By John Redmond
The Royal Asiatic Society Korean Branch (RASKB) will host a special tour of the Imjin River honoring the greatest offensive of the Korean War on June 1.
On April 22, 1951, dubbed “the Armageddon North of Seoul,” at a key breakthrough point on the Imjin River, the 1st battalion of the
Regiment was cut off, surrounded on an isolated hill and wiped out.
On this day, the greatest offensive of the Korean War was unleashed.
“The story of a band of outnumbered men, holding a key pass through the hills before being overwhelmed after a last stand, has been compared to Thermopylae, and U.S. general and 8th Army commander James Van Fleet called the
’s action, ‘The greatest example of unit bravery in modern warfare,’” states a press release.
RASKB council member Andrew Salmon, historian and author of “To the Last Round: The Epic British Stand on the Imjin River, Korea, 1951” will guide the tour.
He will brief on both the tactical and strategic pictures, presenting maps, photographs and paintings, as he reveals what it was like to fight China’s awesome “human wave.”
The group will overlook the ford on the Imjin, then visit “Castle Site.” Guests will enter a Confucian shrine where an unknowing Lieutenant Phil Curtis took communion that Sunday morning, and stand on the spot where, just hours later, he died and was posthumously awarded a Victoria Cross.
Salmon will present a theory as to why this young man acted so heroically.
The group will then visit the brigade artillery position where Chinese attackers were repelled. In the main valley, the tour will hear about hand-to-hand combat, premonitions of death and visit the backstop position overrun in the last hours.
The group will pass the spot where Colonel Kingsley Foster was killed with his rearguard at a Chinese ambush laid on the brigade’s line of retreat.
The tour will finish at the Gloucester memorial park at Solma-ri, where Andrew will recount the doomed battalion’s final hours.
Tour-goers will meet at 9 a.m. in front of Yongsan Post Office (subway line number 4, Sinyongsan Station, at exit 1). The drive to the battlefield, near Jeoksong, takes almost an hour.
The group will dine at a country restaurant located on the battlefield.
The cost is 58,000 won for members and 69,600 won for non-members.