On the evening of Oct. 1, 1950, the submarine USS Perch surfaced 4 miles off the east coast of North Korea. A veteran of World War II combat against Japan, the warship had been converted into a troop transport and in place of torpedo tubes carried troops—67 members of Britain’s 41 (Independent) Commando, Royal Marines. Led by Lt. Col. Douglas B. Drysdale, the men were among the first members of their service to go into action behind enemy lines in the Korean War. Their target that night was a rail line used by the North Koreans to transport supplies and personnel south.
The commandos busied themselves retrieving a 24-foot motorboat, dubbed the “skimmer,” and inflatable rafts from an airtight 36-foot-long cylindrical cargo hangar welded to the submarine’s aft deck—a feature that led the marines to dub the vessel the “Pregnant Perch.” With the boats in the water, the skimmer towed the rafts toward the beach while Perch waited on the surface. Once ashore the raiders planted explosives along the tracks in tunnels and an adjoining culvert, though the latter presented an unexpected challenge. “The plan was to crawl to the center [of the culvert], then pack in as much explosives as possible,” commando Fred Hayhurst recalled. “The culvert, however, housed years and years of rotting, smelly rubbish. The first task was to clear some of the obstacles, then crawl through the slimy mess with packs of explosives.”
Detonated as planned, the explosives destroyed a long section of railway, and the raiders made it back to in the predawn darkness. They returned with the body of Peter R. Jones, the first Royal Marine casualty of the war, who’d been killed during a firefight with North Korean troops. Despite that loss—and others to come—the successful raid marked the beginning of a highly effective covert war carried out by Britain’s
