精华 不谢的罂粟花 --加拿大的Remembrance Day
- 主题发起人 Riven
- 开始时间
http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgminfo/korea/index.html
(1)
" Riffraff "
They gather every July 27 for a small service at a Brampton, Ontario cemetery, just as they have to mark the end of the Korean War and to honour their comrades who died in that conflict. They are Canadian veterans; former soldiers who remember why they went to Korea and what happened when they came home. Here is a look at a long-neglected chapter in Canadian history. The Magazine's Dan Bjarnason reported The Forgotten War, which was produced by Lani Selick.
Ted Zuber, sniper, fought in the Korean hills almost 50 years ago. Korea still haunts the mind of Ted Zuber, artist.
"It was the last war in which Canadians died in combat," he says. "We've had Canadians lose their lives many places with our peacekeeping efforts throughout the world in the last number of years. But the last combat casualties Canada experienced were in the Korean war. We should never forget why we went to war and what we had to sacrifice to achieve so-called victory....You don't have to relish it. You don't have to wallow in it. We don't have to put up too many bloody monuments. But let's not forget it because that would be stupid.
"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."
More than 25,000 Canadians went off to fight in Korea. More than 500 of them died there. Their names are now enshrined on a memorial wall in Brampton, Ontario. They were part of a United Nations army that went off to stop North Korea when it invaded South Korea. It was a UN war. It was a meatgrinder of a war that scarcely anyone remembers today. The memorial was put up by the veterans themselves and when it was dedicated in 1997, the federal government sent no one to attend the ceremony.
At the time, it was the gravest crisis since World War II. The Korean conflict began at dawn on June 25, 1950 when some 90,000 troops from the Communist North -- with Russian backing -- swept into the South to try to unify the two countries by force of arms.
The United Nations Security Council created a special military expeditionary force -- led by the United States -- to save the South.
Historian David Bercuson has just written a study of the war in Korea.
David Bercuson
"I think the Korean war was a very important war," Bercuson says. "We suspected it at the time but now that we've had access to Soviet archives, we know that it was a test, it was meant to be a test, of Western resolve to defend non-Communist territory."
The war was launched by North Korea with the blessing of Stalin. [He] equipped the North Korean troops with tanks and with aircraft, sent Soviet advisors and then of course with the support of China. If we had let South Korea go, I think the message that would've been sent to Stalin and to world Communism, as it was at the time, was that we were not prepared to put it on the line, to defend non-Communist territory. And that if the Communists wanted to grab territory in Korea or maybe next time in Europe, it was there for the taking. It was very, very important that they be stopped where they were at that time."
Canada was in at the creation of the UN's army in Korea, two months after the North struck. Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent announced Canada was sending troops to the flashpoint in Asia. It was not technically a war, but a so-called "police action."
Louis St. Laurent addresses the nation
In an address to the nation, St. Laurent said. "This brigade will be known as the Canadian Army Special Force. And it will be specially trained and equipped to be available for use in carrying out Canada's obligations under the United Nations Charter. The army wants young men, physically fit, mentally alert, single or married and particularly just as many veterans of the Second World War as possible.
Ted Zuber
So when war came to Korea, so did Ted Zuber.
"I had grown up during the Second World War, and you were a man if you were in uniform," he says. "The war ended, thank heaven, too soon for me to be a soldier. And when the Korean thing came along five years later, I enlisted."
Another author, Ted Barris, interviewed more than 200 Korean vets.
"The common thread that sewed all those volunteers together who went to Korea was… a sense of adventure," Barris says.
"There was something out there that they had not experienced and wanted to. They sought out the adventure."
Jack Lachance
Jack Lachance of Windsor was afraid he'd missed his war.
"I joined on August 18, 1950. I was 18 years old," Lachance says. "I always wanted to be a soldier from the time I was a little kid but I was too young for the Second World War. So when the Korean War broke out, I was working in a factory in Windsor. So it was around August the 10th or 11th when the decision came down from Ottawa that they were going to recruit 10,000 people for the Korean War. That's when I went in."
Don Hibbs
Young Don Hibbs was an amateur hockey player.
"I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life," Hibbs says. "I had left school early to play hockey. I dropped out of my second year in high school just to play hockey and played junior hockey and I travelled to Europe and played.
