Abstract
Ray Rogers was a signalman. He came to Korea in 1950 at the outset of the war. Being a signalman, Ray had a radio strapped to his back with an antenna sticking up like a target for the enemy. He talks about combat in a mobile war, the time when he came close to severe injury or death, and lighter moments of the war when he enjoyed American peanut butter or a beer. Ray’s story comes complete with descriptions of the landscape to match the trauma.
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Notes
- 1.
Upon reflection, Ray believes the PRC77 came into use nearer the end of the war, and the no. 31 radio set he used was actually a modified version of the American SCR300. It weighed approximately 38 pounds.
- 2.
Bruce Bairnsfather of the Royal Warwickshire regiment was a humourist and cartoonist famous for a character, named “Old Bill.” Bairnsfather was hospitalized with shell shock and hearing loss after the second battle of Ypres in 1915. His best-known cartoon had the catchphrase, “If you knows of a better ole, go to it!”
- 3.
Rogers had a further recollection on the matter that he related via email: We made it in to the foothills at the start of the pass but completely outgunned we had to withdraw, I was still trying to locate my OC, but as our numbers were getting less and less, I guessed that he had already moved back and so I decided that it was time for me to go as well. It was when I was passing the ruins of a Korean cottage and a voice spoke to me was my first meeting with Titch May, who was lying at the foot of its picket fence. I asked him why he wasn’t moving back, because the Chinese couldn’t have been far behind us. He replied that he hadn’t seen Corporal Miller and Charley Barnes, the Bren gun team, and he was not going to leave until he knew they were OK. In all conscience, I couldn’t leave him on his own and so I settled down beside him at the foot of the fence. We hadn’t been there long when a mighty roar coming from behind us and heading towards the pass was an American fighter plane obviously looking to get revenge on the Chinese. Flying low he opened up his machine guns and showered us with splinters as he blasted the tops off the fence, frightening the hell out of us. Obviously, he had mistaken us for the enemy, but that was enough for us to decide it was time to leave. We made it back to the others in time to regroup for a fresh attack the next day; without our efforts in keeping the pass open, the carnage would have been far worse. Something else that I learned that day: as far as trench-mates went, I couldn’t do any better than that little gutsy bugger, Titch May. As the Australian phrase goes, “He was as game as Ned Kelly,” and I never knew his Christian name!
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© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
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Rogers, R. (2023). Sergeant Raymond Rogers. In: Cullinane, M.P., Johnston-White, I. (eds) A Forgotten British War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10051-2_17
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