For all frontline troops in the war, including Canadian, U.S., British, and various U.N. troops, as well as those on the communist side, the term “little” would not have come easily to mind. It was an enormous bloodbath involving Chinese mass human-wave attacks and ferocious artillery duels that saw a pace of battle deaths that far outstripped even the subsequent Vietnam War.
It was in this landscape of mountain trenches, dugouts, and steel defences in Korea that Canadian troops made their mark through repelling Chinese troop attacks and in repeated patrolling into no man’s land. They fought largely within a famously steady Commonwealth Division made up of British, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand troops. Canadian “volunteers” sailed off to Korea without illusions about war. A great many were veterans of the Second World War, and their ranks contained, according to historian Desmond Morton, “plenty of rough diamonds with battle experience.”
All their toughness would be required for a war remembered by veterans not only for bitter fighting, but for a relentlessly harsh climate, where one baked in summer and froze in winter, and where the terrain of one mountain range flowed into another, seemingly designed to make war impossible for armour, and hellish on infantry.
It was a lonely conflict. Troops felt cut off from home, and served without the kind of intense and united popular support that had bolstered Second World War troops. And over this very “hot” war there hung a curtain of Cold War terror almost unimaginable today. The U.S. talked openly of the possibility of using nuclear weapons to end fighting, while China hinted as broadly of its ability to flood Korea with up to a million fresh troops.
The war resulted in a partial victory for the West, as the aggression was stopped and thereafter contained. But there was little celebrating once the fighting was over, and returning troops never received the debt of gratitude their countries owed them.
Instead, the very nightmarish quality of the Korean War caused western societies to push it well into the background of thought, where it remains to this day.
No one, and certainly not Canadians, should forget the sacrifices of the past. For me those little capsules containing the soil where some of our most famous military moments took place help do that. For all of us, this book can now do the same for a part of our proud history so many of us know virtually nothing about. That is so wrong. Those who never came home from a fight we asked them to conduct on our behalf deserve better from their country.
Read on, and touch history. Our history.
Peter Mansbridge
Acknowledgements
Thanks for their candour, patience, and insights goes to Kapyong veterans Charles Petrie, Kim Reynolds, Rollie Lapointe, Al Lynch, John Bishop, Mike Czuboka, Don Hibbs, Murray Edwards, Bill Chrysler, Alex Sim, Smiley Douglas, Bob Menard, Bill White, Bernie Cote, Ron Rushton, and Hub Gray, who has donated many of his Korean War photographs to the PPCLI Archives and Museum in Calgary and his personal Kapyong documents and letters to the Military Museums, Library and Archives, University of Calgary.
And special thanks for their special guidance and help to: Colonel Walt Ford, United States Marine Corps; William Johnson, Historian, Department of National Defence; military scholars David Bercuson and Jack Granatstein; Marjorie Levy; Don Levy; Korean veteran and war artist Ted Zuber; Maggie Arbour-Doucette, Jane Naisbitt, and Susan Ross of the Canada War Museum; Dora Winter of Library and Archives Canada; John Wright and Donna Zambory of Military Museums, Library and Archives, University of Calgary; military author and historian Mark Zuehlke; Vince Courtenay of the Korea Veterans Association of Canada; and Korean War PPCLI veteran and journalist, Peter Worthington.
Ivan Duguay, a Canadian who lectures at Semyung University in South Korea, has made a hobby of exploring the battlefield and his descriptions of Kapyong today provide a great sense of place.
My editor at Dundurn Press, Jennifer McKnight, turned what I feared could have been an agonizing process into a delightfully pleasant and smooth collaboration.
Also appreciation to PPCLI Regimental Major Harpel Mandaher, and to Regimental Adjutant Captain Richard Dumas in Edmonton for making available many photographs from the PPCLI archives, and also the Kapyong article by Lieutenant Colonel Owen Browne.
Much gratitude to friends and former colleagues at the CBC: Eric Foss, Manmeet Ahluwalia, and Peter Mansbridge.
Adrienne Clarkson took a deep personal interest in this story, which is reflected in her touching foreword.
Susan Papp started it all rolling by introducing me to the people at Dundurn Press, who took to the Kapyong story from the start.
When the author was an officer cadet at the School of Infantry in Camp Borden Ontario in the early 1960s, his platoon commander was Lieutenant Don Ardelian, a distinguished PPCLI veteran of the fighting in Korea. It was Ardelian who first planted the seeds of the Kapyong story, a half century ago. He died in June 2010.
And finally, and especially, to Nance who’s been pleading with me for years to write this story, and had faith in the Kapyong tale long before I was convinced there was such a thrilling tale to tell.
Introduction
Kapyong is the perfect example of the perfectly fought defensive battle.
It is a thrilling story, but is now largely an invisible battle from the “Forgotten War” in Korea six decades ago. It is about as far removed from us as the Second World War was from the Riel Rebellion. Kapyong is about one April night in 1951, when freshly minted, hopelessly outnumbered Canadian soldiers made a desperate stand on a rocky hill near a nothing village on the edge of nowhere.
Korea was largely a war at night, in small groups, fought to grab control of hilltops. It was a war of patrols and ambushes; of snipers and prisoner snatches. There were no Vimy Ridges here, or Normandys. In Korea, Canadians usually died in little batches of fives and sixes. But not always. Sometimes there were awful battles where positions were swamped by Chinese human-wave attacks. Kapyong was one such terrible fight. It was Canada’s first battle in the Korean War.
This is the story of only 700 men, all volunteers, in the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, who’d signed up specifically to fight, and fight specifically, in Korea. The story is about how on this lonely night they found themselves surrounded and cut off by 5,000 tough, seasoned Chinese veterans sweeping around their positions.
It was a terrifying battle-in-the-dark that had the feel of a Canadian Thermopylae; the several hundred against the several thousand; with hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets, shovels, and rifle butts when ammunition and grenades ran out; with foxholes lost and retaken; and with calling down artillery fire on their own positions.
Kapyong is also about what did not happen. The Canadian position held on, despite everything. The hill did not fall. The Korean capital, Seoul, only a few miles away, was not laid open to a Chinese breakthrough. The Chinese assault was blunted and led to nowhere. And so, the Korean War did not end abruptly in April 1951 in a communist victory.
It’s a matter of some resentment to Canadian soldiers who came later to the war that it is Kapyong that resonates. No one now gives a second thought to the other awful battles that followed, where Canadians fought and died in human-wave attacks just like those at Kapyong; places with drab names like Hill 419, Hill 532, Hill 355, Hill 97, or Hill 187. But, however unfairly, no one remembers any of this now. It is Kapyong that has captured the popular memory of what little is recalled of our war in Korea.
There is only room for one event that symbolizes a country’s wartime experience. For the Russians, among a thousand battles against the Nazis, it is surely Stalingrad. For the British, in their years upon years of fighting Napoleon, it is Waterloo, and also, perhaps, Trafalgar, though no one ever talks about “meeting your Trafalgar.” For Americans, the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising on a South Pacific flyspeck has come to stand for their entire Second World War experience.
And so it is Kapyong that is Canada’s singular Korean War memory.