Frank Deveau

At the start of the campaign the boys would tell me, before I got there, they would send waves of people over ahead of them, ahead of the army general, to get over the wire fences and stuff.  They'd make sort of a human bridge, and then the troops would come behind and just walk over them as a bridge.  They'd just, you know, put the wire down, so many people, bodies.  And then they'd come over in waves and just walk over them as a human bridge, and they'd come over by the thousands, and that's why it was so difficult to keep them down.  But, because of your positions, you're higher up and they're coming [lower down], you're able to pretty well keep them at bay.  But they used to -- but when they attacked [Hill] 355 [in October 1952], I don't know if you ever read that story, they came over the night before, through the valleys, snuck over.  And, they got below our mountain range, and they hid there, the rest of the day, and at suppertime we always let half the people go for a meal and the other half would be on duty.  And, that's when they hit us, when we had half, and they drove our battalion right off, our companies right off, the hill.  We lost a number of people.  And then we called the artillery in on our own position, because there were so many Chinese enemy that – but we got it back before daybreak.  When daybreak, it was just covered with bodies of Chinese.  You know, a few of our own, of course.  But, they come en masse.  They – yeah, there's so many of them that – as you know, the Chinese could be a hundred, a hundred men wide [across their front] and march and parade forever and never finish, there’s many troops.  Yeah, there – there's no lack of troops.

Well, the amount of killing, the amount of hand-to-hand fighting, it's unbelievable the number of enemy that would come at you in waves.  Yeah.  We would, we would burn out machine gun barrels from steady firing from, you know, for, you know, maybe 20 minutes.  Your barrel would get so red hot that it would warp.  You'd have to change your Bren [light machine] gun barrels.  It was a shame you really felt because I guess they had the same job to do as we did, so it was a hard…

I felt sorry for them, especially because they were so poorly equipped and they didn't have proper clothing.  They had good weapons, but I know in quiet times we would see them and we would, you know, cross the valley, on other mountain, and we wouldn't even fire at them because, you know, unless we're in a real pitched battle, we sort of left them alone because we know they were going through hell living in, you know, bunkers in the ground.  And, when we found on patr[ol] – when we were on patrols, they had some Mongolians with them.  And, we found that they – they must have been drugged up because they were so slow to react, that we had the advantage over them because, you know, we – we acted quickly and either, you know, get rid of them, or get out of there before we had to do hand-to-hand [combat] with them because our purpose of patrol was to get prisoners.  So, yeah, it was, it was sad, yeah.

While you'd patrol, you'd leave just at dark and you'd go and you'd follow set down trails and go through mine fields and – which are – we had them, we had them pretty well marked, in front of our positions.  And we'd go.  We'd try to, you know, we'd set up and we'd watch and try to find some of their patrols, because they did the same thing and tried to get prisoners.  More than killing, we went there trying to get information, bring them back, and have them interviewed and that way we got a lot of information from – or not me, but the people that did the interviewing, yeah.

Another duty I had, which was tough, was when our boys got killed whether it was from rifle fire or mortars, I'd have to go with the medical officer and we'd have to take the body and go through the pockets and all that, get all the – whatever he carried for his next of kin.  And, you know, do all the paperwork on – the doctor and myself.  And, that, that was tough.  Especially if you knew the individual, yeah.  You couldn't let it – because you would be useless as a fighter if you let it get to you.

The only time that it was rough, was when we come home, we stopped at the UN cemetery in Pusan [Republic of Korea].  The whole unit, we went by troop train from the frontline on our way back.  We had a big parade.  That was hard, yeah.  Yeah, that was difficult to -- to do.

Oh, 20 miles out you could smell putrid, because they used to put human manure on their gardens.  And in the summertime you can imagine – Japan did that as well, but they'd have cucumbers that big.  But, the smell.  It was hot and humid, I tell you.  We weren't used to it, see, but after a while you get used to it, so.  Once we got on land, we – it didn't bother us as much, yeah.  But everything was flattened by the time we got there, so it was just desolate.  It just was hard to look at.  And, we felt sorry for the civilians and the kids, because a lot of them would be staying in, in mud holes in the mountains and that, and at night they'd come out to our dumps.  If we had anything put out, food that we didn't use, we wouldn't throw it in the hole, we'd put it on the side in a container, and they'd come at night and take it away, because we knew they were in the area, yeah.  And we'd find the odd child, you know, sometimes frozen to death.  That was – that was rough.  Yeah, they took more of a beating than we did – the local population, yeah, the families.