At 9:00 in the morning on the 22nd of October, 1950, the Australian column halted on a dirt road 1 and 1/2 km north of a burning town called Yongyu. Small arms fire snapped out of an apple orchard on the right flank. Mortar rounds dropped into the road beside the lead Shermans of D company, 89th Tank Battalion.

Captain Archer Dennis, riding the turret of the lead American tank with C company of the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, dropped into the dirt and called the contact in. The orchard was thick with apple trees and dug positions in the hillside, and the men in those positions were a North Korean rearguard everyone had thought was already destroyed.

 Inside that orchard sat roughly 1,000 North Koreans of the 239th Regiment, entrenched on the high ground with mortars zeroed on the highway and machine gunners watching the road. They had been forming up for a final lunch at the American paratroopers pinned in the hills 2 km to the north. They had let the Australian tanks roll past because in the smoke and noise of that morning, the gunners thought the Shermans were their own armor finally arriving.

 The men behind the tanks were diggers and the gunners didn’t know it yet. Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Green came forward from the battalion headquarters group and lay down in the dirt beside Dennis. The textbook said, “Wait for the artillery to be brought up and the mortars to range in, then commit attack with a fire plan when the 239th Regiment finally exposed itself.

” Standard Commonwealth doctrine, the kind any senior officer would have followed without a second thought. Green had been a student at Staff College in Queenscliff earlier that year, where he’d worked through that exact doctrine on training maps. He didn’t have time for any of it now. The paratroopers of the 3rd Battalion, 187th Regimental Combat Team, the men General Douglas MacArthur had personally watched float out of the sky 2 days earlier, were on borrowed minutes.

Their Korean opponents had broken out of the American pocket at midnight and were about to fall on them from the south with nearly 1,000 rifles. Bowen’s men had no tanks and the light artillery dropped with them was running short on ammunition after a full day’s fighting. If Green waited for the textbook, the Americans wouldn’t be there to relieve when the textbook attack finally went in.

 Green made his decision in under a minute. He told Dennis to put C Company straight into the orchard off the line of march with the Shermans firing on the move and the infantry coming up behind them through the trees. No fire plan was prepared. No mortars were laid. The battalion that had been written off 7 weeks earlier as a garrison force unfit for combat was about to launch the kind of attack that staff colleges would later study as the textbook example of how to throw the textbook away.

 The orchard above them had not yet noticed the danger from below. Korea was 4 months old when the Australians arrived. North Korean armor had crossed the 38th parallel on the 25th of June, 1950 and very nearly driven the United Nations forces into the sea. MacArthur’s amphibious landing at Inchon on the 15th of September had cut the supply lines of the North Korean Army and broken its hold on the south.

By mid-October, UN forces were chasing the survivors north toward the Manchurian border. Pyongyang fell on the 19th of October. The war seemed almost finished with most observers betting on Christmas at the latest. MacArthur wanted to finish it himself. He had just returned from meeting President Truman at Wake Island on the 15th of October where he had promised the war would be over by Christmas.

He believed one heavy hammer blow north of Pyongyang would seal the trap on what remained of the North Korean army and capture the senior officials fleeing the capital. The blow he chose was an airborne envelopment, the same kind of operation he’d watched in the Philippines 6 years earlier. He had under his command the only fully combat ready airborne unit in the Pacific theater, the 187th Regimental Combat Team, the Rakkasans, under Colonel Frank S. Bowen Jr.

On the 18th of October, MacArthur ordered the drop for 2 days later against the recommendation of some staff officers who wanted more preparation time. At dawn on the 20th of October, 71 C-119 Flying Boxcars and 40 C-47s lifted out of Kimpo airfield carrying more than 2,800 paratroopers and 300 tons of equipment.

 The aircraft flew north over a captured Pyongyang and dropped their men on two zones near the villages of Sukchon and Sunchon, about 40 km north of the North Korean capital. MacArthur personally watched the operation from the air in his Constellation transport circling above the drop zones with the Far East press corps in the cabin behind him.

The drop itself was textbook successful with only a single fatality on the descent. The trap had closed on an empty cage. American prisoners of war that the paratroopers had been sent to rescue had already passed through the area days earlier and the North Koreans had executed those prisoners in a railway tunnel south of Sunchon before the drop ever happened.

