A war hero you’ve never heard of

HE IS ... PEERLESS WHEN IT COMES TO POLITICAL ACUMEN — VIVIAN BERCOVICI

Hub Gray died the other day. He was 90. You know, Hub Gray … that war hero you never heard of. The guy from the “Forgotten War.”

Hub showed immense physical courage during the battle of Kapyong in the Korean War. And also deep moral courage which he flung into another battle in the years that followed.

Hub was a young lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (2PPCLI), a special unit of volunteers raised specifically to fight in Korea. It was under the command of Col. Jim Stone, a much-decorated, if somewhat flawed hero of the Second World War 2. Col Stone was quirky but brilliant.

2PPCLI arrived in Korea on Dec. 18, 1950. In April it found itself near the village of Kapyong, a milepost on the traditional invasion path into the south of Korea.

On the night of April 22, 1951 an entire Chinese division attacked, hoping to take Seoul, only a few miles away. 2PPCLI was surrounded, and on its own. This was to be Canada’s first battle of the Korean War.

It was a terrifying night of positions lost and re-taken, hand-to-hand fighting in the dark, with bayonets, grenades, rifle butts, and shovels.

At one point, the Chinese attacked battalion headquarters from the rear. If HQ fell, the Canadians would be driven off the hill and the road to Seoul would be open. It did not fall, in part thanks to Hub Gray.

He was in charge of a small mortar-machine gun unit. Coming at them: about 500 battle-hardened Chinese. With the enemy almost on top of them, Gray’s men opened fire, the Chinese attack stalled, and then fell apart, described by one Canadian as “like kicking the top off an ant hill.” The Canadians were down to their last bullets when the Chinese advance finally broke. Hub’s machine guns had saved HQ. And so Kapyong did not fall. Nor did Seoul.

Hub Gray was a real-life hero whose courage and initiative made the difference. Five men in other units were (rightly) decorated for bravery that night. Hub Gray was not among them. In later years he wrote his own ac- count of Kapyong (“Beyond the Danger Close”) with a vivid account of the fighting, but no mention at all of his own vital role. You’d scarcely know he was there.

That’s Hub Gray … the hero you never heard of.

Another neglected Kapyong hero was a dashing young lieutenant, Mike Levy, who’d fought behind the lines in Southeast Asia against the Japanese. At Kapyong, Levy was in command of an isolated platoon that came under an attack so intense his men were on the verge of being overwhelmed. He called in artillery fire on his own position. Levy was an extremely popular officer and everyone in the battalion knew he’d had his own foxholes shelled.

Mysteriously, Levy got no decoration. No one could figure it out.

Enter Hub Gray. Researching his own book on Kapyong, he came across Mel Canfield, an officer logging communications between Col. Stone and his companies during the fighting. Canfield was a fly on the wall. Stone was contemplating the awarding of medals, and Canfield said he overheard Stone saying: ” … I will not award a medal to a Jew.” And there the matter stood for over half a century.

But not for Hub Gray. The injustice of it all haunted him. He had moral courage that matched his battlefield bravery. He lobbied, cajoled, and prodded for years.

Col. Stone — who died in 2005 — was a popular commander with his men, and among historians. Some felt the Levy/stone issue was history and best just left in the past. Not Hub.

He recruited the-then governor-general, Adrienne Clarkson, to the cause, who had deep personal connections to PPCLI and to the Korean War (she is now PPCLI’S Colonel-in-chief). In 2004, she granted a coat of arms to Mike Levy in recognition of his work that April night at Kapyong.

So that’s who Hub Gray was: a hero no one’s heard of.

He died Nov. 9 in Calgary. A pity it wasn’t in the news.

LEVY GOT NO DECORATION. NO ONE COULD FIGURE IT OUT. ENTER HUBGRAY.

Hub Gray, 1950.