"When I came back, I had to have a job. I looked and thought, what have I got to lose? And I can be a hero over there pulling hand grenades out with my teeth, was my expression. I joined basically for the adventure, not patriotism. I didn't even know where Korea was. I didn't care where Korea was."
Fifteen other countries also sent fighting troops. The feature that distinguished Canada's contingent is that all were volunteers, but the home front paid them little attention once they marched off to war.
"I think the military figured we got a bunch of unemployed bums that needed jobs, so they joined the army. We got a bunch of Second World War rummies that never got over to the Second World War, who joined for a place to sleep, a home. This was the attitude everybody took on the army."
"They weren't the cream of Canadian society," Barris says. "They came from, you know, low paying jobs, small towns, low economic scale communities and some of the people who were in their command, even some of the officers who commanded them referred to them as riffraff. "
(2)
Kapyong
The war had grown more complex and more bloody. Hundreds of thousands of well-trained and well-equipped Chinese troops had intervened to save their North Korean allies.
The first Canadian infantry arrived six months after the fighting began.
Don Hibbs recalls his unit deploying for their first action.
Don Hibbs
"We came to a clearing where there was an American platoon. They were all dead. The colonel made the greatest statement of all," Hibbs recalls. "'Okay guys. Siddown, have lunch. Get your lunch over with 'cause we're moving out after lunch.' And I thought, lunch. I'm sitting eating lunch looking around and seeing like 30 or 40 dead men that have been killed the night before. Rigor mortis hadn't even set in. And I thought this is terrible, you know, and that's when I wrote my mother a letter and said 'Farewell, I'll never see you again .'"
Canadian soldiers who thought they would be playing at war, soon found Korea was a grisly business where you played for keeps.
The armies fought over mountains and hills, one after the other, separated by deep ravines and valleys and rice paddies.
The goal was to occupy high ground and then make the enemy come uphill to get at you. The enemy had exactly the same idea.
Weather could be a killer.
"It was very cold in the winter," Zuber says. "You couldn't put a fire on, you couldn't have a cigarette in the trench. You'd just draw artillery fire or sniper fire."
"The war in Korea was a meatgrinder," Barris says. "It was a horrible, dirty, grimy war. These men went through hell. You have to understand that Korea at the time-- as it had been for centuries-- was mostly an agrarian nation. All of the land virtually from coast to coast up and down the peninsula, was fertilized by human excrement.
Canadian trench
"So the Canadians dug deeper and deeper in to living quarters and fighting trenches and bunkers to protect themselves from the incoming mortars and shells from the Chinese, they dug deeper into the most hostile environment with rats and lice and disease. Some of the most horrific diseases that the world had ever seen from warfare came out of Korea."
The war in Korea could kill you with more than the bullets and the bombs. It was in many ways a death trap for so many of the Canadians who went there.
Bunkers
Zuber agrees. "At least the enemy was sort of honourable. They shot you and you shot back sort of thing. Whereas you had rats continuously around you and I actually was awakened with my bunker mate - we had no more than two men per bunker in case the bunker was destroyed. And Johnny sort of waked me screaming, a great rat was cleaning some chocolate, I'd eaten a chocolate bar before I fell asleep and he was eating this off the side of my mouth."
But for most, the risk of certain death was most likely from explosions and gunfire.
Kapyong
In a heroic action in the spring of 1951, a cut-off Canadian unit held out at a hill called Kapyong, after units from other armies on surrounding hills abandoned their positions. The Canadians did not and -- it is argued -- saved the front from collapsing.
Don Hibbs was there.
"I'd say more than 7,000 troops were against us, We were outnumbered seven or 10 to one," he says.
The Canadians -- surrounded and alone -- were supplied by air drop.
"I remember the planes," Hibbs says. "I wasn't really thinking at that time, gee, are we out of ammunition, are we out of food? I knew we were out of food.
Machine gun at Kapyong
"I believed that that night that maybe we weren't gonna be here tomorrow. I believed that we had to go down fighting, you know the old gung-ho but I wasn't gung-ho, I was praying that I could survive the day, and I believe that most of the fellas in the battle were not going to go down without a fight, 'cause that may be more sensible. We weren't going down without a fight but if we're gonna go down, we're not gonna go alone."
