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Chapter 2

Jack James’s Scoop

Korea is in a tough neighbourhood, and has been seen as fair game by its rapacious neighbours.

Korea is a strange country that for centuries has had most of the prerequisites for nationhood, including a distinct language and culture. And for more than 700 years it’s been on someone’s invasion list: first the Mongols came, and then the Chinese. Most recently the Japanese outright occupied the country in the early 1900s and savagely suppressed all Korean dissent. Despite all this, the Koreans have retained a sense of their Koreanness. They never viewed their rule by foreigners as anything other than illegal. And temporary.

With the surrender of Japan in September 1945, the Soviets and the Americans moved in to jointly occupy and administer the country, dividing it at the 38th parallel. After all that was to happen in the bloody years ahead, it’s roughly that same border that divides the country to this day. The Cold War set in. U.N. election observer ring teams, with Canada on board, were not allowed into the north. Instead, the Soviets set up and armed a brutal Stalinist regime, leaving their strongman, Kim Il-Sung, in charge. In the south, where elections were held, a pro-western strongman, Harvard and Princeton graduate Syngman Rhee, got the most seats in parliament (but not a majority) and became president. Both were tough and ruthless men, and both claimed to speak for one Korea.

There followed a period of low-intensity violence between the two hostile Koreas: raids, ambushes, shellings, snipings, and kidnappings. But nothing got out of hand.

Then, around eight o’clock on a sleepy Sunday morning on June 25, 1950, Jack James, a well-connected correspondent for the United Press wire agency walked into the American embassy in Seoul with the scoop of a lifetime.

“The North Koreans have crossed over the parallel in force!” he announced to a marine guard on duty.

The bored duty sergeant said simply, “So what? This is a common occurrence.”

“Yeah,” said James. “But this time they’ve got tanks.”1

Jack James’s exclusive beat the State Department announcement by two hours. The Korean War was on.

It was almost a very short campaign. The tough, well-trained, and well-equipped North Koreans swept aside the South Koreans and the capital was evacuated. American occupation forces based in Japan were sent to try to salvage the unfolding disaster.

The U.N. Security Council, boycotted at the time by the U.S.S.R., voted to come to South Korea’s defence with uncharacteristic speed. This decision would eventually lead to an international fighting force from almost twenty countries, lead by the U.S. and fighting under a U.N. banner. “Neutralist” countries such as Sweden and India sent medical teams. Even tiny Luxembourg, a member of the newly-founded NATO, sent forty-four soldiers.

In Ottawa, however, there was great hesitation. Even the defence minister was wary of getting involved with what he feared would become some endless American adventure in Asia. But Lester Pearson was among those saying it would be very difficult to say “No” to the Americans if they insisted Canada join in sending combat troops to Korea to drive back a blatant example of communist aggression.

Eventually Canada did climb board. In August, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent (external affairs minister under Mackenzie King, who had only died a few weeks earlier and whose ghost must have been uneasy at what was about to be announced) declared that Canadians would be going to Korea to fight. Canada was a driving force in the founding of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization and was being governed by a generation of Atlantic-minded men. Europe’s defence against the Soviets was their obsession.

There was also little taste for another Canadian military venture in Asia after the disaster at Hong Kong in the last war, in which ill-trained and badly led troops had been sacrificed for no apparent reason and were captured and brutally treated (and often murdered) by the Japanese. Canada’s sacrifice in the Hong Kong debacle seemed, to many, to be serving mainly Britain’s interests. And now there was a similar unease that the war revving up in Korea was to serve Washington’s agenda more than Canada’s or the U.N.’s. But other countries were not hesitating to contribute combat forces, including fellow Commonwealth cousins such as Britain and Australia. So, too, were fellow NATO allies, such as Turkey and Greece, which couldn’t possibly be any further away from Korea. And the Americans, with Munich ever on their minds, felt this was a classic case of a testing of resolve in standing up against clear-cut aggression.

Munich symbolized the meek capitulation of Britain and France to Hitler’s demands to take over Czechoslovakia, making the Second World War a virtual certainty. Munich forever gave “appeasement” a bad name. The Munich ghost made several return visits to American foreign policy in the years ahead, providing some of the philosophic and moral unpinning in justifying intervention in Vietnam a decade after Korea, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein a half century into the future. Munich has had a long shelf life. Korea would not be abandoned as Czechoslovakia had been. If a Korea-style U.N. force had been available to defend the Czechs in the late 1930s, the thinking went, Hitler’s invasion schemes could have been stopped cold.

