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.

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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.

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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

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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 reconnaissance 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

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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.’

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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 international 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. In 1940, he had told Britons he could offer them nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat as they waged war ‘against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lament- able catalogue of human crime’. He called his 1946 speech ‘The Sinews of Peace’. Saying he had no offi cial mission or status of any kind, that he spoke only for himself, he urged the American democracy to accept ‘an awe-inspiring accountability to the future’. People in all the lands had to be shielded from the two giant marauders, war and tyranny; the United Nations had to be equipped with an international armed force.

A shadow has fallen upon the scene so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows for sure what Soviet Russia and its communist international organisation intends

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to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies . . . From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Soﬁ a, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet inﬂ uence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow . . . Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.

The Cold War had been joined. Then, on June 25, 1950, North Korean forces blitzkrieged across the dividing line, the 38th Parallel, determined to create a united, communist Korea. United Nations forces, led and dominated by America, responded. The Cold War had its hot war. Was it to be a ‘frightful collision’, part of Stalin’s grand plan to overthrow imperialism?

POET RAY MATHEW wrote angrily about the Korean War:

Let us not pretend this is a war of adults. Let us admit it is a war of children. Little children – pushing soldiers from a table. Only children could not realise the stopping of a sense The sudden ceasing of delight. Only children could pick them up again And set them right.

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It was a well-shaped metaphor, but not apt. The masters of the Korean War were the two towering tyrants, Stalin and Mao Zedong, along with Kim Il Sung, the man who made himself a demi-god and punctuated the North Korean countryside with heroic statues of himself even as he devastated it; Douglas Mac- Arthur, the brilliant, imperious, fl awed general hailed as saviour of Australia and called the American Caesar; and Truman, who fatefully unleashed the atomic bomb. All had their own agendas as did the polyglot of nations which followed America under the United Nations banner. All of those wanted a special relationship with the United States, the country which, as Churchill said at Westminster College, stood at the pinnacle of world power. Those relatively small nations which sent their relatively small contingents to Korea risked being trampled by giants. Whoever the winners were in the grand ideological and stra- tegic game, there were the usual losers on the ground in ruined Korea, perhaps four million of them: soldiers and civilians, men, women and children, killed by bullets, bombs, blasts, napalm, frostbite, atrocity, accident, starvation and disease. Flags of 16 nations which sent fi ghting elements to Korea fl y at Pusan’s military cemetery: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Columbia, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. All lost sons. Three hundred and forty Australians died. This was Denis O’Brien’s death: At 3.30 on October 5, 1951, 3 RAR is fully awake, ammuni- tion has been checked, the rifl emen have fi xed their bayonets and Denis O’Brien, who would prefer to be fi ghting with a stalwart .303, has serviced his Bren gun, the powerful weapon in an infantry section. It is deeply dark. The moon has set and the valley is blanketed by heavy fog; ‘Thank God – you beauty,’

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D Company’s Major Basil Hardiman says to himself. With the Chinese dug in on the commanding heights, a valley crossing in a clear dawn could have been a disaster. D Company moves off, happy to be cloaked in fog, but cursing it as they start the clamber. The ground is broken, the hill thickly timbered and the men struggle in a chain, the man in front held on to by the man behind. They sweat in white silence while artillery rounds scream somewhere overhead and crump into the Chinese positions. Map and compass are little help. Hardiman’s D Company catches up with Henry Nicholls’s B Company and Hardiman hears Nicholls radioing the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hassett: ‘I am lost, sir – I don’t know where I am – and here is Basil and he’s lost too.’ Hardiman is happy not to hear the reply. Nicholls and he decide to bear due west. Hardiman is bemused when Nicholls and B Company head north. Lieutenant Jim Young’s 12 Platoon leads off west for D Company and Denis O’Brien is the lead Bren gunner in the lead section. It is now around 9 in the morning and Hardiman is still searching on his map to pinpoint his location. The Chinese await; they know the artillery barrage during the night means an attack and they have heard the grind and grumble of the tanks of the 8th Irish Fusiliers. O’Brien’s fate awaits.

A FORTNIGHT EARLIER, Keith Langdon and Denis O’Brien had gone on ﬁ ve days’ leave in Japan. ‘Let’s go to the beer hall and have a few beers,’ Langdon said. ‘No,’ O’Brien said. ‘I’m going to the American PX to buy presents for my family.’ ‘Well, that’s fair enough too,’ Langdon said. ‘I’ve got enough dough to have a few beers and a bit of a good time.’ ‘No,’ O’Brien said.

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‘Well, what’s wrong with you?’ ‘All right. I’ll tell you. When I go back and we go into action, I’m going to get smacked.’ ‘Sounds like a bit of rubbish to me,’ Langdon said. ‘Well, that’s the way it is.’

SUMMER OR WINTER, swelter or snow, 3 RAR’s Catholic chaplain, Father Joe Phillips, wore army boots without socks. Phillips was a Discalced Carmelite. ‘Discalced’ means barefoot and members of the order usually wear sandals. He was a tall, pale, slim man, quiet and aesthetic. He would conduct Mass wherever convenient, in a deserted building perhaps, but more often in a paddy ﬁ eld. He would hear confession and grant absolution to the soldiers wherever convenient too. A week after the morning on Maryang San, Father Phillips wrote to Monica O’Brien, Denis’s mother:

Denis was a most extraordinary character. He had a nature that was simple, sincere and just loveable . . . It is no wonder that the Good Lord wanted him for Himself . . . He looked upon me as both a friend and a priest. But a few days before the fatal attack he called down at my tent one evening. We had a very long chat. Then he made his peace with God. Next day he was at Mass and Holy Commu- nion. This was most surely a most beautiful preparation and anticipation of the invitation that our Divine Lord was so soon to make of him.

