Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
We thought the war was over in October 1950. The British fleet had gone back to Hong Kong. Our ship had originally been an East Indies station ship so we had no families in Hong Kong so they left our ship, and two Australian destroyers, three Canadian destroyers in the operational area.
We heard that the, while we were refitting in Kure, that the Chinese had come into the war and that there was a new complexity in the war. We quickly re-ammunitioned, put the ship together again and got up off a place called Chanampo, the Taedong River, and that was the first time we started to see ice and snow in the winter. It started to set in.
There were ice flows coming down and it was very, very cold and I remember, being the air direction officer, it was an eerie feeling, I could hear an American pilot. I couldn't pick him up on radar and he had lost his way and we could hear his plaintiff call 'Can somebody help me and identify where I am? I am trying to find a landing.' And there was nothing we could do to help and I often think about the fate of that pilot and what became of him.