Senior officials evacuating Pyongyang had already moved north of the drop zone with armed escorts. Only the 239th Regiment, the North Korean rear guard, was still south of the airborne. The Americans had been dropped into clear country then turned around to fight south against an enemy they thought was broken.

On the 21st of October, two combat teams from the 187th moved south down the Sukchon-Yongju road in a reconnaissance in force. They were trying to clear the railway and the highway and link up with the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade pushing up from the south. Outside Yongju, they ran headlong into the 239th Regiment dug into the hills.

The Korean regiment had heavy mortars and machine guns waiting in prepared positions. The paratroopers had what they had carried on their parachutes, which meant rifles, light machine guns, bazookas, and the 75-mm pack howitzers that had come down on dedicated cargo shoots. They were a light infantry force on terrain that needed armor.

Bowen requested armored assistance from the British column to the south as the fighting around the town intensified, and a medic named Richard Wilson kept working on the wounded under fire until he himself was lost in the action. The British column was British in name only.

 Under Brigadier Basil Aubrey Code sat two British battalions alongside one Australian. Scots from the first battalion of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders made up one. English from the first battalion of the Middlesex Regiment made up another. Diggers from the recently formed Royal Australian Regiment made up the third. Code himself was a veteran British officer who’d survived the Normandy campaign and earned the Distinguished Service Order with bar.

He had been told the Australians were occupation troops out of Japan, and he was prepared to use them carefully until he saw what they could actually do. The third battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, had landed at Pusan on the 28th of September, less than 4 weeks before the Apple Orchard. The battalion was a patchwork.

 Part of it came from the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan, where Australian soldiers had been doing garrison duty around Hiroshima since 1946. The rest came from K Force, the emergency call up of Pacific war veterans who had volunteered when Australia answered the United Nations request for troops. The men who arrived in Korea weren’t green at war, but they weren’t yet a fighting battalion either.

 Their original commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel F. S. Walsh, had no operational combat experience. The army replaced him at the last moment with someone who did. Charles Hercules Green was born in Grafton, New South Wales in 1919. He had fought with the 2/2 battalion at the siege of Tobruk and through the Battle of Greece in 1941.

He had commanded the 2/11 battalion in the Aitape-Wewak campaign on Papua and earned the Distinguished Service Order for it. At 30 years old, Green was one of the most decorated battalion commanders in the Australian Army. And he had 2 weeks in Japan to take a half-formed unit of garrison troops and patchwork volunteers and turn it into something that could fight.

 At midnight on the 21st of October, the 239th Regiment did what Bowen had feared. They broke north out of the pocket where the paratroopers had pinned them, slipping through the dark in roughly battalion-sized columns and headed for the open ground south of the airborne positions to regroup for an assault. The American radios crackled with the news.

 The paratroopers were now caught between a regiment of North Koreans to their south and the broken North Korean Army somewhere ahead of them. They needed the brigade to come up the road fast or there wouldn’t be any paratroopers left to relieve. At dawn on the 22nd, the 27th Brigade crossed the Taedong River at Pyongyang and moved north on the main highway.

The Argylls went in first. Two companies of Scots advanced into the town of Yongju, working from building to building with high explosive grenades and white phosphorus to clear North Korean snipers from the houses. The phosphorus stuck to thatch and to clothing alike and gave the Argyle’s a reputation for ruthlessness that the Koreans would talk about for the rest of the war.

By the time the town stopped resisting, much of it was burning around the column of advancing tanks. The Argyle’s were tough and practical and the smoke pouring out of the houses was visible for kilometers in every direction. From the hills further north, the 239th regiment could see exactly what was coming up the road behind them.

 At 7:00 in the morning, Green received the brigade order. Push the battalion through Yongju, link up with the 187th, close the gap between the two forces. C company, commanded by Captain Archer Dennis, mounted on Sherman tanks from D company of the 89th tank battalion that the Americans had attached to the brigade. The battalion headquarters group fell in behind.

 The rifle companies were strung out along the road in marching column. Green himself rode in a Bren gun carrier near the front of the headquarters group with his intelligence officer, Lieutenant Alf Argent, at his side. At 9:00, the column reached a point 1 and 1/2 km north of Yongju where the road ran through low hills covered by an apple orchard.

The 239th regiment, having broken out at midnight, had stopped here to dig in and form up for a coordinated assault on the 187th positions to the north. Roughly 1,000 North Koreans were entrenched in the hillside orchard on the right flank of the road. They watched the Australian tanks come and let them pass.

