| Nov 14, 2013


Youtube interview of Bill Robinson here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbItySUOAT0

The battle for Hill 187 resulted in the deaths of 26 Canadian soldiers. Twenty-seven more were injured and seven were taken prisoners. It was the worst engagement of the entire war for the Royal Canadian Regiment. The losses were suffered by the regiment's newly arrived Third Battalion, whose numbers were beefed up with soldiers from other regiments who had not yet served enough time to be sent home.

According to an account of the battle in the Korea Veterans Association website, this particular battle has ever received its due, a forgotten battle from Canada's forgotten war.

“This unfortunate tragedy, the Battle of Hill 187 – which should be an unforgettable incident in the Korean War - was not even properly reported in Canadian newspapers. Censors in Korea wanted to keep the enormity of the losses covered up during the last months of the peace talks,” (Korean Veterans Association Newsletter, May 3, 2011)

One of the soldiers who were wounded at the Battle of Hill 187 was Bill Robinson, who is well known locally as the long-serving, sometimes combative, Portland District councilor in the South Frontenac Council.

On May 2, 1953, Bill Robinson was one of the soldiers in the trenches during the Battle of Hill 187. Although most of the soldiers in his regiment had only arrived in Korea weeks earlier, he had already been fighting for eight months and had been assigned to reinforce the under-manned Third Battalion of the Royal Canadians.

The attack was the fiercest he ever experienced in Korea. At one point a shell blast hit in the corner of his trench, sending him flying. He suffered a concussion and an injury to his ear, and he has never recovered his hearing in that ear.

The battle itself raged on for two days. The account published by the Korean War Veteran Association describes in some detail how the Third Battalion was under-manned and, in the writer's view, unnecessarily exposed to enemy fire at the time. And the battle has never been talked about very much in the intervening 60 years.

“How must this horrid battle have haunted the hearts and the minds of those caught up in it? Not just for weeks of months or even years, but for decades?

“There were no definitive news reports about this battle. There was a terribly inept article, diced and scratched by censors, that appeared in a few Canadian papers two months later. It told no story; only gave an impression that a company of the newly arrived Royal Canadian Regiment had been attacked.

Through the years, tales told by those who were there on the night of May 2/3, 1953 have fallen on deaf ears. Those willing to talk about it finally gave up and went silent. Nobody was interested. Anyone with vague interest believed the war had pretty much ended long before the spring of 1953 and those on the ground in Korea were mostly a symbolic force, not actually fighting. So the story of the brave 3rd Royals who fought their enemy in pitched battle soon after arriving in Korea, is not only forgotten; it was not even told.” (KVA newsletter, May 3, 2011)

As for Bill Robinson, the war did not end after the Battle of Hill 187. Rather than being sent back home, he continued on in Korea until the end of the war.

“A doctor cleaned the blood out of my ear and said I was ok. It was only after that I found out he was a psychiatrist, not an MD.”

He remained with the battalion, and on patrol, for four more months. On July 27, 1953, when the fighting ended, Robinson said his battalion only found out on the morning that the armistice had been signed. But the peace did not take effect until after midnight, and the Chinese fighters kept firing all day and all night. “That was a long patrol, none of us wanted to go down on the last day before the whole thing was going to be over,” he said.

Bill was 18 when he joined the army in Kingston in 1952.

“It was just an adventure in my mind at the time,” he said.

Sixty years after the end of the Korean War, as Bill Robinson laid a wreath at the Sydenham Cenotaph on behalf of Korean War veterans for the 38th time, and joined the procession of veterans who pinned their poppy to a wreath at the end of the ceremony, Bill said he still remembers “all the bad parts of the war; all the memories are still there, and they come back from time to time, when there is a sudden noise, something like that.”

Bill remained in the military until 1969. By that time he was well qualified as a lineman and could have worked for Bell or Hydro, but neither were interested in taking on his military pension, so he worked for the prison service in various capacities until he retired in 1988.

He worked for his wife, who held the management contract at the Verona waste site, until recently.

He has served on South Frontenac Council as the Portland Rep since amalgamation in 1998.


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