In the end, they didn't go down. The Chinese finally abandoned the attack The front held. Seoul was saved.
For their valor, the unit -- The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry -- was honoured not by their own country but by the United States.
The Patricia's received a presidential citation, a decoration rarely awarded to non-American troops.
"We were the first Canadian troops ever to be honoured by an American organization as a battalion," Hibbs says.
"One thing that seemed to come through in spite of the horrible conditions and the senselessness of the war was a sense of commitment," Barris says. "They signed up for their 18 months of duty, felt obliged to do it and through thick and thin, better or worse, they would do it and they did. It's amazing. I don't have any information in the research I did that there was, you know, too many absent without leave problems, that there were desertions, that people ran from the front in the face of the enemy. "
(3)
Homecoming
Only a few months after Kapyong, peace talks began and the nature of the war changed.
Fighting went on for another two bloody years, but it wasn't about defeating the enemy any more. It was about holding the line. It was about returning to the status quo with two Koreas, divided at the 38th parallel, roughly the border when the war began.
"It was the first post-World War II war that was fought with very definite political limits," Bercuson says. "In the sense that it was a Cold War war. Basically it was a limited political war and had to be fought as a limited political war to take great care it didn't become World War III and in that sense it was like all of the other wars that have followed since between Communist and non-Communist forces or between, the great powers and their agents.
Trenches
As the peace talks groaned on, Korea took on the look of a World War I battlefield -- the two sides hunkered down in trenches-- a war of raids and patrols and constant small battles over and over again for the same neighbouring hills.
"You're standing in your trench, you're in the trenches, from dusk to dawn, every day, like the whole year," Lachance says, " Dusk to dawn. You're on the reverse slopes in the daytime and you're on the forward positions in the nights. You can't see your hand in front of you. It's just like being in space. All of a sudden you can hear the mumblings and grumblings down in the valley. I think probably the scariest time of a young soldier's life is anticipating to see somebody."
Canadian infantry were at a tremendous disadvantage through the entire war. They were outgunned, Canadian World War II rifles needed to be re-cocked after each round. The Chinese used automatic weapons that fired as long as the trigger was pressed
Canadian soldiers
"Imagine you're going up a Chinese position at night, and there's only 12 of you. You're 12 abreast. You're going up this Chinese position. There's probably 1500 Chinese up there, all equipped with 8 and 900 rounds per minute burp gun. And they open fire and you're trying to give them return fire one bloody bullet at a time? I thought it was disgusting."
Enterprising soldiers at the front always have a knack getting things done.
Canadian beer
Our troops had beer, but no modern weapons.
American troops, had modern weapons but no beer.
So unofficial deals were made; a sort of early free trade agreement.
"A lieutenant, myself and another corporal went down to Pusan with our jeep to do some trading," Hibbs recalls. "What my colonel or my major wanted was a jeep trailer, and two walkie-talkies, that was what our project was. So we went downtown to Pusan and I had to look around, I found an American GHQ, general headquarters, and I went in there to the sergeant on duty. He asked me what have I got to trade and I got a bottle of rum out of the jeep. "I said, 'I need a trailer.'
"He says 'I'll get you one, I'll get you one.'
"So I gave him the bottle, I got the two walkie-talkies, the two 45's. And about ten minutes later he comes driving up with a two-and-a-half-ton truck with a two-and-a-half-ton trailer on the back, and says 'There's your trailer.'"
"And I said, 'I can't pull that. I have only got a jeep.'" "He said, 'Well take the truck.' So I did."
Armistice
On July 27, 1953, an armistice stopped the shooting; a demilitarized zone separated the two Koreas. POWs (prisoners of war) were exchanged, including 32 Canadians. All had been wretchedly treated in captivity. The war started with two Koreas and ended with two Koreas.
To many, it seemed as if the war had been for nothing.
So what were the consequences if the West hadn't fought in Korea? Or if the West fought and lost?
"There was a time in late December 1950, when it looked very much as if the Chinese were going win the war, and sweep the Americans and the RoK [Republic of Korea] forces and everybody else off the Korean peninsula." Bercuson says.
