How Australian Diggers Slaughtered A Chinese Division In The Last Battle Of The Korean War

In a hut at a place called Kanunjam, a stack of documents is being prepared for signature. The papers will end the Korean War. They are being read [music] and reread and initialed and slid across a table. 30 km to the northwest of that hut [music] on a ridge called the Hook. An Australian machine gunner is stacking belts of ammunition.

He is cleaning the feed tray on a vicar’s gun that has already been cleaned twice today. [music] He can hear the diplomats in his head. He knows the war is nearly over. He also knows what the Chinese army has decided to do about that because [music] tonight on ground that will be frozen inside a week, thousands of men are [music] going to fight over a ridge.

And by the time the diplomats sign, most of those men will already be dead. This is the story of the last battle of the Korean War. This [music] is the story of the hook. And this is the story of two clocks. the one on the wall at Panmunjam and the one in the trench above the Samisham Valley running down to the same second.

To understand what is about to happen, you have to understand the [music] ridge itself. The hook is a crescent-shaped spur of high ground that curls out from the main Allied line [music] into the Samishon Valley. From its forward trenches, a man with a set of binoculars can see straight across to the Chinese positions on the opposite ridge.

On a clear day, he can see the wire on the far slope. On a wet day, he can see the shell craters. The hook is not big. It is not glamorous. It has no strategic importance in [music] the grand sense of the phrase, but it commands the valley. Whoever holds the hook can see who is moving in the low ground. Whoever holds the hook can put artillery onto anything that crosses [music] that low ground.

And that is why the Chinese people’s volunteer army have already tried to take it three times and failed three [music] times in the last nine months of this war. The first attempt came in October of 1952 [music] when the US Marines held the hook and beat off a night assault. The [music] second came in November when it was the Scottish Black Watch on the ridge and the Chinese threw a full attack at them [music] and were cut to pieces by machine guns firing on fixed lines from across the valley.

The third came in May of 1953 [music] when the Duke of Wellington’s regiment held the ridge through a bombardment of over 20,000 shells in 10 days with 11,000 of those shells falling on the hook in a single night. And still the Chinese could not walk into the trenches. Three times they have come. Three times they have died on that spur.

And every time the ground has stayed in Allied hands. That is the ridge. That is the piece of Korea. that is about to become the last battlefield of the Korean War onto the hook on the 9th of July 1953 march the men of the second battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment. They are known simply as two RR. They have been in Korea since the 17th of March and for the last 4 months they have been patrolling no man’s land in the Jamestown line sector in the country between the Injin and Samishan rivers.

They are veterans of that specific exhausting unglamorous kind of war. The war of night patrols and listening posts and mortar duels. The war where you never see the enemy but you can feel him watching. They belong to the 28th Commonwealth Brigade [music] commanded by Australian Brigadier John Wilton. Their neighbors on the left are the seventh Marine regiment of the first US Marine Division, holding a chain of hills that includes Hill 111 and a strong point the Americans have named Boulder [music] City. Their neighbors on

the right on the far side of the ridge are three R, the third battalion of their own regiment. [music] Between them and the Chinese, about 200 m of dead ground at the closest points, a [music] belt of barbed wire and a scatter of forward listening posts with names the diggers used like place names in a country town.

Greenfinger, Ronson, the contact bunker. The names have already been through the mouths of three earlier owners of these trenches. [music] Now they belong to two R are. A battalion is deployed in a way that will matter enormously in the next fortnight. D Company holds the [music] tip of the hook, the most forward, most exposed position on the ridge, the one where the ground drops away sharply on three sides.

C Company holds a spur to the west, a feature called Hill 121, from which they can put fire down into the gully that separates them from the Marines on hill 111. A company sits [music] in depth behind them, ready to reinforce or counterattack. B [music] Company is in reserve and detached from the battalion, sent across to the American positions on hill 111, is a section of two RA’s own medium machine gun platoon under a sergeant named Brian Cooper.

Cooper’s job is to sit on that hill with his vicar’s guns [music] and rake the low ground between the Australians and the Marines with fire whenever anything moves through it at night. He is on his own out there with the Americans as an Australian gun crew [music] in a marine trench. That fact will save the marine line before this is over.

The men know the ridge has been fought over. They can see it. Every meter of the trench system is scarred by the May [music] battle. Bunkers have caved in. Communication trenches have been shelled shallow. Whole stretches of overhead cover are missing. On the 13th of July, a photographer named Philip Hobson stands on the hook and takes pictures of the desolation.