The international U.N. force being put together was quite unlike anything that followed. It was not a peace-observing mission, or even peace-keeping. There was no peace to keep. It was a fighting force heading, by design, straight into harm’s way.

It was truly a “coalition of the willing,” in some cases with traditional foes such as Greece and Turkey fighting on the same side. All were more-or-less democracies. All would pay a heavy price in blood, including countries such as Columbia, with 146 killed, and Turkey with over 800 killed. (The group cohesion of the Turks was so strong that their captured soldiers had the highest survival rate in the brutal Chinese POW camps.) Ethiopia sent what it called “Conqueror Battalions” and had 122 killed. Thailand had 136 killed; Belgium, 97; Greece, 190; and tiny Luxembourg had seven killed.

Italy, which was not a U.N. member at the time (it had actually been an enemy country and fought at Hitler’s side in the war which ended only six years earlier), sent a Red Cross unit.

Norway and Denmark each sent a hospital ship. Sweden sent a field hospital, which stayed on long after the war ended. India sent a MASH unit, which was much praised by the Canadian wounded, and also sent a medical team that accompanied American paratroopers when they jumped into combat.

Many countries, Canada included, won U.S. Presidential Citations from President Truman for feats of particular bravery. Two British units received such citations, as did one from Australia (at Kapyong); also Belgium, Turkey, Greece, France, a South African Air Force Squadron, and Holland, whose Regiment Van Heutsz, received the citation twice.

Korea was a remarkable example of shared international sacrifice and reflected a highly diverse array of religions and cultures that held intact throughout the entire conflict. No one dropped out along the way. Canada, after a confused start, was to be in to the finish.

On August 7, about six weeks after the invasion, Prime Minister St. Laurent announced that a “special force” would be raised specifically to go into combat to help defend the embattled South Koreans. The march to Kapyong had started.

This would not be a war, St. Laurent stressed, not a “real war” at any rate, but a “police action.” And it would not be an American war, he emphasized. Rather, it would be run under the United Nations flag. This was a quaint legal nicety. The Americans provided the leadership, in large part American equipment and weapons would be used, and Americans were providing, by far, most of the troops. And, most importantly, the U.S. military was certainly charting the war’s overall direction and strategy. Aside from the Koreans themselves, the Americans were doing most of the fighting and most of the dying, so the war would be run their way. When Truman once suggested he would not rule out the use of nuclear weapons in Korea, a startled British Prime Minister Clement Attlee quickly flew to Washington for assurances Britain would be consulted first. He was given no such assurances. There was no doubt: as the senior partner, the U.S. was calling the shots in this war, although as we shall see when the Americans tried to rush Canadian troops into combat prematurely, their commander bravely, and successfully, stood up to U.S. bullying.

St. Laurent’s phrase “police action” never sat well with the troops who were doing the shooting and dying, and was seen as outright hypocrisy intended to lull the folks back home into thinking nothing too serious was happening. An additional problem was that, technically, if no actual war was declared, then where was the process that would someday end it? How do you undeclare a war that was never declared? And in a dilemma that Canada and its allies in Afghanistan would face decades later, what exactly was victory anyway; what exactly would “winning” look like? Was winning simply driving the invaders out of South Korea? Or was it to crush the North Korean Army? Or was it, more ominously, to destroy the North Korean state? The war aims changed and morphed as the war dragged on, and many of the more drastic end-scenarios were mused about rather than stated. Everyone, it seemed, had their own definition about what the point of it all was, where it was leading, and how it would wrap up.

This was a fuzzy, new world that the military felt quite uncomfortable in. The Americans were not at all at ease the idea of fighting for anything less than total victory. In this reality, they were not out to destroy North Korea as Japan and Nazi Germany had been crushed. They were merely there to stop North Korea’s aggression, which meant American pilots were forbidden to even fly into Chinese airspace in pursuit of Chinese jet-fighter aircraft (sometimes secretly flown by Soviet pilots) fleeing back into their safe havens once China stepped in. Fighting a limited war was so contrary to American military doctrine and culture that it created a profound crisis in which the President Harry Truman fired his popular (with the public at least, if not in the Pentagon) war commander, Douglas MacArthur, who threw out broad hints of invading China. The frustration of fighting to win something less than “victory” didn’t seem to bedevil Canada’s soldiers, who just lived with it, but it infuriated America’s military. As it turned out, fighting would finally end, not with surrender or a peace treaty, but with an armistice, which was a military, not a political document. That armistice is still in effect today and in a technical sense the “war” is still on, it’s just on hold. But among all soldiers on the sharp end of events, out in the hills, the “police action” phrase would later take on an acidic taste as Korea turned into a meat grinder.

