personal choice to command 2 PPCLI, the first Canadian unit to go into combat in Korea.
Oddly, though decorated four times for bravery by the time he retired, in Korea Stone told his men that he didn’t believe much in medals, so don’t expect any.
The mountain warfare skills he mastered in the Italian campaign gave him precisely the insights that would be priceless later on at Kapyong. However, there was an important difference: in Italy he was attacking, where at Kapyong he’d be defending. But thanks to his Italian battles, he developed the vital knack of seeing things from the enemy’s point of view.
Even in the decades that followed Korea, the men who fought in Stone’s army had a strange attachment to the man. At a fiftieth anniversary ceremony in Kapyong itself, veterans made arrangements to phone Stone who could not attend because of poor health. When the call was made, a military bureaucrat from the Canadian embassy tried to break in and stop it because, he said, there was a ceremony taking place. He was curtly told by the veterans that they were making the call to the man who’d made the ceremony possible.
Jim Stone was a tough man to love and an easy one to admire. Some of his men asked specifically to serve under him. He was a special soldier, exactly the type of inspired and inspiring leader you’d want in a desperate situation. He was a popular choice; a fighting infantry commander who led from the front. A soldiers’ soldier. The troops respected him, the press lionized him, and the public ate it up. A Winnipeg Free Press headline caught the tone exactly: “Big Jim From Ortona Rejoins The Army; Canada’s ‘Legend’ To Head Unit In Korea.”3
There was no shortage of volunteers for the special force. Ten days into the recruitment campaign 7,000 men had signed up. Their makeup was different than those who’d gone to war against Hitler only a few years earlier. That had been a crusade against an enormous evil, and virtually the entire nation rose up and joined in the struggle.
The volunteers for Korea were not by-and-large from the main-stream middle class, who were busy building comfortable careers and raising families in Canada’s post-war prosperity. Korean volunteers, the enlisted men at least, were more likely to be working class. Officers and senior non-commissioned officers, such as sergeants, were likely to be veterans of the Second World War. But the private soldiers were mostly straight out of civilian life, with many still in their teens. This would be a citizen’s army. These recruits joined up not just to be in the army, but to be in the army to fight, and to fight specifically in Korea. They were after adventure, certainly, but also because they wanted combat. There’d never been a Canadian military force quite like this before. These young men had not the least interest in the grand issues of politics or balance of power or ideology or any great moral crusade.
This was the army Stone wanted. He didn’t want dreamers. He wanted fighters.
The Kapyong army was “recruited from the streets,”4 as he once tersely put it in his talk to the new generation of PPCLI officers years later.
Among them were many dead-beats, escapists from domestic troubles, cripples, neurotics and other useless types all of whom broke down under the rigorous training program and we got rid of them prior to going into action.
Those who joined to fight for a cause were difficult to find. Bill Boss, our accompanying war correspondent, tried to find the idealist who joined solely to fight a holy war against Communism, like Diogenes searching with his lantern trying to find an honest man. Bill was unsuccessful.
The strength of the Battalion was its adventurers, those who joined the army because there was a war to fight and they wanted to be there. Personally I believe that all volunteer armies in wartime are composed mostly of adventurers.5
Pierre Berton, the journalist, quickly spotted the absence of moral commitment in the Canadian troops, and he disapproved: “What struck me during my first few days with the Canadian troops,” Berton wrote years later in Maclean’s magazine, “was the appalling lack of understanding among the rank and file, who, for the most part, had no real idea why they were in Korea. They were tough, resourceful and skilled; they had exchanged shots with the enemy, and discipline was not a problem. But the Why We Fight kind of lecture that had been part of basic infantry training in the Global War wasn’t part of the syllabus.”6
Berton did not grasp that these men were a new, existential breed of soldier. They needed no pep talks or motivational lectures. They knew precisely why they had gone to war: they wanted to fight.
Don Hibbs, the twenty-year-old cab driver from Guelph, Ontario, asked himself: What am I doing here in this stupid car when I could be in the army?7
He’d missed the last war and he didn’t want to miss this one.
“I can be a hero over there pulling hand grenades out with my teeth, was my impression. I joined basically for the adventure, not patriotism. I didn’t even know where Korea was. I didn’t care where Korea was. I just thought: I want to go to war. I want that experience.”
John Bishop was working in British Columbia logging camps. He was nineteen and he, too, joined for the action. Some, he said, enlisted looking for adventure, but some simply “wanted to get away from wives. Or they were not in a good relationship with the police. I knew of only one man went over to fight communism. We joined to fight. We knew we were going to a fight. We were pretty proud. Almost all of us got out at the end of our [eighteen-month] tour. Very few became regulars.”8
One of the few was Bishop, who went on to become a career soldier and diplomat, and later in life was posted to a peacetime Korea as military attaché at the Canadian embassy.
Another who simply liked the military life was Alex Sim of Kamloops, British Columbia. He was a Second World War veteran, who left the army after the war and then re-enlisted for Korea.
He felt and still feels it was the right thing to do.
“We had an obligation to go,”9 he explains today. “The Koreans were taking a terrible beating. The Brits were going. The Aussies were going. What’s matter with Canada? We should be going. I wrote letter to someone in the government saying I was very disappointed Canada not going to assist. I never got an answer.”
Sim had also a brother and a cousin in the same platoon. His cousin was given a medical evacuation because of an ear infection only a few days before Kapyong and so missed the battle.
“We never talk about it,” says Sim.
To join up, recruits often showed great inventiveness. In Rivers, Manitoba, Mike Czuboka, fresh out of high school, hitched a ride on a freight train to Winnipeg to enlist, and then lied to the army about his age, claiming he was nineteen, not eighteen.
“According to official army records, I’m still that one year older than I really am,”10 he says today.
Czuboka had felt he was missing out on a thrilling opportunity; something that would never come again. He worshiped his older brother who’d been in the RCAF and had flown fifty-two missions over the Atlantic hunting U-boats.
“I was fourteen years old when World War Two ended and I saw Korea as a chance for a great adventure of the kind I’d been denied in the War.”
But he also had a sadder motive. His Ukrainian-born father was imprisoned during the First World War as an enemy alien and afterwards always felt he was an unwanted foreigner in his adopted country. Deeply hurt, young Mike Czuboka signed on for Korea in part “to prove [he] was a good Canadian.”
But the excitement of combat was always a huge attraction to a young, restless prairie