And later, people who look at those pictures will say they look like Pashendale in 1917. That is what the ridge is. That is what two R inherits. From the 9th of July onwards, every hour that is not spent on watch or on patrol is spent on repair. Bunkers are re-wed. Trenches are redug. Wire is rerung, ammunition is stockpiled, [music] and every night, small parties of Australian infantry go forward into no man’s land to see what the Chinese are doing on the other side of the valley.

What the Chinese are doing is preparing. That much is obvious. Patrol clashes multiply through the middle of July. On the 22nd of July, the Chinese lay a careful ambush against an Australian patrol. That [music] in itself is a signal. You do not set ambushes if you are running down the clock to peace. You set ambushes if you are trying to strip the defenders of eyes and ears.

The Australian war diary through those weeks records the same words over and over. Movement, weather, shells in, shells out. No casualties, [music] no casualties, no casualties. You can feel the relief in the phrasing. Every day that passes without a friendly name on the list is a day closer to the end. And this is the point where the two clocks start to become the same clock.

30 km south [music] in Panmunjam, the negotiators are haggling over the last details of an armistice that everyone at the table knows will be signed inside days. Rumors are traveling out from the peace talks in every direction. On the 23rd of July, at a quarter 6 in the evening, Brigadier Wilton calls his battalion commanders into an urgent conference at his headquarters.

[music] He tells them what he has been told. The signing is imminent. Only patrols essential to the security of the hook are to be sent out from now on. In other words, stop taking chances. [music] Do not lose a man for a piece of ground that will be handed back at the ceasefire. Get through the next 48 hours alive.

The word for that meeting spreads down through the officers to the sergeants and by the smallest and quietest channels to some of the men, not all of them. The rumors reach the forward trenches only unevenly, and the men on hill 121 and the tip of the hook are for the most part still preparing for war, as if there will never be an end to war.

That is important because in less than 30 hours, the Chinese are going to attack. And the men who take the first shock of that attack will still in the main [music] believe that this is just another night in a war that stretches out forever in both directions. The counter starts to tick. 72 hours to the armistice. 71 70.

Why did the Chinese come? [music] That is the question people ask about the hook and it has to be answered before the shells fall because [music] otherwise everything about the next 3 days looks like insanity. The peace was known. [music] The signing was days away. Both sides had been fighting a war of fixed lines [music] for 2 years. A war of trenches and hills and small savage patrols.

A war in which almost no ground had changed hands since 1951. So why in the last week attack? [music] The answer is not madness. The answer is a map. When the armistice was signed, the line of contact, [music] the line between the armies on the day of signature would become the demilitarized zone. Whichever hills you held on the day the gun stopped, you kept.

Whichever hills you did not hold, you did not keep. This meant [music] that any lastm minute gain was worth its weight in the political geography of the peninsula for years to come. Take a hill on the 26th of July, hold it for 24 hours, [music] and you have a permanent hill. Fail to take it and it belongs to the enemy in the maps that will be printed for the next 70 years.

And so on the last night, both sides looked at the map and the Chinese command looked at the hook. Three times they had tried and failed. Three times the ridge had held. Perhaps this time with a fresh division, with maximum artillery, with a divisional sized assault along the boundary between the Commonwealth Division and the [music] Marines.

Perhaps this time in the last hours, they could crack it and turn the flank of the American position on the Immun. If they broke through the divisional boundary, they could threaten the whole marine line. [music] That was the calculation. It was cold. It was rational. It was made by men in warm command posts by candle [music] light using rulers and dividers on paper maps.

And it was going to be paid for in a currency of 19 and 20year-old Chinese conscripts [music] by the ton. 48 hours to the armistice. The evening of the 24th of July comes down slow and warm over the Samishon Valley. The monsoon has broken. There is haze in the low ground. On the hook, [music] the men of D Company have been stood to since before sunset.

Weapons in hand at every [music] second firestep. C Company on hill 121 is watching the gully toward the Marines. A company [music] is watching the ground behind. B Company is stood ready in reserve. Down on hill 111, [music] Sergeant Brian Cooper has his machine gun crews on the tripods, laying stripes of tracer down the pre-registered fixed lines that will slice the low ground apart the moment anything [music] moves in it.

