Triumph at Kapyong. Dan Bjarnason
shoulder during the darkest days of the war against the U-boats, it is knowing of past heroism and sacrifice that sustains generations that follow through the most fearsome hours and blackest nights. That is why “tradition,” so quaint a concept to many civilians, is so priceless to armies. If scarcely any civilian now has ever heard of Kapyong, every Canadian soldier in today’s army surely knows of it and what happened there. Kapyong is a sure-fire thriller. It has all the ingredients of a terrific saga, full of gunfire and danger, of heroism and sacrifice. It’s also full of Canadians. It’s the classic story of the few against the many.
An American Civil War general argued that battles aren’t won by the generals, no matter how brilliant they are. A general’s job is to get his soldiers to the battlefield. After that, it’s all up to his men. Will they fight or not fight? Generals can lose battles, but to win battles, well, that’s determined by the men. Jim Stone, the gruff, hawk-nosed commander who led the defence at Kapyong, agreed.
Long after the battle, twenty years later, he told a younger generation of Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI) officers the most important weapon in their arsenal was a factor that was almost spiritual, although such a hard man would never have used that soft phrase.
“There was something of much greater importance at Kapyong than the tactics of defence,” he told his audience. “Kapyong demonstrated that morale, spirit of the troops, or call it what you will, is probably the most important factor in battle; and all the logistical support, the finest plans and the many other factors that are considered as requirements to fight a battle are subsidiary to it.”1
The 2nd battalion of the Patricias went to Korea because they volunteered. They wanted to be there. At Kapyong, they had simply decided they could, despite the awful arithmetic, tough it out alone on their rocky hill and prevail.
It is an utter enigma why the Korean War, and the story within it of Kapyong and other valiant stands, has vanished from this country’s memory. It’s more than the Forgotten War: it’s the war that never happened, scarcely touched on in high school history courses.
It is a fantasy to believe this country’s military story is one of dedication to neutrality and peacekeeping. We have a long history as a people in arms. This country fought in the Boer War, sent a 6,000-man force to intervene in the Russian Civil War, and, of course, was a major player in the two greatest wars in history. Canada was one of the founding members of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance specifically formed to be prepared for war with the Soviet Union. To back up our commitment to fight, we had hundreds of fighter aircraft and thousands of troops permanently stationed in Germany until the mid-1990s when the Cold War ended. Lester B. Pearson, who was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was one of NATO’s most passionate defenders and did not automatically reject force as an instrument of national policy. Canadians (in a pre-Confederation Canada) as individuals volunteered and fought in Cuba’s war of Independence in the 1800s, and one man, Toronto-born William Ryan, was captured and executed by the Spanish. His portrait, flanked by a Canadian flag, is displayed at a memorial in Havana today where Ryan is an honoured hero in Castro’s Cuba. Canadians in their tens of thousands fought in the American Civil War. In the Spanish Civil War no country aside from France had a greater proportion of its population involved. Canadians were with Castro in the hills fighting and running guns to his guerrillas. Other Canadians went to Rhodesia to fight guerrillas there. Many Canadians have fought for Israel in its many wars against the Arabs, and one of this country’s most illustrious Spitfire pilots, Buzz Beurling, died in a mysterious crash while running arms to the fledgling Jewish state. About 30,000 Canadians volunteered to fight in Vietnam, including the son of a chief of the Canadian defence staff, who died there in the battle for Hue. Almost 120 Canadians have been killed in U.N. peacekeeping missions, including nine who died in a U.N. plane deliberately shot down by the Syrians in 1974. In Korea, fifty Canadians were killed in the two years after the armistice was signed.
It is simply untrue to believe this is a nation without a military tradition. And so it remains baffling why Korea, and Kapyong in particular, has been air-brushed out of our national story. Max Hastings, the British military historian, has suggested that if the Canadians at Kapyong had been massacred and no one had come down off the hill alive … well … that’s the way to be remembered in history books. But that’s the history that happily didn’t happen.
Jack Granatstein, a prolific military historian and former head of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, has given much thought to the question: “Who killed Canadian history?” In a story so uncomplicated and easy to grasp and so full of heroes from central casting, why is Kapyong not the stuff of movies and TV dramas? Why aren’t there parks and boulevards and high schools and scholarships named to commemorate this stirring tale of Canadian courage?
It was a small war. It was sixty years ago. Those are the key factors right off the bat.
Kapyong was a big battle for the battalion involved, but there were ten fatalities; a pretty small battle. It isn’t D-Day; it isn’t Falaise. Coming after the Second World War, where there were 5,000 fatalities at Normandy, it was pretty small-scale. If it’s been neglected there may be a reason. I think that’s the key.
Korea was a sideshow in Canadian eyes even at the time. The country was going through a real burst of post-war prosperity, helped along by re-armament certainly, but Korea was a small war in a part of the world that Canadians didn’t pay much attention to and had never done so in the past.2
Far away, perhaps, but it was a brutal, exhausting slogging match for those who were actually there on the snow-covered winter hills and in the boiling summers (the temperatures reached eighty degrees Fahrenheit at the time of Kapyong, and Canadian soldiers were still stuck with their heavy winter battle jackets). The casualties in Korea, where Canada had men in combat for only two years, were horrendous compared to Afghanistan, where Canadians have been fighting for almost a decade.
“Afghanistan matters more than Korea, if I can put it that way,” says Granatstein. “It deals with something that is apparent in Western society: in other words, Islamisation, Islamist radicalism. It follows on 9/11. Korea didn’t have anything like that to bring it home at the beginning. That shapes the way Afghanistan is seen and Korea is not.”
The British have a knack of giving glorious life to their martial exploits, even to their fiascos. Churchill said of a particular defeat: “If this is a victory in disguise, it is very well disguised.” The British learned about spin and public relations long before Madison Avenue got in on the act. Long ago the British mastered the trick of turning even a debacle into a triumph. At the same time that the Canadians were winning at Kapyong, the British Gloucestershire Regiment under the same kind of attack, a few miles to their west, was almost wiped out.
“The Glorious Glosters, the British battalion, it got creamed and yet got much more press than the PPCLI because it was creamed,” says Granatstein. “Defeats go over better than victories, in a sense. Think of the way we wallow in Dieppe. It’s a great defeat. ‘We were betrayed.’ ‘The British did it to us.’ We love defeats. Maybe it’s because we expect victories. Defeats sink in more because they’re unusual for us.”
There is something strangely alluring about the martyrdom of glorious defeat, unless you were there in person, in the thick of it, on the losing side. Defeat can have a greater pull on the imagination and on patriotism than the hard-fought victory. Everyone remembers the Alamo. But no one remembers the battle of San Jacinto six weeks later when those same victors at the Alamo got trounced in a battle that was over in twenty minutes.
And it can’t simply be the “smallness” of Kapyong that’s relegated it to oblivion in Canadian history courses. Other countries manage to make a big deal of small battles. There were half as many Texans at the Alamo as at Kapyong. In the gallant British stand at Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu War in southern Africa, made famous in the movie Zulu with Michael Caine, there were a quarter as many as at Kapyong. At the most-filmed, most written-about, most argued-over, least-consequential gunfight in history, the O.K. Corral, nine men shot it out, and it was all over in thirty seconds. Size doesn’t count in the Famous Battle Sweepstakes.
So if “smallness” and “winning” cannot entirely account for