Ted Zuber, a war artist, reflected on the bitterness on being told he wasn’t in a “real” war. “I can remember some people saying, ‘Well, that’s not like the Second World War.’ And I said tell that to the guy that got wounded or died over there. A bullet couldn’t give a goddamn what war it is,” Ted Zuber told the author many years ago.

Zuber was not at Kapyong, but served as a sniper later in the war and was wounded. After Korea he became a distinguished painter and combat artist and many of his paintings are in the Canada War Museum in Ottawa. The Zuber painting on the cover of this book depicts a night patrol in Korea. A Chinese flare shoots up, catching the Canadian squad exposed and helpless in no man’s land. The men “freeze,” fearful that any movement would give them away to Zuber’s counterparts, the Chinese snipers lying in ambush. Zuber was a combat infantryman of great experience and several of his works depict the fight at Kapyong. He was Canada’s official war artist in the First Gulf War of 1991.

Yard for yard, bomb for bomb, bullet for bullet, hour for hour, Korea was as relentless a killing factory as any “real” war. To an infantry soldier it was every bit as violent and deadly as the Second World War. In many ways it resembled, especially in its latter stages, the stalemated but treacherous trench warfare of the First World War. It was such a bloodbath that it is so odd that it is so little remembered or written about today. More than 36,000 Americans were killed in Korea, as were more than 500 Canadians. China may have lost 1.5 million; no one knows. And all this in just three years. This war in Korea is now strangely vanished, but it was a remorseless slogging match and all soldiers who fought there, including Canadians, to this day deeply resent the absurd “police action” description, a seemingly ridiculous label, they say, dreamed up by international law specialists and diplomats sitting safely back home, not by the people doing the fighting.

Canada entered this war wondering where on earth it would find the soldiers to fight it. After cutbacks at the end of the Second World War, in Canada the army alone had been slashed from 700,000 down to 16,000. To maintain new NATO commitments in Europe, which were aimed at meeting a very grave and immediate concern, namely defending Europe against the U.S.S.R., Canada’s new Korean fighting formations had to come from somewhere new; some, as yet, untapped resource. A new fighting force was to be created from scratch, not from the existing army.

Canada’s special Korean force would be formed into a new brigade of around 5,000 men. Three new battalions would be grafted onto regular army existing regiments. For example, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry already had one battalion and the new one would be designated the 2nd. And it was this new force, 2 PPCLI as it was termed (and still is today), that would be the first to go into combat in Korea, and would become the most famous fighting unit in the Canadian army since the Second World War.

Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry: an odd sort of name. A military force that describes itself using the words “Princess,” “Patricia,” and “Light” doesn’t sound as if it’s serious about its work. But from its inception, PPCLI staked out a reputation as being tenacious and rock-solid reliable.

The “Light” part of the name implies they were fast moving and mobile, relying on stealth and fitness; light as in “travel light.” They are often regarded as elite units. Commandos, mountain troops, marines, and anti-guerrilla forces are regarded as “light.” Historically, they were snipers and skirmishers. Medium and heavy infantry usually dates to a pre-gunpowder era and refers to the use body armour, javelins, and pikes. Most infantry in modern armies, whatever their names, are light infantry.

But who is Patricia, and what was she doing in Korea?

The PPCLI is one of the most decorated forces in Canadian history. It was created when the First World War broke out in the very twilight of the Victorian age. Canada’s entire regular army was only 3,000-men strong. It was a time when private individuals — rich private individuals — could actually create their own military units, and, not unlike medieval times, put them at the service of the nation. These philanthropists would often provide the rifles, the clothing, and the upkeep. Sometimes they designed their own uniforms, and on occasion even thought, well, it’s mine. Why don’t I command it?

Montreal businessman and Boer War veteran Alexander Hamilton Gault had a brainstorm. He would personally come up with $100,000 (about $2 million in today’s funds) to raise a battalion to go and fight the Germans as part of Canada’s contribution to beating the Kaiser. Ottawa snapped up the offer, and in eight days over 1,000 men were enlisted, little dreaming what a bloodbath they were heading into. Lieutenant Colonel Francis D. Farquhar of the Coldstream Guards was selected to command the new force. His boss happened to be the Governor General, the Duke of Connaught, who just happened to have a lovely daughter, Patricia, who was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and an accomplished artist who lived on until 1974. Farquhar’s flash of insight was to ask the Duke if he could name the regiment after Patricia.

