Colonel Peter Ormrod MC was interviewed by the Imperial War Museum. We are very greatly indebted to him and to Clare Cooke, who transcribed the tapes, for this compelling description of an often overlooked and very bloody war.
HOW DID YOU COME TO GO TO KOREA?
I was Adjutant of the Regiment when we moved down to Tidworth about three months before going to Korea. I started to hand over my duties and though I was not to be Adjutant in Korea I was of course involved with the preparation. The 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, now known as the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars after they amalgamated with the 4th Hussars, were at Tidworth when suddenly we were instructed to mobilise.
In a period of about two or three weeks Reservists were called up and the Regiment was brought up to strength in both officers and men; some of our men and officers were rejected on medical grounds and they had to be replaced. We left the UK with our tanks in merchant ships, ourselves on the troopship Empire Fowey, and after six weeks we arrived at Pusan the port in the South of Korea.
WHAT KIND OF EQUIPMENT DID YOU TAKE WITH YOU?
We had Centurion tanks plus a number of Cromwells which were lightly armoured and light gunned reconnaissance tanks left over from the war, but the Centurions were brand new and had never been used on active service before. The Cromwell was unsuited for the terrain, it tended to cast tracks and unfortunately, it was never properly tested because of what happened to the whole of the Reconnaissance Troop. At first, we thought the Centurions were going to be very difficult to use but once our drivers and commanders had learnt how to overcome the paddy fields and the steep hillsides they were magnificent at their cross-country role. However, it really did depend not so much on the tank but on the training and experience of the drivers and the commanders.
WHAT DID THE MEN THINK ABOUT GOING TO KOREA?
Everyone was very excited. Many of the men had joined since the war – young officers and soldiers are training for war and therefore when one goes to war one is excited about it, but the reservists weren’t too keen and that showed up after about six or nine months when the began to hope they could find a soft job somewhere, especially if they were married with children. Initially, however, they were marvellous because it was only five or six years since they had been in the war and they had come back full of experience. I think this was the main strength of the Regiment when we started.
HOW MUCH ABOUT KOREA HAD YOU KNOWN BEFORE YOU WENT?
Nothing at all, but we sent forward a couple of officers who flew out (in those days aeroplanes were very rare). One of them. Captain Neil Whitfield (who had been a troop leader with the Irish Guards in NW Europe) met us on the boat at Singapore and gave lectures on what we were to expect. We just could not believe what he was talking about: the height of the hill’s steepness of the slopes, the paddy fields – it all sounded incomprehensible until we got there.
I would describe Korea as being very like Snowdonia except that after we had taken a ridge of hills, there was a never-ending ridge of hills; not very high mountains but steep sides, up to 2,000 feet above sea level and covered with thick scrub. The people were very poor and lived in very modest huts.
WHEN DID YOU ARRIVE IN PUSAN?
We arrived in November 1950 and stayed unloading and assembling our tanks because everything was coming off the merchant ships. We didn’t have to go into action immediately because the Americans were driving the enemy back at that moment, but after a short, while we put one squadron of tanks and Regimental headquarters onto flat railway wagons and they were carried along the only line, which was single track, all the way up to northern Korea and past the capital of North Korea, very nearly up to the Chinese frontier where they were unloaded and prepared to defend Korea against what was by then the advancing Chinese Army.
WHAT WERE YOUR FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE COUNTRY?
I had never been out in the Far East before, it was very very poor, very dirty and very backward. We didn’t know the language, we couldn’t speak to anybody, people were very shaken up by the fighting which had already gone on. Pusan had nearly been captured in the summer and war rushed to and fro, sometimes one end of Korea sometimes the other, and each time villages got burnt and the people suffered. That was my impression. “was the country worth fighting for”? the ordinary soldier began to ask himself very soon but, if you are a regular soldier, you fight wherever you are sent and you don’t question that.
The soldiers in the British Army do what they are told to do, even if they are a type of mercenary. We were under the United Nations under American command, the 29th Brigade which was an infantry brigade with one regiment of tanks, three battalions of infantry and a regiment of guns and then a few supporting troops. There was another English Brigade out there but it was on another part of the front and we never saw them. I think it was the 28th Brigade. I believe they were a very fine Brigade, mostly made up of troops that had been drawn out of Hong Kong.
DID THE FACT THAT YOU WERE UNDER UN COLOURS MAKE A GREAT DEAL OF DIFFERENCE TO YOU?
It made us even more proud of the fact that we were British and we were fighting alongside Belgian, French, Turkish, American and Puerto Rican and, of course, South Korean troops. There were other countries out there but I forget who they all were. When we formed the famous Commonwealth Division after the Battle of Imjin we had a Brigade of Canadians, a Battalion of Australians a Regiment of Artillery from New Zealand, and the Indian Medical Company. There was quite a competitive feeling between the various countries. We were all very friendly towards each other but we wanted to make sure that we didn’t show off badly in comparison with others.
YOU TALKED ABOUT THE AMERICANS HAVING ADVANCED VERY QUICKLY TO THE NORTH?
I don’t think it was too fast but the Americans tend to move fast in every direction and this is their trouble. They weren’t slow-moving stoic sort of people like the British Army who, when they take something try to hang on to it. They seem to be just as willing to go back as to go forward and I remember often in retreat some infantry officer would come up to me and say “well let’s go let’s go” and they would get in their trucks and might go twenty or thirty miles back before anyone could stop them. The British did not do that and later on in the winter, which I will mention, we stopped the retreat because we just couldn’t see why we were retreating. We advanced up to the north of Pyongyang; the trains were then all filled with refugees and went away so we had to retreat on our tracks.
