Soldier's Experience in the Korean War - Emile Gleeson

Introduction

These interviews are about the Korean War. Each interviewee served in the Korean War and so has direct experience with the topic. Each interview focuses on the interviewee’s personal experience as a soldier in the war (what was it like, what do they remember most, etc.). Each interview is about a different time period of the war (stated in the first paragraph of each interview).

Fred Cowan

I was in Korea for 1 year. 1953. I was an engineer; I was in the army engineers. I think I was around 23 years old, and I had never been in any other wars before.
I was a part of the engineer construction company. We were in the Port of Inchon. We worked on construction. We built warehouses, even outhouses (laughs). We worked on road repair as well. We also had a rock crusher which we used to crush huge rocks (laughs).
I was the company commander, my rank was lieutenant. There were 94 men in the company plus about 8 officers and around 300 ROK soldiers, who were really just laborers.
The most memorable thing that I remember from Korea was my living quarters. I lived in the BOQ, but most people lived in the barracks. The BOQ was only for officers. It was very nice. The engineering and construction company had built for themselves before the war started, which was why it was so nice.
We had a lot of equipment too. There were about 23 cranes which we used for unloading things at the port. We also had dump trucks which could carry 4 tons. We had tractors too. The tractors were really big.
(Long pause).
I didn’t see many communists myself when I was in Korea. How should I say this? … We thought of them as… well… Well you see they were bombing things they weren’t supposed to. They would fly overhead and drop hand grenades on us – they were very primitive. Once we were all inside eating dinner and then we heard a large noise and we looked and they had blown up our gas storage place. It started a huge fire that took us a long time to put out. It wasn’t good.
Luckily, the 1st marine division was located just north of us, so they were between us and the enemy. This usually meant that the communists didn’t reach us, which was why they were only sometimes able to bomb us. We provided the marines with the supplies they needed to fight the communists. We built things for them and kept their camp in good shape. We gave things to them and they protected us from the enemy. I guess we were both sort of protecting each other really.
The one thing that I learned from the war is this; don’t trust the enemy.


Jim Simms

I was an enlisted man, my rank was master sergeant. I was in Korea in 1950. I was in the Inchon invasion. I suppose I was about 21, or maybe 22. 21 or 22. I was in the 65th ordinance unit. We supplied ammunition and provided automotive repairs.
I had already served in the army before I went to Korea. I was in Japan in WWII from 1947 to about 1949. This was when I had my first experience with communists. Japan was going to have elections, and we were there to make sure that the communists didn’t interfere.
I arrived in Korea in July of 1950. One of my memories of the war is about the Inchon invasion. MacArthur was a genius. He used scientific data to predict the rise and fall of the tides at Inchon, and he planned the invasion to be at high tide so the ships could go in closer to the shore. There was a 40 foot tide in Inchon, much bigger than the one we have here – it’s only about 12 feet. Anyway, after MacArthur got all the ships in at high tide, then twelve hours later the water went out and the ships were already on the ground. It was genius. We didn’t have to drag the ships ashore at all. There were about a hundred ships left there on the ground. The North Koreans at that time didn’t have airplanes, well not good airplanes anyway, which is why they didn’t come and shoot at us when we were coming in. If they had had airplanes they could have flown out there and bombed us, but they didn’t.
We went ashore and began providing ammunition and other supplies. We didn’t do any shooting ourselves, only the marines did that. I was never out on the front lines except for a few times when we would have to run out there to provide ammunition to a soldier.
In Korea there was Inchon then Taegu moving south, and then another city… I can’t remember what it was called. (pause). Maybe I’ll remember later. Anyways, there was Taegu and then that other city and then all the way down to Pusan. The North Koreans pushed us all the way down to Pusan. At that time they had the Pusan Perimeter. The US fought off the North Koreans down at Pusan, but we didn’t kill a lot of them. It wasn’t a massacre or anything. We tried not to kill too many of them, we were just trying to fight them off. This was before Inchon, when I was there. When I came we invaded at Inchon and we cut off the North Koreans in the South because they were all down at Pusan. That was in July of 1950.
After Inchon I stayed in Yungdungpo. We provided ammunition to the soldiers there. There were no trees in Korea, just lots of hills. You could see the Chinese coming since there were no trees. They came in thousands. Like I said before, I only went out to the front lines occasionally, but I could see the Chinese coming anyways. First a man on a horse would come up to the top of a hill. He would blow his horn and soon the Chinese would come and fill up the entire hill. The Chinese overran everybody. They pushed us back south again. The Chinese came in waves. It was a human wave. They would come and then the first wave would get shot down and the second wave would come and pick up the dropped weapons and keep fighting. It was very hard to beat them because there were always more and more waves. They just kept coming.
The Chinese would take prisoners too. The soldiers wouldn’t know it was happening. They would just be sleeping in their sleeping bags and the Chinese would come and pick them up and swing the sleeping bag over their shoulder and just keep on going. They would get carried away like that. Because of this problem they made a new sleeping bag for the soldiers that you could push out of easily so you wouldn’t be trapped inside.
Now after that, I wasn’t in Korea anymore, but what happened was that we pushed back up to the 38th parallel again, but we didn’t go past it. Also, Truman relieved MacArthur of duty because Truman didn’t want to fight China. Now I’m not sure if this next part is true, so don’t take my word for it, I heard it from other people. They said that when the Chinese came over, because they had been captured by Mao, that he told the soldiers that they had to fight or he would kill them. This is just a rumor though. People were trying to explain why the Chinese would go out and fight without guns. They were basically sacrificing themselves, and no one could understand why they would do that. In the waves, so many of them died, and then they would have to pick up the weapons from those who had already fallen. Why would they want to do that?
Going back to when I was in Korea in December, the group that we had been helping provide ammunition to had all been killed. The Chinese had made a five mile blockade and killed everyone who was trying to retreat and go south. I didn’t do any fighting myself, but soldiers would come back to our base and tell us stories about it, so I had a pretty good idea of what it was like. It was very cold in Korea, because the Koreans didn’t have central heating. The building would have tile floors and you had to build a fire underneath the floor. Also, there were very few trees, maybe because they had been bombed and blown up.
One interesting thing I learned after I was in the war was that the Koreans were very helpful to the US after the fighting started, but they had been hostile before.
The food that the North Koreans ate gave their bodies a certain odor. They ate kim chee, which was fermented fish. They would bury the fish under the ground for months and then finally they would take it out and eat it. It was very gross. Who would want to eat that? (laughs). The South Koreans had a very different odor from the food that they ate. The Koreans were able to use this odor to tell whether someone was a North or South Korean. I couldn’t do that though. Us Americans couldn’t tell the difference.


