Reviewed by J. L. Granatstein
Canada and the Korean War: Histories and Legacies of a Cold War Conflict. Andrew Burtch and Tim Cook, eds. Vancouver: UBC Press.
CANADA EMERGED from the Second World War as a substantial military power, a nation that disbanded its forces at great speed. By 1949 when Ottawa signed the North Atlantic Treaty, the country’s military strength was negligible. And when North Korea invaded South Korea on Jun. 25, 1950, there was reluctance to send troops — in fact Canada had almost nothing to despatch beyond a handful of Royal Canadian Navy destroyers. Only after strong pressure from the United States did the Liberal government agree to recruit a brigade for the conflict that the Americans saw as signalling a newly aggressive Moscow that had designs on Western Europe. Ottawa came to share this view and soon raised another brigade for NATO while increasing its military spending within a few years to more than seven percent of GDP. The Korean War made Canada a Cold Warrior state not by choice but out of necessity.
More than sixty years ago, I had just graduated from the Royal Military College. As a brand new lieutenant of 22, I was posted to Camp Borden and informed that I was to train officer cadets from the university-based Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, a few of whom were older and one or two much more knowledgeable about the army than I was. A sergeant, wearing his two Korean War ribbons, was assigned to work with me, and he seemed capable and especially good in drilling the cadets on the parade square. He didn’t talk much about his experiences during the Korean “police action,” though he once said something I had until now forgotten. He had visited a prostitute well back of the lines and, instead of paying her, he had pulled the pin and tossed a grenade behind him as he departed. Presumably this killed or seriously wounded her.
Could this have been true? He had never been court-martialled nor was there any indication of regret. Was he just bragging to show me how tough he was? Or was this near normal soldiers’ behaviour in that conflict? I didn’t know, nor did he mention this again and, more than slightly stunned, I didn’t try to raise it with the sergeant. What this did do was to suggest that the brutality of some Canadian soldiers sometimes was unlimited. The Koreans were “gooks” and were slightly less than human and of little value beyond a few moments of licentious pleasure. At the very least, this made me worry how I would respond if I, as a junior officer, at some point in my service, had to handle such crimes among the men I was responsible for. Fortunately for me, no such occasion ever arose, and most of my Army time was spent on leave without pay at university or working in the Army Historical Section in Ottawa.
Subscribe to support accurate history reporting and sensible historical commentary!
This long forgotten memory popped up when I read “Canada’s Korean War Dead,” Andrew Burtch’s chapter in this edited collection of fine essays. He notes the brothels and bars behind the front lines and talks about the heavy drinking of the troops, so heavy in fact that some drank the canned heat that was intended to warm up rations, and several died from this wood alcohol. He does not go into the soldiers’ sexual activities and makes no mention of crimes like those claimed by my platoon sergeant. S. P. Mackenzie’s chapter on the Commonwealth Division, however, does note a Military Police investigation of a sexual assault and murder of Korean civilians by soldiers from the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. His endnotes refer readers to an article by historian John Price discussing this case; the perpetrators, as in some 60 such Canadian cases, apparently were released very quickly.
In her chapter on medical care, Megan Fitzpatrick discusses the extraordinary incidence of venereal disease. The Commonwealth Division in which the Canadian brigade served after Jul. 1951 had the highest rate of infection of all United Nations contingents. In 1952, there were almost 10,000 cases or an astonishing 300 per 1,000 men. This was ten times higher than the prevalence of VD in the Second World War. Fitzpatrick unfortunately does not break down the Canadian numbers — I’m sure we held up our end (Canadians in the Great War had the highest VD rate in the British Expeditionary Force) — and she attributes most of the cases to soldiers’ leaves in Japan where sex was “easily affordable to relatively affluent Western troops.” Sailors from RCN destroyers serving during the war also had high rates of VD. The availability of penicillin offered an easy cure and the absence of disciplinary action made “punishment … not a realistic fear.”
