Bloodbath that nearly downed the world: In their own enthralling words, the spine-tingling heroism of the forgotten British troops who fought for their lives in the Korean War

• As with so many missions facing British soldiers in the godforsaken war they were fighting, the odds were stacked against them
• Few of us have anything but a hazy notion of the vicious conflict that split the Korean peninsula in the Fifties
• Korean War was a bloodbath in which 40,000 American troops, 500,000 North Korean and Chinese soldiers and at least 2.5 million civilians all died
  

By TONY RENNELL FOR MAILONLINE

Published: 17:41 EDT, 26 December 2013 | Updated: 17:41 EDT, 26 December 2013

Corporal Jim Lucock was, in his own words, ‘just an ordinary national serviceman who didn’t want to die’.

But warfare doesn’t pay much attention to how desperately a man wants to stay alive, and one day Jim and his mates were ordered to enter and destroy a maze of tunnels dug by enemy troops.

As with so many missions facing British soldiers in the godforsaken war they were fighting, the odds were stacked against them.

Ordeal: British troops (pictured) and United States soldiers battled the enemy and hellish conditions

Jim recalled how, as the unit moved gingerly forward in the dark, ‘this lad in front said, “Hey Corp, I think I’ve stood on a mine”, but somebody called out, “It’s not a bloody mine, stop acting the goat”. So he took his foot off and it went up.

‘He was killed instantly. So was the lad behind me. I was hit and lay unconscious for a couple of hours with 36 pieces of shrapnel in me. I still have some in my left leg.’

Here is a general knowledge quiz: a) During the Cold War, where did British soldiers battle the enemy head on for three years? b) Where did more of our troops die than in the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan put together? c) Where were our prisoners-of-war tortured and brainwashed? d) Where did World War III nearly break out? e) Where, more than 60 years on, is there, astonishingly, still no peace agreement between the warring sides?

The answer to each of these questions is the same — Korea.

These days we know plenty about the grim state of North Korea under its crazed Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-Un, who this month was reported to have executed his uncle for corruption.

But few of us have anything but a hazy notion of the vicious conflict that split the Korean peninsula in the Fifties, when Britain joined the U.S. under the flag of the United Nations to combat communist forces backed by Mao Tse Tung’s China.

More than 100,000 British troops were involved, three quarters of them inexperienced lads in their teens called up for their compulsory two years of national service.

Wet behind the ears, some straight out of school, they said goodbye to Mum and Dad, and, after basic training, were on their way by ship to a land most had never heard of. There they fought — and 1,078 died — in a largely forgotten war.

The Korean War was a bloodbath in which 40,000 American troops, 500,000 North Korean and Chinese soldiers and at least 2.5 million civilians all died — a slaughter 30 times greater than today’s conflict in Syria.

And yet, once over, it passed so quickly into history that it now seems no more than a footnote.

The Korean War was a bloodbath in which 40,000 American troops (pictured), 500,000 North Korean and Chinese soldiers and at least 2.5 million civilians died - a slaughter 30 times greater than today's Syria conflict

Even at the time the fighting was woefully under-reported. Unlike today, when bulletins from war fronts are immediate and extensive, press coverage back then was sparse, televisions were few and far between, and only the occasional black-and-white newsreel told cinema audiences what was going on 5,500 miles away.

It was real enough in its horror to the dwindling band of men now in their late 70s and 80s who fought it, and their memories — and indignation — still burn bright, as a gripping new book of reminiscences shows.

Some shouldn’t have been there. Regulations decreed that no one under 19 should go into battle. But this was ignored as 18-year-olds were thrust into the front line. Most barely knew why they were there. ‘All anybody told us,’ recalled one, ‘was that we were fighting the reds.’

The ins and outs for which they were laying their lives on the line went unexplained. They were, in fact, the first front-line troops in the Cold War between the democratic West and the communist-controlled East.

After World War II, the Korean peninsula had been divided up along the 38th Parallel by the Russians and Americans. When the super-powers pulled out in 1947, they left a communist North Korea and a U.S.-backed South Korea, each determined to oust the other and unite their nation.