"I can tell you Canada's Minister of National Defence... wrote a memo to the cabinet and said, 'This could be the beginning of World War III' and it was the beginning of the largest peacetime mobilization in Canadian history and you'll find the same response in Washington and London, they were really worried about what was going to happen, if the UN lost the Korean war. So the consequence of a loss would've been, I think, catastrophic. It would have created a precedent, 'the West cannot defend itself, the West does not have the staying power. They can't stand the gaff, they can't take the casualties.'"
When the troops came home they were told their war wasn't a war at all but a "police action."
The public had scarcely noticed they'd been away.
The government ignored what they'd done.
Weren't there supposed to be marching bands and flowers in the streets?
Homecoming
"The only thing that happened, when I came home," Hibbs recalls. "We landed in Vancouver and all the gangsters of the city came and asked if we had any weapons. That was the only reception party I had."
"When I came home," Lachance says. "I got off the train in Windsor and the Windsor Star reporter was there. I had my picture in the paper and a small write-up, which I thought was very nice of them. Windsor Star. But that was it. I was back to work four days after I got home. Two weeks after that, I was hit with malaria, and almost died right in Windsor. I was an absolute rag. I was too weak to work. I'd lost about 35 pounds. And it was really a time of a downer for me, you know. So I just put it away. Took it out of my mind and put it away."
Ted Barris
"Because Korea was not seen as a war, they were not technically in many Veterans Affairs' officials' eyes veterans, so they didn't get the benefits," Barris says. "They wouldn't get the loans, they wouldn't get the health coverage. Some of the guys who had been prisoners of war were just sort of marshalled back home without any psychological debrief and they were given cards ranging from white to black as to how their performance had been under duress in prisoner of war camps. Some of the guys I talked to said they were social misfits after coming home from Korea. There was never an attempt by the government, by the army, to deal with the baggage of the war.
"The few times when I did sit down to seriously by myself sketch out some of my thoughts, I broke down," Zuber says.
But finally after 25 years, Zuber was able to deal with his war. He came to grips with his Korean experience through his art. Today a series of his paintings hang in the Canadian War Museum, in Ottawa.
Detail "First Kill-The Hook" by Ted Zuber Courtesy Canadian War Museum #90031
"I was there, so these are personal memoirs," he says. "I'm shooting an enemy sniper who is moving out to take up an enemy position to kill our own people. I stop that. I have to keep reminding myself, I'm an old man now, but I wonder who those guys were that I killed. You know, you do stupid things like that. So I just remind myself, hey Ted, you know what the hell it was all about, and I go back to sleep."
Zuber is still working on more Korean paintings. It's a project that seems to have no end.
"The bloody thing won't leave me alone, I guess," Zuber says. "I completed another painting what, in the last year-and-a-half, on the Korean War. I guess I'll always do something every once in a while because you're never finished with it because it's not finished with you.
The war hasn't finished with Jack Lachance either.
No one seemed to care about Korea or what had been done in Korea.
So two years ago, the veterans themselves created their own memorial in Brampton for their 516 friends who never came home.
For Jack Lachance, it was time to dust off old memories he'd put away long ago. He wrote a poem that meant so much to his fellow vets that they put it on their memorial.
Jack Lachance
"It took 43 years for the Canadian government to issue Korean War veterans a volunteer service medal." Lachance says. "And then when we did receive them, we got them in the mail with the flyers. Does that tell you something? We built the most - this is one of the most magnificent memorial walls in Canada, right here we're sitting at today. And the only person that I saw from the Canadian government here the day that this wall was dedicated was my MP from Sarnia Lampton, Roger Galloway.
Every once in a while I look at one and think I knew that guy. I know I've done my duty. Everyone one of these guys on the wall did their duty.
The war has never ended for all our forgotten soldiers from our forgotten war.
For Korea itself, the war is not over. An armistice stopped the shooting but an armistice is only a truce, not a peace.
(1)
" Riffraff "
They gather every July 27 for a small service at a Brampton, Ontario cemetery, just as they have to mark the end of the Korean War and to honour their comrades who died in that conflict. They are Canadian veterans; former soldiers who remember why they went to Korea and what happened when they came home. Here is a look at a long-neglected chapter in Canadian history. The Magazine's Dan Bjarnason reported The Forgotten War, which was produced by Lani Selick.