The North Korean gunners had assumed the armor was their own up until the moment they realized it wasn’t. C company drove straight into the killing ground without realizing what was on either side of them. The orchard waited until the lead tanks had passed and then opened fire on the infantry walking behind.

Mortar rounds dropped onto the road. Light machine gun fire chopped across the column from the orchard. Australian soldiers went down on the verge. Dennis rolled off the turret of his Sherman and crawled into the ditch beside the road, calling the contact back to battalion. Green came forward at speed in his Bren gun carrier.

Within minutes, the colonel and the company commander were lying side by side in the dirt, looking up the slope into the trees. Green had two choices in front of him. The first was the doctrinally correct one. Pull C company back, deploy the battalion in proper assault formation off the road, bring up the mortars, range them in, hit the orchard with a fire plan, then commit a deliberate attack supported by fires.

That would take three or four hours minimum. By then, the 239th Regiment would have either finished their assault on the American paratroopers to the north or melted back into the hills with the brigade’s chance gone. The second choice was to attack off the line of march immediately with whatever was at hand and no time to prepare.

Green took the second choice. He had no idea exactly where the third battalion of the 187th was sitting somewhere in the hills to the north, which meant indirect fire from artillery and mortars was too risky. Friendly shells dropped into American positions would do more damage than the North Koreans could manage.

 He pushed C company straight up the slope into the orchard. Shermans firing on the move, rifle sections leapfrogging from tree to tree behind the armor. A and B companies were committed onto the higher ground to the right of the road. D company moved up the left flank. The North Koreans had been preparing for an attack from the wrong direction.

Their machine guns were sighted north toward the Americans and their mortar pits faced away from Yongyu. When the Australian rifle sections came through the orchard from below, the defenders had to turn their weapons around in the fighting positions. Some of the gunners passed away still trying. C Company took the first line of trenches in a rush, bayonets fixed, with the Shermans hitting the dugouts at point-blank range with 75-mm rounds.

More than 70 North Koreans were lost in the initial assault on the orchard. What followed was close-range work in the trees. Australians cleared the dugouts one at a time, throwing grenades through the entrances, and then going in with rifles and bayonets. Eight or nine more North Korean defenders were lost as the position was cleared.

 The diggers set fire to the dugouts as they went, using whatever combustibles were at hand and the dry timber of the dugout roofs. Smoke rose through the apple trees in dirty columns. Within 45 minutes of Green’s order, the high ground of the orchard belonged to C Company. The 239th Regiment was now on open ground with no cover and Australians behind them.

 Battalion Tactical Headquarters, following close behind C Company on the road, was caught by a group of North Koreans who had broken east through the orchard. Green’s command group had to fight off the breakthrough at close range with personal weapons. The colonel himself was at the center of the fighting with his signalers and intelligence officer, Argent.

The orchard ground was the kind of chaos no map could show. Australians and Koreans fired at each other through smoke and trees without always knowing who was where, and several of the headquarters runners were lost in the confusion. To the north, the 187th paratroopers heard the firefight behind the Koreans and understood what was happening.

Bowen pushed his third battalion south against the 239th, pinning them from above with what light artillery and machine guns the airborne had. The Koreans were now between two forces with no high ground left and no cover. They tried to withdraw westward across the open paddy fields. The Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, working up the road behind the Australians, swung onto the open flank and engaged the retreating Koreans as they ran.

The Scots took prisoners by the dozen and inflicted heavy casualties on the broken regiment. By midday, the fighting was effectively over. The orchard belonged to the Australians and the high ground belonged to the Argyles. The 239th Regiment, as a fighting formation, had ceased to exist. Three hours after first contact, C Company linked up with the American paratroopers in their defensive positions north of the orchard.

The 27th Brigade then relieved the 187th at Sukchon for the continuation of the drive to the Chongchon River. Many of the surviving Koreans hid in the orchard or played wounded until they were either captured or dealt with. In the Australian sector alone, North Korean losses came to 150 lost in the orchard and another 239 wounded.

 A further 200 were taken prisoner. Across the brigade as a whole, including the Argyles’ work on the western flank, more than 200 Koreans had passed away and more than 500 had been taken prisoner. Australian casualties in the apple orchard came to seven men wounded. None of the diggers had been lost. The 239th Regiment, until that morning, a unit of nearly 2,000 men had stopped existing as a coherent fighting force.