Sure enough, in June 1950, 135,000 communist troops invaded the south. An aggressive American response saw Mao send in 300,000 troops of his People’s Liberation Army, and a full-scale war unfolded in which thousands of benighted British troops found themselves fighting for their lives.

What they remember most vividly was the cold. In their first winter in Korea, temperatures plummeted to minus 40f. Rivers froze and the ground was so hard that specialist engineers were needed to dig trenches.

If a hand touched metal, it stuck to it, causing a large loss of skin, according to Peter Jones of the Argylls. ‘Snow fell with abandon, 24 inches in a couple of hours.’ One soldier’s moustache froze and snapped off.

A North Korean soldier guards an unidentified U.S. prisoner of war next to a downed aircraft during the war

Staying warm was made worse because the British troops arrived there scandalously under-equipped.

Where Americans had fur-lined parkas with hoods, our boys shivered in army-issue string vests and as many layers as they could get on and be able to move. With mittens on, they couldn’t fire their rifles, but they risked frostbite in seconds if they took them off.

Sleeping bags didn’t arrive for a month. ‘We had to huddle together just to keep alive,’ said Bill Fox, an infantryman in the Gloucester Regiment.

They were rarely able to wash, and defecated where they could. Everyone stank. ‘You rarely took off your clothes, even to sleep,’ said Terry Moore, a lieutenant in the Ulster Rifles. ‘You got filthy and you stayed filthy, riddled with fleas and bugs. We never took our boots off because your feet would freeze.’

Pat Quinn thinks that without cold-weather clothing the Americans eventually passed to the Brits, he would have frozen to death.

After the initial fast-manoeuvring phase of the war, troops lived in two-man dug-outs known as ‘hutches’ carved into hillsides — heated by petrol stoves, also courtesy of the Americans. With logs, sandbags and soil piled on top, these hutches gave reasonable protection from enemy shells, but pop your head outside and there was every chance of it being blown off by a Chinese sniper.

Inside, there was a constant battle against rampaging rats — they took a chunk out of Kingsman Brian Hough’s face as he slept — and, in the summer, mosquitoes. Food was meagre and unappetising, generally American cold rations of tinned beans, chocolate and cigarettes.

The enemy was very close, hunkered down on neighbouring hills sometimes just 200 yards away, with the ground in between often lit up by star shells. ‘There was always fire going one way or the other,’ recalled Ivan Williams. ‘We were always on semi-alert.’

Patrols crept out to lay mines or sweep for enemy ones. Then one side or the other would attack and there would be fierce fighting. The Chinese line might be forced back half a mile but a few days later the ground gained was retaken.

The enemy were relentless. Jim Houghton of the Royal Leicesters remembered Chinese and North Korean soldiers throwing themselves at the wire defences in the face of withering rifle and Bren gun fire. ‘They just kept on coming. Their commissars would blow a whistle and they had no choice. We shot them down until all our ammunition was spent.’

At the Imjin River, Bill Fox of the Gloucester Regiment reeled under wave after wave of attacks. ‘They had stick grenades and machine guns, but we were well dug in and blasted them back. They retreated a bit but then another wave came.

‘We were standing shoulder to shoulder but a machine gunner got our range and my mate next to me took a bullet in the head. He dropped to the floor, dead. We pulled out. We had no choice.’

But a British soldier might just as easily be in danger from his friends as his enemies. Pat Quinn was with the Argylls when they captured Hill 282 from the North Koreans. ‘We took it with a classic Highlander bayonet charge, yelling like banshees.’

This photograph shows men of the U.S. Army's 24th Infantry Regiment loading trucks in July 1950

But then they came under attack from another hill and asked for an air strike to clear that position. American fighter planes roared in — and hit the wrong hill! Worse still, they dropped napalm, the terrible incendiary gel that sticks to skin.

‘We were barbecued and blasted off our hill. I was so badly wounded that I could not walk and had to be dragged to safety,’ said Quinn. Thirteen British soldiers died and 75 were wounded in the incident.

