Why do we forget Britain’s role in the Korean War?

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice. Sadly, in the British media it will be forgotten that Great Britain and its Commonwealth forces, roughly some 104,000 troops in total, were America’s junior partner in the United Nations force that took on the defence of South Korea.

The United Nations’ call to arms was made possible by the absence of a veto from the Soviet Union (which had temporarily walked out of the UN assembly because of its refusal to recognize the People’s Republic of China). It became necessary after Kim Il Sung, the revolutionary founder and leader of the communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and grandfather of the country’s current leader Kim Jung Un, invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950.

In terms of British military lives lost, the Korean War accounted for 1,129 deaths, making it the third most costly since the second world war. Only the Malayan Emergency (1,442 deaths) and ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland (1,441 deaths) brought more British military casualties. The British Army’s losses were, apart from Turkey with 720 deaths, second only to those of the United States’ 33,629 military deaths and were twice as high as any of the thirteen other countries that joined the United Nations force in Korea. 

To put it in context, more British troops died in Korea than in the conflicts of the Falklands War (237) the Gulf War (45), Balkans War (72), Afghan War (457) and Iraq War (178) combined. In addition, Commonwealth forces suffered heavy losses: Korean War deaths included 339 Australians, 516 Canadians, 45 New Zealanders and 37 South Africans. Other countries’ contingents, including Turkey, France, Greece, Columbia, Netherlands, Thailand, Belgium and the Philippines, lost 1,733 soldiers. The media inattention to the Korean War is even more surprising because, unlike the Malayan Emergency, it was not an insurgency but a significant Cold War superpower conflict which cost the lives of an estimated 1.5 million civilians and 927,000 combatants.

Nevertheless the start of the war did pique the interest of the British intelligentsia. Malcom Muggeridge, the Manchester Guardian journalist who did much to publicise the horrors of the mass starvation caused by Soviet collectivisation, was on holiday in Monte Carlo when the war broke out and rushed back to the UK in panic. In his diary he wrote that people were ‘frenziedly following the Korean news’. Similarly, the novelist Graham Greene reported that people were transfixed about ‘whether the war is on or off in Korea’. No doubt many feared that this would be the start of a third world war.

Soon however, a war-weary British public slouched into general apathy. The Korean War became known as ‘the Forgotten War’. As William Swarbrick of 20th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, recalled:

When I came home after being away for 12 months there was no home coming party. When I met friends and they said that they hadn’t seen me for a while, I told them I had been to Korea. They usually asked where it was in the world. I don’t think that many people knew about the Korean War….

Of course, all wars get forgotten but some get forgotten more than others. In the case of the Korean War, one wonders why? It was not as if there were no pulsating events or larger than life characters involved. On the communist side, key decision makers included Stalin, Mao and the chief instigator of the war Kim Il Sung, who had managed to persuade his superpower backers to come to his aid.

On South Korea’s side, the UN forces were commanded by the narcissistic monomaniac, American General Douglas MacAthur. President Harry Truman hooked him out of Tokyo, where he was was working on the post-war reconstruction of Japan in his position as the supreme commander of the Allied powers.

In a flanking naval landing manoeuvre at the Battle of Inchon, MacArthur broke out of the North’s containment of UN forces at Pusan and put Kim Il Sung’s army to flight. It was the one unquestionably brilliant victory of an otherwise questionable military career. Not surprisingly given his character, MacArthur overplayed his hand. He was sacked in spectacular fashion by President Harry Truman for trying to expand the war to China by taking his forces, against explicit orders, up to the Yalu River which delineated the Korean border with China.

On 1 November 1950, a patrol of the 8th US Cavalry reported being under attack from unidentified troops. Seemingly without notice, waves of Chinese troops wearing padded cotton tunics had appeared out of the mists. MacArthur had foolishly ignored the warning given by Mao’s foreign minister Zhou Enlai that if the UN crossed the 38th parallel, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would attack.

As ever, it was a war of misunderstandings. During Mao’s visit to Moscow in December 1949, Stalin told him that the Americans were too afraid to fight another war. In fact, the US response was instantaneous. ‘By God I’m going to let them have it,’ President Truman stormed when he learnt of Kim Il Sung’s invasion of the South. After losing China to communism in 1949, a failure for which he was being blamed by a Republican-controlled Congress, Truman had no option but to combat what was seen as a further global expansion of Soviet influence.