But the Canadians were in Korea to fight. The 2nd Battalion of the PPCLI, the first unit to reach Korea in early 1951, made their mark at Kap’yong in April when they played a critical role in stopping a Chinese offensive. Their Commanding Officer, Lt.-Col. Jim Stone, said of his men that they were “fit, morale high, show lots of guts in close contact,” and were well led by their officers. One platoon commander, Lt. Mike Levy, was fluent in Chinese and exchanged insults with the enemy commander during the attack on the PPCLI position at Kap’yong. This infuriated the Chinese officer: “Kill the Imperialist Pigs,” he shouted to his men. Levy replied: “We are Canadian soldiers. Come to us, we have lots of food and medicine, and you will be well treated.” The Chinese commander replied, “Don’t listen to that Son of a Turtle,” a nasty insult in Chinese. But as the exchanges went on, one of Levy’s soldiers loudly complained, “Tell the bloody platoon commander to Shut Up!” Every time they yelled at each other, he roared, “the Chinese intensify their attacks.” When the enemy finally overran Levy’s hilltop position, he called for the supporting New Zealand artillery to fire repeatedly on his own well dug-in men, and this wiped out the attackers.
As this suggests, the soldiers recruited off the street for the Korean war did well by all accounts, their ranks leavened by veteran officers and adventurous types. But curiously, the regulars who arrived in Spring 1952 to relieve them performed with less distinction, or so William Johnston argues persuasively, because of poor leadership at all levels that led to “a more passive attitude.” In the largely static operations at that time, patrolling was critical, and the passivity of the Canadians was notable and led to criticism from the Australians in particular (and later from their historians).
OF COURSE, THE Chinese had something to do with this too. Xiaobing Li’s article, which uses Chinese documentation, notes that Beijing sent three million troops to fight in Korea over the course of the war, and these men suffered more than a million casualties. At the time of Kap’yong, they had 950,000 troops in Korea and by their 1952 Spring offensive almost 1.5 million men on the ground plus some 72,000 Soviet airmen and technical support. The United Nations forces held them off, however, and when the war ended in a negotiated armistice in Jul. 1953, Chairman Mao nonetheless claimed victory: the fighting had saved North Korea, improved Beijing’s relations with Moscow, and secured the People’s Republic against invasion by the United States. It also, one of his generals observed, began the transformation of the Chinese military into a modern force.
This volume also devotes chapters to the RCN and the RCAF. The RCAF’s combat role was limited to officers posted to American fighter squadrons, and the Canadians did well against the Soviet MiGs. The Navy’s role was larger, three Tribal class destroyers at a time deployed off the Korean coast. Their roles varied from shelling shore installations, shooting up railway traffic, and even evacuating soldiers during the Chinese advance in late 1950. The sailors lived in cramped quarters, most still sleeping in hammocks, but ate well, the “best food of any Commonwealth navy,” their commander said. Morale generally was good, historian Michael Whitby adds, because they “did their job as well, and often better than their allies. That lifted spirits across the entire navy.”
Edited by Tim Cook and Andrew Burtch of the Canadian War Museum, this book includes much more. There are chapters on Canadian foreign policy and politics, on the American army’s lessons learned in Korea, on Prisoners of War, the veterans’ experience, the war’s impact on Korea and on Canadian-Korean relations, and on commemoration. The editors’ introduction and conclusion are well done, and the bibliography includes almost all the Canadian literature on the war and a good sampling of that produced elsewhere. This is a first rate collection, another excellent volume in the Studies in Canadian Military History series produced by the War Museum and the University of British Columbia Press.
FINALLY, WAS IT worth it? Did the Korean War merit the loss of 312 killed in action, missing, or presumed dead; 143 dead in accidents; 49 dead of illness; eight from suicide; and four in homicides? Was Korea worth the human cost to Canada, not to forget the millions of Koreans, Chinese, and U.N. soldiers? North Korea, devastated by the war, became a Communist satrapy ruled by the Kim family, a starving militarized state with nuclear weapons. For the North, the war produced nothing but loss and continued slavery. But South Korea, after many hiccups, became a democracy with a growing, prosperous population and a booming industrialized economy. For the South the war brought positive change that, while nothing can equal the wartime losses, makes clear that national survival brought a much better life. Canada did its share in Korea, and the Koreans remember. Was it worth it? Oh, yes.
Taken from the Summer 2024 print edition of THE DORCHESTER REVIEW, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 47-49.