VALIANT GLOUCESTERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 797, 29 October 1954, Page 12

VALIANT GLOUCESTERS

THE EDGE OF THE SWORD, by Captain Anthony Farrar-Hockley, D.S.O., M.; Frederick Muller, N.Z. price 12/6. HE quibblings of Panmunjom and the stories of Communist and Allied "brainwashing" made the war in Korea from this distance seem rather unreal. Its idiom was strange, too: the wadis and escarfpments and Wogs of North Africa were too well cherished to be replaced by the bunds, rice paddies and

gooks of Korea. But there was something solid and familiar in the valour of the Gloucesters, whose 800 men in April, 1951, held their hilltop positions near the Imjin River on the road to Seoul for three days before being encircled and swamped by thousands of Chinese. For this action the Gloucesters’ colonel won the V.C. and their adjutant, the author, the D.S.O. While the truce negotiators bickered over details for more than two years, the Gloucesters’ survivors in ‘their prison camps resisted their captors’ constant efforts to corrupt them by political indoctrination, and fought a losing battle to keep alive. Their colonel spent nineteen months in solitary confinement in underground bunkers and bare concrete cells, and dismissed it all on repatriation with the concise comment: "The food was rotten, and I was damned bored!" The adjutant. was a more than usually troublesome prisoner; he escaped five times survived the bruta] interrogations and torture in harsh. civilian prisons that followed recapture, made two more attempts that went wrong at the last minute, and was again arrested and interrogated, In this hard schoo] the author learnt to understand the complex Chinese mind and the devious reasoning of Communist politics. His impressions are sharp and he writes well.

W.A.

G.