Marine officers walk the trench and check the wire. The seventh Marines are ready behind them in the gun lines of the 16th Field Regiment of the Royal New Zealand Artillery and the American 11th Marines and the divisional gunners of the First Commonwealth Division. The fire plans have been laid on for weeks.

Every possible line of Chinese approach has a code word. Every code word has a shoot pattern. [music] Every shoot pattern has been rehearsed. The signalers in the forward company command posts have their handsets in their fists. The night is coming down. And everybody on that ridge knows that if it is going to come, it is going to come tonight.

It [music] comes at dusk with the small movements. First little parties of Chinese infantry, four and five men working forward in the folds of ground below the hook. They are looking for gaps in the [music] wire, seams between the Australian companies, weaknesses in the fire plan. They are the whiskers of the attack, [music] feeling ahead, but the hook has been feeling for them for a week.

Australian listening posts pick [music] them up. Australian standing patrols identify the direction. Australian mortars come down on the identified ground in ones and twos, [music] then in stons. The probes are broken up before they reach the wire. Small firefights burn in the folds of the valley in the last light.

Chinese soldiers die in the grass without ever seeing the men who shoot them. This goes on for perhaps 40 minutes. [music] At about a/4 to 9 at night, the second clock, the clock in Panmanj, [music] is forgotten completely because the Chinese guns open up. The bombardment does not creep in.

It falls on the hook and hill 111 and Boulder City all at once [music] in one enormous rolling stroke and it does not stop. Medium mortars, heavy artillery, recoilless rifles from the forward Chinese positions on the opposite ridge. The pressure of the shell fire, the men in the trenches will say later, is a thing you feel first in your teeth and then in the bones behind your eyes.

The concussion pushes the air out of your lungs and [music] puts it back in on the way down. Dirt comes off the trench walls in sheets. Timber overhead groans and splinters. The signaler in the decomp command post hangs onto the handset with both hands, shouting corrections into it while grit rains onto his face from the roof. In the fire plan behind the ridge, the New Zealand and American and British guns come alive and start hammering back onto the pre-registered Chinese assembly areas and forward approach lines.

The counter fire goes up. The Chinese fire keeps coming down. The valley starts to glow in that particular purple white unreal color that only comes when there is enough high explosive going off in one place to light the underside of the clouds. And then at the height of the bombardment, this is the Chinese method.

And everybody in these trenches knows it. The shellfire lifts and the infantry come. They come in waves. The Australians will say later that they [music] came in bugles and whistles. Illumination rounds go up from the mortar lines behind the hook and drift down under their parachutes. [music] And in that slow rocking light, the men on the firestep see the low ground in front of the hook full of running figures.

Not a platoon, not a company, a river of men coming across the valley floor and up [music] the slope in the hundreds. The main axis of assault is the gully between hill and 21 and hill 111. The gully between the Australians and the Marines, the boundary that the Chinese identified from weeks of night patrols. That is the seam.

That is where they hope to break through. They come at hill 121 and they come at hill 111 [clears throat] and behind and further to the left they throw the diversionary weight of the assault against Boulder City. All at once on a two battalion front and into that assault the 16th field regiment of the Royal New Zealand artillery pours [music] the killing weapon of the night.

High explosive shells with variable time fuses set to detonate not on impact with the ground but at a fixed height above it in the air. just over the heads of the running men so that the [music] fragments come down like glass in a cone into flesh with no cover. The wire in front of sea company on hill 121 is reached.

There are Chinese soldiers in the coils crawling and pulling and dying. There are Chinese soldiers coming up behind them over their own dead throwing grenades. [music] Machine guns from the Australian bunkers. Bren guns from the firesteps. The vicar’s section of the medium machine gun platoon still at their tripods.

[music] Everything on the position is firing. Grenades come out of the trench in a steady [music] procession. The signaler in the command post is shouting map references. The mortars behind the ridge are dropping curtain fire almost onto the wire itself. Illumination rounds keep going [music] up so that the killing ground stays lit.

And still the Chinese come wave after wave. Some of them dying at 40 m, some at 10, some in the wire itself. [music] Nobody gets into the trenches. Nobody gets through. On Hill 11, the Marines are in worse trouble. The main Chinese effort seems to be crashing into the American position. Bombardment, wave, bombardment, wave, and several forward marine trenches are overrun in the first assault.

Marines are killed in their bunkers. Chinese infantry come pouring into a stretch of the main line. The Marines counterattack with what they have in the immediate reserve, but the position is close to being lost. It is at this moment that Sergeant Brian Cooper sitting with his Australian vicar section on hill 111 does something that would [music] in any other circumstances be called suicide.

