David Bercuson, director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, holds out little hope that the sixtieth anniversary of Kapyong and other Korean battles will rouse Canadian consciousness in the way the Steven Spielberg epic Saving Private Ryan rekindled the Second World War in the public imagination for a new generation.
Bercuson says it’s always been a tough sell to generate excitement for a conflict that basically became a war of patrols, even when it was being fought.
“I was a young guy back then when it was on,” says Bercuson. (He was five when it started.) “I remember listening to the radio: this hill or that hill had been attacked or not attacked. That’s a kind of dull and boring war, not to the guys on the hill, certainly, but to folks here.”3
“The war was on people’s minds only at the beginning, at the very start,” he says. “There was no real antiwar movement. People just soon became indifferent to it. It became the Forgotten War right in the middle of the war. At some point their interest just stopped.”
On the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the Globe and Mail newspaper carried only two items marking the occasion: a column from Bercuson and a letter from the South Korean ambassador. That was it. No news story from anywhere. No editorial.
It’s odd and speaks to the overwhelming disinterest in both the war and in Kapyong. Kapyong was strategically important. The Americans think so, as do the British and the Australians, too, who fought next to the Patricias on the neighbouring hill.
Britain and Australia both produced large and comprehensive official Korean War histories. Canada’s official history of the Korea War is what Bercuson refers to as “this little book.”
By the 1970s Canadian governments and schools were downplaying wars as a significant factor in Canadian history. At one point Canadian culture found the idea of Canadian heroes not to its taste. But not now, says Bercuson, Afghanistan has oddly changed that. Now we like our heroes.
“Opposition has grown to the war,” he says, “but it’s not the casualties: rather it’s a combination of the casualties and no clear message. Canadians aren’t sure what it’s about any more. There’s a growing feeling from the public that we’re not going to win this thing no matter what we do.”
But this has not translated into being wary of heroes. In fact, the public largely now has great admiration for Canada’s soldiers.
“Canadians have changed. Afghanistan has changed people’s views on the military and they understand what they’re about and they accept it,” says Bercuson.
But if admiration of soldiers and their patriotism had taken root, this had not translated into interest in what they were doing six decades ago in Asia. The sixtieth anniversary of Kapyong has slim hope of planting seeds of lasting renewed interest in Canada’s Korean experience. A Private Ryan moment seems unlikely.
We’ve had about the same number of troops serve in Korea as have served in Afghanistan, but our population meantime has about doubled and our casualties are far fewer. So, proportionally, far fewer people are committed to the fight and fewer feel the pain. If Canadians have almost no memory of Korea and Kapyong, why in the years to come would they ever remember Afghanistan and Operations Anaconda and Medusa and Mountain Fury and all the others?
“When people think about veterans disappearing, Greatest Generation and all that,” says Bercuson, “they don’t really think about Korea. I’m sure we’ll see the same thing happening to Afghanistan twenty years down the road.”
Now-familiar names such as Kandahar or Panjwaii would then slowly become as obscure, dimly remembered, and then finally forgotten, as is Kapyong.
This is all a great pity. The Kapyong story sparkles with qualities that Canadians like to believe make up their national character: courage, initiative, modesty, and an uncomplicated, rock-solid belief in themselves.
This is not, hopefully, another war book. It is possible to tell this story without understanding military terms or unit structures, or caring what CMMFE, or BAR, or Chicom or CIC of U.N. Command or Operation Killer means; or where Kansas Line or Wyoming Line really are; or the difference between an F-86 and a P-80, between a colonel and a corporal; or how the Fifth Phase Offensive differed from the Fourth Phase Offensive; or that the DMZ keeps DPRK and ROK apart. None of this matters to tell this story. The people in this story are what matter. They are like those you pass on the street every day without giving them a moment’s thought. But on one April night six decades ago, they were wonderful. So keep track of a handful of names that keep popping in and out of the narrative as it goes along, and you can easily follow Kapyong. It’s a great tale.
The Canadians held on and won at Kapyong because they believed they were the best men on the hill that night. And they were right.
Chapter 1
Canada Is Not Sir Galahad
If only they’d listened to Mackenzie King.
On a treacherous moonlit night, on a rocky, nowhere hill in Korea, desperate Canadian soldiers fought for their lives. April 24, 1951, was a night of great terror and much heroism.
Ken Barwise, a giant, six-foot lumber worker from Penticton, B.C., scrambled forward, dodging gunfire as he dashed to recover a captured machine gun and used it to blaze away in the darkness at the enemy soldiers that swarmed around him. Nearby, Smiley Douglas, a construction worker from tiny Elnora, Alberta, reached down in a frantic attempt to get rid of a live grenade that landed in the middle of his platoon. He was a micro-second too late.
Back home, you’d never know what Canada was up to over in Korea that night. As these events unfolded, that evening’s edition of the Toronto Globe and Mail told its readers that Trans-Canada Airlines expected to show a profit. Con Smyth said that year’s Maple Leafs were the best ever. Mink stoles were on sale for $1,200. Coca Cola cost a nickel.
Lieutenant Mike Levy, commanding officer of 10 Platoon, D Company, 2 PPCLI.
Photo by Hub Gray.
And back in Korea that night, nineteen-year-old Wayne Mitchell from Vancouver was wounded in the eye as he was forced to abandon his trench. He fought on, blazing away with his submachine gun, and was almost overrun again as bodies piled up around him. Charging into the midst of the enemy, he took a second bullet, this time in the chest. It was also a desperate time for Mike Levy from Vancouver. As a teenager he’d fought as a guerrilla behind Japanese lines in Malaya. Now he was in his
second Asian war, with his small, isolated platoon about to be swamped by hundreds of Chinese soldiers. In a last ditch attempt to save his men, Levy called in artillery fire on his own position. Just to the south of Levy, Hub Gray, who as a boy in Winnipeg had dreamed of joining the Navy, was light years away from sailing the seas. He spotted enemy soldiers in their hundreds manoeuvring in the darkness to attack the main command post from the rear. If it fell, so would the entire Canadian position, and then perhaps the whole front. Only Gray’s men stood in the way. With the Chinese only a few meters away, he ordered his 50-calibre heavy machine gun crews to open up.
Meanwhile, the Globe’s sports columnist in that night’s edition warned that baseball was becoming big business. Someone dressed up like a doctor in an advertisement assured us that Buckingham cigarettes were “throat easy.” And at Loews Uptown movie theatre, the hit Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man was going into its second big week. Admission: 35 cents.
There was a single wire service story on page one about the war raging in Korea. “Reds Rip Gaping Hole in UN Line,”1 shouted the headline. There was no mention anywhere that Canadian soldiers are in the thick of it.
They were, in fact, trapped on a place referred to as Hill 677, but everyone on 677 called it simply Kapyong.
To many dug in on Kapyong, it certainly looked like their last night on earth. Don Hibbs, a taxi driver from Galt, Ontario,