One indelible memory was Chinese propaganda. From loudspeakers, a woman’s voice would invite the British soldiers to give up their fight.

One Christmas Eve, music came from the enemy lines and a baritone voice started singing ‘Rose of England’, recalled Hough. Then came the seasonal message: ‘What are you British soldiers doing fighting with these Americans? Why not come and join us? The Americans will all be on a beach in Florida celebrating Christmas.’

Hough and his mates roared with laughter. ‘It was good entertainment. It cheered us up.’

But it was no laughing matter if you were unlucky enough to fall into enemy hands. Just over 1,000 British servicemen were taken prisoner in Korea, of whom around 80 died in the hellish camps.

The largest contingent were from the Gloucesters, forced to surrender at the Battle of the Imjin River.
Bill Fox was in a column marched north for six weeks, passing through hostile villages where North Koreans lined up to throw stones at the bedraggled captives.

Conditions in the prison camp they arrived at were terrible, with weevil-ridden food and zero hygiene. ‘Some Americans had been there some months already and were dying. Dead bodies were just dumped in a pit.’

Another prisoner, Ted Beckerley, recalled swelling up to Michelin man proportions with beri-beri because of the lack of nourishment. His mate, Charlie, went the other way, getting thinner and thinner until he was ‘a skeleton with huge staring eyes’ and died.

But the worst part of being captured in this war was not knowing if you would ever be free. The names of prisoners were not passed home via the Red Cross. Who in the outside world even knew you were there?

Common sense told Fox that ‘they could put a bullet in the back of your head any time they wanted to and nobody would ever be the wiser. It was a terrible feeling.’

He survived there for the next two-and-a-half years under a harsh regime, on a par with, if not worse than, Japanese camps of World  War II. There was torture. If a prisoner crossed the Chinese guards, they would beat him with rubber sticks or string him to a beam with his toes just touching the ground and leave him dangling for hours.

Republic of Korea oldiers move in single file towards Korea's east-central front in June 1953

‘Worst of all was the pit. They would put you in a hole in the ground, put a lid over you and leave you there to the beetles and worms. They’d give you just enough food and water to keep you alive. They did it to a friend of mine and, though he lived, he was never the same again,’ recalled Fox.

‘They also tried brainwashing us. They brought in well-educated English-speaking Chinese who would lecture us about Marx and Engels and how working people like us should share the wealth that we had created.’

To Fox’s relief, eventually news filtered home that he was a PoW (and not dead, as his family had believed). ‘We were given pencil and paper to write home and told to say that the Chinese were lovely people and that they treated us well. If you didn’t, the guards would rip up your letter.’

Meanwhile, on the 38th Parallel, the war was petering out into a stalemate. There were long drawn-out talks which ended in an armistice.

The courage and resolve of the British soldiers had done much to hold back the communist forces: indeed, the success of the Allied forces in the field convinced the Americans they should not launch the nuclear strike on Korea and China that President Harry Truman had seriously considered.

Britain’s conscript army, including its released PoWs, was finally allowed to go home — to a country that had hardly registered their absence and took no notice of their homecoming.

There were no bands and no high-ranking officers to welcome them or to say thank you. They got their campaign medals not in an official ceremony but in the post.

Nobody asked much about what they had been doing, what it was like or how they had been treated.
At a dance he attended in uniform, Bill Hurst scrapped with two yobs who mocked him. ‘They asked: “What’s Korea, where’s that?” They’d never heard of it. Nobody had. So they had a go at me.’

They were indeed a ghost army. But, for all their resentment at being ignored, in time most were proud to have done their bit. On his return, Jim Lucock always thought the war was a terrible waste of time.

‘But then I went back years later to South Korea and saw a country with children well fed, people well educated, well dressed. Unlike in North Korea. So if what I did made those people in South Korea happy, then my time there was worthwhile after all.’

• British Soldiers Of The Korean War In Their Own Words, by Stephen F. Kelly, published by History Press, £16.99. To order a copy for £14.99 (incl p&p) call 0844 472 4157.