IN THE GULLY Keith Langdon walks alongside Denis O’Brien. They clamber upwards. Sun suddenly burns off the fog and

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everything is ready for God’s invitation. The Chinese are as surprised as the Diggers. They open ﬁ re from 15 to 35 metres away. The section goes to ground. Another burst. Langdon throws himself down beside O’Brien and his Bren and sees with horror the terrible blossoming of the wound. He screams for the medics. In a lull Major Hardiman walks across to O’Brien. ‘How are you feeling, Snowy?’ ‘Fine, sir. Do you think I’ll be OK?’ ‘Sure. You’re looking great.’ He isn’t. He loses consciousness. The stretcher bearers carry him 1500 metres to one of the Fusiliers’ Centuri- ons on the bank of the Imjin River and lash his stretcher to the side. The tank begins to ford the river, heading for the American MASH unit. Somewhere upstream last night a cloudburst had poured rain down the valley sides. The surge swamps the Centu- rion, completing the work of Denis O’Brien’s death wound. Yes, the Good Lord surely wanted him for Himself.

WHEN I VISITED the United Nations cemetery at Pusan in 2009, I laid a single fl ower on Denis’s grave, a peony, as I had told his still-mourning family I would. Across the 38th Parallel in Heochang County each year on October 25, the offi cial anniversary of the Chinese intervention in what North Koreans call the Fatherland Liberation War and Chinese the War to Resist America and Aid Korea, government offi cials and army leaders march into the Cemetery for the Heroes of the Chinese People’s Volunteers Army, carrying a wreath. One grave receives special attention. The soldier was 28, not much older than Denis O’Brien. He was only one of the vast army of Chinese dead. Estimates range from 140,000 through 400,000 to 900,000. But he was Mao Anying, oldest son of Mao Zedong. Mao Anying, so one version goes, was taken under the wing of General Peng Dehuai, leader of the Chinese forces, who,

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protective of the son of the Great Helmsman, refused to let him serve as an infantryman and appointed him to his staff as a Russian translator. This was a mistake. As it happened, instead of protecting Mao Anying, Peng was putting him in harm’s way. Peng set up his headquarters at Taeyudong, a North Korean base. On November 24, less than ﬁ ve weeks after China entered the war, American planes bombed an electricity sub-station on a nearby hill and that evening a Mustang on reconnaissance circled the area. Peng’s deputy, General Hong Xuezhi, who had ordered the blasting of an anti-aircraft cave, was worried the base would be attacked the next day. That night he removed Peng’s maps from the hut the commander worked in and on the morning of November 25 persuaded a reluctant Peng to work in the shelter of the cave. Two staff stayed in the hut, and for reasons Hong could not explain, Mao Anying went to join them. As Hong feared, the bombers came, two B-26s. The napalm canisters tumbled. The hut blazed. One of the staff escaped. Peng came down and looked at two burnt bodies. Mao Anying was dead. For the rest of the day Peng sat silent in the cave. Peng was Mao’s revolutionary comrade, a hero of the Long March, but he had to send news of a son’s death to a man becoming accustomed to myth and adulation. In a major speech to the party in 1938, Mao had said: ‘Every communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. Our prin- ciple is that the party controls the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organisations, as witness the powerful Party organisations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. We can also create schools, culture, create mass movements.’ And, he could have added, cults. In 1942, the song which became the anthem of the Cultural Revolution was written, as legend has it, by an old peasant who had watched the dawn:

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The East is Red, the sun rises. In China a Mao Zedong is born. He seeks the people’s happiness. He is the people’s Great Saviour.

Mao’s portrait was painted on village walls and public build- ings. Toddlers were taught to chant: ‘We are all Chairman Mao’s good children.’ The afternoon of Mao Anying’s death Peng sent a telegram to Mao whose secretary, Ye Zilong, decided that the war was at too critical a stage to have a father distracted by grief. The Chinese forces were preparing a massive strike, one which would leave Acheson searching for a way to describe the scale of the American calamity. He settled on a Civil War analogy: it was the greatest defeat suffered by the American military since the Battle of Bull Run, the 1861 Civil War battle in which the Confederates routed the Union forces. It was left to Peng himself to blurt out the news when he visited Beijing three months later. He was ashamed he had not protected Anying better, he said. Mao crumpled. He trembled so violently he could not light his cigarette and sat silent for several minutes. Then he said, according to a Red Guard publication: ‘In war there must be sacrifi ce. Without sacrifi ces there will be no victory. To sacrifi ce my son or other people’s sons are just the same. There are no parents in the world who do not treasure their children. But please do not feel sad on my behalf, because this is something entirely unpredictable.’ In his turn, Mao kept the news from Songlin, Mao Anying’s wife of a year, only telling her after the signing of the armistice in 1953. Anying’s brother, Anqing, later wrote in Recollections of Our Father: ‘[Father] consoled her by saying “It’s war and war will take people’s lives. Don’t think that Anying should

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not have died for the people of China and Korea because he was my son.” . . . Once sister Songlin asked Father for per- mission to bring Anying’s remains back to China but he shook his head and said: “Martyrs can be buried anywhere. Why should we bring their remains home? Aren’t there thousands and thousands of martyrs among the Chinese Volunteers who have been buried in Korea?”’ Perhaps there are those who lie in neat formation in North and South Korea’s ﬁ elds of the dead who did come looking for martyrdom. Mao Anying’s father called him a martyr; Denis O’Brien’s family thought he was a martyr. In the cemeteries rest the willing and unwilling, the extraordinarily brave and the ordinary who fought bravely in the shadow of their fear.

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