A Talk with Korean War Veteran Ed Gruber
The Korean War began on June 25th, 1950, when North Korean soldiers invaded South Korea.
US President Harry Truman pressed the UN to quickly approve a “police action” to aid South Korea—an international effort spearheaded by the US. The brutal conflict that followed led to millions of Korean deaths and close to 140,000 American casualties.
One of the many forgotten aspects of this war is that the US actually fought China: in December 1950, the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army came to the aid of North Korea, and their estimated casualties are in the hundreds of thousands.
Another forgotten fact: 5.7 million American servicemen and women served in Korea. Among them was Ed Gruber, a self-professed “wiseass kid from the Bronx,” who had enlisted in the Navy in 1948.
Ed and I became friends through the Korean War Veterans Family and Supporters Facebook Group. I had joined the group when I started publishing fiction set during the Korean War. Ed is also a writer, and he turned out to be a helpful source for historical accuracy as well as a supportive reader.
The war was just one aspect of an eventful life. He was childhood friends with singer Edye Gorme (née Edith Gorman) and friendly in high school with a young photographer named Stanley Kubrick. He snuck into Yankee Stadiaum and ended up watching the game with heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
While waiting tables in a Catskills hotel, Ed kibitzed with Red Buttons. And while stationed with the Navy at Pearl Harbor, he shook hands with President Truman. After the war, as an ad man in Detroit, Ed worked (and drank) with another promising young copywriter who wrote Western stories in his spare time—Elmore Leonard.
2025 marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. This year also marks the release of In Combat in Korea: Eighteen Veterans Remember the War, by Ryan Walkowski. Ed wrote the foreword and mentored Ryan through the editing process. Ed refers to it as “a labor of love in honor of all my brothers who served in Korea—those who survived, those who didn’t, those who still carry scars.”
In light of the anniversary and the book release, I thought it would be illuminating to have Ed share his experiences. Our conversations, via phone and email, have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Tell us about your family and your childhood.
My parents were both born in Harlem. My immigrant grandfather tended horses and shoveled manure in Manhattan stables. Mom was a housewife, and Dad drove trucks and buses. During the Great Depression, he moonlighted as a cab driver. Then he got a job at a leather belt factory until he joined his brothers in the banana trucking business.
I was born in the Bronx in 1928. My earliest memories are from when I was two or three years old. I remember the iceman coming to fill our icebox. And one memory that’s indelible, my maternal grandfather teaching me to play a card game called Pishe Pasha. His smile was so warm, so paternal, so loving, it’s a precious moment I’ve kept close to my heart.
Where were you educated?
I attended public schools in the Bronx and graduated from William Howard Taft High School in 1946. Stanley Kubrick and I knew each other well enough to say “hi” in the halls and occasionally share a table in the cafeteria. I was good friends with Mark Rydell—or Morty back in high school—who went on to direct The Rose and On Golden Pond.
I was a so-so student, a smart-ass, a street-kid in corduroy knickers. I preferred to play ball more than anything else, except for my weekly treks to the Bronx Public Library, rain or shine.
After high school, I attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. It was a two-year college then. I took the production engineering course: production line workflow, business accounting, industrial psychology, things like that. I knew it wasn’t for me. I didn’t know what was, but this was not it.
How did you end up in the Navy?
The government was still drafting young men for military service, but you had a choice in a way. You could be conscripted for two years or enlist for three. So after FIT, I enlisted in the Navy. I was willing to go the extra year to stay out of foxholes and mud, as Army service was vividly described to me by a neighborhood guy who’d fought in Europe during WWII.
The Navy got you started in communications and journalism.
After boot camp, I read in a service publication about the Navy’s School of Journalism, where sailors and marines were trained to become combat correspondents. I applied and was transferred to the school located at Great Lakes. It was a jam course in writing, newspaper layout and design, public relations, photography, and radio, including working weekends as a rookie reporter with one of the Chicago newspapers, going on calls to fires and robberies.
After graduating, my new post was at the Pearl Harbor Public Information Office at the headquarters of the Commander in Chief of the Pacific and the Pacific Fleet.
What kind of work did you do at Pearl Harbor?
One of my first assignments was to record a USO show starring Al Jolson for the Navy’s archives. The technology was a pre-magnetic tape era wire recorder. I set my mike on the stage among the others and sat on the floor of the arena before the platform.
Mostly though I was writing dull Navy peacetime press releases about promotions and ship arrivals. What I found more interesting was helping to design and build a radio recording studio. Two days a week there were lineups of sailors and marines waiting to record interviews on miniature vinyl records. We’d send the platters back to their hometown radio stations. The stations would call the families and tell them when the records would be on air, and each kid’s voice, his impressions of the Navy or Marine Corps, and his duty in the Hawaiian Islands, would be broadcast for all friends, neighbors, and relatives.
Where were you when the Korean War started?
