Dan Bjarnason - Triumph at Kapyong: Canada’s Pivotal Battle in Korea

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To my parents

TRIUMPH AT KAPYONG

CANADAS PIVOTAL
BATTLE IN KOREA

Dan Bjarnason

Forewords by Adrienne Clarkson and Peter Mansbridge

Contents

Foreword by Adrienne Clarkson 7

Foreword by Peter Mansbridge 10

Acknowledgements 13

Introduction 15

Chapter 1 Canada Is Not Sir Galahad 23

Chapter 2 Jack Jamess Scoop 27

Chapter 3 A Citizens Army Goes to War 51

Chapter 4 Death in the Snow 68

Chapter 5 The Battle Begins: Let the Bastards Come! 99

Chapter 6 Just a Wonderful Group of Men 151

Whatever Happened to 169

Decorations Won at Kapyong 173

Killed in Action at Kapyong 175

Notes 177

Further Reading 185

Index 187

Foreword

by Adrienne Clarkson

As a child, the Korean War was a very significant event for me. After arriving in Canada as refugees and struggling to find our place in Canada during the war time and right after it, my family was very alert to the idea that things were still in flux in China. Mao Zedong had triumphed in 1949, and my father announced solemnly to us that we would never be returning to Hong Kong. We were going to become Canadian, and the door was shut forever on our past. As a result of the Japanese conquering Hong Kong in 1941, we had lived under the occupation for six months, and then, in a dramatic and now unbelievable way, were rescued and made our way to Canada of which we had only flimsy knowledge and where my father had some business connections.

Every evening in our cottage at McGregor Lake, we huddled by the radio and listened to the news. My father was very pessimistic about General MacArthur being able to hang on to Korea in the face of the Chinese offensive. He would say, Were just going to be pushed right off the end of that peninsula, right off the end of Busan. Every day was full of punishing news. As a family, we were extremely depressed. It wasnt that we wanted to return to Hong Kong; it was the idea that somehow defeat was coming again.

Meanwhile, I personally felt a connection with the war because my friend Ruth Gray, whose father was the minister at St. Pauls Church on Daily Avenue in Ottawa, had seen her brother, Alex, go off as a private with the Princess Patricias 2nd Battalion. He was killed and we plunged into a deep mourning all of his former classmates at Lisgar Collegiate, the parish of St. Pauls, and the group of giggling girlfriends who shared lunch in one corner of the cafeteria. Alex was a grand young man and we worshiped him as only young teenagers can do to someone who plays football wonderfully and who volunteers to go to a war. Ruth herself died several years ago and we had been in touch since I mentioned her brother several times while I was governor general and commander-in-chief. He will always be, for me, the living embodiment of a spirit of gallantry and devil-may-care commitment.

When I gave the commander-in-chiefs commendation to the 2nd Battalion for their actions in Medak Pocket in 2003, I thought of Alex. When I spoke at the funeral of our four 3rd Battalion soldiers killed in the friendly fire incident in 2002, I thought of Alex. And when I visited the 2nd Battalion at Shilo, Manitoba, in May 2010, I again thought of Alex.

As colonel-in-chief of the Princess Patricias Canadian Light Infantry since 2007, I am completely bound up with the fortunes and the lives of this extraordinary regiment. The Patricias are the stuff that legends are made of: raised swiftly at the outbreak of the First World War; distinguishing themselves at Vimy Ridge, Canadas defining battle; and culminating in Ortona in the Second World War all of these are lights on a path of beauty, sacrifice, and honour.

I am very proud that Dan Bjarnason has written the history of the Battle of Kapyong, in which the Korean Special Force and 2 PPCLI play such an important role. It is a thrilling account, and though I have particular reasons to remember the name Kapyong, I am very aware that most Canadians do not remember it. For the first time, the moving story of Major Levy, in which I played a marginal personal role, is revealed in its sad complexity. This is history at its finest. I am also fortunate to know people like Hub Gray (Captain Retired); Bjarnason draws very much on Hubs own memoir entitled Beyond the Danger Close.

When I am with my regiment, I know that they incarnate the true spirit of the Patricias, who are first in the field and who have such a close relationship as officers and men because of the kind of infantry regiment it has always been.

Anyone going to Korea today, seeing that hilly countryside and the magnificent forests that cover it, would find it difficult to believe what I saw in the newsreels when I was a child in 195051: Korean peasants digging through the earth and eating roots and what looked like bark from trees; the hills almost completely denuded except for a few leafless shrubs. We sacrificed in order for that to change and we should feel some satisfaction now, knowing that South Korea has developed so strongly as an industrial power. If we were sacrificing in order to bring a better way of life, we certainly did it successfully in Korea. Our loss of 520 are buried in the U.N. Memorial Park cemetery in Busan.

The Battle of Kapyong is an enthralling story of they shall not pass dimensions. Our small band of seven hundred stood off an enemy of five thousand tough soldiers who had just been through a triumphant revolution. The word Kapyong is synonymous with courage. All Canadians can be proud.

The Right-Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, PC, CC, CMM, CD

Twenty-seventh Governor General of Canada

Foreword

by Peter Mansbridge

Theres a small plastic container on a shelf in my office at the CBC in Toronto. Most people dont even notice it. I do. Almost every day.

Dan Bjarnason brought it to me in April of 1992, just after hed arrived home from an overseas assignment. He had travelled across the ocean to report on half a dozen First World War veterans who had fought at one of the most important battles in Canadian military history the battle of Vimy Ridge. Theyd returned to the same spot, seventy-five years on, to honour the 3,598 Canadians who died on that ridge, in a battle that helped define us as a nation. Vimy Ridge is hallowed ground, and the stunning Walter Allward monument that looms over the area is testament to the first time Canadians had fought under Canadian command.

So whats in the container? And why do I cherish it to this day? Dan knew that as an amateur military history buff myself, I had envied his assignment. Id never been to Vimy Ridge and desperately wished I had. So Dan did the next best thing he brought Vimy Ridge to me. He scooped up a small amount of Vimy soil, placed it inside a 35mm camera film capsule, brought it back across the ocean, and placed it on my desk. Every once and a while I do more than just look at that old capsule I open it and touch the particles inside. Touching history.

Over the years Ive added a few other little containers to the collection Dan started for me: sand from Juno Beach in Normandy, gravel from Apeldoorn in the Netherlands, a stone from Hong Kong. All encourage me, again, to touch history.

Which brings me to this book. Its written by my friend and colleague of almost forty years, that same Dan Bjarnason. The conflict in Korea in the early 1950s and Canadas role in it has been called the Forgotten War, and for the most part that description is correct. So few Canadians know what happened, why it happened, and how our own soldiers fought and died there.

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