In 1939 he was working in a forestry camp in northern Alberta. When war broke out in September he was thirty-one, an absurdly ancient age to start an army career. He mounted his horse, Minnie, rode her 30 miles to Spirit River, then thumbed a ride to Grand Prairie, and enlisted as a private in the Edmonton Regiment. His aura of natural leadership and toughness were quickly spotted and he was promoted through the ranks and fast-tracked into officer’s training.
Brigadier General John Rockingham (centre, with Scottish headwear) and Colonel Jim Stone (right of Rockingham, with moustache).
Paul E. Tomelin/Department of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada, PA-133399.
Stone fought first in Italy, in Canada’s first battles with the Nazis since the debacle at Dieppe the year before. Italy was a tough, mountainous, wild place to fight an infantry war against crack German troops. Stone was at the centre of the bitter house-to-house battles around Ortona, where he established a reputation as an aggressive commander of great tactical skill — a reputation enhanced by the precious care he took with the lives of his men.
In a typical Stone exploit, during fighting through rubble-strewn streets of Ortona, he wanted tanks to blast their way through an obstacle, helping pave the way for his infantry. In his classic account of the dreadful agony at Ortona, Mark Zuehlke captures the spirit of Jim Stone at his most cantankerous and his best:
But suddenly, little more than 25 yards short of the rubble pile, the lead tank paused. The other tanks ground to a halt, maintaining their preset intervals between each other. They also ceased firing their guns. The infantry milled, unsure what was happening. By pausing, the tankers were hopelessly messing up the attack. As an infantryman, Stone believed, it was an all-too-common experience. Stone jumped up on the lead tank. “What the hell’s the matter?” he yelled. The tank commander pointed at a scrap of sheet metal lying in the road. “It’s probably concealing a mine,” he said. Stone was incredulous. The entire street, from one end to the other, was littered with bricks, stones, chunks of metal, broken boxes, and other debris from the battered and destroyed buildings fronting it. What made this piece of metal special? Stone tried to convince the man to get going again. He could feel the attack’s momentum slipping through his fingers, like so many grains of wheat. The tank commander said petulantly, “Don’t you realize a tank is worth $20,000? I can’t risk it.” “You armoured sissy,” Stone snapped. “I’ve got 20 to 30 men here with no damned armour at all and they’re worth a million dollars apiece.”2
The attack bogged down. A German anti-tank gun started firing at the Canadian tanks. Stone yelled at his own anti-tank man to open fire with his PIAT, a British version of the bazooka. The man fired and missed and then began trying to reload. Stone had run out of patience. He tossed a smoke grenade at the German gun, then, all alone, began running towards it, pulling out a fragmentation grenade as he went, and tossed it over the gun’s steel shield protecting the Germans, wiping them all out. He was awarded the Military Cross for his amazing day’s work.
Stone was light years removed from military behind-the-lines, “chateau” commanders who gave their orders far removed from the front, inhabiting a different universe from the men they commanded. Stone lived, ate, and slept where his men did and took the same risks. And they knew it.
By war’s end he’d become a lieutenant-colonel and gone on to fight his way into Germany. In addition to his Military Cross, he had been decorated with the Distinguished Service Order — twice.
One of his citations reads: “There were many instances (in Italy and Holland) where Lt-Col. Stone’s personal leadership was the contributing factor to the success in battle. His initiative and courage are unsurpassed.”
In Korea, he would drop in on his front line troops, and often walk along the crest of a hill offering himself as a live target, daring the Chinese to fire at him, which they did without result. It was Stone’s way of telling his soldiers they were all in it together. Stone was Rockingham’s personal choice to command 2 PPCLI, the first Canadian unit to go into combat in Korea.
Oddly, though decorated four times for bravery by the time he retired, in Korea Stone told his men that he didn’t believe much in medals, so don’t expect any.
The mountain warfare skills he mastered in the Italian campaign gave him precisely the insights that would be priceless later on at Kapyong. However, there was an important difference: in Italy he was attacking, where at Kapyong he’d be defending. But thanks to his Italian battles, he developed the vital knack of seeing things from the enemy’s point of view.
Even in the decades that followed Korea, the men who fought in Stone’s army had a strange attachment to the man. At a fiftieth anniversary ceremony in Kapyong itself, veterans made arrangements to phone Stone who could not attend because of poor health. When the call was made, a military bureaucrat from the Canadian embassy tried to break in and stop it because, he said, there was a ceremony taking place. He was curtly told by the veterans that they were making the call to the man who’d made the ceremony possible.
Jim Stone was a tough man to love and an easy one to admire. Some of his men asked specifically to serve under him. He was a special soldier, exactly the type of inspired and inspiring leader you’d want in a desperate situation. He was a popular choice; a fighting infantry commander who led from the front. A soldiers’ soldier. The troops respected him, the press lionized him, and the public ate it up. A Winnipeg Free Press headline caught the tone exactly: “Big Jim From Ortona Rejoins The Army; Canada’s ‘Legend’ To Head Unit In Korea.”3
There was no shortage of volunteers for the special force. Ten days into the recruitment campaign 7,000 men had signed up. Their makeup was different than those who’d gone to war against Hitler only a few years earlier. That had been a crusade against an enormous evil, and virtually the entire nation rose up and joined in the struggle.
The volunteers for Korea were not by-and-large from the main-stream middle class, who were busy building comfortable careers and raising families in Canada’s post-war prosperity. Korean volunteers, the enlisted men at least, were more likely to be working class. Officers and senior non-commissioned officers, such as sergeants, were likely to be veterans of the Second World War. But the private soldiers were mostly straight out of civilian life, with many still in their teens. This would be a citizen’s army. These recruits joined up not just to be in the army, but to be in the army to fight, and to fight specifically in Korea. They were after adventure, certainly, but also because they wanted combat. There’d never been a Canadian military force quite like this before. These young men had not the least interest in the grand issues of politics or balance of power or ideology or any great moral crusade.
This was the army Stone wanted. He didn’t want dreamers. He wanted fighters.
The Kapyong army was “recruited from the streets,”4 as he once tersely put it in his talk to the new generation of PPCLI officers years later.
Among them were many dead-beats, escapists from domestic troubles, cripples, neurotics and other useless types all of whom broke down under the rigorous training program and we got rid of them prior to going into action.
Those who joined to fight for a cause were difficult to find. Bill Boss, our accompanying war correspondent, tried to find the idealist who joined solely to fight a holy war against Communism, like Diogenes searching with his lantern trying to find an honest man. Bill was unsuccessful.
The strength of the Battalion was its adventurers, those who joined the army because there was a war to fight and they wanted to be there. Personally I believe that all volunteer armies in wartime are composed mostly of adventurers.5
Pierre Berton, the journalist, quickly spotted the absence of moral commitment in the Canadian troops, and he disapproved: “What struck me during