I was actually in a bar in San Diego. We’d stopped on the way to an assignment in Alaska. On Sunday, June 25, 1950, a group of us were having beers and shooting dice when two guys from the Shore Patrol began thumping their nightsticks on the bar and shouting, “Now hear this! The fucking North Koreans have invaded South Korea and we’re in a fucking war. Get back to your ships and bases on the double.”
What happened next?
Things got more interesting on Pearl Harbor. A lot of people came through on the way to Korea. Carl Mydans, a fantastic photographer from Life Magazine, gave us an impromptu photography lesson. John Ford, the Hollywood director, showed up on the way to shoot his documentary This Is Korea. I helped Lieutenant General Chesty Puller, the legendary Marine, prep for a press conference.
One guy I worked with, a chief petty officer, came up with a brilliant P.R. idea—a radio program to distribute to commercial stations with Hawaiian music and a vignette about Navy and Marine heroics or an interview with a visiting celebrity. We called it Across the Blue Pacific, and I got to write most of the dramatic segments and do many of the interviews.
I have great memories of John Wayne. He was shooting Big Jim McLain nearby and agreed to do a monologue for us. He arrived at the studio sporting a world-class hangover. He could hardly read the script. We filled him with potent Navy coffee, and even that failed. Our commander had us lace the coffee with something from the bottle he kept in his desk drawer. Wayne gave a flawless performance, with me as director and engineer.
Another time, I nabbed an interview with Bob Hope, and it went so well he invited me to play the straight man in a bit with him for his radio show.
One member of Hope’s entourage was a young comedy writer by the name of Larry Gelbart, who among other things went on to become one of the creative forces behind M*A*S*H. I spent as many minutes with Larry as possible, hoping some of his talent and know-how would rub off. When he got back to New York, he very kindly called my parents to tell them I was fine and not being shot at.
But you did volunteer to cover the fighting.
In retrospect it seems like an absurb impulse, but I still had the irrational guy-thing to “get over there.” In June of 1952, I broached the subject to my boss, Commander William Lederer, and he agreed that reporting from closer to the action would broaden my experience. (Commander Lederer, by the way, was already a published author.) To ensure my relative safety, he ordered that I take along Seaman Dean Musgrave from Iowa as an assistant.
Commander Lederer was expecting that I couldn’t get into too much trouble. Officials from the UN, North Korea, and China, were having truce talks at Panmunjon. But there was still plenty going on. There were no large-scale combat operations, but there were a hell of a lot of small ones, if you can call people trying to blow your head off “small.”
Dean and I flew from Honolulu to Tokyo and then to an aircraft carrier, the USS Valley Forge. Then we transferred to the USS Mispillion, a Navy tanker. We did this by highline, also called a “breeches buoy.” This is an open, one-person apparatus run on a pulley system attached to lines strung between two ships while they move in open water at equal speeds. Dean and I were relieved to plant our feet on the steel deck, and I was beginning to question my judgment in volunteering for this assignment.
Finally, we made our way to one of the islands called Modo. It was only only 2000 yards from the mainland—not only in sight of enemy eyes, but also in range of their firepower. On Wonsan, the nearby port on the East Coast of North Korea, the enemy had shore batteries and antiaircraft guns and an estimated 80,000 Communist troops.
Modo was laced with trenches and sandbagged bunkers. Dean and I were assigned to a cave-bunker and given free rein by the officer in command to explore. He did warn us that if the Chinese on the mainland saw unusual movement, they’d direct mortar shells or machine gun fire at the island. We set out to explore and look for stories anyway. We were young and invincible, probably stupid, and began our walk—kicking up pieces of shrapnel with almost every step.
We encountered a Korean Marine Corps (KMC) outfit guarding a group of North Korean and Chinese POWs who were digging trenches and bunkers. We heard “Incoming! Hit the dirt!” Which we did. Then, two explosions about 75 yards from us; shells from the Chinese. Nobody was hurt, but it was a rude awakening.
When it was time to leave Modo, we filed some hometown hero stories from an aircraft carrier, got cleaned up, and headed to the Korean mainland, where the First Marine Division was deployed on the Main Line of Resistance (MLR).
What was it like on the Korean mainland?
We went through Seoul by jeep, and there was hardly a roof left on any of the buildings, and many were completely gutted. The locals wore customary Korean garb or western clothing, and some wore GI castoffs. They pushed or pulled wooden carts or tended to retail stands along the road—trying to survive amidst this hell.
As a teenager during WWII, we saw the war through newsreels and LIFE Magazine. And here I was traveling through the devastation that was once a major Asian metropolis. I was thinking how fortunate Americans were that our homes and cities didn’t suffer the ravages of battle.
Our destination was a Marine unit on the MLR near Munsan-ni. We were greeted and briefed by Lieutenant Anton Froelich, from Chicago. He explained that the Chinese were just up the road and that the roads and rice paddies between us and them were mined. Panmunjon, where they were holding the truce talks, was up another narrow road.
