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The Korean War

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The Korean War CHAPTER 1 Fathers and sons Was it for this the clay grew tall? Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility’ he bright moon plays on that ragged, dangerous ridgeline. TDown in the valley men sit in a circle. Keith, Denis, Sam, Titch and Ron are not ready for sleep. It would be good to have a fi re to keep away shadows and thoughts of tomorrow. It would be good to have a beer. Not this night, but they do sing a drinking song. It’s a song Denis carried in his memory from another war on another continent, sad, angry, defi ant, written fi rst as a poem for soldiers in the 19th century and adopted as an anthem by some their 20th century descendants. Stand to Your Glasses is a variation of the universal theme of young men far from home and facing death. On a battle eve they sing: Who dreads to the dust returning? Who shrinks from the sable shore? Where the high and haughty yearning Of the soul will be no more. 1 TThehe kkoreanorean wwar.inddar.indd 1 99/9/10/9/10 99:43:36:43:36 AAMM THE KOREAN WAR There is not time for repentance, ’Tis folly to yield to despair When a shudder may fi nish a sentence Or death put an end to a prayer. Both Confederate and Union soldiers sang the song during the American Civil War and World War I airmen made it their own: We loop in the purple twilight, We spin in silvery dawn, With a trail of smoke behind us, To show where our comrades have gone. Errol Flynn and David Niven sang it in The Dawn Patrol, the 1938 fi lm about British World War I fi ghter aces. And now Keith, Denis, Sam, Titch and Ron, members of 12 Platoon, D Company, 3 RAR (the 3rd Royal Australian Regiment), in a remote Korean valley on battle eve in the world’s latest war, sing the chorus: Stand to your glasses steady, It’s all we have left to prize, Let’s drink to the dead already And three cheers for the next man to die. That will be Denis – Denis Austin O’Brien, 25 years old, inevi- tably nicknamed Snowy because of his fair hair and blue eyes; Denis, who knows he will die the next day, October 5, 1951, as 3 RAR storms that ragged, dangerous ridgeline during the Battle of Maryang San; Denis, who has had time for repentance. * 2 TThehe kkoreanorean wwar.inddar.indd 2 99/9/10/9/10 99:43:36:43:36 AAMM FATHERS AND SONS AUSTRALIA’S OFFICIAL WAR historian, Robert O’Neill, delivering the Australian War Memorial oration in 2003, said that at Maryang San 3 RAR, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hassett, had achieved ‘one of the best battalion victories in our national military experience of over a hundred years’. American military historian S. L. A. Marshall labelled the Korean War ‘the century’s nastiest little war’. It was a war, in its genesis and prosecution, of great, blundering miscalculations. Old Diggers, with resignation and a touch of bitterness, call it the forgotten war. And, 60 years and several other nasty little wars on, it is easy to forget both the atrocious conditions under which the war was fought, how terrible was the cost and how high the perceived stakes were. The Korean peninsula is crumpled into precipitous hills and mountains which form 70 per cent of its surface. Its winter sweeps out of the Siberian wastes. Some of its valleys are tradi- tional invasion routes between Japan and China. Across a section of its border is the Russian empire. The American Secretary of State Dean Acheson, author of one of the war’s miscalculations, said: ‘If the best minds in the world had set out to fi nd us the worst possible location to fi ght the damnable war politically and militarily, the unanimous choice would have been Korea.’ When Denis O’Brien, Keith Langdon and their mates waited under looming Maryang San in October 1951, the damnable war had been raging for more than 15 months. On June 25, 1950, North Korea had sent its forces blitzkrieging across the 38th Parallel, the border with its separated brother, South Korea, determined to create a united, communist Korea. America scrambled to stop a rout and sent rallying calls to its United Nations allies, including Australia. A small American task force went into action on July 5 but the North Koreans threatened to push American and South Korean forces into the 3 TThehe kkoreanorean wwar.inddar.indd 3 99/9/10/9/10 99:43:36:43:36 AAMM THE KOREAN WAR sea. Desperate defence of a toehold around the south-east port of Pusan (now called Busan) in July and August turned to attack after UN Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur’s masterstroke: an amphibious landing