Frontline Korea: time to remember the forgotten war

By SIMON COLLINS

Three years ago Korean War veteran Brian Goodhue stood waiting in Aotea Square to join a commemorative parade that was coming up Queen St.

A young Korean man saw his medals and asked if he had fought in Korea.

"I said, 'Yes'," says Mr Goodhue. "He put his arm around me and started to cry, thanking me very much for what we did for them, even though he was not born at the time."

To the 6100 New Zealanders who served in Korea, such exchanges mean more than anything that may be said at the official function at Parliament this weekend marking the 50th anniversary of the war's outbreak.

As early as November 1951, when the war was already bogged down on a fixed front, New Zealand's K-Force soldiers were being referred to as "a forgotten force." Veterans call Korea "the forgotten war."

The conflict stemmed from the division of Korea along the 38th parallel after the Japanese surrender in 1945. Russian troops occupied the north until 1948, and Americans ran the south until 1949.

North Korea tried to reunite the country by invading the south on June 25, 1950. They took the southern capital of Seoul on June 28 and pushed quickly south.

At America's urging, the United Nations Security Council condemned the invasion and urged all countries to help South Korea.

New Zealand sent two frigates and decided to recruit 1000 volunteer gunners.

Colin Stanbridge, a clerk and part-time Territorial soldier who was among the first volunteers, says: "I doubt, in 1950, if you had asked 100 people where Korea was, that one would have been able to tell you."

But carpenter Phil Ward had spent 1946-47 with the occupying forces in Japan and regarded Korea as "unfinished business."

Frank Mitchell, who joined the Navy at 17, says: "It was our OE [overseas experience]. We couldn't have afforded to get OE."

Mr Goodhue did not want to go at first. When he was called up for compulsory military training, he "went bush" until caught by a police officer.

But when officials called for volunteers for Korea, "I thought about it and said, 'Why not?'"

By September 1950, North Korea had pushed the South Koreans and Americans into a southeastern enclave around the port of Pusan.

On September 15, America's General Douglas MacArthur transformed the war by a bold landing far behind the front at Inchon - cutting off the North Korean forces in the south. The northern Army quickly collapsed.

The war could have ended there, with the North Koreans expelled from virtually the whole of South Korea below the 38th parallel by the end of September.

But the Americans tried to reunify the country by destroying North Korean resistance.

MacArthur pushed right to the Chinese border by late November, bombing bridges on the Yalu River between the two countries.

China then entered the war with massive forces. MacArthur retreated. The Chinese recaptured Seoul on January 4, 1951.

On January 22, New Zealand's K-Force arrived at the front in mountainous country southeast of Seoul. Here, in bloody battles over individual hills, the Chinese were finally halted and, in the next three months, pushed back slowly to the 38th parallel. Seoul was retaken for the South on March 14.

The wild swings of the war left the whole country devastated. Villages near the fighting were cleared routinely so communist guerrillas could not use them as sanctuaries.

"Nothing is worse than going into a local village and telling them they have to leave their homes, particularly when it was cold and miserable," recalls Mr Stanbridge.

For three months, K-Force moved constantly, up to three times a day. At each stop, they had to burn the frozen earth to get their tent poles into the ground.

In April, they were caught up in a Chinese counterattack against a South Korean division in the Kapyong Valley, east of Seoul. A New Zealand troop was ordered to hold off the Chinese while their colleagues pulled back.

"We were down in the vicinity of 1000 yards, firing practically flat out. We were down to seven rounds of ammunition," says Mr Ward.

"Then we got the call to go. We got out ... Within four or five minutes the Chinese had come up to the T-junction and captured the whole headquarters staff of the Korean division."

During May and June, the UN pushed the Chinese back up to the 38th parallel, with the New Zealanders this time further west, on the Imjin River north of Seoul.

"We had a series of quite significant, bitter battles, and that was the first time we came under any sustained shelling from the Chinese," recalls Mr Stanbridge.

Mr Goodhue, who arrived in 1952, says towns, bridges, even trees were all wiped out.

"The people were surviving with great difficulty. They had nothing. I felt real sorry for them. I will never forget, just before I came home, they were pulling out the 48th Field Regiment. They had all these foodstuffs, they said, 'Take it to the tip and dump it.'

"I took it down to a village. Jesus, next thing these black marketeers came in. I had a sten gun and turned around and said, 'Over my dead body!' In the end the schoolteacher there distributed the stuff around the school."

From late 1951, the war bogged down along much the same line that became the ceasefire line in July 1953. For those two years, as peace talks spluttered on and off at Panmunjom, the soldiers waited for the war to end.

Says Jack Spiers, who arrived with an Australian unit in September 1952: "We used to look across to Panmunjom where there was a searchlight in the air. They said when the searchlight goes out, that will be the ceasefire. I used to look every bloody night to see if the searchlight was still there."

Bruce Matthews, an Auckland bricklayer and Territorial, also volunteered for the Australians in 1952. He slept in a two-metre-square underground dugout and led 15-man night patrols between the hills occupied by the two warring Armies.

"We were given ambush positions which we had to hold. In the winter we could only stay for 30 minutes in any one position or people would get frostbite."

He made "contact" only once, when the platoon he was with walked into an ambush and the Chinese opened fire from behind a small hill.

Most of the platoon ran for their lives, while Mr Matthews and two Englishmen fired back at the Chinese.

"They were giving us hell with their hand-grenades, but we stopped them from following up. We just walked backwards and kept firing at them."

Four of the men were badly wounded. Mr Matthews had a bullet in his arm and shrapnel from grenades lodged in his spine, knee and three other places.

Because there were only three stretchers available, he kept quiet about his own injuries and climbed the 300m hill to the Australian dugouts, losing blood all the way.

When he reported, his superiors saw that he was covered in blood, ripped off his bulletproof vest, bandaged him up, then questioned him.

"I gave them as much information as I could. I was going on and off air," he says. Then he was evacuated out to hospital.

Did he ever think that he would die when he met the Chinese?

"I never thought of the possibility. That was what I was there for. I would have hated to have gone and not had a close contact."

Later in the war, he saw napalm used "extensively," usually airdropped over Chinese positions.

"It burned the local atmosphere, burned off the oxygen. People would end up as cinders."

Then finally the ceasefire came at 10 pm on July 27, 1953. Mr Matthews remembers "blood-curdling yelling and carrying on" from a Scottish battalion across the valley.

"There was not a sound out of any of the Aussies - I reckon because we were just so thankful it was all over."