He said, “We send patrols out most every night to get prisoners or to ambush enemy patrols or just to learn what’s happening out there. If you’re looking for stories, there’s a patrol going out tonight. Want to go along? Might be fun.”
“We have no combat training,” I said.
“Don’t worry. My boys will take good care of you, even though you’re Navy.”
We met up with squad leader Sergeant Mac McCorckle, from Palatka, Florida. Mac was a veteran of the horrific Chosin Reservoir pullout where he’d been wounded—three burp gun shells across his chest. He was sent back to the States to recover, and then volunteered to return to combat.
“Why the hell would you want to come back,” I asked. “You paid your dues.”
His answer was simple: “To prove to myself I’m not chicken.”
An hour or so before sunset the patrol formed up. It was made up of two squads [a squad is about ten men] led by a Sergeant Moore. We were reinforced with a machine gun squad.
Moore briefed us: “We’ll be taking the Panmunjon truce road to our breaking-off point.”
“But isn’t that a neutral zone?” I asked.
“Good point, Gruber. So if we meet any Chinese, no firing. We get our business done with no noise.”
The ramifications of that statement weakened my knees. Meanwhile, the guys—Frankie, Woody, Morgan, Tony, Tom, Tex, Shelton, Burnett, and the others, were checking their weapons and canteens with lots of kibitzing and lack of tension; these were veterans.
Luckily, we met no Chinese on the dusty truce road, even though I thought I saw one behind every bush. On schedule, we reached our destination at the base of a hill just after dark. The sun had dropped like a bullet behind the western mountains, and we went from a hot red sky to a cold black one instantaneously.
It was a sweaty, feel-your-way-along in the dark, ten-minute climb to the top of the hill. Once there, I plopped down alongside a well-sandbagged position and Mac told me to stay close to him and do whatever he said, to do it fast, and without question.
When Sergeant Moore clicked on the field telephone, it turned out the line had been cut.
“Okay, they know we’re here,” Mac said calmly. Then he whispered to me, “Pass the word, Ed. Fix bayonets.”
I could hardly get the words out to the Marine next to me.
I’d been in a few fistfights in my life and only wound up with a black eye. I hadn’t planned on hand-to-hand combat, and I was shaking—and it wasn’t from the cold Korean mountain air.
Throughout the chilled night, we all crouched in anticipation, watching machine gun tracers lighting up the sky over nearby hills, where firefights were in progress. I was wondering if ours would start…and when. I wondered how Dean and I would handle it.
My body so desperately wanted to doze off, but every little sound was like a screaming alarm clock. Mac recognized my anxieties and quietly explained, “If they come it’ll probably be just before dawn. They’ll drop some 80mm mortar shells on us, then they’ll blow those goddamn bugles. We’ll pop a few flares, so you just toss those grenades where you see the moving shadows. You’ll be okay. Just keep your head down.”
I shivered the night away waiting, waiting, and waiting. At dawn, sure enough, four enemy mortar rounds came in over our heads and exploded just beyond our positions with enough force to give us a bounce and shake some sand out of our protective sandbags. But no bugles, no flares, no shadows, no Chinese coming up the hill.
We scrambled down White Hill and made our way back to the MLR without incident.
“How about that, Ed!” Mac exclaimed over a beer back at camp. “Your first patrol and you didn’t hurt yourself or anybody else. You did good. I’ll take you Navy boys out anytime!”
The war patrols that came later—some were nasty. But even with the bugles and the flares, the shadows, the noises, the yelling, and the horrors, it was a different kind of terror than first one. On that initial patrol, the most frightening thing was my own mind and the pictures it called up.
I ordered Dean to remain behind on those later sorties. I chose not to put him in harm’s way again, and he’d be able to write up our stories using the typewriters at company headquarters. It turned out to be good for Dean, because he didn’t have to do or see the things I did, of which to this day, I do not—cannot—speak or write.
What was like being a Jew in the service in the early 1950s?
Generally, in the Navy’s Public Information Office, I was surrounded by young men of intelligence, humanity, and tolerance. But there were a few minor incidents of anti-Semitism during my four-year hitch. Some were resolved with bloody noses, sometimes mine and sometimes the other guy’s.
There was one memorable incident when we were recording Across the Blue Pacific at Pearl Harbor. I wrote a monologue about a veteran Marine sergeant, and [Oscar-winning actor] Walter Brennan played him.
I was working the engineering board when Brennan told the guys in the studio a stale, anti-Semitic joke. He didn’t know the mic was still hot. Brennan was a fine actor, but to me he was a lousy person.
What are your thoughts on the Korean conflict?
It’s been considered “the forgotten war,” and there has never been a signed peace treaty. From a positive viewpoint, the UN—led by US forces and dollars—was victorious in driving Communist North Korean Forces out of South Korea, which did become a model democracy and world industrial leader. But the cost was high in the deaths of those who fought, as well as innocent civilians. When it was all over, I was hoping that lessons were learned on diplomacy, great power politics, and readiness. I’m not so sure.
