On the morning of the 5th of October, 1951, 700 Australians were climbing a hill that the United States Army had already tried to take twice and failed both times. Fog sat so thick on the slopes above the Imjin River that a man couldn’t see the soldier 10 paces ahead of him, and that was exactly how the Australians wanted it.

Every meter they climbed unseen was a meter closer to the Chinese trenches before the first shot went off. The hill was called Maryang San on the ground and Hill 317 on the map, and it rose 200 m straight out of the valley floor. Every gun the Chinese had up there was already laid on the ground below. The Chinese had turned Maryang San into a fortress over the summer.

 Trenches were cut along the ridgeline, bunkers roofed with pine logs and packed earth, machine gun posts sighted to cover every approach, and mortars ranged onto the open ground below. >>  >> Two full battalions held the position, dug in and waiting, with more men in reserve on the ridges behind. >>  >> Anyone coming up had to cross bare slopes in full view into interlocking fire uphill  the whole way.

It was one of the strongest positions the Australians would face in the entire Korean War. Before the Australians ever looked at it, the Americans had tried. Twice United  States troops had gone at Maryang San across the valley, and twice they’d been thrown back down the slope they came up.

 The ground beat them as much as the Chinese  did. A frontal push over open floor uphill into prepared fire gave the defenders everything and the attackers nothing. After the second failure, the hill sat there, quiet and held, a gap in the United Nations line that nobody had worked out how to close. By the autumn of 1951, it carried a reputation,  and the reputation was that Maryang San couldn’t be taken.

 On the night of the 4th of October, the Australians were told the hill  was theirs to take. 700 men of the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, 3 RAR, checked their weapons, loaded up with grenades and water, and waited for the dark to thin. Their commanding officer had spent days on the ground, and he’d decided the obvious way up was the wrong way.

Long before first light, the column moved off along a line of low knolls that ran into the hill from the flank, well clear of the valley floor where the Americans had come to grief. The fog came down with them and swallowed the whole battalion. For hours it worked.  3 RAR climbed in silence, company behind company, close enough to the Chinese positions to hear movement in the trenches above them.

Then, mid-morning, the fog began to burn off. It lifted the way a curtain goes up,  and it left the leading Australian companies standing in the open on a bare slope, a few hundred meters below the Chinese  line, with nowhere left to hide. Up in the trenches, the machine gunners had the leading Australians cold,  out in the open and still short of the wire.

For a moment, nothing happened at all.  By the autumn of 1951, the Korean War had stopped moving. The front had frozen into a line of hills and trenches that ran across the peninsula, and at Panmunjom, the two sides had sat down to argue about a ceasefire. Every commander on the United Nations side understood the same thing.

Whatever ground they held when the talking stopped, they would hold for good. So, the last weeks before an armistice became a scramble to grab the high ground and the observation that came with it. Along the Imjin River, the best of that high ground was a ridge the Chinese already owned.

 The push to take that ground was called Operation Commando. In the first week of October 1951, the United States 1st Corps attacked all along its front to drive the Chinese back onto a new line, the one the maps would call the Jamestown line, >>  >> and the first Commonwealth division held the left of it. Inside the Commonwealth sector, the hardcore of the objective was two hills that sat side by side above the Imjin.

Hill 355, a bald dome the troops had nicknamed Little Gibraltar, and Maryang San a couple of kilometers to the east. Take both and the Chinese lost their eyes over the whole river valley. Leave either one and its guns could still sweep everything moving below. This was a Commonwealth show and the Australians were one battalion inside it.

The 28th Commonwealth Brigade put three infantry battalions into the attack. The King’s Own Scottish Borderers and the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry drew Little Gibraltar and 3 RAR drew Maryang San. Even that split wasn’t clean because C Company of the Australian battalion under Major Jack Gerke went in alongside the Scots on the approaches to Little Gibraltar and took a knuckle of ground the troops called Baldy.

The Australians were the spearhead on the harder hill and they went up as part of a coalition with British guns behind them and British battalions on their flank. The Australians who drew Maryang San were veterans of all of this. 3 RAR had been in Korea since the back end of 1950 and it had spent the year in some of the war’s worst fighting.

The battalion had chased the enemy north in 1950, held the line through the Chinese entry into the war, and in April at Kapyong it had blunted a Chinese offensive that was driving toward Seoul. By October the men had a hard year behind them. They knew what a dug-in Chinese hill cost and they knew the difference a decent plan made to the bill.

 The ground itself explains most of the battle. North of the Imjin, the hills run in a tangle of steep spurs and narrow ridgelines, bare on top and cut by deep gullies. Maryang San stood at the eastern end of the line, 200 m above the valley, with ridges running east and west off the summit like the spokes of a wheel. Little Gibraltar sat a couple of kilometers to the west, lower but just as bald and just as heavily held.

