"Kerry monument unveiled to honour 35 dead of the 'forgotten war' in Korea," this newspaper declared last Wednesday.
We reported of the 29 Irishmen who had been killed serving with the US army in Korea over 50 years ago, and also of five priests and one Anglican nun who had been murdered by communist forces; and in their honour, a memorial was unveiled in Lixnaw, Co Kerry, a week ago.
Well, we should all be glad that the hitherto forgotten are remembered, especially the victims of war, but Lixnaw does not tell the whole story. For the overwhelming majority of Irishmen killed in the Korean War were not in the US army, but in Irish regiments of the British army - and they are not commemorated at Lixnaw at all.
Kerry is Kerry, I know, and uniquely in Munster it sometimes believes itself to be part of the Occupied Six Counties, grinding under the oppression of the SAS, the Orange Order, Lord Brookeborough, the Penal Laws, Oliver Cromwell, the Famine - raging at this very moment around Tralee - and of course the Black and Tans, still there in strength. Which is probably why one of Kerry's TDs is the bearded boatman, Old Semtex Ferris, the bore with the oar.
But it is hard to believe that Kerry's often curious version of national identity could have been consciously responsible for excluding the far greater number of Irishmen who perished in Korea simply because they wore uniform of the crown. No, this must have been amnesia at its most powerfully authentic. To paraphrase the lapidary words of the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld: There are things we know we have forgotten. But there are also the forgotten forgottens, the ones we've forgotten we've forgotten.
The Irish dead of Korea, especially of the Royal Ulster Rifles and the Irish Hussars, clearly fall into that category. This is doubly strange, for what distinguished their sacrifice was that it was, like that of their fellow Irishmen a decade later at Niemba, on a UN mandate. Korea could not be presented as an imperial adventure: these Irishmen served alongside Thais and Turks, Filipinos and Finns, Americans and Australians in the first great world resistance to totalitarian aggression since the end of the second World War.
The mighty Chinese night assault of January 1951 was conducted in silence, with two divisions approaching the positions held by the Ulster Rifles. Aware that something strange was happening beyond their barbed wire, the Ulsters sent out an armoured patrol to investigate, and it was never seen again.
Meanwhile Chinese infantry were stealthily infiltrating the Rifles' position, killing and capturing whatever Irish soldiers they found.
On their left flank, the US 35th infantry division fled, so the Ulster Rifles were left unprotected. Chinese troops soon commanded both sides of the road down which lay the Rifles' sole line of retreat. The American commander General Ridgeway was desperate to secure their safe withdrawal, but the local British commander - harshly but probably rightly - decided that the Ulsters must fend for themselves. To send other units to their rescue would simply have been to despatch all to a common ruin.
The main body of the Ulsters - some 300 men - were killed or captured. An entire troop of Irish Hussar tanks that had been placed to protect the Ulster Rifles from close attack was wiped out. A Chinese officer asked for the Ulster's commanding officer to identify himself from the ranks of the captured. Major Tony Blake from Wicklow - a survivor of Arnhem six years earlier - stepped forward, as did his Irish batman; the Chinese officer promptly executed them both. For the surviving Irish POWs, ahead lay a mid-winter death-march to prison camps, brainwashing and torture.
The ordeal of the rest of the Ulster Rifles, and other regiments, was only beginning as they fought a bloody retreat through the human-wave attacks of the Chinese. As fierce an enemy was the weather, as little parcels of men fought their way back to the allied rearguard, with the temperature falling to -380 Celsius, and an evil wind from Mongolia making conditions quite insufferable. Men who were left behind froze to death where they lay.
After a year of brutal, bloody war, the Irish Hussars were replaced by another armoured Irish regiment, the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards. Meanwhile, the battered Royal Ulster Rifles had made good their losses, largely with a draft of men from the Royal Irish Fusiliers. Yet of all these Irishmen who fell, including 100 Ulster Riflemen, killed in action, Lixnaw is silent.
Yet paradoxically, it is Lixnaw's commemoration of the six religious who died in Korea which contains an inadvertent link with the Royal Ulster Rifles. One of them, Father Jack O'Brien, was a Columban missionary who had been captured and summarily murdered by Korean Communists at the Franciscan Monastery in Taejon, in 1950.
However, he was not just a missionary. Six years earlier that same Jack O'Brien had been a chaplain to the 2nd Royal Ulster Rifles in the Normandy landings, serving with the battalion as it fought through to Germany and victory. For his indomitable humour and unswerving courage, he was much loved by all ranks, regardless of religion. He at least is remembered at Lixnaw; not so the many scores of his fellow Irishmen, who perished in the same war which took his life, while serving, as he had once done, in the uniform of the crown.
I had truly thought such amnesiac days were over. But in Kerry? Obviously not.