The trouble was if a tank broke down mechanically or threw a track, there were no spare; we just had to blow it up. I was not there but was fully aware of what was going on we only had one squadron forward at a time because of the road connections and the supply situation. This squadron came back, it did a certain amount of fighting commanded by Major de Clermont and it didn’t suffer any casualties in personnel. We eventually retreated to a position around the capital Seoul and spent Christmas there. Everything was quiet, after Christmas, the Chinese wanted to capture Seoul and on the last day of December came news that the South Koreans were being attacked in strength across the Imjin.
Now we all know about the Imjin being the barrier between the North and South and to our front was a rather loose mobile force of the South Korean Army. These weren’t up to much morale nor training but they were pushed out in front and lived in the villages and kept contact with the Chinese. The Chinese system was to gather themselves together and when they were ready to advance, they advanced in great weight of numbers straight forward against their enemy with no particular finesse but just great numbers of people welling out over the countryside.
On New Year’s night, they came up against the British force in the dark and pushed us back. At that moment there was just the Royal Ulster Rifles and Northumberland Fusiliers defending the front in front of Seoul; the Chinese pushed these two Battalions back in night fighting and our Reconnaissance Troop of nine tanks who were with them were all captured. It was frozen ground and the tanks slid about on the roads and off the roads into ditches, they were all captured or killed and I don’t think a Single officer or man survived that troop, certainly, none of the officers survived. It was known as Cooper Force because it was commanded by Captain Donald Astley-Cooper. We knew he was killed because his body was found later. Lieut Alexander a Troop Leader, was killed and his body was found. Another officer Lieutenant Probyn was never found which was sad, his grandfather had founded Probyn’s Horse an Indian Cavalry Regiment and his father had had a distinguished career in the last war in Probyn’s Horse.
(Please allow a few moments for the slideshow to start)
WHERE WERE YOU PERSONALLY WHEN THIS HAPPENED?
I was behind the river that runs through the middle of Seoul and ‘C’ Squadron was in reserve at a town called Yong Don Po. The first we heard about this disaster was when Colonel Jumbo Phillips, the Commanding Officer, arrived. He was very shaken and upset about the loss of his troop. That was New Year’s Day 1951 and we then withdrew behind the line of the river Han at Seoul and held that for a very brief while. I think we could have held it quite easily but the Americans were in a flap and they started pulling back in various places. No sooner had one unit stopped and taken up a defensive position than a unit on the flank would suddenly move away for no real reason.
Our communications with the Americans weren’t very good and maybe they were ordered back, but we never quite understood their thinking. We were the armoured regiment of 29 Brigade we came under their command and did what we were told to do. We couldn’t stay behind because we would have been surrounded by the Chinese so we pulled back about forty miles south of Seoul; it was very tragic seeing all the refugees coming through in thousands four or five people wide on the road just marching along in great column carrying their baggage and crowding onto any train that went past.
We found that one of the railway bridges had weakened so we couldn’t evacuate tanks by train and we had to say to the Brigadier “well, if we have to go back any further we may have to blow up all our tanks, or we must try and go to the sea in case a ship can come and take us off”. I think he said to the Americans “there’s no point going back any further we are not being pressed the enemy are not in close touch with our patrols, why are we going back?” At any rate 29 Brigade stood still, I believe the 28 Brigade did the same about thirty or forty miles inland, and really the two British Brigades held the front for a least six weeks under appalling weather conditions of cold and snow.
The clothing we had was ordinary winter clothing that we would have worn at Tidworth plus a string vest each, one extra jersey and an extra pair of woollen gloves. It was as cold that everything froze except for whisky and gin and we hadn’t got any of that, beer froze and cracked the bottles, eggs were solid frozen in the morning and one didn’t know whether to peel the egg and then fry it or whether to soften it up first and then break the egg, If water was poured on the ground it froze on touching the ground.
WERE THERE FROSTBITE PROBLEMS?
Anybody who lost their gloves, which could happen, was more or less bound to get frostbite and it was unpleasant if one touched the side of the tank: the skin froze to the side of the tank and the only way to get a man clear was to get hot water and pour it against his hand so that his hand came away from the tank. Most of us were under thirty-five and withstood the cold very well, but some men and officers in the Brigade who were older suffered. Thirty-five is a crucial age for the Army and this was proved in Korea.
CAN YOU DESCRIBE IN DETAIL WHAT YOU DID IN ACTION?
The weather got a little warmer and we started to advance; we were pushed out on the flank that’s inland on our right flank, and we had one or two battles. At that time the tanks couldn’t get off the roads much as they could not get on to frozen paddy fields. The steel tracks slid about on the frozen ground and we couldn’t do a lot with them but we had magnificent guns and used these very effectively to support the infantry.
At that stage we became strictly infantry support tanks, the infantry fought up the hills and we supported them. We had no means of having an OP like the gunner that was with the forward tanks to direct fire so we started to put out our own armoured OP. These were people on foot and I was the one for ‘C’ Squadron, together with a man who carried a wireless set and another who could operate it. We attacked one hill with the Glosters called 352 and I found myself and my team in front of the infantry for quite a long period of time, which I will describe.
