Brother Fish Read online

  They say you grow up quickly in combat and you know you’re a competent soldier when you finally realise that good leadership, air superiority and all the artillery cover you think you’re going to need will not win a battle. The only element that finally counts is a line of infantry off their scones with a mixture of fear and the peculiar sustained excitement that comes with a natural injection of adrenaline pumping through your bloodstream.

  In the end you’re it. Muggins here has the job to dig the enemy out of their trenches with bullet and bayonet and you know that he’s got cover and you haven’t. You’re out in the open coming towards him and he’s tucked out of sight with his rifle or machine gun steadied and waiting. However clever the battle plan, and however well you’re trained as a fighting unit, you know some of your mates are going to be killed or wounded and some are not going to be there in the end – and that you may be among the dead or casualties.

  The veterans have a saying that has become a hoary old combat cliche, which nonetheless remains army lore: ‘If the bullet has your name on it there’s nothing you can do about it.’ You can be reckless in a battle but you can’t be careful. You can throw away your life by trying to be a hero but you can’t preserve it by exercising extreme caution.

  For all our cleverness and skill in the advance to the north, the battalion had so far suffered nine blokes killed and sixty-nine wounded. Going into the Chongju battle, with the enemy determined to make a stand, we knew the number of dead and wounded was likely to increase significantly. This proved to be the case – we lost several more men and suffered a lot more wounded before driving the enemy further north. By normal combat standards our casualties were light and, as a consequence, Charlie Green had yet another feather in his cap. A message of congratulations arrived for the battalion from the divisional commander: ‘Congratulations on your sensational drive into enemy territory.’ I guessed Green would soon add a second gong to his DSO.

  Nice as this accolade was, we were battle-weary and happy enough to relinquish the lead to another battalion and grab a rest. Leading an advance is a pretty nerve-racking business. You’re at the sharp end all the time and constantly concerned that, if things go wrong, you’ll let down those that follow you. Nobody says it aloud, but it becomes a matter of pride – you don’t want to be seen to have been caught with your pants down and be forced to radio for help. We told ourselves, perhaps foolishly, that Australians didn’t do that sort of thing.

  We may have lacked training at the beginning but there’s nothing like a battle or two to knock the rust off and get down to the true mettle, if you’ll pardon the pun. By now the Regular Army and K Force blokes were indistinguishable. Under Charlie Green we’d become combat-hardened and we were regarded by the other battalions as a crash-hot fighting unit. A battalion is formed of a group of disparate men, and Green had forged us into a bloody good team. A good commander gives a soldier a lot of confidence – he was definitely one of the best, and we loved him for it.

  When you finally pull up for a rest and are no longer on high alert you realise for the first time how very weary you are. Putting it crudely, we were buggered. We dug in not far from Chongju, happy to put our feet up for a couple of days and let someone else take the responsibility.

  But there’s no rest for the wicked. Our new-found hero status soon disappeared, and we ‘deserters’ were still copping all the extra jobs around the place. Once the army has your number there’s nothing private about being a private, there’s simply no letting up. ‘Private McKenzie, get up to headquarters and guide the sigs back to us,’ our platoon sergeant, Ivan Freys, predictably known as ‘Ivan the Terrible’, instructed.

  The battalion headquarters was tucked in safely behind a ridge line. I arrived to find the place a hive of activity – trenches being dug, tents erected and signal lines being laid. Even while resting, Charlie Green was a stickler for order and didn’t like a slack-looking camp. I was in the process of briefing the signals sergeant when there was an explosion on the ridge directly above us, and I immediately hit the deck. The sergeant grinned down at me. ‘Get up, soldier, you’re safe enough here.’ In what was considered more a nuisance than a real danger, the soldiers digging in on the ridge line above became an occasional target for an enemy tank or self-propelled gun. Every once in a while a shell would whistle high overhead or, as had just occurred, one would land on the forward slope. I stood up a little sheepishly, brushing the dirt from the front of my battle dress as I continued to brief him. ‘Righto then, we’ll attend to it shortly,’ he said finally. I thanked him and turned to leave when another shell must have clipped the top of the ridge and diverted into a tree, sending bits of tree and shrapnel showering over headquarters below. There was momentary panic with soldiers everywhere hitting the deck, but it soon became apparent that nobody was hurt.

