Army Cpl. Frank H. Smith will be buried with full military honors Thursday in North Syracuse.
U.S. Army Corporal Frank Herbert Smith was killed in action during the Korean War in 1951. This photo was taken during basic training shortly before he was sent to Korea. His sister, Marion Smith Chester of Salina, was notified of the identification of her brother's remains last month. Salina, NY -- Twelve days before his death, a soldier from Salina wrote home from the Korean War front. He said he hoped the conflict would end soon but warned his family that he might be headed into heavy combat.
“I just hope we don’t have to go back into the attack again,” Army Cpl. Frank H. Smith wrote to his sister Arlene on July 13, 1951. “What’s the matter with the big shots anyway, all they seem to be doing is talking about a ceasefire? I wish they’d do something about it.”
It was the last his family heard from him. Smith was killed July 25, 1951, at age 23, while his infantry squad attacked communist Chinese troops holding a hill near the 38th parallel, the line that divides North and South Korea.
The intensity of enemy fire prevented Smith’s fellow soldiers from bringing his body off the hill, which changed hands more than once during the seesaw battles that marked much of the fighting in the Korean War from 1951 to 1953. His family in Liverpool never had a body to bury, and he never left their minds.
“We always wondered, we always thought: What happened to him?” said his sister, Marion Chester, 89,who still lives in Salina. Her sister, Arlene Simms, lives in Liverpool. “We were a close family. I thought about him every day.”
A month ago, two Army officers came to Chester’s home on Fairmount Avenue and ended the wondering. Remains discovered by a South Korean military team in June last year had been identified by the American military’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii as Smith’s, they told her.
"I thought about him every day," Marion Smith Chester, of Salina, said about her brother, U.S. Army Cpl. Frank Smith, who was killed in action at age 23 during the Korean War. Here she holds a copy of the report identifying his remains.“It’s a great, great feeling of relief because we always wanted to have closure, and now we do,” Chester said.
Smith’s remains, under military escort, will return to Syracuse Tuesday aboard a flight to Hancock Airport. He will be buried Thursday with full military honors in North Syracuse Cemetery next to his mother, Esther Wagner Smith, who died in 1987, and not far from his father, Dwight, who died in the early 1990s.
“My mother always missed him,” said Chester. “He was always good for her. He was just a good kid.”
Cpl. Smith’s brother, Howard, died in 1962, and his brother, Robert, died in 2008.
Raised on a small farm across Morgan Road from what is now the Liverpool Country Club, Smith worked as a plumber after graduating from Liverpool High School. He enlisted in the Army in September 1950, less than a year after North Korean forces invaded the south, touching off the war.
Wounded then returned
In March 1951, he arrived in Korea and quickly found himself in the middle of bloody back-and-forth fighting, much of it for hills known only by numbers on military maps but sometimes given names like “Pork Chop Hill” by the soldiers who fought on them.
Chester said Smith was wounded in the legs and thighs by a land mine in June 1951 but recovered after a brief stay in the hospital and returned to duty.
In the letter to his sister Arlene, Smith asked if she was going on a summer vacation and expressed a desire to join her.
“I’d like to be there to do a little bass fishing,” he said.
He told of a rumor that his regiment would be placed in reserve in a few days.
“I sure hope it’s true,” he said.
But he also saw signs of the opposite. The 19th Infantry Division had passed through his regiment’s lines a few days earlier, ran into a concentration of Chinese troops and was sending its wounded back through his regiment’s lines ever since.
“It seems to me like too near the end of the war for that to happen,” he said. The war would continue until July 1953.
Smitty charges the hill
According to a report given to Smith’s family last month, elements of the U.S. Eighth Army, including units of Smith’s 24th Infantry Division, advanced on enemy forces along the width of the Korean peninsula near the 38th parallel in July 1951. The 24th Infantry Division anchored the center of the line north of the city of Ch’unch’on, also spelled Chuncheon, in South Korea.
View Ch'unch'on, South Korea in a larger map
On July 25, the 5th Infantry Regiment, Smith’s regiment, was deployed about 30 miles northwest of Ch’unch’on when it came under enemy attack. The attack was repulsed, but Smith and another American soldier in his company went missing, the report said.
