To the Last Round by Andrew Salmon

Author:Andrew Salmon [Salmon, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845138318
Publisher: MBI

At 22:00 bugles sounded. In dead ground around the foot of the hill, assault parties marshalled and climbed. Their aim: to eliminate this stubborn battalion for good. Carne moved forward to tour the fighting positions, while Farrar-Hockley, speaking to brigade, discussed an air strike for first light. Radio batteries were running low: it was decided to keep just one call sign, the artillery FOOs’, operating on 45 Field’s net. Returning from the perimeter, Carne confided to Farrar-Hockley his concerns about A Company. The previous night the colonel had personally repelled attackers with rifle and grenades (‘just shooing away some Chinese’, he commented); now he remarked to his adjutant: ‘It seems we are going to find a job for ourselves as riflemen before long.’ The two of them emptied a haversack of grenades, laying out eighteen along the parapet of their slit trench.21

Enemy assault waves were ascending. Glosters listened intently for the clink of metal, the sound of scrambling feet or enemy chatter; as always, Chinese noise discipline was poor. Crowds of shadows broke the skyline. Gunfire crackled. There were no tactical formations apparent; just masses, charging upward, firing burp guns, throwing stick grenades.147 ‘That was when the shit really hit the fan, when the balloon went up,’ said Mercer. ‘If I hadn’t known I was at war before, I knew it then.’ If a single position went under, it would compromise the integrity of platoon, company, battalion. If anyone shirked, the Chinese would gain a foothold. Every Gloster with a Chinese in his foresight had to shoot. ‘It was part training, part survival,’ said Private Tony Eagles, with Drums Platoon. ‘They were targets; I suppose I was frightened – but it didn’t occur. None of us wanted to get our heads blown off. The discipline of soldiers was there. You obeyed orders.’ Grenades were the weapon of choice. With such short horizons on the hilltop, the Chinese, hidden from direct fire by the slope, massed close to the British line, then rose from cover and charged. The Glosters pulled pins and rolled grenades down the hillside into enemy below the contour.22 The Chinese tried to hurl their grenades over the British slits, so that they hit the slopes above, then rolled down and detonated inside the trenches.23

45 Field was delivering its thunder. The FOOs on the hilltop were adjusting fire to within twenty-five metres of the perimeter. The tell-tale, shrieking whoosh sounded overhead, followed by a flashing series of drumfire crumps that burst like giant flashbulbs, illuminating the landscape for a split second, ploughing the slopes and shredding assault parties clambering up. ‘When I saw those 25-pounders going in, I was proud to be an artilleryman!’ said mortar man Tom Clough, crouched in his shell scrape. Even compared to previous nights, the volume of pyrotechnics unleashed around, over and onto the fire-ringed hill was awesome: Lance-Corporal Charles Sharpling was reminded of the Blackpool Illuminations. ‘It was like fireworks night, tracers here, there, everywhere – Christ Almighty!’ said Private Morris Coombes.

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