Around the middle of December, after a couple of days at the transit camp at Pusan we embarked on trains to take us north to our base areas. The trains had wooden seats and no windows and, right in the middle of the winter, it was colder than you can imagine. We had to travel roughly 300 miles, a journey which the present day high-speed trains do in less than three hours, but in our case the trip took almost 24 hours, punctuated by frequent starts and stops. I can still vividly remember nodding off now and then and waking up shivering. Our haversack rations were, of course, consumed during the first couple of hours, and in some cases before we even entrained(!), so we were pretty hungry when we eventually got to our destination, somewhere near Seoul, as I recall, and were packed into US Army Deuce-and-a-halfs (their equivalent of our 3-tonners) for the final leg of the journey to our base camps.

A few words here about the Korean winter. The cold was unlike anything we had ever experienced before, really penetrating and numbing. Morning parade started with everybody jogging on the spot and patting each other on the body. Inspections were still held but held quickly. To prevent the oil and petrol in the vehicles freezing up, all vehicle engines were kept running through the night, with sentries responsible for re-starting any engine that stopped. Although not common, forty-gallon drums of fuel were known to freeze solid on occasion. Beer at the canteen came in bottles (Asahi beer from Japan, we pronounced it Ah-Shy) and froze solid if the canteen was left unheated. Very few soldiers undressed to go to bed; in fact it was commonplace to put more clothing on before retiring. One of our tents acquired a small pup from somewhere, called Skoshie, Korean for small. It was found one morning frozen to death at the tent entrance, where it had been unable to find its way back inside.

The Batteries and RHQ were all located in different locations some miles apart, although 87 Bty and 179 Bty were fairly adjacent, about 600 yards walk over a small hill. Accommodation consisted of 160lbs tents for officers and senior ranks, and standard marquees for the rank and file. In addition, there were Quonset huts serving as Canteen/Bar, Dining Hall and Officers’ and Sergeants’ Messes.

Squaddies were billeted about twelve to a marquee, each with a standard issue steel bed; bedding was an inner and an outer sleeping bag. Every marquee had two pot-bellied space heater stoves, with the stovepipe going through the tent roof via a steel protective plate. For safety reasons it was strictly forbidden for stoves to be burning after lights out, so the place was really cold first thing in the morning, and getting up and ready for parade was a bit of an ordeal. My National Service pal, Pete Barber from Rochdale, and me used to take turns to get up first and dash to the cookhouse for a mug of tea and a basin of hot water. Whoever went for the water got to wash first, others in the tent often used it after the pair of us. Hot water wasn’t always available, in which case two mugs of tea would be brought back, one for drinking and the other one for shaving.

The stoves were designed to use diesel fuel, fed via a rubber tube from an upside-down jerrican on a stand outside the tent, but we quickly discovered that petrol got the thing going much quicker and hotter. The trouble was that the stove and its chimney could get red-hot really quickly if nobody was there to keep an eye on it. We had two marquees burnt to the ground in 179 Bty before it was declared on Orders as a Court Martial offence to use petrol to fuel a stove. We had no more fires after that, but we still used petrol occasionally whenever we reckoned we could get away with it, word spreading rapidly from tent to tent if the BOS was on his rounds.

To be continued…………………..