How on earth did these young men — most scarcely out of high school, from farms and small towns, from lumber camps and construction crews, whose fathers, older brothers, and uncles had just finished crushing the Nazis — how did they ever end up on the edge of oblivion in the dead of night surrounded by thousands of Chinese peasants armed to the teeth in an unknown country? How did this happen? And how would they get out?
Canada had backed into the Korean story. If only someone had listened to Mackenzie King’s warnings. King’s instincts had been dead on from the start: steer clear of Korea.
Domestic tranquility, not the messy world of foreign policy, was his comfort zone. The lonely, mystic prime minister had a keen instinct of how human nature functioned and how seemingly simple matters could quickly be made to unravel into a nightmare by well-meaning busybodies. Daring, flamboyant gestures were dangerous and not to his political taste. To this master politician, Korea just didn’t feel right.
In late 1947, the United Nations wanted Canada to help supervise elections in Korea, newly liberated from Japan and jointly occupied by the Americans and the Soviets.
King had a superb sense of what worked and what didn’t. And Korea, his senses told him, was something that didn’t. He confided these broodings to his diary and maybe to his best (and perhaps only) friend and confident — his dog Pat.
King knew nothing about Korea and that stark fact told him all he needed to know about how to proceed, or not to proceed. King could smell trouble.
“Canada’s role was not that of Sir Galahad to save the world,”2 he wrote in his now-famous diary.
To his fury, King, in December 1947, discovered that his external affairs minister, Louis St. Laurent, and his representative at the United Nations, Lester Pearson (both future prime ministers), had volunteered Canada’s participation in the election commission.
King liked none of this. It was all just too dreamy. And too far away. He confided to his diary: “… a great mistake was being made by Canada being brought into situations of which she knew nothing whatever … without realizing what the consequences might be.”
Picking up steam as he wrote, King roasted Pearson for his “youth and experience,” implying his man at the U.N. was a little full of himself in offering up Canada for service in Korea before either he or the cabinet had thought it all through.
There were no Canadian interests at stake in Korea. We had no historic, commercial, or cultural ties with the place. The only Canadians over there were a handful of missionaries and a few mining engineers.
Fighting the Nazis and the Japanese empire in the greatest war in history, which had ended only two years earlier, was one thing. That was strategic and vital. But Korea was a land of utter mystery and misery and utterly unimportant to anyone, except Koreans. There was, he wrote, no one in the cabinet who knew anything at all about the place. What started out as helping to supervise a simple election could quietly and quickly morph into something lethal and dangerous. King, with remarkable insight for a politician with a modest world view, sensed that involvement in Korea involved unforeseen, messy repercussions and could someday, in some way — he wasn’t sure how — draw Canada into a war in Asia. As it turned out, the unification elections for Canada to help supervise were never held — and Korea to this day is famously un-unified — but the seeds of Canada’s Korean involvement that so worried King were germinating. King had been right; no one had ever heard of the place. But the clock had now begun ticking in the countdown on Canada’s road to Kapyong.
Chapter 2
Jack James’s Scoop
Korea is in a tough neighbourhood, and has been seen as fair game by its rapacious neighbours.
Korea is a strange country that for centuries has had most of the prerequisites for nationhood, including a distinct language and culture. And for more than 700 years it’s been on someone’s invasion list: first the Mongols came, and then the Chinese. Most recently the Japanese outright occupied the country in the early 1900s and savagely suppressed all Korean dissent. Despite all this, the Koreans have retained a sense of their Koreanness. They never viewed their rule by foreigners as anything other than illegal. And temporary.
With the surrender of Japan in September 1945, the Soviets and the Americans moved in to jointly occupy and administer the country, dividing it at the 38th parallel. After all that was to happen in the bloody years ahead, it’s roughly that same border that divides the country to this day. The Cold War set in. U.N. election observer ring teams, with Canada on board, were not allowed into the north. Instead, the Soviets set up and armed a brutal Stalinist regime, leaving their strongman, Kim Il-Sung, in charge. In the south, where elections were held, a pro-western strongman, Harvard and Princeton graduate Syngman Rhee, got the most seats in parliament (but not a majority) and became president. Both were tough and ruthless men, and both claimed to speak for one Korea.
There followed a period of low-intensity violence between the two hostile Koreas: raids, ambushes, shellings, snipings, and kidnappings. But nothing got out of hand.
Then, around eight o’clock on a sleepy Sunday morning on June 25, 1950, Jack James, a well-connected correspondent for the United Press wire agency walked into the American embassy in Seoul with the scoop of a lifetime.
“The North Koreans have crossed over the parallel in force!” he announced to a marine guard on duty.
The bored duty sergeant said simply, “So what? This is a common occurrence.”
“Yeah,” said James. “But this time they’ve got tanks.”1
Jack James’s exclusive beat the State Department announcement by two hours. The Korean War was on.
It was almost a very short campaign. The tough, well-trained, and well-equipped North Koreans swept aside the South Koreans and the capital was evacuated. American occupation forces based in Japan were sent to try to salvage the unfolding disaster.
The U.N. Security Council, boycotted at the time by the U.S.S.R., voted to come to South Korea’s defence with uncharacteristic speed. This decision would eventually lead to an international fighting force from almost twenty countries, lead by the U.S. and fighting under a U.N. banner. “Neutralist” countries such as Sweden and India sent medical teams. Even tiny Luxembourg, a member of the newly-founded NATO, sent forty-four soldiers.
In Ottawa, however, there was great hesitation. Even the defence minister was wary of getting involved with what he feared would become some endless American adventure in Asia. But Lester Pearson was among those saying it would be very difficult to say “No” to the Americans if they insisted Canada join in sending combat troops to Korea to drive back a blatant example of communist aggression.
Eventually Canada did climb board. In August, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent (external affairs minister under Mackenzie King, who had only died a few weeks earlier and whose ghost must have been uneasy at what was about to be announced) declared that Canadians would be going to Korea to fight. Canada was a driving force in the founding of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization and was being governed by a generation of Atlantic-minded men. Europe’s defence against the Soviets was their obsession.
There was also little taste for another Canadian military venture in Asia after the disaster at Hong Kong in the last war, in which ill-trained and badly led troops had been sacrificed for no apparent reason and were captured and brutally treated (and often murdered) by the Japanese. Canada’s sacrifice in the Hong Kong debacle seemed, to many, to be serving mainly Britain’s interests. And now there was a similar unease that the war revving up in Korea was to serve Washington’s agenda more than Canada’s or the U.N.’s. But other countries were not hesitating to contribute combat forces, including fellow Commonwealth cousins such as Britain and Australia. So, too, were fellow NATO allies, such as Turkey and Greece, which couldn’t possibly be any further away from Korea. And the Americans, with Munich ever