He gets on the radio to the artillery and he calls the shellfire down on his own position down onto the top of the hill he is standing on down onto the trench he is standing in. He asks for variable time fuse so that the shells burst above him. He asks for it now in weight on every stick of ground where the Chinese have got a foothold on the summit because he knows those trenches are at that second full of enemy and empty of Marines.

The New Zealanders and the American gunners deliver. The air bursts detonate over hill 111 while Kooper and his gunners and the surviving Marines press themselves flat into the bottom of their trenches under the overhead cover. The Chinese in the open trench above them are hit by fragments from directly above. When the fire lifts, there are no Chinese left on the summit alive.

[music] That is how hill 111 is saved. by an Australian sergeant putting friendly artillery onto his own head. The attacks go on all night. [music] They lose their coherence, but they do not stop. Small parties keep pushing forward. Individual Chinese assault sections keep trying the wire. The Australian mortars keep answering. The counterbatter fire [music] keeps hammering the assembly areas across the valley.

It is only in the last black hour before dawn on the morning of the 25th of July that the shooting starts to thin out. Bugles fall silent. The illumination round stop going up in the trenches. The men do not stand down. They wait for it to come again. It does not. Not before daylight anyway. When first gray light comes over the Samichon Valley on the 25th of July, the men of two RAR look down from their parapets at the ground below hill [music] 121 and see for the first time what they have done in the night.

It is not a full accounting that will come later. But the wire is full. The slope is [music] full. The gully is full. There are Chinese soldiers dead where they stood up to throw grenades and dead where they fell running and dead where they lay down to change magazines and did not get back up.

The Australians count the dead they can see in front of them and then they [music] stop counting because you cannot count what will not stop. down on hill 111. When Sergeant Cooper looks out from his position at dawn, he sees the same thing, but worse. Because the ground he is looking at [music] is the ground he called the artillery down on.

He sees the summit littered with the men he killed to save his own trench. There is nothing to say about it. There is very little to say about any of it. In the D company, lines a runner is bringing hot tea around the section commanders. Someone is passing out biscuits. Somebody in a bunker with a wound is asking for a stretcher and being told to hold on.

This is the morning after the first night. The war is still on. The clock is still running. 36 hours to the armistice. The day of the 25th of July is not quiet. Chinese artillery drops onto the hook and stons through the whole afternoon. Not the volume of the night before, but steady ranging shots, harassing [music] fire, testing where the Australians have put their patched up wire back and where the new mortar positions are.

In between the shell bursts, in the trenches, [music] the men of two RA trade rumors. Somebody from battalion has come forward with the water and the ammunition. And somebody from battalion always knows something. The word [music] is that Panmunjum is done or nearly done. The word is that the ceasefire will be signed in the next day [music] or two, maybe tonight.

The word is that they are firing all this off because there will be no more war for anyone soon. In some trenches, the men are surprised by the word. In others, they say they already knew. It travels along the firesteps in the pauses between the incoming rounds. It is an eerie thing to sit in a trench under shellfire and be told the war is nearly over. It concentrates the mind.

[music] Every man in every bunker on the hook that afternoon does the sum whether he wants to or not. He sits there and he counts the hours between his position and the signing of the peace. And he thinks, [music] “Do not die tonight. Not tonight. Not for this ridge. Not for a ridge with no future. Not now.

[music] Not now. Not now.” And this is the pressure the officers are managing on the 25th of July. Because the men who know the war is almost over and the men who still have to hold the wire are the same men bring. Brigadier Wilton’s order still [music] stands. No patrols except those essential to the security of the hook.

But essential means what it always meant. Listening posts still have to be manned. [music] Forward observers still have to look at the ground. Section commanders still have to walk the parapet at last light and check that every fire step has a man on it. You cannot let the ridge think about tomorrow. The ridge has to think about tonight because the [music] Chinese, everybody knows, are going to come back.

12 hours to the resumption. Six. [music] At last light on the 25th of July, the Australians on the hook do all the things they did the night before. Stand to [music] ammunition checked, water in the guns, handsets in the fists of the signalers, fire plans laid on. New Zealand guns behind the ridge sighted [music] and ready.