Frank Roe

I was in Korea from 1951 to 1952. I was in the 1st marine division. I was part of the headquarters battalion. I was 26. I remember because I had just gotten married in September, and then I got shipped out in January. I had previously been in WWII, in Japan in the navy.
What did I do in Korea? Well, I did what I was told. I don’t really remember exactly what I did.
I flew in from Japan, to outside of Taegu. There were no civilians there, and we were told by the officials there to hitch a ride. They said, “That way’s north,” and then they left the rest to us. The various army camps fed us on the way up, they were very nice. Eventually, we found our way to the marines and were sent out to the artillery. I remember there was a big ridge there, and you could go out and stand on it and look down and see the army.
Once I stole a half track with some other guys. It was broken down. The army had left it on the side of the road. The terrain in Korea was rough, it was all hills. That was probably why they had to abandon it.
The Chinese soldiers had the German 88 rifle. It shot straight, so it wasn’t any good with the hills. The guns that we had shot up in an arc so we could shoot them over the hill and they would hit the Chinese on the other side. The Chinese came in human waves. You could never shoot fast enough to kill them all. But you would always know when they were coming because you could hear the bugle that they would blow. We always had a fallback position just in case.
One of my first memories of the war that comes to mind is my mustache. When I went to Korea I grew a mustache. It was 6 inches long by the time it was summer. The Koreans respected it, because they respected old age and mustaches. The most respected Koreans were the old ones with the long droopy mustaches (laughs). They had long droopy beards too. (laughs). In the fall though, I shaved my mustache because of the rain. When it rained on my mustache it got longer and I would be eating and then I would wonder what I had in my mouth and it would be my mustache! (laughs).
I don’t really remember what exactly I did in Korea. I never saw anyone doing clerical work though. I didn’t do clerical work either. I don’t know how it got done.
We didn’t think of the Communists as too bad. They were fine. It was their indoctrination that was bad. The commissars were the ones who would try to convert you to Communism. The communist Chinese actually liked us. They didn’t really want to be fighting us. The common guy wasn’t bad. The commissars were bad. The commissars would claim that people had dumdum bullets and make them kneel down and shoot them in the head just to teach someone a lesson.
When we would go out on patrol we would get counted after we came back from our walk so they would know how many Chinese had snuck in with us.
I felt kind of bad for the Chinese soldiers in Korea. They always had on light summer gear, even in the middle of winter. They must have been very cold.
We got a lot of time when we were allowed to rest when I was in Korea. We would go to the rivers sometimes – they had a few rivers near our camp. If the river was high, then it was fine for swimming, but when the river was low it smelled like human poop. (laughs).
I can’t remember what I did in Korea. I remember that the Chinese could only shoot straight, so we would always get down behind ridges and then they couldn’t shoot us. I also remember that we would have to take our baths out of our helmets. You could put water in your helmet and then heat it over a flame and then you would use that water for your bath.
I mostly saw Chinese soldiers. There were very few North Koreans left after we knocked the hell out of them. The soldiers were almost all Chinese by the time I got to Korea. The Chinese though, they were incredibly stupid. They would leave the mine wrappers lying out on the ground so you would always know when there was a mine around.
By the fall when I was in Korea, the US had moved above the 38th parallel. When we were up there we would come across old Chinese fox holes. They would be filled with dead Chinese. They had just been lying there all summer. Their skin would be very tight and wrinkled around their bones. They looked like mannequins. Because of all the dead Chinese everywhere you always went 100 yards or so upstream so there wouldn’t be any dead Chinese in the water when you were trying to get water for bathing or drinking or swimming or whatever. The dead Chinese were everywhere. It was very hard to avoid them.