Gault liked the words “light infantry” because it had an “irregular” sort of commando feel to it. And so, “Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry” it became. And still is.

The Patricias were in the trenches of Flanders by January 6, 1915. Two days later, two lance corporals, Norman Fry and Henry Bellinger, were dead — the first Canadians killed in the War to End All Wars. They would be joined by thousands more. By the time the shooting stopped, three Patricias had won the Victoria Cross, two posthumously. Almost 1,300 men had been killed.

The Patricias’ “colours” suggest they were sent to Siberia. It is listed on their official list of where they saw action. But actually, they never got into Siberia. In 1918, Canada sent a small contingent of about 1,000 men in an outfit called the 260th Battalion to Vladivostok as part of a half-hearted foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War. The men of the 260th never fired a shot in anger and in a few weeks were brought home. Fast forward eighty years. In 1997, in a quirky and uniquely Canadian system that insures the deeds of disbanded combat units are remembered, the PPCLI agreed to safeguard and in effect adopt the 260th’s “heritage” and now carries that long defunct battalion’s Siberian battle honour, even though no Patricia ever set foot in the place.

In the Second World War, the PPCLI fought in Sicily for the first Canadian assault on the Nazis since the debacle at Dieppe. Then they moved on to the Italian mainland and a grueling string of battles against crack German troops in wretched weather and treacherous terrain. Then they headed over to Holland for the Liberation and by the time of Germany’s surrender the battalion had acquired eighteen battle honours. They were headed for the Pacific to take on Japan when Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war. They had a magnificent war record and a reputation as tough, imaginative troops.

But these existing Patricias were, by and large, not the Patricias that would go to Korea. The Korean force would come from those three new battalions the army would create from nothing. The first to go to war, the men fated to become the Patricias of Kapyong, formed the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, or 2 PPCLI as its termed in military shorthand. These new Patricias were joining a family with a fine and noble lineage. It was a distinction that probably meant little to these recruits who were mostly young, mostly restless, on the prowl for excitement, and who were sneeringly dismissed by the brass in Ottawa as untrustworthy adventurers whose favorite marching song contained the line they shouted with pride: “We’re untrained bums, we’re from the slums.”

In command of the three battalions of the Korean Special Force was John Rockingham, a Second World War veteran brought out of retirement for this special mission. He looked, sounded, and acted exactly like what everyone imagined a magnetic commander would be like. He was a Gibraltar of a figure who literally towered over everyone around him. Rockingham was a dashing, charismatic leader right out of a recruiting poster, who led from the front. He joined the militia as a private and ended his career as a general, commanding the 9th Canadian Infantry brigade in Europe. He led his men through some of the bloodiest fighting in the war, eastward across France and Holland, and on into Germany. In one action, his driver and signaller beside him were shot by a sniper and Rockingham’s own nose was clipped by a bullet. He grabbed a submachine gun, stalked the sniper, shot him, and then resumed the war. He was slated to command a brigade of Canadian troops to fight the Japanese, when Hiroshima happened and the Pacific War ended.

Rockingham’s soldiers felt he was one of them and would follow wherever he led. He was a restless warrior and had no interest in being in the military at all unless there was fighting to be done. Rockingham was an improviser with the ability to rivet his attention on the crisis at hand

and not be distracted by peripheral matters; an ideal commander to take charge in Korea.

Brigadier General John “Rocky” Rockingham, a much-decorated Second World War hero, was plucked from his tedious job as union negotiator for a B.C. bus company to command the special Canadian force being created to fight in Korea. It was an inspired choice. Rockingham was a fighting general who had no interest in a life in the army unless there was fighting to be done.

PPCLI Museum and Archives.

In August 1950, he had an unbearably boring desk job with a British Columbia bus company. He was in charge of tedious union contract negotiations. To this real-life action figure used to making instant life and death decisions involving of thousands of men, his biggest issue now was over the issue of lunch breaks. The give and take and compromise so much at the heart of negotiating was not to his nature. He was a commander. Then, happily, in the midst of deadlocked contract talks, his phone rang. It was Ottawa on the line. It was a life-changing call for Rockingham. They were offering him command of the Korean special force and he could pick his own staff. Rockingham checked with his wife and the next day accepted. Two days later he was in Ottawa starting to organize his Korean army. He was only thirty-nine. He was rightly perceived as a seasoned combat leader who was coming not from the military culture but from civilian life. He would protect Canadian interests while serving under a foreign (American) command and would stick up for his men. In particular, he would work well with the Americans on a personal level and there could be no doubting his professional credentials, although once he got to Korea Rockingham would often clash with his U.S. officers over their emphasis on body counts as a measure of progress, a questionable yardstick which would afflict the U.S. military fifteen years later in Vietnam. Rockingham was a charismatic bulldog of a man. He was an inspired choice, and was selected personally by the minister of defence, Brooke Claxton.