American guns behind the marine line. The same illumination rounds stacked at the mortar positions. Grenades [music] stacked in the trenches and down the valley in front of them. In the gathering dark, [music] the Chinese assembly areas are filling up again. The same divisional assault, the same [music] axis, the same seam between the Commonwealth Division and the Marines, the same gully between Hill 121 and Hill 11.

[music] two nights in a row on the same ground with the same plan because the Chinese commander of the 137th division has been told that [music] the hook is to be taken before the piece is signed and there is one night left in which to take it. It starts the way the first night started. Small parties in the low ground.

Probes then at about the same hour the bombardment. But this time [music] everybody in the trenches knows what it is. There is no confusion, no firsttime shock. The men in the deco company forward [music] positions do not need to be told what is coming. When the shell fire lifts, they are already on the parapet.

The Chinese come out of the smoke exactly where they came out the night before, and the Bren guns and the vicar’s guns [music] and the 2-in mortars open on them from exactly the same fire steps, and the whistled corrections go into the same handsets [music] to reach the same New Zealand gunners behind the ridge. This time, however, the artillery answer is bigger because this time [music] the whole fire plan has been rehearsed 24 hours ago on live targets and everybody [music] knows the drill.

The New Zealanders lay down variable time fuse over the assault lanes in weights that men who were there will still be [music] trying to describe 50 years later. The American 11th Marines pour into the same lanes from their gun positions behind Hill 11. The British and Canadian and Australian gunners of the First Commonwealth Division [music] come in on top.

Somewhere in the record, it is written that the divisional artillery fired 13,500 rounds in support of the defenders on those two nights. 13,500 in an area a few kilometers wide. The Chinese reach the wire in front of Sea Company again. This time they do not get past it. They do not even get properly into it.

The air bursts catch the assault waves in the last 200 m of open slope. Men who watched it happen from the trenches on hill 121 will describe it as a curtain that came down and cut the assault apart in the air. The individual assault groups that push through anyway die on the wire. A few grenades come over into the forward Australian trenches.

Nowhere, nowhere, at any point on two ra’s front does a Chinese infantryman get into the Australian main position. The wire holds, the trench holds, the hill holds. On the Marines line, it is closer again. The Chinese put the weight of the second night’s assault, if anything, more heavily against the American positions because that is where they nearly broke through the night before.

And once again, the men of the seventh Marines are fighting for their forward trenches in the dark with grenades and bayonets. Once again, the artillery is [music] called down. Once again, the air bursts come. The Marines pay for the ground in blood, but they hold the ground. Boulder City holds. Hill 111 holds.

The gully holds. Nowhere along the whole two battalion front does the Chinese division get through. Nowhere. [music] At 3:00 in the morning of the 26th of July, in a command post somewhere on the other side of the Samishan Valley, a senior Chinese officer says the word that ends the last offensive of the Korean War. The attack is called off.

The 137th Division has been fought to a standstill. [music] The battalions that were pushed forward are pulled back over the ground they cannot hold and cannot even collect their dead from. The Bugles stop. The bombardment thins. In the forward trenches of Turra, the signalers listen to the artillery net and cannot quite believe what they are hearing, which is nothing.

The clock in the trench, the clock on the wall of the decomp command post, ticks quietly through the last hour before dawn. Nobody stands down. Nobody puts down a rifle. Every man on the parapet still waits for it to come back. It does not come back. Gray light rises on the 26th of July over the Samishon Valley for the second [music] time.

And this time it rises on the true accounting. This is the dawn image the war will keep. This is the picture the Australian War Memorial will use its own quiet [music] honest word for smashed. The men of two RA come up out of their bunkers and stand on the parapet and look down. The valley is not empty. The valley is not in any conventional sense [music] a valley.

It is a floor of dead men. The Australian estimate made in the days that follow, working through the ground and counting what could be [music] counted before the ceasefire took effect, puts the number at somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Chinese soldiers killed in front of the hook and along the Marines line. Wounded, they will estimate exceeded 10,000.

Because for every one man killed in that kind of shellfire, several more crawl or are carried away with wounds, [music] they will not all survive. Those are the United Nations numbers. On the Chinese side, in accounts written later, the 137th [music] Division put its total casualties at 886. Both numbers exist. Both numbers are in the record.

Neither has ever been reconciled. History has to hold them both. What is not disputed on either side of the valley is that at 3:00 in the morning of the 26th of July, a Chinese infantry division was pulled off the hook because it could not go on. It had come to take a ridge in the last week of the war. It had not taken the ridge.

