Brother Fish (22 page)

Now he reached over and touched me lightly on the shoulder and mumbled under his breath, ‘Good one, Jacko. You should've been a bloody general.' I decided, for the umpteenth time, that there simply wasn't any point in taking offence. John Lazarou was an unredeemable idiot.

After the Battle of Chongju I recalled the US 24th Division passing through the town to take over the lead. The Yanks don't believe in doing things by halves. They had the usual 10 000 men, but it was their ordnance and vehicles that boggled the mind. I didn't see the whole convoy but even in the few hours I watched, hundreds of trucks packed with troops passed me. There were literally scores of armoured vehicles, artillery pieces being towed by enormous gun tractors, trucks packed with artillery shells, engineer vehicles with bridging equipment and barbed wire, stores trucks galore, and jeeps, jeeps, jeeps everywhere you looked, hundreds of them. And of course the petrol tankers needed to keep this giant snake moving forward. Already many tankers, having fed the beast, were returning to the rear to refill. One of the Yanks told me there were over 2000 vehicles carrying the combat elements of the division. ‘And there's a whole lot more way back carrying the resupply.' It'd take twenty-four hours for the whole lot to pass through if all went well, he said.

The point being that this great convoy of vehicles now had to go back through the choke point of the river crossings. And it was not just the 24th Division; convoys of two other divisions had to pass through too. It was hard to imagine the traffic jam: vehicle convoys stretching back many miles converging on the narrow crossing points, confusion as the traffic merged, delays as trucks broke down or skidded and crashed on the frozen roads. It wouldn't take hours for them to cross to safety – it would take at least a couple of days. And all the time the enemy pressing their attack on the right flank to capture the crossing points and cut the road further south at Kunu-ri. If the Chinese succeeded, those divisions would be cut off from supply and reinforcement and, with the Chinese numerical superiority, would soon be destroyed. Only the US 2nd Infantry Division, precariously holding off the marauding masses of enemy infantry, stood in the way of military disaster. The question was whether or not the 2nd Division could hold off the enemy for those vital two days.

‘Well, that's the situation, boys,' the skipper concluded. ‘The good news is that we are being sent to the rescue. Pack your woollies – we're leaving for Kunu-ri.'

We set off for Kunu-ri on an ice-rutted poor excuse for a road jammed bumper to bumper with trucks, jeeps, petrol tankers and gun tractors, and choked with refugees.

I had never witnessed a mass exodus of civilians before. Men carrying enormous loads on wooden A-frames strapped to their backs, loads so heavy they could only move a hundred yards or so before stopping to rest. Women carried babies strapped to their breasts and pushed handcarts packed with the family belongings – pots and pans that banged together and created a cacophony you could hear for miles in the clear, cold air. Children led oxen and pigs while old people sat hunched over on donkeys that often stumbled, falling into the freezing mud up to their hocks and knee joints so that their legs were caked with mud and blood. It was difficult to imagine how this continuous stream of humans would survive the deep-freeze nights and bitter days, much less the long journey on foot to the South.

There is a saying in the army, ‘Greatcoats on, greatcoats off'. This is when orders are issued then changed, then changed again. It's not only a wearisome business to your average digger, but also of some concern because it usually indicates the top brass are confused. Soon after arriving at Kunu-ri the order came for us to move back north. Then we were told we would be moving north but not until the following morning because it would be impossible to move against the flow of the traffic scrambling south at night. Morning came and the order was cancelled and we were told to move south to a place called Chasan. But then there was a delay – they said they were trying to organise transport. Finally the word came that the Yanks had no spare trucks, so some of us would have to march to our destination.

B and D companies and a couple of companies of the Argylls set off on foot. At first we were accompanied by a confusion of traffic and a mass of refugees, but as we marched into the night, the last of the retreating traffic using this road passed through us and disappeared south. The refugees disappeared, too. Curiously, wartime refugees seem to have a sixth sense for when an attack is about to take place. On the other hand, on this occasion they may simply have gone off to seek refuge from the freezing night temperatures.

