Dunning’s Leslie McColl is sole Scottish veteran among about 200 to return to South Korea

Apr 27 2010 Perthshire Advertiser Tuesday

DUNNING man Leslie McColl looked out over a barren terrain he barely recognised from the one where he and several hundred other Black Watch soldiers bravely fought to hold South Korea from the clutches of communism 58 years ago.

The 78-year-old was last week back at the scene of the bloody battles where as a fresh-faced 19-year-old he witnessed humanity at its worst.

Currently caught up in the volcanic ash travel chaos, he was waiting to get home after the first ever return to the land of the “forgotten” Korean war in which about 60,000 British soldiers participated.

He was among 200 British and Commonwealth veterans who fought in the country to be invited by the South Korean government for 60th anniversary commemoration activities.

The conflict ensued when China-backed North Korea sought to take over the entire Korean peninsula, which had been divided after the end of the Second World War.

Looking out onto the battlefield for the first time in 57 years, Mr McColl’s face portrayed a look of stunned calm. The hills were where some of the most brutal fighting of the 1950-53 affair took place.

But the Perthshire man, a piper in the former Scottish regiment, now part of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, harbours painful memories.

As he struggled to pinpoint an area of the landscape known as the “Hook” – a ridge now located deep inside the heavily mined demilitarised zone dividing North and South – a young South Korean soldier in military fatigues pointed to the spot a couple of miles in the distance where the Black Watch, just several hundred strong, were up against an enemy numbered in their thousands.

“It is so sad, terrible,” he told Corporal Kang Jin-kook (23) as the young conscript asked what it was like to be back near the site. They were standing at an observation point on the very tip of the southern edge of the barbed wire fence marking the southern limit line of the DMZ, a North Korean guard tower clearly visible on the crest of a hill about mile in front.

For widower Mr McColl, a father-of-three and grandfather-of-four, it is his first time back since leaving on a ship in May 1953, close to the end of the conflict. Tens of thousands of soldiers from 17 countries united under the UN flag to repel the North when it invaded on June 25 1950. He was the sole Scottish veteran among the party of over 200, which also included Victoria Cross recipient Bill Speakman and George Cross holder Derek Kinne.

The Black Watch lost more than 60 men in the fierce battles around the Hook and earned a regimental battle honour for their efforts.

It was November 1952 when Mr McColl and his comrades arrived to relieve shattered US troops who had been resisting an enemy intent on breaking through the UN barrier to capture South Korea’s capital, Seoul.

What ensued was a relentless battle during which, Mr McColl recalls, the Black Watch refused to be defeated.

“The Chinese kept attacking us,” he said.

“There must have been 550-600 of us and they had maybe 8000 to 10,000. You just see a mass of bodies.

“There was a Turkish regiment on the right hand side of us. They thought we were going to retreat. They phoned up our CEO and asked if we would retreat, but the Black Watch never retreats. It went on near all night.”

Typical of the type of fighting that characterised the Korean war, Mr McColl described a kind of hand-to-hand combat that had similarities with the First World War. When a flare was lit on the night-time scene as the Chinese army attacked, Mr McColl saw what he says was a human wave.

To this day, he struggles to comprehend how the Chinese soldiers continued to attack in the numbers they did given the heavy causalities they had been incurring against better equipped forces. Superior air power is cited as one of the chief reasons for the UN’s success when confronted with vastly bigger armies.

“We were in reserve when it started and had to get up the hill and start to throw grenades,” said Mr McColl. “Things seem to happen that fast. You don’t get time to realise the position you are in.

“But everybody was scared in case the North Koreans got you. If you finished up with the North Koreans, you had no chance because they would torture you to death or shoot you. They were bad, bad people.”

Treated like returning heroes by South Koreans, Mr McColl said he was astonished to see the way the country is today and the strides it has made since emerging from the ashes of the war – now ranking among the world’s top 20 economies.

He said the conflict – which claimed the lives of millions, including around 1110 British troops, 200 of them Scots – had been worth the pain.

“I was amazed (when I arrived),” said Mr McColl, who had been persuaded into making the journey so his local branch of the British Korean Veterans’ Association was represented.

“The last time I was in Seoul it was a heap of rubble. It was well worth fighting for when you see the job they have done. Everywhere you go, (the people) can’t do enough for you.”

Insisting he is not bitter about what many see as the disregard the British government has shown towards the country’s Korean war veterans, he believes the proximity of World War II may explain why it became “the forgotten war”.

“We lost 1087 or in that region and it’s never even mentioned. If it was not for the British Korean Veterans’ Association there wouldn’t be anything… most people don’t know how many were killed anyway. The government seems to ignore it.”