Munich symbolized the meek capitulation of Britain and France to Hitler’s demands to take over Czechoslovakia, making the Second World War a virtual certainty. Munich forever gave “appeasement” a bad name. The Munich ghost made several return visits to American foreign policy in the years ahead, providing some of the philosophic and moral unpinning in justifying intervention in Vietnam a decade after Korea, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein a half century into the future. Munich has had a long shelf life. Korea would not be abandoned as Czechoslovakia had been. If a Korea-style U.N. force had been available to defend the Czechs in the late 1930s, the thinking went, Hitler’s invasion schemes could have been stopped cold.
The international U.N. force being put together was quite unlike anything that followed. It was not a peace-observing mission, or even peace-keeping. There was no peace to keep. It was a fighting force heading, by design, straight into harm’s way.
It was truly a “coalition of the willing,” in some cases with traditional foes such as Greece and Turkey fighting on the same side. All were more-or-less democracies. All would pay a heavy price in blood, including countries such as Columbia, with 146 killed, and Turkey with over 800 killed. (The group cohesion of the Turks was so strong that their captured soldiers had the highest survival rate in the brutal Chinese POW camps.) Ethiopia sent what it called “Conqueror Battalions” and had 122 killed. Thailand had 136 killed; Belgium, 97; Greece, 190; and tiny Luxembourg had seven killed.
Italy, which was not a U.N. member at the time (it had actually been an enemy country and fought at Hitler’s side in the war which ended only six years earlier), sent a Red Cross unit.
Norway and Denmark each sent a hospital ship. Sweden sent a field hospital, which stayed on long after the war ended. India sent a MASH unit, which was much praised by the Canadian wounded, and also sent a medical team that accompanied American paratroopers when they jumped into combat.
Many countries, Canada included, won U.S. Presidential Citations from President Truman for feats of particular bravery. Two British units received such citations, as did one from Australia (at Kapyong); also Belgium, Turkey, Greece, France, a South African Air Force Squadron, and Holland, whose Regiment Van Heutsz, received the citation twice.
Korea was a remarkable example of shared international sacrifice and reflected a highly diverse array of religions and cultures that held intact throughout the entire conflict. No one dropped out along the way. Canada, after a confused start, was to be in to the finish.
On August 7, about six weeks after the invasion, Prime Minister St. Laurent announced that a “special force” would be raised specifically to go into combat to help defend the embattled South Koreans. The march to Kapyong had started.
This would not be a war, St. Laurent stressed, not a “real war” at any rate, but a “police action.” And it would not be an American war, he emphasized. Rather, it would be run under the United Nations flag. This was a quaint legal nicety. The Americans provided the leadership, in large part American equipment and weapons would be used, and Americans were providing, by far, most of the troops. And, most importantly, the U.S. military was certainly charting the war’s overall direction and strategy. Aside from the Koreans themselves, the Americans were doing most of the fighting and most of the dying, so the war would be run their way. When Truman once suggested he would not rule out the use of nuclear weapons in Korea, a startled British Prime Minister Clement Attlee quickly flew to Washington for assurances Britain would be consulted first. He was given no such assurances. There was no doubt: as the senior partner, the U.S. was calling the shots in this war, although as we shall see when the Americans tried to rush Canadian troops into combat prematurely, their commander bravely, and successfully, stood up to U.S. bullying.
St. Laurent’s phrase “police action” never sat well with the troops who were doing the shooting and dying, and was seen as outright hypocrisy intended to lull the folks back home into thinking nothing too serious was happening. An additional problem was that, technically, if no actual war was declared, then where was the process that would someday end it? How do you undeclare a war that was never declared? And in a dilemma that Canada and its allies in Afghanistan would face decades later, what exactly was victory anyway; what exactly would “winning” look like? Was winning simply driving the invaders out of South Korea? Or was it to crush the North Korean Army? Or was it, more ominously, to destroy the North Korean state? The war aims changed and morphed as the war dragged on, and many of the more drastic end-scenarios were mused about rather than stated. Everyone, it seemed, had their own definition about what the point of it all was, where it was leading, and how it would wrap up.
This was a fuzzy, new world that the military felt quite uncomfortable in. The Americans were not at all at ease the idea of fighting for anything less than total victory. In this reality, they were not out to destroy North Korea as Japan and Nazi Germany had been crushed. They were merely there to stop North Korea’s aggression, which meant American pilots were forbidden to even fly into Chinese airspace in pursuit of Chinese jet-fighter aircraft (sometimes secretly flown by Soviet pilots) fleeing back into their safe havens once China stepped in. Fighting a limited war was so contrary to American military doctrine and culture that it created a profound crisis in which the President Harry Truman fired his popular (with the public at least, if not in the Pentagon) war commander, Douglas MacArthur, who threw out broad hints of invading China. The frustration of fighting to win something less than “victory” didn’t seem to bedevil Canada’s soldiers, who just lived with it, but it infuriated America’s military. As it turned out, fighting would finally end, not with surrender or a peace treaty, but with an armistice, which was a military, not a political document. That armistice is still in effect today and in a technical sense the “war” is still on, it’s just on hold. But among all soldiers on the sharp end of events, out in the hills, the “police action” phrase would later take on an acidic taste as Korea turned into a meat grinder.
Ted Zuber, a war artist, reflected on the bitterness on being told he wasn’t in a “real” war. “I can remember some people saying, ‘Well, that’s not like the Second World War.’ And I said tell that to the guy that got wounded or died over there. A bullet couldn’t give a goddamn what war it is,” Ted Zuber told the author many years ago.
Zuber was not at Kapyong, but served as a sniper later in the war and was wounded. After Korea he became a distinguished painter and combat artist and many of his paintings are in the Canada War Museum in Ottawa. The Zuber painting on the cover of this book depicts a night patrol in Korea. A Chinese flare shoots up, catching the Canadian squad exposed and helpless in no man’s land. The men “freeze,” fearful that any movement would give them away to Zuber’s counterparts, the Chinese snipers lying in ambush. Zuber was a combat infantryman of great experience and several of his works depict the fight at Kapyong. He was Canada’s official war artist in the First Gulf War of 1991.
Yard for yard, bomb for bomb, bullet for bullet, hour for hour, Korea was as relentless a killing factory as any “real” war. To an infantry soldier it was every bit as violent and deadly as the Second World War. In many ways it resembled, especially in its latter stages, the stalemated but treacherous trench warfare of the First World War. It was such a bloodbath that it is so odd that it is so little remembered or written about today. More than 36,000 Americans were killed in Korea, as were more than 500 Canadians. China may have lost 1.5 million; no one knows. And all this in just three years. This war in Korea is now strangely vanished, but it was a remorseless slogging match and all soldiers who fought there, including Canadians, to this day deeply resent the absurd “police action” description, a seemingly ridiculous label, they say, dreamed up by international law specialists and diplomats sitting safely back home, not by the people doing the fighting.
Canada entered this war wondering where on earth it would find the soldiers to fight it. After cutbacks at the end of the Second World War, in Canada the army alone had been slashed from 700,000 down to 16,000. To maintain new NATO commitments in Europe, which were aimed at meeting a very grave and immediate concern, namely defending Europe against the U.S.S.R., Canada’s new Korean fighting formations had to come from somewhere new; some, as yet, untapped resource. A new fighting force was to be created from scratch, not from the existing army.
Canada’s