In normal circumstances I would have enjoyed the solitude of a night where the moonlight reflected on the frozen paddy fields. But on this occasion I was afraid some Chinese might have been not far behind. I wondered if we were marching fast enough to outpace them, and there was no thought of enjoying the quiet. On a long march you can get right inside yourself in a kind of self-hypnosis. It seemed to grow colder as the night wore on and my face and ears stung in the frosty atmosphere. Except for the crunch of our boots on the frozen ground and the distant wail of the bagpipes from a lone Argyll piper in the company ahead of us, the night, defeated by the cold, had completely closed down. The sound of our boots seemed an intrusion into the total stillness, but strangely the sad wail of the bagpipes seemed appropriate to the frozen world around us.

I was suddenly snapped out of this reverie and reminded of the horror of war. At the side of the road, sitting upright on a small heap of frozen mud, was a dead baby with one hand held out as if its tiny fingers were waving at us.

Funny how you can kill a man, run right up to him and put a bayonet into him and come out of it feeling okay – pretty upset, but okay. But the effect the frozen baby had on me, and the men immediately surrounding me, was devastating. John Lazarou, beside me, gasped. ‘Oh, Jesus!' he said. Shortly afterwards, I heard him sobbing. Several blokes around me were the same, and the lump in my throat wouldn't go away until we'd marched a good few miles away from the poor little bastard. We always seem to forget that war isn't only about combat, soldiers fighting each other for whatever reason – it's also about civilians having their lives destroyed and their babies left to die on a heap of frozen mud.

As we marched towards Chasan I noted the road was often flanked by high ground ideal for an ambush. But the Americans appeared to be in such a hurry that they were neglecting to clear and secure it. It made me nervous and I kept glancing up, half expecting to fall victim to some enterprising Chinamen who had managed to get ahead of us.

To be ambushed is a soldier's worst nightmare. It means you have been caught by surprise in a killing zone that has been chosen by the enemy for its potential effectiveness. Suddenly your column is hit from the flank by withering and carefully aimed machine-gun fire. Bullets whine about you claiming your mates, and the wounded are screaming, begging for help, but if you move to get to one you reveal your position and you're dead meat before you reach them. Making a run for it is usually terminal – the enemy is prepared for this, waiting to cut you down the moment you reveal yourself. Your best chance is to lie still, to play possum. Returning fire is pointless – the enemy is concealed and well protected and your chances of killing him are negligible. Conversely, your gunfire gives away your position and he'll pick you off with a burst from a machine gun. You pray that with any luck they'll withdraw without coming in to look for spoils – that is, assaulting into the ambush.

I was relieved when, at three-fifteen a.m., we arrived unscathed, and dug in to protect a road junction and ferry crossing. A day or so later the US 2nd Division, following the same route we'd marched, began its own withdrawal. We saw the first lot come through. They seemed to be making a fairly good job of it, but then a little later the troop convoy heading south started to dry up and we observed ambulance after ambulance heading in the opposite direction.

‘Something's happened to those guys,' I said to Jason Matthews, who was on sentry duty with me. ‘Why all the ambulances?' Then a couple of hours later the ambulances started returning, whole convoys, more than I'd ever seen at one time. We'd come to the end of sentry duty and I made an excuse to stroll up to company headquarters where I knew Ian Ferrier was the wireless operator. I'd known Ian from way back – we'd been in New Guinea together at the tail end of the last war, where both of us were pretty upset that we'd missed out on the fighting. In Korea we'd renewed our friendship.

Some wireless operators are pretty uptight and don't let you in on anything. They want you to believe that they know stuff that might blow your tiny mind if it was revealed. Ian wasn't like that – he was a knob twiddler, always on the search for something juicy. ‘Freq-goss' was what he called it. If anyone would know what was happening to the Yanks, he'd be the one.