  I looked up and grinned at the signals sergeant lying beside me wearing a mouthful of dirt. ‘What was that bit about safety, sarge?’

  ‘Don’t be cheeky, son,’ he said smiling, wiping the grit from his mouth.

  Then we noticed several officers running towards Charlie Green’s tent. A piece of shrapnel had ripped into his stomach. As they say in the army, Green was in the wrong place at the wrong time – the terrible irony being that for once in his life he was taking a rest. Our beloved commanding officer, the only casualty from the errant shell, was severely wounded and died two days later.

  We were pretty choked up about his death and, when the news came that the Commonwealth Brigade was to step aside to allow the US 24th Division to pass through Chongju and head north for the border less than sixty miles away, we were mad as a cut snake. Battle fatigue notwithstanding, a couple of days’ rest was all we reckoned we needed. We’d done all the hard yards, borne the full brunt of the advance, lost several dead including our beloved leader and suffered a lot more wounded, but we’d fought well and now the powers that be were going to let the Yanks take all the glory. Besides, we told ourselves we wanted to do it for Charlie Green. Now the Yanks would become the photo opportunity for the world’s tabloids. It would be Iwo Jima all over again, with the marines beautifully posed and back-lit, raising the Stars and Stripes on a cairn of carefully constructed rock, only this time on the China border. The world’s photographers would be flown in to bear witness, with Life and Look magazines and the Saturday Evening Post along with the New York Times and United Press given the front positions with The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald on tiptoe at the back, their camera lenses peeping through a jostle of massed shoulders.

  We were carrying on a treat about the Yanks grabbing the glory when it occurred to me that perhaps we weren’t being entirely fair. ‘Wait on,’ I said, ‘we’ve been made to fight bloody hard to get this far, the nogs are no pushover and the Yanks have still got sixty miles to go. Who says they won’t do it tough?’

  ‘You’re not much of a map reader, are you, McKenzie?’ It was Ivan the Terrible, our ever-loquacious platoon sergeant who specialised in putting people down. ‘I’d have thought a bloody know-all like you would have the intelligence to consult a map before opening yer mouth.’

  Several blokes rolled their eyes – the bastard couldn’t help himself.

  Now he removed a map from his map pocket and opened it up. ‘Here, take a dekko at this.’ His stubby finger ran across a short stretch of the map he held covering the distance to the border North Korea shared with China. ‘See that? Nothing but flat land. There’s nowhere for the nogs to put up any sort of defence – hardly a rise an ant could hide behind. It’s an easy stroll to the border, then it’s “lights, camera, action” – all the glory for the bloody Yanks.’

  ‘Bloody typical! Uncle Sam stealing the show!’ Ernie Stone remarked in disgust.

  It wasn’t the first time we’d been sidelined when it became time to call in the photographers. Our brigade had been in the lead during the advance to Pyongyang when we were sent on a mysterious detour while the 1st Cavalry Division did the victory march int
o the city. Gloria, as usual, cut the pictures out, happy with the thought that her son had been nowhere near the action leading up to the capture of the city.

  It wasn’t all doom and gloom – a couple of the blokes had family in Japan and you could see they were happy the war would soon be over, and didn’t give a damn who got the kudos. ‘Catflap’ Buggins was also walking around grinning like he’d just won a chook raffle. Ever since we’d departed from Japan he’d had only one subject on his mind – an acrobatic little Japanese love-making machine from the Full Moon Bar in Kure. His previous nickname had been ‘Stubby’, which physically described him perfectly. But ever since Japan he’d regaled us endlessly with his various sexual exploits, and so Buggins’ nickname had been changed to ‘Catflap’, in reference to those little two-way flaps built into the laundry or kitchen door to let the cat out, because the only subject ever to come out of his mouth was pussy.

  ‘Lotus Blossom here I come!’ he announced happily on hearing the news.

  ‘Lotus Blossom?’ several of us chorused.

  ‘So? What’s wrong with that?’ Catflap asked defensively.

