BARON MURCHISON OF HAN

By RONALD McKIE

In Korea's Siberian winter the Han is a highway of ice almost all along the 38th parallel. In summer it moves, swift and black—a dirty evil river—through a hot dry countryside to the Yellow Sea.

But the Han does not merge with the sea as a river should. It loses itself in a spiderweb estuary of narrow channels, low islands and tidal mud banks. At high water—and high it is for the tide in the Han lifts 28 feet—the estuary is five miles across, but at low tide the water flows meanly among a wasteland of temporary islands and stinking mud.

The Han estuary is no place for ships, even baby ones, to move and manoeuvre, but in Korea, where many concepts of war had to be discarded, the Han became a mobile stage for some of the most unconventional and gallant actions in naval warfare.

The battles of "Operation Han" were unconventional because the ships which fought them ceased to be ships and became more like amphibious tanks than anything else. And the battles were brave because men fought at point-blank range against land armament which ranged from 75-mm. guns and heavy mortars down to light machine guns and small arms.

Murchison Gunners Hauling Back Barrels after action in the Han River Estuary.

"Operation Han" was no war of broadsides at ten miles. It was a Little Ship affair which began in July 1931, and went on for many months. It began when the Chinese pulled back beyond the line of the lmjin River and the Allied Naval Command decided to send their frigates into the Black Han, if they could get them there, to play hide and seek among the creeks and mud banks while bombarding across part of the Communist Yellow Sea flank.

Fourteen ships took part in this long, tedious and dangerous operation which was planned to extend the extreme range of Allied land bombardment many miles into enemy territory. The ships, all under the command of Rear- Admiral A. K. Scott-Moncrieff, R.N., were English, Australian, New Zealand, American and South Korean. They were the English "Bay" ships—Cardigan, Morecambe, St. Brides, Mounts—and Black Swan, Amethyst and Comas, the Kiwi frigates Rotoiti, Hawea and Taupo', the U.S. ships Abnaki and Weirs, and the frigates and patrol boats of South Korea. But the veteran of them all was the Royal Australian Navy frigate Murchison (Lieutenant-Commander Allen Dollard) which spent more time inside the Han than any other and brought great distinction to its navy and its country.

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