The 45th Field fired in their support until gun tubes shimmered. In all, the 25-pounders fired more than a thousand rounds per tube, more even than the average at Alamein. They fired until almost every round of British ammunition in Korea had been exhausted, and at times they fired into Chinese riflemen less than one hundred yards away.
They protected the guns, and continued the mission. More than that cannot be expected, or said, of any artillery.
But as 23 April lengthened, then waned, the Glosters, fighting on, began to run out of supply. They needed ammunition, fresh guns, medicines. They had no food, except some bread and a few hard-boiled eggs.
American air tried to drop supply to them, but the battle was too close about the beleaguered hills. The air drops had poor success.
But all the air power that could be thrown into the battle swarmed down from the sky, rocketing, blasting, searing the Chinese-dotted hills with napalm.
In spite of the continuous rumble of the artillery, in spite of air power, the CCF trickled behind the two other battalions. The Ulsters and Fusiliers were cut off, too. The Brigade HQ was under small-arms fire. A number of green replacements just in from England for the Fusiliers were fired on, and some were killed before they could join.
All day the 23rd, and all that night, the Glosters beat off swarming infantry attacks, holding their precious high ground. At dawn of the 24th, the Glosters' situation was serious.
Able Company had been swamped by the first wave, and insistent pressure had worn Baker Company down to an effective strength of one officer and fifteen other ranks. The remaining men fought back from deep foxholes, into which sleeted unceasing machine-gun fire. It was impossible to move without being hit.
Commanding the original 622 officers and men of the Glosters was Lieutenant Colonel J. P. Carne, a tall, normally reticent officer who had been with the regiment twenty-six years. Carne, calm and pipe-smoking, drew the companies back onto the hill on which he had placed his own CP. Despite the heavy fire, the maneuver succeeded; now the Gloster line had shrunk from four miles to a few hundred yards, but the line still held.
Carne, in weak radio communication with Brigade, asked only for helicopters to carry away his desperately wounded. But the fire was too close and too intense for the copters to come in. Carne was asked if he thought a relief column through the hills could reach him.
'No,' he said, with complete honesty.
But on the afternoon of 24 April a battalion of Filipinos led by American tanks was ordered toward Gloster Hill. The column ground to within less than two thousand yards of the British before the lead tank caught fire and blocked a defile. Lashed by unbearable fire, the column retreated.
Later, the Filipinos tried again, now accompanied by Belgians, some Puerto Rican infantrymen, and tanks from the 8th Hussars. They ran into thousands of Chinese in the hills and gorges, and fell back.
The American 3rd Division, which had fallen back south of the Imjin now and which was not yet under heavy pressure, abandoning its own probe toward Ch'orwon, tried to break through with tanks and infantry.
They were not able even to get close.
On the hill, the Glosters held fast, as the sun sank. By now a gap of seven miles had been opened between them and the other units of the 29th Brigade.
All night they fought off Chinese, now coming at their hill in desperation. The Glosters were spoiling the First Step, Fifth Phase Offensive, at its very start. Before them already lay several thousands of dead Chinese, and they still had teeth.
But at dawn they had only some three hundred men fit to hold a gun, and ammunition was so low that officers whispered to hold fire until the assaulting infantry was fifteen yards away.
And at dawn of the 25th, the brigadier commanding the 29th received new orders: fall back. The Fusiliers and Ulsters were badly hurt, and with the front holding solidly elsewhere, and supporting units behind them, it was senseless slaughter to keep the decimated British on line.
Those Fusiliers and Ulsters who were on their feet came out in good order. Their wounded, two hundred of them, were loaded onto tanks. Coming out, the tanks were brought under fire. The decks and sponsons ran slick with blood, and the dead and dying lay so thickly across the tanks the gunners could not traverse the tubes. But the hurt and dying were brought out, and the 29th Brigade, two-thirds of it, fell back.
Miles deep in Chinese territory now, the Glosters were on their own.
And they were almost done, this 25th of April.
At Alexandria, Egypt, during the battle for the Nile, the Gloucestershire Regiment had approached the French in two long ranks, one to kneel and fire, one to hold off the enemy with the bayonet while the second row reloaded. They were surrounded.
Their officers shouted, 'Rear rank—right-about-face! Fire!'
Back to back, the Glosters fired and repelled charges until the French retired.
Ever since, the Glosters, alone in the British service, have been entitled to wear two cap ornaments, one in front, one in back.
On Gloster Hill, Korea, one hundred and fifty years later, the Glosters fought back to back again. These were no longer the mindless automatons of Wellington's legions; many of them were reservists called to the colors upon the Korean emergency. Most of them were past the age of thirty; a great many of them had left wives and children behind in Britain.
But whatever else they might be, they were men of the Gloucestershire Regiment.
Just before daylight, the Chinese bugles made the rocky hills eerie with music, as they marshaled to charge again. There were three hundred Glosters on the hill, and a bugler. The bugler put his own horn to mouth and blew
The sound of the Chinese horns died away.
Then, as the Chinese listened in amazement, the Gloster bugler sounded
At 0605, by radio, their brigadier told them they had his permission to leave Gloster Hill.
Lieutenant Colonel Carne said he was surrounded and could not break out. He asked for air support.
He got it. Dive bombers shrieked down upon their hill, blasting the ground only thirty-five yards beyond their holes. Individual Gloucesters threw smoke grenades to mark the spots they wanted hit. It was close, desperate work, but it sent the CCF reeling back.
At 0755, after fighting continuously for almost sixty hours, Carne reported to Brigade that his radio batteries were almost gone. He asked for the air and artillery to continue pounding in close.
Then Carne talked to his acting company commanders, sheltered by a fold of ground near the CP where the wounded litter patients, some five dozen of them, lay about. He told them the battalion was done. They had a choice of surrendering or trying to fight their way out in small groups.
The commanders of Able, Baker, Charlie, and Dog said they would try to fight their way through.
There was no hope of taking the seriously wounded through. With these volunteered to stay Colonel Carne, Regimental Sergeant Major Hobbs, the doctor and chaplain.
Hobbs and Carne had lived their entire adult lives within the Glosters; it was unthinkable to them to desert their own. The surgeon and chaplain, brave men each, could in no other way fulfill their callings.
The remnants of A, B, and C companies started off the hill in the respite the savage air attacks had given them. On the hill Colonel Carne and the leader of the fourth party, Captain Michael Harvey of Dog Company, watched these dirty, hungry, unkempt, staggering, proud men march away into oblivion.
Harvey got his own party, about a hundred, ready to move out.
As they started down the hill, Carne asked quietly, 'Any of you chaps happen to have a spare twist of tobacco?'
Captain Harvey, not yet thirty, was a reserve officer and a veteran of the Hampshire Regiment. Until this moment, he had considered himself a Hampshire man strayed from the fold. On the 25th of April, Michael Harvey, with no discredit to the Hampshires, became a Gloster.
A somewhat untidy man wearing large horn-rimmed glasses, Harvey ordered his group not to follow the three other parties moving south toward friendly lines, but to do the unexpected—head due north for at least a mile then bear west and south toward the Americans.