  ‘Mate, that’s only in musicals! Is that really her name?’ Jason asked.

  ‘Nah, that’s what I call her.’ He paused, looking pleased with himself. ‘Wanna know why?’

  We agreed we did. For once in his life Catflap wasn’t talking in female anatomical terms but showing a genuine romantic streak, which I must say surprised us all.

  ‘I done it because her little pink petals open up for me at night. Clever, eh?’

  Catflap hadn’t let us down.

  But the army did. The 24th Division’s dream of front-page fame, and Catflap’s prospects of further sexual adventure with his little native of Japan, were to be dashed. The Americans were only halfway to the border when the order came to withdraw.

  ‘Withdraw? Fuckin’ withdraw?’ John Lazarou shouted, when we were given the news. ‘All I wanted was one more go at the bastards with me bayonet!’ He still hadn’t let up about his exploits at Apple Orchard, which by now included an entire nog platoon speared, kebab-like, on the end of his bayonet.

  We’d made the usual infantryman’s mistake: judging the state of the war by our own immediate experience of the enemy. We’d been successful in battle so had concluded the same must be true for all the other divisions. The skipper, Lieutenant Hamill, called us all together for a briefing. Charlie Green had always insisted that everyone must be kept informed – that is, see the big picture as well as the bit that’s your responsibility – and the skipper was maintaining the tradition after Green’s death.

  ‘Okay, listen in!’ he said. ‘We’re pulling back, and here’s why.’

  He’d made a model on the ground with piled dirt for hills, sticks for roads and signal wire for the rivers. ‘You will recall about twenty-five miles back on the road to Chongju we crossed two rivers that flowed quite close together,’ he began.

  One of these crossings was in the general proximity of the Battle of the Broken Bridge and we didn’t exactly have to remind ourselves where it was.

  ‘Right then,’ he continued, ‘both these crossings are effectively the only point an army can cross at this time of the year. You will recall that with the recent rains both rivers are flowing swiftly, and that’s the immediate problem. But more importantly, these crossings are a choke point, a classic bottleneck, which is a bloody nuisance for an advancing army but a disaster if we have to withdraw.’

  He then explained that up to now these two choke points had been only of minor concern. ‘We were winning the war and, at most, they somewhat inhibited our supply lines,’ he said. Then he hit us with the bad news. ‘That’s no longer the case, lads. There have been some disturbing reversals on our right flank.’ He explained that some fifty miles to the east, the 6th Republic of Korea (ROK) Division, the South Koreans on our side, were in retreat, their soldiers abandoning their weapons and fleeing towards the two choke points. Furthermore, their 7th and 8th divisions were hanging on by the skin of their teeth twenty miles upstream from the crossings and about to make a run for it and were likely to collide with their 6th Division. But that wasn’t all. A bit further to the north the 1st ROK Division, together with the US 1st Cavalry Division, while not yet retreating, were not making any headway and were beginning to look decidedly vulnerable. They too might soon be on the run. ‘Put in simple terms, the crossings are under threat. Our lot and the US 24th Division are being withdrawn from the advance to protect these two vital choke points.’

  It didn’t take too much brain power to realise that if the enemy held these two points, anyone trying to cross would be decimated.

  Then Ivan the Terrible asked the question that was on everyone’s mind except perhaps for John Lazarou’s, because he didn’t have one. ‘Sir, we’ve managed to send the North Koreans packing on our front – how come they’ve suddenly grown such sharp teeth, winning on all the other fronts?’ he asked.

  His reply stunned us all. ‘They haven’t, sergeant. The Chinese have entered the war.’

  This may not have meant a whole lot to the other blokes, except that now we faced a new enemy, and the likelihood of the war being over in a few more days was probably no longer the case. I knew a bit about China, thanks again to the redoubtable Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan who’d always been a bit of a China buff. She’d made me read a fair bit of Chinese history, starting way back with Marco Polo, then the Opium Wars against the British, where surprisingly she’d always taken the side of the Chinese. Then, as I grew a little older, she’d introduced me to current Chinese politics, the struggle between Chiang Kai-shek, who ruled most of China in the 1930s, and the communist upstart, Mao Zedong, who turned out to be one of Lenoir-Jourdan’s favourites. I also learned that the ideological scrap between these two Chinese leaders was interrupted in 1937 when the Japanese, who had already annexed Manchuria, pushed south into China proper. In what was, to say the least, a curious alliance, the two factions joined forces to fight the invader.