Between and around them, the Chinese had spent months digging until the whole ridge was one connected position of trenches and bunkers that could pass fire from one hill to the next.  On the other side of the wire, the hill belonged to the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army, the force that had  poured into Korea a year earlier and driven the United Nations back down the peninsula.

 Two battalions held Maryang San itself, with  more troops on the ridges behind and artillery ranged from further back. These were  hard, experienced soldiers who’d built the position to be held and meant to keep it. They had the numbers to counterattack in real strength the moment any of it slipped. Whoever took Maryang San would have to take it fast and then survive  everything the Chinese threw in to win it back.

 Maryang San mattered even more than Little Gibraltar and it had already made a name for itself. Earlier in 1951, United States troops had attacked it and been driven off, then attacked it again and been driven back a second time. Both times the pattern was the same. The Americans crossed the valley and climbed the bare face straight into the Chinese fire >>  >> and both times the hill did to them what it had been built to do.

By the time the Commonwealth Division took over the sector, Maryang San had a reputation as a position that couldn’t be carried. The reason was the shape of the ground. Maryang San rose steep and almost bare out of the valley, its slopes swept clear of cover and every weapon on it sighted to catch a man climbing up from the floor.

A frontal attack meant crossing open ground in full view, and fighting uphill into interlocking machine gun fire the whole way, with the defenders looking straight down onto the attackers. The Chinese had built the whole position around that open approach. Nothing about it had changed when the order to take the hill landed on the Australian battalion instead of an American one.

 The man who looked at that problem and refused it was Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hassett. Hassett had taken  command of 3 RAR earlier that year, and he’d already brought the battalion through hard fighting. He was a professional  soldier with a long war behind him. In the Second World War, he’d fought the Japanese in the mountains of New Guinea,  where Australian battalions had learned to take high ground the hard country way, by moving along the ridgelines instead of grinding up the face of them.

He’d watched good commanders use ground and timing to get in among a dug-in enemy before that enemy could bring his full weight to bear. Korea handed him the same problem on different hills. The order that came down to Hassett was the frontal one, the same push across the valley that had already failed. He argued against it.

 He went to his divisional commander and asked to throw the plan out and do it his own way. And he got his way. Instead of crossing the valley into the teeth of the position, 3 RAR would swing wide and come at Maryang San along a spur of low knolls that ran into it from the northwest. The attack would go in at first light, out of the morning gloom, from a direction the Chinese weren’t watching.

Hassett wanted to be in among the forward trenches before the defenders worked out where he’d come from. The plan Hassett built around that idea was careful. The battalion would move onto its start line in darkness and go in at first light, in the gray before the sun was properly up, when the defenders on the crest could see least.

Commonwealth field guns and the battalion’s own mortars were registered on the summit and the reverse slopes to cut the position off from help once the assault started. Each company had its own stretch of the spur, and they would take the ridge in bounds, one clearing a set of trenches while the next passed through toward the following one.

It asked a great deal of tired men on bad ground, and all of it depended on a surprise that could vanish the moment the weather turned. It depended above everything else on staying hidden long enough to close the distance. On the 5th of October, hours before dawn, 3 RAR moved off the start line and began feeling its way along the knolls in the dark.

 Then the fog rolled in and made the cover complete. The Australians climbed through gray nothing, section by section, so close to the Chinese line by mid-morning that the forward men could hear the defenders talking and moving in the trenches above them. The plan was working better than Hassett had any right to expect. Then the fog lifted and the leading companies were caught in the open below the trenches.

For a few seconds, the Chinese did nothing. Whether it was surprise at Australians appearing on that flank or confusion in the sudden light, the defenders held their fire just long enough. 3 RAR used those seconds and charged. The forward companies went straight up the last of the slope and into the first line of trenches before the guns could sweep them off it and the fighting turned hand-to-hand along the diggings.

The first trenches went in a short, savage burst of close work. Australians cleared the bunkers with grenades and Owen guns, working along the line one bay at a time, while Bren gunners fired over their heads onto the Chinese reserves coming up behind. Commonwealth artillery walked shells across the upper slopes to seal the position off from reinforcement.

The noise on the ridge was constant. Small arms and grenades and the crash of the guns and through it 3 RAR kept pushing upward. By the end of the first day, the Australians had a grip on the lower position and the Chinese had pulled back toward the summit. The first night on the hill was cold  and loud.

 3 RAR held what it had taken and waited for the Chinese to come back for it while the wounded went down the slope in the dark  and ammunition came up. Nobody on that ridge slept much. Above them, the crest was still Chinese  and the hardest part of the climb, the last stretch up the narrow spine of the ridge  to the summit, was still to come.

