I have been conducting oral history and journalistic interviews ever since I was a young student under Raph Samuel at Ruskin College in the late 1960s when I interviewed an old communist who had led the unemployed riots in Birkenhead in 1932. It was an interview that would initiate a life long passion for talking to people. And yet in all the years since I have never conducted an interview of such intensity as I did earlier this year as part of a book about British soldiers in the Korean War.
The interview was with a sprightly 85 year old former soldier who had fought in the war. The intention of my book was to tell the story of the ordinary soldier in their own words about what it was like fighting a war where the winters were -40 degrees and the equipment and clothing was, to say the least, inadequate.
The Korean War had begun in 1950 when the North Koreans invaded the south, driving the South Korean and American forces almost out of the country. America along with United Nations forces fought back driving the North Koreans northwards to the 38th parallel. During the course of the war 100,000 British troops were involved with just over a thousand of them dying. It was the bloodiest conflict British forces have been engaged in since the Second World War and yet it remains almost forgotten. But what is perhaps most astonishing about our involvement is that 70 per cent of those soldiers who served were conscripts, ordinary lads aged 18, 19 years of age, doing their national service.
My interview with Bill Fox, took place, like so many of my interviews, sitting in the front room of his Manchester house over a cup of tea. Little did I know how harrowing it would be over the next three hours. Jim had served with the Glosters at the Battle of the Imjin River in April 1951 when over 200 British soldiers died, many killed by American napalm bombs. Bill had witnessed at first hand many of his comrades being killed. Another solider I had interviewed had seen his friend crouching next to him have his head shot off. During the battle Bill had managed to make it down the hillside as the Chinese forces came pouring over the hill. He lay in the dark in a ditch with a couple of others planning to make a bid to escape when it grew dark. But then the dreaded happened. A Chinese soldier was standing over him with a rifle pointing at his head. They were promptly taken prisoner by the Chinese and marched off to a prisoner of war camp. It was a march that took months, during which they had little to eat or drink, were treated harshly and had no facilities to wash. As Bill remembered, he had no idea how long he would be a prisoner. “If I had committed some crime back home and been sent to prison I knew it would be for three months, a year, six years, whatever. But here I had no idea when I would be released.’ In fact it would be two and a half years.
I doubt if Bill had ever really told his full story to anyone. It’s not the sort of thing you settle down to tell the kids or grandchildren. And anyhow it takes too long. Indeed two other soldiers I wanted to interview about being a prisoner of war had refused, merely saying that they ‘saw terrible, terrible things’ and didn’t want to rake up any memories. But Bill, maybe realizing that he was getting older, was prepared to tell all. As he talked about the prisoner of war camp he became animated, tears rolled down his cheek, and he began to curse heavily. The tears became even more distressing when he told me how the Ministry of War had written to his parents to tell them that he was missing in action and presumed dead. How they must have grieved, he said. Bill witnessed torture in the camps, was beaten up himself, suffered disease, infestations and was kept alive on the barest quantity of food. Eventually he was released and returned home to his astonished parents in Collyhurst.
Although Bill’s story was without doubt the strongest interview of all in the book, others, such as the young lad who had to find and bury the dead, are also harrowing. And when you leave them after the interview all you experience is humility. They were brave young lads who have experienced trauma in a way that most of us (thankfully) never will. Some times it’s a privilege to be an oral historian.
Stephen F. Kelly is the author of British Soldiers of the Korean War: In Their Own Words, which is published by The History Press.