Other soldiers from Smith’s company knew he had been killed.
On Sept. 16, 1951, less than two months after Smith’s death, his brother Robert received a letter from James Clark, a soldier in Smith’s unit. Clark said Smith was killed by a grenade thrown by Chinese troops as he charged up a hill.
“Smitty took off up the hill where the lieutenant was,” Clark said. “He was shooting like a madman. He said to this other guy, ‘I see one and I am going after him,’ and they started on up. About that time, the (Chinese) heaved a grenade and it got Smitty right beside the head.”
Clark said Smith lived only four or five minutes after he was hit. A lack of stretchers and the Chinese gunfire made it difficult to get the wounded and dead off the hill, and the squad did not even realize it had “left Smitty up there” until after it was off the hill and across a rice paddy, he wrote.
“It made us all feel bad,” Clark wrote. “You would have been proud of him and the whole platoon.”
South Korean soldiers later re-took the hill and buried Smith, he said.
Smith’s remains were nearly lost to history in the unmarked grave. Soon after his death, a military review board declared him killed in action but deemed his remains to be “non-recoverable,” though the remains of the other soldier reported missing on the hill were recovered and identified.
Smith’s obituary appeared in The Post-Standard on Oct. 7, 1951, under the headline, “Liverpool Corporal Killed Leading Attack in Korea.” He was one of the 54,000 Americans who would die in the war.
Dogtags and a ring
Smith’s body remained on the hill until June 26, 2009. That’s the day that a recovery and identification team from the South Korean Ministry of National Defense Agency, working at what appeared to be a former fighting position on a hill designated on military maps as “Hill 735,” just south of the Demilitarized Zone that now separates the two Koreas, found human remains 20 inches below the surface.
The remains consisted of parts of a skull and many bones. Along with the skeletal remains were a U.S. Army boot, a ring, three military uniform buttons and two military identification tags stamped with the name “Smith, Frank H.” and Smith’s service number.
Several of the bones had fractures, and a metal fragment was embedded in the left hip bone. Smith’s family believes the evidence supports the report that Smith was killed by a grenade.
Smith’s family was not immediately told of the discovery of his remains. The U.S. military wanted to first match DNA samples from the remains to those of his living relatives. And the military had those family DNA samples because Chester and her daughter, Marny Peterson, of Dallas, provided them in 2008.
During a visit to Liverpool for Christmas in 2006, Peterson’s husband, Michael, an Air Force veteran, talked to Chester about the fact that her brother’s remains were never recovered.
“She’s always been upset that Frank never came home after the war,” he said.
Soon afterward, he contacted the Army and asked if a search could be conducted. In 2008, the military sent his wife and Chester a kit for submitting DNA samples. They returned the kits with swabs from their mouths.
The South Korean team, during a search for South Korean war dead on the hill, came across Smith’s remains and turned them over to the U.S. military.
On April 6 of this year, military representatives called Chester and said they were pretty sure they had found Smith’s remains and asked if they could meet with her to deliver their formal report.
On July 27, two Army officers, one a casualty assistance officer from Fort Drum in Watertown, arrived at Chester’s home. It is the same house where she and her husband, Reginald, a wounded World War II veteran, were living when her brother was killed.
The officers told her that her brother’s remains had been positively identified. They gave her his dog tags and the ring that was found with his remains — a ring Chester thinks was given to him by a girlfriend from Liverpool whom she did not know. Chester declined the torn remains of the boot found with his remains.
The officers also handed her a 49-page report from the military’s Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, which is charged with finding and identifying U.S. remains from past conflicts, including the nearly 8,022 Americans still missing in action from the Korean War.
Included in the report were pictures of Smith’s remains, the articles found with them and a map pinpointing the hill where they were found.
“It was hard to believe because it’s been such a long period of time,” Chester said. “I’ve always wanted to have Frank brought home. Now he’s coming home.”
--Contact Rick Moriarty at rmoriarty@syracuse.com or 470-3148.