At first light on the 6th of October, the battalion pushed on into the part of the hill that mattered most and cost the most. The upper ridge was a different fight from the lower slopes. It narrowed to a spine barely wide enough to move along, climbing  toward the crest with a steep drop on either side and Chinese fire coming down the length of it.

3 RAR took it a position at a time. One company clearing a set of bunkers while the next passed through toward the following ones. The Chinese fought for every meter and fell back slowly toward the top. Water and ammunition had to come up  the same exposed spine the men had just cleared, carried on the backs of soldiers who took the wounded back down the  same way.

 The final push for the summit came on the 7th of October. Under cover of the guns, the leading company went at the last Chinese positions on the peak and after a sharp fight at close quarters, the defenders broke and pulled off the top. By the afternoon, the Australian battalion stood on the crest of a hill the United States Army had failed to take twice.

The neighboring attack had gone in as well and little Gibraltar had fallen to the Scots and the Australians of C Company. The high ground along that stretch  of the Imjin belonged to the Commonwealth for the first time. Holding it turned out to be the hard part. The Chinese command didn’t accept the loss of Maryang San and threw fresh troops at it almost at once.

Through the 7th and into the night, the counterattacks came up the  slopes in waves covered by mortar and shellfire meant to swamp the Australians before they could turn the captured trenches around >>  >> and dig in. Flares hung over the ridge and the fighting ran on in the dark at close  range.

3 RAR held its ground bound by bound giving up a forward trench here and taking it back there and the slopes below filled with Chinese casualties. Commonwealth artillery made the difference in the end. Forward observers on the crest called fire down onto the forming up points below breaking up each counterattack before it reached the top sometimes within a hundred meters of their own positions.

The Australians fought from the same bunkers the Chinese had built roofed and cited to beat exactly this kind of assault and now the strength of the position worked for the defenders instead of against them. By the morning of the 8th of October the counterattacks had burned themselves out.

 The Chinese had spent two battalions trying to take back what they’d lost and they’d failed. By the 8th of October it was over and the ridge was firmly in Commonwealth hands. The cost to 3 RAR was 20 men lost and close to 90 wounded in some of the heaviest fighting Australian saw anywhere in the war. The two Chinese battalions that had held the hill were wrecked around 340 of their men gone between them across five days of fighting for a single ridge.

Taking Maryang San and Little Gibraltar pushed the Chinese back two or three kilometers and took away the observation they’d had over the whole Imjin Valley. It was the ground the United Nations had wanted before the armistice and the Australians had taken the part of it that everyone else had failed on.

 The battalion that came down off Maryang San had paid a heavy price for it, and it showed. The men were filthy and worn through, short of sleep after 5 days and nights on the ridge, and a good number of them were being carried. Coming off a hill like that, most of a rifle company wants a hot feed and a dry blanket long before it wants to hear about history.

The talk of greatest feats came later, and it came from other people. The soldiers who’d done the climbing mostly wanted to know when they’d be pulled out of the line. What 3 RAR had done wasn’t lost on anyone who understood the ground. 700 Australians had shifted a stronger enemy out of a prepared position of real strength on a hill that had beaten two American attacks before them, and they’d done it in 5 days.

The official history of Australia in the Korean War would later set it down plainly that Maryang San was probably the greatest single feat of the Australian Army in the whole war. Frank Hassett came out of it with the Distinguished Service Order, and he would rise in the years after to become the professional head of the entire Australian military.

The battalion he’d led up the hill had earned the record the hard way. In the years that followed, Maryang San became a set piece in Australian military teaching, held up as a model of how one battalion could take a strong position by maneuver instead of weight. The lesson was the one Hassett had argued for on the ground.

 The obvious attack straight across the valley and up the face was the one that had broken two American assaults and would have broken his. The way in was around the side, out of the weather and the half-light, onto a flank nobody was watching. 700 men and a commander who’d read the country right had done what a heavier hand couldn’t.

Maryang San didn’t end the war or even change its shape. The fighting in Korea had settled into a grind along a fixed  line, and it stayed that way for almost two more years, hill by hill, until the armistice was finally signed in July 1953. What the battle  did was take a piece of ground the United Nations wanted before the shooting stopped, and take it off an enemy who had held every advantage.

For the Australian Army, it stood as the high point of a hard war, the one action above all the others that the official record would single out. There’s a hard footnote to Maryang San. A few weeks after the battle, 3 RAR was pulled off the ridge and relieved by British troops, and in early November, the Chinese came back for the hill one more time.

On the night of the 4th of November, after hours of shelling, they took Maryang San back,  and this time it stayed in their hands to the end of the war. The men who’d taken it in October were somewhere behind the line by then, and most of them heard about losing it secondhand.

 They had been told to take the hill the Americans couldn’t. Nobody had said anything about keeping it forever.