Battleground Korea by Whiting Charles

Author:Whiting, Charles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven – Chinks!

It had been a long voyage for the ‘Geordies’, six weeks to be exact. As in the old days of the new fast-declining British Empire, the northerners of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers stopped at ‘Alex’, Port Said, Colombo and all the rest of those ‘exotic’ ports which for generations of soldiers had dotted the British Army troop-ships’ route to the Blast. In the Suez Canal they had heard the old cries from soldiers already there to ‘get yer knees brown, mate’ — this to men who had got their ‘knees brown’ when the young conscripts below had still been in short pants. At Port Said, the ‘wogs’ in their bathrobes had lifted them to show the gawping soldiers lining the rails high above their ‘bumboats’ the desirable sexual effect that came from the perusal of the ‘dirty, naughty postcards’ they were peddling.

For the Geordies, the men of the 8th Royal Irish Hussars, and the lads of the Royal Artillery and Engineers who made up the contingent of 2,000 men on board the Empire Halladale, these occasions had made welcome breaks in the boring shipboard routine of morning drills and afternoon ‘housey-housey’ gambling sessions. But after they had left Singapore behind in the last stage of their journey to battle, Nature soon roused them from their boredom. As the big trooper entered the China Sea, now six thousand miles from ‘Blighty’ she was hit by a tremendous cyclone. As Fusilier Thompson, known to his mates as ‘Thommo’, recalls: ‘All aboard were tossed around like paper dolls...The ship was near to sinking with massive waves lashing her constantly amidships.’ In the end ‘the Captain had no option but alter course and steer towards the Chinese mainland...in order to ride out the massive waves’. Little did the Empire Halladale’s skipper know that he had placed himself in yet another danger by doing so, as he would learn later.

Finally the frightening storm ended and the 2,000 men of the Fusiliers, Hussars, Artillery and Sappers sailed on to the port of disembarkation, Pusan. Here they and the rest of Brig Brodie’s 29th Independent Brigade Group — the Gloucestershires, the Royal Ulster Rifles, the Royal Tank Regiment equipped with an antiquated but still fearsome weapon, the Crocodile (a flame-throwing Churchill tank) — started to form up for what lay in front of them. One thing they knew — as ‘Thommo’ of the Fusiliers put it: ‘Soon we’ll be fighting, we knew that. So let’s get it over quick...But as events were to prove, it wasn’t going to be as easy as that...’ Fusilier Thompson, the 22-year-old regular and future writer,[59] was right. For while the lead elements of the new British Brigade under Brodie had ridden out the storm in the China Sea, the war in Korea had taken a decisive turn for the worse for the Western Allies.

By then General MacArthur, without consultation with Washington, had decided he would exceed his brief and not stop short of the Yalu, leaving the ROK forces alone to move further north, even to the Chinese Manchurian frontier if necessary.

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