PAJU, South Korea — An American veteran of a legendary British battle was saluted Thursday by top brass from around the world at South Korea’s Gloster Hill Memorial Park in Paju, just south of the Demilitarized Zone.
Seventy-five years to the day after fighting in a back-to-back action at the epicenter of the biggest communist offensive of the Korean War, Edwin Warwick of Milwaukee returned to the battleground for the first time since April 1951.
The reception he received was very different from his earlier experience.
Mr. Warwick took salutes from the visiting chief of the general staff of the British army, the Australian general who is the deputy commander of the U.S.-led United Nations Command, and the South Korean general whose division holds the terrain.
The South Korean deputy minister of patriots and veterans affairs insisted on a photograph, and a Korean general took a knee before him.
Awestruck local schoolchildren crowded around, offering gifts, while reporters aimed TV cameras.
“This is not easy, I tell you,” he said. “I don’t feel like a hero; the heroes are the ones who did not come back.”
He struggled to identify terrain.
“I don’t recognize it,” he said as he gazed up a dappled green slope. “I was looking down from up there, not up from down here.”
“Up there” is a rugged hill just south of the Imjin River. “Down here” is the low ground from where Chinese troops clambered over the piled-up bodies of their dead to prosecute their attacks.
Mr. Warwick, born in Britain, fought in the British army during the “Forgotten War,” as the Korean War is sometimes called. Postwar, he migrated to the U.S. and became an American citizen in 1963.
He was joined Thursday by his daughter, Jacqueline Davis, who appeared close to tears.
“It’s overwhelming to learn all this,” she said. “The people are so genuine.”
Last stand on Hill 235
Today, the forested hills in Paju, just south of the Imjin River, feature winding hiking trails and suspension bridges. In April 1951, the hills were barren and were strongpoints of Britain’s 29th Infantry Brigade.
For the first time in a whirlwind fight that had blazed from Busan in the peninsula’s southeast to the Yalu River on the China border, there was an operational pause.
The killing winter was over, and spring had sprung. The front was silent; enemies had disappeared.
On Sunday, April 22, 29th Brigade troops were piling up Japanese beer in preparation for a party and a movie the next day: “St George’s Day.”
They had no idea that Peng Dehuai, commander of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army, had withdrawn and, after regrouping, was set to unleash the biggest offensive of the Korean War.
As night fell, a third of a million communist bayonets surged south along a 35-mile front. So large was the attack that the Korea Institute of Military History dubbed it “The Armageddon North of Seoul.”
Chinese units aimed to punch through the U.N. Command line in the Imjin and Gapyeong valleys, isolate the main U.S. force in Korea by cutting the roads behind it and then annihilate it. With the U.S. ejected, Seoul would fall by May Day, and South Korea could be mopped up.
Things did not go according to plan.
The densest Chinese force concentration was on the Imjin as the 63rd Army hurled 27 battalions against the 29th Brigade’s four.
For three nights, the 29th Brigade forced the Chinese through a meat grinder of massed automatic fire and artillery barrages.
The pressure was immense. Early on April 25, the entire U.N. Command line pulled back. The 29th Brigade fought south through a valley swarming with the enemy.
But for one battalion, the Glosters, named for their home depot in southwest England, it was too late. They were cut off from allied units by “human waves” tactics that either overran or flowed around strongpoints.
“In the dark, we could hear them as they moved,” Mr. Warwick recalled of the bugles the Chinese used to send signals. “When they hit resistance, they went around.”
The Gloster perimeter shrank.
“Our machine gun groups were used to support other units but had to defend themselves,” he said. “We got smaller and smaller. … Water ran out, food ran out, ammunition ran out. Grenades were long gone.”
Survivors regrouped, back-to-back, on the summit of Hill 235. Enemy waves assaulted under sizzling flares. Mid-battle, the Glosters’ bugler played his repertoire, including reveille and “The Last Post,” in defiance of Chinese signalers.
On April 25, the Glosters tried to exfiltrate south in small groups, leaving wounded behind.
“I had to leave a friend, we were both 20, as he could not walk,” Mr. Warwick recalled. “I was not happy.”
Surrounded by nine Chinese battalions, fewer than 70 of 700 Glosters escaped. Mr. Warwick was one.
“I was captured for about half an hour,” he said. “Then two U.S. planes came over, the Chinese scattered, and I got away.”
The Battle of the Imjin River became legendary.
Gen. James Van Fleet, commander of the U.S. 8th Army, called the Glosters’ last stand “the greatest example of unit bravery in modern warfare.”
The Glosters were renamed “The Glorious Glosters.” Hill 235 was dubbed “Gloster Hill.”
Today, a memorial park stands at its foot, complete with a wall of honor, statues of Glosters on eternal patrol and signage illustrating the battle.
Even U.S. veterans know the story.
“A few years back, I was in a place called Belgium in Wisconsin, and I was talking to this veteran about the Army,” Mr. Warwick said. “When I said I was with the Glosters, this guy came round the table crying. ‘In my lifetime, I never thought I’d shake the hand of a man who saved my ass,’ he said.”
The British stand on the Imjin and the concurrent Australian-Canadian-New Zealand defense of Gapyeong are credited with preventing Chinese forces from surrounding U.S. divisions.
Mr. Warwick’s family, fearful of his traumas, learned little of his experiences.
“We always knew, growing up, not to ask about it,” Ms. Davis said. “Now, he is the only one of his unit to come back.”
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