Edward Zuber

The very first time I went up as a sniper, as I said, Al Craig and myself were partners.  We worked together but because it was a trench warfare, there were all fixed lines.  We knew exactly where the enemy were, the enemy knew exactly where we were type of thing.  And up on The Hook [3km long crest line that had been frequently fought over between Chinese and Commonwealth forces] it was a very short distances, as little as two and a half, 300 yards between the enemy and our own trenches.  It was very close.  So when Al and I said, were told, “Okay, you’re going up for six or seven days, something like that,” the first thing we did was we elected to separate because of the terrain.  Al would go down about 250 yards to my left with another rifle company and where I was going to be it was up on The Hook proper itself.

But two of us could cover each other’s blind spots and we hooked up a field telephone between the two of us and the trick was for me to find a place where I could set up a basic hide as we called it.  And sometimes, of course, I had to move out in front of the battalion [1 Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment] and spend a day out there camouflaged for observational purposes.

But most of the time I worked in a couple of bombed out, there was one in particular, an observation post, blown to pieces.  It all caved in and I crawled, and I used to crawl under this, had a small little slit where I could watch.  I had a pretty good point of observation on there and this where I did my work.

Now up on The Hook, we didn’t live in bunkers, although there were a few bunkers, but we lived in tunnels.  And, so anyway when Al and I went up the first time I reported to the company commander that was up there and asked him for assistance in acquainting me with the area.  So he brought out his topographical maps and some aerial photographs that he had of the area and his reports his own people had brought in on a day-in day-out basis, he shared that with me so I could get an idea of where the activity might, could be found; enemy troop movements, areas that we knew that the enemy were. Every once in a while they would set up a mortar position, short range mortar, set up a temporary position, I’d watch for that.

So I acquainted myself with the area and then I went out and searched for, and that’s when I found this observation post had been blown out and there was a bit of a broken down trench that was still a shallow ditch that I could use to get out to it.  So that became my hide and of course Al was doing the same thing down in his area.

And we hooked up a field telephone between the two of us for our permanent little hides.  And that very first day, about three o’clock that afternoon, a Chinese sniper came out and he was walking, brazenly, in daylight along the top of the trench line.  They had no reason to fear us at all.  It was ridiculous.  So that was the beginning of the sniping action.  It’s a strange thing.  I still carry this with me of course, and I killed some human beings there.  And I wasn’t brought up to do that, but I was trained to do that.  And of course, if I did that here I’d go to prison for the rest of my life.  Over there I got bloody praised for it.

A strange story, it’s really weird.  The one sniper that I killed, they checked him out.  The patrols were asked, our own patrols I should say, if you could, do a reconnaissance on that body that slipped down the forward slope of the Chinese position and see what you can find.  Well, they brought back an American snooperscope [night vision device], which is an American [M1] carbine, a 30-calibre carbine and mounted on that was an infrared night sight with a four-power scope on it.  And Corporal [John Francis] Gill’s dog tags [3 Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, died 1 January 1953].  Corporal Gill had been the batman to the colonel.  Peter Bingham was their colonel.  And back in Canada officers have, I think they have to be a captain or higher would have a valet or a batman.  And the colonel’s batman was Corporal Gill.  And when they got into the field, that is into action in Korea, they gave up this luxury of having a valet or a batman, and in this case Corporal Gill became a section leader with one of the rifle companies.  He was on patrol one night up on The Hook, and on the way he was the last man on the line and as they’re coming in close to our own position on the return, he was shot through the head by a Chinese sniper.

Anyway, the next night they brought his body in.  Well, the sniper I had shot and killed that slipped down the forward slope, they checked him that night and they found that, yes, he had used a snooperscope.  He had it with him with a 40 000 volt backpack sort of thing, or side pack.  And he had Corporal Gill’s dog tags.  Well, that was quite something.  It’s even mentioned in the war diary about how Zuber evened the score.