Misunderstandings even took place among the UN allies. At the Battle of Imjin River, English Brigadier Tom Brodie of the Gloucester regiment was part of a 12-mile front held by the 29th British Independent Brigade. When he told his American commander that ‘Things are a bit sticky, sir,’ his classic English understatement led to the Gloucesters being unsupported and stranded on Hill 235.

Led by Cornishman Colonel James Carne, the surviving Gloucesters defied three whole Chinese divisions comprising 27,000 troops and were credited preventing the fall of Seoul to the communists. For his part in the legendary episode, Carne was awarded a Victoria Cross, as was Lt. Philip Curtis of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, albeit posthumously.

A British film of this heroic action, A Hill in Korea (1956) is as forgotten as the war itself; a pity since it gave early screen credits to later film stars such as Stanley Baker, Robert Shaw and Michael Caine, himself a Korean War veteran. Caine, a national service infantryman in the 1st Fusiliers would later recall the horrific nature of the war:

Thousands of Chinese advancing toward our positions, led by troops of demonic trumpet players. The artillery opened up but they still came on, marching toward our machine guns and certain death.

Caine, a communist sympathiser before the war, Caine became a determined anti-communist afterwards.

The thin British cultural residue of the Korean war compares unfavourably with America and indeed China. America has the iconic black comedy series M*A*S*H about a US Army medical unit. There is also the brilliant John Frankenheimer cold war thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which plays on the fact that captured American and British troops were brainwashed by the Chinese.

Meanwhile Xi Jin Ping’s China has recently used the Korean War to plug Chinese nationalism. The film The Battle of Lake Changjin (2021), the costliest production in Chinese history, celebrates an epic Chinese victory won at appalling cost as the PLA drove the Americans back from the Yalu River.

To western historians, this episode of the war is known as the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. It was a valiantly fought retreat. Though when an American war reporter asked 1st Marines Major General O.P. Smith whether his surrounded forces were retreating, he supposedly replied, ‘Retreat, Hell…we’re just attacking in another direction.’ Fought in windchill temperatures of -70^o C, the Battle of Chosin Reservoir has been described as the coldest battle in history.

Despite its memorable personalities and epic battles, there will be no VE Day or VJ Day type celebrations on Thursday. Labour party amnesia on the subject is understandable: the Korean War, which was endorsed by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, eventually split the party. There were concerns not only that a rising defence budget would impinge on welfare spending but also that participation in the war would be perceived as imperialistic. Some on the left, of course, were pro-communist.

When Sir Winston Churchill returned to power in 1951, he twisted the knife. In defending himself against charges of warmongering in his statements to the US Congress, Churchill responded, ‘We have only followed and conformed to the policy for which the late government were responsible.’ Aneurin (Nye) Bevan and 56 other Labour MPs voted against rearmament. It was the first major Labour-Conservative split on foreign policy since the ending of World War II. Nye Bevan’s resignation from the Labour party in 1951 hobbled it for a decade.

That the BBC will not be celebrating the armistice on Thursday will therefore come as no surprise. Instead, the corporation’s ‘wokerati’ will celebrate a historical cause much closer to their hearts: a BBC 2 documentary called David Harewood on Blackface.

The fact is that the Korean War does not, as Dr. Grace Huxford, lecturer in modern history at Bristol University and author of The Korean War in Britain (2018), points out, fit neatly into the historical narrative of Britain’s post-war reconstruction. For the left in particular, the building of a welfare state and the creation of the National Health Service are the issues that count in post-war British history.

Dr Huxford also notes that the Korean War highlights ‘Britain’s increasing redundancy on the world stage’. This may explain why the Korean War and its British casualties are as much orphaned on the political right as on the left. A perusal of the website of the Conservative MP for Gloucester, Richard Graham, gives no indication that he will be celebrating the heroic actions of the ‘Glorious Gloucesters’ on Thursday’s Korean War Armistice Day anniversary. Neither do there appear to be any plans for celebrations by the British government, our defence minister, Ben Wallace, or the embassy in Seoul.

By contrast, according to the North Korean Central News Agency, both China and Russia are sending senior delegations to Pyongyang. The Russian delegation will be led by defence minister Sergei Shoigu in a ‘congratulatory visit’ for what is falsely described as North Korea’s victory in the ‘Grand Fatherland Liberation War’.

Today’s anniversary is a celebration by the communist superpower allies, which only serves to underline Britain’s shameful neglect of its participation in the Korean War. Britain’s Korean War dead and their families deserve better.