One of Rockingham’s choices was Lieutenant-Colonel “Big Jim” Stone, one of the most talented and innovative soldiers in Canadian history.

He looked like something from a Marx Brothers movie, sporting a huge walrus moustache that made him resemble a puffed-up, desk-bound, self-important, Colonel Blimp-type figure from Punch magazine. He was none of those things. Kapyong is impossible to understand without understanding Jim Stone.

In 1939 he was working in a forestry camp in northern Alberta. When war broke out in September he was thirty-one, an absurdly ancient age to start an army career. He mounted his horse, Minnie, rode her 30 miles to Spirit River, then thumbed a ride to Grand Prairie, and enlisted as a private in the Edmonton Regiment. His aura of natural leadership and toughness were quickly spotted and he was promoted through the ranks and fast-tracked into officer’s training.

Brigadier General John Rockingham (centre, with Scottish headwear) and Colonel Jim Stone (right of Rockingham, with moustache).

Paul E. Tomelin/Department of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada, PA-133399.

Stone fought first in Italy, in Canada’s first battles with the Nazis since the debacle at Dieppe the year before. Italy was a tough, mountainous, wild place to fight an infantry war against crack German troops. Stone was at the centre of the bitter house-to-house battles around Ortona, where he established a reputation as an aggressive commander of great tactical skill — a reputation enhanced by the precious care he took with the lives of his men.

In a typical Stone exploit, during fighting through rubble-strewn streets of Ortona, he wanted tanks to blast their way through an obstacle, helping pave the way for his infantry. In his classic account of the dreadful agony at Ortona, Mark Zuehlke captures the spirit of Jim Stone at his most cantankerous and his best:

But suddenly, little more than 25 yards short of the rubble pile, the lead tank paused. The other tanks ground to a halt, maintaining their preset intervals between each other. They also ceased firing their guns. The infantry milled, unsure what was happening. By pausing, the tankers were hopelessly messing up the attack. As an infantryman, Stone believed, it was an all-too-common experience. Stone jumped up on the lead tank. “What the hell’s the matter?” he yelled. The tank commander pointed at a scrap of sheet metal lying in the road. “It’s probably concealing a mine,” he said. Stone was incredulous. The entire street, from one end to the other, was littered with bricks, stones, chunks of metal, broken boxes, and other debris from the battered and destroyed buildings fronting it. What made this piece of metal special? Stone tried to convince the man to get going again. He could feel the attack’s momentum slipping through his fingers, like so many grains of wheat. The tank commander said petulantly, “Don’t you realize a tank is worth $20,000? I can’t risk it.” “You armoured sissy,” Stone snapped. “I’ve got 20 to 30 men here with no damned armour at all and they’re worth a million dollars apiece.”2

The attack bogged down. A German anti-tank gun started firing at the Canadian tanks. Stone yelled at his own anti-tank man to open fire with his PIAT, a British version of the bazooka. The man fired and missed and then began trying to reload. Stone had run out of patience. He tossed a smoke grenade at the German gun, then, all alone, began running towards it, pulling out a fragmentation grenade as he went, and tossed it over the gun’s steel shield protecting the Germans, wiping them all out. He was awarded the Military Cross for his amazing day’s work.

Stone was light years removed from military behind-the-lines, “chateau” commanders who gave their orders far removed from the front, inhabiting a different universe from the men they commanded. Stone lived, ate, and slept where his men did and took the same risks. And they knew it.

By war’s end he’d become a lieutenant-colonel and gone on to fight his way into Germany. In addition to his Military Cross, he had been decorated with the Distinguished Service Order — twice.

One of his citations reads: “There were many instances (in Italy and Holland) where Lt-Col. Stone’s personal leadership was the contributing factor to the success in battle. His initiative and courage are unsurpassed.”

In Korea, he would drop in on his front line troops, and often walk along the crest of a hill offering himself as a live target, daring the Chinese to fire at him, which they did without result. It was Stone’s way of telling his soldiers they were all in it together. Stone was Rockingham’s personal choice to command 2 PPCLI, the first Canadian unit to go into combat in Korea.

Oddly, though decorated four times for bravery by the time he retired, in Korea Stone told his men that he didn’t believe much in medals, so don’t expect any.

