David Green - Captured at the Imjin River: The Korean War Memoirs of a Gloster

First published in Great Britain 2003 by
LEO COOPER
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Limited
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright David Green, 2003

ISBN 1 85052 959 X
ePub ISBN:9781844683727
PRC ISBN: 9781844683734

A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.5/12.5pt Plantin by
Phoenix Typesetting, Burley-in-Wharfedale, West Yorkshire

Printed in England by
CPI UK

Dedicated to the Memory
of
No. 22341335 Private Peter D. Hone
1st Battalion The Gloucestershire Regiment
Killed in Action
April, 1951
Aged 19 years

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my warmest thanks to the Curator of the Gloucestershire Regiment War Museum and the Editor of the Gloucestershire Echo for all their help and for giving me permission to reproduce photographs and illustrations from their archives.

My best thanks too to three of my former comrades, Tony Eagles, Roy Mills and Morris Coombes for their contributions.

My sincere thanks to my publisher, Brigadier Henry Wilson of Pen & Sword Books, for his most cordial and encouraging enthusiasm for my story, and to my editor, Brigadier Bryan Watkins, who has shown just the same enthusiasm and interest. I am grateful to him for his concise editorial revision of my original manuscript and for the addition of historical background notes throughout the text.

Lastly, and most especially, to my darling and devoted wife Janet, who has always shown faith in me and for the long hours spent in setting my handwritten text into print.

Foreword

In this book I have set out to describe my life as an eighteen-year-old National Service soldier with the 1st Battalion The Gloucestershire Regiment in the early 1950s. The Battalion served in Korea with 29th British Infantry Brigade as part of the United Nations Force, under American command, which finally stalled the attempts of the Communist North and their Chinese allies to overwhelm South Korea and to bring it under Communist domination. We experienced great hardship at times and were involved in some very hard fighting, the Battalion being finally annihilated at the Battle of the Imjin in April, 1951. For all the hardship and dangers, there was one priceless thing which I can never forget: the wonderful comradeship of a soldiers life on active service.

This book is dedicated to my closest friend my best mate No. 22341335 Private Peter D. Hone, with whom I served from my first day in the Army. Pete was killed in the Imjin Battle, fighting heroically with his Bren gun against the hordes of Chinese soldiers who finally swamped our position on Hill 235, overlooking the Imjin Valley.

Despite the fact that over 142,000 United Nations soldiers, mostly Americans, were killed in Korea and that the Communist casualties, for which we have no official figures, must have exceeded that number by many hundreds of thousands, few people today seem even to know that the Korean War was fought or why. Certainly very, very few understand what an important part was played in that war by the British National Servicemen who formed so large a proportion of those serving in 27th and 29th British Infantry Brigades and their supporting arms and services. I, for one, am intensely proud to have been amongst them.

Taken prisoner during the Imjin Battle, I spent two and a half years as a prisoner of war in Chinese hands.

Pete Hone has no known grave, for when the Americans retook what by then had become known as Gloucester Hill, three weeks or so after the battle, they so blitzed the area that such bodies of our dead mates as were recovered were quite unrecognizable. They were cremated and their ashes buried in a United Nations War Cemetery in Pusan, each headstone bearing the inscription Soldier of the British Army.

What little faith I had had in a God had been shattered by the sights that met our eyes when we arrived in Korea.

Now, over fifty years later, I have revisited the country and I marvelled at its progress. To see the happy faces of the hard-working people, and especially the children, has made me realize that the sacrificial efforts of the United Nations Force had not been in vain. Ironically, the situation in North Korea, whose Communist leader Kim Il Sung was chiefly responsible for the tragedy that hit the South, is still desperate.

It was 9 March 1950, and a cold, windy spring morning, as I stepped off the double-decker bus at what was then called Cheltenhams LMS (London, Midland and Scottish Railways) station, clutching the little brown suitcase which my Mum had just bought for me at Boots The Chemists. I had come to catch the 8.45 train for Wiltshire which would take me on the first stage of my journey to Bulford Camp, on Salisbury Plain, and the start of a new adventure.

I had been called up for National Service in the Army and allocated to the Gloucestershire Regiment known throughout the Army and thereafter as The Glosters. Now I was off to report to the Wessex Brigade Training Centre at Bulford for my recruit training.

As the wind whistled through the sooty, corrugated roof, the Birmingham-bound train was busily getting up steam, its smoke billowing through the ancient bridge, engulfing me as I made my way to the southbound platform. At the foot of the steps a bespectacled, moustached, overweight porter-cum-ticket inspector held out his hand, his beady but kindly old eyes peering out over the inch-thick lenses. As he took my Railway Warrant, he grunted, Goin to be a soldier, eh? Good luck to ya son. Muttering my thanks, I glanced up at the big station clock which hung from the roof. With a clunk the minute hand moved on to twenty-two minutes past eight. As I had often done in the past, I made my way to the only warmth and comfort available, the railway caf and its inevitable cup of stewed tea. Stewed though the tea was, I knew I could rely upon finding a slice of excellent slab fruit cake, just like the cake we had on Sundays at the boys home where I had spent a few correctional months as a fifteen year old and for which I had often been involved in a keen battle with the cards in the hope of winning some more.

As I sat there munching my cake, I looked back over the past few years, years which had certainly had their ups and downs. I reflected that today I was setting out on an entirely new life and one into which I was determined to put my heart and soul. All those blots on my copy-book (such as my recent spell in Gloucester jail for the theft of a camera which one of my mates had actually stolen I had just happened to be with him but I wasnt going to tell them that) would be water under the bridge and quite unknown to my new companions.

Before I had received my call-up papers, I had been growing increasingly unsettled and bored, constantly seeking something I could really get stuck into. Meanwhile, I had been working as a builders labourer, a job that kept me very fit but lacked any sort of challenge or prospects. I had even been toying with thoughts of the Foreign Legion. Now things were going to be different but just how different I never guessed.