“At the start of the Korean War, the South Korean army was organised only for defence.
#Stand o food 3 rar rar#
Although our battalion suffered – well I know it suffered more casualties than any other Australian unit, it did fight well but of course you’ve got to realise 3 RAR were there for over three years of fighting and our casualties were, I think 234 killed in that time – out of a total Australian fatal casualty list of 340, but that’s over a three-year period. The US Marines were very gung-ho, very macho, but I think they suffered more casualties than they needed to do because some of them just refused to dig in, because “Marines don’t do that!” Whereas we had the attitude – “You dig or you die” and that’s the difference I think. But a lot of the units were extremely good. So that particular division suffered close to 60% casualties including those captured. Under those circumstances you’d have thought that the officers or senior NCO’s would have rallied the men and attacked uphill and tried to clear the hills, but they didn’t. A lot of the US soldiers refused to get out of their vehicles and just stayed there and hundreds of them surrendered. One US Division tried to fight its way through a roadblock. Like when the Chinese first came in, in early November 1950. And consequently some units performed poorly. The radio equipment that they had issued to them, probably 50-60% of it didn’t work. They were soft, physically unfit and a lot of them, just frankly didn’t want to be there. They were in the main occupation troops who had been doing no training. “The Americans – initially they didn’t perform very well at all because they’d been flown in very quickly from Japan.
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