As a young second lieutenant leading 8 Platoon, ‘C’ Company, 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian LIght Infantry, in Korea, Chris Snider of Oakville, Ont., earned a Miltary Cross for valour. At 92, he still attends Remembrance Day ceremonies at Sunnybrook Veterans’ Centre in Toronto. [Stephen J. Thorne/Legion Magazine]

In Toronto, a Korean War veteran remembers

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

The first time Second Lieutenant Chris Snider came under enemy fire was the day he arrived at the battle front on the Korean peninsula.

“We were going down this long, long trench,” Snider said in a video made by students at Crestwood high school in Toronto. “I kept hearing these buzzing noises.

“I said to the guy with me, ‘what’s this buzzing noise?’ He said, ‘those are enemy rounds; they’re firing at where they think we might be; they don’t know where we are because it’s dark.’ I thought, ‘gosh, bullets are coming our way.’ And the odd one would come a little lower and maybe hit somebody, but not normally.”

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I Echelon officers of 2nd Battalion, Le Royal 22e Régiment at battalion headquarters, behind Hill 355 in Korea. [Wikimedia]

Fighting the tide: The first Canadian Battle of Hill 355

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

“No withdrawal. No platoons overrun. No panic.”

These were the simple yet assertive instructions of Lieutenant-Colonel Jacques Dextraze, commander of 2nd Battalion, Royal 22e Régiment, as his men prepared for the looming Battle of Hill 355 Nov. 22-25, 1951, amid the Korean War.

By that stage, indeed since that summer, international calls for peace negotiations had convinced both sides to discuss the prospect of an armistice. It was a notion that seemed almost as distant as Canada itself to the troops settling into their hastily made defences on the saddle between the U.S.-occupied Hill 355 to the east—dubbed “Little Gibraltar”—and the Chinese-held Hill 227 to the west.

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• The forgotten grave of Canada’s first VC recipient, Alexander Roberts Dunn

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