The mountain warfare skills he mastered in the Italian campaign gave him precisely the insights that would be priceless later on at Kapyong. However, there was an important difference: in Italy he was attacking, where at Kapyong he’d be defending. But thanks to his Italian battles, he developed the vital knack of seeing things from the enemy’s point of view.

Even in the decades that followed Korea, the men who fought in Stone’s army had a strange attachment to the man. At a fiftieth anniversary ceremony in Kapyong itself, veterans made arrangements to phone Stone who could not attend because of poor health. When the call was made, a military bureaucrat from the Canadian embassy tried to break in and stop it because, he said, there was a ceremony taking place. He was curtly told by the veterans that they were making the call to the man who’d made the ceremony possible.

Jim Stone was a tough man to love and an easy one to admire. Some of his men asked specifically to serve under him. He was a special soldier, exactly the type of inspired and inspiring leader you’d want in a desperate situation. He was a popular choice; a fighting infantry commander who led from the front. A soldiers’ soldier. The troops respected him, the press lionized him, and the public ate it up. A Winnipeg Free Press headline caught the tone exactly: “Big Jim From Ortona Rejoins The Army; Canada’s ‘Legend’ To Head Unit In Korea.”3

There was no shortage of volunteers for the special force. Ten days into the recruitment campaign 7,000 men had signed up. Their makeup was different than those who’d gone to war against Hitler only a few years earlier. That had been a crusade against an enormous evil, and virtually the entire nation rose up and joined in the struggle.

The volunteers for Korea were not by-and-large from the main-stream middle class, who were busy building comfortable careers and raising families in Canada’s post-war prosperity. Korean volunteers, the enlisted men at least, were more likely to be working class. Officers and senior non-commissioned officers, such as sergeants, were likely to be veterans of the Second World War. But the private soldiers were mostly straight out of civilian life, with many still in their teens. This would be a citizen’s army. These recruits joined up not just to be in the army, but to be in the army to fight, and to fight specifically in Korea. They were after adventure, certainly, but also because they wanted combat. There’d never been a Canadian military force quite like this before. These young men had not the least interest in the grand issues of politics or balance of power or ideology or any great moral crusade.

This was the army Stone wanted. He didn’t want dreamers. He wanted fighters.

The Kapyong army was “recruited from the streets,”4 as he once tersely put it in his talk to the new generation of PPCLI officers years later.

Among them were many dead-beats, escapists from domestic troubles, cripples, neurotics and other useless types all of whom broke down under the rigorous training program and we got rid of them prior to going into action.

Those who joined to fight for a cause were difficult to find. Bill Boss, our accompanying war correspondent, tried to find the idealist who joined solely to fight a holy war against Communism, like Diogenes searching with his lantern trying to find an honest man. Bill was unsuccessful.

The strength of the Battalion was its adventurers, those who joined the army because there was a war to fight and they wanted to be there. Personally I believe that all volunteer armies in wartime are composed mostly of adventurers.5

Pierre Berton, the journalist, quickly spotted the absence of moral commitment in the Canadian troops, and he disapproved: “What struck me during my first few days with the Canadian troops,” Berton wrote years later in Maclean’s magazine, “was the appalling lack of understanding among the rank and file, who, for the most part, had no real idea why they were in Korea. They were tough, resourceful and skilled; they had exchanged shots with the enemy, and discipline was not a problem. But the Why We Fight kind of lecture that had been part of basic infantry training in the Global War wasn’t part of the syllabus.”6

Berton did not grasp that these men were a new, existential breed of soldier. They needed no pep talks or motivational lectures. They knew precisely why they had gone to war: they wanted to fight.

Don Hibbs, the twenty-year-old cab driver from Guelph, Ontario, asked himself: What am I doing here in this stupid car when I could be in the army?7

He’d missed the last war and he didn’t want to miss this one.

“I can be a hero over there pulling hand grenades out with my teeth, was my impression. I joined basically for the adventure, not patriotism. I didn’t even know where Korea was. I didn’t care where Korea was. I just thought: I want to go to war. I want that experience.”

John Bishop was working in British Columbia logging camps. He was nineteen and he, too, joined for the action. Some, he said, enlisted looking for adventure, but some simply “wanted to get away from wives. Or they were not in a good relationship with the police. I knew of only one man went over to fight communism. We joined to fight. We knew we were going to a fight. We were pretty proud. Almost all of us got out at the end of our [eighteen-month] tour. Very few became regulars.”8

One of the few was Bishop, who went on to become a career soldier and diplomat, and later in life was posted to a peacetime Korea as military attaché at the Canadian embassy.

