Valley of hell
James Delingpole
It came as quite a surprise to me that the British soldiers who fought in 1951 at the battle of the Imjin river could be described in a Korea Remembered tribute as Forgotten Heroes (BBC 2, last Friday). Having spent a good chunk of my boyhood thinking about little else, I'd assumed that it was the same for the rest of my generation. Or at the very least, that they would have heard of the exploits of the Glorious Glosters, which are surely right up there with the defence of Rorke's Drift as one of the alltime great British military actions.
I suppose it must have been my father's doing. Though he missed his National Service in Korea by two years, ending up in Hong Kong as an RAF translator eavesdropping on the transmissions of Chinese MiG pilots, he was keenly aware of what might have been had he been just a bit older and followed his original urge to join a fighting regiment. And, of course, he passed this soldier manqué problem on to me.
One of our favourite shared horror fantasies was the thought of being up there on Gloucester Hill with the imperturbable Colonel Carrie and his men, holding out for three days with no sleep or food and dwindling ammunition as wave after wave of bugle-blowing Chinese swarmed onto their positions like ants.
Thanks to the documentary, we have found a new one. It was prompted by the eyewitness account of an infantryman who'd escaped in an armoured breakout from the encircling Chinese. As he and his fellows clung to the side of the tanks retreating down the valley, the yellow hordes attempted to pull or pick them off. He recalled booting one of them in the face; the friend next to him who fell off never to be seen again; and the return to base where the tank tracks were found to be so heavily smeared with the mangled limbs of crushed Chinese that the surviving infantrymen were ushered into a tent to spare them further trauma.
Is it because I have an overactive imagination or does everyone react this way after watching such things? I keep trying to picture that infernoesque scene. How, after three days non-stop fighting, would you have found the energy to haul yourself onto the tank in the first place? What would have gone through your head as you retreated through that valley of hell, cling
ing to a juddering, slow-moving target, agonisingly exposed and under constant fire, listening to the screams of agony, the crunch of bones and the whizz of bullets ricocheting off the armour beneath you, feeling your comrades being dragged and shot off beside you, wondering when it was going to be your turn.
Yet after all this, having saved South Korea by stopping the invasion of Seoul, the men of Britain's 29th Brigade came home to almost universal indifference. The Gloucesters' heroic stand received a certain amount of publicity. But those from other battalions on the Imjin defences, who had experienced similar hardships, were virtually ignored. One soldier remembered coming back, suntanned, and bumping into one of his old friends from the village. 'Been on holiday?' he was asked. Having recently experienced a much bigger war Britain couldn't bring itself to care about a tiny sideshow somewhere they'd never heard of in the East.
Maybe it is slightly bathetic to move straight on to Trigger Happy TV (Channel 4, Friday) but since everyone is raving about it, I feel it's important to be the miserable bastard who says, well, actually it's pretty ordinary. In case you haven't seen it, it's a sort of trendy update of Candid Camera in which a well-spoken bloke called Dom Joly shouts into a giant mobile phone in places where you're supposed to be quiet (art galleries, cinemas, libraries etc.). And other such stuff.
My favourite thing about it is the background music, which is usually mildly recherché, beautiful and strangely affecting. If it weren't there, I doubt the programme would be nearly so popular because the sketches themselves can be quite lame or cringe-inducing.
To give you a couple of examples, there's the practical-joke type of sketch like the one where he pretends to be an ice-cream salesman and, just after someone has ordered something, he sneaks out of the far side of his van and joins the back of his own queue, while the person waiting for the ice-cream keeps doing puzzled double takes. But why? Isn't our existence difficult enough already without some annoying twat playing tricks on us when all we want is to buy an ice-cream?
And then there's the hideous toe-curling embarrassment type of sketch where, say, he pretends to be interviewing the Marquess of Bath while suffering from tremendous diarrhoea which he has to relieve mid-interview. I do admire Joly's fearlessness in performing such stunts but, again, I don't quite get the point of them. I mean the idea, presumably, is to make the viewer cover their eyes, tie their legs in knots and go, `Aaargh. No. I can't bear it.' Which is normally the point when I switch over.
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