As far as I was concerned we started up the hill behind the leading Company up a track which the villagers had used to go to the top of the hill but the enemy realised this was virtually the only track up through the scrub and defended it stoutly. We started getting casualties in this leading Company, chiefly because the enemy threw grenades down on top of us and each time someone was wounded there were four very ready volunteers to carry him down the hill again. In the end, I remember the Company Commander said to me that half his company had disappeared. I said, “I know where, I’ve seen them go past me down the hill carrying their comrades”. “You must stop that and leave the wounded to be picked up later”.
However, he was relieved by another Company but in the confusion, the other Company took up defensive positions below where I was hiding behind the rocks so I decided that what they needed was tank support. My two men and I moved out to a flank about fifty or sixty yards we had orange recognition panels for aircraft and we put these on the rocks so the tank commanders could see them. I could direct and say “one hundred yards to the left of the orange panel”, or “one hundred yards above me”. In that way, we were able to support the infantry who were much encouraged we were able to fire both machine guns and heavy tank guns. It would be no lie to say the tanks were firing within twenty yards of our positions thanks to these coloured panels and thanks to my being able to speak to them on the wireless. We all got to the top of the hill urged on by Colonel Carne, the Commanding Officer of the Glosters who had come up to give his lot a bit of a shove and consolidation. As so frequently happened we were overlooked by another hill, and we were getting a lot of enemy shell fire down upon us.
I remember we were hiding in a hollow in the ground and I said to my wireless operator “Corporal I think this is rather a poor hole let’s go to one I can see over there”. He replied “oh no, you know that saying about ‘this hole’s better than the next one”‘. However, we moved and the gunner op who didn’t feel very happy moved into my hole. A moment later a shell landed on him and that was the end of him and his team. It was quite sharp up on top of that hill. Eventually, by bringing fire down on all the other ridges that were overlooking our position, the Chinese decided they had had enough and withdrew and we won the day.
WHAT WAS THE DATE OF THAT ACTION, AND AT SEOUL?
February 1951. I was the 2 i/c in a Squadron called ‘C’ Squadron commanded by Major Henry Huth who was a very experienced Irish officer from the last war. The Regiment was Irish and about half the men and half the officers were from Southern Ireland in those days. We went back onto the main road, advanced up to Seoul where we found the South Koreans were holding the line of the River Han. We were on one side, the enemy on the other, and I think the town we were firing from was Yong Don Po. We were fired on by our own Cromwell tanks that had been taken over by the enemy and were being used against us from dug-in positions. Knowing their range we retreated out of the range of their guns. We got our tanks into position and knocked out our own Cromwell tanks quite decisively so that they all caught fire in turn.
Shortly after this skirmish, the Americans crossed the river and retook Seoul. I remember going forward to the British Embassy the day after they took it, and finding it was unharmed. The Embassy was a typical old Victorian house with a large garden rather like an old vicarage, and all the furniture inside was unharmed perhaps because of diplomatic privilege. There was an old caretaker there who kept the door locked. It had not been forced. Next to the Embassy was the English Anglican Cathedral which we went inside and found was unharmed; we dusted it down and actually held a service there. Subsequently, a window commemorating the British forces and our Regiment, in particular, was erected in this cathedral. It was very moral lifting for the soldiers to go in there and find a little bit of contact with England because by then we had been living in this country for months with nothing in any way like our own country. I think quite a lot of young soldiers were getting homesick by then and this gave them quite a morale boost.
There was no comfort, no NAAFI or canteen ever came to us. Occasionally a quartermaster would bring a case of beer if it hadn’t burst or frozen en route. Cigarettes were in generous supply but the food was only the daily rations in ration boxes, twelve men to a box. The trouble was of course that there were four men on a tank so the boxes divided into three, never divided fairly, and it was very difficult to keep everybody happy about that. Some of the boxes were better than others. For example, some contained Christmas pudding while others would contain rice pudding and inevitably the people in the front got the rice pudding. As far as the meat was concerned, some of these contained rather nice tinned steak while others contained skinless sausages, the front people got the skinless sausage. I believe this happened in every war.
We cleared Seoul and were then left a Brigade in the reserve position. These reserve positions were obliged because there was only just the odd road leading north and we couldn’t put the whole army advancing up it. When we were in reserve positions we either found places to play football or what games we could, or we went on training and practising battle drills with our infantry or with any regiments of any arm we could find around us. They were all longing to practice with tanks because certainly, we were the only Centurions in the Far East and more modern than the American tanks.
We lived, all of us, in small bivouac tents tied to the side of the tanks in which four men could sleep. It was the officer’s privilege to sleep on the outside of the tent where the flap was; I don’t think it was much privilege, perhaps one got more fresh air in the summer but more cold air in the winter and, if a Chinese came along at night presumably the officer would ha e been the one who got bayoneted.
WHAT FOLLOWED?
We lived very close to each other for weeks at a time and never had a bath. I wore a string vest which I never took off for four and a half months, and I don’t think I changed my socks either. It was so cold there was no disease, nobody had colds or flu or anything like that. No bug could live under those conditions. There were no rats or mice, certainly not in the winter, but in the summer there were insects galore which was another problem.
As the spring came so it rapidly got warmer and we started to think how we were going to move our tanks and how to get across the paddy fields which were like a bog, wet and with a bund or bank between each paddy field. One had to come over the bund and bang down into the mud then along the mud and over the next one. It was like hunting in Southern Ireland and, being a cavalry regiment with a lot of our officers keen on hunting, we adopted similar tactics and taught ourselves, our drivers, the sergeants and the corporals commanding tanks, how to get across these paddy fields. We began to venture up the hills learning how to tighten the tracks much more than the book said in order to keep them on.
