'Fear and gratitude': Iconic photo captures Canada's role in a forgotten war

Ottawa Citizen

4 hours ago

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Many years later, in 1994, a Korean War exhibit at the Canadian War Museum would bring to light the minor controversy over the soldier's identity.
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Pte. Herbert Norris of Kingston, Ont., was also a signaller in Charles Company in Korea, and had been giving talks about the war and identifying himself as subject of The Face of War. This came to wide attention through media coverage of the exhibit, including the museum's presentation of a framed print to Norris at a gala. Faced with a growing scandal, the museum looked more closely into it, and based on evidence from archives, police facial recognition experts, and the confirmation of both Tomelin and the person who processed the film, concluded they had made a mistake. The Face of War was Matthews.
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It left Norris feeling disrespected, he would later tell the Kingston Whig-Standard. He was not the only Korea veteran to feel this way. Even during the war, when U.S. President Harry Truman called it a 'police action,' rather than a war that had not been formally declared, many veterans of Korea felt their contributions were inadequately respected.
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Korea was an unpopular war, and Sayle said it was a main reason the Democrats lost the 1952 U.S. election. It was especially worrying to Canada, though in a slightly different way, Sayle said.
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The Korean War was 'exceptionally significant' in international relations, Sayle said. It transformed European security. It led to the deployment of Canadian and American forces in Europe with NATO, anticipating conflict with the Soviet Union.
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'The actual continental commitment begins because of the attack in Korea,' Sayle said.
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So Canadians were alarmed to see American forces bombing defenceless villages in Korea, and came to wonder whether they would also fight that way if hot war came again to Europe. The concern reached the cabinet level, and Sayle shared a declassified message from Canada's minister of national defence to his American counterparts, warning of the 'magnificent ammunition' for enemy propaganda and the risk to military morale posed by using heavy artillery and large bombers against villages; by naming missions things like 'Operation Killer;' and by using racist slurs for South Koreans, the same ones that would later be notorious among American soldiers in Vietnam.
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There is a valid argument to be made that Canada was fighting to protect South Korea, Sayle said, but the way the conflict played out 'robs the war of any satisfying heroic narrative, especially because it ends in armistice rather than true peace. There's no closure for the public. There's no celebration, no Victory in Korea day,' Sayle said.
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Over the following years, as Korea slipped from immediate memory into modern history, there was another shooting war in Southeast Asia that coloured its remembrance. Korea was in that sense 'in the shadow of Vietnam,' Sayle said.
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In the 1980s and 1990s, when there was an 'explosion of memory' of the Second World War, as Sayle puts it, this sharpened the contrast with Korea, leaving its veterans sometimes overlooked, out of the Remembrance Day spotlight.
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'Just because of the historical nature and context I think we can understand why it was forgotten, but that doesn't excuse the forgetting of these veterans and their experiences,' Sayle said. As this photo illustrates and reminds, any individual soldier's experience of war is 'indivisible,' Sayle said.