Myths and frightful memories from the front

But what about our forgotten heroes?

Every Anzac Day we think of the misery endured by past generations involved in war and admire the bravery and the great sacrifice of the soldiers involved.

Yet, amid the dreadful carnage, myths sometimes, somehow, later evolve.

One myth is that every soldier was always a full-blown hero in waiting, stoic and resolute in war, unwavering, never scared and ready for anything.

Maybe they all were at the start, but as a Civil War general once said, "War is hell", and the soldiers who survive are never the same. War breaks people.

For example, the aged and damaged World War I Diggers I met many years ago before each Anzac Day all hated war with a vengeance.

One chap I remember, who was in a wheelchair and suffering from post-traumatic stress, said he and many colleagues were still around decades later only because they were "lucky" to be wounded and repatriated home.

In this gentleman's case, he had been buried alive on the WWI's Western Front by an enemy shell burst. Suffocating in the mud, he was frantically dug out by his mates. No glory here.

Some other soldiers, frightened and desperate amid the horror of trench warfare, won medals through sudden, conspicuous gallantry, then drank heavily afterwards behind the lines to forget the nightmare of war.

Then there are the accidental heroes, which, in the following case, goes to prove that truth in war can sometimes be all smoke and mirrors. And that every soldier at one stage or another, is likely to be terrified.

Take the probably unknown story once told to me by a former colourful colleague, Francis Joseph Sullivan, who passed away about a decade ago.

Frank Sullivan was a keen military enthusiast. He'd even visited Civil War battlefields in America and brought home musket balls as a souvenir.

The occasion that sparked his story must have been just before an Anzac Day in the 1980s.

Frank had been visiting a Hunter Valley farm on an unrelated story when he noticed some war medals hanging on a wall, gathering dust, in the old farmer's barn. When Frank asked about the cluster of World War I medals, the farmer said they belonged to him.

Asked whether he wore them in Anzac Day marches, the man replied he never marched, but that he would tell Frank the background story only on the condition he never repeated it publicly during the farmer's lifetime.

As I remember Frank's tale, the former veteran said he and a few AIF mates had ended up on the battlefields of France in the dying days of WWI all hoping for the killing to soon end.

No such luck, however, as his battalion was ordered to advance across the wasteland of no-man's land at dawn the next day in a large-scale surprise attack on, hopefully, exhausted and demoralised German troops.

The day dawned and the war-weary Aussie soldiers, with bayonets fixed, gingerly climbed up over parapets to move stealthily forward under a mantle of heavy fog. It was eerily quiet as the Diggers slowly advanced.

Frank's farmer and another soldier, hoping not to be shot on what might just be the last day of the war, deliberately hung back in the heavy fog, then tried to walk in a giant circle instead, avoiding all the action.

Unexpectedly, there was no enemy fire from ahead. Just silence and, predictably, the Aussie duo got lost in the fog.

Soon, among the shell craters, they found themselves gradually walking up a huge mound.

Here they stopped and lay face down to get their bearings. Still no enemy fire.

Then the fog started to lift revealing ahead and to the right their fellow soldiers still blindly advancing without being challenged.

Then, to the amazement of the two watchers, some of the earth below them started to move. They slid back as a trapdoor suddenly opened and they saw the back of a German enemy soldier emerge to view the scene.

They were on top of a German pillbox, a machine gun post overlooking the misty battlefield.

The enemy soldier abruptly looked around, was horrified to see the two Aussies and yelled out in alarm as the fearful (later) farmer instinctively lunged with his rifle. No time to think.

But he only managed to stab the retreating German in the buttocks before the lid closed. There was a muffled scream below. Then, despite the confusion, the Aussies prised open the lid and threw two hand grenades inside, destroying the hidden bunker. The explosion alerted the startled Diggers below that they had been close to annihilation.

The duo were soon hailed as heroes by their comrades.

Afterwards, their unit sergeant called the duo aside to bawl them out, yelling: "I know what you've done. I think you're cowards, but you've saved a lot of lives by mistake. You'll get a medal, but it will be done later privately, not publicly and you better not ever talk about it.

"In the meantime, you'll spend the rest of a war peeling potatoes as punishment behind the lines and away from the other men. It's an embarrassment."

And that's how the story ended. Frank had a good bullsh*t detector. He believed the farmer's yarn and so do I.

Weirder things have happened in war.

Once in a while an astonishing book comes along. This is one such book.

Tom Gilling's The Diggers of Kapyong tells the story of a single Aussie battalion, aided by allies, dug in on a hilltop north of Seoul, South Korea, in April 1951.

They were heavily outnumbered, and the Korean War was on a knife's edge. Thousands of Chinese soldiers supporting Korean communist fighters launched wave after wave of fanatical attacks to dislodge the Diggers of 3RAR.

They were all that stood on the peninsula between Mao Zedong's army and the South Korean capital.

The dogged defence blunted the huge Chinese Spring offensive and, within a few weeks, the Korean War, our "forgotten war", lapsed into a stalemate. The two Koreas have existed in an uneasy standoff for 70 years.

For successfully defending high ground in the rugged valley on the eve of Anzac Day, the soldiers were awarded the rare honour of a US Presidential Citation for their extraordinary heroism.

The battles, unlike others fought by the UN army, were not decided by tanks, artillery or air strikes but by courageous diggers tenaciously fighting hand-to-hand, often in the dark, with whatever they had.

After, the weary, surviving Diggers felt like Anzacs, but there was no hero's welcome home later. Some Korean War veterans remembered being rebuffed by RSL clubs because "that wasn't a proper war".

When a veteran US journalist began researching his book on the Korean War in a library, he found 88 books on Vietnam and only four on Korea.

That about sums it up.