By March there was an advance from the Seoul area to the River Imjin. My Squadron was in reserve but the other two squadrons of the Regiment took part in that advance forward and came under fire and did some shooting and they may have had a few casualties. The British 29 Brigade advanced and secured a position on the River Imjin, about fifty miles north of Seoul. At that moment I had an interesting experience because I had been put in charge of the Regimental Funds: I was waiting to go to the front when a wireless message came to say Captain Ormrod is required at Pusan to help with the audit of the Regimental funds.
I was rather pleased that I shouldn’t have been, but I was. So I packed my bag, handed my tank over to an NCO and set off for the local airfield which was then at Seoul. I hitched a lift on an American plane that was going to Pusan but when it stopped it landed me in Japan! I was in terrible, dirty and filthy order hadn’t changed my vest for four months and my uniform was in a similar state. The Americans were very kind to me, I couldn’t wear their uniform so I had a marvellous hot bath and put the same dirty uniform on again ate an enormous meal and then they said OK we will fly you back to Pusan”. I got on the plane – it didn’t go to Pusan but to a place called Taegu which I know was halfway to Seoul. It was a place where only the tiniest aircraft could land but somehow it dropped down on this airfield as it was getting dark and we couldn’t move anywhere.
The next day I left the aircraft, got on a lorry and drove a hundred miles back to Pusan and got to our Rear Regimental HQ, commanded by Major Dunne, and we had a couple of days auditing the accounts which was a marvellous relief from the front line. I had cleaned up quite a bit and when I went back to my squadron they were then getting ready to relieve one of our forward squadrons.
TELL ME ABOUT THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER IMJIN
A leave system had just started and both officers and men were allowed seventy-two hours in Tokyo in a hotel. This was called R & R (Rest and Relaxation). Lots were drawn and Major Huth drew one of the first tickets to go. As soon as we moved up to the Imjin, he said “Well, the Squadron is yours of three or four days or more depending on how long it takes me to get back”.
After taking over the next day, 2lst April, I was told that my Squadron with the Glosters was going to advance across the River lmjin on a long patrol to see what was going on because we had lost complete contact with the enemy. They seemed to have withdrawn from the River Imjin and our foot patrols didn’t get contact with them. We advanced about four or five miles and saw nothing at all, no sign of the enemy. In a big valley bottom, it was grassy and fairly easy to travel with tanks. The soldiers travelled on top of the tanks going forward on this patrol and if we had been attacked they would all have jumped off and formed a fighting force.
Coming back that night as it was getting dark one of the tanks cast a track just as it was going down to the Imjin and it was jammed in a position where we could not move it, so all the tanks and the Glosters went. I asked if they could leave a company behind to defend us but the reply was “sorry no we are going to dig ourselves in on the other side you’ll just have to abandon your tank”. We didn’t do that and we, first of all, tried to work with the aid of shaded torches but there wasn’t enough light. We put a spotlight on the tank to light up what we were trying to repair and were being as quiet as possible but the fitters couldn’t manage that so they proceeded to bang away with a sledgehammer sending echoes all up and around the valley. I don’t think I have been so frightened in all my life because I had a sinister feeling inside me we were being watched.
I am not a smoker but I remember on that occasion smoking a cigarette because somebody said it steadied the nerves. I can assure you it does no good at all! After an hour we got the track sorted out and over the river we went and scuttled off on a road on the other side into our own leaguer. At night the tanks would go behind the lines of forward infantry and go into a close leaguer as the Boers had many years ago against the Zulus. It was a pattern used in the desert fighting against Rommel, with all guns turned outwards because you can’t move about at night as you have no lights on the tank.
The first night was alright but towards morning the Northumberland Fusiliers reported that a patrol of Chinese infantry had bumped into them from across the Imjin so I was right in thinking that where I had been left behind with the tank somebody was watching us! There was a little bit of firing but nothing else happened and the next day the Fusiliers sent a patrol out and reported there was nothing there all was quiet. I remember we had a lorry with the Officers Mess kit on, a little bit of comfort that I foolishly allowed to come in to the leaguer area for the night, plus some other transport.
On the night of 22nd April firing started on several hills which we were defending. Not just one hill but practically every hill around seemed to be having enemy contacts. We couldn’t see anything and lay down on the ground behind our tanks while I went around trying to get everybody to lie facing outwards. When morning came the firing was still going on, the enemy hadn’t gone away so I got the tanks out of leaguer into a spread-out position around our area and sent all our transport away as it was quite clear a major firefight was starting. Enemy were in contact everywhere. The Adjutant Captain Farrar-Hockley, now General Farrar-Hockley, rang me up as I had a telephone to my Squadron Headquarters to ask if we could send a Troop of tanks around the front of the Brigade, along the River Imjin to help in the defence of the Glosters position.
I didn’t like this idea at all because we would have gone for two or three miles without any contact or support as each Battalion was quite far apart on different groups of hills, and the Glosters in particular were about three miles from where I was. However, I sent forward our Squadron Reconnaissance Troop of four very light tanks, to see if we could get around with the heavy tanks, but they came under severe fire. I then had to do quite a hit of fighting to get them out and get them back two of them damaged by some sort of anti-tank weapons. We did what fire support was required then the Americans suddenly arrived, two Battalions of American troops said they were going to clear out the position in front us and we were all being a bit “soft”.