I could hear the crackle and squeak of his wireless gear from fifty feet away. I entered his tent to see him bent over his equipment, earphones on, listening intently, fingertips delicately twiddling knobs to tap into the frequencies of the other networks. Strictly speaking this was forbidden, but it had never occurred to Ian to take any notice of the rules – he was a frequency junkie, a stickybeak addicted to radio gossip. I touched him on the shoulder and he tweaked a moment longer, then stopped and removed his earphones.

‘Oh g'day, Jacko, what can I do you for?' he asked in his usual flippant way.

‘Mate, what's going on with the US 2nd? Judging from the ambulances, they've been copping heaps.'

‘You're not wrong,' he answered. ‘There's been one bloody great fuck-up – they've been ambushed by what they reckon is an entire division of Chinese dug in along the ten-mile stretch of high ground overlooking the road. The chinks waited until the Yanks were well into their trap and then let them have it. They were sitting ducks, mate, it's the full turkey shoot!' he said, mixing his metaphors.

Ian was talking about that high ground I'd worried about during our march only a day before. It made my skin prickle.

‘It's this way,' said Ian. ‘The US 2nd Division managed to hold off the chinks just long enough for the rest of the 8th Army to get to safety. Quite an effort, really. But that was about a day too long for them to save themselves. In that time the chinks had been able to find their way round the flanks of 2nd Division's defence and get thousands of men dug in on their withdrawal route. In a way, the 2nd Division was sacrificed to save the rest of us.'

‘That makes sense,' I said, ‘but maybe the sacrifice wouldn't have been half so great if they'd got out of their bloody trucks and tried to clear the high ground instead of haring down the road and hoping for the best.'

‘Mate, what can you expect – they're Yanks,' replied Ian, as if this explained everything.

That was the beginning of a withdrawal that drove us back deep inside South Korea in a very short time. The first 250 miles were completed in two frantic weeks.

We joined the Americans going south and while we maintained a tidy convoy, theirs seemed to be in chaos. The going was pretty rough – their trucks lost traction in the icy conditions and slipped off the road, where they were simply abandoned. The same happened to us on three occasions and it was everybody out and push until we got going again. When this happened the Yanks would yell at us, ‘Ferchrissakes, leave it buddy, get moving, the gooks are burning our ass!'

After a while you can smell fear in warfare, and as the days wore on there was the distinct whiff of it in the bitterly cold air. The signs of an army in chaos were beginning to accumulate. For instance, there seemed to be no traffic control. Vehicles wanting to join the traffic flow had to bully their way into the queue as best they could. Despite the examples of the US 2nd Division ambush and the occasional burned-out, bullet-riddled hulk of a truck standing by the roadside, the Yanks failed to clear and secure the high ground overlooking the road.

American failure to observe normal military procedure was a constant worry. No one said as much but I know we couldn't help thinking that the Chinese might catch up with us and the Americans would be in such disarray they'd be more a hindrance than a help. Sandwiched into the middle of a jittery American convoy of conscript soldiers wasn't a whole heap of fun. It would have been a lot more comforting had they been the US Marines and not the frightened schoolboys they were, who wondered why they were in Korea in the first place and now found themselves constantly running for their lives.

In the parlance of the military we were all withdrawing, which suggests a high degree of order and planning. In effect, we were running away as fast as our transport could carry us. The roadside was strewn with American trucks of all types that had skidded off the track and been abandoned. We'd picked up a Yank truck driver who'd abandoned his vehicle when it had left the road. ‘What's going on with you guys?' I asked him.

‘It's the big bug out!' he replied.

The Yanks certainly know how to fashion a succinct phrase – ‘the big bug out' explained everything going on. We picked it up and used it for just about anything that seemed like a cop-out by our leaders or anyone avoiding doing a specific job. In the great Australian tradition of shortening everything, this soon led to the phrase ‘bugging out', which, even today, you hear in use often enough.