a forward foxhole, looked up and said: “You beauty”. He saw Four American Corsairs overhead. One peeled off. “The mug’s coming in the wrong way,” he shouted. The silver napalm canister tumbled down.

Liquid fire flowed over the Australians. As the smoke drifted away, medic Nugget Dunque, wounded earlier in the day and again by exploding grenades, was approached by “the most appalling apparition, a man with no flesh – his hands were dripping – completely naked … I didn’t know who he was. He looked at me and said: ‘Jesus, Nugget, you’re having a bad day’.”

O’Dowd got the Diggers and their wounded out safely, through dark and danger, waiting for bugles and whistles.

There were no Anzac Day celebrations in Sherwood Forest. The wreaths withered; 3RAR buried its dead. The Diggers at Kapyong were the heirs of the Anzacs. In Afghanistan, Australian heirs of Kapyong are now dying. There is still a blood price to the alliance that was shaped in Korea.