Ted Zuber, sniper, fought in the Korean hills almost 50 years ago. Korea still haunts the mind of Ted Zuber, artist.
"It was the last war in which Canadians died in combat," he says. "We've had Canadians lose their lives many places with our peacekeeping efforts throughout the world in the last number of years. But the last combat casualties Canada experienced were in the Korean war. We should never forget why we went to war and what we had to sacrifice to achieve so-called victory....You don't have to relish it. You don't have to wallow in it. We don't have to put up too many bloody monuments. But let's not forget it because that would be stupid.
"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."
More than 25,000 Canadians went off to fight in Korea. More than 500 of them died there. Their names are now enshrined on a memorial wall in Brampton, Ontario. They were part of a United Nations army that went off to stop North Korea when it invaded South Korea. It was a UN war. It was a meatgrinder of a war that scarcely anyone remembers today. The memorial was put up by the veterans themselves and when it was dedicated in 1997, the federal government sent no one to attend the ceremony.
At the time, it was the gravest crisis since World War II. The Korean conflict began at dawn on June 25, 1950 when some 90,000 troops from the Communist North -- with Russian backing -- swept into the South to try to unify the two countries by force of arms.
The United Nations Security Council created a special military expeditionary force -- led by the United States -- to save the South.
Historian David Bercuson has just written a study of the war in Korea.
David Bercuson
"I think the Korean war was a very important war," Bercuson says. "We suspected it at the time but now that we've had access to Soviet archives, we know that it was a test, it was meant to be a test, of Western resolve to defend non-Communist territory."
The war was launched by North Korea with the blessing of Stalin. [He] equipped the North Korean troops with tanks and with aircraft, sent Soviet advisors and then of course with the support of China. If we had let South Korea go, I think the message that would've been sent to Stalin and to world Communism, as it was at the time, was that we were not prepared to put it on the line, to defend non-Communist territory. And that if the Communists wanted to grab territory in Korea or maybe next time in Europe, it was there for the taking. It was very, very important that they be stopped where they were at that time."
Canada was in at the creation of the UN's army in Korea, two months after the North struck. Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent announced Canada was sending troops to the flashpoint in Asia. It was not technically a war, but a so-called "police action."
Louis St. Laurent addresses the nation
In an address to the nation, St. Laurent said. "This brigade will be known as the Canadian Army Special Force. And it will be specially trained and equipped to be available for use in carrying out Canada's obligations under the United Nations Charter. The army wants young men, physically fit, mentally alert, single or married and particularly just as many veterans of the Second World War as possible.
Ted Zuber
So when war came to Korea, so did Ted Zuber.
"I had grown up during the Second World War, and you were a man if you were in uniform," he says. "The war ended, thank heaven, too soon for me to be a soldier. And when the Korean thing came along five years later, I enlisted."
Another author, Ted Barris, interviewed more than 200 Korean vets.
"The common thread that sewed all those volunteers together who went to Korea was… a sense of adventure," Barris says.
"There was something out there that they had not experienced and wanted to. They sought out the adventure."
Jack Lachance
Jack Lachance of Windsor was afraid he'd missed his war.
"I joined on August 18, 1950. I was 18 years old," Lachance says. "I always wanted to be a soldier from the time I was a little kid but I was too young for the Second World War. So when the Korean War broke out, I was working in a factory in Windsor. So it was around August the 10th or 11th when the decision came down from Ottawa that they were going to recruit 10,000 people for the Korean War. That's when I went in."
Don Hibbs
Young Don Hibbs was an amateur hockey player.
"I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life," Hibbs says. "I had left school early to play hockey. I dropped out of my second year in high school just to play hockey and played junior hockey and I travelled to Europe and played.
"When I came back, I had to have a job. I looked and thought, what have I got to lose? And I can be a hero over there pulling hand grenades out with my teeth, was my expression. I joined basically for the adventure, not patriotism. I didn't even know where Korea was. I didn't care where Korea was."
Fifteen other countries also sent fighting troops. The feature that distinguished Canada's contingent is that all were volunteers, but the home front paid them little attention once they marched off to war.
