Peter Chisholm (Primary Source)

Testimony

We arrived in Korea as supernumerary junior officers. And, the general approach was to assign us each to one of the troops, in the 59 Field Squadron, which was the Royal Canadian Engineer field squadron serving the 25^th Canadian Infantry Brigade at that time. And, I was assigned to No. 2 Troop of the RCE. The commanding officer was Donald Eadie, I believe. And, shortly after that, the 59 Field Squadron was within the 1^st Commonwealth Division, and was assigned tidy-up duties after the truce was signed. As such, we – at least I’ll say I – didn’t serve as a troop commander. Instead, I did work for several of the troops, and the work that I did, was coordinated by the 28^th Field Engineer Regiment, which was the [British] field engineering regiment within the Commonwealth Division. And the work that we did was to secure minefields, along the Commonwealth Division, to make sure that people would not stray into the minefields. The work that we did was to repair the fences, and to map them on air photos, and all of that work was coordinated by the intelligence officer at the 28^th Field Engineer Regiment. His name was Captain John Elderkin.

Serving with Captain John Elderkin, as I say, our principal duty was to secure the safe passage along the Demilitarized Zone and to help with the mapping of minefields to make sure that they were properly located for the future. During the field reconnaissance episodes, required to secure the Demilitarized Zone, and the demarcation line, as I’ve mentioned, we were also required, when we encountered unexploded ordnances, to map the location of these pieces of ordnance, and to return later to demolish them. And, that work was usually undertaken by individuals, rather than groups, because of the danger to larger formations of people. We also, as well at that, had to demolish some of the residue from the war, and also to mark the location of casualties or human remains left in the field, map them, report and take pictures, and send them through the 59 Field Squadron office to the [Commonwealth War] Graves Commission for subsequent securing of the human remains, either to the North [Korea] or to the South [Korea], depending on the nationality.

On the eve of the day that the armistice was to be signed, I think it was the 27^th of July [1953], we were all confined to our troop locations, we weren’t allowed to move out of them. And, in my troop, No. 2 Troop, we were viewing – on the evening of the ceasefire – we were watching a movie film in our troop area in the dark and a mortar bomb came and landed within a few metres of the area where we were all sitting. And, it didn’t explode, but a lot of the mortar bombs and shells and things like that in Korea didn’t work very well anyway. That’s why there was such a surplus of unexploded ordnance lying around. The next morning, after the truce had been signed, we were – our troop position was just southwest of Hill 355, and Hill 355, as a feature, sort of extended almost directly west, and the Chinese locations, west of Hill 355, were four hills referred to as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - the four Apostles – occupied by Chinese. And I don’t know which one of the hills it was on, but when we got up at first light, on the 27^th of July, the Chinese had erected a banner – it must have been two or three hundred metres long, bright blue - and we could readily read the lettering on it from where we were. And what the lettering said – excuse me – was “Don’t fuck up the peace boys.”

It was within days that we started to map up the minefield locations, secure the fences, destroy ordnances left lying around, recover bodies… all those tasks were started quickly after the 27^th of July and continued, and that, not only did we do that, we also – on an individual basis – I accompanied the Military Armistice Commission officers to investigate alleged violations of the truce conditions and that would have been early in August, after the 27^th of July. So, we got on to that very, very quickly and that was necessary, because, with the shelling at nighttime, there was not a lot of repair done to defensive locations and there was an awful lot of work to be done to re-establish minefield fences and to establish minefield locations and I think under the terms – like I don’t know specifically, but my recollection is that – to answer your question – we got to work on that very, very quickly, after the 27^th of July.