  Later, after I’d joined up and returned from New Guinea, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was back onto her favourite subject, which had now become the Long March by Mao Zedong. Thinking back, she was probably responsible for my initial sympathy for the communist cause.

  I recalled how late in 1949 I’d been driving a DC8 bulldozer in a road construction crew, one of the many unsatisfactory jobs I’d had after the war. I was taking it back to the government works depot in Baldwin for a service, lumbering along and just about to enter the outskirts of the town, when I was confronted by my nemesis standing in the middle of the road. She was holding up the Hobart Mercury and shouting at me. Unable to hear what she was saying above the engine noise and, besides, I was about to flatten her, I ground the bulldozer to a halt and switched off the ignition.

  ‘Look, Jack McKenzie! Look!’ she shouted excitedly. The front page of the newspaper she held up read: ‘COMMUNIST VICTORY IN CHINA!’

  ‘We’ve won! Look, we’ve won!’ Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan’s pin-up boy had won the war and Chiang Kai-shek had fled to Formosa, which, of course, later became Taiwan.

  Now, with China suddenly our enemy, I recalled the details of the People’s Liberation Army. The Americans had backed Chiang Kai-shek, pouring hundreds of millions of US dollars into his cause all in the name of democracy, just as they were now doing in Korea. Despite America’s support, Chiang’s armies had been crushed, no match for the resourceful, hardened and enormously courageous communists. And then I remembered, at the end of the civil war Chairman Mao’s army stood five million strong!

  ‘Crikey, skipper!’ I suddenly blurted out. ‘The Chinese have an army of millions and they’re still on a war footing, have been for twenty years. What now?’

  Some of the blokes in our platoon looked around, probably thinking I was back to being a bloody know-all.

  ‘In that case, Jacko, you’ll be glad to know our intelligence estimates only about 20 000 Chinese volunteers are involved,’ he replied.r />
  This was small comfort. I knew that Chinese ‘volunteering’ wasn’t the same as K Force. The number of fighting men who crossed the border to help their communist cousins in Korea would be entirely at the discretion of Chairman Mao. Who, quite apart from his opposition to capitalism, had every reason to dislike the Americans. It didn’t take a whole heap of brains to realise that the Korean War had taken a turn for the worse.

  We’d barely occupied our new position upstream from one of the crossings near the town of Pakchon when the Chinese swept in from the east. They headed for the gap between the Commonwealth Brigade and the unit on our right flank where they overran an American artillery position and took occupation of a hill overlooking the road. What they’d effectively achieved in one fell swoop was to cut off our withdrawal route and threaten the crossing. The call came for 3RAR to push them off the hill. We had no artillery support but called in the Mustangs from Australia’s 77 Squadron who swooped in above the attacking troops, rocketing and strafing the hilltop held by the Chinese.

  I won’t go through the cut and thrust of battle – this was an attack similar to the Battle of the Apple Orchard and at Chongju. The Chinese were dug in snug as a bug in a rug on a bloody great hill and here we were, the mug infantry with rifle and bayonet going in against what were the most battle-hardened troops in the world. The call came and we were at them with our bayonets, which they didn’t like a bit. They fought hard and didn’t panic like the exhausted nogs at Apple Orchard, but in the end the dreaded pig-sticker did the job and we drove them off.

  As they scampered back down the hill their retreat became my first true sighting of the Chinese hordes, the so-called yellow peril Australians were always being told about and which, at the coming of Federation in 1901, was the primary reason for our White Australia Policy. I watched as the sun set over the enemy our grandad had warned would one day come to get our abalone. True to my boyhood imagination, as the sky behind us bathed them in gold, they literally became the yellow peril. Though I must say it didn’t seem to worry our blokes what colour peril they were taking on. This early success against the Chinese made me think that maybe you can read too much into these things.