"I think the military figured we got a bunch of unemployed bums that needed jobs, so they joined the army. We got a bunch of Second World War rummies that never got over to the Second World War, who joined for a place to sleep, a home. This was the attitude everybody took on the army."
"They weren't the cream of Canadian society," Barris says. "They came from, you know, low paying jobs, small towns, low economic scale communities and some of the people who were in their command, even some of the officers who commanded them referred to them as riffraff. "
(2)
Kapyong
The war had grown more complex and more bloody. Hundreds of thousands of well-trained and well-equipped Chinese troops had intervened to save their North Korean allies.
The first Canadian infantry arrived six months after the fighting began.
Don Hibbs recalls his unit deploying for their first action.
Don Hibbs
"We came to a clearing where there was an American platoon. They were all dead. The colonel made the greatest statement of all," Hibbs recalls. "'Okay guys. Siddown, have lunch. Get your lunch over with 'cause we're moving out after lunch.' And I thought, lunch. I'm sitting eating lunch looking around and seeing like 30 or 40 dead men that have been killed the night before. Rigor mortis hadn't even set in. And I thought this is terrible, you know, and that's when I wrote my mother a letter and said 'Farewell, I'll never see you again .'"
Canadian soldiers who thought they would be playing at war, soon found Korea was a grisly business where you played for keeps.
The armies fought over mountains and hills, one after the other, separated by deep ravines and valleys and rice paddies.
The goal was to occupy high ground and then make the enemy come uphill to get at you. The enemy had exactly the same idea.
Weather could be a killer.
"It was very cold in the winter," Zuber says. "You couldn't put a fire on, you couldn't have a cigarette in the trench. You'd just draw artillery fire or sniper fire."
"The war in Korea was a meatgrinder," Barris says. "It was a horrible, dirty, grimy war. These men went through hell. You have to understand that Korea at the time-- as it had been for centuries-- was mostly an agrarian nation. All of the land virtually from coast to coast up and down the peninsula, was fertilized by human excrement.
Canadian trench
"So the Canadians dug deeper and deeper in to living quarters and fighting trenches and bunkers to protect themselves from the incoming mortars and shells from the Chinese, they dug deeper into the most hostile environment with rats and lice and disease. Some of the most horrific diseases that the world had ever seen from warfare came out of Korea."
The war in Korea could kill you with more than the bullets and the bombs. It was in many ways a death trap for so many of the Canadians who went there.
Bunkers
Zuber agrees. "At least the enemy was sort of honourable. They shot you and you shot back sort of thing. Whereas you had rats continuously around you and I actually was awakened with my bunker mate - we had no more than two men per bunker in case the bunker was destroyed. And Johnny sort of waked me screaming, a great rat was cleaning some chocolate, I'd eaten a chocolate bar before I fell asleep and he was eating this off the side of my mouth."
But for most, the risk of certain death was most likely from explosions and gunfire.
Kapyong
In a heroic action in the spring of 1951, a cut-off Canadian unit held out at a hill called Kapyong, after units from other armies on surrounding hills abandoned their positions. The Canadians did not and -- it is argued -- saved the front from collapsing.
Don Hibbs was there.
"I'd say more than 7,000 troops were against us, We were outnumbered seven or 10 to one," he says.
The Canadians -- surrounded and alone -- were supplied by air drop.
"I remember the planes," Hibbs says. "I wasn't really thinking at that time, gee, are we out of ammunition, are we out of food? I knew we were out of food.
Machine gun at Kapyong
"I believed that that night that maybe we weren't gonna be here tomorrow. I believed that we had to go down fighting, you know the old gung-ho but I wasn't gung-ho, I was praying that I could survive the day, and I believe that most of the fellas in the battle were not going to go down without a fight, 'cause that may be more sensible. We weren't going down without a fight but if we're gonna go down, we're not gonna go alone."
In the end, they didn't go down. The Chinese finally abandoned the attack The front held. Seoul was saved.
For their valor, the unit -- The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry -- was honoured not by their own country but by the United States.
The Patricia's received a presidential citation, a decoration rarely awarded to non-American troops.
"We were the first Canadian troops ever to be honoured by an American organization as a battalion," Hibbs says.