Another who simply liked the military life was Alex Sim of Kamloops, British Columbia. He was a Second World War veteran, who left the army after the war and then re-enlisted for Korea.

He felt and still feels it was the right thing to do.

“We had an obligation to go,”9 he explains today. “The Koreans were taking a terrible beating. The Brits were going. The Aussies were going. What’s matter with Canada? We should be going. I wrote letter to someone in the government saying I was very disappointed Canada not going to assist. I never got an answer.”

Sim had also a brother and a cousin in the same platoon. His cousin was given a medical evacuation because of an ear infection only a few days before Kapyong and so missed the battle.

“We never talk about it,” says Sim.

To join up, recruits often showed great inventiveness. In Rivers, Manitoba, Mike Czuboka, fresh out of high school, hitched a ride on a freight train to Winnipeg to enlist, and then lied to the army about his age, claiming he was nineteen, not eighteen.

“According to official army records, I’m still that one year older than I really am,”10 he says today.

Czuboka had felt he was missing out on a thrilling opportunity; something that would never come again. He worshiped his older brother who’d been in the RCAF and had flown fifty-two missions over the Atlantic hunting U-boats.

“I was fourteen years old when World War Two ended and I saw Korea as a chance for a great adventure of the kind I’d been denied in the War.”

But he also had a sadder motive. His Ukrainian-born father was imprisoned during the First World War as an enemy alien and afterwards always felt he was an unwanted foreigner in his adopted country. Deeply hurt, young Mike Czuboka signed on for Korea in part “to prove [he] was a good Canadian.”

But the excitement of combat was always a huge attraction to a young, restless prairie boy.

“If you want to be a soldier then combat is something you’re looking forward to,” says Czuboka. “It’s the making of you. Specifically I went into the infantry because that’s where the action is. There’s no point in telling an infantryman it’s a dangerous business; of course it’s dangerous. It’s like telling a race car driver they shouldn’t race because it’s dangerous. That’s why they race.”

In Mike Czuboka’s mortar platoon the casualty rate was to be almost 30 percent.

Free spirits the volunteers may have been, but they were hardly the “soldiers of fortune” that the chief of the general staff, General Charles Foulkes, labelled them. Curiously, it was an important civilian, the defence minister, Bruce Claxton, who was most impressed with the calibre of the recruits he’d met. But the military brass were always uneasy with the Korean special force, feeling, strangely, that people who actually wanted to fight a war were not the types wanted in the army. As it turned out, these were precisely the type of people who fought superbly.

Despite Foulkes’ demeaning sneer, these young men turned out to be deadly serious. They were quick learners and imaginative improvisers, capable of great heroism. They seemed to be natural fighters with an uncanny ability to adapt to circumstances and make do with the resources at hand. These talents later turned out to be a great asset when they were sent into the fight with the wrong training and the wrong weapons for this odd war.

Such was the enthusiasm to enlist, an assortment of misfits and oddballs got in line. One man with an artificial leg managed to slip through the initial recruit medical examination. Another was seventy-two years old. In another instance a civilian, on a last-minute impulse, jumped on a troop train heading out of Ottawa and it was weeks later before he was finally discovered, drilling with PPCLI recruits way out in Alberta.

The three-battalion Korean force was eventually organized into a formation called the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade and was to be concentrated in one place. Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington was chosen. Training could be completed there and it was also closest to an embarkation port to the Far East.

The Fort Lewis venture had its tragic moment in late November.

One of the last trains bringing the troops out, at a hamlet called Canoe River, British Columbia, was winding its way westward through the Rockies and smashed head-on into an oncoming express as both were rounding the same curve. Seventeen men were killed. Four bodies were never found. Seventy were injured, many scalded, for these were the final days of the era of steam locomotives. Both the prosecution and the railway tried to pin the blame for the disaster on a lowly CNR telegrapher. The man was acquitted thanks to the flaming oratory and the brilliant defence presented by his lawyer, the underdog’s ferocious champion and a man on his way up: a young Prairie firebrand named John Diefenbaker.

Back at the war, events had taken a dramatic new turn. It appeared to be winding down.

After an initial dismal showing, the Americans eventually held the line against the North Koreans. General Douglas MacArthur was put in charge and staged a brilliantly executed invasion in September on Korea’s west coast at Inchon, quickly driving the North Koreans out of the south. MacArthur, who was steeped in military history, while planning the Inchon landing was reading James Wolfe’s diaries about planning his fight against Montcalm at Quebec City. All of Wolfe’s officers said Wolfe’s plans were impossible and Wolfe decided if they thought so, then so would the French. Similarly, MacArthur reasoned if many of his own staff thought Inchon a dangerously unworkable idea, then so would the North Koreans. Inchon turned out to be MacArthur’s masterpiece. The Americans were soon pushing on up the peninsula, seemingly unstoppable and heading ominously close to the Chinese border.

