you want to be a soldier then combat is something you’re looking forward to,” says Czuboka. “It’s the making of you. Specifically I went into the infantry because that’s where the action is. There’s no point in telling an infantryman it’s a dangerous business; of course it’s dangerous. It’s like telling a race car driver they shouldn’t race because it’s dangerous. That’s why they race.”
In Mike Czuboka’s mortar platoon the casualty rate was to be almost 30 percent.
Free spirits the volunteers may have been, but they were hardly the “soldiers of fortune” that the chief of the general staff, General Charles Foulkes, labelled them. Curiously, it was an important civilian, the defence minister, Bruce Claxton, who was most impressed with the calibre of the recruits he’d met. But the military brass were always uneasy with the Korean special force, feeling, strangely, that people who actually wanted to fight a war were not the types wanted in the army. As it turned out, these were precisely the type of people who fought superbly.
Despite Foulkes’ demeaning sneer, these young men turned out to be deadly serious. They were quick learners and imaginative improvisers, capable of great heroism. They seemed to be natural fighters with an uncanny ability to adapt to circumstances and make do with the resources at hand. These talents later turned out to be a great asset when they were sent into the fight with the wrong training and the wrong weapons for this odd war.
Such was the enthusiasm to enlist, an assortment of misfits and oddballs got in line. One man with an artificial leg managed to slip through the initial recruit medical examination. Another was seventy-two years old. In another instance a civilian, on a last-minute impulse, jumped on a troop train heading out of Ottawa and it was weeks later before he was finally discovered, drilling with PPCLI recruits way out in Alberta.
The three-battalion Korean force was eventually organized into a formation called the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade and was to be concentrated in one place. Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington was chosen. Training could be completed there and it was also closest to an embarkation port to the Far East.
The Fort Lewis venture had its tragic moment in late November.
One of the last trains bringing the troops out, at a hamlet called Canoe River, British Columbia, was winding its way westward through the Rockies and smashed head-on into an oncoming express as both were rounding the same curve. Seventeen men were killed. Four bodies were never found. Seventy were injured, many scalded, for these were the final days of the era of steam locomotives. Both the prosecution and the railway tried to pin the blame for the disaster on a lowly CNR telegrapher. The man was acquitted thanks to the flaming oratory and the brilliant defence presented by his lawyer, the underdog’s ferocious champion and a man on his way up: a young Prairie firebrand named John Diefenbaker.
Back at the war, events had taken a dramatic new turn. It appeared to be winding down.
After an initial dismal showing, the Americans eventually held the line against the North Koreans. General Douglas MacArthur was put in charge and staged a brilliantly executed invasion in September on Korea’s west coast at Inchon, quickly driving the North Koreans out of the south. MacArthur, who was steeped in military history, while planning the Inchon landing was reading James Wolfe’s diaries about planning his fight against Montcalm at Quebec City. All of Wolfe’s officers said Wolfe’s plans were impossible and Wolfe decided if they thought so, then so would the French. Similarly, MacArthur reasoned if many of his own staff thought Inchon a dangerously unworkable idea, then so would the North Koreans. Inchon turned out to be MacArthur’s masterpiece. The Americans were soon pushing on up the peninsula, seemingly unstoppable and heading ominously close to the Chinese border.
It now looked as if the North Korean army was finished as a fighting force and North Korea itself would soon be finished as a state. The war was all but over.
As it was shaping up, there now would be no need for all those fighting Canadians. What was now needed was not a combat force, but an occupation army.
With the pressure off, Canada decided to send only one unit of the three that had been formed: the 2nd Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. It would be made up of about 900 men. The great adventure now seemed destined to be something far less. Occupation duty offered no danger, certainly, but also no excitement. Danger and excitement were supposed to be part of the deal. To these young Canadian soldiers, it was the whole point.
An aging American Second World War-era troop ship named the USS Private Joe P. Martinez would take the Patricias from Seattle to Pusan, Korea. A U.S. Navy band saw them off, playing with great geographic if not musical accuracy, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” The voyage was a nightmare and would last almost three agonizing weeks.
The poor old Martinez was a liberty ship. Cheap and churned out in their thousands, they were mass-produced to a single design to get quickly across the Atlantic to beat the U-Boats waiting in ambush. They took just a little over a month to build; although one was completed in four days as a publicity stunt. They were a masterpiece of American industrial assembly-line efficiency. About 2,500 were still in service at the end of the Second World War when hundreds were bought up by Greek shipping magnates, such as Aristotle Onassis, and formed the basis of their new empire of cargo fleets. Liberty ships were designed with one single aim in mind: they were no-frills workhorses. What they were not were passenger liners. Onto this wheezing, geriatric rust bucket were loaded almost 2,000 Canadian and American troops and all their paraphernalia of war.
The Martinez was named to honour a real-life hero, an American soldier, Joseph Martinez from Taos, New Mexico, who deserved a better memorial. The son of dirt-poor farm workers, he was the first Hispanic-American to be awarded the Medal of Honor. Although only a private, he personally led repeated attacks over snow-covered mountains against Japanese positions in the Aleutian Islands campaign, off the coast of Alaska. The Aleutian Campaign was an obscure theatre, little studied by historians and the only part of the Second World War fought on North American soil. It was a war fought in extreme weather, and rough terrain in a place hardly anyone involved in had ever heard of. It was remarkably like Korea.
But remote and neglected by history as the campaign is, men still died there. Joe Martinez was one of them. As he stormed the last Japanese trench on the island of Attu, Martinez was shot in the head and died the next day. Several army facilities and legion posts in the American southwest are today still named in his honour. Canadians in the elite Canadian-American Devil’s Brigade also fought in the Aleutians. The exploits of this dashing, unconventional unit was the basis of the popular Hollywood movie starring William Holden. Part of the Aleutian invasion planning team was George Pearkes, a gallant Victoria Cross winner from the First World War and who later, as defence minister under John Diefenbaker, recommended the cancellation of the Arrow program.
Ironically, one of the Patricias who would fight at Kapyong and was aboard the Martinez had also fought in the Aleutians with the ship’s slain namesake: Tommy Prince, an Ojibwe from just north of Winnipeg. Unbelievably brave, Prince fought later in Italy and France and ended the war as the most decorated soldier in Canadian history. However, it is unlikely that he and Joe Martinez ever actually crossed paths during the Alaskan campaign.
For three miserable agonizing weeks, the struggling little Martinez worked its way across the Pacific and its wretched and retching passengers bobbed like a cork in the rough weather. Few of the Patricias were convinced it was seaworthy. Only the rust, they said, was keeping the water out. Toilet facilities were crude. The food was inedible. The cooks sweated into the meals they were preparing.
“The weather was some of the worst in memory. Even the ship’s crew were seasick,” remembers Mike Czuboka. “I spent the first week in my bunk flat on my back and next to my rifle. The bunks were six deep and jammed together in the hold. The odour of unwashed bodies and feet
