[imText1]“We’d be on the road sometimes, going to another hillside or another mountain; you’d see the civilians with what they could get, running back the other way…”
The last time John Baugh was in Korea was April, 1952. The 11th, he thinks, although he isn’t quite sure. It was a different world then; a place of hardships, but also a place full of memories.
John, then a young private with the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, remembers fighting “up by 355,” but cannot offer more information. Not because he has forgotten, but because to him, nothing much in Korea back then had a name, and 355 was just the number given to the hill he happened to be on.
“We didn’t know where it was,” he explains, “coz there was no names or nothing. Up by the Imjin River.” He thinks more. “We came to relieve the Middlesex Regiment…” He laughs. “From there we were just scrapping all the way to the 38th Parallel…”
Korea looks very different now, he notes, looking around. We are standing with two more veterans, Tony Preece and Bert “Bob” Adams, on the steps of the War Memorial of Korea, an imposing building which abuts the Yongsan U.S. Army Garrison in central Seoul. To the left is an incongruous area of low rise buildings, for the U.S. Army is not one for high rise ostentation. To the right, luxury apartments loom over Samgakji station.
It’s a transfer station for Subway Lines 6 and 4. Seoul has nine subway lines now. Back then Korea didn’t even have roads.
“It’s completely different altogether now than when we were here,” Tony agrees when asked how Korea has changed in the 58 years since he was last in town.
“It was more or less flattened; there were no proper roads or motorways or nothing. All it was just dirt tracks, little children running about with no parents; you never knew where they come from.”
“It was really upsetting, some of it,” he adds after a pause.
Great Britain sent a total of 63,000 soldiers to fight in the Korean War, the third largest international contingent after those of the U.S. and China. Many of them were conscripts, and 1,078 of them didn’t make it home at all. Indeed, thanks to the nature of relations with the North Korean regime, many remain in North Korea. If not where they fell, then not far away.
One of the unfortunate 1,000 or so others who were taken prisoner was Royal Northumberland Fusilier Derek Kinne. His story, told in a press conference in Seoul during the 60th anniversary events, is one of escape, recapture, torture and discomfort, of constant hunger and of “being kept in a wooden box.”
But it is also one of hope. “It makes you feel and react a lot different than what you normally would have done; you have more compassion for your fellow men,” Kinne says of his experience, rejecting the temptation to dwell on it in a negative light.
For despite the undoubted hardships, every veteran The Daily NK spoke to who returned this April to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War on the invitation of the Korean government said that joining the fight was something they are glad they did.
“We came here, we fought, we really didn’t know what was going on; everything was so chaotic, chaotic, chaotic,” King’s Own Scottish Borderer Bill Speakman, the only Brit to receive the Victoria Cross for his service in Korea explains. “But all I can say now is that it was worth coming here, to Korea, doing something about it. The wonderful way you’ve recovered and what Korea is today, it is wonderful.”
Kinne agrees, adding, “It was an experience I would never do it again, and yet it is an experience I wouldn’t want to have missed.”
Thinking back on the people who kept him alive, Speakman recalls fondly those Koreans who acted as porters for his unit; people charged with delivering whatever was needed to the men fighting at the front.
“Without those Korean porters with their A-frames on their back,” he says, trailing off, “they bought our mail, our ammunition, our water and our food up the hill because we had to remain in the line, to fight,” he says, “without those Korean porters, without them we wouldn’t have been able to survive… they were wonderful people.”
“You see those people coming up with those things on their backs, it was a wonderful sight…”
“It broadened my shoulders a lot to see what it was like on the other side of the world,” Speakman concludes, “It made me better for life.”
