Korea - Major Peter Duckworth

·1 hr 8 min·1 clip

The last moment of normalcy before a warship sailed into history.

The interview opens with Major Peter Duckworth recalling Korea in an oral-history session recorded on March 22, 1994. He starts with the practical route into the war: a sail from Liverpool in October 1951, training before going out, a regiment that had come from Germany, and the business of leaving its own tanks behind while taking over the 8th Hussars' vehicles on arrival. The movement feels matter-of-fact. From there he describes the regiment coming back to Aldershot, gearing up there, and sailing out as part of the ordinary military routine that sat behind a battlefield posting. Then the shelling begins. He says the enemy fire became noticeably heavier and more frequent, and he remembers a period when it seemed to move from one target to another with devastating effect, perhaps with outside direction behind it. Squadron headquarters took the hit. That strike killed some men, wounded others including him, and smashed several vehicles, which he recalls as absolute mayhem rather than a dramatic set piece. After that, the pattern held. Whenever the other side attacked, he says, there could be an enormous barrage, and he points to the scale of fire used against one hill later in the year as one of the things that made Korea feel especially horrendous. He goes back to the ground. When he visited the position the next morning after one attack, he found the trenches and forward slopes almost unrecognizable, with crawl trenches that had been deep and firm reduced in places to rain-swept rubble. The Hook comes into view. He notes the first and second battles of the Hook and places his own experience around the first one, which happened just before his unit left in November, while the second came later. Observation mattered. A great deal of the danger, he explains, came from how well the enemy could observe the positions and direct fire onto them, turning shelling into a relentless, targeted problem. Tanks were part of that answer. He describes them as something used on call for a specific task, able to put pinpoint fire down without ranging, and says the close working relationship between platoon commanders, troop leaders, company commanders, and crew commanders made that possible because they lived and worked together on the hills. It was effective. At the same time, he calls the tank role a misuse in one sense, because the machine was being asked to sit like a pillbox, even though it could be very effective and sometimes drew fire that men on the ground would rather not have had near them.

As heard by us

A Korean War remembrance shaped by training, shellfire, and survival.

Major Peter Duckworth's account moves from Germany to Korea with plain, useful detail: training, the stop at Aldershot, the handover of another unit's tanks, and the sailing from Liverpool in October 1951.

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Hear Major Peter Duckworth trace Korea from Liverpool and Germany into tank service under heavy shellfire.

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