Interview with Phil Burke

My name is Phil Burke. I was with the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. I landed in Korea in 1951. We moved up to the front lines in April, and if you're not familiar with Korea, it's a very hilly country. The hills are sometimes between twenty-five hundred and four thousand metres high, so it's a lot of hills. On the morning of the 23rd of April, we were moving into our positions because the Chinese had trapped an American division in there, as well as some South Koreans, so we had set up a perimeter to try to allow them to escape through a junction by the (?) River. What happened was that we moved up. There was about two to three feet of snow in the hills. It was raining that morning, and very cold. We set up our positions. We were on Hill 677, and to our south was the Middlesex Regiment, and that was a British regiment. And we had also the Australian regiments – they were to our east. On that day, April 23rd, the Communists put on quite a display and they attacked our position. There were times when they overran some of our positions but we fought them off with machine gun and mortar fire. Then, on the 24th, they attacked again and we beat them off again. We had sustained… the first night, we lost eight killed and about fifteen wounded, but we put heavy losses on them. On the 24th of April, things got very bad again. We had ten killed and twenty-three wounded. For our stand at Kapyong with the Royal Australian Regiment and the New Zealand Regiment, we received the Presidential Citation from the President of the United States. It was a hell of a fight and a hell of a time; an experience I would not want to go through again, but we came out of it pretty good, with the amount of casualties we had. What we inflicted on the enemy was quite heavy. I've been in the service for twenty-five years and I'm retired now, but I can still remember that morning as if it were yesterday. It's something that sticks in your memory for ever.