"One thing that seemed to come through in spite of the horrible conditions and the senselessness of the war was a sense of commitment," Barris says. "They signed up for their 18 months of duty, felt obliged to do it and through thick and thin, better or worse, they would do it and they did. It's amazing. I don't have any information in the research I did that there was, you know, too many absent without leave problems, that there were desertions, that people ran from the front in the face of the enemy. "
(3)
Homecoming
Only a few months after Kapyong, peace talks began and the nature of the war changed.
Fighting went on for another two bloody years, but it wasn't about defeating the enemy any more. It was about holding the line. It was about returning to the status quo with two Koreas, divided at the 38th parallel, roughly the border when the war began.
"It was the first post-World War II war that was fought with very definite political limits," Bercuson says. "In the sense that it was a Cold War war. Basically it was a limited political war and had to be fought as a limited political war to take great care it didn't become World War III and in that sense it was like all of the other wars that have followed since between Communist and non-Communist forces or between, the great powers and their agents.
Trenches
As the peace talks groaned on, Korea took on the look of a World War I battlefield -- the two sides hunkered down in trenches-- a war of raids and patrols and constant small battles over and over again for the same neighbouring hills.
"You're standing in your trench, you're in the trenches, from dusk to dawn, every day, like the whole year," Lachance says, " Dusk to dawn. You're on the reverse slopes in the daytime and you're on the forward positions in the nights. You can't see your hand in front of you. It's just like being in space. All of a sudden you can hear the mumblings and grumblings down in the valley. I think probably the scariest time of a young soldier's life is anticipating to see somebody."
Canadian infantry were at a tremendous disadvantage through the entire war. They were outgunned, Canadian World War II rifles needed to be re-cocked after each round. The Chinese used automatic weapons that fired as long as the trigger was pressed
Canadian soldiers
"Imagine you're going up a Chinese position at night, and there's only 12 of you. You're 12 abreast. You're going up this Chinese position. There's probably 1500 Chinese up there, all equipped with 8 and 900 rounds per minute burp gun. And they open fire and you're trying to give them return fire one bloody bullet at a time? I thought it was disgusting."
Enterprising soldiers at the front always have a knack getting things done.
Canadian beer
Our troops had beer, but no modern weapons.
American troops, had modern weapons but no beer.
So unofficial deals were made; a sort of early free trade agreement.
"A lieutenant, myself and another corporal went down to Pusan with our jeep to do some trading," Hibbs recalls. "What my colonel or my major wanted was a jeep trailer, and two walkie-talkies, that was what our project was. So we went downtown to Pusan and I had to look around, I found an American GHQ, general headquarters, and I went in there to the sergeant on duty. He asked me what have I got to trade and I got a bottle of rum out of the jeep. "I said, 'I need a trailer.'
"He says 'I'll get you one, I'll get you one.'
"So I gave him the bottle, I got the two walkie-talkies, the two 45's. And about ten minutes later he comes driving up with a two-and-a-half-ton truck with a two-and-a-half-ton trailer on the back, and says 'There's your trailer.'"
"And I said, 'I can't pull that. I have only got a jeep.'" "He said, 'Well take the truck.' So I did."
Armistice
On July 27, 1953, an armistice stopped the shooting; a demilitarized zone separated the two Koreas. POWs (prisoners of war) were exchanged, including 32 Canadians. All had been wretchedly treated in captivity. The war started with two Koreas and ended with two Koreas.
To many, it seemed as if the war had been for nothing.
So what were the consequences if the West hadn't fought in Korea? Or if the West fought and lost?
"There was a time in late December 1950, when it looked very much as if the Chinese were going win the war, and sweep the Americans and the RoK [Republic of Korea] forces and everybody else off the Korean peninsula." Bercuson says.
"I can tell you Canada's Minister of National Defence... wrote a memo to the cabinet and said, 'This could be the beginning of World War III' and it was the beginning of the largest peacetime mobilization in Canadian history and you'll find the same response in Washington and London, they were really worried about what was going to happen, if the UN lost the Korean war. So the consequence of a loss would've been, I think, catastrophic. It would have created a precedent, 'the West cannot defend itself, the West does not have the staying power. They can't stand the gaff, they can't take the casualties.'"
When the troops came home they were told their war wasn't a war at all but a "police action."
