Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Training at Puckapunyal
My name is John Murphy and I was born in Tipperary, in Ireland and I came out here in 1949 and I was kind of wandering around, I didn't have any relations out in Australia, I was wandering around from job to job. 1950, a year went by and 1950 came up and I seen a newspaper one day with an ad in it saying that the Australian government was looking for trained soldiers to make up a contingent to go to the war in Korea.
I was a non- commissioned officer in the Irish army before I came out here, so I thought well maybe they'll take me. I didn't like communism and that's what happened in the Korean war the North invaded the South, the communists and I said well if they are looking for trained soldiers called K-Force to augment the 3rd Battalion which was stationed in Japan as an occupation force, so I said, Well I'll try that and contacted Swanbourne barracks and they said yeah, they're looking for trained soldiers.
I got a doctor's examination and in three days I was on my way to Puckapunyal in Victoria and in another five weeks, a refresher course at Puckapunyal army base, I was on my way to Japan and Korea and that's how I got to the war.
Importance of WW2 veteran experience
A bit of a difference in some of the things in the Australian army. They had a light machine gun which was called a Bren gun and we were trained with a Lewis gun but it didn't take long to work out what the difference was. I graduated to a Bren gun and I finished up in the 3rd Battalion and I found out that the Australian soldiers were very good as far as the old ones, you know, there was a lot in K-Force who were Second World War veterans and rejoined up for various reasons, some probably didn't quite fit back into modern society as it was then and decided to have a go again in Korea and they were pretty good because they knew exactly what the war was about and blokes like me who did have army experience but not battle experience they kind of shielded us a bit gave us some hints, what to expect and what to do and how to work things out, so I found that very good.
On top of that my father served at Gallipoli. He was with an Irish regiment in the British army and he served alongside the Australians at Gallipoli and he used to tell me what the Australians were like, you know, they were well respected as some of the top soldiers in the Second World War [sic] especially at Gallipoli and of course that always stuck in my mind when I came out here. On account of that I worked with the ones who were with me in Korea.
They were not hard to get along with, you know, the Irish seemed to have a bit of a rapport with them, so I was pretty lucky, in a way, that I fitted in, put it that way and I never regretted it. Went through, I was wounded at Kapyong I'd I've been pretty well looked after since then by the Department of Veterans' Affairs, they made me a TPI so I've been looked after during the war and a long, long time after the war.
Devastated country and refugees
Let me tell you we didn't really have that much chance of kind have anything to do with the Korean people. It was a devastated country then, the war was raging and the first we noticed on the way up to the front was burnt out towns and villages. The people were just moving around. It was like they were trying to find some place where they could start to make their lives again, carrying their belongings with them. It was horrible, you know, to see that happening but we didn't really get that much chance to have any interaction with the Korean people but one thing I found out about the Korean people was that during the war years, especially up in the hills, when the Australians were finding it hard to get supplies up there, there was no way in the world you could get any trucks, jeeps or anything, everything had to be carried up by hand.
There was hundreds of metres up in these mountains and the, they got these Korean porters, they were volunteers, guys who were maybe too old to serve in the Korean army or maybe had some sort of a, something wrong with them physically and they were in, what they called, made them into squads of Korean porters and they'd carry these ammunition, food, right up into these mountains supplying us. They weren't armed and they were often under fire so you had to take your hat off to them, you know, so that was really the most I had to do with, as far as Korean people go.
Six weeks in the line
We had just come down from the mountain, we were up there about six weeks and boy were we looking forward to a rest area because our under clothes were rotting, you know, just six weeks sleeping and in the ground, you know, gun pits, in holes in the ground, you know, for six weeks you can imagine what, there were no supplies, the food was coming up and ammunition but no clothing. What you were wearing you had and after six weeks we were told we were coming to a place for a rest area.
We said, 'Oh great'. They had 44-gallon drums filled up with water but a hole in it, just underneath, let the water pour down, and matted hair, you know, and just let the water wash the underwear off. We got two or three underpants, a shirt, singlet, clean underwear, we got toothpaste. The first time we got toothpaste was the Salvation Army post they were handing out toothpaste
Moved to Kapyong
We were going to have a get together with the Kiwis, with the Turks. The Turkish Brigade was only a few kilometres away. They were in a rest area too and they were going to have a couple of, either a football game or a soccer game, whatever, you know, just a get together and that would have been a historic event because sixty years after, hated enemies and they were meeting again as friends, you know, they were friends not foes and we were all looking forward to that and then suddenly somebody said 'Pack your gear'. 'Where are we going?' 'Oh, we're just going up to a place, a place called Kapyong. We're going to dig in and wait just in case something happens up the front.' Because we knew there was a South Korean division in front of us with 10,000 South Korean troops fully armed with American equipment, the latest American equipment, you know, the Garland rifles, they were rapid fire ones, you know, for a single fire weapon, we only had the old .303 rifles that they had in the First World War so we were a bit envious of the Americans supplying the South Koreans with their equipment and we're getting the old.