They asked in which direction the enemy was and I pointed out what positions I knew in the hills. They advanced up a hill and they never came down again: I found out that they advanced up the hill and went down the other side back to their own lines – not much cop, but they looked good and their morale was good. That night the Brigadier drew us all back into a much tighter reserve position except for the poor old Glosters who by then were cut off from us, way on the flank but with a narrow road for their withdrawal.
Looking back on it now I think perhaps they could have got out on the first day but Colonel Carne may have been ordered to hold that position. It was a very key position and if they hadn’t blocked it the enemy could have poured through and been well on their way to Seoul while the rest of us were wondering that was going on. Colonel Carne held on there and the enemy cut his road during the night. By then my Squadron Leader, Major Huth, had returned having flown back immediately from his leave, and he controlled a small force of reserve tanks and some light American tanks trying to fight their way through to the Glosters.
However, they couldn’t do it, the enemy had got some excellent anti-tank weapons which were carried by infantrymen which could knock out these light tanks and indeed they knocked out one or two of ours chiefly by breaking the tracks and the driving wheels.
By the end of the 23rd day there had been quite a lot of fighting, on the 24th day the fighting became more severe and it was clear that as far as we were concerned there was a Pass which we had to hold for the 29th Brigade. I was in better communication with everybody than anybody else because we had fairly efficient wireless sets in every tank, while the infantry sets were all giving trouble. Commanding Officers and senior officers would come to one of our tanks and try to get messages back to Brigade Headquarters. We fought hard all that day around a very large dominant mountain called Kamaksan.
Later in the war this mountain dominated the Commonwealth Division. It was the height of Snowdon, so high that nobody ever put troops up at the top of it; we always surrounded it but never tried to go up the top because there were no real means of supply. We had no helicopters but the Americans had a few. On this last day the Brigade Major, Major Ken Trevor, who had been on leave with Major Huth, came hurrying back; it had been difficult for the Brigadier because he hadn’t got his Senior Staff Officer.
We thought things were going to be very light, nobody had any impression at all that the enemy was putting this attack on. We had no intelligence system in our own Brigade except for what the Battalion Intelligence Officers could see with their binoculars, the American intelligence system seemed to be very poor and so we were completely shaken by this enormous weight of attack.
On this last night, I had taken my squadron again back into a close leaguer. It was a bright moonlight night and the enemy was not firing so much, it seemed to have gone very quiet and we wondered whether we were holding our positions; but the enemy was reorganising and was slipping through over the top of Kamaksan.
At about midnight I was on guard as everybody took their turn, and I could see a patrol of the enemy within about one hundred and fifty yards of our tanks; it was very unpleasant to see them walking along in single file and I remember going around and quietly waking people up “wake up, look to your front”, the men were very very tired and I had to go round and round saying “wake up, wake up, be ready to fire” and they just fell asleep again. Some of them would stay awake but most of us had had so little sleep. It is very tiring sitting inside a tank with a wireless set on your head all the time and the heat of the inside of a tank.
Morning came and this patrol had gone away. It was the advance troops and they must have seen our tanks and as they hadn’t got any anti-tank weapons they hid back in the scrub. I returned back up and over the pass and, as I went over, I heard that we were to withdraw and my Squadron was to help the Royal Ulster Rifles and The Northumberland Fusiliers, that was my mission. As we came down the other side we ran into an ambush of Chinese and three of my tanks were knocked out. We went on to our positions and the Infantry started their withdrawal.
A little personal point the British Army teaches a lot about attack a little bit about defence, but practically never teaches anybody about withdrawal working on the basis that the British Army never withdraws, although in fact if you look in history we do more withdrawals than attacks. I was trying to prepare for the Staff College exam at the time and was taking a correspondence course in Korea so in the periods when we were in reserve I would be reading and doing my correspondence course.
A week before this happened, I had just finished the chapter on Withdrawals so I know something about it, otherwise I would have known absolutely nothing. You must keep one foot on the ground all the time as you go backwards so that you have one foot solid behind you before you lift the next one. This is one of the main principles of withdrawal and if you start moving both at once then you can’t stop.
It was an awful job to get the Americans to put their foot down on the ground again. There were a number of other point about support fire, the main one was keeping these firm bases and I planned a number of firm bases when we started to withdraw; we tried to get as many tanks out as we could that had been damaged. There was an interesting tank which was commanded by Sergeant Holberton who later became our Regimental Sergeant Major. When he saw that he couldn’t go through the village where the ambush was he came back, went over a steep bank and drove his gun into the ground so the tank couldn’t move and he had to abandon it. Unfortunately on abandoning it, he and his crew were made prisoners.
We lost quite a number of tanks that day, possibly more than the Regiment had lost in any day’s fighting in the last war. Eight or nine, half the Squadron at least either knocked out or tracks thrown. The Chinese were very brave soldiers, but very inaccurate in shooting otherwise most of us would have been dead. They would come very close to you and they had a great number of hand grenades, also they stuck bombs to the side of the tanks.
In the withdrawal, I got to the top of the pass that we were holding and fortunately a troop of the Royal Engineers were available to try to help, although there was nothing much they could do; they turned themselves into infantrymen because Sappers are trained to be infantrymen, and they defended this pass. They had been holding this position, they were fresh and not tired and I got a troop of tanks onto this pass whilst Sappers climbed up the hill on each side. They were instrumental in letting these two very tired Battalions, the Royal Ulster Rifles and The Northumberland Fusiliers get through and retire.