on September 15, 1950, far behind North Korean lines at Inchon, port of Seoul, South Korea’s capital. Torn between a reluctance to return to war and a desire to be seen to be a willing ally of the West’s Great Power, some nations took part in an almost indecent race to announce the sending of contingents. Australia’s 77 Squadron fl ew its fi rst mission over Korea on July 2, 1950; Australia’s 3 RAR landed at Pusan on September 28. The war swept the peninsula in waves. Seoul, which had fallen fi rst on June 27, 1950, changed hands four times. On October 26, a South Korean reconnais- sance patrol reached the Yalu River, the North Korean border with China. Perhaps MacArthur, as he hoped, would get the boys home for Christmas. However, China had already begun infi l- trating a massive nine armies and launched its fi rst offensive on October 27. Under this weight, the United Nations forces retreated far south. After a series of offensives and counteroffensives, the war settled in July 1951 into the bloody grind of stalemate in the region of the 38th Parallel, where it had begun. The Battle of Maryang San in October 1951 was one of the attempts, futile as it happened, to push back the Chinese defensive line. WHEN THE FORGOTTEN war started, the world was living under the doom of the dawn of the atomic age. Less than fi ve years after America had used humanity’s worst weapon, generals and politicians were talking about using it again. Less than fi ve years after the slaughter of World War II had stopped, leaving 50 million dead, generals and politicians were talking of Korea 4 TThehe kkoreanorean wwar.inddar.indd 4 99/9/10/9/10 99:43:36:43:36 AAMM FATHERS AND SONS as a prelude to World War III. Indeed, it has been described as the substitute for World War III. At the Crimean city Yalta in February 1945, Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, victorious allies in the fi ght against fascism and Nazism, had begun dividing the globe into spheres of infl uence. In peace they would be enemies. They drew the ideological battlelines for the great clash between the forces of communism and the forces of democracy. One of the lines on the map cut through the Korean peninsula. You would have thought that, with soil heavy with blood and souls wearied, the world would have turned its back on war. There was, after all, so much to do: in many nations, physical rebuilding from the ruins; the chance perhaps of fi ghting the internal enemies of inequality and racism; an opportunity, squandered after World War I, to craft a new, peaceful world order. But a war of words soon began. IN 1919, WITH the War to End All Wars barely over and the Kaiser’s Germany shattered, Churchill identifi ed a new enemy, a threat to civilisation which was ‘being completely extinguished over gigantic areas’. The Russian Bolsheviks, he said, ‘hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their enemies’. For Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks and father of the revolution which shook the world in 1917, the inevitability of a great confron- tation with the West was an article of communist faith. Lenin had said: ‘The existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with the imperialist states for a long time is unthinkable. One or the other must triumph in the end. And before that end supervenes, a series of frightful collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states will be inevitable.’ 5 TThehe kkoreanorean wwar.inddar.indd 5 99/9/10/9/10 99:43:36:43:36 AAMM THE KOREAN WAR In 1927, Stalin, Lenin’s heir, told a delegation of American workers: ‘In the course of further development of international revolution there will emerge two centres of world signifi cance: a socialist centre, drawing to itself the countries which tend towards socialism, and a capitalist centre, drawing to itself the countries which tend towards capitalism. Battle between these two centres for command of the world economy will decide the fate of capitalism and of communism in the entire world.’ In February 1946, Stalin forgot wartime alliances and dusted off the old dogma. He saw no possibility of a peaceful inter- national order. Capitalism, monopoly and imperialism were in command outside the Soviet Union. Churchill, though he had been thrown out of offi ce by an ungrateful British people, took up Stalin’s gauntlet. He travelled by train with Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, to a small college in the President’s home state, Missouri, sipping whiskey and playing poker on the way to deliver another of his great speeches.
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