And Colonel Bingham, I guess he’d become attached to this Corporal Gill.  He’d been with the family for a couple of years was almost like a son to him I suppose.  And the colonel sent a runner up to me with a fresh sandbag, with a bottle of Hagen Hagen from his own personal stock.  And the message was verbal, because he wouldn’t have written this down.  But the message was, “Zuber, find a cave for a couple of days,” and I was given time off and this bottle.  Well, in actual fact, of course, within an hour and a half the bottle was emptied and I was a hero for a couple of hours amongst the fellows in the tunnel.  But that was the little things that go on.

About a year and a half ago I got a phone call here at my studio.  And this fellow asked, he said, “Are you the Zuber that was the sniper up on The Hook position?”  And I said, “Yeah.”  I make prints available of my Korean paintings by the way so I thought this was the fellow calling to order a print, you know.  So I’m giving a nice talk, I’m polite to him and he said, ‘Well,” he said, “did you shoot a sniper that had been found to kill a Corporal Gill?”  I don’t talk about this very much so I said, “Yeah,” I said, “well, how did you know?”  He said, “He was my dad,” and he wanted to see me.  And he didn’t live very far, about 40 miles from here outside of Kingston [Ontario].  And this young Gill, with his wife, came to visit me, and it was quite a visit for the two of us.  But he looked on me as somehow I guess I helped close it for him as they say, I don’t know.  But the boy, he was three years old and I killed the sniper that killed his father.

One funny little part of my drawing experience in Korea came from the company commander when I was up, when I first went over and I was with the I[ntelligence] Section.  The company commander spoke to me.  He said, “Ted, is you draw quite a bit,” and I said, “Oh, yeah.”  We were sort of almost, not quite, but he used my first name.  I still referred to him as sir of course.  But I said, “Yeah.”  I said, “I want to be a painter all my life,” and this type of thing, you know.  And he said, “Well, look,” he says, “I’ve got a favour to ask of you.”  He said, “Would make a sketch?  Go down that slightly lower on the front slope,” he said, “down, go down to the Vickers machine gun post down there and he said make a sketch from left to right, right across our front.”  And he said, “Take compass bearings from that position and put the compass bearings on each feature, like the height of the uppermost point of the enemy position and the hills, the little butts that come, [Hill] 113,” these are different little fields that came out.  And he said, “The little village of Songok, you sketch that in.”

He says, “Give me a panoramic drawing,” and he said, “a camera can’t do that because it gives me too much bloody information and I can’t see behind the trees.”  So I said, “Sure.”  So I went down and I did a drawing for him on a 8.5 by 11 pad.  And I gave it to him.  He was delighted with it.  Well, the next day, or a day or so later, he said, “It’s over.  You’re going over to Charlie Company, do the same type of sketch for these guys.”  So I did.  It was a little diversion for me.  Well, I went one time down to the 1^st Marine Division [United States Marine Corps].  I was over with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers [British Army].  I was being sent five or six different places to make these sketches for these people.

At first I didn’t have much in the way of art supplies but managed to get a few things from the intelligence section.  And I didn’t draw all that much.  It was a strange thing.  I got wounded up on The Hook position.  And when I came back, my personal effects were gone.  My cigarettes and my sketch pad was gone now.  I’d lost it, and it been picked up by somebody.  Well, I learned some time later, after I got back to Canada, that a fellow, I won’t forget his name, Harry Larry MacAlary, and he was a signaler with the battalion.  We’d become friends over there.  He had salvaged my drawings for me and some of them, a lot of them had been destroyed of it.  But in any case he, I contacted him and asked him if I could have them.  And he said, “No, he says, but I’ll send you copies.”  So that was fine with me.

And, anyway, he sent them to me and it was amazing.  As I looked at these drawings, I don’t know if I could do it today.  There was no emotion in the drawings.  It was a strange thing.  They were descriptive; it would be two or three men sitting there alongside a trench, or showing two fellows hanging their laundry or having their lunch, fellows climbing in and out of trucks or off of tanks, things like this.  But they all had blank faces. Emotion was such a luxury, but without realizing it, I had not incorporated any emotion whatsoever in these drawings.