It now looked as if the North Korean army was finished as a fighting force and North Korea itself would soon be finished as a state. The war was all but over.

As it was shaping up, there now would be no need for all those fighting Canadians. What was now needed was not a combat force, but an occupation army.

With the pressure off, Canada decided to send only one unit of the three that had been formed: the 2nd Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. It would be made up of about 900 men. The great adventure now seemed destined to be something far less. Occupation duty offered no danger, certainly, but also no excitement. Danger and excitement were supposed to be part of the deal. To these young Canadian soldiers, it was the whole point.

An aging American Second World War-era troop ship named the USS Private Joe P. Martinez would take the Patricias from Seattle to Pusan, Korea. A U.S. Navy band saw them off, playing with great geographic if not musical accuracy, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” The voyage was a nightmare and would last almost three agonizing weeks.

The poor old Martinez was a liberty ship. Cheap and churned out in their thousands, they were mass-produced to a single design to get quickly across the Atlantic to beat the U-Boats waiting in ambush. They took just a little over a month to build; although one was completed in four days as a publicity stunt. They were a masterpiece of American industrial assembly-line efficiency. About 2,500 were still in service at the end of the Second World War when hundreds were bought up by Greek shipping magnates, such as Aristotle Onassis, and formed the basis of their new empire of cargo fleets. Liberty ships were designed with one single aim in mind: they were no-frills workhorses. What they were not were passenger liners. Onto this wheezing, geriatric rust bucket were loaded almost 2,000 Canadian and American troops and all their paraphernalia of war.

The Martinez was named to honour a real-life hero, an American soldier, Joseph Martinez from Taos, New Mexico, who deserved a better memorial. The son of dirt-poor farm workers, he was the first Hispanic-American to be awarded the Medal of Honor. Although only a private, he personally led repeated attacks over snow-covered mountains against Japanese positions in the Aleutian Islands campaign, off the coast of Alaska. The Aleutian Campaign was an obscure theatre, little studied by historians and the only part of the Second World War fought on North American soil. It was a war fought in extreme weather, and rough terrain in a place hardly anyone involved in had ever heard of. It was remarkably like Korea.

But remote and neglected by history as the campaign is, men still died there. Joe Martinez was one of them. As he stormed the last Japanese trench on the island of Attu, Martinez was shot in the head and died the next day. Several army facilities and legion posts in the American southwest are today still named in his honour. Canadians in the elite Canadian-American Devil’s Brigade also fought in the Aleutians. The exploits of this dashing, unconventional unit was the basis of the popular Hollywood movie starring William Holden. Part of the Aleutian invasion planning team was George Pearkes, a gallant Victoria Cross winner from the First World War and who later, as defence minister under John Diefenbaker, recommended the cancellation of the Arrow program.

Ironically, one of the Patricias who would fight at Kapyong and was aboard the Martinez had also fought in the Aleutians with the ship’s slain namesake: Tommy Prince, an Ojibwe from just north of Winnipeg. Unbelievably brave, Prince fought later in Italy and France and ended the war as the most decorated soldier in Canadian history. However, it is unlikely that he and Joe Martinez ever actually crossed paths during the Alaskan campaign.

For three miserable agonizing weeks, the struggling little Martinez worked its way across the Pacific and its wretched and retching passengers bobbed like a cork in the rough weather. Few of the Patricias were convinced it was seaworthy. Only the rust, they said, was keeping the water out. Toilet facilities were crude. The food was inedible. The cooks sweated into the meals they were preparing.

“The weather was some of the worst in memory. Even the ship’s crew were seasick,” remembers Mike Czuboka. “I spent the first week in my bunk flat on my back and next to my rifle. The bunks were six deep and jammed together in the hold. The odour of unwashed bodies and feet was almost unbearable.”11

John Bishop remembers the creaking of the hull convinced the soldiers they were headed straight for the bottom long before they’d ever make it to the battlefield. Even the captain was seasick.

“The hull developed a vertical crack along the bulkhead of our hold,” he wrote. “In the roughest weather we could actually see it lengthening as the water leaked in. A warm soup of sea water and vomit sloshed back and forth every time the ship rolled, and when the ship heeled badly to our side it was over a foot deep.”12

No one mentioned anything like this in those inspiring recruiting ads.