Brigadier Code came up to the orchard later in the day. He had been told he was getting occupation troops from the BCOF garrison in Japan. What he had seen instead was a battalion that had launched an unprepared frontal assault on prepared positions in open ground without artillery support against a regiment that outnumbered them and had taken the position in under 3 hours with seven wounded.

Code later wrote that the Australian battalion was the finest unit in his brigade. Within weeks he would be telling London the same thing and London would be passing it on to Canberra. The Australians had done what the textbook said couldn’t be done. They had attacked off the line of march without indirect fires against a numerically superior force on prepared high ground and they had broken it.

The Australian War Memorial would later put it in plain terms. Charlie Green’s handling of the battalion had been bold and his decision to attack off the line of march proved decisive. The North Koreans had been so focused on the Americans to their north that they hadn’t been ready for the Australians coming up from the south.

 Surprise had done the work that artillery normally would have. Awards came afterward in due course. Captain Archer Dennis received the Military Cross for his handling of C Company through the orchard. Lieutenant David Butler received the United States Silver Star for his work that morning at the head of his platoon. Several other diggers were mentioned in dispatches and a number received personal recognition from the brigade.

Green himself would later be awarded the United States Silver Star presented by Bowen on behalf of the American command though by the time the citation came through he wasn’t there to receive it. The men who had been told seven weeks earlier they were a garrison unit had become in one morning a fighting battalion with a reputation that ran ahead of them across the brigade.

Code began routinely placing them at the head of the column whenever serious work needed doing. The work didn’t stop at the orchard. Within a week Green had taken 3 RAR through the engagement at the broken bridge near Kujin on the 25th of October where the battalion forced a crossing of the Taeryong River against entrenched opposition and lost only a handful of men in doing it.

Four days later, they fought at Chongju on the 29th and 30th of October, this time against North Korean T-34 tanks dug into the ridges. 3 RAR took the position by infantry assault, knocking out 11 tanks and two self-propelled guns in the process. By the end of October, the battalion that had landed at Pusan a month earlier was being treated by both Bowden’s paratroopers and Code’s Brigade as the spearhead of the advance toward the Yalu River.

The Australians had become the brigade’s point unit by default, the formation Code sent forward whenever the next position needed cracking. On the evening of the 30th of October, 3 RAR was in a rest position near Chongju after the morning’s fighting. A North Korean self-propelled gun in the hills opposite the battalion fired six rounds at the Australian area.

Five of the shells hit the forward slope of the hill and did no damage to anyone. The sixth shell sailed over the crest, struck a tree above Green’s command tent, and burst in an airburst over the headquarters position. Around 40 men were in the immediate vicinity. The shrapnel from that single airburst found only one of them.

 Charles Hercules Green, aged 30, the commanding officer of 3 RAR, was hit in the abdomen by shrapnel from the airburst. He was evacuated to the mobile army surgical hospital at Anju. The wound was peritoneal and there was little the surgeons could do. Green passed away on the 1st of November 1950, 10 days after the apple orchard.

He was buried first at Pakchon and later moved to the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Pusan during Operation Glory. His wife Alwyn received the telegram in Sydney. Their daughter Anthea was 13 months old. Alwyn had 4 years of marriage to Charlie behind her and decades of self-taught research into the Korean War ahead.

 The battalion went on without him. They fought through the Chinese intervention, the winter retreat from the Yalu, the holding action at Kapyong in April 1951, where 3 RAR won the United States Presidential Unit Citation, and the static line battles of the years after. By the time the armistice was signed at Panmunjom in July 1953, 3 RAR had become one of the most decorated Australian battalions of the post-war era.

None of that reputation existed before the Apple Orchard. All of it began on a dirt road 1 and 1/2 km north of a burning town when a colonel chose to attack instead of waiting. The orchard itself is still there, north of what is now the North Korean town of Yongyu. There are no Australian markers in the trees.

The veterans who came home from 3 RAR went back to farms in the Hunter Valley and trades along the Sydney Harbor, with others scattered to the wheat country further west. They got on with the rest of their lives. Most of them have passed away now. The few who remain don’t talk about the Apple Orchard much. When pressed, they tend to say only that Charlie Green knew what he was doing, and that’s about as much as anyone really needs to know.