But the enemy patrol we had seen at night showed they had got behind our lines. It obviously indicated the position of the enemy forward troop. I sent back another troop of tanks to put another firm base down and also I sent back our doctor who was with us in an armoured half track which had a wireless. I heard some firing some way behind me, but there was firing everywhere. Suddenly over the wireless came the doctor saying that he had been captured. I asked “where are you” and before he could explain I heard some Chinese words which I recognised and then the whole thing went dead.
This alerted me to the fact that something pretty disastrous was going on in the rear if the doctor had been captured so I hustled on with withdrawal. The Royal Ulster Rifles were a bit fitter than The Northumberland Fusiliers, they were little Irishmen and they said they weren’t going down into the valley behind us but they would march off over the hills, which they did do in single file. We stayed there for about half an hour to cover their retreat and during that time Chinese troops began to march up the valley towards us on the pass, sometimes in formations of three; we would wait until we could see them clearly and then with tank guns we just mowed them down. They were everywhere coming on and on and on and we couldn’t hold them back. We could easily hold them back coming up the valley but they were coming along the hills as well. The Northumberland Fusiliers insisted on going back down the principal road and I think a lot of them became casualties.
I offered to push their Commanding Officer, Colonel Foster, inside my turret and take him back but he said he would feel safer in his jeep. He was killed about a mile behind me because I saw him lying on the road when we came back.
We then started to withdraw as I suddenly realised we really were getting cut off ourselves, with the doctor saying he was a prisoner, so I ordered everybody to move and broke the rule about always keeping one foot on the ground. I had sent tanks back – another two tanks to firm up the position where I hoped they found somewhere to cover us and I went down the valley leading the remaining seven tanks that I had. I came round a bend in the road and there I saw the doctor’s half track on fire and two of my tanks on fire as well. A swarm of Chinese, about fifty in number crowding around them the doctor standing with his hands up and and also a man called Sergeant Reekie, who was one of our experienced very bold sergeants. I knew that some pretty awful ambush had occurred.
I mention at this stage that I am a horse-racing man and used to riding across country. Before Tidworth, we had been stationed in Leicestershire. Many of us rode to hounds and we were used to galloping across the country. This certainly helps when you are commanding a tank across country. I called on everybody to take off and follow me and we charged across open country over the paddy fields, bumping and banging.
Chinese were running around out of our way mostly, until we came to a particularly deep bund, a ditch and bank and my tank got stuck. We were being fired on the whole time and you could hear the bullets bouncing on the outside of the armour. I put my head out of the tank to see how we could get out, giving my driver instructions on the intercom as to what he was to do and he was beginning to get the tank out of the ditch by reversing when a Chinese started climbing on board the tank. We were all armed with pistols I drew mine and fired at him. It didn’t seem to matter, he kept on climbing but at that moment another tank commander came upon the wireless and said “get your head down, I’ll blow these people off’ – which he did by firing at my tank with his machine gun.
The others were rather hesitant because of my stopping but we got out of the ditch somehow. I had a very good driver and we advanced again, by which time various infantrymen and odd people had come running across to our tank and climbed on because they would have been prisoners otherwise. We thundered off down the valley again, spread out, being shot at, and unfortunately a Chinese was a better shot than normal and he hit me in the head.
I was quite badly cut and after that, I rather ceased to take much interest. We got out of the range of the enemy and I remember corning to a place where we got on the road and at that point, there was Major Huth with the reserve four tanks. I stopped in front of him and told him what was going on and apologised for having lost half his Squadron and I remember him saying “for God’s sake get out of the way, you are holding me up from firing at the enemy”. By then we were about two and a half miles behind the pass which we thought was the last position that we had to hold.
I think I must have passed out then and the next thing I remember was being lifted out of the tank by my crew. The wireless operator who was an old Geordie, was saying to me “it s alright I’ve got your address if you don’t manage it I’ll write to your mother”! I was taken to an American first aid station where a man was coming round with an enormous syringe pumping morphia into everybody. Having jabbed me he said “lie there and a helicopter will pick you up”.
No helicopter came and I was conscious, fortunately; we were just lying on stretchers on the ground and the enemy firing was getting near when I saw a British ambulance coming. I got off my stretcher went to the side of the road covered in blood held my hand up, thumb up, and said “look I want a lift”. I was thrown into the back with a lot of people all crowded up and off we went. I reckoned the people on stretchers never got away.
A little personal story of interest, I have got only one eye having lost the other eye in Normandy. I have a glass eye and after about 24 hours, this eye gives trouble so I have to take it out and I usually put it in my shirt pocket. This I did during the battle, when I was wounded and taken to the hospital they wrote down that I was “unconscious and right eye blown out”. In fact, the eye was in the pocket of my shirt. When they undress you in American hospitals they use electric scissors to run down your garments in a way that all your clothes fall off, boots the lot. I was stark naked and my eye, the only eye that existed that I could use nearer than London was in my shirt pocket being thrown away.
I was eventually evacuated down to near Pusan where there was a Danish hospital ship called Jutlandia Denmark’s contribution to this war was to provide this hospital ship which specialised in head wounds. An American Red Cross lady came round with comforts for us and she said “do you want anything?”. I responded “yes I want a glass eye because if I can’t get a glass eye I can’t get back to my Regiment they won’t have me”. She asked about it and I described how it was lost, how this shirt must be lying some one hundred and fifty miles up near Seoul or somewhere in Korea. She said she would do what she could and a week later she came to see me with the glass eye in her hand! There you are, a miracle. So that was the end of the Battle of Imjin for me.
WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU AFTER JUTLANDIA?
