Les Peate - Korean War - Army

My name is Les Peate, and I'm a veteran of the Korean War. I served as an infantryman, I was on the line for something like 15 or 16 months, and the conditions, quite frankly, were pretty bad. We lived in holes in the ground which we dug ourselves, called hootches, that were very cold in winter. They were infested with lice, with rats, with bugs, and they were usually waterlogged in the bottom. We heated them with stoves which we made ourselves, they were a makeshift thing which worked on a drip-feed from a jerry-can full of gasoline or diesel fuel. They preferred diesel fuel because it was less likely to explode, but we couldn't always get it. And these would keep us fairly warm, but not very. Lighting, of course, was candles. The winter was very, very cold. We were issued charcoal burners which we would have in our slit trenches when we were on guard at night. We usually did two hours on and four hours off. The purpose of this was not to keep us warm, but to stop the working parts of our weapons from freezing, because the oil on our Bren guns, Stens, and other automatic weapons would freeze if we didn't keep them warm.

This was more or less the sort of existence we had. The positions were on top of the hills. Everything had to be carried up, that included our ammunition, our water, our supplies, and, in the case of most platoons, a case of Japanese beer. The rations were what was known as "sea rations", these were an American issue, and each day you got a box which contained three what they referred to as meat units, perhaps ground meat and spaghetti, hamburger patties, chicken stew, ham and lima beans, pork and beans - which was a euphemism because there were a lot of beans but there was very little pork - and also you get a can which contains, which was called a "B Unit" this contained things like crackers, a chocolate disk, can of jam, cocoa powder, coffee powder, sugar, and powdered milk. To open these sea rations each box cam with a can opener, quite a handy little gizmo, it was small enough to wear on your chain with your dog tags. It's very effective. It's more effective, in fact, than most of the commercial can openers you buy, and I still have mine today. So we didn't do too badly as far as food was concerned. I like to keep the can opener because it's a reminder of the way that we ate, the things that we did, and our life in the hole in the ground.

We probably suffered more from the attempts to help us, because we had bugs we were constantly being sprayed, both our quarters, ourselves, our weapon pits, with DDT in either powder or liquid form. One of the things that's been happening to Korean War veterans since the war is that this DDT has had quite an effect on our systems; we've had some people who've been really affected by this.

There was quite a propaganda war in Korea, really the people on both sides came from the same stock, they were the same kind of people, and they were even related in some cases, and it was merely an accident of geography that made some people North Koreans and some people South Koreans. There were quite a lot of defections, it was hard to know who was who. Both sides were encouraging members of the other side to defect to their side, and one of the things that the Americans and South Koreans would do to try and persuade the North Koreans to defect to the South, they would fly over there and they would drop a bunch of propaganda leaflets or surrender leaflets, safe conduct passes. To make these attractive one side was printed to look like a 100 won bill. How effective it was I don't know, we did get some people coming waving these things.

Les Peate on the Digital Archive