Lieutenant George Butcher

The Imjin was quite a river� I reckoned it had a flood-flow of about, in the old imperial, of about 600,000 cu secs� it was 300 metres wide and it rose 13 or 14 metres� it would rise a metre in half an hour.

I was involved with an Australian sapper officer� and we had a small army of our own to try and disintegrate debris before it got down to the [Teal high-level] bridge... because everything was coming down. There were Korean houses, complete American squad tents� vehicles� and great masses of haystacks and goodness knows what�.

In this particular flood an American construction battalion was driving piles to put these shearwaters in front of each pier of the bridge, and when another flood came down� it rose so rapidly they lost equipment� for a while they had a grab over the side of the bridge, they were removing the debris, and these shearwaters were reasonably effective. But anyway they thought it was too dangerous for them to continue, and so my guys and I were given the job of removing the debris and that was a matter of climbing down the faces of the shearwaters or the piers, and at this stage some of the shearwaters were leaning back on the piers with the amount of debris, and so we placed charges. You had to walk out over the debris raft, and there were logs and goodness knows whatever else, and place charges and try and remove the debris in this way while the Americans looked on. So we managed to clear some of the piers and the guys were making up the charges and I was placing them. We were fairly fortunate, what happened was that the piles hadn't been driven sufficiently far and scour occurred, that is, the bed of the river became a fluid in effect, you know, I remember I was just climbing back from one of the piers, I think it was the next pier but one, I could see it moving sideways, it seemed to take ages, but then it moved down stream, the spans fell off and the whole thin tipped over, so at that stage� there was nothing more we could do to save the bridge.

Eventually the bridge was replaced with a low-level bridge, which during the flood period was over-topped� but in the mean time we had the job of operating a ferry. We had these boats and we operated the ferry� as the river fell, of course, the distance we had to ferry supplies across became shorter� we had designed and built a cableway at Pintail, which was the upstream bridge serving the [Commonwealth] Div for emergencies and there was a cableway down at Teal, which we also operated, and we did a lot of trials for casualty evacuation and so on