I was completely peppered all over my face from my nose round to my ear and I have got two large indents in my skull where they were patched up, but about four weeks afterwards I was back with my Regiment again. When I got back the front had stabilised and we had fought our way back to the Imjin because the Chinese were a rather spent force. They came too far and the Americans were more prepared to counterattack.
At that time the Commonwealth Division was formed and I appeared completely shaven-headed with great scars and stitch marks all over my head and my Commanding Officer Sir William Lowther said “ho, we can’t have you in a tank because you would frighten the troop too much, more than the enemy in that condition”. I realised when I looked in the mirror I was a pretty awful sight so I was sent off to the new Divisional Headquarters as the Divisional Intelligence Officer. I had had a certain amount of Staff training but this was a new occupation and I wasn’t very pleased about leaving my fighting squadron as I thought I would be able to fight again with them. However, I had another nine months of very interesting service as Divisional Intelligence Officer.
WHAT DID THAT INVOLVE?
It involved collecting up information from every possible source of what was going on immediately in front of the Division and then briefing the General and the three Brigadiers in turn, and they would then pass it down. General Jim Cassells was the Commander of the Commonwealth Division, Brigadier Taylor was 28 Brigade, Brigadier Rocksavage for the Canadian Brigade and Tom Brodie for 29 Brigade.
The way we collected information was interesting and obtained in numerous ways. In my team, I had two officers from the Intelligence Corps one of whom could speak Korean and Japanese. I had an American Officer attached who could speak Korean and was a liaison to the American Corp that we were involved with. The methods were as follows. First of all, information coming back from the front line troops about them seeing the movement of men and how many men are on skylines or in distant positions. We had ways of detecting where their guns were being fired from.
We had aerial photographic reconnaissances being flown daily over the lines and these were examined by one of the Intelligence Officers who were trained in that field. If we took any prisoners they were interrogated in a Divisional compound before they were sent to the rear by the Korean speaking Intelligence Officer. They were very willing to tell you as much as they knew but they were very uneducated and it was difficult to get much out of them because of their lack of understanding.
We had another thing which was quite funny. There was a constant movement of civilians across the line. The line wasn’t a long stretch of barbed wire or a wall, it was a number of defensive positions on hills with open ground in between. Civilians would go from one village to another to see the uncle or aunt whether the firing was going on or not. They all wore white clothes. We had a South Korean Officer attached to us and he would go into the nearest village to find out who he thought could be trusted, pay them to go and visit their cousin in a different village behind the enemy lines keep their eye skinned, and come back and tell us what they had seen.
This was a rather bright idea which we thought was very clever, but the Chinese rumbled to it and took hold of these people paid them a bit more to come back and tell them what was going on in our position. It was a job trying to find out who was faithful and who was unfaithful one could never rely on any source, and always had to double-check one thing against another and keep maps of all the information we had on our front. Each week we put a new map one on top of the other, overlays, so we could see if one position kept on showing an artillery position every week from various sorts of information.
When we knew there was a definite threat we would have it bombed or heavily shelled. More importantly, we could get the feel of or sense things in intelligence one could get a smell that something was happening. Maybe there seemed to be more movement of troops in the rear and more information coming through but I remember foretelling a major attack on our positions in the Commonwealth Division, telling the General the day before it was going to happen.
There was very little he could do about it other than send messages saying “look out” to all the forward troops. Throughout any war, Intelligence Officers are always saying “look out” so I don’t think the front line troops always believed you. General Jim was very cautious about this but he did warn them on this occasion and I think it probably helped them quite a bit. It was absorbingly interesting and one had to learn all about the Chinese army which was modelled on the Russian army, we had books sent us showing the tactics of the Russians and from that, we could know the tactics of the Chinese.
When there was an attack the first prisoner was captured we would find attached to his belt a little sack of rice. We knew that they had a ration of so much rice a day and that the only food they ate was rice. Weighing the sack of rice we would know how many days the attack was going to go on because the Chinese never supplied their troops during an attack. We could work out from that roughly what their rate of advance was what had been their objective or the objective they intended to take. It was a very useful piece of information. If they were just a patrol they would have no rice or enough of just one day.
WHY DO YOU THINK THAT THE PRISONERS WERE SO READY TO SPEAK?
I think they weren’t taught not to speak and they were very shaken up at being made prisoners. They were especial1y frightened of the South Koreans who had a reputation for being brutal to prisoners, and all the prisoners were looked after by the South Korean Army. As a result I think they were only too willing to speak, hoping this would help them a bit. I never went back to the prisoner-of-war camps. I saw South Koreans being brutally treated by South Korean police treated in a way that we used to treat Englishmen in 1830.
That was their way of life and I began to realise that when our people were treated badly by the Japanese and South Koreans in the last War they were being treated the way the South Koreans and Japanese would have treated their own people if they had been a guard in a prison. From what I could see of the prison camp which was being monitored by the Americans there was less of that; they were shepherded about and put into compounds in a fairly animal like way, but I never heard of anybody being beaten – they were just treated very roughly.
DID YOU EVER FIGHT AGAINST THE NORTH KOREANS?
We weren’t aware of it. I think we were always fighting the Chinese who we were a bit fearful of to start with because we thought they were much better people at fighting in the rough country and at night. We proved this was wrong by actively patrolling ourselves. Certain regiments like the Royal Ulster Rifles were particularly strong on patrolling and proved that they were better than the Chinese; if they met a Chinese patrol in the night they defeated them. In the end, we always dominated our area with our patrolling.
WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE AMERICAN ALLIES?
The first impression I had of the Americans was their generosity. To give an example during the monsoon period in the summer when one would get soaking wet, I went to the rear in an open jeep to the Corp Headquarters because I was Divisional Intelligence Officer. I hadn’t got a coat and when I left the Headquarters it was toppling down with rain growing dark and quite cool. I had about a twenty-mile drive and the Officer who was seeing me off who was a full Colonel took his waterproof jacket off and said: “here you are your need is greater than mine”.
Whether he had another coat or not I don’t know but he pressed me with him and I took it. They were always out to help and be generous to you. They never seemed to have bad tempers but would shout at each other “come on, let’s do this or that” and so on.
On the whole, they were badly trained and they were pretty confused with their battle procedure. They had things called SOPs (Standard Operational Procedures). They weren’t flexible enough and if they were I think half the time they forgot what their SOPs were. They weren’t very good but I did go and watch a Division attacking the right of the Commonwealth Division one day orders were very brief and mostly written with china-graph onto maps. They hated any form of paper.
They gave the briefest descriptions and when you got down to the level of the Squadron Commander or Company Commander he just pointed to the hill and said “see that hill let’s go and get it SOP” and thus they were all meant to know what all the other arms would do and off they went. They fought their way straight up the hill, failed to get to the top and about an hour later they tumbling back saying “where’s the chow queue”? Our troops, if they hadn’t got to the top would have sat down there and waited for someone else to come through them.
It worries me a bit about what will happen in the next war. Their food was very much better than ours and their comforts were miles better. In the early part of the campaign they would never leave the main roads, they did later learn to do that but nearly always one of the major priorities was to get a jeep track up to the top of the hill. We were used to doing a different system.
The Koreans have things called A-frames very like the type of metal rucksack which is now carried by our mountain climbers and they carry these on their back. These men were very used to carrying heavy weights and could carry wounded men out on their backs on these A-frames also they would carry our stores up the hill. They could easily carry one hundredweight of stores up a hill so we used a lot of them as Porters.
I don’t know if the Americans used them as Porters. They had a lot of wonderful equipment which we didn’t have especially their engineering and bridging equipment. Their tanks were good but they weren’t as accurate as ours. When shooting they tended to just spew bullets out all over the place thinking that the more bullets you fired then you’ve won the war while we always acted on the good old British tradition of a few well-aimed shots. We did a tremendous amount of shooting with all our weapons when in reserve so our men were first-class shots, whether with a tank gun or a rifle or pistol. If we had nothing else to do we would pop up a target on a hillside and do some shooting.
DID YOU COME ACROSS TURKISH TROOPS?
Yes, they were first-class. Very brave men, very stoie, and I would like to have them on my side in the next war. They were a type of peasant troop they don’t feel the pain cold or roughness and they don’t need ice cream and hamburgers or anything like that. The Turks were very tough and I believe the Chinese were frightened of them because they had a reputation of not taking any prisoners. They were all big and dark, slightly sinister looking men but always very friendly and nice and smiled at you when you talked to them. The pick of their army. There was only one Battalion and it was next door to us.
DID THE CHINESE HAVE THEIR OWN TANKS?
No, we never saw any, although, from the intelligence we did see track marks in photographs as if they were mobile guns or tanks, they seemed to keep them well at the rear and out of sight. They were very good masters at camouflage.
DID YOU MENTION THEIR STICKY BOMBS IN THE FIGHTING?
It was a magnetic type of hand grenade that was thrown against the side of a tank and it would then cause a small hole into the inside of the tank. We were lucky in that the Centurions had shields on the side of the tanks to protect the tracks and when these magnetic bombs were thrown against the sides of the tanks the plate would be blown off before the side of the tank or the actual track was damaged.
I had some tanks where plates had been blown off and they were irreplaceable without returning to England. There was a big white star on the side of each tank and the enemy always tended to fire at the white star. The idea of the star was that the American aircraft supporting us would recognise our tanks from the enemy and therefore we had these white stars on everything all our vehicles had white stars on the roof.
We never got shot up by our own aircraft. We directed their aircraft strikes against hills where the enemy was on. There was a good deal of air support and a lot of Napalm bombing which I believe is very unpleasant.
There was one Squadron of Australian planes that used to come sometimes in support and we used to do our damnedest to try and get them to come to us because it was a great morale uplift to see our own markings on planes, that is the British markings. The troops would cheer when they turned up they really thought that was tremendous. Occasionally there would be an aircraft carrier lying off the coast and they would send in a flight. We got very excited about it and all the troops cheered. The moral lifter was, if we were near the coast, if we could get communications with the Navy they would go to tremendous lengths to try to get some of our troops off shore on to their warships whether they were cruisers destroyers or aircraft carriers and give us twenty-four hours of a good time. HMS Kenya was the one I went on, she was a cruiser like the Belfast.
It is difficult to explain but when you are a young man and you are halfway round the world so far away from home in an absolutely strange country which you have never seen before you do occasionally long to see a little bit of old England. Because I was wounded I never got any leave as it was considered my time in hospital had been enough. It was quite true really but otherwise, the soldiers would get about one seventy-two hour leave every nine months in Tokyo.
DO YOU REMEMBER THE MONTH YOU LEFT?
It was getting to spring 1952 when I got back and the reason I was there longer than some was because I had become the Divisional Intelligence Officer. My relief was an Australian, a very nice rather bright product of the Staff College Canberra, who arrived to take over from me.
