Berton did not grasp that these men were a new, existential breed of soldier. They needed no pep talks or motivational lectures. They knew precisely why they had gone to war: they wanted to fight.
Don Hibbs, the twenty-year-old cab driver from Guelph, Ontario, asked himself: What am I doing here in this stupid car when I could be in the army?7
He’d missed the last war and he didn’t want to miss this one.
“I can be a hero over there pulling hand grenades out with my teeth, was my impression. I joined basically for the adventure, not patriotism. I didn’t even know where Korea was. I didn’t care where Korea was. I just thought: I want to go to war. I want that experience.”
John Bishop was working in British Columbia logging camps. He was nineteen and he, too, joined for the action. Some, he said, enlisted looking for adventure, but some simply “wanted to get away from wives. Or they were not in a good relationship with the police. I knew of only one man went over to fight communism. We joined to fight. We knew we were going to a fight. We were pretty proud. Almost all of us got out at the end of our [eighteen-month] tour. Very few became regulars.”8
One of the few was Bishop, who went on to become a career soldier and diplomat, and later in life was posted to a peacetime Korea as military attaché at the Canadian embassy.
Another who simply liked the military life was Alex Sim of Kamloops, British Columbia. He was a Second World War veteran, who left the army after the war and then re-enlisted for Korea.
He felt and still feels it was the right thing to do.
“We had an obligation to go,”9 he explains today. “The Koreans were taking a terrible beating. The Brits were going. The Aussies were going. What’s matter with Canada? We should be going. I wrote letter to someone in the government saying I was very disappointed Canada not going to assist. I never got an answer.”
Sim had also a brother and a cousin in the same platoon. His cousin was given a medical evacuation because of an ear infection only a few days before Kapyong and so missed the battle.
“We never talk about it,” says Sim.
To join up, recruits often showed great inventiveness. In Rivers, Manitoba, Mike Czuboka, fresh out of high school, hitched a ride on a freight train to Winnipeg to enlist, and then lied to the army about his age, claiming he was nineteen, not eighteen.
“According to official army records, I’m still that one year older than I really am,”10 he says today.
Czuboka had felt he was missing out on a thrilling opportunity; something that would never come again. He worshiped his older brother who’d been in the RCAF and had flown fifty-two missions over the Atlantic hunting U-boats.
“I was fourteen years old when World War Two ended and I saw Korea as a chance for a great adventure of the kind I’d been denied in the War.”
But he also had a sadder motive. His Ukrainian-born father was imprisoned during the First World War as an enemy alien and afterwards always felt he was an unwanted foreigner in his adopted country. Deeply hurt, young Mike Czuboka signed on for Korea in part “to prove [he] was a good Canadian.”
But the excitement of combat was always a huge attraction to a young, restless prairie boy.
“If you want to be a soldier then combat is something you’re looking forward to,” says Czuboka. “It’s the making of you. Specifically I went into the infantry because that’s where the action is. There’s no point in telling an infantryman it’s a dangerous business; of course it’s dangerous. It’s like telling a race car driver they shouldn’t race because it’s dangerous. That’s why they race.”
In Mike Czuboka’s mortar platoon the casualty rate was to be almost 30 percent.
Free spirits the volunteers may have been, but they were hardly the “soldiers of fortune” that the chief of the general staff, General Charles Foulkes, labelled them. Curiously, it was an important civilian, the defence minister, Bruce Claxton, who was most impressed with the calibre of the recruits he’d met. But the military brass were always uneasy with the Korean special force, feeling, strangely, that people who actually wanted to fight a war were not the types wanted in the army. As it turned out, these were precisely the type of people who fought superbly.
Despite Foulkes’ demeaning sneer, these young men turned out to be deadly serious. They were quick learners and imaginative improvisers, capable of great heroism. They seemed to be natural fighters with an uncanny ability to adapt to circumstances and make do with the resources at hand. These talents later turned out to be a great asset when they were sent into the fight with the wrong training and the wrong weapons for this odd war.
Such was the enthusiasm to enlist, an assortment of misfits and oddballs got in line. One man with an artificial leg managed to slip through the initial recruit medical examination. Another was seventy-two years old. In another instance a civilian, on a last-minute impulse, jumped on a troop train heading out of Ottawa and it was weeks later before he was finally discovered, drilling with PPCLI recruits way out in Alberta.
The three-battalion Korean force was eventually organized into a formation called the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade and was to be concentrated in one place. Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington was chosen. Training could be completed there and it was also closest to an embarkation port to the Far East.
The Fort Lewis venture had its tragic moment in late November.
One of the last trains bringing the troops out, at a hamlet called Canoe River, British Columbia, was winding its way westward through the Rockies and smashed head-on into an oncoming express as both were rounding the same curve. Seventeen men were killed. Four bodies were never found. Seventy were injured, many scalded, for these were the final days of the era of steam locomotives. Both the prosecution and the railway tried to pin the blame for the disaster on a lowly CNR telegrapher. The man was acquitted thanks to the flaming oratory and the brilliant defence presented by his lawyer, the underdog’s ferocious champion and a man on his way up: a young Prairie firebrand named John Diefenbaker.
Back at the war, events had taken a dramatic new turn. It appeared to be winding down.
After an initial dismal showing, the Americans eventually held the line against the North Koreans. General Douglas MacArthur was put in charge and staged a brilliantly executed invasion in September on Korea’s west coast at Inchon, quickly driving the North Koreans out of the south. MacArthur, who was steeped in military history, while planning the Inchon landing was reading James Wolfe’s diaries about planning his fight against Montcalm at Quebec City. All of Wolfe’s officers said Wolfe’s plans were impossible and Wolfe decided if they thought so, then so would the French. Similarly, MacArthur reasoned if many of his own staff thought Inchon a dangerously unworkable idea, then so would the North Koreans. Inchon turned out to be MacArthur’s masterpiece. The Americans were soon pushing on up the peninsula, seemingly unstoppable and heading ominously close to the Chinese border.
It now looked as if the North Korean army was finished as a fighting force and North Korea itself would soon be finished as a state. The war was all but over.
As it was shaping up, there now would be no need for all those fighting Canadians. What was now needed was not a combat force, but an occupation army.
With the pressure off, Canada decided to send only one unit of the three that had been formed: the 2nd Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. It would be made up of about 900 men. The great adventure now seemed destined to be something far less. Occupation duty offered no danger, certainly, but also no excitement. Danger and excitement were supposed to be part of the deal. To these young Canadian soldiers, it was the whole point.
An aging