It had left a great many of its men on the slope in front of the Australian wire and on the slope in front of the Marines wire. And it had gone back across the Samishon Valley to what would in 24 hours become the far side of a demilitarized zone that would still divide Korea 70 years later. And on the ridge on that morning, the accounting on the other side has to be spoken as well because this was a shared line.

In the trenches of two ra the officers add up the sums. [music] Five men killed, 24 wounded, five names. It is a small number for what happened in front of them. It is a very great number for the five families it belongs to. Down the ridge in the seventh Marines lines, the Americans add up their sums. 43 killed, 316 wounded.

Their price was worse because the weight of the assault fell harder on them and because the fighting inside the forward marine trenches [music] was handto hand for hours. 43 American Marines dead, 316 wounded [music] in the last two nights of a war that had been going for 3 years and 1 month. Those numbers [music] must be said next to the Australian numbers.

Those numbers are the reason the ridge was there in the morning to look down from. Five Australians, 43 Americans, two knights, one hill, 31 hours to the armistice. The day of the 26th of July on the hook is a strange day [music] because it is a day inside a war that everybody now knows is essentially over.

Chinese artillery still comes down in stons, not the bombardments of the two previous nights, but harassing fire, ranging shots. Australian counter battery goes out. Mortars respond. In the trenches, exhausted men clean weapons. Somewhere on the ridge, somebody makes tea in a mess tin over a hexamine block. And the smoke curls up into an afternoon sky that has at last cleared.

Stretcher parties bring wounded down. The dead go quietly wrapped in blankets in the back of Land Rovers. Along tracks the men [music] on those tracks have driven under fire a dozen times. The battalion is not stood down. Every fire step is still manned. Every listening post is still out. If a Chinese division came back tonight, [music] the battalion would fight it again.

But the Chinese division does not come back tonight. And the battalion in some corner of itself [music] that its officers cannot allow themselves to touch until the guns actually stop begins to understand that it has fought the last major action of the Korean War and that it has won. Down south in the heart at Panmanj, the clock is finally running out on the other side of the [music] line.

In the late morning of the 27th of July, at 10:00, the documents that have been prepared for weeks are laid out on a table [music] and the signatures are made. Not talking heads, not speeches, a pen, a hand, a page, and another [music] pen, and another hand, and another page. The armistice is signed. [music] It is not a peace treaty.

It has never been a peace treaty. It is a ceasefire. [music] It will still be a ceasefire unresolved decades later. But on that morning in that room, the signatures are enough. The war is going to end. The two clocks are at last 1:00. It ticks from 10:00 in the morning of the 27th of July toward 10 at night of the 27th of July. 12 hours between the signing and the effect.

12 hours in which any commander foolish enough to try to grab a last piece of ground will pay for it and get nothing. 12 hours in which the men in the trenches on the hook and in the trenches opposite the hook. Sit and count the seconds. In the Australian trenches, the word has arrived from battalion. The ceasefire [music] will come at 2200 hours.

10:00 at night local time. The men do not celebrate. The men do not do [music] anything. They stay in the trenches. They keep the firesteps manned because until 10:00 the war is on and nobody is going to be the last man killed. Nobody. 6 hours 3 1. At 10:00 [music] at night on the 27th of July 1953 on the hook above the Sammy Valley, the guns stop, [music] not all at once.

There are a few late shells in the last minutes on either side on ground of no importance to anybody. fired by gunners who wanted to have fired the last round of the war. Then the guns stop, the mortars [music] stop, the illumination rounds stop, the rifles stop. There is nothing to describe.

There is nothing to write down. There is only a silence in the low ground of the Samishon Valley that has not existed in that valley for 3 years. It sits on the ridge like weather. The men in the decomp trenches sit in it. The men on hill 121 sit in it. The Marines on Hill 111 sit in it. Sergeant Brian Cooper at his vicar’s gun on the American position [music] sits in it.

Nobody in any of those trenches on that night is going to be able to describe what that silence sounded [music] like. There is not a good word for it in the English language. It is the sound of no guns. That is all it is. Two nights before the same valley was a rolling wall of high explosive under the underside of the clouds. Now it is a valley of grass and [music] dead men and silence and the silence is the point.

The clock on the wall at Panm Moonjam and the clock in the trench above the Samishan Valley both stop at the same second at 10:00 at night [music] on the 27th of July 1953. In that same second, [music] the Korean War ends. Not the disagreement, not the division, not the demilitarized zone that will run through the middle of the peninsula for the rest of anybody in that trench’s life. Just the shooting.

