To my parents
TRIUMPH AT KAPYONG
CANADA’S 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 James’s Scoop 27
Chapter 3 A Citizen’s 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, “We’re 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 wasn’t 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. Paul’s Church on Daily Avenue in Ottawa, had seen her brother, Alex, go off as a private with the Princess Patricia’s 2nd Battalion. He was killed and we plunged into a deep mourning — all of his former classmates at Lisgar Collegiate, the parish of St. Paul’s, 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-chief’s 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 Patricia’s 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, Canada’s 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 Hub’s 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 1950–51: 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
There’s a small plastic container on a shelf in my office at the CBC in Toronto. Most people don’t even notice it. I do. Almost every day.
Dan Bjarnason brought it to me in April of 1992, just after he’d 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. They’d 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 what’s 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. I’d 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 I’ve 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. It’s written by my friend and colleague of almost forty years, that same Dan Bjarnason. The conflict in Korea in the early 1950s and Canada’s 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.
That near amnesia over Korea is surprising given the enormous strategic importance and dreadful scale of the conflict in which, for three years, communist forces