to show a profit. Con Smyth said that year’s Maple Leafs were the best ever. Mink stoles were on sale for $1,200. Coca Cola cost a nickel.Lieutenant Mike Levy, commanding officer of 10 Platoon, D Company, 2 PPCLI.
Photo by Hub Gray.
And back in Korea that night, nineteen-year-old Wayne Mitchell from Vancouver was wounded in the eye as he was forced to abandon his trench. He fought on, blazing away with his submachine gun, and was almost overrun again as bodies piled up around him. Charging into the midst of the enemy, he took a second bullet, this time in the chest. It was also a desperate time for Mike Levy from Vancouver. As a teenager he’d fought as a guerrilla behind Japanese lines in Malaya. Now he was in his
second Asian war, with his small, isolated platoon about to be swamped by hundreds of Chinese soldiers. In a last ditch attempt to save his men, Levy called in artillery fire on his own position. Just to the south of Levy, Hub Gray, who as a boy in Winnipeg had dreamed of joining the Navy, was light years away from sailing the seas. He spotted enemy soldiers in their hundreds manoeuvring in the darkness to attack the main command post from the rear. If it fell, so would the entire Canadian position, and then perhaps the whole front. Only Gray’s men stood in the way. With the Chinese only a few meters away, he ordered his 50-calibre heavy machine gun crews to open up.
Meanwhile, the Globe’s sports columnist in that night’s edition warned that baseball was becoming big business. Someone dressed up like a doctor in an advertisement assured us that Buckingham cigarettes were “throat easy.” And at Loews Uptown movie theatre, the hit Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man was going into its second big week. Admission: 35 cents.
There was a single wire service story on page one about the war raging in Korea. “Reds Rip Gaping Hole in UN Line,”1 shouted the headline. There was no mention anywhere that Canadian soldiers are in the thick of it.
They were, in fact, trapped on a place referred to as Hill 677, but everyone on 677 called it simply Kapyong.
To many dug in on Kapyong, it certainly looked like their last night on earth. Don Hibbs, a taxi driver from Galt, Ontario, wanted only to escape from the dreary life of a cabbie. He joined the army just for the sheer adventure of fighting in Korea. It was shaping up as the worst decision of what was starting to look like his very short life. We’re never going to make it, he thought. There’s just too many of them. This is where I’m going to die.
How on earth did these young men — most scarcely out of high school, from farms and small towns, from lumber camps and construction crews, whose fathers, older brothers, and uncles had just finished crushing the Nazis — how did they ever end up on the edge of oblivion in the dead of night surrounded by thousands of Chinese peasants armed to the teeth in an unknown country? How did this happen? And how would they get out?
Canada had backed into the Korean story. If only someone had listened to Mackenzie King’s warnings. King’s instincts had been dead on from the start: steer clear of Korea.
Domestic tranquility, not the messy world of foreign policy, was his comfort zone. The lonely, mystic prime minister had a keen instinct of how human nature functioned and how seemingly simple matters could quickly be made to unravel into a nightmare by well-meaning busybodies. Daring, flamboyant gestures were dangerous and not to his political taste. To this master politician, Korea just didn’t feel right.
In late 1947, the United Nations wanted Canada to help supervise elections in Korea, newly liberated from Japan and jointly occupied by the Americans and the Soviets.
King had a superb sense of what worked and what didn’t. And Korea, his senses told him, was something that didn’t. He confided these broodings to his diary and maybe to his best (and perhaps only) friend and confident — his dog Pat.
King knew nothing about Korea and that stark fact told him all he needed to know about how to proceed, or not to proceed. King could smell trouble.
“Canada’s role was not that of Sir Galahad to save the world,”2 he wrote in his now-famous diary.
To his fury, King, in December 1947, discovered that his external affairs minister, Louis St. Laurent, and his representative at the United Nations, Lester Pearson (both future prime ministers), had volunteered Canada’s participation in the election commission.
King liked none of this. It was all just too dreamy. And too far away. He confided to his diary: “… a great mistake was being made by Canada being brought into situations of which she knew nothing whatever … without realizing what the consequences might be.”
Picking up steam as he wrote, King roasted Pearson for his “youth and experience,” implying his man at the U.N. was a little full of himself in offering up Canada for service in Korea before either he or the cabinet had thought it all through.
There were no Canadian interests at stake in Korea. We had no historic, commercial, or cultural ties with the place. The only Canadians over there were a handful of missionaries and a few mining engineers.
Fighting the Nazis and the Japanese empire in the greatest war in history, which had ended only two years earlier, was one thing. That was strategic and vital. But Korea was a land of utter mystery and misery and utterly unimportant to anyone, except Koreans. There was, he wrote, no one in the cabinet who knew anything at all about the place. What started out as helping to supervise a simple election could quietly and quickly morph into something lethal and dangerous. King, with remarkable insight for a politician with a modest world view, sensed that involvement in Korea involved unforeseen, messy repercussions and could someday, in some way — he wasn’t sure how — draw Canada into a war in Asia. As it turned out, the unification elections for Canada to help supervise were never held — and Korea to this day is famously un-unified — but the seeds of Canada’s Korean involvement that so worried King were germinating. King had been right; no one had ever heard of the place. But the clock had now begun ticking in the countdown on Canada’s road to Kapyong.
Chapter 2
Jack James’s Scoop
Korea is in a tough neighbourhood, and has been seen as fair game by its rapacious neighbours.
Korea is a strange country that for centuries has had most of the prerequisites for nationhood, including a distinct language and culture. And for more than 700 years it’s been on someone’s invasion list: first the Mongols came, and then the Chinese. Most recently the Japanese outright occupied the country in the early 1900s and savagely suppressed all Korean dissent. Despite all this, the Koreans have retained a sense of their Koreanness. They never viewed their rule by foreigners as anything other than illegal. And temporary.
With the surrender of Japan in September 1945, the Soviets and the Americans moved in to jointly occupy and administer the country, dividing it at the 38th parallel. After all that was to happen in the bloody years ahead, it’s roughly that same border that divides the country to this day. The Cold War set in. U.N. election observer ring teams, with Canada on board, were not allowed into the north. Instead, the Soviets set up and armed a brutal Stalinist regime, leaving their strongman, Kim Il-Sung, in charge. In the south, where elections were held, a pro-western strongman, Harvard and Princeton graduate Syngman Rhee, got the most seats in parliament (but not a majority) and became president. Both were tough and ruthless men, and both claimed to speak for one Korea.
There followed a period of low-intensity violence between the two hostile Koreas: raids, ambushes, shellings, snipings, and kidnappings. But nothing got out of hand.
Then,
