Korean War veteran from Turnersville brings history to life

Of all the memories Fred Connolly has of the Korean War, it is the killing of a 10-year-old girl that most haunts him.

Connolly's Army unit had befriended the child and her family as it passed through their village. Soldiers gave them rations, candy, and cigarettes.

When the GIs returned, they found three adults in the group dead and two toddlers crying next to their bodies.

But it is the little girl that Connolly, of Turnersville, Gloucester County, remembers - especially on military observances such as Veterans Day - when he thinks back to his service.

She was found hanging by her long black hair from a tree limb, her hands bound behind her, leaves stuffed in her mouth.

The terrible war he fought 60 years ago became known as the "forgotten war," sandwiched as it was between World War II and Vietnam. But Connolly says he hasn't forgotten any of it - especially not that day in 1950.

A former driver for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, he speaks in hushed tones of landing at Inchon, retaking Seoul, crossing the 38th parallel, and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Chinese soldiers at the Chosin Reservoir.

He talks of being bayoneted, and of seeing slaughtered civilians, their bodies left out to decay.

Connolly, 79, is devoted to the Korean War Veterans Association and fellow military members, often attending funerals in a dress-blue uniform and carefully folding the flags for the families.

He shares the story of the Korean conflict with middle and high school students because, he said, they learn little about it in class. He will speak at two Camden County schools this week, wearing his uniform from Inchon.

"When we heard the war broke out, we were all scared, but we knew it was our duty," Connolly said.

Connolly grew up in Queens, N.Y., with six brothers and seven sisters. With his father's permission, he enlisted in the Army at age 17 in 1949.

"The recruiter told my father, 'OK, he's ours now. You can go home,' " he said.

After basic training at Fort Dix, Connolly headed to Hokkaido, Japan, where he and other ill-equipped soldiers provided security, "but mostly just sat around."

A favorite memory is of his 21 days as a driver for MacArthur, then Japan's military governor.

But by June 25, 1950, the easy times were over. Connolly was guarding a ship in Yokohama when his captain told him, "You guys are going to Korea."

"The first thing I thought about was my father fighting in World War I and three brothers in World War II. Two of them were killed by the Japanese on Attu Island," part of Alaska's Aleutian Islands occupied by the enemy.

Members of Connolly's Seventh Infantry Division were dispatched while he and others in the division's 31st Infantry Regiment remained in Japan to train newly drafted GIs.

The United Nations forces had been driven south and were barely holding on when MacArthur boldly ordered an amphibious landing at Inchon on Sept. 15, 1950, to cut North Korean supply lines.

"The Navy was firing the big guns and our planes were strafing" the enemy as Marines and Army forces headed toward beaches, Connolly said. "The gate of my landing craft went down and we got out into mud. Some guys lost their boots in it.

"One of my buddies was hit" in the chest by sniper fire, he said. "That was the first time I saw anything like that and I got sick as a dog."

With his unit, Connelly, then a corporal, flushed snipers out of small one- and two-story buildings with grenades.

Afterward, "we would find civilians in there with the North Koreans who had killed them days earlier to occupy their house.

"It was my first taste of combat and that's when you go shaky," he said. "I had to put it out of my mind, though - I was responsible for my squad."

Connolly was 18, and was seeing dead men, women, and children - with gaping wounds and missing limbs - on the roadside as he and others made their way to Seoul.

After U.N. forces cleared the city of North Korean troops, he and a South Korean soldier stopped at a nearby airport to cook rations.

Walking by were two orphans, "a girl of about 8 or 9, carrying her little brother on her back," he said. "The South Korean said, 'Let's give them our rations.' " They instructed the children to rifle the pockets of dead North Korean soldiers in nearby foxholes for the rice packets they always carried.

"Many children were wandering around," he said. "We sent them back to the chaplain" and orphanages.

Connolly's unit followed South Korean troops over the 38th parallel and were passing through a mountainous area when they came upon more than a dozen children who had burrowed into the earth with shovels to create an underground shelter. They were sent to the rear.

By October 1950, he and the other GIs had taken up positions in a village, and were hit by a ferocious counterattack. "We lost two or three that night, and by daylight, we found a couple hundred North Koreans lying there dead," he remembers.

Connolly's unit continued forward and stopped at the village that remains in his memory as the place where the little girl and her family were killed, leaving two orphaned toddlers.

A month later, he and others in the Seventh Infantry Division and Marines occupied the Chosin Reservoir area as the temperature dropped to at least 30 degrees below zero.

"Our weapons were freezing and the canteens split open," he said. "You couldn't dig in because the ground was too icy, so you'd use a grenade to create a foxhole."

Making matters worse, Chinese troops had entered the conflict. Thousands came in vast waves at night, blowing whistles and horns and pounding drums "that drove you crazy," Connolly said.

"We fired until we ran out of ammunition, then used our bayonets," he said. "You thought there were millions coming at you."

His position was overrun, and a Chinese soldier wounded Connolly in the neck with a bayonet. He would have finished Connolly off if not for a comrade who shot the soldier with a .45 caliber sidearm.

U.N. forces retreated south, lost Seoul, then retook it.

Connolly was 20 when he returned home in 1951, nearly two years before a cease-fire was signed in July 1953.

He took a train to Penn Station in New York, then got a cab to his parents' home. About 8 a.m. on a Saturday, his mother saw him walk in, dropped a pot of coffee she had just made, and hurried to embrace him. Her son had returned home safely.

Connolly trained recruits at Fort Dix and was discharged in 1952. He married in 1954, had a son and daughter, and worked 38 years for the New York City Transit Police.

"I never talked about the war," said Connolly, who moved to Turnersville in 1996, at the same time finding his uniform in a box with other memorabilia.

"But after 9/11, I joined the American Legion and started speaking at schools because they weren't learning" about the conflict, he said.

The visits have been rewarding - and surprising.

About six years ago, Connolly was at Williamstown High School in Gloucester County. He was telling the story about the little girl when "one of the students started crying. He put his head in his hands, then left the classroom."

In the hallway, Connolly found out why. The boy was of Korean descent and had been told by his grandfather and uncle that their family had been killed in the war. They told him they were saved by U.S. soldiers.

"Maybe that was us," Connolly said.