The way I put it, they’re about as interesting as a topographical map.  The, was the strangest thing.  But, basic information, like how did we hang our blankets, the structure of a sandbag, frontal force [on the sandbag], and how we built a camouflage area over a urinal or some damn thing, even how we built that.  I had those details in these drawing drawn.  But all the emotion that I eventually portrayed in my paintings, it all came from memory, really not from the drawings at all.  Was a strange thing.

The Korean [peninsula], in those three years in the war, was sort of a quick experience sort of thing, you know.  But it’s uncanny how, what it’s meant to me though the rest of my life.  Being a painter, years later I decided to commit my memoirs to canvas and it was then I learned that they never had sent a war artist to Korea.  I didn’t know anything about that.  They had nothing on Korea. And in 1959 there was a government building fire in Montreal where they lost nearly all of the photographic documentation of the Korean War.

And so I got a call from the Canadian War Museum one day and they said, “Is it true that you’re producing a series of paintings based on your memoirs?”  I said, “Yes.”  And they said, “We’d love to see them because we have nothing.”  To make a long story short, a [patron] was found.  He purchased the paintings with the agreement that he would, for tax purposes of course, he would turn them over to the War Museum.  And that’s what happened, so they’ve since been declared the official art of the Korean War.

I remember speaking with a fellow veteran one day about something and I think I realized I couldn’t remember the details on this.  “Oh, God, if I’m going to do painting,” because I thought about doing paintings, and I did a couple of paintings when I first came home but it was too confusing for me.  I couldn’t take one experience and leave it alone and concentrate on it to paint.  I ended up having too many things to incorporate, and following up the composition.  It was just too much, my memory was loaded with so bloody much I just left it alone.

But it was years later, about 20 years later that I realized, “No, if you’re going to put this down, Ted, this is the time to do it.”  So I did 12 paintings initially and they were 100% based on my own personal experience.  And without sounding corny, I believe it was Leonardo Di Vinci that said to his students, “Only paint what you know.”

So I was painting what I knew.  I was sharing experiences and I was trying to portray it in such a way that it was honest to the scene and to the apparatus that made up the composition.  But to somehow express it in a way that only the paintbrush can do, to share the emotion of these experiences.  And so basically sharing the experience.  It wasn’t to show what I’d been through so much but to show what people who thankfully never have to see these things, the paintings are not necessarily ugly.  As a matter of fact, they’re really not.  I did two paintings based on my sniping.  But they were the last two I was able to do.  I couldn’t do those at first.

The very first painting was one of the Sami-ch’on Valley showing the natural beauty of the land.  It’s truly beautiful.  And I was very pleased with this painting.  It’s about 30 by 40 inches.  And it was the valley in the early morning.  Korea, by the way, translated means land of the morning calm.  There’s always a mist, not fog, but a very light mist in the valleys and of course by ten o’clock it burned off.  And so I made a point of incorporating that little mist in the valley and the painting is simply called “Korea, Land of the Morning Calm.”  And I’d loved it.  It was a beautiful painting, landscape wise, I mean.

And then I put the military stuff into it.  There are two men in the foreground filling a sandbag and they look like two British gardeners.  And then I put in the [Vought F4U] Corsair aircraft doing an airstrike, they’re dropping napalm on the enemy [Hill] 166 position. And it destroyed the bloody painting.  I looked at it and then I realized, oh my God, that’s what the war did.  It was a strange thing.  In a sense I wish I almost hadn’t put the war in it because it immediately took your ability to enjoy the beauty of the landscape.  It destroyed that ability for any of us; all you see are the aircraft, the smoke and the flame.  And of course that’s what bloody war is like.  So in a sense the ugliness of the painting is why it’s so successful.