Anyway, we got in and we even got mail, they brought up mail there, the supply people brought up mail and we were even supplied with a hot meal at Kapyong where we dug in. Everyone was expecting to be pulling out again and going back to the rest place where were and carry on. They were going to send up some movies and then somebody said 'Nope.' You could hear the rumble and there was these refugees coming down the valley, you know, on both sides of the Kapyong road, alongside the Kapyong river, and they were the refugees.
They were carrying them down, they were carrying their stuff on the backs, there was bullocks loaded with stuff, children and then they had crowds of South Korean soldiers panicking, coming down, trucks and, you know, thousands of people coming to safety. We didn't know what was happening. We didn't get much information and we didn't have what you call, in a case like that, we probably would have been, if we knew there was going to be a breakthrough, we would have added some extra provisions and also some extra ammunition but we just thought we were just going to be there for a while, just in case type of thing and then comes the Chinese and boy did they come.
Chinese attacks
I was in one platoon, A Company, and a sergeant came around and gave us two extra grenades that was all the extra ammunition, it looks like where're going to be, we could hear the shots following the Chinese as they started to intermingle with the South Koreans and refugees and they were stirring it up and we knew they were going to get through and we knew that we were going to be surrounded because once the refugees and the South Koreans retreated the Chinese would just go down and we'd be surrounded so we knew we were going to be in for it. Sure enough, we heard the whistles going and we knew how they attacked.
They used whistles, the squads used whistles to gather them together when they were attacking a position and then they sounded a bugle and I'm not sure what the bugles were for, whether they were signals or for shoring up there courage but it didn't give us courage and then there was silence and then they had these grenadiers with the grenades. They either had satchels, these grenadiers, these canvas satchels full of these stick grenades or buckets full of grenades and they would move up close to your position and start hurling these grenades but luckily enough they were eight second grenades and they give you plenty of time to pick 'em up and chuck them back again or duck well down in your gunpit so they wasn't too bad, you know, and then, of course, you knew after the grenadiers came the Chinese and they came five times up to, they started about a quarter to ten that night and they came at us, one platoon, about five times until one o'clock in the morning and by that time we'd lost seventeen killed and wounded in our platoon.
I'd been flattened by a grenade, you know, bowled over by a grenade but was lucky enough to still function and a few more of the thirteen were much the same way, hit by fragmentation from the grenades. If the company commander hadn't decided to pull out the last of us up, up to company headquarters, we didn't have enough ammunition to ward off another attack because we knew it was coming, we could hear the whistles going and bugles and then this company commander, sent down two runners and the medical orderly said 'Right, pull back up to company headquarters' and as we were pulling back the Chinese were going in and jumping into our weapon pits. If he hadn't have given that order, we were gone, gone to the world, we'd either been killed or prisoners of war.
Moans and cries of the wounded
And that was it. As soon as we got to company headquarters and they gave us a bit of extra ammunition, and they attacked us from another side and this went on all night and then A Company was about 100 men, lost 50 casualties and you had to endure the night with about, you know, these 35 wounded fellows lined up on the back of the hill away from the firing and you could hear the moans and the cries of the wounded and no help, we were surrounded, there was no help for them, there's no morphine, no nothing and these blokes were laying in the cold with mortar fire going on and what not and knowing any minute a shell or a mortar might land in the middle of them but it's hard, you know, just to put up with that and that went on all night. I'm sure most of the guys who were there were glad they seen the daylight in the morning because at least you had fields of fire then and you could see what was coming at you but we held on and we survived.
Napalm victims from US bombing
One of the things that happened during the day, you know, in the morning, the Americans accidentally dropped napalm on some of our fellows. We had to tend to them and, you know, when the fighting withdrawal was on we had to carry them out and the Australians won't leave wounded, you know, they might leave their dead but they won't leave their wounded and we had to carry those guys, you want to see those guys, there was skin, the napalm, the face you could see the bone of the jaw sticking out, then elbows and arms, clothes burned off and just the bone and even that was burnt brown, you know, from the napalm. It was terrible.
We had to bring them out and we had taken forty Chinese prisoners, one of the other companies had taken those prisoners and we had to bring those prisoners out with them. We used some of those prisoners to carry some of the wounded and some of the weapons that the dead and wounded had so Ben O'Dowd was the A company captain and he was the main battle commander and he organised a retreat and it wasn't a rout it was just a retreat, a fighting withdrawal and we were hitting the Chinese as they were coming after us. We had the support from the New Zealand artillery and then a couple of American tanks helped also and stopped the Chinese and the Chinese went over and hit the Canadians so we were able to get away and that was it, two days, well one full day and a half a day, continuous fighting and I'm telling you we were pretty glad when we got out and got into what they call Brigade headquarters where the Middlesex battalion was and that was as far as I was there, that was it, that was Kapyong. I always say and I say it again it was the tenacity and the training and the Australian tradition, when they go into a spot they don't retreat.
You'll either knock us off or we'd stay there. The only reason that they withdrew there was because they ran out of ammunition and we had no way of treating the wounded. We had forty prisoners and we had some folks burning up with napalm. We had to get out to get them help and that was the reasons for the fighting withdrawal.
