An Australian serving with the Royal Artillery, Geoffrey Brennan commanded 20th Field Regiment RA during the second phase of the Korean War. In June 1951 the leadership of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army fighting in the peninsula had accepted that there could be no rapid victory. They therefore adopted a policy of protracted fighting. Brennan and his gunners were to see plenty of that, culminating in the particularly vicious battle of the Hook at the end of May 1953.
The respective offensives of the early stages of the war had left the opposing forces on the general line of the 38th parallel, confronting each other in trench warfare. While armistice negotiations continued in Panmunjon, the Chinese rebuilt their forces in preparation for a spring offensive against the 1st Commonwealth Division’s sector, in the centre of which stood the comparatively low, 200-ft high hill known as the Hook, dominating the Sami-ch’on valley to the north.
The Hook had been subjected to two previous attacks and the Chinese were determined to succeed on this occasion. The feature was held by 1st Battalion, The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, with close artillery support provided by Brennan’s 20th Field Regiment. The attack opened in mid-morning of May 28 with a Chinese artillery bombardment which lasted for the rest of the day and the following night. The UN forces’ counter-bombardment represented the greatest artillery duel on a 1,000-yard front since the First World War. The British artillery fired 37,000 shells during the battle, which was won as much by the supporting artillery fire as by the tenacity of the infantry. This proved to be the last battle of the Korean War and Brennan was awarded the DSO for 20th Field Regiment’s part in it.
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Thomas Geoffrey Brennan was born in Melbourne, where his father was Comptroller of the Victoria State Railway. He was educated at Xavier College, Melbourne, and the Royal Military College, Duntroon, where he won the Sword of Honour.
He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1929 and served from 1931 to 1938 with 4th Artillery Brigade in India, much of it on the North West Frontier. In later years he would recall lavish birthday celebrations of the Maharajah of Kashmir, Hari Singh, who, as a Hindu, opted for Kashmir’s joining India in 1947 despite 90 per cent of the population being Muslim.
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He returned to England in 1938 and went to France with the British Expeditionary Force in December 1939. Hardly had he seen his battery’s guns surveyed in on the Franco-Belgian frontier when he was recalled to attend the wartime course at the Staff College. He spent the next four years on the staff in the UK, including 14 months as Chief British Liaison Officer with the US Army in England, for which service he was later appointed an Officer of the US Legion of Merit. Only the opening of the North West European campaign allowed him to return to active service.
He landed in France on D+5 as the senior logistics officer of 49 (West Riding) Infantry Division and took part in operations leading to the breakout from the Normandy beachhead, the advance into Belgium and Holland and the occupation of the lateral strip between the River Waal and the Neder Rijn, west of Nijmegen. His final part in operations during the war was with 49th Division against the Dutch Nazis of the 34th SS Division which had been left bottled up in western Holland by the Allied advance.
He was appointed OBE for his services with 49 Division and promoted to colonel to become chief instructor at the wartime Staff College in Haifa. He returned to England before the end of the British Mandate in Palestine to join the Directorate of Military Training in the War Office, at the end of which he was advanced to CBE. He held a staff appointment at GHQ Middle East Land Forces after giving up command of 20th Field Regiment and retired from the Army in 1959.
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His research in preparation for writing a unit history of an artillery battery brought the exploits of 20th Field Regiment in Korea back into focus. He discovered that various officers of the 1st Commonwealth Division had been awarded decorations by the French Government for the support or assistance they had given to the French battalion in Korea. These included a Croix de Guerre to himself for the fire support provided by 20th Field Regiment in March 1953. In the curiously inconsistent way the British Ministry of Defence deals with foreign awards to British nationals, it took Brennan from 1989 to 1991 to have these awards properly recognised.
His marriage in 1941 to Rosamund Kennedy was dissolved in 1953, and he married Irene (“Ba”), daughter of William Wayling Smith, in 1954. He is survived by her, two sons of his first marriage and a stepdaughter.
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Colonel Geoffrey Brennan, CBE, DSO, Croix de Guerre, commander of 20th Field Regiment at the Battle of the Hook in Korea in 1953, was born on January 14, 1909. He died on December 31, 2007, aged 98