fleeing back into their safe havens once China stepped in. Fighting a limited war was so contrary to American military doctrine and culture that it created a profound crisis in which the President Harry Truman fired his popular (with the public at least, if not in the Pentagon) war commander, Douglas MacArthur, who threw out broad hints of invading China. The frustration of fighting to win something less than “victory” didn’t seem to bedevil Canada’s soldiers, who just lived with it, but it infuriated America’s military. As it turned out, fighting would finally end, not with surrender or a peace treaty, but with an armistice, which was a military, not a political document. That armistice is still in effect today and in a technical sense the “war” is still on, it’s just on hold. But among all soldiers on the sharp end of events, out in the hills, the “police action” phrase would later take on an acidic taste as Korea turned into a meat grinder.
Ted Zuber, a war artist, reflected on the bitterness on being told he wasn’t in a “real” war. “I can remember some people saying, ‘Well, that’s not like the Second World War.’ And I said tell that to the guy that got wounded or died over there. A bullet couldn’t give a goddamn what war it is,” Ted Zuber told the author many years ago.
Zuber was not at Kapyong, but served as a sniper later in the war and was wounded. After Korea he became a distinguished painter and combat artist and many of his paintings are in the Canada War Museum in Ottawa. The Zuber painting on the cover of this book depicts a night patrol in Korea. A Chinese flare shoots up, catching the Canadian squad exposed and helpless in no man’s land. The men “freeze,” fearful that any movement would give them away to Zuber’s counterparts, the Chinese snipers lying in ambush. Zuber was a combat infantryman of great experience and several of his works depict the fight at Kapyong. He was Canada’s official war artist in the First Gulf War of 1991.
Yard for yard, bomb for bomb, bullet for bullet, hour for hour, Korea was as relentless a killing factory as any “real” war. To an infantry soldier it was every bit as violent and deadly as the Second World War. In many ways it resembled, especially in its latter stages, the stalemated but treacherous trench warfare of the First World War. It was such a bloodbath that it is so odd that it is so little remembered or written about today. More than 36,000 Americans were killed in Korea, as were more than 500 Canadians. China may have lost 1.5 million; no one knows. And all this in just three years. This war in Korea is now strangely vanished, but it was a remorseless slogging match and all soldiers who fought there, including Canadians, to this day deeply resent the absurd “police action” description, a seemingly ridiculous label, they say, dreamed up by international law specialists and diplomats sitting safely back home, not by the people doing the fighting.
Canada entered this war wondering where on earth it would find the soldiers to fight it. After cutbacks at the end of the Second World War, in Canada the army alone had been slashed from 700,000 down to 16,000. To maintain new NATO commitments in Europe, which were aimed at meeting a very grave and immediate concern, namely defending Europe against the U.S.S.R., Canada’s new Korean fighting formations had to come from somewhere new; some, as yet, untapped resource. A new fighting force was to be created from scratch, not from the existing army.
Canada’s special Korean force would be formed into a new brigade of around 5,000 men. Three new battalions would be grafted onto regular army existing regiments. For example, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry already had one battalion and the new one would be designated the 2nd. And it was this new force, 2 PPCLI as it was termed (and still is today), that would be the first to go into combat in Korea, and would become the most famous fighting unit in the Canadian army since the Second World War.
Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry: an odd sort of name. A military force that describes itself using the words “Princess,” “Patricia,” and “Light” doesn’t sound as if it’s serious about its work. But from its inception, PPCLI staked out a reputation as being tenacious and rock-solid reliable.
The “Light” part of the name implies they were fast moving and mobile, relying on stealth and fitness; light as in “travel light.” They are often regarded as elite units. Commandos, mountain troops, marines, and anti-guerrilla forces are regarded as “light.” Historically, they were snipers and skirmishers. Medium and heavy infantry usually dates to a pre-gunpowder era and refers to the use body armour, javelins, and pikes. Most infantry in modern armies, whatever their names, are light infantry.
But who is Patricia, and what was she doing in Korea?
The PPCLI is one of the most decorated forces in Canadian history. It was created when the First World War broke out in the very twilight of the Victorian age. Canada’s entire regular army was only 3,000-men strong. It was a time when private individuals — rich private individuals — could actually create their own military units, and, not unlike medieval times, put them at the service of the nation. These philanthropists would often provide the rifles, the clothing, and the upkeep. Sometimes they designed their own uniforms, and on occasion even thought, well, it’s mine. Why don’t I command it?
Montreal businessman and Boer War veteran Alexander Hamilton Gault had a brainstorm. He would personally come up with $100,000 (about $2 million in today’s funds) to raise a battalion to go and fight the Germans as part of Canada’s contribution to beating the Kaiser. Ottawa snapped up the offer, and in eight days over 1,000 men were enlisted, little dreaming what a bloodbath they were heading into. Lieutenant Colonel Francis D. Farquhar of the Coldstream Guards was selected to command the new force. His boss happened to be the Governor General, the Duke of Connaught, who just happened to have a lovely daughter, Patricia, who was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and an accomplished artist who lived on until 1974. Farquhar’s flash of insight was to ask the Duke if he could name the regiment after Patricia.
Gault liked the words “light infantry” because it had an “irregular” sort of commando feel to it. And so, “Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry” it became. And still is.
The Patricias were in the trenches of Flanders by January 6, 1915. Two days later, two lance corporals, Norman Fry and Henry Bellinger, were dead — the first Canadians killed in the War to End All Wars. They would be joined by thousands more. By the time the shooting stopped, three Patricias had won the Victoria Cross, two posthumously. Almost 1,300 men had been killed.
The Patricias’ “colours” suggest they were sent to Siberia. It is listed on their official list of where they saw action. But actually, they never got into Siberia. In 1918, Canada sent a small contingent of about 1,000 men in an outfit called the 260th Battalion to Vladivostok as part of a half-hearted foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War. The men of the 260th never fired a shot in anger and in a few weeks were brought home. Fast forward eighty years. In 1997, in a quirky and uniquely Canadian system that insures the deeds of disbanded combat units are remembered, the PPCLI agreed to safeguard and in effect adopt the 260th’s “heritage” and now carries that long defunct battalion’s Siberian battle honour, even though no Patricia ever set foot in the place.
In the Second World War, the PPCLI fought in Sicily for the first Canadian assault on the Nazis since the debacle at Dieppe. Then they moved on to the Italian mainland and a grueling string of battles against crack German troops in wretched weather and treacherous terrain. Then they headed over to Holland for the Liberation and by the time of Germany’s surrender the battalion had acquired eighteen battle honours. They were headed for the Pacific to take on Japan when Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war. They had a magnificent war record and a reputation as tough, imaginative troops.
But these existing Patricias were, by and large, not the Patricias that would go to Korea. The Korean force would come from those three new battalions the army would create from nothing. The first to go to war, the men fated to become the Patricias of Kapyong, formed the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, or 2 PPCLI as its termed in military shorthand. These new Patricias were joining a family with a fine