The public had scarcely noticed they'd been away.
The government ignored what they'd done.
Weren't there supposed to be marching bands and flowers in the streets?
Homecoming
"The only thing that happened, when I came home," Hibbs recalls. "We landed in Vancouver and all the gangsters of the city came and asked if we had any weapons. That was the only reception party I had."
"When I came home," Lachance says. "I got off the train in Windsor and the Windsor Star reporter was there. I had my picture in the paper and a small write-up, which I thought was very nice of them. Windsor Star. But that was it. I was back to work four days after I got home. Two weeks after that, I was hit with malaria, and almost died right in Windsor. I was an absolute rag. I was too weak to work. I'd lost about 35 pounds. And it was really a time of a downer for me, you know. So I just put it away. Took it out of my mind and put it away."
Ted Barris
"Because Korea was not seen as a war, they were not technically in many Veterans Affairs' officials' eyes veterans, so they didn't get the benefits," Barris says. "They wouldn't get the loans, they wouldn't get the health coverage. Some of the guys who had been prisoners of war were just sort of marshalled back home without any psychological debrief and they were given cards ranging from white to black as to how their performance had been under duress in prisoner of war camps. Some of the guys I talked to said they were social misfits after coming home from Korea. There was never an attempt by the government, by the army, to deal with the baggage of the war.
"The few times when I did sit down to seriously by myself sketch out some of my thoughts, I broke down," Zuber says.
But finally after 25 years, Zuber was able to deal with his war. He came to grips with his Korean experience through his art. Today a series of his paintings hang in the Canadian War Museum, in Ottawa.
Detail "First Kill-The Hook" by Ted Zuber Courtesy Canadian War Museum #90031
"I was there, so these are personal memoirs," he says. "I'm shooting an enemy sniper who is moving out to take up an enemy position to kill our own people. I stop that. I have to keep reminding myself, I'm an old man now, but I wonder who those guys were that I killed. You know, you do stupid things like that. So I just remind myself, hey Ted, you know what the hell it was all about, and I go back to sleep."
Zuber is still working on more Korean paintings. It's a project that seems to have no end.
"The bloody thing won't leave me alone, I guess," Zuber says. "I completed another painting what, in the last year-and-a-half, on the Korean War. I guess I'll always do something every once in a while because you're never finished with it because it's not finished with you.
The war hasn't finished with Jack Lachance either.
No one seemed to care about Korea or what had been done in Korea.
So two years ago, the veterans themselves created their own memorial in Brampton for their 516 friends who never came home.
For Jack Lachance, it was time to dust off old memories he'd put away long ago. He wrote a poem that meant so much to his fellow vets that they put it on their memorial.
Jack Lachance
"It took 43 years for the Canadian government to issue Korean War veterans a volunteer service medal." Lachance says. "And then when we did receive them, we got them in the mail with the flyers. Does that tell you something? We built the most - this is one of the most magnificent memorial walls in Canada, right here we're sitting at today. And the only person that I saw from the Canadian government here the day that this wall was dedicated was my MP from Sarnia Lampton, Roger Galloway.
Every once in a while I look at one and think I knew that guy. I know I've done my duty. Everyone one of these guys on the wall did their duty.
The war has never ended for all our forgotten soldiers from our forgotten war.
For Korea itself, the war is not over. An armistice stopped the shooting but an armistice is only a truce, not a peace.
- 注册
- 2003-04-13
- 消息
- 240,733
- 荣誉分数
- 37,795
- 声望点数
- 1,393
While Remembrance Day is considered a federal statutory holiday in most provinces and territories, Ontario, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Quebec treat it differently. Those provinces mark Remembrance Day as a federal holiday, meaning that government workers get the day off, but all other employees still have to work and schools remain open.
"英国人用于国殇纪念的是“虞美人”（corn poppy）、而不是制作鸦片的花种“罂粟”(opium poppy)"
www.bbc.com
虞美人与英国国殇纪念日：不同颜色的“罂粟花”代表的不同含义 - BBC News 中文
在英国，“国殇纪念日”时人们佩戴在胸前的虞美人花除了红色，也有其他颜色。你知道它们的来历与象征意义吗？
www.bbc.com