The shooting ends. 2 days later, on the 28th of July, an Australian photographer named Douglas Bushby walks across the hook and takes pictures of the men of Turra standing upright on ground where standing upright would have got them killed a week earlier. In one of the photographs, diggers of the anti-tank platoon are carrying surplus ammunition down off the ridge, boxes of it, belts of it, [music] grenades in canvas bags, bringing it down out of the trenches they had lived in for 3 weeks, [music] wearing armored vests they no longer

needed and would not before the day was over be wearing anymore. In another photograph, a group of Australians simply walks along the top of the hook along the ground the Chinese division had died in front of [music] as if it were a country lane. Nobody in the photographs looks jubilant. Nobody in the photographs looks anything at all.

They look mostly tired. They look like men who have understood something quietly in the last week that they did not know before. And what those men understood, though almost none of them would ever have put it in these words, was that the ridge they held was the last ridge. That the war they were in was the last war of that kind.

The war of trenches and wire and fixed lines and bugles at midnight, the war their fathers had fought in France and their older brothers had finished in Europe 8 years earlier. that the ground under their boots on the 28th of July 1953 had 3 days earlier been the last piece of ground that mattered in a certain kind of war.

72 hours after the ceasefire on the 30th of July, the men of two RAR marched off the hook and back to the boundary of what was already being called the demilitarized zone. The battalion held Korea until the following spring. On the 6th of April 1954, two Ra sailed for home on a ship called the New Australia. They arrived at Brisbane on the 16th of April [music] and moved into Inoga barracks.

For its stand on the hook, the battalion was awarded a battle honor with a single word on it, Samishon. Just the name of the river below the ridge. Just the name of the low ground the 137th division had come across in the dark and had not in any meaningful sense come back from. Samishan one word a last battle honor of the last war of a certain century.

And so the story of the last night of the Korean War is in the [music] end the story of a small number of men on a small ridge doing an old and unfashionable thing extremely well. [music] It is the story of two raw 500 and something exhausted diggers on a scarred spur of hillside holding a piece of ground they had inherited a fortnight earlier from four previous owners.

It is the story of the seventh Marines beside them 43 of whom died so that the line could be held. It is the story of the New Zealand gunners of the 16th Field Regiment whose airburst shellfire cut the assault lanes in half and more than any single element of the defense killed a Chinese division.

It is the story of Sergeant Brian Cooper on Hill 111, an Australian with a vicer’s gun in a marine trench who called the artillery down onto his own head and saved an American hill. It is the story of Brigadier John Wilton at his headquarters who told his battalion commanders on the 23rd of July to take no chances they did not have to take because he could see the peace coming and he wanted his men to see it too.

It is the story of Panunjam 30 km away where clean hands in a clean hut were signing pages while dirty hands on a ridge were holding a line so that the [music] pages could mean something. It is the story of two clocks that were in the end the same clock. They held the hook for a war they knew was ending. They held it for a valley that would be handed back the day after they held it.

They held it for a piece that arrived at 10:00 at night on the 27th of July 1953 in the form of a silence in the [music] low ground. They held it because the men to their left, the Marines of the 7th regiment, held Hill 11 and they knew it. They held it because the gunners behind them in three armies and one navy of shells laid down variable time fuse over the killing ground of the Samishon like a roof.

They held it because a sergeant at his vicar’s gun called the artillery onto the trench he was standing in. They held it because Brigadier John Wilton had told them to hold it and because their fathers in 1918 and their uncles in 1942 had held ridges very much like it. They held it because in the last week of a war that had already gone on too long, a Chinese division was ordered to take it and could not.

They held the last hill of a war that was already over. And when the guns stopped at 10 at night on the 27th of July above the Samishon Valley on the ridge called the Hook, five men from two R were not standing there to see it. Their names are on the record. Their names are on the memorials. Their names belong to the last five Australians killed in the Korean War in the last three days of the last war of a particular century on ground that was frozen into the map the following morning.

Five men, 24 wounded, one battle honor on a color and the silence of the Samishon Valley on the night of the 27th of July, which is in the end the only monument to any of it that anybody who was there ever really trusted. That is the story of how Australian diggers [music] on a ridge above a river in Korea stopped a Chinese division in the last battle of the Korean War.

That is the story of the two clocks. That [music] is the story of the hook.